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What does it mean to belong to a place that can never belong to you?

Set in the high country above June Lake on the eastern slope of the Sierra Nevada, this reflective narrative explores the enduring relationship between people and landscape. From their modest cabin near the headwaters of Reversed Creek, Michael and Valerie Cohen look across June Lake toward the vast expanse of the Great Basin. They are drawn to the region by its beauty and solitude, and the conviction that they are exactly where they ought to be.

Yet living in a place also means witnessing its transformation. Over nearly fifty years, the Cohens observe changes that reshape the Mono Basin and surrounding mountains: shifting economies, expanding development, record-breaking winters, wildfire threats, and the gradual erosion of community traditions.

Part memoir, part environmental reflection, part cultural history, this meditative narrative draws on writers and thinkers such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Aldo Leopold, and Lew Welch. The Cohens’ efforts to maintain an aging cabin and a life together become a lens through which to examine stewardship, memory, resilience, and loss. This meditation on place returns to a question that has occupied generations of writers and naturalists: As the world continually reinvents itself, how must those who live within it respond?

The wetlands of the San Juan Basin in Central Veracruz, Mexico, have been a favored place since the fifth century A.D., when Prehispanic people built an extensive network of canals and raised fields that allowed for almost year-round agriculture. Alfred Siemens' discovery of the remains of this network in the 1970s led him to uncover fifteen centuries of land-use history in the region. This book contains a full record of his findings.

Siemens organizes his history of the San Juan Basin around the question: What relationships exist between Prehispanic agriculture and the production systems of the tropical lowlands in our own time? This focus allows him to chart the changes in human perceptions and uses of the landscape, from the Prehispanic wetland agricultural system to the drained pastures of today's cattle ranches.

Amplified with air oblique photography, maps, and tables, and enriched with data from archaeology and colonial archives, this is an authoritative historical geography of a wetland landscape. Or, in the author's more modest words, "It seems to me that what I have here is a biography of a swamp."

Belize's Chiquibul Forest is one of the largest remaining expanses of tropical moist forest in Central America. It forms part of what is popularly known as the Maya Forest. Battered by hurricanes over millions of years, occupied by the Maya for thousands of years, and logged for hundreds of years, this ecosystem has demonstrated its remarkable ecological resilience through its continued existence into the twenty-first century. Despite its history of disturbance, or maybe in part because of it, the Maya Forest is ranked as an important regional biodiversity hot spot and provides some of the last regional habitats for endangered species such as the jaguar, the scarlet macaw, Baird's tapir, and Morelet's crocodile.

A Natural History of Belize presents for the first time a detailed portrait of the habitats, biodiversity, and ecology of the Maya Forest, and Belize more broadly, in a format accessible to a popular audience. It is based in part on the research findings of scientists studying at Las Cuevas Research Station in the Chiquibul Forest. The book is unique in demystifying many of the big scientific debates related to rainforests. These include "Why are tropical forests so diverse?"; "How do flora and fauna evolve?"; and "How do species interact?" By focusing on the ecotourism paradise of Belize, this book illustrates how science has solved some of the riddles that once perplexed the likes of Charles Darwin, and also shows how it can assist us in managing our planet and forest resources wisely in the future.

In this remarkable collection of essays, Stephen Harrigan explores, with an unfailing depth of feeling, the human longing to feel at home in the world of nature. In vivid and convincing prose, he evokes the landscape of his home territory, Texas, and his own reactions, sometimes droll, sometimes haunted, to the extraordinary power of place that Texas projects.

In the 1950s, Darryl Cole-Christensen and his family were among the first settlers of the Coto Brus, an almost impenetrable, mountainous rain forest region of southeastern Costa Rica. In this evocative book, he captures the elemental struggles and rewards of settling a new frontier—an experience forever closed to most people in Western, urbanized society.

With the perspective of more than forty years' residence in the Coto Brus, Cole-Christensen ably describes both the settlers' dreams of bringing civilization and progress to the rain forest and the sweeping and irreversible changes they caused throughout the ecosystem as they cut the rain forest down. Writing neither to apologize for nor to defend their actions, he instead illuminates the personal and subjective factors that cause people to risk danger and hardship for the uncertain rewards of settling a frontier.

In his own words, Cole-Christensen says, "This is a book for the scientist who wants to recapture a sense of an incalculable world departed, for the student who asks: How is it that our forebears changed and restructured this land? For the adventurer who dreams of the expanse of frontiers, for every person who, having passed once through the darkening forest along a path in twilit stillness looks back to find that a blanket of murmurs remains."

In A Reverence for Rivers, Kurt Fausch draws on his experience as a stream ecologist, his interest in Indigenous cultures, and a thoughtful consideration of environmental ethics to explore human values surrounding freshwater ecosystems. Focusing on seven rivers across the globe—from the Salmon River in Oregon to the Sarufutsu River in Japan—he examines the growing ethical dilemmas threatening our rivers, including increasing demands for water, habitat fragmentation, overfishing, and deepening climate change.

How do we decide which rivers deserve legal protection? What is our right to water as humans? And how do we foster resilient rivers? Through a combination of scientific expertise and thoughtful observations of the natural world, Fausch translates the science of rivers into accessible language for readers and begins to address these questions. He weaves deep Indigenous histories throughout the book and includes personal visits to tribal lands to explore the traditional values held by several Indigenous groups. Fausch reminds us that our connection to rivers is personal and grounded in specific places, flowing from the stories we carry about our relationships with and responsibilities to these rivers.

In a final essay Fausch ponders Aldo Leopold’s statement that “nothing so important as an ethic is ever written,” but instead evolves in the minds of a thinking community. A Reverence for Rivers speaks to both the mind and the heart, offering perspectives so that we might begin to imagine and create an ethic for living with and caring for the running waters on which we rely for so much.

As a changing climate threatens the whole country with deeper droughts and more furious floods that put ever more people and property at risk, Texas has become a bellwether state for water debates. Will there be enough water for everyone? Is there the will to take the steps necessary to defend ourselves against the sea? Is it in the nature of Americans to adapt to nature in flux?

The most comprehensive—and comprehensible—book on contemporary water issues, A Thirsty Land delves deep into the challenges faced not just by Texas but by the nation as a whole, as we struggle to find a way to balance the changing forces of nature with our own ever-expanding needs. Part history, part science, part adventure story, and part travelogue, this book puts a human face on the struggle to master that most precious and capricious of resources, water. Seamus McGraw goes to the taproots, talking to farmers, ranchers, businesspeople, and citizen activists, as well as to politicians and government employees. Their stories provide chilling evidence that Texas—and indeed the nation—is not ready for the next devastating drought, the next catastrophic flood. Ultimately, however, A Thirsty Land delivers hope. This deep dive into one of the most vexing challenges facing Texas and the nation offers glimpses of the way forward in the untapped opportunities that water also presents.

Louisiana's Chenier Plain is a 2,200-square-mile region of marshes and oak-covered ridges (cheniers) that stretches along the Gulf of Mexico from Sabine Lake to Vermilion Bay. Its inhabitants, some 6,000 people of Cajun and other ancestries, retain strong economic and cultural ties to the land and its teeming wildlife. They call it paradise...but it is a vulnerable paradise. In this multifaceted study, Gay Gomez explores the interaction of the land, people, and wildlife of the Chenier Plain, revealing both the uniqueness of the region and the challenges it faces.

After describing the geography and history of the Chenier Plain, Gomez turns to the lifeways of its people. Drawing on their words and stories, she tells how the chenier dwellers combine modern occupations with traditional pursuits such as alligator and waterfowl hunting, fur trapping, and fishing. She shows how these traditions of wildlife use provide both economic incentives for conservation and a source of personal and place identity. This portrait of a "working wetland" reveals how wildlife use and appreciation can give rise to a stewardship that balances biological, economic, and cultural concerns in species and habitat protection.

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. 

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.

From Eudora Welty's memoir of childhood to May Sarton's reflections on her seventieth year, writers' journals offer an irresistible opportunity to join a creative thinker in musing on the events—whether in daily life or on a global scale—that shape our lives. In An Extraordinary Year of Ordinary Days, best-selling mystery novelist Susan Wittig Albert invites us to revisit one of the most tumultuous years in recent memory, 2008, through the lens of 365 ordinary days in which her reading, writing, and thinking about issues in the wider world—from wars and economic recession to climate change—caused her to reconsider and reshape daily practices in her personal life.

Albert's journal provides an engaging account of how the business of being a successful working writer blends with her rural life in the Texas Hill Country and the Sangre de Cristo Mountains of New Mexico. As her eclectic daily reading ranges across topics from economics, food production, and oil and energy policy to poetry, place, and the writing life, Albert becomes increasingly concerned about the natural world and the threats facing it, especially climate change and resource depletion. Asking herself, "What does it mean? And what ought I do about it?", she determines practical steps to take, such as growing more food in her garden, and also helps us as readers make sense of these issues and consider what our own responses might be.