A SCHOLARLY BOOK REPOSITORY
In addition, in November 2008, despite massive doses of terrible financial news, voters across the U.S. approved land conservation funding measures. It was a record-breaking year for land protection financing, with voters demonstrating substantial support for open space ballot measures despite the economic and fiscal crisis of the time.
The Conservation Program Handbook is a manual that provides all of the information—on a broad spectrum of topics—that conservation professionals are likely to encounter. It compiles and distills advice from professionals based on successful conservation efforts across the country, including a list of “best practices” for the most critical issues conservationists can expect to face. By providing information on how to do conservation work in the best possible manner, The Conservation Program Handbook has the goal of increasing the amount, quality, and pace of conservation being achieved by local governments throughout the nation.
For more than a century the establishment of national parks and protected areas was a major threat to the survival of indigenous people. The creation of parks based on wilderness ideals outlawed traditional ways of life and forced from their homelands peoples who had shaped and preserved local ecosystems for centuries.
Today such tragic conflicts are being superseded by new alliances for conservation. Conservation Through Cultural Survival assesses cutting-edge efforts to establish new kinds of parks and protected areas which are based on partnerships with indigenous peoples. It chronicles new conservation thinking and the establishment around the world of indigenously inhabited protected areas, provides detailed case studies of the most important types of co-managed and indigenously managed areas, and offers guidelines, models, and recommendations for international action. The book:
- discusses the goals and development of the global protected area system
- assesses the strengths and limitations of a range of different types of indigenously inhabited protected areas
- discusses key issues and indigenous peoples' concerns
- recommends measures to promote conservation
- suggests international actions that would promote co-managed and indigenously managed areas
Conservation Through Cultural Survival will be required reading for environmentalists, protected area planners and managers, and all who care about the future of indigenous peoples and their homelands.
Winner of the 2024 Forest History Society Charles A. Weyerhaeuser Book Award
A contemporary map of New England, scaled to the township level, brings to light a dense pattern of protected areas ringing almost every town and city in the region. Big and small, rural and urban, these green spaces represent more than a century of preservation efforts on the part of philanthropic foundations, planning professionals, state agencies, and most importantly, community-based conservation organizations. Taken together, they highlight one of the most significant advances in land stewardship in US history.
Democratic Spaces explains how these protected places came into being and what they represent for New Englanders and the nation at large. While early New Englanders worked to save local fish, timber, and game resources from outside exploitation, no land-stewardship organizations existed before the founding of the Trustees of Public Reservations in Boston in 1891. Across a century of dramatic change, New England preservationists through this and other, smaller community-based land trusts preserved open spaces for an ever-widening circle of citizens.
Protected areas around the globe national parks, wildlife reserves, biosphere reserves will prosper only if they are supported by the public, the private sector, and the full range of government agencies. Yet such support is unlikely unless society appreciates the importance of protected areas to its own interest, and the protected areas are well-managed and contribute to the national welfare in a cost-effective way.
A crucial foundation for success is full cooperation between individuals and institutions. Based on papers presented at the IVth World Congress on National Parks and Protected Areas, Expanding Partnerships in Conservation explores how new and stronger partnerships can be formed between managers of protected areas and other sectors of society. It describes a range of activities currently underway in many parts of the world that are intended to improve conservation efforts at the international, national, and local levels.
From the colorful variety of birds at War Bluff Valley Audubon Sanctuary to the exposed bedrock and cliff faces of Apple River Canyon, Exploring Nature in Illinois will inspire readers to explore wonders hidden from urban sprawl and cultivated farmland. Maps and descriptions help travelers access even hard-to-find sites while a wealth of detail and photography offers nature-lovers insights into the flora, fauna, and other aspects of vibrant settings and ecosystems. The authors also include diary entries describing their own impressions of and engagement with the sites.
A unique and much-needed reference, Exploring Nature in Illinois will entertain and enlighten hikers, cyclers, students and scouts, morning walkers, weekend drivers, and anyone else seeking to get back to nature in the Prairie State.
Intrepid explorers Kenneth M. Wills and L. J. Davenport divide Alabama into eleven geographic regions that feature state parks and preserves, national monuments and forests, wildlife management areas, Nature Conservancy and Forever Wild properties, botanical gardens and arboreta, as well as falls, caverns, and rock cliffs. Exploring Wild Alabama provides detailed site entries to one hundred and fifty destinations. Each section is beautifully illustrated with color photographs and area maps.
Exploring Wild Alabama includes a large state map and numerous local topographic maps to help readers locate each site. Individual site entries include
· written directions to each site and GPS coordinates;
· engaging notes about the ecology, landscape features, and local species of plants and animals of the sites; and
· international recreation symbols for hiking, fishing, boating, camping, hunting, and other fun outdoor activities.
Wills and Davenport guide travelers to Alabama jewels such as Sand Mountain’s Chitwood Barrens, which harbors the rare Green Pitcher Plant and other exotic botanical species; Blowing Springs Cave in Lauderdale County, named for the cool air and the clear spring flowing out of the cave opening; Jackson Prairies in the Lime Hills region; and Booker’s Mill in Conecuh County, offering diverse habitats and historic structures.
Long a favorite destination for outdoor sports enthusiasts, Alabama is fast becoming a major “ecotourism” destination, with thousands of travelers discovering the state’s unsung natural treasures. Exploring Wild Alabama will be used and trusted by anyone who loves the outdoors—birders, botanists, cave explorers, cyclists, hunters, fishermen, rock climbers, canoeists, teachers, and other outdoor enthusiasts.
This extensively illustrated field guide presents detailed information on the macroscopic and microscopic features needed to identify species, as well as extensive notes on how to differentiate closely related lichens—both those present at White Rocks and those likely to be found elsewhere in western North America. This guide is one of the only complete lichen inventories of a sandstone formation in North America and covers all constituents including the crustose microlichen biota, traditionally excluded from other inventories. A short introduction and glossary equip the reader with basic information on lichen morphology, reproduction, and ecology.
Visitors to White Rocks Nature Preserve must schedule staff-led public tours or set up sponsored research projects through the City of Boulder Open Space and Mountain Parks, and there are many other outcroppings of Fox Hills sandstone across the West, making Field Guide to the Lichens of White Rocks a significant resource for anyone interested in this unique environment. This accessible, user-friendly guide will also be valuable to naturalists and lichenologists around the world as well as educators, conservationists, and land managers concerned with the growing significance of open spaces and other protected urban areas throughout North America.
The University Press of Colorado gratefully acknowledges the generous support of the University of Colorado Natural History Museum, City of Boulder Parks & Open Spaces, and the Colorado Native Plant Society board and members toward the publication of this book.
Force of Nature reveals how a failed civil servant, with few assets apart from his tenacity and vision, initiated the natural areas movement. In the boom years following World War II, as undeveloped lands were being mined, drained, or bulldozed, Fell transformed a loose band of ecologists into The Nature Conservancy, drove the passage of the influential Illinois Nature Preserves Act, and helped spark allied local and national conservation organizations in the United States and beyond.
In this wide-ranging primer, leading experts in the field provide a detailed how-to for planners, designers, landscape architects, and citizen activists.
A Healthy Nature Handbook captures hard-earned ecological wisdom from this community in engaging and highly readable chapters, each including illustrated restoration sequences. Restoration leaders cover large-scale seeding approaches, native seed production, wetland and grassland bird habitat restoration, monitoring, and community building.
Contributions from local artists bring the region’s beauty to life with vibrant watercolors, oil paintings, and sketches. A Healthy Nature Handbook is packed with successful approaches to restoring nature and is a testament to both the Chicago region’s surprising natural wealth and the stewards that are committed to its lasting health.
Indigenous Peoples, National Parks, and Protected Areas integrates wide-ranging, multidisciplinary intellectual perspectives with detailed analyses of new kinds of protected areas in diverse parts of the world. Eleven geographers and anthropologists contribute nine substantive fieldwork-based case studies. Their contributions offer insights into experience with new conservation approaches in an array of countries, including Australia, Canada, Guatemala, Honduras, Nepal, Nicaragua, Peru, South Africa, and the United States.
This book breaks new ground with its in-depth exploration of changes in conservation policies and practices—and their profound ramifications for Indigenous peoples, protected areas, and social reconciliation.
Author John E. Schwegman looks at the state’s early natural history, including its prehistoric vegetation and wildlife. He describes surviving remnants of formerly widespread species, such as biting horseflies so abundant they could kill a horse and flights of passenger pigeons dense enough to block the sun. The book addresses issues of species decline, the ways animals adapt to climate change and dwindling habitats, and the problem of invasive exotic species. Ecosystem preservation is discussed, and readers will witness prescribed burning techniques and volunteers aiding in natural land management.
Animal and plant conservation in Illinois is illustrated by essays that examine the efforts to save our dwindling Prairie Chicken population and to reintroduce river otters, the return of nesting bald eagles and cormorants to the state, the discovery of armadillos in southern Illinois, the pros and cons of feeding birds, and the biological significance of frog calls. Essays on Illinois’ native plants cover a wide range of topics, from defensive strategies to poisonous and edible species, prairie’s dependence on fire, how to recognize our wild roses, orchids, prairie grasses, and more. Full of fascinating information and expert knowledge, this book will prove invaluable to scholars, students, teachers, and casual nature lovers.
In Natural Visions, Finis Dunaway tells the story of how visual imagery—such as wilderness photographs, New Deal documentary films, and Sierra Club coffee-table books—shaped modern perceptions of the natural world. By examining the relationship between the camera and environmental politics through detailed studies of key artists and activists, Dunaway captures the emotional and spiritual meaning that became associated with the American landscape. Throughout the book, he reveals how photographers and filmmakers adapted longstanding traditions in American culture—the Puritan jeremiad, the romantic sublime, and the frontier myth—to literally picture nature as a place of grace for the individual and the nation.
Beautifully illustrated with photographs by Ansel Adams, Eliot Porter, and a host of other artists, Natural Visions will appeal to a wide range of readers interested in American cultural history, the visual arts, and environmentalism.
The Other Public Lands looks at both differences and common patterns in state land management, including the structure of natural resource agencies. Davis examines the privatization and commercialization of state parks, and the tensions between recreation, revenue and the preservation of biodiversity and natural landscapes. He also raises issues about equity, access, appropriate development, and ecological health. Chapters review state forests, state wildlife management areas, and school trust lands. In addition, the roles of interest groups, the courts, and agency culture and behavior are compared and analyzed both between states and the federal government and between states with differing approaches to specific issues.
As there has been a demand to transfer at least some federal lands to the states, The Other Public Lands concludes with an appraisal of whether states could handle this transfer and goes on to suggest ways to ensure adequate access in an era of increased demand.
What are the odds of finding Minnesota's tiniest orchid? Why take a Breathalyzer test to study frogs? How does ice fishing warm the heart? Who would live in such a cold, lean region? Our Neck of the Woods takes on these and other urgent (and sometimes quirky) questions, showcasing writers' own experiences in the best-loved places in Minnesota, including the North Shore, Lake Bemidji, the western prairies and grasslands, the Boundary Waters, and the Mesabi Iron Range.
The outdoor experiences described here range from sweeping natural history observations to adventurous tales of coming-of-age camping and hunting trips. We follow notable writers and conservationists Sigurd F. Olson, Paul Gruchow, Bill Holm, Jan Zita Grover, Greg Breining, Laurie Allmann, and many others as they descend a frozen river toward Lake Superior, explore a crystalline palace at minus 20 degrees, and trace a family's history along the Mississippi River. Writing on such themes as embracing winter, making camp, and finding wildness even amid development, these authors tell of hunting, fishing, birding, canoeing, and other great outdoor activities that help define what it means to be Minnesotan.
Drawn from the pages of Minnesota Conservation Volunteer magazine-published by the Department of Natural Resources since 1940-these writings evoke a strong sense of place and suggest that the outdoor experiences we share with others come to mean the most to us. With rich observations and spirited tales, Our Neck of the Woods beckons Minnesotans to work, play, and explore in the natural places close to their homes and hearts.
Resource protection and public recreation policies have always been subject to the shifting winds of management philosophy governing both national and state parks. Somewhere in the balance, however, parks and preserves have endured as unique places of mind as well as matter. Places of Quiet Beauty allows us to see parks and preserves, forests and wildlife refuges—all those special places that the term “park” conjures up—as measures of our own commitment to caring for the environment. In this broad-ranging book, historian Rebecca Conard examines the complexity of American environmentalism in the twentieth century as manifest in Iowa's state parks and preserves.
North America’s grasslands once stretched from southern Canada to northern Mexico, and across this considerable space different prairie types evolved to express the sum of their particular longitude and latitude, soils, landforms, and aspect. This prairie guide is your roadmap to what remains of this varied and majestic landscape.
Suzanne Winckler’s goal is to encourage travelers to get off the highways, out of their cars, and onto North America’s last remaining prairies. She makes this adventure as easy as possible by providing exact driving directions to the more than three hundred sites in her guide. She also includes information about size, management, phone numbers, and outstanding characteristics for every prairie site and provides readers with a thorough list of recommended readings and Web sites.
The scope of the guide is impressive. It encompasses prairies found within national grasslands, parks, forests, recreation areas, wildlife refuges, state parks, preserves, and natural areas and on numerous working ranches in Saskatchewan and Manitoba, the Dakotas, Minnesota, Illinois, Iowa, Kansas, Missouri, Nebraska, Oklahoma, and Texas. A series of maps locate the prairies both geographically and by name.
From “the largest restoration project within the historic range of tallgrass prairie” at Neal Smith National Wildlife Refuge in Iowa to Big Bend National Park in Texas, where “the Chisos Mountains, completely surrounded by the park, rise up majestically from the Chihuahuan Desert floor,” Winckler celebrates the dramatic expanses of untouched prairie, the crown jewels of prairie reconstruction and restoration, and the neglected remnants that deserve to be treasured.
“The essential purpose of Saving the Big Sky is to inspire the reader to help conserve even more of Montana,” write Bruce Bugbee, Robert Kiesling, and John Wright in this compelling study of how six million acres of biodiverse land were conserved in Montana over the past fifty years. Indigenous and non-Indigenous knowledge about land stewardship has evolved and since the 1970s tribes, nonprofit organizations, land trusts, and government agencies have conserved land in many creative ways. Beautifully illustrated with more than ninety color photographs and thirty detailed maps, Saving the Big Sky showcases land conservation achievements across eight regions of the state: the Rocky Mountain Front, the Blackfoot Valley, the Greater Yellowstone, the Missoula Region, the Helena Region, Northwest Montana, the Flathead Indian Reservation, and the American Prairie.
Land protection is shown to work best when large, intact, connected landscapes can be conserved, rather than small, fragmented, isolated parcels. Conservationists have found that landowners in Montana more widely accept conservation easements and other voluntary, financially compensating tools that respect private property rights. The brilliant images and striking before-and-after maps featured here celebrate the ranches, farms, wildlife habitats, and scenic open spaces that are forever safeguarded.
In documenting conservation accomplishments and suggesting what more can be done, Saving the Big Sky invites readers to participate in conserving Montana—or whatever cherished landscape they call home.
A study of Palestine-Israel through the unexpected lens of nature conservation
Settling Nature documents the widespread ecological warfare practiced by the state of Israel. Recruited to the front lines are fallow deer, gazelles, wild asses, griffon vultures, pine trees, and cows—on the Israeli side—against goats, camels, olive trees, hybrid goldfinches, and akkoub—which are affiliated with the Palestinian side. These nonhuman soldiers are all the more effective because nature camouflages their tactical deployment as such.
Drawing on more than seventy interviews with Israel’s nature officials and on observations of their work, this book examines the careful orchestration of this animated warfare by Israel’s nature administration on both sides of the Green Line. Alongside its powerful protection of wildlife biodiversity, the territorial reach of Israel’s nature protection is remarkable: to date, nearly 25 percent of the country’s total land mass is assigned as a park or a reserve. Settling Nature argues that the administration of nature advances the Zionist project of Jewish settlement and the corresponding dispossession of non-Jews from this space.
Lewis has organized this beautifully presented volume into twelve monthly chapters. She starts her year in April after the crystalline frosts of winter have thawed. Already a bobcat has stamped a padded paw print in the lush spring muds as crossvine blossoms of magenta and lemon beckon winged pollinators nearby. Walk with her into the months of summer, when trees leaf out into a cathedral of habitats for birds, insects, and small mammals. In language naturalists of any age will enjoy, Lewis explains marvelous compound eyes, called ommatidia, of iridescent dragonflies and the homey carpentry of beavers damming a creek. As colored reflections signal autumn, companionable songbirds migrate south while the last caterpillars of summer roll themselves into a leaf tent, or hibernaculum, to exist in diapause until next spring. In winter, Lewis admires nature at rest and rocks like chert, sought by Native Americans for arrowheads. Chert lies over bedrock of crenellated limestone, remnant of a time when an undersea Alabama reverberated with life preparing to emerge from the sea.
Southern Sanctuary provides a rich compendium of useful features. Lewis uses both common and Latin names for the insects, plants and flowers, fungi, fish, reptiles, and mammals thus enriching knowledge of botany and zoology. Her photos and descriptions make it easy for explorers of Southern Appalachian riparian habitats to use the book to identify species of plants and animals near their own homes. Rounding out this astonishing work are handy guides to additional resources, taxonomy and measurements, rainfall, soil types, and native trees.
Southern Sanctuary will be of value to educators and students, professional and amateur naturalists, hikers, birdwatchers, botanists, and ecologists. Infusing a wealth of useful information into an elegant design, it encourages an awareness of Alabama’s rich biodiversity. Marian Moore Lewis’s Southern Sanctuary is a new classic in the best tradition of nature writing.
How “innovative” finance schemes skim public wealth while hijacking public governance
Charter school expansion. Vouchers. Scholarship tax credit programs. The Swindle of Innovative Educational Finance offers a new social theory to explain why these and other privatization policies and programs win support despite being unsupported by empirical evidence. Kenneth J. Saltman details how, under the guise of innovation, cost savings, and corporate social responsibility, new and massive neoliberal educational privatization schemes have been widely adopted in the United States. From a trillion-dollar charter school bubble to the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative to celebrities branding private schools, Saltman ultimately connects such schemes to the country’s current crisis of truth and offers advice for resistance.
Forerunners is a thought-in-process series of breakthrough digital works. Written between fresh ideas and finished books, Forerunners draws on scholarly work initiated in notable blogs, social media, conference plenaries, journal articles, and the synergy of academic exchange. This is gray literature publishing: where intense thinking, change, and speculation take place in scholarship.
One woman’s enlightening trek through the natural histories, cultural stories, and present perils of thirteen national monuments, from Maine to Hawaii—now available in paperback
This land is your land. When it comes to national monuments, the sentiment could hardly be more fraught. Gold Butte in Nevada, Organ Mountains–Desert Peaks in New Mexico, Katahdin Woods and Waters in Maine, Cascade–Siskiyou in Oregon and California: these are among the thirteen natural sites McKenzie Long visits in This Contested Land, an eye-opening exploration of the stories these national monuments tell, the passions they stir, and the controversies surrounding them today.
Starting amid the fragrant sagebrush and red dirt of Bears Ears National Monument on the eve of the Trump Administration’s decision to reduce the site by 85 percent, Long climbs sandstone cliffs, is awed by Ancestral Pueblo cliff dwellings and is intrigued by 4,000-year-old petroglyphs. She hikes through remote pink canyons recently removed from the boundary of Grand Staircase–Escalante, skis to a backcountry hut in Maine to view a truly dark night sky, snorkels in warm Hawaiian waters to plumb the meaning of marine preserves, volunteers near the most contaminated nuclear site in the United States, and witnesses firsthand the diverse forms of devotion evoked by the Rio Grande. In essays both contemplative and resonant, This Contested Land confronts an unjust past and imagines a collaborative future that bears witness to these regions’ enduring Indigenous connections.
From hazardous climate change realities to volatile tensions between economic development and environmental conservation, practical and philosophical issues arise as Long seeks the complicated and often overlooked—or suppressed—stories of these incomparable places. Her journey, mindfully undertaken and movingly described, emphasizes in clear and urgent terms the unique significance of, and grave threats to, these contested lands.
—Cayuse Chief Young Chief, Walla Walla Council of 1855
America has always been Indian land. Historically and culturally, Native Americans have had a strong appreciation for the land and what it offers. After continually struggling to hold on to their land and losing millions of acres, Native Americans still have a strong and ongoing relationship to their homelands. The land holds spiritual value and offers a way of life through fishing, farming, and hunting. It remains essential—not only for subsistence but also for cultural continuity—that Native Americans regain rights to land they were promised.
Beth Rose Middleton examines new and innovative ideas concerning Native land conservancies, providing advice on land trusts, collaborations, and conservation groups. Increasingly, tribes are working to protect their access to culturally important lands by collaborating with Native and non- Native conservation movements. By using private conservation partnerships to reacquire lost land, tribes can ensure the health and sustainability of vital natural resources. In particular, tribal governments are using conservation easements and land trusts to reclaim rights to lost acreage. Through the use of these and other private conservation tools, tribes are able to protect or in some cases buy back the land that was never sold but rather was taken from them.
Trust in the Land sets into motion a new wave of ideas concerning land conservation. This informative book will appeal to Native and non-Native individuals and organizations interested in protecting the land as well as environmentalists and government agencies.
Wild New Jersey invites readers along Wheeler’s whirlwind year-long tour of the most ecologically diverse state for its size in America. Along with the expert guidance of charismatic wildlife biologists and local conservationists, he explores mountains, valleys, beaches, pine barrens, caves, rivers, marshlands, and more—breathtaking landscapes and the state’s Noah’s Ark of fascinating creatures.
This isn’t your ordinary ride on the Jersey Turnpike. Fasten your seatbelts and join Wheeler as he . . .
- Kayaks through the Meadowlands under the watchful eye of the Empire State Building,
- Pans for cretaceous fossils in a hidden brook once home to mastodons and giant sloths,
- Rides a fishing boat in the frigid snows of winter on a high-seas quest for Atlantic puffins,
- Trudges through the eerie darkness of a bog on a mysterious night hike,
- Dogsleds across the windswept alpine slopes in the haunts of the porcupine and bobcat.
With Wheeler’s compelling narrative, in-depth background details, and eye for revealing the offbeat, you can count this as the first nature book to paint the extraordinary picture of New Jersey’s unlikely wilderness in all its glory. Come along for all the adventure and insight in Wild New Jersey!
• Where are you most likely to spot a moose, black bear, or otter in the wild?
• On what hilltop can you see thousands of migrating hawks in a single day?
• Where might you see a basking shark, seal, or sea star?
Experienced nature writer and photographer John S. Burk answers these questions and more in this unique guidebook. Organized by state, each viewing location is discussed in detail, including its natural habitats and their unique features, characteristic species to watch for and when to see them, and recommended trails, auto roads, and driving directions. The Wildlife of New England also offers informative introductions to 60 of the region’s iconic animals organized by their natural habitats and shown in stunning photographs, many in color.
Cattails grow in a marsh, pitcher plants grow in a bog, jewelweed grows in a swamp, right? Do sandhill cranes live among sandy hills? Frogs live near lakes and ponds, but can they live on prairies, too? What is a pine barrens, an oak opening, a calcareous fen?
Wisconsin’s Natural Communities is an invitation to discover, explore, and understand Wisconsin’s richly varied natural environment, from your backyard or neighborhood park to stunning public preserves.Part 1 of the book explains thirty-three distinct types of natural communities in Wisconsin—their characteristic trees, beetles, fish, lichens, butterflies, reptiles, mammals, wildflowers—and the effects of geology, climate, and historical events on these habitats. Part 2 describes and maps fifty natural areas on public lands that are outstanding examples of these many different natural communities: Crex Meadows, Horicon Marsh, Black River Forest, Maribel Caves, Whitefish Dunes, the Blue Hills, Avoca Prairie, the Moquah Barrens and Chequamegon Bay, the Ridges Sanctuary, Cadiz Springs, Devil’s Lake, and many others.
Intended for anyone who has a love for the natural world, this book is also an excellent introduction for students. And, it provides landowners, public officials, and other stewards of our environment with the knowledge to recognize natural communities and manage them for future generations.
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