Download or read book Wanted Mountain Cedars written by Elizabeth McGreevy and published by . This book was released on 2021-04-15 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This controversial, eye-opening book by Elizabeth McGreevy suggests a different perception of Mountain Cedars (also called Ashe Junipers). It digs into the politics, history, economics, culture, and ecology surrounding these trees in the Hill Country of Texas from the 1700s to the present. Since the 1920s, reporters, writers, scientists, landowners, politicians, and cedar fever victims have characterized the trees as a non-native, water-hogging, grass-killing, toxic, useless species to justify its removal. The result has been a glut of Mountain Cedar tall tales. Yet before the 1890s, people highly respected Mountain Cedars. The Mountain Cedars they reported were large timber trees with strong, decay-resistant heartwood. Most were cut down and sold to boost the young Hill Country economy. The clearcutting of old-growth forests and dense woodlands and the continuous overgrazing of prairies that followed led to mass soil degradation and erosion. Acting as nature's bandage, Mountain Cedars morphed into pioneering bushes and spread across degraded soils. This book tracks down the origins of the tall tales to determine what is true, what is false, and what is somewhere in between. Through a series of revelations, the author replaces anti-cedar sentiments with a more constructive, less emotional approach to Hill Country land management.
Download or read book Snow Falling on Cedars written by David Guterson and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. This book was released on 1994 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A powerful tale of the Pacific Northwest in the 1950s, reminiscent of To Kill a Mockingbird. Courtroom drama, love story, and war novel, this is the epic tale of a young Japanese-American and the man on trial for killing the man she loves.
Download or read book East of the Mountains written by David Guterson and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2012-05-01 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When Dr Ben Givens left his Seattle home he never intended to return. It was to be a journey past snow-covered mountains to a place of canyons, sagelands and orchards, where, on the verges of the Columbia River, Ben had entered the world and would now take his leave of it.
Download or read book Venture To The Interior written by Laurens Van Der Post and published by Random House. This book was released on 2010-05-25 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Summoned to Whitehall in 1949, Laurens van der Post was told that in old British Central Africa there were two large tracts of country that London didn't really know anything about, and could he go in there on foot and take a look, please? Venture to the Interior is the account of that journey, a journey filled with adventure and discovery, flying from London across Europe and Africa, and after days in small aircraft, on foot across the mountains to the two lost worlds of central Africa.
Download or read book Tallgrass written by Sandra Dallas and published by St. Martin's Press. This book was released on 2007-04-03 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An essential American novel from Sandra Dallas, an unparalleled writer of our history, and our deepest emotions... During World War II, a family finds life turned upside down when the government opens a Japanese internment camp in their small Colorado town. After a young girl is murdered, all eyes (and suspicions) turn to the newcomers, the interlopers, the strangers. This is Tallgrass as Rennie Stroud has never seen it before. She has just turned thirteen and, until this time, life has pretty much been what her father told her it should be: predictable and fair. But now the winds of change are coming and, with them, a shift in her perspective. And Rennie will discover secrets that can destroy even the most sacred things. Part thriller, part historical novel, Tallgrass is a riveting exploration of the darkest--and best--parts of the human heart.
Download or read book Two Trees Make a Forest written by Jessica J. Lee and published by Catapult. This book was released on 2020-08-04 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This "stunning journey through a country that is home to exhilarating natural wonders, and a scarring colonial past . . . makes breathtakingly clear the connection between nature and humanity, and offers a singular portrait of the complexities inherent to our ideas of identity, family, and love" (Refinery29). A chance discovery of letters written by her immigrant grandfather leads Jessica J. Lee to her ancestral homeland, Taiwan. There, she seeks his story while growing closer to the land he knew. Lee hikes mountains home to Formosan flamecrests, birds found nowhere else on earth, and swims in a lake of drowned cedars. She bikes flatlands where spoonbills alight by fish farms, and learns about a tree whose fruit can float in the ocean for years, awaiting landfall. Throughout, Lee unearths surprising parallels between the natural and human stories that have shaped her family and their beloved island. Joyously attentive to the natural world, Lee also turns a critical gaze upon colonialist explorers who mapped the land and named plants, relying on and often effacing the labor and knowledge of local communities. Two Trees Make a Forest is a genre–shattering book encompassing history, travel, nature, and memoir, an extraordinary narrative showing how geographical forces are interlaced with our family stories.
Download or read book The Last American Man written by Elizabeth Gilbert and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2009-08-17 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: _____________ 'It is almost impossible not to fall under the spell of Eustace Conway ... his accomplishments, his joy and vigor, seem almost miraculous' - New York Times Review of Books 'Gilbert takes a bright-eyed bead on Eustace, hitting him square with a witty modernist appraisal of folkloric American masculinity' - The Times 'Conversational, enthusiastic, funny and sharp, the energy of The Last American Man never ebbs' - New Statesman _____________ A fascinating, intimate portrait of an endlessly complicated man: a visionary, a narcissist, a brilliant but flawed modern hero At the age of seventeen, Eustace Conway ditched the comforts of his suburban existence to escape to the wild. Away from the crushing disapproval of his father, he lived alone in a teepee in the mountains. Everything he needed he built, grew or killed. He made his clothes from deer he killed and skinned before using their sinew as sewing thread. But he didn't stop there. In the years that followed, he stopped at nothing in pursuit of bigger, bolder challenges. He travelled the Mississippi in a handmade wooden canoe; he walked the two-thousand-mile Appalachian Trail; he hiked across the German Alps in trainers; he scaled cliffs in New Zealand. One Christmas, he finished dinner with his family and promptly upped and left - to ride his horse across America. From South Carolina to the Pacific, with his little brother in tow, they dodged cars on the highways, ate road kill and slept on the hard ground. Now, more than twenty years on, Eustace is still in the mountains, residing in a thousand-acre forest where he teaches survival skills and attempts to instil in people a deeper appreciation of nature. But over time he has had to reconcile his ambitious dreams with the sobering realities of modernity. Told with Elizabeth Gilbert's trademark wit and spirit, The Last American Man is an unforgettable adventure story of an irrepressible life lived to the extreme. The Last American Man is a New York Times Notable Book and National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist.
Download or read book Mount Rainier National Park written by Molly Hashimoto and published by . This book was released on 2021 with total page 136 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Unique and charming gift book about iconic Mount Rainier National Park from a beloved artist's perspective
Download or read book The Tree Shepherd s Daughter written by Gillian Summers and published by North Star Editions, Inc.. This book was released on 2010-09-08 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When her mother dies, fifteen-year-old Keelie Heartwood must leave California to live with her nomadic father at a renaissance festival. Playacting the Dark Ages is an L.A. girl’s worst nightmare. But then Keelie starts seeing fairies and uncovers her connection to a community of elves.
Download or read book Walking to Gatlinburg written by Howard Frank Mosher and published by Crown. This book was released on 2011-03-01 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A Civil War odyssey in the tradition of Charles Frazier’s Cold Mountain and Robert Olmstead’s Coal Black Horse, Mosher’s latest, about a Vermont teenager’s harrowing journey south to find his missing-in-action brother, is old-fashioned in the best sense of the word....The story of Morgan’s rite-of-passage through an American arcadia despoiled by war and slavery is an engrossing tale with mass appeal." –Publisher's Weekly Morgan Kinneson is both hunter and hunted. The sharp-shooting 17-year-old from Kingdom County, Vermont, is determined to track down his brother Pilgrim, a doctor who has gone missing from the Union Army. But first Morgan must elude a group of murderous escaped convicts in pursuit of a mysterious stone that has fallen into his possession. It’s 1864, and the country is in the grip of the bloodiest war in American history. Meanwhile, the Kinneson family has been quietly conducting passengers on the Underground Railroad from Vermont to the Canadian border. One snowy afternoon Morgan leaves an elderly fugitive named Jesse Moses in a mountainside cabin for a few hours so that he can track a moose to feed his family. In his absence, Jesse is murdered, and thus begins Morgan’s unforgettable trek south through an apocalyptic landscape of war and mayhem. Along the way, Morgan encounters a fantastical array of characters, including a weeping elephant, a pacifist gunsmith, a woman who lives in a tree, a blind cobbler, and a beautiful and intriguing slave girl named Slidell who is the key to unlocking the mystery of the secret stone. At the same time, he wrestles with the choices that will ultimately define him – how to reconcile the laws of nature with religious faith, how to temper justice with mercy. Magical and wonderfully strange, Walking to Gatlinburg is both a thriller of the highest order and a heartbreaking odyssey into the heart of American darkness.
Download or read book Koya Bound written by and published by . This book was released on 2016-09 with total page 96 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Humane Gardener written by Nancy Lawson and published by Chronicle Books. This book was released on 2017-04-18 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this eloquent plea for compassion and respect for all species, journalist and gardener Nancy Lawson describes why and how to welcome wildlife to our backyards. Through engaging anecdotes and inspired advice, profiles of home gardeners throughout the country, and interviews with scientists and horticulturalists, Lawson applies the broader lessons of ecology to our own outdoor spaces. Detailed chapters address planting for wildlife by choosing native species; providing habitats that shelter baby animals, as well as birds, bees, and butterflies; creating safe zones in the garden; cohabiting with creatures often regarded as pests; letting nature be your garden designer; and encouraging natural processes and evolution in the garden. The Humane Gardener fills a unique niche in describing simple principles for both attracting wildlife and peacefully resolving conflicts with all the creatures that share our world.
Download or read book The True Secret of Writing written by Natalie Goldberg and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2014-02-11 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The author draws on her teaching background to share new writing guidelines and outline the steps for a personal or group writing retreat, providing coverage of such topics as working in silence and writing without criticism.
Download or read book Trees in Trouble written by Daniel Mathews and published by Catapult. This book was released on 2020-04-07 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A troubling story of the devastating and compounding effects of climate change in the Western and Rocky Mountain states, told through in–depth reportage and conversations with ecologists, professional forest managers, park service scientists, burn boss, activists, and more. Climate change manifests in many ways across North America, but few as dramatic as the attacks on our western pine forests. In Trees in Trouble, Daniel Mathews tells the urgent story of this loss, accompanying burn crews and forest ecologists as they study the myriad risk factors and refine techniques for saving this important, limited resource. Mathews transports the reader from the exquisitely aromatic haze of ponderosa and Jeffrey pine groves to the fantastic gnarls and whorls of five–thousand–year–old bristlecone pines, from genetic test nurseries where white pine seedlings are deliberately infected with their mortal enemy to the hottest megafire sites and neighborhoods leveled by fire tornadoes or ember blizzards. Scrupulously researched, Trees in Trouble not only explores the devastating ripple effects of climate change, but also introduces us to the people devoting their lives to saving our forests. Mathews also offers hope: a new approach to managing western pine forests is underway. Trees in Trouble explores how we might succeed in sustaining our forests through the challenging transition to a new environment.
Download or read book Backpacking California written by Wilderness Press and published by Wilderness Press. This book was released on 2010-05-10 with total page 504 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Backpacking California is a collection of more than 70 of the most intriguing backpacking adventures in Wilderness Press's home territory of California. With contributions from more than a dozen Wilderness Press authors, the book describes routes ranging from one night to one week. Backpacking novices as well as "old hand" California hikers will find expert-crafted trips in the Coast Ranges, the Sierra, the Cascades, and the Warner Mountains. Expanded coverage includes trips in Big Sur, Anza-Borrego, Death Valley, and the White Mountains. Several trips have been described in print nowhere else. Each trip includes a trail map and essential logistical information for trip planning.
Download or read book In Defense of Plants written by Matt Candeias and published by Mango Media Inc.. This book was released on 2021-03-16 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Study of Plants in a Whole New Light “Matt Candeias succeeds in evoking the wonder of plants with wit and wisdom.” ―James T. Costa, PhD, executive director, Highlands Biological Station and author of Darwin's Backyard #1 New Release in Nature & Ecology, Plants, Botany, Horticulture, Trees, Biological Sciences, and Nature Writing & Essays In his debut book, internationally-recognized blogger and podcaster Matt Candeias celebrates the nature of plants and the extraordinary world of plant organisms. A botanist’s defense. Since his early days of plant restoration, this amateur plant scientist has been enchanted with flora and the greater environmental ecology of the planet. Now, he looks at the study of plants through the lens of his ever-growing houseplant collection. Using gardening, houseplants, and examples of plants around you, In Defense of Plants changes your relationship with the world from the comfort of your windowsill. The ruthless, horny, and wonderful nature of plants. Understand how plants evolve and live on Earth with a never-before-seen look into their daily drama. Inside, Candeias explores the incredible ways plants live, fight, have sex, and conquer new territory. Whether a blossoming botanist or a professional plant scientist, In Defense of Plants is for anyone who sees plants as more than just static backdrops to more charismatic life forms. In this easily accessible introduction to the incredible world of plants, you’ll find: • Fantastic botanical histories and plant symbolism • Passionate stories of flora diversity and scientific names of plant organisms • Personal tales of plantsman discovery through the study of plants If you enjoyed books like The Botany of Desire, What a Plant Knows, or The Soul of an Octopus, then you’ll love In Defense of Plants.
Download or read book Like You d Understand Anyway written by Jim Shepard and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2008-08-12 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Following his widely acclaimed Project X and Love and Hydrogen—“Here is the effect of these two books,” wrote the Chicago Tribune: “A reader finishes them buzzing with awe”—Jim Shepard now gives us his first entirely new collection in more than a decade. Like You’d Understand, Anyway reaches from Chernobyl to Bridgeport, with a host of narrators only Shepard could bring to pitch-perfect life. Among them: a middle-aged Aeschylus taking his place at Marathon, still vying for parental approval. A maddeningly indefatigable Victorian explorer hauling his expedition, whaleboat and all, through the Great Australian Desert in midsummer. The first woman in space and her cosmonaut lover, caught in the star-crossed orbits of their joint mission. Two Texas high school football players at the top of their food chain, soliciting their fathers’ attention by leveling everything before them on the field. And the rational and compassionate chief executioner of Paris, whose occupation, during the height of the Terror, eats away at all he holds dear. Brimming with irony, compassion, and withering humor, these eleven stories are at once eerily pertinent and dazzlingly exotic, and they showcase the work of a protean, prodigiously gifted writer at the height of his form. Reading Jim Shepard, according to Michael Chabon, “is like encountering our national literature in microcosm.”
