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The story of a fascinating fish and the forward-thinking people who saved them in Wisconsin 

For millennia, sturgeon swam the waterways of Wisconsin. Before the 1800s, an estimated eleven million sturgeon lived in Lake Michigan alone. Menominee and Ojibwe people depended on the fish for food and harvested them sustainably. But in the early 1900s, the lake sturgeon was near extinction. Saving Our Sturgeon tells the remarkable story of lake sturgeon in Wisconsin, the conservation efforts to save the species, and what is being done to keep the population healthy and thriving today.  

Readers will learn about the natural history of the lake sturgeon—its anatomy, behavior, and habitat—and the factors that threatened its survival, from overharvesting to the building of dams that prevented sturgeon from reaching spawning areas. The book, written for young readers aged eleven and up, explains how government agencies, conservationists, and citizen groups worked together to save the sturgeon population in Wisconsin. 

Saving Our Sturgeon includes a chapter about the Menominee Nation’s work to revitalize cultural traditions focused on the sturgeon and restore access to the fish on their reservation. The book also highlights how young people can get involved with sturgeon conservation efforts. 

A great resource for classroom use, Saving Our Sturgeon contains maps, photos, and diagrams, plus a glossary of terms, a timeline of events, a Who’s Who list of individuals and groups featured in the book, and a bibliography that highlights kid-friendly sources to learn more. Young readers will learn basic facts about sturgeon biology, what it means for a species to be threatened or endangered, and how scientists use data to support repopulation. This inspiring book shares a conservation success story about one remarkable (and plenty peculiar) species of fish and shows young readers how they, too, can help protect these incredible creatures.

Hardly a place exists on earth that has not been shaped in some way by human beings. Every day we modify and even sweep away natural landscapes as we build places to live and work. But why we react and interact as social beings intent on exercising ecological dominance poses an endlessly compelling puzzle for everyone from novelists to geographers.

In Showing Off, distinguished geographer Philip L. Wagner offers a persuasive hypothesis. Drawing on a lifetime of inquiry, travel, and teaching, he asserts that the strive for Geltung—personal standing, recognition, acceptance, esteem, and influence—shapes all of our interactions and defines the unique social character of human beings.

Wagner applies the Geltung hypothesis to a wide range of human activities from falling in love and spreading gossip to buying goods and making war. His examples demonstrate how communication and display—"showing off"—impel geographic change, as they reveal how and why people with the most Geltung tend to occupy the most desirable places.

This broad vision draws insights from many fields. A major contribution to cultural geography, the book also sheds new light on individual psychology and psychopathology and suggests new themes for cognitive science and even philosophy. Sure to stir lively debate in many circles, it will be provocative reading for everyone fascinated by the continuum between people and places.

Neoliberals often point to improvements in public health and nutrition as examples of globalisation's success, but this book argues that the corporate food and medicine industries are destroying environments and ruining living conditions across the world.

Scientist Stan Cox expertly draws out the strong link between Western big business and environmental destruction. This is a shocking account of the huge damage that drug manufacturers and large food corporations are inflicting on the health of people and crops worldwide. Companies discussed include Wal-Mart, GlaxoSmithKline, Tyson Foods and Monsanto. On issues ranging from the poisoning of water supplies in South Asia to natural gas depletion and how it threatens global food supplies, Cox shows how the demand for profits is always put above the public interest.

While individual efforts to "shop for a better world" and conserve energy are laudable, Cox explains that they need to be accompanied by an economic system that is grounded in ecological sustainability if we are to find a cure for our Sick Planet.