Results by title
2817 books match the query 'Nature' and 595 start with t
The Knowledge of Nature and the Nature of Knowledge in Early Modern Japan
Federico Marcon
University of Chicago Press, 2015
The first book-length English-language study devoted to the important field of honzogaku, The Knowledge of Nature and the Nature of Knowledge in Early Modern Japan will be an essential text for historians of Japanese and East Asian science, and a fascinating read for anyone interested in the development of science in the early modern era.
The Land Is Our Community
Aldo Leopold’s Environmental Ethic for the New MillenniumRoberta L. Millstein
University of Chicago Press, 2024
Informed by his experiences as a hunter, forester, wildlife manager, ecologist, conservationist, and professor, Aldo Leopold developed a view he called the land ethic. In a classic essay, published posthumously in A Sand County Almanac, Leopold advocated for an expansion of our ethical obligations beyond the purely human to include what he variously termed the “land community” or the “biotic community”—communities of interdependent humans, nonhuman animals, plants, soils, and waters, understood collectively. This philosophy has been extremely influential in environmental ethics as well as conservation biology and related fields.
Using an approach grounded in environmental ethics and the history and philosophy of science, Roberta L. Millstein reexamines Leopold’s land ethic in light of contemporary ecology. Despite the enormous influence of the land ethic, it has sometimes been dismissed as either empirically out of date or ethically flawed. Millstein argues that these dismissals are based on problematic readings of Leopold’s ideas. In this book, she provides new interpretations of the central concepts underlying the land ethic: interdependence, land community, and land health. She also offers a fresh take on of his argument for extending our ethics to include land communities as well as Leopold-inspired guidelines for how the land ethic can steer conservation and restoration policy.
The Land Remembers
The Story of a Farm and Its PeopleBen Logan, with an introduction by Curt Meine
University of Wisconsin Press, 2017
The Land Still Lives
Jerry Apps
Wisconsin Historical Society Press, 2019
Originally published in 1970, The Land Still Lives is the first book by Wisconsin’s greatest rural philosopher, Jerry Apps. Written when he was still a young agriculture professor at the University of Wisconsin, The Land Still Lives was readers’ first introduction to Jerry’s farm in central Wisconsin, called Roshara, and the surrounding community of Skunk’s Hollow. This special 50th-anniversary edition features a new epilogue, in which Jerry revisits his philosophy of caring for the land so it in turn will care for us. This is vintage Apps, essential reading for Jerry’s legions of fans—and for all who, like Jerry, wish “to develop a relationship with nature and all its mystery and wonder.”
The Land of the Dead Is Open for Business
Jacob Strautmann
Four Way Books, 2020
The Last Beach
Orrin H. Pilkey and J. Andrew G. Cooper
Duke University Press, 2014
After explaining beaches as dynamic ecosystems, Pilkey and Cooper assess the harm done by dense oceanfront development accompanied by the construction of massive seawalls to protect new buildings from a shoreline that encroaches as sea levels rise. They discuss the toll taken by sand mining, trash that washes up on beaches, and pollution, which has contaminated not only the water but also, surprisingly, the sand. Acknowledging the challenge of reconciling our actions with our love of beaches, the geologists offer suggestions for reversing course, insisting that given the space, beaches can take care of themselves and provide us with multiple benefits.
The Last Cheater's Waltz
Beauty and Violence in the Desert SouthwestEllen Meloy
University of Arizona Press, 1999
The Last Days of St. Pierre
The Volcanic Disaster That Claimed 30,000 LivesErnest Zebrowski, Jr.
Rutgers University Press, 2002
On May 8, 1902, Mont Pelée on the island of Martinique exploded. A deadly cloud of steam and ash churned through plantations and villages, flattened the grand city of St. Pierre, then thundered into the bay where it sank eighteen ships and hundreds of smaller craft. Within a minute or two, nearly 30,000 humans died. The splintered rubble of their homes and belongings burned for three days, and the world began to understand the awesome power of nuées ardentes, glowing avalanches of hot gas and debris that sweep down the slopes of volcanoes, instantly steaming to death anything in its path. The enormous death toll was particularly tragic because it was avoidable. Had it not been for an unfortunate combination of scientific misjudgment and political hubris, most of the victims would have escaped.
In The Last Days of St. Pierre, Ernest Zebrowski Jr. counts down the days leading up to the catastrophe, and unfolds a tale intertwining human foolishness and heroism with the remarkable forces of nature. Illustrations contrast life in Martinique before and after the eruption, and eyewitness accounts bring the story to life.
Although it seems a long time since the destruction of St. Pierre, it is a mere blink of an eye in our planet’s geological history. Mont Pelée will erupt again, as will Vesuvius, Krakatau, St. Helens, Thera, and most other infamously fatal volcanoes, and human lives will again be threatened. The St. Pierre disaster has taught us much about the awesome power of volcanic forces and the devastation they can bring.
The Last Dinosaur Book
The Life and Times of a Cultural IconW. J. T. Mitchell
University of Chicago Press, 1998
Mitchell aims to trace the cultural family tree of the dinosaur, and what he discovers is a creature of striking flexibility, linked to dragons and mammoths, skyscrapers and steam engines, cowboys and Indians. In the vast territory between the cunning predators of Jurassic Park and the mawkishly sweet Barney, from political leviathans to corporate icons, from paleontology to Barnum and Bailey, Mitchell finds a cultural symbol whose plurality of meaning and often contradictory nature is emblematic of modern society itself. As a scientific entity, the dinosaur endured a near-eclipse for over a century, but as an image it is enjoying its widest circulation. And it endures, according to Mitchell, because it is uniquely malleable, a figure of both innovation and obsolescence, massive power and pathetic failure—the totem animal of modernity.
Drawing unforeseen and unusual connections at every turn between dinosaurs real and imagined, The Last Dinosaur Book is the first to delve so deeply, so insightfully, and so enjoyably into our modern dino-obsession.
The Last Grizzly and Other Southwestern Bear Stories
Edited by David E. Brown and John A. Murray
University of Arizona Press, 1988
The Last Mixtape
Physical Media and Nostalgic CyclesSeth Long
University of Chicago Press, 2025
Obsolescence makes the heart grow fonder, at least in the case of the mixtape. Not all technologies are so lucky. Some (say, wax cylinders) fade almost completely from cultural memory. A lucky few pass into metaphor: we still “hang up” our smartphones, “cut” film, and “patch” computer code. As digital streaming completes the obsolescence of physical media, what will become of the humble cassette?
In The Last Mixtape, Seth Long offers a microhistory of music curation, anchored by the cassette, from which he explores the meanings of obsolescence, ownership, nostalgia, and the speed of cultural change. A moving meditation on our relationship with music, memory, and curation in the digital century, Long ultimately calls for a return to the media ecology represented by the mixtape: a world in which media is cheap and abundant but tactile and meaningfully engaged.
The Last Panda
George B. Schaller
University of Chicago Press, 1993
"No scientist is better at letting the rest of us in on just how the natural world works; no poet sees the world with greater clarity or writes about it with more grace. . . . Anyone who genuinely cares for wildlife cannot help being grateful to Schaller—both for his efforts to understand the panda and for the candor with which he reports what has gone so badly wrong in the struggle to save it from extinction."—Geoffrey C. Ward, New York Times Book Review
"Schaller's book is a unique mix of natural history and the politics of conservation, and it makes for compelling reading. . . . Having been in giant panda country myself, I found some of the descriptions of the animals and habitats breathtaking. Schaller describes the daily routines and personalities of the giant pandas he studied (as well as their fates thereafter) as though they were his blood relatives. . . . Schaller's brilliant presentation of the complexities of conservation makes his book a milestone for the conservation movement."—Devra G. Kleiman, Washington Post Book World
"George Schaller's most soulful work, written in journal style with many asides about a creature who evolved only two to three million years ago (about the same time as humans). . . . Here, conservation biology confronts an evil that grinds against hope and shatters the planet's diversity. Written with hope."—Whole Earth Catalog
"A nicely crafted blend of wildlife observation and political-cultural analysis. . . . The Last Panda is a sad chronicle of our failure, so far, to stem the decline of the animal that may be the most beloved on the planet."—Donald Dale Jackson, Smithsonian
The Last River
Life Along Arkansas's Lower WhiteTurner Browne
University of Arkansas Press, 1993
The Last of the Market Hunters
Dale Hamm with David Bakke
Southern Illinois University Press, 1996
Duck hunting has changed greatly since the days of unlimited duck kills, as the limit of fifty ducks a day established in 1902 has fallen to the present three. A legitimate hunter now, Dale Hamm learned the art of market hunting—taking waterfowl out of season and selling them to restaurants—from his father during the l920s. During the l930s and l940s, he kept his family alive by market hunting. At the peak of his career, Hamm poached every private hunting club along the Illinois River from Havana to Beardstown.
After market hunting died out, Hamm became a legendary and almost respected—albeit controversial—character on the Illinois backwaters. He was eventually invited to hunt on the same clubs from which he had once been chased at the point of a shotgun. He hunted with judges, sheriffs, and the head of undercover operations for the Illinois Department of Conservation, all of whom knew of his reputation. He passed on to these hunting partners a lifetime of outdoor knowledge gained from slogging through mud, falling through ice, hunting ducks at three o’clock in the morning, dodging game wardens, and running the world’s only floating tavern.
"I always said if anyone ever cut open one of us Hamms, all they’d find was duck or fish," Hamm once said of his family. Now in his eighties, Hamm still carries a pellet from a shotgun in his chin to remind him of a shotgun blast that ricocheted off the water and into his face. Bakke notes that it is appropriate that a man who spent his life with a shotgun in his hands should carry a bit of buckshot wherever he goes.
Everyone who ever met Dale Hamm has a story about him. His own story is that of a one-of-a-kind character who, in his later years, used his considerable outdoor savvy to conserve the natural resources he once savaged. "His time and kind are gone," Bakke notes, "and there will never be another like him."
This book will be of interest to anyone who has ever been hunting—or who enjoys reading about colorful people and times that exist no more.
The Later Works of John Dewey, Volume 1, 1925 - 1953
1925, Experience and NatureJohn Dewey. Edited by Jo Ann Boydston
Southern Illinois University Press, 2008
John Dewey’s Experience and Nature has been considered the fullest expression of his mature philosophy since its eagerly awaited publication in 1925.Irwin Edman wrote at that time that “with monumental care, detail and completeness, Professor Dewey has in this volume revealed the metaphysical heart that beats its unvarying alert tempo through all his writings, whatever their explicit themes.” In his introduction to this volume, Sidney Hook points out that “Dewey’s Experience and Nature is both the most suggestive and most difficult of his writings.”
The meticulously edited text published here as the first volume in the series The Later Works of John Dewey, 1925–1953spans that entire period in Dewey’s thought by including two important and previously unpublished documents from the book’s history: Dewey’s unfinished new introduction written between 1947and 1949,edited by the late Joseph Ratner, and Dewey’s unedited final draft of that introduction written the year before his death. In the intervening years Dewey realized the impossibility of making his use of the word “experience” understood. He wrote in his 1951draft for a new introduction: “Were I to write (or rewrite) Experience and Nature today I would entitle the book Culture and Nature and the treatment of specific subject-matters would be correspondingly modified. I would abandon the term ‘experience’ because of my growing realization that the historical obstacles which prevented understanding of my use of ‘experience’ are, for all practical purposes, insurmountable. I would substitute the term ‘culture’ because with its meanings as now firmly established it can fully and freely carry my philosophy of experience.”
The Lessening Stream
An Environmental History of the Santa Cruz RiverMichael F. Logan
University of Arizona Press, 2002
The Lichen Museum
Laurie A. Palmer
University of Minnesota Press, 2023
A radical proposal for how a tiny organism can transform our understanding of human relations
Serving as both a guide and companion publication to the conceptual art project of the same name, The Lichen Museum explores how the physiological characteristics of lichens provide a valuable template for reimagining human relations in an age of ecological and social precarity. Channeling between the personal, the scientific, the philosophical, and the poetic, A. Laurie Palmer employs a cross-disciplinary framework that artfully mirrors the collective relations of lichens, imploring us to envision alternative ways of living based on interdependence rather than individualism and competition.
Lichens are composite organisms made up of a fungus and an alga or cyanobacteria thriving in a mutually beneficial relationship. The Lichen Museum looks to these complex organisms, remarkable for their symbiosis, diversity, longevity, and adaptability, as models for relations rooted in collaboration and nonhierarchical structures. In their resistance to fast-paced growth and commodification, lichens also offer possibilities for humans to reconfigure their relationship to time and attention outside of the accelerated pace of capitalist accumulation.
Drawing together a diverse set of voices, including personal encounters with lichenologists and lichens themselves, Palmer both imagines and embodies a radical new approach to human interconnection. Using this tiny organism as an emblem through which to navigate environmental and social concerns, this work narrows the gap between the human and natural worlds, emphasizing the notion of mutual dependence as a necessary means of survival and prosperity.
The Life of Plants
E. J. H. Corner
University of Chicago Press, 2003
The Life of a Leaf
Steven Vogel
University of Chicago Press, 2012
In Vogel’s account, the leaf serves as a biological everyman, an ordinary and ubiquitous living thing that nonetheless speaks volumes about our environment as well as its own. Thus in exploring the leaf’s world, Vogel simultaneously explores our own.
The Life of the Lakes, 4th Ed.
A Guide to the Great Lakes FisheryBrandon C. Schroeder, Dan M. O'Keefe, and Shari L. Dann
University of Michigan Press, 2019
Now in its fourth edition, The Life of the Lakes examines the complex portrait of the Great Lakes fishery, including the history of the fishery’s exploitation and management, the current health of the Lakes, and the outlook for the future. Featuring more graphics, photos, and illustrations than ever, all printed in full color, the new edition of this engaging book is a perfect resource for general readers, teachers, and students looking for an easy-to-follow guide to the Great Lakes fishery. This book is published in collaboration with Michigan Sea Grant (www.michiganseagrant.org), a cooperative program of the University of Michigan and Michigan State University.
The Light-Green Society
Ecology and Technological Modernity in France, 1960-2000Michael Bess
University of Chicago Press, 2003
The Light-Green Society limns sharply these trends over the last fifty years. The rise of environmentalism in the 1960s stemmed from a fervent desire to "save" wild nature-nature conceived as a qualitatively distinct domain, wholly separate from human designs and endeavors. And yet, Bess shows, after forty years of environmentalist agitation, much of it remarkably successful in achieving its aims, the old conception of nature as a "separate sphere" has become largely untenable. In the light-green society, where ecology and technological modernity continually flow together, a new hybrid vision of intermingled nature-culture has increasingly taken its place.
The Lion's Historian
Africa's Animal PastSandra Swart
Ohio University Press, 2025
“Until the lion has a historian of his own, the tale of the hunt will always glorify the hunter.” Sandra Swart takes up the challenge of that African proverb and, with this book, becomes the lion’s historian. As a species, humans are not alone; but our history has been written as though we were. Swart insists on a multispecies retelling of our more-than-human past as she reconstructs a shifting series of significant interspecies relationships, from quirky, idiosyncratic connections to others that triggered major changes. Embracing a radical interdisciplinarity informed by a background in history and environmental studies, Swart combines the natural sciences with the social sciences, oral history, indigenous knowledge, and archival research. She blends current thinking about animal sentience, agency, cognition, and emotion to offer a new way to understand animals’ role in our shared history. The animals in this book—baboons, cows, elephants, hippos, horses, jackals, lions, Nazi cattle, okapi, police dogs, quagga, sheep, and white ants—exemplify different facets of our shared past. With this animal-centric lens, decades of research are brought together in a collection that takes animals seriously. It is a book with claws and fangs, tearing through conventional narratives to ask, Are we prepared to move beyond the convention that “history” is the story of only our own species? The entanglements between humans and other animals have shaped our past, but they suggest something more. The possibility of our shared future pivots on a reckoning with our shared pasts. Swart shows what human-animal history can do, not only to understand our place in the world better but to make our world—however slightly—a better place.
The Literary Animal
Evolution and the Nature of NarrativeJonathan Gottschall and David Sloan Wilson
Northwestern University Press, 2005
The goal of this book is to overcome some of the widespread misunderstandings about the meaning of a Darwinian approach to the human mind generally, and literature specifically. The volume brings together scholars from the forefront of the new field of evolutionary literary analysis-both literary analysts who have made evolution their explanatory framework and evolutionist scientists who have taken a serious interest in literature-to show how the human propensity for literature and art can be properly framed as a true evolutionary problem. Their work is an important step toward the long-prophesied synthesis of the humanities and what Steven Pinker calls "the new sciences of human nature."
The Lizard Man Speaks
By Eric R. Pianka
University of Texas Press, 1994
Alone on the endless red-sand desert in the Australian outback, tracking Varanus giganteus, the perentie lizard that grows to be more than six feet long...for desert rat Eric Pianka, such adventures have led to a satisfying, if unusual, way of life, as well as a distinguished career as a field biologist.
In The Lizard Man Speaks, Pianka recounts more than thirty years of adventures in reptile studies. He tells of "lizarding" in the North American deserts, the Kalahari Desert of southern Africa, and the Great Victoria Desert in Western Australia. His vivid imagery draws the reader into a world where lions lurk in the darkness beyond a gecko hunter's lights, where being stranded by car trouble miles from the last outpost is a constant danger, and where the wilderness still deserves to be called wild.
Along the way, Pianka provides much general information about lizard ecology, the fire succession cycle, and the interaction of humans with the landscape. And he reveals the springs of his own determined spirit and love of solitude, describing a near-fatal boyhood accident and its shaping and character-building effect on the life that followed.
The Locavore’s Kitchen
A Cook’s Guide to Seasonal Eating and PreservingMarilou K. Suszko
Ohio University Press, 2011
More and more Americans are becoming dedicated locavores, people who prefer to eat locally grown or produced foods and who enjoy the distinctive flavors only a local harvest can deliver. The Locavore’s Kitchen invites readers to savor homegrown foods that come from the garden, the farm stand down the road, or local farmers’ markets through cooking and preserving the freshest ingredients.
In more than 150 recipes that highlight seasonal flavors, Marilou K. Suszko inspires cooks to keep local flavors in the kitchen year round. From asparagus in the spring to pumpkins in the fall, Suszko helps readers learn what to look for when buying seasonal homegrown or locally grown foods as well as how to store fresh foods, and which cooking methods bring out fresh flavors and colors. Suszko shares tips and techniques for extending seasonal flavors with detailed instructions on canning, freezing, and dehydrating and which methods work best for preserving texture and flavor.
The Locavore’s Kitchen is an invaluable reference for discovering the delicious world of fresh, local, and seasonal foods.
The Lone Wolverine
Tracking Michigan's Most Elusive AnimalElizabeth Philips Shaw and Jeff Ford
University of Michigan Press, 2012
It began in late winter of 2004. Almost 100 years had passed since the last spotting of a wild wolverine in Michigan when coyote hunters caught a glimpse of one of the animals in a frozen farm field in the northern thumb region. For the next six years, Jeff Ford, a local science teacher and amateur naturalist, devoted himself to locating and filming the wolverine that had unexpectedly and inexplicably appeared in the Wolverine State. By the time hikers found the animal dead in early 2010, Ford had taken hundreds of rare live action photos and shot numerous hours of video, with the story of the "Wolverine Guy" attracting national attention through countless newspaper and magazine articles and appearances on Animal Planet and PBS Nature.
This is the tale of Ford's quest as he uncovered answers to mysteries surrounding the animal's territory and movement patterns, while sparking a flurry of controversy surrounding the elusive predator's origin, much of which remains unresolved today. It's an intimate look at research in the raw, from DNA samples stuck on barbed wire to a sophisticated, motion-sensing infrared camera unit strategically placed to observe nocturnal behavior.
The Lone Wolverine brings to vivid life this unforgettable piece of American wildlife lore, using candid interviews, public records, and Ford's own vast storehouse of notes, personal writings, correspondence, and images, offering an extraordinary chronicle of a wild wolverine in its natural habitat, at play and in fierce competition for food and survival. This is a wildlife detective story, recounting years of study and fierce debate as researchers pondered the riddles of Michigan's last wolverine---her origins, habits, and ultimately the cause of her untimely death.
The Long and the Short of It
The Science of Life Span and AgingJonathan Silvertown
University of Chicago Press, 2013
With The Long and the Short of It, biologist and writer Jonathan Silvertown offers readers a witty and fascinating tour through the scientific study of longevity and aging. Dividing his daunting subject by theme—death, life span, aging, heredity, evolution, and more—Silvertown draws on the latest scientific developments to paint a picture of what we know about how life span, senescence, and death vary within and across species. At every turn, he addresses fascinating questions that have far-reaching implications: What causes aging, and what determines the length of an individual life? What changes have caused the average human life span to increase so dramatically—fifteen minutes per hour—in the past two centuries? If evolution favors those who leave the most descendants, why haven’t we evolved to be immortal? The answers to these puzzles and more emerge from close examination of the whole natural history of life span and aging, from fruit flies, nematodes, redwoods, and much more.
The Longest Cave
Roger W. Brucker and Richard A. Watson
Southern Illinois University Press, 1987
In 1925 the geological connection between Flint Ridge and Mammoth Cave was proved when dye placed in a Flint Ridge spring showed up in Echo River at Mammoth Cave.
That tantalizing swirl of dye confirmed speculations that wereto tempt more than 650cavers over half a century with the thrill of being the first to make human passage of the cave connection. Roger Brucker and Richard Watson tell not only of their own twenty-year effort to complete the link but the stories of many others who worked their way through mud-choked crawlways less than a foot high only to find impenetrable blockages.
Floyd Collins died a grisly death in nearby Sand Cave in1925, after being trapped there for 15 days. The wide press coverage of the rescue efforts stirred the imagination of the public and his body was on macabre display in a glass-topped coffin in Crystal Cave into the 1940s. Agents of a rival cave owner once even stole his corpse, which was recovered and still is in a coffin in the cave. Modern cavers still have a word with Floyd as they start their downward treks.
Brucker and Watson joined the parade of cavers who propelled themselves by wiggling kneecaps, elbows, and toes through quarter-mile long crawlways, clinging by fingertips and boot toes across mud-slick walls, over bottomless pits, into gurgling streams beneath stone ceilings that descend to water level, down crumbling crevices and up mountainous rockfalls, into wondrous domed halls, and straight ahead into a blackness intensified rather than dispelled by the carbide lamps on their helmets.
Over two decades they explored the passages with others who sought the final connection as vigorously as themselves. Pat Crowther, a young mother of two, joined them and because of her thinness became the member of the crew to go first into places no human had ever gone before. In that role, in July 1972, she wiggled her way through the Tight Spot and found the route that would link the Flint Ridge and Mammoth Cave systems into one cave extending 144.4 miles through the Kentucky limestone.
In a new afterword to this edition the authors summarize the subsequent explorations that have more than doubled the established length of the cave system. Based upon geological evidence, the authors predict that new discoveries will add another 200 miles to the length of the world’s longest cave, making it over 500 miles long.
The Lost Species
Great Expeditions in the Collections of Natural History MuseumsChristopher Kemp
University of Chicago Press, 2017
With Kemp as our guide, we go spelunking into museum basements, dig through specimen trays, and inspect the drawers and jars of collections, scientific detectives on the hunt for new species. We discover king crabs from 1906, unidentified tarantulas, mislabeled Himalayan landsnails, an unknown rove beetle originally collected by Darwin, and an overlooked squeaker frog, among other curiosities. In each case, these specimens sat quietly for decades—sometimes longer than a century—within the collections of museums, before sharp-eyed scientists understood they were new. Each year, scientists continue to encounter new species in museum collections—a stark reminder that we have named only a fraction of the world’s biodiversity. Sadly, some specimens have waited so long to be named that they are gone from the wild before they were identified, victims of climate change and habitat loss. As Kemp shows, these stories showcase the enduring importance of these very collections.
The Lost Species vividly tells these stories of discovery—from the latest information on each creature to the people who collected them and the scientists who finally realized what they had unearthed—and will inspire many a museumgoer to want to peek behind the closed doors and rummage through the archives.
The Lost World of Fossil Lake
Snapshots from Deep TimeLance Grande
University of Chicago Press, 2013
The Lure of the North Woods
Cultivating Tourism in the Upper MidwestAaron Shapiro
University of Minnesota Press, 2013
In the late nineteenth century, the North Woods offered people little in the way of a pleasant escape. Rather, it was a hub of production supplying industrial America with vast quantities of lumber and mineral ore. This book tells the story of how northern Minnesota, northern Wisconsin, and Michigan’s Upper Peninsula became a tourist paradise, turning a scarred countryside into the playground we know today.
Stripped of much of its timber and ore by the early 1900s, the North Woods experienced deindustrialization earlier than the Rust Belt cities that consumed its resources. In The Lure of the North Woods, Aaron Shapiro describes how residents and visitors reshaped the region from a landscape of exploitation to a vacationland. The rejuvenating North Woods profited in new ways by drawing on emerging connections between the urban and the rural, including improved transportation, promotion, recreational land use, and conservation initiatives. Shapiro demonstrates how this transformation helps explain the interwar origins of modern American environmentalism, when both the consumption of nature for pleasure and the work of the Civilian Conservation Corps in the North Woods and elsewhere led many Americans to cultivate a fresh perspective on the outdoors. At a time when travel and recreation are considered major economic forces, The Lure of the North Woods reveals how leisure—and tourism in particular—has shaped modern America.
The Magic of Children's Gardens
Inspiring Through Creative DesignLolly Tai
Temple University Press, 2017
Children’s gardens are magical places where kids can interact with plants, see where food and fibers grow, and experience the role of birds, butterflies, and bees in nature. These gardens do more than just expose youngsters to outdoor environments, they also provide marvelous teaching opportunities for them to visit a small plot, care for vegetables and flowers, and interact in creative spaces designed to stimulate all five senses.
In The Magic of Children’s Gardens, landscape architect Lolly Tai provides the primary goals, concepts and key considerations for designing outdoor spaces that are attractive to and suitable for children especially in urban environments. Tai presents inspiring ideas for creating children’s green spaces by examining nearly twentycase studies, including the Chicago Botanic Gardens and Longwood Gardens in Kennett Square, PA.
The Magic of Children’s Gardens features hundreds of comprehensive drawings and gorgeous photographs of successful children’s outdoor environments, detailed explanations of the design process, and the criteria needed to create attractive and pleasing gardens for children to augment their physical, mental, and emotional development.
Exposing youth to well-planned outdoor environments promotes our next generation of environmental stewards. The Magic of Children's Gardens offers practitioners a guide to designing these valued spaces.
The Magical State
Nature, Money, and Modernity in VenezuelaFernando Coronil
University of Chicago Press, 1997
The Magnificent Flora Graeca
How the Mediterranean Came to the English GardenStephen Harris
Bodleian Library Publishing, 2007
The publishing of the Flora Graeca was a landmark event in 1830. Only 25 copies were published, due to the book’s size of 10 double folio volumes and its numerous illustrations, and it cost over £620, a colossal sum at the time. The Flora Graeca brought together beautiful renderings of the fruits of the travels of British scientist John Sibthorp, who made multiple trips to the eastern Mediterranean in the early nineteenth century to collect a rich array of exotic floral specimens. Now The Magnificent Flora Graeca chronicles Sibthorp’s immense undertaking, including brilliant selections from his groundbreaking volume.
The story of the expeditions of Sibthorp and his renowned illustrator Ferdinand Bauer is a tale replete with larger-than-life characters and adventures on land and sea. Harris profiles the lives of Sibthorp, Bauer, and other leading characters, and explores the Flora Graeca’s rich cultural and scientific legacy. Sibthorp’s pioneering adventures unearthed floral specimens previously unknown to science, as he collected the originals of such popular garden flowers as the Crocus flavus ssp. flavus, the parent of the Golden Yellow; and Cyprus’s Cyclamen persicum, the parent of the widely grown garden cyclamens species.
This new volume, drawn from photographs of Sibthorp’s remarkably well-preserved specimens and luminous reproductions of the original watercolors and engravings by Bauer, features more images from the Flora Graeca than have ever been published since its first printing.
A fascinating treasure of floral wonders, The Magnificent Flora Graeca is an essential addition to the bookshelf for the plant lover or anyone curious about the natural history behind their beloved garden retreats.
The Magnificent Mesquite
By Ken E. Rogers
University of Texas Press, 2000
"This book is one-of-a-kind. It is the only book that I'm aware of that summarizes the biology, ecology, uses, and management of mesquite.... It is the most complete book in print on mesquite."
—C. Wayne Hanselka, Associate Department Head and Extension Program Leader for Rangeland Ecology and Management, Texas Agricultural Extension Service
A reliable source of food and shelter even in the severest droughts, the mesquite tree sustained American Indians in the Southwest for centuries. Today, mesquite is popular for barbecuing, woodworking, furniture making, flooring, sculpture, jewelry, and food products ranging from honey to jelly and syrup. Even ranchers, who once fought to eradicate mesquite, have come to value its multiple uses on well-managed rangeland.
In this book written especially for a general readership, one of the world's leading authorities on mesquite presents a wealth of information about its natural history and commercial, agricultural, and woodworking uses. Ken Rogers describes the life cycle, species, and wide distribution of the mesquite, which is native or naturalized not only in the Southwest and Mexico, but also in India, Africa, Australia, South America, and Hawaii. He discusses the many consumer and woodworker uses of mesquite at length-even giving instructions for laying a mesquite wood floor and making mesquite bean jelly. He also looks into the ways that people are using mesquite in nature, from rangeland management in the Southwest to desertification prevention in arid countries.
The Making of the Northwest Forest Plan
The Wild Science of Saving Old Growth EcosystemsK. Norman Johnson
Oregon State University Press, 2023
Tree sitters. Logger protests. Dying timber towns. An iconic species on the brink. The Timber Wars consumed the Pacific Northwest in the late 1980s and early1990s and led political leaders to ask scientists for a solution. The Northwest Forest Plan was the result.
For most of the twentieth century, the central theme of federal forest management in the Pacific Northwest had been logging old-growth forests to provide a sustained yield of timber. During the 1970s and 1980s, however, a series of studies by young scientists highlighted the destructive impact of that logging on northern spotted owls, salmon, and the old-growth ecosystem itself.
Combining this new science with newly minted environmental laws like the Endangered Species Act, environmental activists obtained court injunctions to stop old-growth logging on federal land, setting off a titanic struggle in the Pacific Northwest to find a way to accommodate conservation imperatives as well as the logging that provided employment for tens of thousands of people. That effort involved years of controversy and debate, federal courts, five science assessments, Congress, and eventually the president of the United States. It led to creation of the Northwest Forest Plan, which sharply and abruptly shifted the primary goal of federal forestry toward conserving the species and ecosystems of old-growth forests. Scientists went from spectators to planners and guides, employing their latest scientific findings and expertise to create a forest plan for 20 million acres that would satisfy the courts. The largest upheaval in federal forest management in history had occurred, along with a precipitous decline in timber harvest, and there was no going back.
In this book, three of the scientists who helped craft that change tell the story as they know it: the causes, development, adoption, and implementation of the Northwest Forest Plan. The book also incorporates personal reflections from the authors, short commentaries and histories from key figures— including spotted owl expert Eric Forsman—and experiences from managers who implemented the Plan as best they could. Legal expert Susan Jane M. Brown helped interpret court cases and Debora Johnson turned spatial data into maps. The final chapters cover the Plan’s ongoing significance and recommendations for conserving forest and aquatic ecosystems in an era of megafires and climate change.
The Malthusian Moment
Global Population Growth and the Birth of American EnvironmentalismRobertson, Thomas
Rutgers University Press, 2012
Weaving together the international and the domestic in creative new ways, The Malthusian Moment charts the explosion of Malthusian thinking in the United States from World War I to Earth Day 1970, then traces the just-as-surprising decline in concern beginning in the mid-1970s. In addition to offering an unconventional look at World War II and the Cold War through a balanced study of the environmental movement’s most contentious theory, the book sheds new light on some of the big stories of postwar American life: the rise of consumption, the growth of the federal government, urban and suburban problems, the civil rights and women’s movements, the role of scientists in a democracy, new attitudes about sex and sexuality, and the emergence of the “New Right.”
The Mammals of Minnesota
Harvey L. Gunderson and James R. Beer
University of Minnesota Press, 1953
The Mammals of Minnesota was first published in 1953. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.
For the many Minnesotans interested in the wildlife of their state and for anyone with a special interest in the fur or game animals or in the control of harmful species, this is a practical source of information. Schools will find the book useful in teaching natural history. All the mammal species identified within Minnesota are described, and keys to the classification are given, with careful instructions on how to use the keys. Step- by step directions include photographs of animals, diagrams of the methods described, and 70 maps showing the geographical distribution of species. The material is based primarily on the collections in the Museum of Natural history and the Division of Entomology and Economic Zoology at the University of Minnesota.
The Mammals of Texas
By David J. Schmidly and Robert D. Bradley
University of Texas Press, 2016
From reviews of previous editions:
“This is the standard reference about Texas mammals.” —Wildlife Activist
“A must for anyone seriously interested in the wildlife of Texas.” —Texas Outdoor Writers Association News
“[This book] easily fills the role of both a field guide and a desk reference, and is written in a style that appeals to the professional biologist and amateur naturalist alike. . . . [It] should prove useful to anyone with an interest in the mammal fauna of Texas or the southern Great Plains.” —Prairie Naturalist
The Mammals of Texas has been the standard reference since the first edition was coauthored by William B. Davis and Walter P. Taylor in 1947. Revised several times over the succeeding decades, it remains the most authoritative source of information on the mammalian wildlife of Texas, with physical descriptions and life histories for 202 species, abundant photographs and drawings, and distribution maps.
In this new edition, David J. Schmidly is joined by one of the most active researchers on Texas mammals, Robert D. Bradley, to provide a thorough update of the taxonomy, distribution, and natural history of all species of wild mammals that inhabit Texas today. Using the most recent advances in molecular biology and in wildlife ecology and management, the authors include the most current information about the scientific nomenclature, taxonomy, and identification of species, while also covering significant advances in natural history and conservation.
The Man Who Created Paradise
A FableGene Logsdon
Ohio University Press, 2001
Gene Logsdon’s The Man Who Created Paradise is a message of hope at a time when the very concept of earth stewardship is under attack. The fable, inspired by a true story, tells how Wally Spero looked at one of the bleakest places in America—a raw and barren strip-mined landscape—and saw in it his escape from the drudgery of his factory job. He bought an old bulldozer and used the machine to carve patiently, acre by acre, a beautiful little farm out of a seemingly worthless wasteland.
Wally’s story is a charming distillation of the themes that the late, beloved Gene Logsdon returned to again and again in his many books and hundreds of articles. Environmental restoration is the task of our time. The work of healing our land begins in our own backyards and farms, in our neighborhoods and our regions. Humans can turn the earth into a veritable paradise—if they really want to.
Noted photographer Gregory Spaid retraced the trail that Logsdon traveled when he was inspired to write The Man Who Created Paradise. His photographs evoke the same yearning for wholeness, for ties to land and community, that infuses the fable’s poetic prose.
The Man from Clear Lake
Earth Day Founder Senator Gaylord NelsonBill Christofferson
University of Wisconsin Press, 2009
On Earth Day 1970 twenty million Americans displayed their commitment to a clean environment. It was called the largest demonstration in human history, and it permanently changed the nation’s political agenda. By Earth Day 2000 participation had exploded to 500 million people in 167 countries.
The seemingly simple idea—a day set aside to focus on protecting our natural environment—was the brainchild of U.S. Senator Gaylord Nelson of Wisconsin. It accomplished, far beyond his expectations, his lifelong goal of putting the environment onto the nation’s and the world’s political agendas.
A remarkable man, Nelson ranks as one of history’s leading environmentalists. He also played a major role as an early, outspoken opponent of the Vietnam War, and as a senate insider was a key player in civil rights, poverty, civil liberties and consumer protection issues.
The life of Nelson, a small town boy who learned his values and progressive political principles at an early age, is woven through the political history of the twentieth century. Nelson’s story intersects at times with Fighting Bob La Follette, Joe McCarthy, and Bill Proxmire in Wisconsin, and with George McGovern, Lyndon Johnson, Hubert Humphrey, Russell Long, Walter Mondale, John F. Kennedy, and others on the national scene.
Winner, Elizabeth A. Steinberg Prize, University of Wisconsin Press
The Marshes of Southwestern Lake Erie
Louis W. Campbell
Ohio University Press, 1994
This book explores both the human and natural history of the marshes between Toledo and Port Clinton, Ohio. The author, Louis Campbell is the acknowledged authority on the birds of the Toledo area. Mr. Campbell began weekly birding trips to the marshes in the 1920’s, carefully recording his observations. His discerning eye and inquiring mind have accumulated a wealth of information, presented here in a style that is comfortably conversational, whether the subject is glacial moraines, nesting eagles, or a drunken meadow mouse.
The book begins with an almanac, a celebration of marsh life throughout the year, enriched by personal experiences. Mr. Campbell’s encounters include a pair of bloodthirsty shrews, a roguish gallery of courting waterfowl, and a rhythm-challenged bittern. He invites the reader to share the risky pleasures of punting and the eerie night sounds of the marsh in May.
Part II describes the history of the low-lying marshes from the Ice Age to the present, as they were transformed into drained, flood-plagued farmland then to drought-and flood-plagued private hunting clubs, and finally to government-protected marshes sealed off by huge dikes from the gift and the threat of Lake Erie. Readers of this book will never again take these wetlands for granted.
The Maya Tropical Forest
People, Parks, and Ancient CitiesBy James D. Nations
University of Texas Press, 2006
The Maya Tropical Forest, which occupies the lowlands of southern Mexico, Guatemala, and Belize, is the closest rainforest to the United States and one of the most popular tourist destinations in the Western Hemisphere. It has been home to the Maya peoples for nearly four millennia, starting around 1800 BC. Ancient cities in the rainforest such as Palenque, Yaxchilan, Tikal, and Caracol draw thousands of tourists and scholars seeking to learn more about the prehistoric Maya. Their contemporary descendants, the modern Maya, utilize the forest's natural resources in village life and international trade, while striving to protect their homeland from deforestation and environmental degradation.
Writing for both visitors and conservationists, James Nations tells the fascinating story of how ancient and modern Maya peoples have used and guarded the rich natural resources of the Maya Tropical Forest. He opens with a natural history that profiles the forest's significant animals and plants. Nations then describes the Maya peoples, biological preserves, and major archaeological sites in Mexico, Guatemala, and Belize. Drawing on more than twenty-five years of conservation work in the Maya Tropical Forest, Nations tells first-hand stories of the creation of national parks and other protected areas to safeguard the region's natural resources and archaeological heritage. He concludes with an expert assessment of the forest's future in which he calls for expanded archaeological tourism to create an ecologically sustainable economic base for the region.
The Mayflies of North and Central America
George F. Edmunds Jr., Steven L. Jensen, and Lewis Berner
University of Minnesota Press, 1976
The Mayflies of North and Central America was first published in 1976. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.
Mayflies have fascinated man for centuries because of the brief span of their adult lives. These aquatic insects spend most of their lives as nymphs in water, then develop into winged stages and soon die, most species having an adult life of only two or three days. This brevity is implied in the very name of the order, Ephemeroptera.
The mayflies are almost worldwide in distribution, being found everywhere except in Antarctica, the extreme Arctic, and many small oceanic islands. All by three of the twenty families in the world occur in North or Central America, the regions covered in this volume. The book provides a modern, useful, and well-illustrated key to the adults and nymphs. Data on habitats, behavior, and life history are given for each genus. Characteristics of nymphs and adults are given for families, subfamilies, and genera, with brief accounts for extralimital families.
A discussion of methods of collecting and preserving specimens precedes the main portion of the text. The book is generously illustrated with drawings, photographs, and a map.
The role of aquatic insects as indicators of water pollution has received increasing attention, and in this connection this book will be of special interest to those concerned with pollution problems. Mayflies, besides indicating the presence of pollutants, also help remove such substances from the waters, the authors explain.
As a basic reference work, the book is essential for all biological science libraries. Many fly-fishermen are amateur students of mayflies, since the nymphs of larger species are used as bait. With the help of this volume the fisherman can acquire a greater knowledge of aquatic entomology and relate to his sport.
The Meaning of Fossils
Episodes in the History of PalaeontologyMartin J. S. Rudwick
University of Chicago Press, 1985
"Rudwick has not merely written the first book-length history of palaeontology in the English language; he has written a very intelligent one. . . . His accounts of sources are rounded and organic: he treats the structure of arguments as Cuvier handled fossil bones."—Roy S. Porter, History of Science
The Meaning of Rivers
Flow and Reflection in American LiteratureT. S. McMillin
University of Iowa Press, 2011
The Meaning of Weather
A Media HistoryJohn Durham Peters
University of Chicago Press, 0
A sweeping history of our relationship with weather in art, media, philosophy, religion, and science—and how the climate continually defies demystification.
We moderns tend to take the weather for granted. We know it through hourly timetables and radar maps and otherwise make it the subject of predictable and safe conversation. But weather is not safe or predictable and never has been. People have long used all their ingenuity to imagine and portray its shifty ways. As John Durham Peters argues, a closer look at the history of these efforts, from painting and poetry to cartography and close observation, has the potential to disclose something important about what it means to live in the world.
In The Meaning of Weather, John Durham Peters shows how the long history of understanding the weather has seen dreamers and data-crunchers alike craft remarkable visions of the world around us. From Babylonian astronomy to the Event Horizon Telescope, from illuminated manuscripts to television, and more, Peters explores the kaleidoscopic ways people have sought to understand, tame, or manage the weather—and how the climate resists being bridled. In this magisterial telling, Peters reimagines Western culture as a continuing struggle to know ourselves and each other through an ever-changing environment.
The Meaning of Wilderness
Sigurd F. Olson
University of Minnesota Press, 2015
Sigurd F. Olson (1899-1982) was one of the greatest environmentalists of the twentieth century. A conservation activist and popular writer, Olson introduced a generation of readers to the importance of wilderness. He served as president of the Wilderness Society and the National Parks Association and as a consultant to the federal government on wilderness preservation and ecological problems. He earned many honors, including the highest possible from the Sierra Club, National Wildlife Federation, and Izaak Walton League.
Olson is perhaps best known, though, for his many books that express the wonder, awe, and peace he found in the wilderness, including the nature classics The Singing Wilderness, Listening Point, and Reflections from the North Country. While these books have greatly influenced subsequent environmentalist movements and writers such as Annie Dillard and Barry Lopez, a major portion of Olson’s wilderness writing-much of it originating as speeches-has been relatively inaccessible, scattered in a number of magazines and obscure books over a period of more than fifty years, or never published at all.
The Meaning of Wilderness gathers together the most important of Sigurd Olson’s articles and speeches, making them available for the first time. The book also contains an introduction and chapter-by-chapter commentary by Olson’s authorized biographer, David Backes, that help the reader discover the various facets of Olson’s wilderness philosophy and their development over time. A lively look at the evolution of one of environmentalism’s greatest figures, The Meaning of Wilderness will be essential reading for Olson fans, historians, and outdoors people around the country.
The Media Commons
Globalization and Environmental DiscoursesPatrick D Murphy
University of Illinois Press, 2017
The media draws the cultural boundaries of our environmental imagination--and influences just who benefits. Murphy's analysis emphasizes social context, institutional alignments, and commercial media's ways of rendering discussion. He identifies and examines key terms, phrases, and metaphors as well as the ways consumers are presented with ideas like agency and the place of nature. What emerges is the link between pervasive messaging and an "environment" conjured by our media-saturated social imagination. As the author shows, today's complex, integrated media networks shape, frame, and deliver many of our underlying ideas about the environment. Increasingly--and ominously--individuals and communities experience these ideas not only in the developed world but in the increasingly consumption-oriented Global South.
The Michigan Eco-Traveler
A Guide to Sustainable Adventures in the Great Lakes StateSally Barber
University of Michigan Press, 2014
Whether you’re a weekend traveler, extreme adventurer, or family on vacation, The Michigan Eco-Travelerlights the way to a greener getaway. Naturalists, conservationists, and hospitality experts will find the book equally helpful in responding to the ever rising demand for sustainable recreation.