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WINNER OF THE SOUTH CAROLINA OUTDOOR PRESS ASSOCIATION'S EXCELLENCE IN CRAFT FOR THE BEST OUTDOOR BOOK AWARD

Adventures and misadventures exploring nature on a patch of “worthless” abandoned farmland

Following his retirement from academic life, renowned naturalist and writer Whit Gibbons and his family purchased a tract of abandoned farmland where the South Carolina piedmont meets the coastal plain. Described as backcountry scrubland, it was originally envisioned as a family retreat, but soon the property became Gibbons’s outdoor learning laboratory where he was often aided by his four grandchildren, along with a host of enthusiastic visitors.

Inspired by nature’s power to excite, educate, and provide a sense of place in the world, Gibbons invites readers to learn about their surrounding environments by describing his latest adventures and sharing expert advice for exploring the world in which we live. Peppered throughout with colorful personal anecdotes and told with Gibbons’s affable style and wit, Salleyland: Wildlife Adventures in Swamps, Sandhills, and Forests is more than a personal memoir or a record of place. Rather, it is an exercise in learning about a patch of nature, thereby reminding us to open our eyes to the complexity and wonder of the natural world.

Starting with the simple advice of following your own curiosity, Gibbons discusses different opportunities and methods for exploring one’s surroundings, introduces key ecological concepts, offers advice for cultivating habitat, explains the value of and different approaches to keeping lists and field journals, and celebrates the advances that cell phone photography and wildlife cameras offer naturalists of all levels. With Gibbons’s guidance and encouragement, readers will learn to embrace their inner scientists, equipped with the knowledge and encouragement to venture beyond their own front doors, ready to discover the secrets of their habitat, regardless of where they live.
 

The human and natural history of a fragile Midwestern landscape 

While many people are familiar with the federally protected St. Croix and Namekagon Rivers of northwestern Wisconsin, few know about the Namekagon Barrens, a rare pine barrens landscape within a few miles of their confluence. A tiny remnant of the millions of barrens acres that once covered the region, the Namekagon Barrens Wildlife Area lies in the heart of the state’s Northwest Sands, a band of pine and oak stretching from Bayfield on Lake Superior to St. Croix Falls on the Wisconsin–Minnesota border. Unfathomable amounts of glacial sand and repeated fires over thousands of years shaped a land of scrub oak and jack pine, blueberries and sweet fern, creating an ideal habitat for wolves and sharp-tailed grouse. 

Just as compelling is the land’s rich human history, from Paleo-Indian hunters to Ojibwe berry pickers, loggers to early road builders, and immigrants whose farming efforts failed to the wildlife habitat specialists who manage it today. The book, told in memoir style and featuring color photographs by the author, sets the land’s unusual natural history as the backdrop for a multilayered story about the impact of people on this vulnerable landscape.

Silver winner of the 2023 Midwest Book Award for History 

"Peters invites his readers on a journey across time and space, to the glacial formation of the Namekagon Barrens into the present. . . . The book is replete with beautiful photographs, useful maps, and a number of other images that seem to appear on nearly every other page. This book should appeal to a wide public readership while at the same time being a useful primer for academics and researchers."
—Hayden L. Nelson, Environmental History 

The forgotten history of grassroots climate science, built by women.

For over two centuries, scientists have struggled to predict how people will respond to the vagaries of weather and climate. Today, governments, insurance companies, and investment firms continue to forecast what climate change will mean for local communities, setting adaptation goals from the top down. But hidden in the archives is another approach to this problem that is democratic, collaborative, and grows from the bottom up.

In Stewards of the Sky, historian Deborah R. Coen uncovers the stories of women who documented the humble drivers of change that unfold at the scale of everyday life, modeling the stewardship of the atmosphere as an equitably shared resource—a commons. These naturalists revealed how insects and plants work together to survive unusual weather, how air powers the cycle of life and death, and how people with disabilities cope with pollution. Coen spotlights Geneviève Thiroux d’Arconville, Anna Kingsford, Rosa Luxemburg, and Margaret Collins, as well as the contemporary figures Susan Cutter, Diana Liverman, and Maria Lemos, scientists and activists who resisted their colleagues’ efforts to replace traditional forms of collective security with predictive sciences that would make risk profitable. In contrast, Coen’s antiheroines demonstrated the value of humility and respect for the interpersonal and cross-species relationships that make research possible. Their work shows that surviving climate change is not a zero-sum game, that mutual aid is critical, and that antiheroic science can help build alliances that respect different ways of knowing the world.