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2817 books match the query 'Nature' and 595 start with t

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The Prairie in Seed

Identifying Seed-Bearing Prairie Plants in the Upper Midwest

Dave Williams

University of Iowa Press, 2016

The tallgrass prairie offers solutions to the many environmental challenges facing our water, soils, and ecosystems. Planting prairie on just 10 percent of a field can effectively remove excess phosphorous and nitrogen from the remaining 90 percent. Deep prairie roots and dense aboveground growth filter and hold soils, keeping them from eroding into our streams and rivers. Plants such as common milkweed are the key to the monarch butterfly’s recovery. In light of these benefits, perhaps our love affair with European turf grass is slowly giving way to an appreciation of the beauty of our original native prairie.

As interest in these wildflowers and grasses has grown, so has demand for better resources to identify the hundreds of species that make up the native prairie. In The Prairie in Seed, Dave Williams shows us how to identify wildflowers when they are out of bloom and, in particular, how to harvest their seeds. Without the flower color and shape as guides, it can be difficult to identify prairie plants. Imagine trying to distinguish between a simple prairie sunflower and an ox-eye sunflower with no flowers to look at!

In this richly illustrated guide, Williams offers dormant plant identification information, seed descriptions, and advice on seed harvesting and cleaning for seventy-three of the most common wildflowers found in the tallgrass prairie. He includes photographs and descriptions of the plants in bloom and in seed to assist in finding them when you are ready to harvest. Each species description explains where the seeds are located on the plant, when seed ripening begins, and how many seeds each species produces, along with a photograph and approximate measurements of the actual seed. Finally, this guide provides assistance on how and when to hand-harvest seeds for each species, as well as some simple tips on seed cleaning.

An indispensable guide for anyone involved in prairie restoration or conservation, this book is the perfect complement to Williams’s The Tallgrass Prairie Center Guide to Seed and Seedling Identification in the Upper Midwest.

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The Price of Nuclear Power

Uranium Communities and Environmental Justice

Malin, Stephanie A.

Rutgers University Press, 2015

Rising fossil fuel prices and concerns about greenhouse gas emissions are fostering a nuclear power renaissance and a revitalized uranium mining industry across the American West. In The Price of Nuclear Power, environmental sociologist Stephanie Malin offers an on-the-ground portrait of several uranium communities caught between the harmful legacy of previous mining booms and the potential promise of new economic development. Using this context, she examines how shifting notions of environmental justice inspire divergent views about nuclear power’s sustainability and equally divisive forms of social activism.

Drawing on extensive fieldwork conducted in rural isolated towns such as Monticello, Utah, and Nucla and Naturita, Colorado, as well as in upscale communities like Telluride, Colorado, and incorporating interviews with community leaders, environmental activists, radiation regulators, and mining executives, Malin uncovers a fundamental paradox of the nuclear renaissance: the communities most hurt by uranium’s legacy—such as high rates of cancers, respiratory ailments, and reproductive disorders—were actually quick to support industry renewal. She shows that many impoverished communities support mining not only because of the employment opportunities, but also out of a personal identification with uranium, a sense of patriotism, and new notions of environmentalism. But other communities, such as Telluride, have become sites of resistance, skeptical of industry and government promises of safe mining, fearing that regulatory enforcement won’t be strong enough. Indeed, Malin shows that the nuclear renaissance has exacerbated social divisions across the Colorado Plateau, threatening social cohesion. Malin further illustrates ways in which renewed uranium production is not a socially sustainable form of energy development for rural communities, as it is utterly dependent on unstable global markets.

The Price of Nuclear Power is an insightful portrait of the local impact of the nuclear renaissance and the social and environmental tensions inherent in the rebirth of uranium mining.

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The Proper Edge of the Sky

High Plateau Country of Utah

Edward A Geary

University of Utah Press, 1992

Edward Geary’s collection of writings on the High Plateau country of central and southern Utah, a combination guidebook, travel narrative, personal essays, and natural, social, and literary history, encompasses each of those forms with a sweep as broad as the landscape it describes.

It traces the progress of travelers to the region, including the historic Dominguez-Escalante party in 1776, and trappers and explorers such as Jedediah Smith, John C. Freemont, and Kit Carson. Scandinavian and English descendants of the early Mormon pioneers, sent to settle Manti and surrounding areas by Brigham Young in 1849, populate many of the pages and dominate the agrarian villages described by the author. The book also describes the multiethnic society of French Basque, Greeks, Slavs, Italians, Chinese, Welsh, and Finnish laborers and coal miners that developed in the region.

Geary writes of all these people with affection and a deep sense of place, of belonging to a distinctive landscape and its history. It is a book that will bring a rush of understanding to those who have lived in the High Plateaus and greater depth of appreciation to visitors.

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The Quest for the Golden Trout

Environmental Loss and America’s Iconic Fish

Douglas M. Thompson

University Press of New England, 2013

The angler’s dream of fishing pristine waters in unspoiled country for sleek, healthy trout has turned fishing into a form of theater. It is a manufactured experience—much to the detriment of our rivers and streams. Americans’ love of trout has reached a level of fervor that borders on the religious. Federal and state agencies, as well as nongovernmental lobbying groups, invest billions of dollars on river restoration projects and fish-stocking programs. Yet, their decisions are based on faulty logic and risk destroying species they are tasked with protecting. River ecosystems are modified with engineered structures to improve fishing, native species that compete with trout are eradicated, and nonnative invasive game fish are indiscriminately introduced, genetically modified, and selectively bred to produce more appealing targets for anglers—including the freakishly contrived “golden trout.” The Quest for the Golden Trout is about looking at our nation’s rivers with a more critical eye—and asking more questions about both historic and current practices in fisheries management.

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The Quiet Extinction

Stories of North America’s Rare and Threatened Plants

Kara Rogers

University of Arizona Press, 2015

In the United States and Canada, thousands of species of native plants are edging toward the brink of extinction, and they are doing so quietly. They are slipping away inconspicuously from settings as diverse as backyards and protected lands. The factors that have contributed to their disappearance are varied and complex, but the consequences of their loss are immeasurable.

With extensive histories of a cast of familiar and rare North American plants, The Quiet Extinction explores the reasons why many of our native plants are disappearing. Curious minds will find a desperate struggle for existence waged by these plants and discover the great environmental impacts that could come if the struggle continues.

Kara Rogers relates the stories of some of North America’s most inspiring rare and threatened plants. She explores, as never before, their significance to the continent’s natural heritage, capturing the excitement of their discovery, the tragedy that has come to define their existence, and the remarkable efforts underway to save them. Accompanied by illustrations created by the author and packed with absorbing detail, The Quiet Extinction offers a compelling and refreshing perspective of rare and threatened plants and their relationship with the land and its people.

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The Raptors of Arizona

Edited by Richard L. Glinski, with full-color illustrations by Richard Sloan

University of Arizona Press, 1998

Thousands of birdwatchers come to Arizona each year seeking rare or intriguing species, and for those watching the skies the additional sighting of a bird of prey is a reward in itself. The Grand Canyon state boasts the most dramatic assortment of raptors in North America: hawks, eagles, falcons, kites, and owls, plus vultures and condors. Here can be found nearly all the raptor species of the continental United States and also established populations of species associated with Mexico, such as the Gray Hawk, Common Black-Hawk, Zone-tailed Hawk, and Whiskered Screech-Owl.

Arizona's raptors are found in an unrivaled diversity of habitats, from saguaro cactus forests where tiny Elf Owls nest to the Vermilion Cliffs, where the gigantic California Condor was introduced in 1996. Yet many species live in habitats that are now jeopardized by degradation or development, making an understanding and appreciation of raptors crucial to their survival.

The Raptors of Arizona brings together the knowledge and insights of 29 raptor and wildlife authorities who provide original information and syntheses on Arizona's 42 raptor species, with an emphasis on aspects of their natural history in Arizona. A chapter on each bird includes its description, a range map, and information on its distribution, habitat, life history, and status. Additional chapters cover conservation, habitats, where and when to watch raptors, and the sport of falconry. The book is enhanced by 42 full-color illustrations by Richard Sloan, one of the premier wildlife artists in North America, whose paintings were commissioned by the Arizona Wildlife Foundation specifically for this project. Co-published with the Arizona Game and Fish Department.

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The Raptors of Iowa

James F. Landenberger, Dean M. Roosa, Jon W. Stravers, Bruce Ehresman, Rich Patterson

University of Iowa Press, 2013

This long-awaited collection of James Landenberger’s paintings of Iowa birds of prey presents thirty-two full-page, full-color species, from the common turkey vulture to the red-shouldered hawk of Mississippi River woodlands to the little northern saw-whet owl. Four naturalists who have devoted their lives to conserving wilderness habitats and species have written essays to complement the paintings.

Thanks to state and federal laws and a shift in public attitude, birds of prey are no longer seen as incarnations of ferocity but as creatures superbly attuned to their lives and surroundings. Although Iowa unfortunately leads the way in the amount of wildlife habitat that has been destroyed, conservation organizations and state agencies have also led the way toward successful raptor restoration projects, among them a roadside nest box program for the American kestrel, a project to restore peregrine falcons to their historic eyries, and a relocation program that should ensure a sustainable population of ospreys. The recent spectacular recovery of the bald eagle, whose nests had vanished from the state for seventy years, is particularly encouraging.

There can be no substitute for seeing thousands of broad-winged hawks soaring high overhead during migration, a great horned owl perching in silhouette at dusk, or a Cooper’s hawk plunging toward its prey along the roadside. But Jim Landenberger’s meticulously detailed paintings go a long way toward conveying the remarkable beauty of the American kestrel and other falcons, the grace of the swallow-tailed kite, the immaculate mystery of the snowy owl and its fellow owls, the glistening head feathers of an adult bald eagle, and the piercing defiance so characteristic of our larger hawks.

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The Red-cockaded Woodpecker

Surviving in a Fire-Maintained Ecosystem

By Richard Conner, D. Craig Rudolph, and Jeffrey R. Walters

University of Texas Press, 2001

Though small among its woodpecker relatives, the Red-cockaded Woodpecker poses a huge dilemma for its human neighbors. Uniquely adapted to live in the old-growth pine forests of the southeastern United States, the Red-cockaded Woodpecker has nearly disappeared as the forests have been cleared for agricultural, commercial, and residential uses over the last two centuries. Today, it waits at a crossroads. Scientific management practices could restore the woodpecker's habitat and population, but the imperative to convert old-growth forests to other uses remains.

In this book, three of the leading experts on the Red-cockaded Woodpecker offer a comprehensive overview of all that is currently known about its biology and natural history and about the ecology of the fire-maintained forests it requires for survival. As the most visible endangered species in the Southeast, and the one whose conservation impacts the largest land area, the Red-cockaded Woodpecker holds a compelling interest not only for ornithologists, but also for wildlife managers, foresters, developers, environmentalists, and government officials. For all of these groups, this book will be the essential resource for learning more about the Red-cockaded Woodpecker and ensuring its survival.

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The Reptiles and Amphibians of Alabama

Robert H. Mount

University of Alabama Press, 1980

The only comprehensive book about the state's 182 species and subspecies of snakes, lizards, turtles, frogs, and salamanders

Generously illustrated, it contains photographs and range maps for each species, showing the specific locality from which each specimen on record was collected. The text includes keys, detailed descriptions, accounts of habitats and life histories, remarks about variations and ecological disturbances, as well as general information on such topics as collecting and care in captivity. The volume is an essential guide for herpetologists of all ages.

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The Return of the Mexican Gray Wolf

Back to the Blue

Bobbie Holaday

University of Arizona Press, 2003

The return of the Mexican gray wolf to Arizona's Blue Range in 1998 marked more than a victory for an endangered species. Long hated by ranchers, the gray wolf had been hunted to the brink of extinction until one woman took on the challenge of restoring it to its natural habitat.

Inspired by the plight of the Mexican gray wolf, retiree Bobbie Holaday formed the citizens advocacy group Preserve Arizona's Wolves (P.A.WS.) in 1987 and embarked on a crusade to raise public awareness. She soon found herself in the center of a firestorm of controversy, with environmentalists taking sides against ranchers and neighbors against neighbors. This book tells her story for the first time, documenting her eleven-year effort to bring the gray wolf back to the Blue.

As Holaday quickly learned, ranchers exerted considerable control over the state legislature, and politicians in turn controlled decisions made by wildlife agencies. Even though the wolf had been listed as endangered since 1976, opposition to it was so strong that the Arizona Game and Fish Department had been unable to launch a recovery program. In The Return of the Mexican Gray Wolf, Holaday describes first-hand the tactics she and other ordinary citizens on the Mexican Wolf Recovery Team adopted to confront these obstacles. Enhanced with more than 40 photographs—32 in color—her account chronicles both the triumphs of reintroduction and the heartbreaking tragedies the wolves encountered during early phases.

Thanks to Holaday's perseverance, eleven wolves were released into the wild in 1998, and the Blue Range once again echoed with their howls. Her tenacity was an inspiration to all those she enlisted in the cause, and her story is a virtual primer for conservation activists on mobilizing at the grassroots level. The Return of the Mexican Gray Wolf shows that one person can make a difference in a seemingly hopeless cause and will engage all readers concerned with the preservation of wildlife.

All royalties go to the Mexican Wolf Trust Fund administered by the Arizona Game and Fish Department.

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The Rights of Nature and the Testimony of Things

Literature and Environmental Ethics from Latin America

Mark Anderson

Vanderbilt University Press, 2024

The Rights of Nature and the Testimony of Things begins by analyzing the ethical debates and political contexts relating to Latin American “rights of nature” legislation and the political ontology of nonhuman speech within a framework of intercultural and multispecies diplomacy. Author Mark Anderson shows how Latin American authors and thinkers complicate traditional humanistic perspectives on nature, the social, and politics, exploring how animals, plants, and environments as a whole might be said to engage in social relations and political speech or self-representation.

Drawing Native Amazonian thought into productive tension with a variety of posthumanist theoretical frameworks—ranging from Derrida’s conceptualization of passive decision and hospitality to biosemiotics, Karen Barad’s theorization of intra-activity, and Isabelle Stengers’ proposal for cosmopolitical diplomacy—Anderson analyzes literary works by Julio Cortázar, Clarice Lispector, José Eustasio Rivera, and Davi Kopenawa that reframe environmental ethics in terms of collective, multispecies work and reciprocal care and politics as a cosmopolitics of friendship rooted in diplomacy across difference. Finally, Anderson examines the points of connection and divergences between Latin American relational ontologies and Euro American posthumanist theories within Indigenous Latin American remodernization projects that reappropriate and repurpose ancestral practices as well as develop new technologies with the goal of forging alternative modernities compatible with a livable future for all species.

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The Rights of Nature

A History of Environmental Ethics

Roderick Frazier Nash

University of Wisconsin Press, 1989

Charting the history of contemporary philosophical and religious beliefs regarding nature, Roderick Nash focuses primarily on changing attitudes toward nature in the United States. His work is the first comprehensive history of the concept that nature has rights and that American liberalism has, in effect, been extended to the nonhuman world.

“A splendid book. Roderick Nash has written another classic. This exploration of a new dimension in environmental ethics is both illuminating and overdue.”—Stewart Udall

“His account makes history ‘come alive.’”—Sierra

“So smoothly written that one almost does not notice the breadth of scholarship that went into this original and important work of environmental history.”—Philip Shabecoff, New York Times Book Review

“Clarifying and challenging, this is an essential text for deep ecologists and ecophilosophers.”—Stephanie Mills, Utne Reader

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The Rise of the American Conservation Movement

Power, Privilege, and Environmental Protection

Dorceta E. Taylor

Duke University Press, 2016

In this sweeping social history Dorceta E. Taylor examines the emergence and rise of the multifaceted U.S. conservation movement from the mid-nineteenth to the early twentieth century. She shows how race, class, and gender influenced every aspect of the movement, including the establishment of parks; campaigns to protect wild game, birds, and fish; forest conservation; outdoor recreation; and the movement's links to nineteenth-century ideologies. Initially led by white urban elites—whose early efforts discriminated against the lower class and were often tied up with slavery and the appropriation of Native lands—the movement benefited from contributions to policy making, knowledge about the environment, and activism by the poor and working class, people of color, women, and Native Americans. Far-ranging and nuanced, The Rise of the American Conservation Movement comprehensively documents the movement's competing motivations, conflicts, problematic practices, and achievements in new ways.

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The Rise of the Green Left

Inside the Worldwide Ecosocialist Movement

Derek Wall

Pluto Press, 2010

Climate change and other ecological ills are driving the creation of a grassroots global movement for change. From Latin America to Europe, Australia and China a militant movement merging red and green is taking shape.

Ecosocialists argue that capitalism threatens the future of humanity and the rest of nature. From indigenous protest in the Peruvian Amazon to the green transition in Cuba to the creation of red-green parties in Europe, ecosocialism is defining the future of left and green politics globally. Latin American leaders such as Morales and Chavez are increasingly calling for an ecosocialist transition.

Drawing on the work of key thinkers such as Joel Kovel and John Bellamy Foster, Derek Wall provides an unique insider view of how ecosocialism has developed and a practical guide to focused ecosocialist action. A great handbook for activists and engaged students of politics.

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The River Knows Everything

Desolation Canyon and the Green

James M Aton

Utah State University Press, 2009

Desolation Canyon is one of the West's wild treasures. Visitors come to study, explore, run the river, and hike a canyon that is deeper at its deepest than the Grand Canyon, better preserved than most of the Colorado River system, and full of eye-catching geology-castellated ridges, dramatic walls, slickrock formations, and lovely beaches. Rafting the river, one may see wild horses, blue herons, bighorn sheep, and possibly a black bear. Signs of previous people include the newsworthy, well-preserved Fremont Indian ruins along Range Creek and rock art panels of Nine Mile Canyon, both Desolation Canyon tributaries. Historic Utes also pecked rock art, including images of graceful horses and lively locomotives, in the upper canyon. Remote and difficult to access, Desolation has a surprisingly lively history. Cattle and sheep herding, moonshine, prospecting, and hideaways brought a surprising number of settlers--ranchers, outlaws, and recluses--to the canyon.

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The River We Have Wrought

A History of the Upper Mississippi

John O. Anfinson

University of Minnesota Press, 2005

The River We Have Wrought is a landmark history of the upper Mississippi, from early European exploration through the completion of a navigable channel and a system of locks and dams in the mid-twentieth century. John Anfinson examines how politics has shaped the landscapes of the Upper Midwest and how taming the Mississippi River has affected economic sustainability, river ecology, and biological diversity.

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The River of Life

Sustainable Practices of Native Americans and Indigenous Peoples

Michael E. Marchand

Michigan State University Press, 2014

Sustainability defines the need for any society to live within the constraints of the land’s capacity to deliver all natural resources it consumes. To be sustainable, nature and its endowment need to be linked to human behavior, similar to the practices of indigenous peoples. The River of Life compares the general differences between Native Americans’ and the Western world’s view of resources and provides the nuts and bolts of a sustainability portfolio designed by indigenous peoples. It also introduces ideas on how to link nature and society to make sustainable choices, aiming to facilitate thinking about how to change destructive behaviors and to integrate indigenous culture into thinking and decision processes.

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The River of the Mother of God

and other Essays by Aldo Leopold

Aldo Leopold; Edited by J. Baird Callicott and Susan L. Flader

University of Wisconsin Press, 1992

His name is inextricably linked with a single work, A Sand County Almanac, a classic of natural history literature and the conservationist's bible. This book brings together the best of Leopold's essays.

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The Road Washes Out in Spring

A Poet’s Memoir of Living Off the Grid

Baron Wormser

University Press of New England, 2008

For nearly twenty-five years, poet Baron Wormser and his family lived in a house in Maine with no electricity or running water. They grew much of their own food, carried water by hand, and read by the light of kerosene lamps. They considered themselves part of the “back to the land” movement, but their choice to live off the grid was neither statement nor protest: they simply had built their house too far from the road and could not afford to bring in power lines. Over the years, they settled in to a life that centered on what Thoreau called “the essential facts.” In this graceful meditation, Wormser similarly spurns ideology in favor of observation, exploration, and reflection. “When we look for one thread of motive,” he writes, “we are, in all likelihood, deceiving ourselves.” His refusal to be satisfied with the obvious explanation, the single thread of motive, makes him a keen and sympathetic observer of his neighbors and community, a perceptive reader of poetry and literature, and an honest and unselfconscious analyst of his own responses to the natural world. The result is a series of candid personal essays on community and isolation, nature, civilization, and poetry.

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The Road Washes Out in Spring

A Poet’s Memoir of Living Off the Grid

Baron Wormser

Brandeis University Press, 2023

A new edition of an evergreen back-to-nature book in the tradition of Thoreau.

For nearly twenty-five years, poet Baron Wormser and his family lived in a house in Maine with no electricity or running water. They grew much of their own food, carried water by hand, and read by the light of kerosene lamps. They considered themselves part of the “back to the land” movement, but their choice to live off the grid was neither a statement nor a protest: they simply had built their house too far from the road and could not afford to bring in power lines. Over the years, they settled into a life that centered on what Thoreau would have called “the essential facts.” In this graceful meditation, Wormser similarly spurns ideology in favor of observation, exploration, and reflection. “When we look for one thread of motive,” he writes, “we are, in all likelihood, deceiving ourselves.” His refusal to be satisfied with the obvious explanation, the single thread of motive, makes him a keen and sympathetic observer of his neighbors and community, a perceptive reader of poetry and literature, and an honest and unselfconscious analyst of his own responses to the natural world. The result is a series of candid personal essays on community and isolation, nature, civilization, and poetry. Lovely and rich, The Road Washes Out in Spring is an immersive read. A new preface by the author rounds out this new edition.

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The Road to El Cielo

Mexico's Forest in the Clouds

By Fred and Marie S. Webster

University of Texas Press, 2002

Hidden high in the Sierra de Guatemala mountain range of northeastern Mexico in the state of Tamaulipas is the northernmost tropical cloud forest of the Western Hemisphere. Within its humid oak-sweetgum woodlands, tropical and temperate species of plants and animals mingle in rare diversity, creating a mecca for birders and other naturalists.

Fred and Marie Webster first visited Rancho del Cielo, cloud forest home of Canadian immigrant Frank Harrison, in 1964, drawn by the opportunity to see such exotic birds as tinamous, trogons, motmots, and woodcreepers only 500 miles from their Austin, Texas, home. In this book, they recount their many adventures as researchers and tour leaders from their base at Rancho del Cielo, interweaving their reminiscences with a history of the region and of the struggle by friends from both sides of the border to have some 360,000 acres of the mountain declared an area protected from exploitation—El Cielo Biosphere Reserve. Their firsthand reporting, enlivened with vivid tales of the people, land, and birds of El Cielo, adds an engagingly personal chapter to the story of conservation in Mexico.

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The Road to Love Canal

Managing Industrial Waste before EPA

By Craig E. Colten and Peter N. Skinner

University of Texas Press, 1995

The toxic legacy of Love Canal vividly brought the crisis in industrial waste disposal to public awareness across the United States and led to the passage of the Superfund legislation in 1980. To discover why disasters like Love Canal have occurred and whether they could have been averted with knowledge available to waste managers of the time, this book examines industrial waste disposal before the formation of the Environmental Protection Agency in 1970.

Colten and Skinner build their study around three key questions. First, what was known before 1970 about the hazards of certain industrial wastes and their potential for causing public health problems? Second, what were the technical capabilities for treating or containing wastes during that time? And third, what factors other than technical knowledge guided the actions of waste managers before the enactment of explicit federal laws?

The authors find that significant information about the hazards of industrial wastes existed before 1970. Their explanations of why this knowledge did not prevent the toxic legacy now facing us will be essential reading for environmental historians and lawyers, public health personnel, and concerned citizens.

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The Rocky Mountain National Park Reader

James H. Pickering

University of Utah Press, 2015

Writer Wallace Stegner once wrote that “No place is a place until things that have happened in it are remembered.” This collection celebrates one of America’s most loved places, Rocky Mountain National Park, which marks its 100th birthday in 2015. Engagement with place and the events that loom large in park history are the underlying themes that connect the thirty-three selections that make up this anthology.

Representative both in subject and approach, the selections reach back to Arapaho and pioneer times before the park was established and move forward to span its entire first century. The voices that speak to us are distinctive: among them are Irish sportsman Windham Thomas Wyndham-Quin, the Fourth Earl of Dunraven; British travel writer Isabella Bird; mountaineer Frederick Chapin; naturalist Enos Mills; iconic ranger Jack Moomaw and his fictional counterpart, Dorr Yeager’s Bob Flame; and contemporary nature writers Anne Zwinger and SueEllen Campbell—to mention but a few. Some tell us about the past, recalling moments of personal triumph and tragedy. Other voices are quieter; some are more polemic. All capture and share a part of the national treasure that is Rocky Mountain National Park.

The first of its kind, this original collection is a rich literary and historical compendium of the best that has been written about Rocky Mountain National Park. As such it provides an indispensable introduction to the nation’s twelfth national park.

Part of the National Park Reader series, edited by Lance Newman and David Stanley

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The Rose's Kiss

A Natural History of Flowers

Peter Bernhardt

University of Chicago Press, 2002

"An engaging botanical overview of flowers."-New York Times Book Review

In The Rose's Kiss, Peter Bernhardt presents a fascinating and wide-ranging look at the natural history of flowers—how they look, what they do, and their often hidden interactions with the surrounding environment and other living organisms upon which they depend for their survival. You'll discover why flowers are so colorful, how they evolved, and how insects exploit them for their nectar. This is a book for all flower lovers, from naturalists and gardeners to poets and botanists.

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The Ruby-throated Hummingbird

By June Osborne

University of Texas Press, 1998

There is no mistaking a hummingbird. Even people who hardly know a robin from a sparrow recognize that flash of iridescent feathers and the distinctive hovering flight. So popular have "hummers" become that even casual birdwatchers now travel great distances to hummingbird hot spots to see masses of birds in their annual migrations.

In this invitingly written book, June Osborne paints a fully detailed portrait of perhaps the best-known hummingbird in the United States, the ruby-throat. Drawing from her own birdwatching experiences, she offers an "up close and personal" look at a female ruby-throat building her nest and rearing young, as well as an account of a day in the life of a male ruby-throat and stories of the hummers' migrations between their summer breeding grounds in the United States and Canada and their winter homes in Mexico and Central America.

In addition to this life history, Osborne recounts early hummingbird sightings and tells how the bird received its common and scientific names. After an overview of hummingbirds' distinctive ways of feeding, flying, and conserving energy, she offers a detailed description of the ruby-throat that will help you tell females from males, immature birds from adults, and ruby-throats from similar species. Osborne also takes you on a visit to the "Hummer/Bird Celebration!" at Rockport, reviews hummingbird banding programs, and explains how to attract hummingbirds to your yard or apartment balcony.

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The Sacred Earth

Jewish Perspectives on Our Planet

Rabbi Andrue J. Kahn

Central Conference of American Rabbis, 2023

The Torah begins by setting forth the heavens and the Earth as God’s creation, impelling humanity to steward our planet for its own sake and for its ability to nurture our lives. Yet the human-Divine-environment relationship seems to be in perpetual crisis. The Sacred Earth is a contemporary Jewish response to the looming threat of climate change, the widespread desire for experiential spirituality rooted in nature, and the continually changing relationship between humanity, nature, technology, and the Divine. The leading thinkers in this collection reflect on human vulnerability in the face of forces of nature, examine conceptions of our place in cosmology, and grapple with environmental destruction. Ultimately, with hope, they creatively explore ways to redeem this sacred Earth.

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The Safe House

A Novel

Christophe Boltanski

University of Chicago Press, 2017

In Paris’s exclusive Saint-Germain neighborhood is a mansion. In that mansion lives a family. Deep in that mansion. The Bolts are that family, and they have secrets. The Safe House tells their story.

When the Nazis came, Étienne Boltanski divorced his wife and walked out the front door, never to be seen again during the war. So far as the outside world knew, the Jewish doctor had fled. The truth was that he had sneaked back to hide in a secret crawl space at the heart of the house. There he lived for the duration of the war. With the Liberation, Étienne finally emerged, but he and his family were changed forever—anxious, reclusive, yet proudly eccentric. Their lives were spent, amid Bohemian disarray and lingering wartime fears, in the mansion’s recesses or packed comically into the protective cocoon of a Fiat.

That house (and its vehicular appendage) is at the heart of Christophe Boltanski’s ingeniously structured, lightly fictionalized account of his grandparents and their extended family. The novel unfolds room by room—each chapter opening with a floorplan—introducing us to the characters who occupy each room, including the narrator’s grandmother—a woman of “savage appetites”—and his uncle Christian, whose haunted artworks would one day make him famous. “The house was a palace,” Boltanski writes, “and they lived like hobos.” Rejecting convention as they’d rejected the outside world, the family never celebrated birthdays or even marked the passage of time, living instead in permanent stasis, ever more closely bonded to the house itself.

The Safe House was a literary sensation when published in France in 2015 and won the Prix de Prix, France’s most prestigious book prize. A French-language film adaptation, La cache, was released in 2025 from director Lionel Baier. With hints of Oulipian playfulness and an atmosphere of dark humor, The Safe House is an unforgettable portrait of a self-imprisoned family.

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The Sagebrush Ocean, Tenth Anniversary Edition

A Natural History Of The Great Basin

Stephen Trimble

University of Nevada Press, 1999

Noted writer and photographer Stephen Trimble mixes eloquent accounts of personal experiences with clear explication of natural history. His photographs capture some of the most spectacular but least-known scenery in the western states. The Great Basin Desert sweeps from the Sierra to the Rockies, from the Snake River Plain to the Mojave Desert. "Biogeography" would be one way to sum up Trimble's focus on the land: what lives where, and why. He introduces concepts of desert ecology and discusses living communities of animals and plants that band Great Basin mountains—from the exhilarating emptiness of dry lake-beds to alpine regions at the summits of the 13,000-foot Basin ranges.

This is the best general introduction to the ecology and spirit of the Great Basin, a place where "the desert almost seems to mirror the sky in size," where mountains hold "ravens, bristlecone pines, winter stillness—and unseen, but satisfying, the possibility of bighorn sheep." Trimble's photographs come from the backcountry of this rugged land, from months of exploring and hiking the Great Basin wilderness in all seasons; and his well-chosen words come from a rare intimacy with the West.

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The Sagebrush Ocean

35th Anniversary Edition

Stephen Trimble

University of Nevada Press, 2026

The Sagebrush Ocean, the essential introduction to the ecology and spirit of the Great Basin Desert, returns in this richly updated 35th anniversary edition. Winner of the Ansel Adams Award for Photography and Conservation, Stephen Trimble’s authoritative voice and evocative photographs illuminate this landscape of sun-struck playas, surprising wetlands, remote canyons, and wind-swept tundra.

Today, the once-vast “sagebrush ocean” is an endangered sea, as environmental changes and human development have diminished it by half. This heartbreaking decline drives Trimble’s updated text, but he blends loss with reverence for what remains—and urgent insight into what’s at stake. Striking color photographs, many newly added, illuminate some of the continent’s most spectacular but little known scenery. For anyone curious about the Great Basin or concerned for its future, this timely edition is indispensable.

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The Saguaro Cactus

A Natural History

David Yetman, Alberto Búrquez, Kevin Hultine, and Michael Sanderson, with Frank S. Crosswhite

University of Arizona Press, 2020

The saguaro, with its great size and characteristic shape—its arms stretching heavenward, its silhouette often resembling a human—has become the emblem of the Sonoran Desert of southwestern Arizona and northwestern Mexico. The largest and tallest cactus in the United States, it is both familiar and an object of fascination and curiosity.

This book offers a complete natural history of this enduring and iconic desert plant. Gathering everything from the saguaro’s role in Sonoran Desert ecology to its adaptations to the desert climate and its sacred place in Indigenous culture, this book shares precolonial through current scientific findings.

The saguaro is charismatic and readily accessible but also decidedly different from other desert flora. The essays in this book bear witness to our ongoing fascination with the great cactus and the plant’s unusual characteristics, covering the saguaro’s: history of discovery, place in the cactus family, ecology, anatomy and physiology, genetics, and ethnobotany. The Saguaro Cactus offers testimony to the cactus’s prominence as a symbol, the perceptions it inspires, its role in human society, and its importance in desert ecology.

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The Salt House

A Summer on the Dunes of Cape Cod

Cynthia Huntington

Dartmouth College Press, 2003

The Salt House is a beautifully observed and written memoir of a long summer's stay on the back shore of Cape Cod. Each chapter is like a prose poem, shedding increasing light on the challenge of finding "home" without the illusion of permanence, a quest based not on ownership but on affinity and familiarity with an area and its people. Cynthia Huntington expands her theme through images of the landscape, the shack, the new marriage. The shack, named "Euphoria," is built as a house set on stilts above the sand, to take the wind under it. Only a partial shelter, it is inhabited for only one season a year, yet it endures. The outer cape has the feel of a place for migrants and drifters -- for birds and other wildlife, and for people such as artists, fishermen, and coast guardsmen. A place where "year-round" often means several addresses. Similarly, her narrative describes improvised, fragile beginnings: a new marriage, learning to be at home in the world, becoming intimate with the natural world, without the necessity of settling down. The Salt House shares a world that is less natural history or memoir than it is neighborhood exploration -- the process of learning a place and becoming native to it.

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The Salt Lake Papers

From the Years in the Earthscapes of Utah

Ed Lueders

University of Utah Press, 2018

Once again cast in the companionable style of journal entries and notes that readers enjoyed in Lueders’s 1977 creative nonfiction classic The Clam Lake Papers, this new investigation into language and ways of knowing follows the author’s move from the north woods of Wisconsin to the Intermountain West of Utah.

The Salt Lake Papers is divided into two sections by location and time. Book One reflects the central geophysical presence of the Great Salt Lake, in view from Leuders’s home and the University of Utah campus where he studied and taught. Researched and composed during the 1980s, it is published here for the first time. Book Two begins with his retirement to the “earthscapes” of the Torrey–Capitol Reef area of southern Utah and contemplates the Colorado River system. Hydrology thus provides both the physical and the metaphysical basis for the author’s reflective insights and for the natural flow of his advancing thought.

Beautifully written, The Salt Lake Papers, in varied ways, speaks to the necessity of the humanities in the modern age. At its heart, Lueders’s small book of intellectual musings explores place and the ways landscape shapes what is observant in each of us.

Hear Ed Lueders talk about his book on Utah Conversations with Ted Capener on KUED

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The San Luis Valley

Sand Dunes and Sandhill Cranes

Text by Susan J. Tweit; Photographs by Glenn Oakley

University of Arizona Press, 2005

It is a high valley edged by serrated peaks, a remote expanse the size of Connecticut lying, as if forgotten, between two mountain ranges. Here, North America’s tallest sand dunes blow against glacier-gouged summits, the Rio Grande begins its long journey from snowflake to saltwater, and vast reaches of desert scrub hide verdant pocket wetlands. Colorado’s San Luis Valley is not a place for the timid. Sizzling hot in summer, frigid cold in winter, this huge landscape is humbling in its openness, a place defined by the rhythms of nature—and by the thrust and parry of male courting female in the ritual dance of sandhill cranes. These majestic birds arrive by the thousands twice a year to feed, rest, and socialize in the valley’s wetlands—invisible except from the air—and their cries temper the constant wind. Susan Tweit lives in the high desert of southern Colorado not far from the valley’s dunes and wetlands. With the precision of a scientist and the passion of a poet, she guides readers through this land of sand dunes and sandhill cranes, describing its natural features and tracing its human history from buffalo hunters and conquistadors to Hispanic farming communities and UFO observatories. And in stunning images, photographer Glenn Oakley brings his intimate feel for light and landscape to portraying not only the subtle beauty of this high-desert sanctuary but also the grandeur of the cranes in flight. As an intimate look at Great Sand Dunes National Park and Preserve and the San Luis Valley, this book reveals a desert place as seductive and sobering as existence itself.

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The Scars of Project 459

The Environmental Story of the Lake of the Ozarks

Traci Angel

University of Arkansas Press, 2014

The Scars of Project 459 tells the environmental story of the Lake of the Ozarks, built by the Union Electric Company in 1931. At 55,000 acres, the lake was the biggest manmade lake in the United States at the time of its completion, and it remains the biggest in the Midwest, with 1,100 miles of shoreline in four different Missouri counties. Though created to generate hydroelectric power, not for development, the "Magic Dragon," as it is popularly known because of its serpentine shape, has become a major recreational area. Located in some of the most spectacular Ozark scenery, the giant lake today attracts three million visitors annually and has more than 70,000 homes along its shoreline. Traci Angel shows how the popularity of the Lake of the Ozarks has resulted in major present-day problems, including poor water quality, loss of habitat, and increasing concerns about aging waste-management systems for the homes surrounding the lake. Many in the area, especially business owners whose incomes depend on tourism, resist acknowledging these problems. The Scars of Project 459 aims to make public the challenges facing this important resource and ensure that its future is not to be loved to death.

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The Scientific Nomenclature of Birds in the Upper Midwest

James Sandrock and Jean C. Prior

University of Iowa Press, 2014

The translation and explanation of genus and species names yield markers to help us identify birds in the field as well as remember distinctive traits. Having a basic understanding of the scientific and common names of birds reveals insights into their color, behavior, habitat, or geography. Knowing that Cyanocitta means “blue chatterer” and cristata means “crested, tufted” or that Anas means “a duck” and clypeata means “armed with a shield” tells you just about everything you need to identify a Blue Jay or a Northern Shoveler. In this portable reference book, James Sandrock and Jean Prior explain the science and history behind the names of some 450 birds of the Upper Midwest states of Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, North and South Dakota, Ohio, and Wisconsin. Since many of these birds occur throughout the United States, this handbook can also be used by birders in other parts of the country.
The authors examine the roots, stems, and construction of scientific names from their classical Latin and Greek or other linguistic origins. The translations of these words and insights into their sources yield quirky, tantalizing facts about the people, geography, habitat, and mythology behind bird names. Each entry also includes the bird’s common name as well as local or regional names. Beginning birders confused by scientific names as well as more experienced birders curious about such names will find that the book opens unexpected connections into linguistic, historical, biological, artistic, biographical, and even aesthetic realms.
Highlighting the obvious and not-so-obvious links between birds and language, this practical guide continues a long scholarly tradition of such books by and for those afoot in the field. Whether you are hiking with binoculars or watching a backyard bird feeder or reading at home, The Scientific Nomenclature of Birds in the Upper Midwest will greatly enhance your appreciation of birds.

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The Scramble for the Amazon and the "Lost Paradise" of Euclides da Cunha

Susanna B. Hecht

University of Chicago Press, 2013

The fortunes of the late nineteenth century’s imperial and industrial powers depended on a single raw material—rubber—with only one source: the Amazon basin. And so began the scramble for the Amazon—a decades-long conflict that found Britain, France, Belgium, and the United States fighting with and against the new nations of Peru, Bolivia, and Brazil for the forest’s riches. In the midst of this struggle, Euclides da Cunha, engineer, journalist, geographer, political theorist, and one of Brazil’s most celebrated writers, led a survey expedition to the farthest reaches of the river, among the world’s most valuable, dangerous, and little-known landscapes.

The Scramble for the Amazon tells the story of da Cunha’s terrifying journey, the unfinished novel born from it, and the global strife that formed the backdrop for both. Haunted by his broken marriage, da Cunha trekked through a beautiful region thrown into chaos by guerrilla warfare, starving migrants, and native slavery. All the while, he worked on his masterpiece, a nationalist synthesis of geography, philosophy, biology, and journalism he named the Lost Paradise. Da Cunha intended his epic to unveil the Amazon’s explorers, spies, natives, and brutal geopolitics, but, as Susanna B. Hecht recounts, he never completed it—his wife’s lover shot him dead upon his return.

At once the biography of an extraordinary writer, a masterly chronicle of the social, political, and environmental history of the Amazon, and a superb translation of the remaining pieces of da Cunha’s project, The Scramble for the Amazon is a work of thrilling intellectual ambition.

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The Seasons Of Fire

Reflections On Fire In The West

David J. Strohmaier

University of Nevada Press, 2001

Fire is a fearsome constant in the America West. As the author David J. Strohmaier notes, "Whether we have tended a campfire along Oregon's Deschutes River in March, engaged the advancing front of a Great Basin wildfire in the torrid heat of August, or watched fire settle into the subdued, smoldering leaf piles of October, all of our lives, to one degree or another, are bracketed by fire." In The Seasons of Fire, Strohmaier effectively blends nature writing, personal essay, and philosophical analysis as he deliberately crosses disciplinary boundaries. He discusses the "moral" dimensions of fire—not only whether fires are good, bad, or indifferent phenomena, but also how fire, more generally understood, shapes meaning for human life. The consequences of discussing the moral side of fire speak directly to the contours of the human soul, and to our sense of our place on the land. Strohmaier, a long-term firefighter himself, includes accurate and sometimes gut-wrenching descriptions of the firefighter's experience.

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The Seasons of the Robin

By Don Grussing

University of Texas Press, 2009

In a small nest in a large oak tree, the drama begins. A young American Robin breaks open his shell and emerges into a world that will provide the warmth of sunny days and the life-threatening chill of cold, rainy nights; the satisfaction of a full stomach and the danger of sudden predator attacks; and the chance to mature into an adult robin who'll begin the cycle of life all over again come next spring.

In The Seasons of the Robin, Don Grussing tells the uncommon life story of one of the most common birds, the North American Robin. Written as fiction to capture the high drama that goes on unnoticed right outside our windows, the book follows a young male robin through the first year of life. From his perspective, we experience many common episodes of a bird's life—struggling to get out of the egg; awkwardly attempting to master flight; learning to avoid predators; migrating for the first time; returning home; establishing a territory; finding a mate; and beginning the cycle again. This creative approach of presenting natural history through a fictional, yet factually based, story allows us to experience the spine-tingling, nerve-wracking, adrenaline-flowing excitement that is so much a part of the life of every wild thing. As Don Grussing concludes in his preface, "Once you experience the world through a robin's eyes, I hope you'll look at every wild thing with new appreciation and respect for what they accomplish by living."

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The Secure and the Dispossessed

How the Military and Corporations Are Shaping a Climate-Changed World

Edited by Nick Buxton and Ben Hayes

Pluto Press, 2015

While ecologists and environmentalists view the melting of the polar ice caps as a dire and threatening effect of climate change, many business and political leaders see emerging opportunity, as a result of newly accessible oil and gas fields. As the contributors to The Secure and the Dispossessed reveal, the ongoing environmental transitions raise a host of complicated questions about global assets and resources as well as dangerous opportunism.

The Secure and the Dispossessed gathers together essays by high-profile journalists, academics, and activists, including Christian Parenti, Nafeez Ahmed, and policy analyst Oscar Reyes. They offer a close and critical guide to questions about climate change, showing how they converge with questions about international security and global economic power, as new natural resources become available. This book is an essential guide to the key environmental and political debates which will shape future policies and elections: how managing the world’s supply of oil and gas can be squared with the environmental impact of our continued reliance on those very same fossil fuels.

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The Serengeti Lion

A Study of Predator-Prey Relations

George B. Schaller

University of Chicago Press, 1976

Based on three years of study in the Serengeti National Park, George B. Schaller’s The Serengeti Lion describes the vast impact of the lion and other predators on the vast herds of wildebeest, zebra, and gazelle for which the area is famous. The most comprehensive book available on the lion, this classic work includes the author’s findings on all aspects of lion behavior, including its social system, population dynamics, hunting behavior, and predation patterns.

“If you have only enough time to read one book about field biology, this is the one I recommend.”—Edward O. Wilson, Science

“This book conveys not only the fascination of its particular study of lion behavior but the drama and wonder and beauty of the intimate interdependence of all living things.”—Saturday Review

“This is an important book, not just for its valuable information on lions, but for its broad, open, and intelligent approach to problems that cut across the fields of behavior, populations, ecology, wildlife management, evolution, anthropology, and comparative biology.”—Richard G. Van Gelder, Bioscience

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