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On any warm summer day, you can easily observe damselflies around a vegetated pond or the rocks along the banks of a stream. Like the more familiar dragonfly, damselflies are among the most remarkably distinctive insects in their appearance and biology, and they have become one of the most popular creatures sought by avocational naturalists.

Damselflies of Texas is the first field guide dedicated specifically to the species found in Texas. It covers 77 of the 138 species of damselflies known in North America, making it a very useful guide for the entire United States. Each species account includes:

• illustrations of as many forms (male, female, juvenile, mature, and color morphs) as possible
• common and scientific names, with pronunciation
• distribution map
• key features
• identifying characteristics
• discussion of similar species
• status in Texas
• habitat, seasonality, and general comments

In addition to photographing damselflies in the wild, the author and illustrator have developed a new process for illustrating each species by scanning preserved specimens and digitally painting them. The resulting illustrations show detail that is not visible in photographs. The book also contains chapters on damselfly anatomy, life history, conservation, names, and photography, as well as a list of species that may eventually be discovered in Texas, state and global conservation rankings, seasonality of all species in chronological order, and additional resources and publications on the identification of damselflies.

The problem of where to store waste has grabbed a lot of headlines, but people have been slow to realize that the environmental damage caused by storage sites is an even greater menace. This book makes the danger clear, as Joel Goldsteen offers the first comprehensive look at the selection and environmental impact of municipal and petrochemical waste storage sites along the Texas and Louisiana coasts.

Goldsteen has distilled a large landfill-worth of data into a highly readable account of the creation and regulation of waste disposal sites, the health issues that surround them, and the human and natural factors that affect how safe or dangerous they become. Chapters that describe industrial development along the Gulf Coast and the concurrent challenges of wastewater treatment, solid waste management, and hazardous waste control are followed by in-depth descriptions of nine Texas and four Louisiana sites, all representative of problems far beyond the Texas-Louisiana coast.

An urgent volume of essays engages the Gothic to advance important perspectives on our geological era

 

What can the Gothic teach us about our current geological era? More than just spooky, moonlit castles and morbid graveyards, the Gothic represents a vibrant, emergent perspective on the Anthropocene. In this volume, more than a dozen scholars move beyond longstanding perspectives on the Anthropocene—such as science fiction and apocalyptic narratives—to show that the Gothic offers a unique (and dark) interpretation of events like climate change, diminished ecosystems, and mass extinction.

Embracing pop cultural phenomena like True Detective, Jaws, and Twin Peaks, as well as topics from the New Weird and prehistoric shark fiction to ruin porn and the “monstroscene,” Dark Scenes from Damaged Earth demonstrates the continuing vitality of the Gothic while opening important new paths of inquiry. These essays map a genealogy of the Gothic while providing fresh perspectives on the ongoing climate chaos, the North/South divide, issues of racialization, dark ecology, questions surrounding environmental justice, and much more.

Contributors: Fred Botting, Kingston U; Timothy Clark, U of Durham; Rebecca Duncan, Linnaeus U; Michael Fuchs, U of Oldenburg, Germany; Esthie Hugo, U of Warwick; Dawn Keetley, Lehigh U; Laura R. Kremmel, South Dakota School of Mines and Technology; Timothy Morton, Rice U; Barry Murnane, U of Oxford; Jennifer Schell, U of Alaska Fairbanks; Lisa M. Vetere, Monmouth U; Sara Wasson, Lancaster U; Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock, Central Michigan U.

A powerful family memoir about inheritance, identity, and the pull of the sea

Surrendered as an infant in America, Maria “Mia” was taken in by Sicilian immigrants in Gloucester, Massachusetts—a gritty working-class town steeped in salt and tradition. She inherits a name that traces back to 19th-century Sicily, where her great-grandfather was abandoned as a newborn on la ruota dei proietti, the “wheel of the castoffs.” Christened Millefoglie, “a thousand leaves, a thousand pages,” he crossed the bold Atlantic to America’s shores, carrying with him a legacy of endurance and exile.

For generations, the Millefoglie men went to sea: dorymen who rose before dawn to cast their nets along jagged coastlines, captains of eastern-rig draggers navigating storms that could split a vessel in half, stowaways chasing the promise of a life they could scarcely imagine. They lived by tides, currents, and the unspoken rules of the ocean; their courage and skill tested daily by wind and water. The women, left on shore, learned a different kind of survival, keeping households, raising children, and enduring the constant absence of fathers, brothers, and husbands. 

Into this world of fishermen and keepers of the shore, Mia was adopted, learning early that bloodlines dictate identity and tradition shapes fate. College is forbidden; marriages are arranged, and no one abandons the family. By nineteen, trapped in a fish-packing job and lost in a haze of drugs, Mia does the unthinkable: she leaves. Decades later, drawn back to Gloucester’s weathered harbor to care for her aging parents, Mia begins to unearth her family’s buried stories, tracing the lineage from a Sicilian orphanage to a New England fishing port and the invisible inheritance that shaped them all. 

Both intimate and historical, Daughters of Stone and Tide is a meditation on identity, abandonment, and belonging—a fisherman’s daughter’s search to understand the forces that bind and break a family across generations and seas.

A powerful family memoir about inheritance, identity, and the pull of the sea

Surrendered as an infant in America, Maria “Mia” was taken in by Sicilian immigrants in Gloucester, Massachusetts—a gritty working-class town steeped in salt and tradition. She inherits a name that traces back to 19th-century Sicily, where her great-grandfather was abandoned as a newborn on la ruota dei proietti, the “wheel of the castoffs.” Christened Millefoglie, “a thousand leaves, a thousand pages,” he crossed the bold Atlantic to America’s shores, carrying with him a legacy of endurance and exile.

For generations, the Millefoglie men went to sea: dorymen who rose before dawn to cast their nets along jagged coastlines, captains of eastern-rig draggers navigating storms that could split a vessel in half, stowaways chasing the promise of a life they could scarcely imagine. They lived by tides, currents, and the unspoken rules of the ocean; their courage and skill tested daily by wind and water. The women, left on shore, learned a different kind of survival, keeping households, raising children, and enduring the constant absence of fathers, brothers, and husbands. 

Into this world of fishermen and keepers of the shore, Mia was adopted, learning early that bloodlines dictate identity and tradition shapes fate. College is forbidden; marriages are arranged, and no one abandons the family. By nineteen, trapped in a fish-packing job and lost in a haze of drugs, Mia does the unthinkable: she leaves. Decades later, drawn back to Gloucester’s weathered harbor to care for her aging parents, Mia begins to unearth her family’s buried stories, tracing the lineage from a Sicilian orphanage to a New England fishing port and the invisible inheritance that shaped them all. 

Both intimate and historical, Daughters of Stone and Tide is a meditation on identity, abandonment, and belonging—a fisherman’s daughter’s search to understand the forces that bind and break a family across generations and seas.

This is an auto-narrated audiobook edition of this book.

The story behind the historic Mineral King Valley case, which reveals how the Sierra Club battled Disney’s ski resort development and launched a new environmental era in America.
 
In our current age of climate change–induced panic, it’s hard to imagine a time when private groups were not actively enforcing environmental protection laws in the courts. It wasn’t until 1972, however, that a David and Goliath–esque Supreme Court showdown involving the Sierra Club and Disney set a revolutionary legal precedent for the era of environmental activism we live in today.
 
Set against the backdrop of the environmental movement that swept the country in the late 1960s and early 1970s, Dawn at Mineral King Valley tells the surprising story of how the US Forest Service, the Disney company, and the Sierra Club each struggled to adapt to the new, rapidly changing political landscape of environmental consciousness in postwar America. Proposed in 1965 and approved by the federal government in 1969, Disney’s vast development plan would have irreversibly altered the practically untouched Mineral King Valley, a magnificently beautiful alpine area in the Sierra Nevada mountains. At first, the plan met with unanimous approval from elected officials, government administrators, and the press—it seemed inevitable that this expanse of wild natural land would be radically changed and turned over to a private corporation. Then the scrappy Sierra Club forcefully pushed back with a lawsuit that ultimately propelled the modern environmental era by allowing interest groups to bring litigation against environmentally destructive projects.
 
An expert on environmental law and appellate advocacy, Daniel P. Selmi uses his authoritative narrative voice to recount the complete history of this revolutionary legal battle and the ramifications that continue today, almost 50 years later.

A critical examination of the environmental movement and the Latinx voices that are shifting how to think about a future shaped by climate change.

In Decolonial Environmentalisms, David Vázquez argues that the mainstream environmental movement is implicated in racial capitalism, not least through its ignorance of environmental justice as it pertains to Latinx people. Through close readings of eco-minded novels, films, visual art, and short stories by Chicanx, Puerto Rican, Dominican, Cuban American, Peruvian, and Central American culture makers, Vázquez surfaces diverse Latinx visions for an equitable and sustainable humanity.

In the creations of Helena María Viramontes, Ester Hernández, Salvador Plascencia, the printmaking collective Dominican York Proyecto GRAFICA, and others, Vázquez locates a bracing critique of racist elisions and assumptions in hegemonic environmentalist thought. At the same time, he shows that the roles of Latinx people in the exploitation of the US West and the ruin of Indigenous communities are ripe for self-examination, in hopes of sparking reform. Indeed, Decolonial Environmentalisms is a work of guarded optimism, finding glimmers of possibility even in dystopic science fiction. The overlooked experiences of Latinx people, Vázquez suggests, can inspire environmental movements capable of transformative advocacy.

Decolonial Topophilia: Nature, Place, and History in Puerto Rican Poetry examines how four major poets—Luis Lloréns Torres, Luis Palés Matos, Juan Antonio Corretjer, and Julia de Burgos—address the ecological and human consequences of colonial domination in early twentieth-century Puerto Rico. Their poetry raises questions about the capitalist transformation of land through monocultures like sugarcane, the reduction of nature to exploitable resources, and the ties between attachment to place and nationalism. In tracing these connections, this pathbreaking book reveals how poetic visions of place can challenge colonial histories and imagine more reciprocal ways of inhabiting the world.

Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.

Mexican conservationists have sometimes observed that it is difficult to find a country less interested in the conservation of its natural resources than is Mexico. Yet, despite a long history dedicated to the pursuit of development regardless of its environmental consequences, Mexico has an equally long, though much less developed and appreciated, tradition of environmental conservation.

Lane Simonian here offers the first panoramic history of conservation in Mexico from pre-contact times to the current Mexican environmental movement. He explores the origins of conservation and environmental concerns in Mexico, the philosophies and endeavors of Mexican conservationists, and the enactment of important conservation laws and programs. This heretofore untold story, drawn from interviews with leading Mexican conservationists as well as archival research, will be important reading throughout the international community of activists, researchers, and concerned citizens interested in the intertwined issues of conservation and development.

Winner of the 2024 Forest History Society Charles A. Weyerhaeuser Book Award

A contemporary map of New England, scaled to the township level, brings to light a dense pattern of protected areas ringing almost every town and city in the region. Big and small, rural and urban, these green spaces represent more than a century of preservation efforts on the part of philanthropic foundations, planning professionals, state agencies, and most importantly, community-based conservation organizations. Taken together, they highlight one of the most significant advances in land stewardship in US history.

Democratic Spaces explains how these protected places came into being and what they represent for New Englanders and the nation at large. While early New Englanders worked to save local fish, timber, and game resources from outside exploitation, no land-stewardship organizations existed before the founding of the Trustees of Public Reservations in Boston in 1891. Across a century of dramatic change, New England preservationists through this and other, smaller community-based land trusts preserved open spaces for an ever-widening circle of citizens.

Remote desert locations, including the Chihuahuan Desert of northern Mexico, southern Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona, draw adventurers of all kinds, from the highly skilled and well prepared to urban cowboys who couldn't lead themselves (much less a horse!) to water. David Alloway's goal in this book is to help all of them survive when circumstances beyond their control strand them in the desert environment. In simple, friendly language, enlivened with humor and stories from his own extensive experience, Alloway here offers a practical, comprehensive handbook for both short-term and long-term survival in the Chihuahuan and other North American deserts.

Design with Nature on Cape Cod and the Islands seeks to reverse this damaging trend by offering landscape professionals, local officials, and homeowners a sustainable approach to landscape design based on the ecoregion’s native plants and plant communities. Presenting detailed discussions of Cape Cod’s natural history, Jack Ahern focuses on the principal plant communities that define its landscape character and that are well adapted to local soils and growing conditions, including climate change. The book also includes strategies for ecological planting design and a portfolio of photographs of active ecologically designed landscapes.