Results by title

The ultimate resource for sport fishing in southern Illinois

Southern Illinois’s many waterways teem with an incredible variety of fish species, and award-winning fisherman and journalist Colby Simms knows exactly where and how to catch them all.

Within these pages, Simms shares the secrets he’s gleaned from years of hard-won experience: colossal catfish dominate the Mississippi River; monstrous muskies rule over Kinkaid Lake. Rend gives up record crappie and bowfin, while Crab Orchard produces excellent largemouth bass fishing and Cedar offers huge striped bass. Whether you’re powerboating a large lake or paddling an out-of-the-way oxbow, the region presents countless opportunities for different styles of fishing. Wondering which bait and tackle will produce the best results, or how seasonal weather affects fish migration patterns? Simms has already conferred with fellow fishing pros as well as biologists, outdoor sports media figures, and other experts to bring you the most current, site-specific information possible. From fishing fundamentals to the most advanced, cutting-edge techniques, he presents a battle plan for attacking the waters, big and small, of the lower Prairie State, which will benefit all anglers—from beginners to seasoned tournament competitors. 

Nestled between the critical information and detailed instructions, you’ll find stories from Simms and additional professional anglers, state fisheries staff, recreational fishers, and others. You’ll find encouragement and motivation to put away life’s modern distractions and get back to nature. Southern Illinois Fishing brims with enthusiasm, humor, and heart, and is sure to educate and inspire readers to lose themselves in the ancient tradition and modern sport of fishing.

Explores the Southeast’s imperiled river systems and solutions for preserving them in the face of habitat loss, climate change, and extinction

Southern Rivers, by award-winning nature writer and biologist R. Scot Duncan, is a thoroughly crafted exploration of the perilous state of the Southeast’s rivers and the urgent need to safeguard their vitality. The region’s rivers are the epicenter of North American freshwater biodiversity and are the top global hotspot for important aquatic animals including mussels, turtles, snails, crayfish, and fish, many of which have made important contributions to southern life and culture.

Centuries of commercial development have impaired the region’s river systems, sacrificing biodiversity and compromising the rivers’ ability to provide resources essential to human life: drinking water, waste disposal, irrigation, navigation, recreation, power production, and more. Now, increased heat and drought caused by climate change are lowering water levels. As such threats increase, it may seem necessary to choose between nature conservation and human needs, but Duncan persuasively demonstrates that this is a false choice. Conservation enhances human life.

In the same engaging voice of an expert friend that won over thousands of readers of his earlier book, Southern Wonder: Alabama’s Surprising Biodiversity, Duncan explains the task of managing southeastern rivers and how river water quality affects the daily lives of the millions who hold these historic waterways dear. He shows how managing rivers wisely can meet the needs of biodiversity and humanity both. With Americans increasingly anxious about the onset of climate change and the accelerating extinction crisis, Southern Rivers illuminates actionable solutions.
 

WINNER, REED AWARD FOR ENVIRONMENTAL WRITING GIVEN BY THE SOUTHERN ENVIRONMENTAL LAW CENTER

Southern Wonder explores Alabama’s amazing biological diversity, the reasons for the large number of species in the state, and the importance of their preservation.

Alabama ranks fifth in the nation in number of species of plants and animals found in the state, surpassed only by the much larger western states of California,Texas, Arizona, and New Mexico. When all the species of birds, trees, mammals, reptiles, amphibians, fishes, wildflowers, dragonflies, tiger beetles, and ants are tallied, Alabama harbors more species than 90 percent of the other states in the United States. Alabamais particularly rich in aquatic biodiversity, leading the nation in species of freshwater fishes, turtles, mussels, crayfish, snails, damselflies, and carnivorous plants. The state also hosts an exceptional number of endemic species—those not found beyond its borders—ranking seventh in the nation with 144 species. The state’s 4,533 species, with more being inventoried and discovered each year, are supported by no less than 64 distinct ecological systems—each a unique blend of soil, water, sunlight, heat, and natural disturbance regimes. Habitats include dry forests, moist forests, swamp forests, sunny prairies, grassy barrens, scorching glades, rolling dunes, and bogs filled with pitcher plants and sundews. The state also includes a region of subterranean ecosystems that are more elaborate and species rich than any other place on the continent.

Although Alabama is teeming with life, the state’s prominence as a refuge for plants and animals is poorly appreciated. Even among Alabama’s citizens, few outside a small circle of biologists, advocates, and other naturalists understand the special quality of the state’s natural heritage. R. Scot Duncan rectifies this situation in Southern Wonder by providing a well-written, comprehensive overview that the general public, policy makers, and teachers can understand and use. Readers are taken on an exploratory journey of the state’s varied landscapes—from the Tennessee River Valley to the coastal dunes—and are introduced to remarkable species, such as the cave salamander and the beach mouse. By interweaving the disciplines of ecology, evolution, meteorology, and geology into an accessible whole, Duncan explains clearly why Alabama is so biotically rich and champions efforts for its careful preservation.

Published in Cooperation with The Nature Conservancy

Explores how, over centuries, Amazonian people and their cultures have interacted with rainforests

William Balée is a world-renowned expert on the cultural and historical ecology of the Amazon basin. His new collection, Sowing the Forest, is a companion volume to the award-winning Cultural Forests of the Amazon, published in 2013. Sowing the Forest engages in depth with how, over centuries, Amazonian people and their cultures have interacted with rainforests, making the landscapes of palm forests and other kinds of forests, and how these and related forests have fed back into the vocabulary and behavior of current indigenous occupants of the remotest parts of the vast hinterlands.

The book is divided into two parts. Part 1, “Substrate of Intentionality,” comprises chapters on historical ecology, indigenous palm forests, plant names in Amazonia, the origins of the Amazonian plantain, and the unknown “Dark Earth people” of thousands of years ago and their landscaping. Together these chapters illustrate the phenomenon of feedback between culture and environment.

In Part 2, “Scope of Transformation,” Balée lays out his theory of landscape transformation, which he divides into two rubrics—primary landscape transformation and secondary landscape transformation—and for which he provides examples and various specific effects. One chapter compares environmental and social interrelationships in an Orang Asli group in Malaysia and the Ka’apor people of eastern Amazonian Brazil, and another chapter covers loss of language and culture in the Bolivian Amazon. A final chapter addresses the controversial topic of monumentality in the rainforest. Balée concludes by emphasizing the common thread in Amazonian historical ecology: the long-term phenomenon of encouraging diversity for its own sake, not just for economic reasons.
 

Exposes how emotion, memory, and national pride shape the stories we tell about science, animals, and the history of the “race to space”

Before humans ever left Earth’s atmosphere, a handful of primates paved the way—earning fame and fascination but leaving behind a complicated and often highly debated legacy. As the Cold War intensified, the US space program turned to monkeys—Able, Baker, Ham, and Enos—to test and explore the limits of human survival in space. These animals became media sensations, museum exhibits, and symbols of American ingenuity, even as their suffering was often overlooked.

With insight and empathy, Lynch unpacks the stories we tell about these primates and how they are remembered through culture and time, both modern and historically. Lynch argues that the public memory of these animals often justifies their use in the name of scientific progress. Sometimes they are portrayed as tools, other times as human stand-ins, and frequently as objects of sympathy—but rarely as subjects of critique.

Lynch shows how feelings—compassion, cuteness, patriotism, and the technological sublime—shape the stories we tell about these animals and the ethical frameworks we build around them. Each chapter focuses on a different genre of memory-making, from newspaper and photojournalism to museum exhibits, children’s literature, and fictional films.

By reframing these animal pioneers, Lynch uncovers the ethical and emotional narratives that shape how we remember science. Space Monkeys! is a vital reflection on memory, identity, and the more-than-human costs of progress. 
 

Speaking of Real Animals and Their History offers an interdisciplinary exploration of animal lives across time, from dinosaurs and long-extinct cave bears to contemporary animals like the giant panda and bald eagles. Drawing on iconography, palaeozoology, zooarchaeology, osteobiography, and textual accounts that document animals’ natural behaviors, Linda Kalof reconstructs in vivid prose a synthesis of interdisciplinary research on the life histories of animals through a realist lens, presenting true‑to‑life portraits of the creatures who have lived on Earth across time.

Protecting endangered species of animals and plants is a goal that almost everyone supports in principle—but in practice private landowners have often opposed the regulations of the Endangered Species Act, which, they argue, unfairly limits their right to profit from their property. To encourage private landowners to cooperate voluntarily in species conservation and to mitigate the economic burden of doing so, the government and nonprofit land trusts have created a number of incentive programs, including conservation easements, leases, habitat banking, habitat conservation planning, safe harbors, candidate conservation agreements, and the "no surprise" policy.

In this book, lawyers, economists, political scientists, historians, and zoologists come together to assess the challenges and opportunities for using economic incentives as compensation for protecting species at risk on private property. They examine current programs to see how well they are working and also offer ideas for how these programs could be more successful. Their ultimate goal is to better understand how economic incentive schemes can be made both more cost-effective and more socially acceptable, while respecting a wide range of views regarding opportunity costs, legal standing, biological effectiveness, moral appropriateness, and social context.

An hourly guide that tracks twenty-four stars, stellar clusters, and constellations across the sky to reveal their luminous lives and lore.

Over the course of a day, the constellations slowly shift, rising in the east and setting in the west, due to Earth’s rotation. A full turn of the celestial sphere, that bowl above us where the stars seemingly appear fixed to the surface, is completed once every twenty-four hours. In fact, the stars inspired the twenty-four-hour day, and one star, our Sun, rules the circadian rhythms of all life on our planet. This short book sweeps through the celestial sphere hour by hour, introducing a remarkable cast of stellar characters with each chapter. Celebrated science writer Marcia Bartusiak and mathematician Stephen Lowe blend practical astronomy with fascinating history to share unique cosmological stories.  

This husband and wife team explain that observers have long split the sky into twenty-four hours of right ascension—a celestial equivalent of longitude and a universal scheme for locating cosmological objects. Each chapter of Star Day presents a single right ascension hour, from the stellar death of S Andromedae (zeroth hour)—an explosion that helped reveal the size of the universe—to Scheat (twenty-third hour), an aging red giant. Twice the mass of the Sun and some 1,500 times as bright, Scheat sometimes guides amateur astronomers to distant galaxies. In between, we learn about humans’ pole star, Polaris (second hour), and meet the supermassive black hole at the center of our Milky Way galaxy (seventeenth hour). By the end of our star day, we will appreciate both our own stellar origins and the fragile and deep connections between human civilizations and the ever-changing heavens. Star Day reminds us that wonder and discovery are easily available, all for the simple price of looking up.

For each chapter, artist Matthew Green has depicted these stellar scenes with entrancing pen-and-ink drawings. Working together to narrate and illustrate these stars' stories, Bartusiak, Lowe, and Green have created an engaging read that is a perfect way to spend an hour or two—and a true gift to both seasoned skywatchers and curious beginners. 

The process of nation-building in Latin America transformed the relations between the state, the economy, and nature. Between 1760 and 1940, the economies of most countries in the Spanish Caribbean came to depend heavily on the export of plant products, such as coffee, tobacco, and sugar. After the mid-nineteenth century, this model of export-led economic growth also became a central tenet of liberal projects of nation-building. As international competition grew and commodity prices fell over this period, Latin American growers strove to remain competitive by increasing agricultural production. By the turn of the twentieth century, their pursuit of export-led growth had generated severe environmental problems, including soil exhaustion, erosion, and epidemic outbreaks of crop diseases and pests.

This book traces the history of the intersections between nature, economy, and nation in the Spanish Caribbean through a history of the agricultural and botanical sciences. Growers and governments in Venezuela, Puerto Rico, Cuba, Colombia, and Costa Rica turned to scientists to help them establish practical and ideological control over nature. They hoped to use science to alleviate the pressing environmental and economic stresses, without having to give up their commitment to export-led growth. Starting from an overview of the relationship among science, nature, and development throughout the export boom of 1760 to 1930, Stuart McCook examines such topics as the relationship between scientific plant surveys and nation-building, the development of a "creole science" to address the problems of tropical agriculture, the ecological rationalization of the sugar industry, and the growth of technocratic ideologies of science and progress. He concludes with a look at how the Great Depression of the 1930s changed the paradigms of economic and political development and the role of science and nature in these paradigms.

A sweeping cultural history of our yearning for psychedelics to free us from both modern life and traditional religion.

In 1957, Life Magazine published an article called “Seeking the Magic Mushroom” about a Mexican healing ritual centered on an obscure psychedelic: Psilocybe mushrooms. Readers raced to experiment with the drug for their own spiritual, therapeutic, and recreational purposes until a psychedelic wave swept the nation. Today, though psilocybin has been transformed from a sacred fungus into a pharmaceutical product, many people still turn to the enigmatic mushroom to encounter profound spiritual experiences without the baggage of traditional religion.

In Still Seeking the Magic Mushroom, Hugh B. Urban examines the alluring promise of mysticism without religion. With psychedelics, one need not fast, flagellate, or even worship a god to encounter the transcendent; a carefully timed ingestion of psilocybin will suffice. But, Urban argues, stripping the trip from its religion came at a cost: the erasure of Indigenous culture and the eventual commercialization and scientification of the psychedelic underground. Urban shows that psychedelic mushrooms, far from the fringe or countercultural margins, have been central players in shaping American attitudes toward religion and science over the last century. He argues that our love affair with the intoxicating fungus reveals a deep frustration with a disenchanted world, desire for meaning beyond religion, yearning for nature amid ecological crisis, faith in science to save us, and the relentless power of capitalism to turn everything into commodities.

A fascinating look at the lives of the world’s largest dog population—street dogs—offering essential insights into your dog’s behavior and the mysterious origins of human-dog cooperation. 

Today, there are close to a billion dogs on the planet. Some twenty thousand years ago, there were none. How did dogs originate from wolves? And how did we begin our best friendship? Although we can’t go back in time, we can study modern dogs for clues. Of today’s dogs, about eighty percent are street dogs, which don’t live in human homes, but near them, existing in a space between wild and domesticated.

This fascinating and eye-opening book offers us a chance to meet these street dogs and, through them, to imagine the earliest stages of human-canine companionship and collaboration. Award-winning author and animal behaviorist Lee Alan Dugatkin and world canine expert Anindita Bhadra take us from the hallways of Bhadra’s Dog Lab onto the bustling streets of Kolkata, India, where we encounter the intelligent, resourceful, and sometimes mischievous street dogs that have lived alongside humans for hundreds of dog generations. By observing these street dogs’ social structures, survival strategies, and personalities—and comparing them to foxes, wolves, and house dogs, among other species—we learn a lot about canine behavior. Take, for example, Bhadra’s discovery that, no matter how vital food is to a street dog, when given a choice between a meal and a gentle carress, dogs choose love over the food. We also learn that many dogs prefer yellow to other colors; that dog grandmoms may adopt unrelated puppies; and that dog genes harbor a mutation that, in humans, is associated with extreme friendliness. We even begin to understand why dogs pee on, well, everything—particularly on other dog pee.

Watching dogs live independent lives alongside humans, we also start to wonder, as Bhadra does, about the origins of human-dog cooperation. She persuades us that early dogs and humans likely protected each other, as many still do today, and that street dogs may help us to imagine our ancestors’ interactions with the earliest proto-dogs. In their engaging exploration, Dugatkin and Bhadra show that getting to know street dogs may help us understand the past, present, and future of our unique interspecies relationship.

Since its original publication in 1986, Studies in Outdoor Recreation has been a standard text in courses on parks and outdoor recreation and serves as an invaluable reference for park and recreation managers. The first book to integrate the social science literature on outdoor recreation, it reviews studies from this broad, interdisciplinary field and synthesizes them into a body of knowledge, providing an historical perspective on outdoor recreation research and developing its practical management implications.
 
This fourth edition includes a new preface and is completely revised to reflect current research and new concerns in the field. A new chapter examines emerging issues such as sustainable transportation and the impacts of climate change.
 
An essential resource for students, scholars, and professionals, Studies in Outdoor Recreation explores the theoretical and methodological issues in outdoor recreation and describes the management implications of outdoor recreation research.

Contributors to the fourth edition include Laura Anderson, Megha Budruk, Kelly Goonan, Jeffrey Hallo, Daniel Laven, Steven Lawson, Rebecca Stanfield McCown, Ben Minteer, Peter Newman, Elizabeth Perry, Peter Pettengill, Nathan Reigner, William Valliere, Carena van Riper, and Xiao Xiao.