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Is there anything you can do when development threatens your local forest, beach, prairie, or wetland? Yes, there is. Across America, citizen activists are fighting and winning battles against unwanted development in their own communities. To help you resist the urban sprawl and absentee landowners that can wreck small towns and cities alike, this book is a practical, hands-on guide for building a grassroots campaign to defeat undesirable development.

Written by a successful activist, Citizen's Primer for Conservation Activism takes you through all the steps necessary to stop unplanned development in your community:

• Identifying the issues at stake
• Getting involved and developing leadership
• Devising a strategy
• Hiring and working with legal counsel
• Building coalitions and partnerships
• Influencing local government
• Conducting a media campaign
• Raising money
• Countering developer tactics
• Managing the whole process

With the proven strategies in this easy-to-access book, you can quickly gear up to challenge unwanted development and preserve the character of your local community.

The labor–climate movement in the U.S. laid the groundwork for the Green New Deal by building a base within labor for supporting climate protection as a vehicle for good jobs. But as we confront the climate crisis and seek environmental justice, a “jobs vs. environment” discourse often pits workers against climate activists. How can we make a “just transition” moving away from fossil fuels, while also compensating for the human cost when jobs are lost or displaced?

In his timely book, Clean Air and Good Jobs, Todd Vachon examines the labor–climate movement and demonstrates what can be envisioned and accomplished when climate justice is on labor’s agenda and unions work together with other social movements to formulate bold solutions to the climate crisis. Vachon profiles the workers and union leaders who have been waging a slow, but steadily growing revolution within their unions to make labor as a whole an active and progressive champion for both workers and the environment.

Clean Air and Good Jobs examines the “movement within the movement” offering useful solutions to the dual crises of climate and inequality.

A critic once wrote that Rebecca West’s Black Lamb and Grey Falcon was about two things: Yugoslavia and everything else. Something similar might be said about Clear Creek. In this boundary-defying work, Erik Reece spends a year beside the stream in his rural Kentucky homeplace, tracking the movements of the seasons, the animals, and the thoughts passing through his mind.

Clear Creek is a series of vignettes that calls us out of our frenzied, digitized world to a slower, more contemplative way of being. Reece’s subjects range from solitude and solidarity to the intricacies of forest communities, and from the genius of songwriter Tom T. Hall to reforestation projects on abandoned strip mines. A work of close observation and carefully grounded insights, Clear Creek articulates a nature-based philosophy for pondering humanity’s current plight.

Examines how Southern literary depictions of the natural world were influenced by the historical, social, and ecological changes of the 1930s and 1940s

Rieger studies the ways that nature is conceived of and portrayed by four prominent Southern writers of the era: Erskine Caldwell, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, Zora Neale Hurston, and William Faulkner. Specifically, he argues that these writers created new versions of an old literary mode—the pastoral—in response to the destabilizing effects of the Great Depression, the rise of Southern modernism, and the mechanization of agricultural jobs.

Mass deforestation, soil erosion, urban development, and depleted soil fertility are issues that come to the fore in the works of these writers. In response, each author depicts a network model of nature, where humans are part of the natural world, rather than separate, over, or above it, as in the garden pastorals of the Old South, thus significantly revising the pastoral mode proffered by antebellum and Reconstruction-era writers.

Each writer, Rieger finds, infuses the pastoral mode with continuing relevance, creating new versions that fit his or her ideological positions on issues of race, class, and gender. Despite the ways these authors represent nature and humankind’s place in it, they all illustrate the idea that the natural environment is more than just a passive background against which the substance of life, or fiction, is played out.

A bold reimagining of climate justice as a collective struggle for freedom, grounded in hope, resistance, and transformative change

In Climate Freedoms, Julie Sze reframes climate justice as a freedom movement, offering a new lens on one of the defining crises of our time. Rather than treating despair as inevitable, Sze argues that denial is a prison and despair sustains the status quo, reinforcing systems built on domination and extraction. Alternatively, climate justice movements can advance a positive vision of collective freedom—one rooted in care, reciprocity, and the possibility of livable worlds.

Centering the perspectives of those most impacted and least responsible for climate disasters, Sze engages climate reparations and traces the connections between climate justice and abolitionist, decolonial, Indigenous, feminist, and Black radical traditions. By analyzing movement stories sparked by climate change–induced disasters specifically affecting frontline communities in the Caribbean, Small Island States in the Pacific, Southeast Asia, and Indigenous communities across the United States, Sze explores how environmental harm is inseparable from colonialism and racial capitalism. These community-based movements challenge narrow, individualist notions of freedom, emphasizing shared responsibility and interconnected futures across local and global scales.

Sze develops three interrelated freedoms: the epistemic freedom to recognize injustice, the imaginative freedom to envision alternatives, and the transformative freedom to create change. These freedoms illuminate how climate justice movements cultivate resistance, survivance, and collective continuance in the face of crisis. The result is a form of grounded hope: clear-eyed about ongoing harm, yet committed to building life-affirming futures.

Retail e-book files for this title are screen-reader friendly.

Explores the ways climate change and extreme weather are negotiated politically in a border community

As a borderland city with generations of slow violence and extreme weather events like flash flooding and intense heat waves, San Antonio, Texas, speaks directly to global issues in climate politics. In Climate Politics on the Border: Environmental Justice Rhetorics, Kenneth Walker takes a place-based approach to his study of San Antonio to explore how extreme weather events and responses to them shape local places, publics, and politics, with an eye toward a future characterized by severe climate breakdown.

Attending to the local histories and micropolitics of San Antonio, Walker examines the effects of extreme weather events as they are experienced across radically inequitable social categories. These local histories serve as a guide, not just for future climates, which stand to be unprecedented, but for the necessary public and political responses to them. He shows how extreme weather events in the past have reinforced colonial social orders that weaken democratic goals of pluralism and equity. Conversely, he also shows how diverse coalitions have resisted and responded to these forces.

Walker examines the ethics of Latinx and Anglo relations within state-sponsored productions of racial inequity and environmental degradation, the coalitional capacities of environmental activists and second-wave Chicana/o organizations to protect clean water and transform local political representation, the obligations of place-keeping in Latinx urban design and ecological restoration, and the need to foster pluriversal worlds in city-level climate action and adaptation plans. Collectively these chapters rethink tropes of adaptation, resilience, and coalition as rhetorical and ecological capacities for public and political responses to extractivism.

Based on years of archival work and fieldwork, Climate Politics on the Border demonstrates vividly why ecological and anticolonial approaches to rhetoric are essential for grappling with climate politics. Overall, this is a timely study of how environmental degradation, pollution, and climate change are disputed and negotiated at the local political level in a borderland community.
 

Explores how perceptions and depictions of the physical landscape both reflected and influenced the history of the British colonial Caribbean

In Colonizing Paradise, historian Jefferson Dillman charts the broad spectrum of sentiments that British citizens and travelers held regarding their colonial possessions in the West Indies. Myriad fine degrees of ambivalence separated extreme views of the region as an idyllic archipelago or a nest of Satanic entrapments. Dillman shows the manner in which these authentic or spontaneous depictions of the environment were shaped to form a narrative that undergirded Britain’s economic and political aims in the region.

Because British sentiments in the Caribbean located danger and evil not just in indigenous populations but in Spanish Catholics as well, Dillman’s work begins with the arrival of Spanish explorers and conquistadors. Colonizing Paradise spans the arrival of English ships and continues through the early nineteenth century and the colonial era. Dillman shows how colonial entrepreneurs, travelers, and settlers engaged in a disquieted dialogue with the landscape itself, a dialogue the examination of which sheds fresh light on the culture of the Anglophone colonial Caribbean.

Of particular note are the numerous mythical, metaphorical, and biblical lenses through which Caribbean landscapes were viewed, from early views of the Caribbean landscape as a New World paradise to later depictions of the landscape as a battleground between the forces of Christ and Satan. The ideal of an Edenic landscape persisted, but largely, Dillman argues, as one that needed to be wrested from the forces of darkness, principally through the work of colonization, planting, cataloguing, and a rational ordering of the environment.

Ultimately, although planters and their allies continued to promote pastoral and picturesque views of the Caribbean landscape, the goal of such narratives was to rationalize British rule as well as to mask and obscure emerging West Indian problems such as diseases, slavery, and rebellions. Colonizing Paradise offers much to readers interested in Caribbean, British, and colonial history.

Thanks to its size and geographic position, Texas is home to nearly 30,000 species of insects, likely making its insect population the most diverse in the nation. Ranging from eastern and western to temperate and tropical species, this vast array of insects can be difficult to identify. In Common Insects of Texas and Surrounding States, John and Kendra Abbott have created the state's most comprehensive field guide to help readers recognize and understand these fascinating creatures.

Containing 1,300 species and more than 2,700 photographs, this guide offers a wealth of information about the characteristics and behaviors of Texas's insects. Each chapter introduces an order with a discussion of general natural history and a description of other qualities helpful in distinguishing its various species, while every species' entry provides a state map showing where it is most likely to be found, a key displaying its seasonal distribution, information about its habitat, and corresponding photos. Featuring colored tabs for quick reference, a glossary, and information about other arthropods, this guide is the perfect companion for anyone wanting to identify and learn more about the many insects of Texas.

Woody plants and cacti are vital staple foods for cattle, deer, and other wildlife in drought-prone South Texas. Ranchers, hunters, and land managers who need to identify these plants relied on A Field Guide to Common South Texas Shrubs (published by Texas Parks & Wildlife Press and distributed by UT Press), which is no longer in print. Responding to ongoing demand for the book, Richard B. Taylor has completely updated and expanded it with seven new species, new photographs, and a quick plant identification key.

Common Woody Plants and Cacti of South Texas is an easy-to-use plant identification field guide to fifty species that comprise an estimated 90 percent of the region’s woody canopy cover north of the Rio Grande Valley. The species accounts include photographs, descriptions, values to livestock and wildlife, and nutritional information. The book also provides historical perspectives and information on brush management techniques and strategies, as well as habitat appraisal. All of these resources will enable readers to analyze stocking rates for deer and cattle, evaluate a prospective hunting lease, or buy property.