Free-flowing rivers in the United States are an endangered species. With more than 500,000 dams in place, we've dammed and diverted almost every major river, straightening curves and blocking passage for fish and other aquatic animals, pushing many to the brink. Now a heartening new movement is helping to demolish harmful or obsolete structures ......
From firewatcher/poet comes a powerfully meditative with a basis in Japanese poetic form Haibun; comps are Peter Matthiesen's Snow Leopard and The Nine-Headed Dragon River, Terry Tempest Williams, Barry Lopez, and even Norman MacLean's Young Men and Fire. Multi-award-winning writer Philip Connors had been a fire watcher in the Gila Wilderness for ......
Texas Lookout Towers, the Forest Service, and the Civilian ConservationCorps
Fire lookout towers are enjoying a retrospective rebirth, attracting the curious and the adventurous, as Americans seeking escape for moments of solitude rediscover the structures' national significance. Though the Civilian Conservation Corps' national fire control policies and reforestation efforts have been covered elsewhere, each state's legacy ......
Life Along the River from Prehistory to the Civil War
When the Bosque Ran Clear: Life Along the River from Prehistory to the Civil War presents a history of early people and their environments along the Bosque River valley in North Central Texas. Spanning from the Pleistocene, thousands of years ago when the earliest peoples arrived in the cool and rainy river valley, to the time of the Comanche in ......
Birds of the Texas Coast: Photographs is the first large-format photography work covering the entire Lone Star coast and its representative bird life. Through Ron Grimes's dramatic photography of more than 200 coastal species, this book encompasses a deep and wide natural history of the region. The Texas Coast is one of North America's premier ......
Near the Forest, By the Lake is a personal exploration of the wonders of the natural world close to home. In this collection of essays, Angela E. Douglas reflects on the lives and habits of the plants, birds, insects, and other creatures inhabiting the landscapes that neighbor her in upstate New York. Some essays focus on individual species, ......
Ice, Exploration, and the Battle for Power at the Top of the World
Almost two centuries after British explorer Sir John Franklin and his men died amid paralyzing cold and ice in pursuit of the mythical Northwest Passage, the Arctic--in response to temperatures greater than at any time in the last ten thousand years--is melting at an alarming pace. Instead of heeding this clear sign that the world must reduce ......
A call to rethink our relationship with forests Ancient and carbon-rich, old-growth forests play an irreplaceable role in the environment. Their complex ecosystems clean the air, purify the water, cool the planet, and teem with life. In a time of climate catastrophe, old-growth and other natural forests face existential threats caused by ......
River Hymnal offers rivers as connective tissue binding Louisiana, Washington, and Florida together. Poems are set in all these locales, and their landscapes shape and contain different permeations of the poet's life and sensibilities. The book's themes of discovery and loss, progress and regress, future and past, are all rivers that the poems ......
