Download or read book Ecology of a Cracker Childhood written by Janisse Ray and published by Milkweed Editions. This book was released on 2023-07 with total page 223 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the memories of a childhood marked by extreme poverty, mental illness, and restrictive fundamentalist Christian rules, Janisse Ray crafted a “heartfelt and refreshing” (New York Times) memoir that has inspired thousands to embrace their beginnings, no matter how humble, and to fight for the places they love. This new edition updates and contextualizes the story for a new generation and a wider audience desperately searching for stories of empowerment and hope. Ray grew up in a junkyard along U.S. Highway 1, hidden from Florida-bound travelers by hulks of old cars. In language at once colloquial, elegiac, and informative, Ray redeems her home and her people, while also cataloging the source of her childhood hope: the Edenic longleaf pine forests, where orchids grow amid wiregrass at the feet of widely spaced, lofty trees. Today, the forests exist in fragments, cherished and threatened, and the South of her youth is gradually being overtaken by golf courses and suburban development. A contemporary classic, Ecology of a Cracker Childhood is a clarion call to protect the cultures and ecologies of every childhood.
Download or read book Ecology of a Cracker Childhood written by Janisse Ray and published by . This book was released on 1999 with total page 318 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A memoir of a childhood, spend in an isolated Georgia community of Crackers, that grew into a passion to save the vanishing longleaf pine ecocystem in which she was raised.
Download or read book Ecology of a Cracker Childhood written by Janisse Ray and published by . This book was released on 1999 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A memoir of a childhood, spend in an isolated Georgia community of Crackers, that grew into a passion to save the vanishing longleaf pine ecocystem in which she was raised.
Download or read book Ecology of a Cracker Childhood written by Janisse Ray and published by . This book was released on 2015 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A gutsy, wholly original memoir of ragged grace and raw beauty." --Kirkus Reviews (STARRED) From the memories of a childhood marked by extreme poverty, mental illness, and restrictive fundamentalist Christian rules, Janisse Ray crafted a memoir that has inspired thousands to embrace their beginnings, no matter how humble, and fight for the places they love. This edition, published on the fifteenth anniversary of the original publication, updates and contextualizes the story for a new generation and a wider audience desperately searching for stories of empowerment and hope. Janisse Ray grew up in a junkyard along U.S. Highway 1, hidden from Florida-bound travelers by hulks of old cars. In language at once colloquial, elegiac, and informative, Ray redeems her home and her people, while also cataloging the source of her childhood hope: the Edenic longleaf pine forests, where orchids grow amid wiregrass at the feet of widely spaced, lofty trees. Today, the forests exist in fragments, cherished and threatened, and the South of her youth is gradually being overtaken by golf courses and suburban development. A contemporary classic, Ecology of a Cracker Childhood is a clarion call to protect the cultures and ecologies of every childhood.
Download or read book Wild Spectacle written by Janisse Ray and published by Trinity University Press. This book was released on 2021-10-26 with total page 148 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Looking for adventure and continuing a process of self-discovery, Janisse Ray has repeatedly set out to immerse herself in wildness, to be wild, and to learn what wildness can teach us. From overwintering with monarch butterflies in Mexico to counting birds in Belize, the stories in Wild Spectacle capture her luckiest moments—ones of heart-pounding amazement, discovery of romance, and moving toward living more wisely. In Ray’s worst moments she crosses boundaries to encounter danger and embrace sadness. Anchored firmly in two places Ray has called home—Montana and southern Georgia—the sixteen essays here span a landscape from Alaska to Central America, connecting common elements in the ecosystems of people and place. One of her abiding griefs is that she has missed the sights of explorers like Bartram, Sacagawea, and Carver: flocks of passenger pigeons, routes of wolves, herds of bison. She craves a wilder world and documents encounters that are rare in a time of disappearing habitat, declining biodiversity, and a world too slowly coming to terms with climate change. In an age of increasingly virtual, urban life, Ray embraces the intentionality of trying to be a better person balanced with seeking out natural spectacle, abundance, and less trammeled environments. She questions what it means to travel into the wild as a woman, speculates on the impacts of ecotourism and travel in general, questions assumptions about eating from the land, and appeals to future generations to make substantive change. Wild Spectacle explores our first home, the wild earth, and invites us to question its known and unknown beauties and curiosities.
Download or read book The Seed Underground written by Janisse Ray and published by Chelsea Green Publishing. This book was released on 2012-07-06 with total page 243 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: There is no despair in a seed. There's only life, waiting for the right conditions-sun and water, warmth and soil-to be set free. Everyday, millions upon millions of seeds lift their two green wings. At no time in our history have Americans been more obsessed with food. Options including those for local, sustainable, and organic food-seem limitless. And yet, our food supply is profoundly at risk. Farmers and gardeners a century ago had five times the possibilities of what to plant than farmers and gardeners do today; we are losing untold numbers of plant varieties to genetically modified industrial monocultures. In her latest work of literary nonfiction, award-winning author and activist Janisse Ray argues that if we are to secure the future of food, we first must understand where it all begins: the seed. The Seed Underground is a journey to the frontier of seed-saving. It is driven by stories, both the author's own and those from people who are waging a lush and quiet revolution in thousands of gardens across America to preserve our traditional cornucopia of food by simply growing old varieties and eating them. The Seed Underground pays tribute to time-honored and threatened varieties, deconstructs the politics and genetics of seeds, and reveals the astonishing characters who grow, study, and save them.
Download or read book The Home Place written by J. Drew Lanham and published by Milkweed Editions. This book was released on 2016-08-22 with total page 143 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “A groundbreaking work about race and the American landscape, and a deep meditation on nature…wise and beautiful.”—Helen Macdonald, author of H is for Hawk A Foreword Reviews Best Book of the Year and Nautilus Silver Award Winner In me, there is the red of miry clay, the brown of spring floods, the gold of ripening tobacco. All of these hues are me; I am, in the deepest sense, colored. Dating back to slavery, Edgefield County, South Carolina—a place “easy to pass by on the way somewhere else”—has been home to generations of Lanhams. In The Home Place, readers meet these extraordinary people, including Drew himself, who over the course of the 1970s falls in love with the natural world around him. As his passion takes flight, however, he begins to ask what it means to be “the rare bird, the oddity.” By turns angry, funny, elegiac, and heartbreaking, The Home Place is a meditation on nature and belonging by an ornithologist and professor of ecology, at once a deeply moving memoir and riveting exploration of the contradictions of black identity in the rural South—and in America today. “When you’re done with The Home Place, it won’t be done with you. Its wonders will linger like everything luminous.”—Star Tribune “A lyrical story about the power of the wild…synthesizes his own family history, geography, nature, and race into a compelling argument for conservation and resilience.”—National Geographic
Download or read book Pinhook written by Janisse Ray and published by Chelsea Green Publishing. This book was released on 2005-04-30 with total page 168 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Janisse Ray, award-winning author of Ecology of a Cracker Childhood and Wild Card Quilt, writes an evocative paean to wildness and wilderness restoration with an extraordinary journey into southern Georgia's Pinhook Swamp. Pinhook Swamp acts as a vital watershed and wildlife corridor, a link between the great southern wildernesses of Okefenokee Swamp and Osceola National Forest. Together Okefenokee, Osceola, and Pinhook form one of the largest expanse of protected wild land east of the Mississippi River. This is one of America's last truly wild places, and Pinhook takes us into its heart. Ray comes to know Pinhook intimately as she joins the fight to protect it, spending the night in the swamp, tasting honey made from its flowers, tracking wildlife, and talking to others about their relationship with the swamp. Ray sees Pinhook through the eyes of the people who live there--naturalists, beekeepers, homesteaders, hunters, and locals at the country store. In lyrical, down-home prose, she draws together the swamp's need for restoration and the human desire for wholeness and wildness in our own lives and landscapes.
Download or read book Drifting Into Darien written by Janisse Ray and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2011 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The book explores both the need and the possibilities for conservation of the river and the surrounding forests and wetlands.
Download or read book Early Spring written by Amy Seidl and published by Beacon Press. This book was released on 2009 with total page 198 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Offers both a personal and a research-based testimonial of the problem of global warming, as an ecologist, her daughters, and their neighbors observe the changing weather and landscape of their small, New England town.
Download or read book Red Lanterns written by Janisse Ray and published by . This book was released on 2021 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Red Lanterns is a collection of new poetry that navigates a borderland between the seen world and the spirit world. Occupying a tangible world is expected of us humans. We have been taught to trust (and trust only) our five major senses, which inform the tangible. Humans, however, possess senses beyond our primary ones, not simply the sixth sense of intuition but also a sense of time, sense of responsibility, sense of being watched, and so on. Some things lie beyond the realm of human knowledge, some things are not as they appear, some places that appear empty may not be, and some things remain wild, secret, and intangible. These poems look at the place where the wild and mysterious joins with the explicable. The poems are about connections, especially spiritual connections - human to human, human to animal, human to land, animal to animal. Many of the poems can be classified as love poems, because love is one of our most primal connections. There is also a thread of fierceness that runs through this work. This ferocity is in seeing disconnection and fighting to restore connectivity. More than anything the book is a manifesto to protect all the connections that allow us to be creatures of spirit as much as creatures of what Flannery O'Connor called "weight and extension," meaning of the body"--
Download or read book Wild Card Quilt written by Janisse Ray and published by Milkweed Editions. This book was released on 2003 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A follow-up to the American Book Award-winning "Ecology of a Cracker Childhood, Wild Card Quilt" finds a journey to a childhood home becoming a powerful meditation on bridging the cultural divide.
Download or read book Forgotten Grasslands of the South written by Reed F. Noss and published by Island Press. This book was released on 2012-12-03 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Forgotten Grasslands of the South is the study of one of the biologically richest and most endangered ecosystems in North America. In a seamless blend of science and personal observation, renowned ecologist Reed Noss explains the natural history of southern grasslands, their origin and history, and the physical determinants of grassland distribution, including ecology, soils, landform, and hydrology. In addition to offering fascinating new information about these little-studied ecosystems, Noss demonstrates how natural history is central to the practice of conservation. Although theory and experimentation have recently dominated the field of ecology, ecologists are coming to realize how these distinct approaches are not divergent but complementary, and that pursuing them together can bring greater knowledge and understanding of how the natural world works and how we can best conserve it. This long-awaited work sets a new standard for scientific literature and is essential reading for those who study and work to conserve the grasslands of the South as well as for everyone who is fascinated by the natural world.
Download or read book Paddlenorth written by Jennifer Kingsley and published by Greystone Books Ltd. This book was released on 2015-09-15 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Tells the story of Jennifer Kingsley's 54-day paddling adventure on the Back River, in the northern wilderness, as she and her five companions battle raging winds, impenetratble sea ice, and treacherous rapids.
Download or read book Ride South Until the Sawgrass written by James Chapin and published by . This book was released on 2020-10-27 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the moment Nat Quinto and his wife Lucy set foot in the Florida Territory, they can't seem to steer clear of Jake Primrose, a rancher whose schemes to increase his already plentiful wealth ensnare everyone around him. Between Primrose's greed and the brutal conflicts brewing in the Territory surrounding them, will the Quinto family be able to stay true to themselves? In four tales, the paths of the Primrose and Quinto families cross, separate, and inevitably intertwine in this virtuosic debut set during the tumultuous years of the Florida Territory's Second Seminole War and early statehood.
Download or read book Journeys Through Paradise written by Gail Fishman and published by University Press of Florida. This book was released on 2017-03-22 with total page 311 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This book is for those inhabited by the same desires that drove the early naturalists afield, who yearn to know wilder territory. We read it voraciously, as if in the understanding of how they loved we might also begin to do so, as if in the reliving of their lives we might recapture some vanishing part of the human psyche that must know wilderness."-- Janisse Ray, author of Ecology of a Cracker Childhood "Like the naturalists she profiles, Gail Fishman takes us on an odyssey through a time when the extraordinary diversity of the southeastern United States was first being explored and described. . . . Entertaining."-- Steve Gatewood, executive director, Society for Ecological Restoration, Tucson "Fishman modernizes the men and their explorations by retracing the terrain that they explored, wrote about, drew and painted. The result is an intriguing and appealing lesson in biographical and scientific history and a literary reading experience that will appeal to a wide audience."-- William W. Rogers, professor of history emeritus, Florida State University Following the original steps of pioneering naturalists, Gail Fishman profiles thirteen men who explored North America’s southeastern wilderness between 1715 and the 1940s, including John James Audubon, Mark Catesby, John and William Bartram, John Muir, and Alvan Wentworth Chapman. The book is also Fishman’s personal travelogue as she experiences the landscape through their eyes and describes the changes that have occurred along the region’s trails and streams. Traveling by horseback, boat, and foot, these naturalists--dedicated to their task and blessed with passion and insatiable curiosity--explored gentle mountains, regal forests, and shadowy swamps. Their interests ran deeper than merely cataloging plants and animals. They identified the continent’s foundations and the habits and histories of the flora and fauna of the landscape. Fishman tells us who they were and what compelled them to pursue their work. She evaluates what they accomplished and measures their importance, also pointing out their strengths and failings. And she paints an engaging picture of what America was like at the time. Fishman combines natural history and American history into a series of portraits that recapture the American Southeast as it was seen by those who first tramped through the wilderness and whose voices from the beginning urged the preservation of wild places. Gail Fishman, a freelance writer who lives in Tallahassee, has worked for the Florida Defenders of the Environment, The Nature Conservancy, and the National Audubon Society. She is a volunteer for the St. Marks National Wildlife Refuge and helped form the St. Marks Refuge Association.
Download or read book Fat Lighter written by Jonathan P. Streich and published by Createspace Independent Pub. This book was released on 2012-05-31 with total page 130 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Those who remember what the longleaf pine woodland looked like are passing with each tree that is cut. Perhaps it takes age, and an outsider who became a fire ecologist, to appreciate what once was. This pictorial gift (over 80 pics & images!) of the longleaf pine story will be appreciated if you liked: Ray's Ecology of a Cracker Childhood, Neel's The Art of Managing Longleaf, or Earley's Looking for Longleaf. If you love the South then this book's for you! It speaks about one of North America's premier forests: the longleaf pine ecosystem. This coastal plain forest once dominated the landscape that greeted the settlers from southern Virginia to the Piney Woods of eastern Texas. Its sap was used to seal ships and make specialty chemicals; its timber was used to build schools, factories, churches, houses and the great American railroads! Today it helps to deliver electric power to millions of homes. What happened to this woodland? Will we bring this treasured forest back?
