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Written in a clear, accessible style with a general audience in mind, the essays in this volume offer fresh approaches to thinking about environmental issues. When we consider the forms of environmental decline most urgently in need of attention—eroding soils, shrinking forests, expanding deserts, acid rain, ozone depletion, air pollution, poisoned water supplies, the loss of biological diversity—it may seem logical that scientists should be the people mobilized to tackle these problems. Yet to devise effective solutions for today's environmental threats, we must situate them within their larger historical, societal, and cultural settings. Amelioration does not require exclusively scientific knowledge, but also changes based upon law and public policy, on institutional structures and practices, on habits of consumption, and on countless other facets of daily life. Earth, Air, Fire, Water seeks to redirect our thinking about environmental issues by locating them in the behavior of human beings—in the institutions, beliefs, and practices that mediate between people and that obscure but beautiful nonhuman world we refer to as “nature.” The book opens with a section on the elements and the ways humans have understood them in the past. There follows a section devoted to social institutions and the ways in which we can learn from current and past efforts to study the interaction between people and nature. The concluding section analyzes the culture of modernity and the ways in which the human imagination has changed in response to the arrival of modern technology. In addition to the editors, contributors include Gregory Nagy, Donald Worster, Stephen J. Pyne, John F. Richards, Richard White, Terence Turner, Barbara Epstein, Oleg N. Yanitsky, Bina Agarwal, Anton Struchkov, Yaakov Garb, and Louis Menand.

Exploring one of the greatest potential contributors to climate change—thawing permafrost—and the anxiety of extinction on an increasingly hostile planet

 

Climate scientists point to permafrost as a “ticking time bomb” for the planet, and from the Arctic, apocalyptic narratives proliferate on the devastating effects permafrost thaw poses to human survival. In Earth, Ice, Bone, Blood, Charlotte Wrigley considers how permafrost—and its disappearance—redefines extinction to be a lack of continuity, both material and social, and something that affects not only life on earth but nonlife, too.

Earth, Ice, Bone, Blood approaches the topic of thawing permafrost and the wild new economies and mitigation strategies forming in the far north through a study of the Sakha Republic, Russia’s largest region, and its capital city Yakutsk, which is the coldest city in the world and built on permafrost. Wrigley examines people who are creating commerce out of thawing permafrost, including scientists wishing to recreate the prehistoric “Mammoth steppe” ecosystem by eventually rewilding resurrected woolly mammoths, Indigenous people who forage the tundra for exposed mammoth bodies to sell their tusks, and government officials hoping to keep their city standing as the ground collapses under it. Warming begets thawing begets economic activity— and as a result, permafrost becomes discontinuous, both as land and as a social category, in ways that have implications for the entire planet. Discontinuity, Wrigley shows, eventually evolves into extinction.

Offering a new way of defining extinction through the concept of “discontinuity,” Earth, Ice, Bone, Blood presents a meditative and story-focused engagement with permafrost as more than just frozen ground.

"As I write this, I am sitting in a cabin at Cedar Point Biological Station in southwestern Nebraska.... The glorious elemental mixture of earth, water, and sky around me is the home of nearly three hundred species of birds, and comprises one of my favorite places in the world. Here no radio stations blare out the most recent results of meaningless sports events ... no traffic noises confound the senses. Instead the wind is the unquestioned dominating summer influence. The prairie grasses bend willingly and gracefully before it, and the leaves of the cottonwood trees convert its breezes into soft music."

Paul Johnsgard is one of America's most prominent ornithologists and a world authority on waterfowl behavior. In these popularly written, often lyrical essays, he describes some of his most fascinating encounters with birds, from watching the annual mating displays of prairie-chickens on a hilltop in Pawnee County, Nebraska, to attempting to solve some of the mysteries surrounding Australia's nearly flightless musk duck.

Reflecting his worldwide interests and travels, the birds Johnsgard describes inhabit many parts of the globe. Grouping the birds by the element they frequent most—earth, water, or sky—he weaves a wealth of accurate natural history into personal stories drawn from a lifetime of avian observation. And, as a bonus, Johnsgard's lovely pen-and-ink drawings illustrate each species he describes.

Originally delivered as the Stegner Lecture at the 2020 annual symposium of the Wallace Stegner Center for Land, Resources and the Environment, this book explores how, in the context of the broad global trends of population growth, climate crisis, and inequitable food availability, food systems need to be re-oriented to ensure they can produce enough food to nourish the world. Fanzo discusses moving toward on-farm sustainable food production practices, decreasing food loss and waste, addressing poverty by creating jobs and decent livelihoods, and providing safe, affordable, and healthy diets for everyone. At the same time, food systems must decrease the pressure on biodiversity loss, conserve land and water resources, minimize air and water pollution, and lower greenhouse gas emissions.

Ecofeminism is a practical movement for social change that discerns interconnections among all forms of oppression: the exploitation of nature, the oppression of women, class exploitation, racism, colonialism. Against binary divisions such as self/other, culture/nature, man/woman, humans/animals, and white/non-white, ecofeminist theory asserts that human identity is shaped by more fluid relationships and by an acknowledgment of both connection and difference.

Once considered the province of philosophy and women's studies, ecofeminism in recent years has been incorporated into a broader spectrum of academic discourse. Ecofeminist Literary Criticism assembles some of the most insightful advocates of this perspective to illuminate ecofeminism as a valuable component of literary criticism.

In the past two centuries, cowbirds have increased in numbers and extended their range across North America, while many of the native songbird species whose nests they parasitize to raise their young have declined. This timely book collects forty essays by most of the principal authorities on the biology and management of cowbirds. The book's goals are to explore the biology of cowbirds, the threats they pose to host species and populations, and the management programs that are being undertaken to minimize these threats.

The book is organized into five sections, each with an extended editors' introduction that places the contributions in a broad, up-to-date setting. The sections cover:

• The changing abundance of cowbirds and the ways in which their numbers can be estimated.
• Host choice by cowbirds, the negative effects of cowbirds on particular host species, and the daily patterns of cowbird behavior.
• Behavioral interactions between cowbirds and specific host species.
• Patterns of cowbird abundance and host use across varying landscapes.
• Management programs designed to control cowbirds and protect threatened songbirds.

Explores 19th-century, modern, postmodern, and millennial texts as they portray the changing ecological face of America

Lee Rozelle probes the metaphor of environmental catastrophe in American literature of the last 150 years. In each instance, Rozelle finds evidence that the ecosublime--nature experienced as an instance of wonder and fear--profoundly reflects spiritual and political responses to the natural world, America’s increasingly anti-ecological trajectory, and the ascendance of a post-natural landscape.

In the 19th century, Rozelle argues, Isabella Bird and Edgar Allan Poe represented the western wilderness as culturally constructed and idealized landscapes. Gardens, forests, and frontiers are conceptual frameworks that either misrepresent or uphold ecological space. Modernists like Nathanael West and William Carlos Williams, on the other hand, portray urban space as either wastelands or mythical urban gardens. A chapter on Charles W. Chesnutt and Rebecca Harding Davis analyzes a new breed of literary eco-advocate, educating and shocking mainstream readers through depictions of ecological disaster. A later chapter probes the writings of Edward Abbey and the Unabomber Manifesto to delve into the sublime dimensions of environmental activism, monkey-wrenching, and eco-terrorism. 

Discover the wonders of ecology through the changing seasons of the natural world.

Whit Gibbons and Anne R. Gibbons’s Ecoviews Too: Ecology for All Seasons is based on the popular weekly column “Ecoviews,” published by numerous newspapers for more than thirty years. A follow-up to Ecoviews: Snakes, Snails and Environmental Tales, this lively and entertaining book provides a fascinating and thought-provoking look at the ecology of animals, plants, and their habitats, and promotes awareness of pressing environmental issues.

Because nature, in all its myriad and amazing manifestations, can be enjoyed all year round, this collection is conveniently divided into four sections paralleling the seasons and tracking the adaptations and responses of wildlife to the relentless changes that occur at any location over time. The ecological vignettes focus on seasonal happenings in the cycle of life. The authors not only draw parallels between the natural world and human activities but also highlight unique behaviors of various plant and animal species. They often use humor to get across their message regarding the need to protect our native species and the habitats they depend on for survival.

An intriguing and captivating publication, Ecoviews Too is comprised of fifty informative essays that address ecological topics such as camouflage and mimicry, hibernation and estivation, the human need to encounter scary animals, the mysteries of plant dormancy in winter, the comeback of the wild turkey coinciding with the decline of bobwhites, the chemistry behind the color change in fall leaves, and the top ten environmental problems facing the world today. Educating, entertaining, and delighting a general audience, especially those with an interest in nature, Ecoviews Too provides a useful resource for students and scientists alike.

Discover the wonder of nature through stories that connect science, wildlife, and everyday life.

This lively and entertaining book provides a fascinating and thought-provoking look at the ecology of animals, plants, and their habitats and promotes awareness of pressing environmental issues. The eight informative chapters deliver effective environmental messages and supply compelling insight into the natural world and the ecologists who investigate its many mysteries.

From a concerned ecological stance, the authors show that human relationship with other organisms and the environment is always complex and can be exhilarating, inspiring, humorous, and irritating, depending on perspectives and circumstances. Writing truly to inform and delight, they give a captivating variety of examples from the natural world in hopes of making readers of all ages more compassionate, more tolerant, and more sensitive to other living organisms and their interrelationships. The book celebrates the intrinsic worth of all plants and animals in order to motivate people in a unified effort to preserve the Earth's rich array of life forms. The preservation of the integrity of our planet's biodiversity is, the authors illustrate, critical to our own survival.