A SCHOLARLY BOOK REPOSITORY154 start with A start with A
From rocky coves at Mendocino and Monterey to San Diego’s reefs, abalone have held a cherished place in California culture for millennia. Prized for iridescent shells and delectable meat, these unique shellfish inspired indigenous artisans, bohemian writers, California cuisine, and the popular sport of skin diving, but also became a highly coveted commercial commodity. Mistakenly regarded as an inexhaustible seafood, abalone ultimately became vulnerable to overfishing and early impacts of climate change.
As the first and only comprehensive history of these once abundant but now tragically imperiled shellfish, Abalone guides the reader through eras of discovery, exploitation, scientific inquiry, fierce disputes between sport and commercial divers, near-extinction, and determined recovery efforts. Combining rich cultural and culinary history with hard-minded marine science, grassroots activism, and gritty politics, Ann Vileisis chronicles the plight of California’s abalone species and the growing biological awareness that has become crucial to conserve these rare animals into the future.
Abalone reveals the challenges of reckoning with past misunderstandings, emerging science, and political intransigence, while underscoring the vulnerability of wild animals to human appetites and environmental change. An important contribution to the emerging field of marine environmental history, this is a must-read for scientists, conservationists, environmental historians, and all who remember abalone fondly.
Above the Oxbow is a journey through the tangle of rich narratives surrounding Mount Holyoke, a locally cherished mountain in Western Massachusetts. It explores how visitors have forged connections with the mountain through various activities over the past two centuries. In an accessible blend of storytelling and scholarly analysis, Danielle Raad shows the significance of the landscape, historic sites, and material culture, revealing how cultural perspectives, community activism, collective memory, and personal experiences shape our understanding of a place. Situated at the intersection of public history and environmental history, this ethnography of place also discloses the curious stories of the Summit House, an erstwhile tramway, an airplane crash, and the local fight to conserve Mount Holyoke as a natural space and celebrates its myriad uses today.
How wild is wilderness and how wild are our experiences in it, asks Jack Turner in the pages of The Abstract Wild. His answer: not very wild. National parks and even so-called wilderness areas fall far short of offering the primal, mystic connection possible in wild places. And this is so, Turner avows, because any managed land, never mind what it's called, ceases to be wild. Moreover, what little wildness we have left is fast being destroyed by the very systems designed to preserve it.
Natural resource managers, conservation biologists, environmental economists, park rangers, zoo directors, and environmental activists: Turner's new book takes aim at these and all others who labor in the name of preservation. He argues for a new conservation ethic that focuses less on preserving things and more on preserving process and "leaving things be." He takes off after zoos and wilderness tourism with a vengeance, and he cautions us to resist language that calls a tree "a resource" and wilderness "a management unit."
Eloquent and fast-paced, The Abstract Wild takes a long view to ask whether ecosystem management isn't "a bit of a sham" and the control of grizzlies and wolves "at best a travesty." Next, the author might bring his readers up-close for a look at pelicans, mountain lions, or Shamu the whale. From whatever angle, Turner stirs into his arguments the words of dozens of other American writers including Thoreau, Hemingway, Faulkner, and environmentalist Doug Peacock.
We hunger for a kind of experience deep enough to change our selves, our form of life, writes Turner. Readers who take his words to heart will find, if not their selves, their perspectives on the natural world recast in ways that are hard to ignore and harder to forget.
Crist argues that to do so would require a two-pronged approach. Scaling down calls upon us to lower the global human population while working within a human-rights framework, to deindustrialize food production, and to localize economies and contract global trade. Pulling back calls upon us to free, restore, reconnect, and rewild vast terrestrial and marine ecosystems. However, the pervasive worldview of human supremacy—the conviction that humans are superior to all other life-forms and entitled to use these life-forms and their habitats—normalizes and promotes humanity’s ongoing expansion, undermining our ability to enact these linked strategies and preempt the mounting suffering and dislocation of both humans and nonhumans.
Abundant Earth urges us to confront the reality that humanity will not advance by entrenching its domination over the biosphere. On the contrary, we will stagnate in the identity of nature-colonizer and decline into conflict as we vie for natural resources. Instead, we must chart another course, choosing to live in fellowship within the vibrant ecologies of our wild and domestic cohorts, and enfolding human inhabitation within the rich expanse of a biodiverse, living planet.
In an era of accelerating extinctions, what does it mean to discover thousands of new species in the deep sea?
As we see the catastrophic effects of the Anthropocene proliferate, advanced technologies also grant us greater access to the furthest reaches of the world’s oceans, facilitating the discovery of countless new species. Sorting through the implications of this strange paradox, Stacy Alaimo explores the influence this newfound intimacy with the deep sea might have on our broader relationship to the nonhuman world. While many images of these abyssal creatures circulate as shallow clickbait, aesthetic representations can be enticing lures for speculating about their lives, profoundly expanding our environmental concern.
The Abyss Stares Back analyzes a diverse range of scientific, literary, and artistic accounts of deep-sea exploration, including work from the naturalist William Beebe and the artist Else Bostelmann as well as results of the Census of Marine Life that began at the turn of the twenty-first century. As she focuses on oft-overlooked creatures of the deep, such as tubeworms, hatchetfish, siphonophores, and cephalopods, which are typically cast as “alien,” Alaimo shows how depictions of the deep seas have been enmeshed in long colonial histories and racist constructions of a threatening abyss.
Drawing on feminist environmentalism, posthumanism, science and technology studies, and Indigenous and non-Western perspectives, Alaimo details how our understanding of science is fundamentally altered by aesthetic encounters with these otherworldly life forms. She argues that, although the deep sea is often thought of as a lifeless void with little connection to human existence, our increasing devastation of this realm underscores our ethical obligation to protect the biodiverse life in the depths. When the abyss stares back, it demands recognition.
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Veteran botanist, scientific author, and professor Robert H. Mohlenbrock brings the full depth of his expertise and scholarship to his latest book, Acanthaceae to Myricaceae: Water Willows to Wax Myrtles, the third of four volumes in the Aquatic and Standing Water Plants of the Central Midwest series. This easy-to-use illustrated reference guide covers aquatic and standing water plants for the states of Iowa, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Kansas, Missouri, Nebraska, and Kentucky (excluding the biologically distinct Cumberland Mountain region of eastern Kentucky), from spearmint to wintergreen, from aster to waterwort.
The volume identifies, describes, and organizes species in three groups, including truly aquatic plants, which spend their entire life with their vegetative parts either completely submerged or floating on the water’s surface; emergents, which are usually rooted under water with their vegetative parts standing above the water’s surface; and wetland plants, which live most or all of their lives out of water, but which can live at least three months in water.
Mohlenbrock lists the taxa alphabetically, and within each taxon, he describes the species with the scientific names he deems most appropriate (indicating if his opinion differs from that of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service), common names, identification criteria, line drawings, geographical distribution, habitat description, and official U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service wetlands designation as described by the National Wetland Inventory Section in 1988.
Acanthaceae to Myricaceae is an essential reference for state and federal employees who deal with environmental conservation and mitigation issues in aquatic and wetland plants. It is also a useful guide for students and instructors in college and university courses focusing on the identification of aquatic and wetland plants.
Accidental Gravity negotiates the difficult edge between a naive belief in an enduring, unassailable natural world and the equally naive belief that human life takes place in some unnatural, more mediated context. The title refers to the accidental but nonetheless meaningful nexus where the personal meets and combines with the universal—those serendipitous moments when the individual life connects to the larger rhythms of time and planet.
Although many of the practical and intellectual traditions that make up modern science date back centuries, the category of “science” itself is a relative novelty. In the early eighteenth century, the modern German word that would later mean “science,” naturwissenschaft, was not even included in dictionaries. By 1850, however, the term was in use everywhere. Acolytes of Nature follows the emergence of this important new category within German-speaking Europe, tracing its rise from an insignificant eighteenth-century neologism to a defining rallying cry of modern German culture.
Today’s notion of a unified natural science has been deemed an invention of the mid-nineteenth century. Yet what Denise Phillips reveals here is that the idea of naturwissenschaft acquired a prominent place in German public life several decades earlier. Phillips uncovers the evolving outlines of the category of natural science and examines why Germans of varied social station and intellectual commitments came to find this label useful. An expanding education system, an increasingly vibrant consumer culture and urban social life, the early stages of industrialization, and the emergence of a liberal political movement all fundamentally altered the world in which educated Germans lived, and also reshaped the way they classified knowledge.
In recent years scholars have begun to question the cultural values underlying our view of Nature. Kevin Dann contributes to this debate by juxtaposing two radically different “Arcadian” experiments founded by Manhattanites seeking cultural renewal through contact with the natural world.
Dann focuses first on initiatives carried out by the American Museum of Natural History and the Eugenics Record Office from 1910 to 1940 within Harriman State Park in the Ramapo Mountains. He argues that these diverse expressions of the early “back-to-nature” movement are united by their biological materialism, or “Naturalism,” which became integral to the popular culture of educated metropolitan Americans in the early twentieth century.
He then compares this activity to the contemporary efforts at nearby Threefold Farm, where anthroposophists--followers of Rudolf Steiner's“spiritual science”--developed a program of natural scientific research and education that directly opposed Darwinian explanations of natural history, social Darwinian views of human society, and reductionist scientific methods. By challenging scientific “fact” with spiritual scientific descriptions of supersensible phenomena, the Threefold Farm initiative offered Americans a new gospel of nature.
Adaptive Strategies and Population Ecology of Northern Grouse was first published in 1988. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.
This book is at once a major reference to the species of grouse that inhabit North America and the Holarctic and a synthesis of all the available data on their ecology, sociobiology, population dynamics, and management. The book undertakes to answer two long-standing questions in population ecology: what actually regulates the numbers within a population, and what are the breeding and survival strategies evolved in this northern environment? For Volume I, editors Arthur T. Bergerud and Michael W. Gratson have drawn together their own work and that of colleagues in North America, Iceland, and Norway—in all, eleven research studies, averaging six years' duration, on eight species of grouse. These studies deal with the blue and ruffed grouse of the forest habitat; the sharp-tailed grouse, prairie chicken, and sage grouse of the prairie or steppe; and the white-tailed, rick, and willow ptarmigan found in alpine and arctic tundras. The authors describe the rich repertoire of behavior patterns developed by the hen and the cock to achieve their two primary objectives—first, to stay alive, and then to breed. Volume II, primarily the work of Bergerud, synthesizes the evidence in Volume I and in the grouse research literature from a theoretical perspective. Several potentially controversial sociobiological hypotheses are advanced to account for flocking behavior, migration, dispersal, roosting and feeding behavior, mate choice and mating systems. The demographic analysis provides new insights into cycles of abundance, the limitation of numbers, and the demographic factors that determine densities. The contributors, besides Bergerud and Gratson: R.C. Davies, A. Gardarson, J.E. Hartzler, R.A. Huempfner, D.A. Jenni, D.H. Mossop, S. Myrberget, R.E. Page, R.K. Schmidt, W.D. Svedarsky, and J.R. Tester.
Adaptive Strategies and Population of Northern Grouse was first published in 1988. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.
The first volume contains eleven studies of eight grouse species; the second contains primarily the work of Bergerud, which utilizes the evidence in the first volume to advance theories of behavior and offer new demographic insights.
This second volume contains primarily the work of Bergerud, which utilizes the evidence in the first volume to advance theories of behavior and offer new demographic insights.
A classic since its first publication in 1947, Adventures with a Texas Naturalist distills a lifetime of patient observations of the natural world. This reprint contains a new introduction by noted nature writer Rick Bass.
Forerunners: Ideas First is a thought-in-process series of breakthrough digital publications. 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.
Aesthetic experience is one of the fundamental ways that we develop a relationship to our natural surroundings. Emily Brady provides a comprehensive study of this type of experience and the central philosophical issues related to it, developing her own original theory of aesthetic appreciation of nature. She provides useful background to the current debate and an up-to-date critical appraisal of contemporary theories.
The context of the contemporary debate is laid out through a discussion of aesthetic experience and aesthetic qualities; early theories of aesthetic appreciation of nature, including the beautiful, the sublime, and the picturesque; and differences between artistic and environmental appreciation and interpretation. Brady situates her own approach in relation to a set of noncognitive accounts of appreciation. Her "integrated aesthetic" brings together various features of appreciation, including the senses, emotion, and imagination, with a reappraisal of the concept of disinterestedness. These ideas are further developed within the more practical domains of aesthetic judgment and education of the environment and through an examination of the role of aesthetic value in environmental conservation.
Arnold Berleant of Long Island University, a pioneer in this area of research, has declared Brady’s work, “admirably comprehensive coverage of the subject.” Julie C. Van Camp of California State University, Long Beach, has said, “The bibliography is priceless. . . . The discussions of such philosophers as Kant and Dewey seem plausible and understandable to an audience of students and the educated public.” This book will be valuable to readers interested in such wide-ranging subjects as philosophy, aesthetics, ethics, ecology, conservation, environmental policy-making, geography, and landscape architecture.
How do we experience the virtual environments we encounter in literature and film on the sensory and emotional level? How do environmental narratives invite us to care for human and nonhuman others who are put at risk? And how do we feel about the speculative futures presented to us in ecotopian and ecodystopian texts? Weik von Mossner explores these central questions that are important to anyone with an interest in the emotional appeal and persuasive power of environmental narratives.
book by an international group of scholars and conservation practitioners provides a methodological framework for understanding these forests by examining their ecological characteristics, delineating how they relate to social dynamics and historical contexts, exploring their ideological aspects, and evaluating their strengths and weaknesses as sites for community-based resource management and the conservation of cultural and biological diversity.
In After Eden, Kirkpatrick Sale answers these questions in a radically new way. Integrating research in paleontology, archaeology, and anthropology, he points to the beginning of big-game hunting as the origin of Homo sapiens’ estrangement from the natural world. Sale contends that a new, recognizably modern human culture based on the hunting of large animals developed in Africa some 70,000 years ago in response to a fierce plunge in worldwide temperature triggered by an enormous volcanic explosion in Asia. Tracing the migration of populations and the development of hunting thousands of years forward in time, he shows that hunting became increasingly adversarial in relation to the environment as people fought over scarce prey during Europe’s glacial period between 35,000 and 10,000 years ago. By the end of that era, humans’ idea that they were the superior species on the planet, free to exploit other species toward their own ends, was well established.
After Eden is a sobering tale, but not one without hope. Sale asserts that Homo erectus, the variation of the hominid species that preceded Homo sapiens and survived for nearly two million years, did not attempt to dominate the environment. He contends that vestiges of this more ecologically sound way of life exist today—in some tribal societies, in the central teachings of Hinduism and Buddhism, and in the core principles of the worldwide environmental movement—offering redemptive possibilities for ourselves and for the planet.
Ben A. Minteer and Stephen J. Pyne bring together a stunning consortium of voices comprised of renowned scientists, historians, philosophers, environmental writers, activists, policy makers, and land managers to negotiate the incredible challenges that environmentalism faces. Some call for a new, post-preservationist model, one that is far more pragmatic, interventionist, and human-centered. Others push forcefully back, arguing for a more chastened and restrained vision of human action on the earth. Some try to establish a middle ground, while others ruminate more deeply on the meaning and value of wilderness. Some write on species lost, others on species saved, and yet others discuss the enduring practical challenges of managing our land, water, and air.
From spirited optimism to careful prudence to critical skepticism, the resulting range of approaches offers an inspiring contribution to the landscape of modern environmentalism, one driven by serious, sustained engagements with the critical problems we must solve if we—and the wild garden we may now keep—are going to survive the era we have ushered in.
Contributors include: Chelsea K. Batavia, F. Stuart (Terry) Chapin III, Norman L. Christensen, Jamie Rappaport Clark, William Wallace Covington, Erle C. Ellis, Mark Fiege, Dave Foreman, Harry W. Greene, Emma Marris, Michelle Marvier, Bill McKibben, J. R. McNeill, Curt Meine, Ben A. Minteer, Michael Paul Nelson, Bryan Norton, Stephen J. Pyne, Andrew C. Revkin, Holmes Rolston III, Amy Seidl, Jack Ward Thomas, Diane J. Vosick, John A. Vucetich, Hazel Wong, and Donald Worster.
Swallowtail butterflies frolic on the wind. Vireos and rock wrens sing their hearts out by the recovering creek. Spiders and other predators chase their next meal. Through it all, John Alcock observes, records, and delights in what he sees. In a once-burnt area, life resurges. Plants whose seeds and roots withstood an intense fire become habitat for the returning creatures of the wild. After the Wildfire describes the remarkable recovery of wildlife in the Mazatzal Mountains in central Arizona.
It is the rare observer who has the dedication to revisit the site of a wildfire, especially over many years and seasons. But naturalist John Alcock returned again and again to the Mazatzals, where the disastrous Willow fire of 2004 burned 187 square miles. Documenting the fire’s aftermath over a decade, Alcock thrills at the renewal of the once-blackened region. Walking the South Fork of Deer Creek in all seasons as the years passed, he was rewarded by the sight of exuberant plant life that in turn fostered an equally satisfying return of animals ranging from small insects to large mammals.
Alcock clearly explains the response of chaparral plants to fire and the creatures that reinhabit these plants as they come back from a ferocious blaze: the great spreadwing damselfly, the western meadowlark, the elk, and birds and bugs of rich and colorful varieties. This book is at once a journey of biological discovery and a celebration of the ability of living things to reoccupy a devastated location. Alcock encourages others to engage the natural world—even one that has burnt to the ground.
"Extraordinarily well documented . . . remarkably clear. This is
the most comprehensive coverage of these issues to date. It will be required
reading for some time." -- Lawrence Busch, Michigan State University
"Krimsky and Wrubel not only describe the components of agricultural
biotechnology, they address and analyze controversies involving the risks
and benefits of new technologies. Coverage of technical to social components
of agricultural biotechnology is unusually complete and thorough. Their
even-handed and comprehensive approach to these topics is rare and extremely
valuable." -- Richard Weinzierl, University of Illinois
Modern agriculture is being transformed by the genetic alteration of
seeds, animals, and microorganisms, a process that has produced such products
as flavor saver tomatoes and crops resistant to specific insects or herbicides.
Agricultural Biotechnology and the Environment is the first comprehensive
overview of the ongoing transformation of agriculture, exploring the impact
of genetic engineering from scientific, social, ethical, and ecological
perspectives.
Sheldon Krimsky and Roger Wrubel detail the impact the new generation
of products is expected to have on agricultural practice and the environment
and assess the degree to which current trends in biotechnology match earlier
expectations. They also analyze the social and political response to innovations
resulting from genetic technology.
Closely examined in each of three areas--transgenic plants, genetically
engineered microorganisms, and transgenic animals--are technical and scientific
problems, social controversies, and anticipated environmental impacts.
An objective, detailed look at a subject of interest to a broad spectrum
of readers, Agricultural Biotechnology and the Environment will
be of interest to researchers in the new biotechnology fields as well
as to educated general readers and policymakers.
A volume in the series The Environment and the Human Condition
A revelation for Moby-Dick devotees and neophytes alike, Ahab’s Rolling Sea is a chronological journey through the natural history of Melville’s novel. From white whales to whale intelligence, giant squids, barnacles, albatross, and sharks, Richard J. King examines what Melville knew from his own experiences and the sources available to a reader in the mid-1800s, exploring how and why Melville might have twisted what was known to serve his fiction. King then climbs to the crow’s nest, setting Melville in the context of the American perception of the ocean in 1851—at the very start of the Industrial Revolution and just before the publication of On the Origin of Species. King compares Ahab’s and Ishmael’s worldviews to how we see the ocean today: an expanse still immortal and sublime, but also in crisis. And although the concept of stewardship of the sea would have been entirely foreign, if not absurd, to Melville, King argues that Melville’s narrator Ishmael reveals his own tendencies toward what we would now call environmentalism.
Featuring a coffer of illustrations and an array of interviews with contemporary scientists, fishers, and whale watch operators, Ahab’s Rolling Sea offers new insight not only into a cherished masterwork and its author but also into our evolving relationship with the briny deep—from whale hunters to climate refugees.
‘Āina Hānau / Birth Land is a powerful collection of new poems by Kanaka ʻŌiwi (Native Hawaiian) poet Brandy Nālani McDougall. ‘Āina hānau—or the land of one’s birth—signifies identity through intimate and familial connections to place and creates a profound bond between the people in a community. McDougall’s poems flow seamlessly between ‘Ōlelo Hawai‘i and English, forming rhythms and patterns that impress on the reader a deep understanding of the land. Tracing flows from the mountains to the ocean, from the sky to the earth, and from ancestor to mother to child, these poems are rooted in the rich ancestral and contemporary literature of Hawaiʻi —moʻolelo, moʻokūʻauhau, and mele —honoring Hawaiian ʻāina, culture, language, histories, aesthetics, and futures.
The poems in Āina Hānau / Birth Land cycle through sacred and personal narratives while exposing and fighting ongoing American imperialism, settler colonialism, militarism, and social and environmental injustice to protect the ʻāina and its people. The ongoing environmental crisis in Hawaiʻi, inextricably linked to colonialism and tourism, is captured with stark intensity as McDougall writes, Violence is what we settle for / because we’ve been led to believe / green paper can feed us / more than green land. The experiences of birth, motherhood, miscarriage, and the power of Native Hawaiian traditions and self-advocacy in an often dismissive medical system is powerfully narrated by the speaker of the titular poem, written for McDougall’s daughters.
‘Āina Hānau reflects on what it means to be from and belong to an ʻāina hānau, as well as what it means to be an ‘āina hānau, as all mothers serve as the first birth lands for their children.
The natural world is filled with diverse—not to mention quirky and odd—animal behaviors. Consider the male praying mantis that continues to mate after being beheaded; the insects, insects, and birds that offer gifts of food in return for sex; the male hip-pocket frog that carries his own tadpoles; the baby spiders that dine on their mother; or the starfish that sheds an arm or two to escape a predator's grasp. In Ain’t Love Grand, Marty Crump—a tropical field biologist well known for her work with the reproductive behavior of amphibians—examines the bizarre conduct of animals as they mate, parent, feed, defend themselves, and communicate. More importantly, Crump points out that diverse and unrelated animals often share seemingly erratic behaviors—evidence, Crump argues, that these natural histories, though outwardly weird, are actually successful ways of living.
Alabama Wildlife, Volume 5 offers a comprehensive update and provides a wealth of new information concerning changes and developments relative to the conservation status of wild animal populations of the state that have occurred in the decade since publication of the previous four volumes in 2004. Enhancements include the addition of any new or rediscovered taxon, species priority status changes, and taxonomic changes, plus the addition of the crayfishes, which were left out previously because so little was known about these understudied taxa.
A complete taxonomic checklist is included, which lists each imperiled taxon along with its priority designation followed by detailed species accounts. The eighty-four crayfish species accounts are comprised of a physical description (including a photograph, when available), distribution map, habitat summary, key life history, ecological information, basis for its status classification, and specific conservation and management recommendations. This revised expansion of the Alabama Wildlife set will be helpful to those seeking to broaden their knowledge of Alabama’s vast wildlife resources and will greatly influence future studies in the conservation of many of the imperiled species.
Breeding on remote ocean islands and spending much of its life foraging for food across vast stretches of seemingly empty seas, the albatross remains a legend for most people. And yet, humans are threatening the albatross family to such an extent that it is currently the most threatened bird group in the world. In this extensively researched, highly readable book, Robin W. Doughty and Virginia Carmichael tell the story of a potentially catastrophic extinction that has been interrupted by an unlikely alliance of governments, conservation groups, and fishermen.
Doughty and Carmichael authoritatively establish that the albatross's fate is linked to the fate of two of the highest-value table fish, Bluefin Tuna and Patagonian Toothfish, which are threatened by unregulated commercial harvesting. The authors tell us that commercial fishing techniques are annually killing tens of thousands of albatrosses. And the authors explain how the breeding biology of albatrosses makes them unable to replenish their numbers at the rate they are being depleted. Doughty and Carmichael set the albatross's fate in the larger context of threats facing the ocean commons, ranging from industrial overfishing to our habit of dumping chemicals, solid waste, and plastic trash into the open seas. They also highlight the efforts of dedicated individuals, environmental groups, fishery management bodies, and governments who are working for seabird and fish conservation and demonstrate that these efforts can lead to sustainable solutions for the iconic seabirds and the entire ocean ecosystem.
In his work De animalibus, Albert integrated the vast amount of information on nature that had come down to him in previous centuries: the exposition of Michael Scotus’s translation from the Arabic of Aristotle’s books on the natural world (Books 1–19), Albert’s own revisions to Aristotle’s teachings (Books 20–21), and a “dictionary” of animals appropriated largely from the De natura rerum of Thomas of Cantimpré (Books 22–26). Albert’s comprehensive treatise on living things was acknowledged as the reputable authority in biology for almost five hundred years.
In this translated and annotated edition, Kenneth F. Kitchell Jr. and Irven Michael Resnick illuminate the importance of this work, allowing Albert’s magnum opus to be better understood and more widely appreciated than ever before. Broken into two volumes (Books 1–10 and 11–26),Albertus Magnus On Animals is a veritable medieval scientific encyclopedia, ranging in topics from medicine, embryology, and comparative anatomy to women, hunting and everyday life, commerce, and much more—an essential work for historians, medievalists, scientists, and philosophers alike.
In his work De animalibus, Albert integrated the vast amount of information on nature that had come down to him in previous centuries: the exposition of Michael Scotus’s translation from the Arabic of Aristotle’s books on the natural world (Books 1–19), Albert’s own revisions to Aristotle’s teachings (Books 20–21), and a “dictionary” of animals appropriated largely from the De natura rerum of Thomas of Cantimpré (Books 22–26). Albert’s comprehensive treatise on living things was acknowledged as the reputable authority in biology for almost five hundred years.
In this translated and annotated edition, Kenneth F. Kitchell Jr. and Irven Michael Resnick illuminate the importance of this work, allowing Albert’s magnum opus to be better understood and more widely appreciated than ever before. Broken into two volumes (Books 1–10 and 11–26),Albertus Magnus On Animals is a veritable medieval scientific encyclopedia, ranging in topics from medicine, embryology, and comparative anatomy to women, hunting and everyday life, commerce, and much more—an essential work for historians, medievalists, scientists, and philosophers alike.
This biography of Aldo Leopold follows him from his childhood as a precocious naturalist to his profoundly influential role in the development of conservation and modern environmentalism in the United States. This edition includes a new preface by author Curt Meine and an appreciation by acclaimed Kentucky writer and farmer Wendell Berry.
The Alewives' Tale describes the plight of alewives and blueback herring, two fish species that have similar life histories and are difficult to distinguish by sight. Collectively referred to as river herring, they have been economically important since colonial times as food, fertilizer, and bait. In recent years they have attracted much attention from environmentalists, especially as attempts are being made, on and beyond Cape Cod, to restore the rivers, streams, ponds, lakes, and estuaries that are crucial for their reproduction and survival.
Brennessel provides an overview of the biology of the fish—from fertilized eggs to large schools of adults that migrate in the Atlantic Ocean—while describing the habitats at different stages of their life history. She explores the causes of the dramatic decline of river herring since the mid-twentieth century and the various efforts to restore these iconic fish to the historic populations that treated many onlookers to spectacular inland migrations each spring.
Wallace declared his eight years of exploration in southeast Asia to be “the central and controlling incident” of his life. As 2019 marks one hundred and fifty years since the publication of The Malay Archipelago, Wallace’s canonical work chronicling his epic voyage, this collaborative book gathers an interdisciplinary array of writers to celebrate Wallace’s remarkable life and diverse scholarly accomplishments. Wallace left school at the age of fourteen and was largely self-taught, a voracious curiosity and appetite for learning sustaining him throughout his long life. After years as a surveyor and builder, in 1848 he left Britain to become a professional natural history collector in the Amazon, where he spent four years. Then, in 1854, he departed for the Malay Archipelago. It was on this voyage that he constructed a theory of natural selection similar to the one Charles Darwin was developing, and the two copublished papers on the subject in 1858, some sixteen months before the release of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species.
But as the contributors to the Companion show, this much-discussed parallel evolution in thought was only one epoch in an extraordinary intellectual life. When Wallace returned to Britain in 1862, he commenced a career of writing on a huge range of subjects extending from evolutionary studies and biogeography to spiritualism and socialism. An Alfred Russel Wallace Companion provides something of a necessary reexamination of the full breadth of Wallace’s thought—an attempt to describe not only the history and present state of our understanding of his work, but also its implications for the future.
Some of the most striking news stories from natural disasters are of animals tied to trees or cats swimming through murky flood waters. Although the issue of evacuating pets has gained more attention in recent disasters, there are still many failures throughout local and national systems of managing pets and accommodating animals in emergencies.
All Creatures Safe and Sound is a comprehensive study of what goes wrong in our disaster response that shows how people can better manage pets in emergencies—from the household level to the large-scale, national level. Authors Sarah DeYoung and Ashley Farmer offer practical disaster preparedness tips while they address the social complexities that affect disaster management and animal rescue. They track the developments in the management of pets since Hurricane Katrina, including an analysis of the 2006 PETS Act, which dictates that animals should be included in hazard and disaster planning. Other chapters focus on policies in place for sheltering and evacuation, coalitions for animal welfare and the prevention of animal cruelty, organizational coordination, decision-making, preparedness, the role of social media in animal rescue and response, and how privilege and power shape disaster experiences and outcomes.
Using data they collected from seven major recent American disasters, ranging from Hurricanes Harvey, Irma, and Florence to the Camp, Tubbs, and Carr Fires in California and the Hawaii Lava Flow, the authors provide insights about the successes and failures of animal care. All Creatures Safe and Sound also outlines what still needs to change to best prepare for the safety and welfare of pets, livestock, and other companion animals in times of crisis.
Amidst Mad Cow scares and consumer concerns about how farm animals are bred, fed, and raised, many farmers and homesteaders are rediscovering the traditional practice of pastoral farming. Grasses, clovers, and forbs are the natural diet of cattle, horses, and sheep, and are vital supplements for hogs, chickens, and turkeys. Consumers increasingly seek the health benefits of meat from animals raised in green paddocks instead of in muddy feedlots.
In All Flesh Is Grass: The Pleasures and Promises of Pasture Farming, Gene Logsdon explains that well-managed pastures are nutritious and palatable—virtual salads for livestock. Leafy pastures also hold the soil, foster biodiversity, and create lovely landscapes. Grass farming might be the solution for a stressed agricultural system based on an industrial model and propped up by federal subsidies.
In his clear and conversational style, Logsdon explains historically effective practices and new techniques. His warm, informative profiles of successful grass farmers offer inspiration and ideas. His narrative is enriched by his own experience as a “contrary farmer” on his artisan-scale farm near Upper Sandusky, Ohio.
All Flesh Is Grass will have broad appeal to the sustainable commercial farmer, the home-food producer, and all consumers who care about their food.
He employs an array of forms and voices, whether penning a break-up letter to America or a literary rock-n-roll road song dedicated to prairie scientists, or giving pregame pep talks to his son’s losing football team. Here, too, are moving portrayals of his father’s last effort as a small-town lawyer to defend the rights of abused women, and his own efforts as a writing teacher to honor the personal stories of his students.
From his Iowa backyard to the edge of the Arctic Circle, from the forgotten recesses of the body to the far reaches of the solar system, this book demonstrates the ways imagination and informed compassion can, as Price describes it, expand thousandfold the boundaries of what we might “have naïvely considered an individual self.”
In this transnational, interdisciplinary history, Carmel Finley answers these questions and more as she explores how government subsidies propelled the expansion of fishing from a coastal, in-shore activity into a global industry. While nation states struggling for ocean supremacy have long used fishing as an imperial strategy, the Cold War brought a new emphasis: fishing became a means for nations to make distinct territorial claims. A network of trade policies and tariffs allowed cod from Iceland and tuna canned in Japan into the American market, destabilizing fisheries in New England and Southern California. With the subsequent establishment of tuna canneries in American Samoa and Puerto Rico, Japanese and American tuna boats moved from the Pacific into the Atlantic and Indian Oceans after bluefin. At the same time, government subsidies in nations such as Spain and the Soviet Union fueled fishery expansion on an industrial scale, with the Soviet fleet utterly depleting the stock of rosefish (or Pacific ocean perch) and other groundfish from British Columbia to California. This massive global explosion in fishing power led nations to expand their territorial limits in the 1970s, forever changing the seas.
Looking across politics, economics, and biology, All the Boats on the Ocean casts a wide net to reveal how the subsidy-driven expansion of fisheries in the Pacific during the Cold War led to the growth of fisheries science and the creation of international fisheries management. Nevertheless, the seas are far from calm: in a world where this technologically advanced industry has enabled nations to colonize the oceans, fish literally have no place left to hide, and the future of the seas and their fish stocks is uncertain.
Carmel Finley reveals that the fallibility of MSY lies at its very inception—as a tool of government rather than science. The foundational doctrine of MSY emerged at a time when the US government was using science to promote and transfer Western knowledge and technology, and to ensure that American ships and planes would have free passage through the world’s seas and skies. Finley charts the history of US fisheries science using MSY as her focus, and in particular its application to halibut, tuna, and salmon fisheries. Fish populations the world over are threatened, and All the Fish in the Sea helps to sound warnings of the effect of any management policies divested from science itself.
Original voices from across the solarpunk movement, which positions ingenuity, generativity, and community as ways to resist hopelessness in response to the climate crisis.
Almanac for the Anthropocene collects original voices from across the solarpunk movement, which positions ingenuity, generativity, and community as beacons of resistance to the hopelessness often inspired by the climate crisis. To point toward practical implementation of the movement’s ideas, it gathers usable blueprints that bring together theory and practice. The result is a collection of interviews, recipes, exercises, DIY instructions, and more—all of it amounting to a call to create hope through action.
Inspired by a commitment to the idea that there can be no environmental justice without decolonial and racial justice, Almanac for the Anthropocene unites in a single volume both academic and practical responses to environmental crisis.
Eight hundred miles long, Baja California is the remotest region of the Sonoran desert, a land of volcanic cliffs, glistening beaches, fantastical boojum trees, and some of the greatest primitive murals in the Western Hemisphere. In Almost an Island, Berger recounts tales from his three decades in this extraordinary place, enriching his account with the peninsula's history, its politics, and its probable future—rendering a striking panorama of this land so close to the United States, so famous, and so little known.
Readers will meet a cast of characters as eccentric as the place itself: Brandy, who ranges the desert in a sand buggy while breathing from an oxygen tank; Katie, the chanteuse; nuns illegally raising pigs. They will encounter the tourist madness of a total eclipse, the story of the heir to an oasis, a musical Mata Hari, rare pronghorn antelope, and a pet tarantula. In prose as glittering as this desert engulfed by the sea, Almost an Island is a fascinating journey into the human heart of a spectacular land.
Vividly written and filled with fascinating insights, Almost Human chronicles the first fifteen years of Strum's fieldwork with the Pumphouse Gang. From the first paragraph, the reader is drawn along with Strum into the world of the baboons, learning about the tragedies and triumphs of their daily lives—and the lives of the scientists studying them. This edition includes a new introduction and epilogue that place Strum's research in the context of the current global conservation crisis and tell us what has happened to the Pumphouse Gang since the book was first published.
In these pages, the reader will witness the dramatic creation of the Tetons; the arrival of the first humans, bands of fur-clad Early Hunters who ventured into the valley some 10,000 years ago; the coming and going of the later Indian tribes; and the nearly incredible journey of John Colter, who back in 1807 is said to have been the first white man to have found his way through the wilderness and into Jackson Hole.
Here, too, the reader will meet the boisterous mountain men, trappers such as Jim Bridger and the former slave, Jim Beckwourth, who roamed the Rockies when St. Louis was still a frontier village; a little Mormon boy who ran away from home and lived with the Indians before becoming a Pony Express rider; a most unusual Englishman who describes a terrible tragedy that befell his Indian wife and half-breed children; a glory-seeking lieutenant who led six cavalrymen on a foolhardy expedition that almost cost them their lives; and a nineteenth-century president of the United States who took a pack trip through Jackson Hole, allegedly leaving a trail of empty bottles behind.
And there is more, much more--the story of the pioneers, those hardy few who dared to settle in this high and inhospitable land; the story of outlaws, a shoot-out, vigilance committees and an Indian "massacre" that embarrassed the New York Times; the story of the deliverance of the world's largest elk herd from the many perils that threatened it with extinction; and, finally, the story of the long and angry controversy over the preservation of the Tetons and Jackson Hole as a national park, a struggle called "one of the most remarkable conservation fights of the twentieth century."
All these and still other episodes in the long and colorful cavalcade of Jackson Hole are woven together to form a work of Western Americana rich in anecdotes and portraits of delightfully eccentric characters.
Features include:
- More than 200 color photographs
- Small size perfect for use in the field
- In-depth scientific information on 150 species, including some recently discovered and most not found outside alpine or Arctic habitats
- Division of species into ecological groups to aid with searching and identification
- Coverage of the Rocky Mountains of Montana, Wyoming, and Colorado, with extensions into British Columbia and Alaska, with many of the same mushrooms also found in the Arctic
- Tips on collecting for both professional researchers and amateur enthusiasts
- A conservation-based approach aimed at the general public, mycologists, researchers, naturalists, land managers, and others
Easy to use and charged with cutting-edge science, Alpine Mushrooms of North America is an expert guide to mycology’s final frontier.
Perhaps no creature has so fired the imagination of a populace as the armadillo—that most ungainly, awkward, and timid little animal. Its detractors call it a varmint and wish it good speed from the Lone Star State and its other natural territories. But its supporters claim that it is the animal kingdom's representative of all that's truly Texan: tough, pioneering, adaptable, and generous in sharing its habitation with others. What is it that sets this quizzical little creature apart from the rest of the animal kingdom?
Larry L. Smith and Robin W. Doughty ably answer this question in The Amazing Armadillo: Geography of a Folk Critter. This informative book traces the spread of the nine-banded armadillo from its first notice in South Texas late in the 1840s to its current range east to Florida and north to Missouri. The authors look at the armadillo's natural history and habitat as well as the role of humans in promoting its spread, projecting that the animal is increasing in both range and number, continuing its ecological success in areas where habitat and climate are favorable.
The book also contributes to a long-standing research theme in geography—the relationship between humans and wildlife. It explores the armadillo's value to the medical community in current research in Hansen's Disease (leprosy) as well as commercial uses, and abuses, of the armadillo in recent times. Of particular note is the author's engaging look at the armadillo as a symbol of popular culture, the efforts now underway to make it a "totem animal" symbolizing the easy-going lifestyles of some Sunbelt cities, and the spread of the craze for armadilliana to other urban centers.
Far into the Atlantic Ocean, the outflow from the Amazon River creates a "sweet sea" of fresh water. At the river's mouth, a vast delta of river channels and marshes, floodplain and upland forests, open and scrub savannas, floating meadows, and mangrove swamps hosts an astonishingly diverse assemblage of plant and animal life. So rich is this biological treasure house that early European explorers deemed it inexhaustible.
In this highly readable book, Nigel Smith explores how human use of the Amazon estuary's natural resources has been affected by technological change, rapid urban growth, and accelerated market integration. Avoiding alarmist rhetoric, he shows how human intervention in the estuary has actually diversified agriculture and helped save floodplain forests from wanton destruction. His findings underscore the importance of understanding the history of land use and the ecological knowledge of local people when formulating development and conservation policies. The book will be of interest to everyone concerned with the fate of tropical forests, conserving biodiversity, and developing natural resources in a sustainable manner.
Widespread human alteration of the planet has led many scholars to claim that we have entered a new epoch in geological time: the Anthropocene, an age dominated by humanity. This ethnography is the first to directly engage the Anthropocene, tackling its problems and paradoxes from the vantage point of the world’s largest tropical rainforest.
Drawing from extensive ethnographic research, Nicholas Kawa examines how pre-Columbian Amerindians and contemporary rural Amazonians have shaped their environment, describing in vivid detail their use and management of the region’s soils, plants, and forests. At the same time, he highlights the ways in which the Amazonian environment resists human manipulation and control—a vital reminder in this time of perceived human dominance. Written in engaging, accessible prose, Amazonia in the Anthropocene offers an innovative contribution to debates about humanity’s place on the planet, encouraging deeper ecocentric thinking and a more inclusive vision of ecology for the future.
At breakfast tables and bakeries, we take for granted a grain that has made human civilization possible, a cereal whose humble origins belie its world-shaping power: wheat. Amber Waves tells the story of a group of grass species that first grew in scattered stands in the foothills of the Middle East until our ancestors discovered their value as a source of food. Over thousands of years, we moved their seeds to all but the polar regions of Earth, slowly cultivating what we now know as wheat, and in the process creating a world of cuisines that uses wheat seeds as a staple food. Wheat spread across the globe, but as ecologist Catherine Zabinski shows us, a biography of wheat is not only the story of how plants ensure their own success: from the earliest bread to the most mouthwatering pasta, it is also a story of human ingenuity in producing enough food for ourselves and our communities.
Since the first harvest of the ancient grain, we have perfected our farming systems to grow massive quantities of food, producing one of our species’ global mega crops—but at a great cost to ecological systems. And despite our vast capacity to grow food, we face problems with undernourishment both close to home and around the world. Weaving together history, evolution, and ecology, Zabinski’s tale explores much more than the wild roots and rise of a now-ubiquitous grain: it illuminates our complex relationship with our crops, both how we have transformed the plant species we use as food, and how our society—our culture—has changed in response to the need to secure food sources. From the origins of agriculture to gluten sensitivities, from our first selection of the largest seeds from wheat’s wild progenitors to the sequencing of the wheat genome and genetic engineering, Amber Waves sheds new light on how we grow the food that sustains so much human life.
Elephants have fascinated humans for millennia. Aristotle wrote of them with awe; Hannibal used them in warfare; and John Donne called the elephant “Nature’s greatest masterpiece. . . . The only harmless great thing.” Their ivory has been sought after and treasured in most cultures, and they have delighted zoo and circus audiences worldwide for centuries. But it wasn’t until the second half of the twentieth century that people started to take an interest in elephants in the wild, and some of the most important studies of these intelligent giants have been conducted at Amboseli National Park in Kenya.
The Amboseli Elephants is the long-awaited summation of what’s been learned from the Amboseli Elephant Research Project (AERP)—the longest continuously running elephant research project in the world. Cynthia J. Moss and Harvey Croze, the founders of the AERP, and Phyllis C. Lee, who has been closely involved with the project since 1982, compile more than three decades of uninterrupted study of over 2,500 individual elephants, from newborn calves to adult bulls to old matriarchs in their 60s. Chapters explore such topics as elephant ecosystems, genetics, communication, social behavior, and reproduction, as well as exciting new developments from the study of elephant minds and cognition. The book closes with a view to the future, making important arguments for the ethical treatment of elephants and suggestions to aid in their conservation.
The most comprehensive account of elephants in their natural environment to date, The Amboseli Elephants will be an invaluable resource for scientists, conservationists, and anyone interested in the lives and loves of these extraordinary creatures.
Whether we live in cities, in the suburbs, or in the country, birds are ubiquitous features of daily life, so much so that we often take them for granted. But even the casual observer is aware that birds don’t fill our skies in the number they once did. That awareness has spawned conservation action that has led to notable successes, including the recovery of some of the nation’s most emblematic species, such as the Bald Eagle, Brown Pelican, Whooping Crane, and Peregrine Falcon. Despite this, a third of all American bird species are in trouble—in many cases, they’re in imminent danger of extinction. The most authoritative account ever published of the threats these species face, The American Bird Conservancy Guide to Bird Conservation will be the definitive book on the subject.
The Guide presents for the first time anywhere a classification system and threat analysis for bird habitats in the United States, the most thorough and scientifically credible assessment of threats to birds published to date, as well as a new list of birds of conservation concern. Filled with beautiful color illustrations and original range maps, the Guide is a timely, important, and inspiring reference for birders and anyone else interested in conserving North America’s avian fauna. But this book is far more than another shout of crisis. The Guide also lays out a concrete and achievable plan of long-term action to safeguard our country’s rich bird life. Ultimately, it is an argument for hope. Whether you spend your early weekend mornings crouched in silence with binoculars in hand, hoping to check another species off your list, or you’ve never given much thought to bird conservation, you’ll appreciate the visual power and intellectual scope of these pages.
John Muir and His Legacy is at once a biography of this remarkable man—the first work to make unrestricted use of all of Muir’s manuscripts and personal papers—and a history of the century-old fight to save the natural environment. Stephen Fox traces the conservation movement's diverse, colorful, and tumultuous history, from the successful campaign to establish Yosemite National Park in 1890 to the movement's present day concerns of nuclear waste and acid rain.
Conservation has run a cyclical course, Fox contends, from its origins in the 1890s when it was the province of amateurs, to its takeover by professionals with quasi-scientific notions, and back, in the 1960s to its original impetus. Since then man’s view of himself as “the last endangered species” has sparked an explosion of public interest in environmentalism.
First published in 1981 by Little, Brown, this book was warmly received as both a biography of Muir and a history of the American conservation movement. It is now available in this new Wisconsin paperback edition.
When the terrorist attacks struck New York City on September 11, 2001, boat operators and waterfront workers quickly realized that they had the skills, the equipment, and the opportunity to take definite, immediate action in responding to the most significant destructive event in the United States in decades. For many of them, they were “doing what needed to be done.”
American Dunkirk shows how people, many of whom were volunteers, mobilized rescue efforts in various improvised and spontaneous ways on that fateful date. Disaster experts James Kendra and Tricia Wachtendorf examine the efforts through fieldwork and interviews with many of the participants to understand the evacuation and its larger implications for the entire practice of disaster management.
The authors ultimately explore how people—as individuals, groups, and formal organizations—pull together to respond to and recover from startling, destructive events. American Dunkirk asks, What can these people and lessons teach us about not only surviving but thriving in the face of calamity?
These eleven original essays by leading wildlife management and public policy scholars deal with policy issues, management perspectives, and the public attitudes about wildlife that shape the world of the wildlife manager.
Part 1 contains William R. Mangun’s introductory essay "Fish and Wildlife Policy Issues" and Daniel J. Decker et al.’s "Toward a Comprehensive Paradigm of Wildlife."
Ann H. Harvey’s "Interagency Conflict and Coordination in Wildlife Management," Philip S. Cook and Ted T. Cable’s "Developing Policy for Public Access to Private Land," and Debra A. Rose’s "Implementing Endangered Species Policy" make up part 2.
Part 3 consists of Cliff Hamilton’s "Pursuing a New Paradigm in Funding State Fish and Wildlife Programs" and Trellis G. Green’s "Use of Economics in Federal and State Fishery Allocation Decisions."
The fourth part includes James J. Kennedy and Jack Ward Thomas’s "Exit, Voice, and Loyalty of Wildlife Biologists in Public Natural Resource/Environmental Agencies"; Jean C. Mangun et al.’s "Nonconsumptive Wildlife-Associated Recreation in the United States"; and Barbara A. Knuth’s "Natural Resource Hazards: Managing to Protect People from the Resource."
In part 5, Joseph F. Coates looks to the future in "Public Policy Actors and Futures."
This powerful book is one of the first to examine the intersections between literature and the environment from the perspective of the oppressions of race, class, gender, and nature, and the first to review American Indian literature from the standpoint of environmental justice and ecocriticism. By examining such texts as Sherman Alexie's short stories and Leslie Marmon Silko's novel Almanac of the Dead, Adamson contends that these works, in addition to being literary, are examples of ecological criticism that expand Euro-American concepts of nature and place.
Adamson shows that when we begin exploring the differences that shape diverse cultural and literary representations of nature, we discover the challenge they present to mainstream American culture, environmentalism, and literature. By comparing the work of Native authors such as Simon Ortiz with that of environmental writers such as Edward Abbey, she reveals opportunities for more multicultural conceptions of nature and the environment.
More than a work of literary criticism, this is a book about the search to find ways to understand our cultural and historical differences and similarities in order to arrive at a better agreement of what the human role in nature is and should be. It exposes the blind spots in early ecocriticism and shows the possibilities for building common ground— a middle place— where writers, scholars, teachers, and environmentalists might come together to work for social and environmental change.
In this elegantly written book, John A. Byers argues that these mystifying behaviors evolved in response to the dangerous predators with whom pronghorn shared their grassland home for nearly four million years: among them fleet hyenas, lions, and cheetahs. Although these predators died out ten thousand years ago, pronghorn still behave as if they were present—as if they were living with the ghosts of predators past.
Byers's provocative hypothesis will stimulate behavioral ecologists and mammalogists to consider whether other species' adaptations are also haunted by selective pressures from predators past. The book will also find a ready audience among evolutionary biologists and paleontologists.
The American Robin is North America's most widespread songbird, with a range extending from Alaska, Canada, and Newfoundland to the highlands of Mexico and Guatemala. Its ruddy red breast and cheerful song have also made it one of our most beloved birds—as American as apple pie, as familiar a harbinger of spring as the first daffodil. Connecticut, Michigan, and Wisconsin have chosen the American Robin as their state bird, while a pair of robins grace the Canadian two dollar bill.
In this book, Roland Wauer offers a complete natural history of the American Robin for a popular audience. Combining his own observations as a field naturalist with data gleaned from the scientific literature, he describes the American Robin from every angle—appearance and biology, distribution, behavior, life cycle, and enemies and threats. In addition, he explores the legends and lore surrounding robins and offers suggestions for attracting them to your yard.
Beginning in the 1870s, sportsmen across America formed hundreds of organizations that not only fostered responsibility for game habitats but also spearheaded the creation of national parks, forests, and wildlife refuges. Reiger tells how these "gentlemen" hunters and anglers, outdoor journals like Forest and Stream, and organizations such as the Boone and Crockett Club—founded by Theodore Roosevelt, George Bird Grinnell, and other prominent sportsmen—lobbied for laws regulating the taking of wildlife, and helped to arouse public interest in wilderness preservation.
In this new edition, Reiger traces the antecedents of the sportsmen's conservation movement to the years before the Civil War. He extends his coverage into the present by demonstrating how the nineteenth-century sportsman's code—with its demand for taking responsibility for the total environment—continues to be the cornerstone of the sporting ethic. A new Epilogue depicts leading environmental thinker Aldo Leopold as the best-known exponent of this hunter-conservationist ideal.
Praised as "one of the seminal works in conservation history" by historian Hal Rothman, Reiger's book continues to be essential reading for all concerned with how earlier Americans regarded the land, demonstrating even to those who oppose hunting that they share with sportsmen and sportswomen an awareness and appreciation of our fragile environment.
Winner, ISHS Certificate of Excellence, 2015
Disaster relief as we know it did not exist when the deadliest tornado in U.S. history gouged a path from southeast Missouri through southern Illinois and into southwestern Indiana. The tri-state tornado of 1925 hugged the ground for 219 miles, generated wind speeds in excess of 300 miles per hour, and killed 695 people. Drawing on survivor interviews, public records, and newspaper archives, America’s Deadliest Twister offers a detailed account of the storm, but more important, it describes life in the region at that time as well as the tornado’s lasting cultural impact, especially on southern Illinois.
Author Geoff Partlow follows the storm from town to town, introducing us to the people most affected by the tornado, including the African American population of southern Illinois. Their narratives, along with the stories of the heroes who led recovery efforts in the years following, add a hometown perspective to the account of the storm itself.
In the discussion of the aftermath of the tornado, Partlow examines the lasting social and economic scars in the area, but he also looks at some of the technological firsts associated with this devastating tragedy. Partlow shows how relief efforts in the region began to change the way people throughout the nation thought about disaster relief, which led to the unified responses we are familiar with today.
Since its first publication in 1988, America's Neighborhood Bats has changed the way we look at bats by underscoring their harmless and beneficial nature. In this second revised edition, Merlin Tuttle offers bat aficionados the most up-to-date bat facts, including a wealth of new information on bat house design and current threats to bat survival.
Named one of “the year’s best gardening books” by The Spectator (UK, Nov. 2014)
The 1890s saw a revolution in advertising. Cheap paper, faster printing, rural mail delivery, railroad shipping, and chromolithography combined to pave the way for the first modern, mass-produced catalogs. The most prominent of these, reaching American households by the thousands, were seed and nursery catalogs with beautiful pictures of middle-class homes surrounded by sprawling lawns, exotic plants, and the latest garden accessories—in other words, the quintessential English-style garden.
America’s Romance with the English Garden is the story of tastemakers and homemakers, of savvy businessmen and a growing American middle class eager to buy their products. It’s also the story of the beginnings of the modern garden industry, which seduced the masses with its images and fixed the English garden in the mind of the American consumer. Seed and nursery catalogs delivered aspirational images to front doorsteps from California to Maine, and the English garden became the look of America.
Yet most of us have never seen a timber rattler. Though they’re found in thirty-one states, and near many major cities, in contemporary America timber rattlesnakes are creatures mostly of imagination and innate fear.
Ted Levin aims to change that with America’s Snake, a portrait of the timber rattlesnake, its place in America’s pantheon of creatures and in our own frontier history—and of the heroic efforts to protect it against habitat loss, climate change, and the human tendency to kill what we fear. Taking us from labs where the secrets of the snake’s evolutionary history are being unlocked to far-flung habitats whose locations are fiercely protected by biologists and dedicated amateur herpetologists alike, Levin paints a picture of a fascinating creature: peaceable, social, long-lived, and, despite our phobias, not inclined to bite. The timber rattler emerges here as emblematic of America and also, unfortunately, of the complicated, painful struggles involved in protecting and preserving the natural world.
A wonderful mix of natural history, travel writing, and exemplary journalism, America’s Snake is loaded with remarkable characters—none more so than the snake at its heart: frightening, perhaps; endangered, certainly; and unquestionably unforgettable.
It all started in 1965 with a guy riding a whale. The guy was Flip Nicklin’s father, Chuck, and the whale was an unlucky Bryde’s Whale that had gotten caught up in some anchor line. Hoping to free the whale, Chuck and some friends took their boat as near as they could, and, just before they cut it loose, Chuck posed astride it for a photo.
That image, carried on wire services nationwide, became a sensation and ultimately changed the life of Chuck’s young son, Flip. In the decades since that day, Flip Nicklin has made himself into the world’s premier cetacean photographer. It’s no exaggeration to say that his photos, published in such venues as National Geographic and distributed worldwide, have virtually defined these graceful, powerful creatures in the mind of the general public—even as they helped open new ground in the field of marine mammalogy.
Among Giants tells the story of Nicklin’s life and career on the high seas, from his first ill-equipped shoots in the mid-1970s through his long association with the National Geographic Society to the present, when he is one of the founders of Whale Trust, a nonprofit conservation and research group. Nicklin is equal parts photographer, adventurer, self-trained scientist, and raconteur, and Among Giants reflects all those sides, matching breathtaking images to firsthand accounts of their making, and highlighting throughout the importance of conservation and new advances in our understanding of whale behavior. With Nicklin as our guide, we see not just whales but also our slowly growing understanding of their hidden lives, as well as the evolution of underwater photography—and the stunning clarity and drama that can be captured when a determined, daring diver is behind the lens.
Humpbacks, narwhals, sperm whales, orcas—these and countless other giants of the ocean parade through these pages, spouting, breaching, singing, and raising their young. Nicklin’s photographs bring us so completely into the underwater world of whales that we can’t help but feel awe, while winning, personal accounts of his adventures remind us of what it’s like to be a lone diver sharing their sea.
For anyone who has marveled at the majesty of whales in the wild, Among Giants is guaranteed to be inspiring, even moving—its unmatched images of these glorious beings an inescapable reminder of our responsibility as stewards of the ocean.
The year he graduated from college, 22-year-old Noah Strycker was dropped by helicopter in a remote Antarctic field camp with two bird scientists and a three months’ supply of frozen food. His subjects: more than a quarter million penguins.
Compact, industrious, and approachable, the Adélie Penguins who call Antarctica home visit their breeding grounds each Antarctic summer to nest and rear their young before returning to sea. Because of long-term studies, scientists may know more about how these penguins will adjust to climate change than about any other creature in the world.
Bird scientists like Noah are less well known. Like the intrepid early explorers of Antarctica, modern scientists drawn to the frozen continent face an utterly inhospitable landscape, one that inspires, isolates, and punishes.
With wit, curiosity, and a deep knowledge of his subject, Strycker recounts the reality of life at the end of the Earth—thousand-year-old penguin mummies, hurricane-force blizzards, and day-to-day existence in below freezing temperatures—and delves deep into a world of science, obsession, and birds.
Among Penguins weaves a captivating tale of penguins and their researchers on the coldest, driest, highest, and windiest continent on Earth. Birders, lovers of the Antarctic, and fans of first-person adventure narratives will be fascinated by Strycker’s book.
Among the Aspen interweaves tales of companionable dogs, lucky hunts, and favorite coverts where quarry lurks with ruminations on the demise of hunting traditions, the sale of public lands and the privatization of places to hunt, the growing indifference to science, and the loss of wilderness on a planet increasingly transformed by the sprawl of humanity.
He weathered brutal temperatures in the wild to document the wolves and provided exceptional insights into wolf behavior. Haber’s writings and photographs reveal an astonishing degree of cooperation between wolf family members as they hunt, raise pups, and play, social behaviors and traditions previously unknown. With the wolves at risk of being destroyed by hunting and trapping, his studies advocated for a balanced approach to wolf management. His fieldwork registered as one of the longest studies in wildlife science and had a lasting impact on wolf policies.
Haber’s field notes, his extensive journals, and stories from friends all come together in Among Wolves to reveal much about both the wolves he studied and the researcher himself. Wolves continue to fascinate and polarize people, and Haber’s work continues to resonate.
The rich diversity of Arkansas’s amphibian and reptilian species comes alive in this thoroughly updated second edition of The Amphibians and Reptiles of Arkansas. An indispensable resource for both professionals and enthusiasts, and praised for its accessible language and scientific rigor, this field guide not only reflects the latest in taxonomic research but also celebrates the surge in herpetological studies in Arkansas over the past two decades, showcasing a thriving academic interest while addressing gaps in the first edition.
Building on the foundation of the acclaimed first edition, this updated work introduces enhanced color maps, updated range data, and an array of new illustrations, capturing a more vivid and comprehensive picture of Arkansas’s herpetofauna. Meticulously illustrated identification keys, species accounts, and pictorial guides make this a valuable tool for identifying species in the field, in classrooms, or in one’s own backyard.
Costa Rica has played, and continues to play, a pivotal role in the study of tropical biology as well as the development of ecotourism and ecoprospecting, in part because more than half of the amphibians and reptiles in Costa Rica are also found elsewhere in Central America. The Amphibians and Reptiles of Costa Rica will be an essential book for a wide audience of nature lovers, naturalists, ecotourists, field biologists, conservationists, government planners, and those interested in Central America more generally.
"Written for the enthusiast as well as for the field researcher, this work is an excellent reference source for each of the 396 species of amphibians and reptiles that can be found in Costa Rica. Includes complete full-color photographs of all known species in the region, as well as maps showing their distribution patterns. . . . A must-have book for any library with interests in this subject area."—J. Elliott, Southeastern Naturalist
Impressively broad in scope, Floyd's volume thoroughly explores Mesa Verde Country's important and historic ecosystem. Covering such diverse topics as geologic evolution, natural history, human history, bats, and fungi, to name but a few, this volume will appeal to scientists, resource managers, conservationists, and the lay reader with an interest in this most western of ecosystems. Technical Editors: David D. Hanna, William H. Romme and Marilyn Colyer
Known to today’s biologists primarily as the “Michx.” at the end of more than 700 plant names, André Michaux was an intrepid French naturalist. Under the directive of King Louis XVI, he was commissioned to search out and grow new, rare, and never-before-described plant species and ship them back to his homeland in order to improve French forestry, agriculture, and horticulture. He made major botanical discoveries and published them in his two landmark books, Histoire des chênes de l’Amérique (1801), a compendium of all oak species recognized from eastern North America, and Flora Boreali-Americana (1803), the first account of all plants known in eastern North America.
Straddling the fields of documentary editing, history of the early republic, history of science, botany, and American studies, André Michaux in North America: Journals and Letters, 1785–1797 is the first complete English edition of Michaux’s American journals. This copiously annotated translation includes important excerpts from his little-known correspondence as well as a substantial introduction situating Michaux and his work in the larger scientific context of the day.
To carry out his mission, Michaux traveled from the Bahamas to Hudson Bay and west to the Mississippi River on nine separate journeys, all indicated on a finely rendered, color-coded map in this volume. His writings detail the many hardships—debilitating disease, robberies, dangerous wild animals, even shipwreck—that Michaux endured on the North American frontier and on his return home. But they also convey the soaring joys of exploration in a new world where nature still reigned supreme, a paradise of plants never before known to Western science. The thrill of discovery drove Michaux ever onward, even ultimately to his untimely death in 1802 on the remote island of Madagascar.
We all have an animal story—the pet we loved, the wild animal that captured our childhood imagination, the deer the neighbor hit while driving. While scientific breakthroughs in animal cognition, the effects of global climate change and dwindling animal habitats, and the exploding interdisciplinary field of animal studies have complicated things, such stories remain a part of how we tell the story of being human. Animal Acts collects eleven exciting, provocative, and moving stories by solo performers, accompanied by commentary that places the works in a broader context.
Work by leading theater artists Holly Hughes, Rachel Rosenthal, Deke Weaver, Carmelita Tropicana, and others joins commentary by major scholars including Donna Haraway, Jane Desmond, Jill Dolan, and Nigel Rothfels. Una Chaudhuri’s introduction provides a vital foundation for understanding and appreciating the intersection of animal studies and performance. The anthology foregrounds questions of race, gender, sexuality, class, nation, and other issues central to the human project within the discourse of the “post human,” and will appeal to readers interested in solo performance, animal studies, gender studies, performance studies, and environmental studies.
Illuminates the profound contingency of market life on animal figures and flesh
The juxtaposition of biopolitical critique and animal studies—two subjects seldom theorized together—signals the double-edged intervention of Animal Capital. Nicole Shukin pursues a resolutely materialist engagement with the “question of the animal,” challenging the philosophical idealism that has dogged the question by tracing how the politics of capital and of animal life impinge on one another in market cultures of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.
Shukin argues that an analysis of capital’s incarnations in animal figures and flesh is pivotal to extending the examination of biopower beyond its effects on humans. “Rendering” refers simultaneously to cultural technologies and economies of mimesis and to the carnal business of boiling down and recycling animal remains. Rendering’s accommodation of these discrepant logics, she contends, suggests a rubric for the critical task of tracking the biopolitical conditions and contradictions of animal capital across the spaces of culture and economy.From the animal capital of abattoirs and automobiles, films and mobile phones, to pandemic fear of species-leaping diseases such as avian influenza and mad cow, Shukin makes startling linkages between visceral and virtual currencies in animal life, illuminating entanglements of species, race, and labor in the conditions of capitalism. In reckoning with the violent histories and intensifying contradictions of animal rendering, Animal Capital raises provocative and pressing questions about the cultural politics of nature.
Why our failure to consider the power of animals is to our deep detriment
Animals are staging a revolution—they’re just not telling us. From radioactive boar invading towns to jellyfish disarming battleships, this book threads together news accounts and more in a powerful and timely work of creative, speculative nonfiction that imagines a revolution stirring and asks how humans can be a part of it. If the coronavirus pandemic has taught us anything, it is that we should pay attention to how we bump up against animal worlds and how animals will push back. Animal Revolution is a passionate, provocative, cogent call for us to do so.
Ron Broglio reveals how fur and claw and feather and fin are jamming the gears of our social machine. We can try to frame such disruptions as environmental intervention or through the lens of philosophy or biopolitics, but regardless the animals persist beyond our comprehension in reminding us that we too are part of an animal world. Animals see our technologies and machines as invasive beings and, in a nonlinguistic but nonetheless intensive mode of communicating with us, resist our attempts to control them and diminish their habitats. In doing so, they expose the environmental injustices and vulnerabilities in our systems.
A witty, informative, and captivating work—at the juncture of posthumanism, animal studies, phenomenology, and environmental studies—Broglio reminds us of our inadequacy as humans, not our exceptionalism.
In the past decade, philosopher Bernard Rollin points out, we have "witnessed a major revolution in social concern with animal welfare and the moral status of animals." Adopting the stance of a moderate, Harold Guither attempts to provide an unbiased examination of the paths and goals of the members of the animal rights movement and of its detractors.
Given the level of confusion, suspicion, misunderstanding, and mistrust between the two sides, Guither admits the difficulty in locating, much less staying in, the middle of the road. The philosophical conflict, however, is fairly clear: those who resist reform, fearing that radical change in the treatment of animals will infringe on their business and property rights, versus the new activists who espouse a different set of moral and ethical obligations toward animals.
From his position as a moderate, Guither presents a brief history of animal protection and the emergence of animal rights, describes the scope of the movement, and identifies major players such as Paul and Linda McCartney and organizations such as People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals that are actively involved in the movement. He concentrates on what is actually happening in the 1990s, discussing in detail the possible consequences of the current debate for those who own, use, or enjoy animals in entertainment and leisure pursuits. A reference work for students in animal sciences and veterinary medicine, the book also poses questions for philosophers, sociologists, and public policymakers as well as animal owners, animal and biomedical researchers, and manufacturers and distributors of animal equipment and supplies.
McHugh’s investigations into fictions of people relying on animals in civic and professional life—most obviously those of service animal users and female professional horse riders—showcase distinctly modern and human–animal forms of intersubjectivity. But increasingly graphic violence directed at these figures indicates their ambivalent significance to changing configurations of species.
Reading these developments with narrative adaptations of traditional companion species relations during this period— queer pet memoirs and farm animal fictions—McHugh clarifies the intercorporeal intimacies—the perforations of species boundaries now proliferating in genetic and genomic science—and embeds the representation of animals within biopolitical frameworks.
In Linzey’s view, animal rights is synonymous with animal theology. Linzey argues that historical theology, creatively defined, must reject humanocentricity. Questioning the assumption that if theology is to speak on this issue, “it must only do so on the side of the oppressors,” Linzey investigates not only the abstractions of theory, but also the realities of hunting, animal experimentation, and genetic engineering. His is a pioneering, vital, and unequivocally Christian voice advocating on behalf of the countless creatures who share our world and our lives but cannot speak for themselves.
Contributors. Neel Ahuja, Tony Ballantyne, Antoinette Burton, Utathya Chattopadhyaya, Jonathan Goldberg-Hiller, Peter Hansen, Isabel Hofmeyr, Anna Jacobs, Daniel Heath Justice, Dane Kennedy, Jagjeet Lally, Krista Maglen, Amy E. Martin, Renisa Mawani, Heidi J. Nast, Michael A. Osborne, Harriet Ritvo, George Robb, Jonathan Saha, Sandra Swart, Angela Thompsell
A growing interest in all things Maya brings an increasing number of visitors to prehistoric Maya ruins and contemporary Maya communities in Guatemala, Belize, El Salvador, western Honduras, the Yucatán Peninsula, and the southern areas of Chiapas and Tabasco, Mexico. For these visitors and indeed everyone with an interest in the Maya, this field guide highlights nearly 100 species of plants and animals that were significant to the ancient Maya and that continue to inhabit the Maya region today.
Drawing from the disciplines of biology, ecology, and anthropology, Victoria Schlesinger describes each plant or animal's habitat and natural history, identifying characteristics (also shown in a black-and-white drawing), and cultural significance to the ancient and contemporary Maya. An introductory section explains how to use the book and offers a concise overview of the history, lifeways, and cosmology of the ancient Maya. The concluding section describes the collapse of ancient Maya society and briefly traces the history of the Maya region from colonial times to the present.
This wide-ranging multidisciplinary anthology presents original material from scholars in a variety of fields, as well as a rare, early article by Virginia Woolf. Exploring the leading edge of the species/gender boundary, it addresses such issues as the relationship between abortion rights and animal rights, the connection between woman-battering and animal abuse, and the speciesist basis for much sexist language. Also considered are the ways in which animals have been regarded by science, literature, and the environmentalist movement. A striking meditation on women and wolves is presented, as is an examination of sexual harassment and the taxonomy of hunters and hunting. Finally, this compelling collection suggests that the subordination and degradation of women is a prototype for other forms of abuse, and that to deny this connection is to participate in the continued mistreatment of animals and women.
Drawing on the latest research in archaeozoology, archaeology, and molecular biology, Animals as Domesticates traces the history of the domestication of animals around the world. From the llamas of South America and the turkeys of North America, to the cattle of India and the Australian dingo, this fascinating book explores the history of the complex relationships between humans and their domestic animals. With expert insight into the biological and cultural processes of domestication, Clutton-Brock suggests how the human instinct for nurturing may have transformed relationships between predator and prey, and she explains how animals have become companions, livestock, and laborers. The changing face of domestication is traced from the spread of the earliest livestock around the Neolithic Old World through ancient Egypt, the Greek and Roman empires, South East Asia, and up to the modern industrial age.
In this fascinating book, Terry O’Connor explores a distinction that is deeply ingrained in much of the language that we use in zoology, human-animal studies, and archaeology—the difference between wild and domestic. For thousands of years, humans have categorized animals in simple terms, often according to the degree of control that we have over them, and have tended to see the long story of human-animal relations as one of increasing control and management for human benefit. And yet, around the world, species have adapted to our homes, our towns, and our artificial landscapes, finding ways to gain benefit from our activities and so becoming an important part of our everyday lives. These commensal animals remind us that other species are not passive elements in the world around us but intelligent and adaptable creatures. Animals as Neighbors shows how a blend of adaptation and opportunism has enabled many species to benefit from our often destructive footprint on the world. O’Connor investigates the history of this relationship, working back through archaeological records. By requiring us to take a multifaceted view of human-animal relations, commensal animals encourage a more nuanced understanding of those relations, both today and throughout the prehistory of our species.
Finalist for the 2021 Siskiyou Prize for New Environmental Literature
As people come to understand more about animals’ inner lives—the intricacies of their thoughts and the emotions that are expressed every day by whales and cows, octopus and mice, even bees—we feel a growing compassion, a desire to better their lives. But how do we translate this compassion into helping other creatures, both those that are and are not our pets? Bringing together the latest science with heartfelt storytelling, Animals’ Best Friends reveals the opportunities we have in everyday life to help animals in our homes, in the wild, in zoos, and in science labs, as well as those considered to be food.
Barbara J. King, an expert on animal cognition and emotion, guides us on a journey both animal and deeply human. We meet cows living relaxed lives in an animal sanctuary—and cows with plastic portals in their sides at a university research station. We observe bison free-roaming at Yellowstone National Park and chimpanzees confined to zoos. We learn with King how to negotiate vegetarian preferences in omnivore restaurants. We experience the touch of a giant Pacific octopus tasting King’s skin with one of his long, neuron-rich arms. We reflect on animal testing as King shares her own experience as the survivor of a particularly nasty cancer. And in a moment all too familiar to many of us, we recover from a close encounter with two spiders in the home.
This is a book not of shaming and limitation, but of uplift and expansion. Throughout this journey, King makes no claims of personal perfection. Though an animal expert, she is just like the rest of us: on a journey still, learning each day how to be better, and do better, for animals. But as Animals’ Best Friends makes clear, challenging choices can bring deep rewards. By turning compassion into action on behalf of animals, we not only improve animals’ lives—we also immeasurably enrich our own.
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