Download or read book Shaped by Wind and Water written by Ann Zwinger and published by . This book was released on 2000 with total page 184 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Known for her observant and beautifully illustrated books on the rivers, deserts, and mountains of the West, Zwinger focuses on her guiding principles as a naturalist as she "looks" with notebook and pencil, believing that "to know the world intimately is the beginning of caring". Illustrations.
Download or read book Modern American Environmentalists written by George A. Cevasco and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2009-04-27 with total page 576 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Modern American Environmentalists profiles the lives and contributions of nearly 140 major figures during the twentieth-century environmental movement. Included are iconic environmentalists such as Rachel Carson, E. O. Wilson, Gifford Pinchot, and Al Gore, and important but less expected names, including John Steinbeck and Allen Ginsberg. The entries recount how each individual became active in environmental conservation, detail his or her significant contributions, trace the influence of each on future efforts, and discuss the person's legacy. The individuals selected for the book displayed either an unparalleled commitment to the conservation, preservation, restoration, and enhancement of the natural environment or made a major contribution to the growth of environmentalism during its first century. With a foreword by environmental historian Everett I. Mendolsohn, a time line of key environmental events, a bibliography of groundbreaking works, and an index organized by specialization, this biographical encyclopedia is a handy and complete guide to the major people involved in the modern American environmental movement. -- Mark Harvey
Download or read book Beyond the Aspen Grove written by Ann Zwinger and published by Big Earth Publishing. This book was released on 2002 with total page 396 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Colorado Rockies are Ann Zwinger's subject in prose and drawing. There, 8,300 feet above sea level, summer is short and winter long and often harsh; it is a place where much of life exists on the margin. In good years the grasses are lush; in bad years, even the mice starve. But it is a land the Zwingers have lovingly explored and recorded, careful not to disrupt the balance of the land, the relationship of plant to animal and of each to its environment.These forty acres, called Constant Friendship after the Maryland land her ancestor settled in the early 1730s, are a place of all seasons, for even in winter there is a promise of spring, and in spring the foretaste of summer. The white of snow becomes the white of summer clouds, the resonant green of spruce becomes the green head of drake mallard ... here part of each season is contained in every other.In beautiful and simple language and with 80 illustrations, Beyond the Aspen Grove tells of meadow, lake, marsh and forest, of algae and dragonflies, of deer and jays that live in the thin clear air of the mountain world.
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 The New Desert Reader written by Peter Wild and published by University of Utah Press. This book was released on 2006 with total page 333 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A slow change in outlook dominates the book, as attitudes shift from viewing the desert as a place of sanctity, then a land to be despised or exploited, and back to an appreciation of it as a special place, an arena of highly complex natural communities, and a wild refuge for the human body and soul.
Download or read book American Women Conservationists written by Madelyn Holmes and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2004-04-20 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection of biographies describes twelve women conservationists who helped change the ways Americans interact with the natural environment. Their writings led Americans to think differently about their land--deserts are not wastelands, swamps have value, and harmful insects don't have to be controlled chemically. These women not only wrote on behalf of conservation of the American landscape but also described strategies for living exemplary, environmentally sound lives during the past century. From a bird lover to a "back to the land" activist, these women gave early warning of the detrimental effects of neglecting conservation. The main part of this work covers six historical figures who pioneered in their thinking and writing about the environment: Mary Austin, Florence Merriam Bailey, Rosalie Edge, Marjory Stoneman Douglas, Helen Nearing, and Rachel Carson. A later chapter gives portraits of six post-World War II conservationists: Faith McNulty, Ann Zwinger, Sue Hubbell, Anne LaBastille, Mollie Beattie, and Terry Tempest Williams. The work covers a broad range of conservationist concerns, including preservation of deserts and old growth forests, wildlife protection, wetlands maintenance, self-sufficient sustainable ways of producing food, and pollution control. A conclusion examines where conservationists have picked up after Rachel Carson's Silent Spring (1962) and gives conservation ideas for our time. An appendix lists the published writings of the twelve conservationists.
Download or read book On the Ice written by Gretchen Legler and published by Milkweed Editions. This book was released on 2005 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "McMurdo Station, Antarctica, is home to eighty-mile-per-hour winds, minus seventy degree temperatures, and months of near-total darkness. Sent to Antarctica as an observer, Gretchen Legler tells the story of her season spent at McMurdo Station. Populated by people from all walks of life - bankers, MBAs, therapists, carpenters, scientists, laborers, and military brass - the individuals that Legler meets have gone to Antarctica to escape everything from parking tickets to angry spouses. Hoping to get away from the complexities of her own life, Legler arrives at McMurdo Station with the intention of researching the landscape; what she finds, instead, is a zany population of people." "Part sociological study, part historiography, and part love story, On the Ice is an exploration of one of the most unexplored places on earth and the people who are drawn to it."--BOOK JACKET.
Download or read book The Prairie in Her Eyes written by Ann Daum and published by Milkweed Editions. This book was released on 2003-01-21 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Framing her recollections with the passage of cranes over her South Dakota ranch, Daum writes about the difficulties of living in a remote place--a fickle river, rattlesnakes, hospitals too far away to be much use, social isolation--but also what keeps her there--the cranes, the rhythms of the land & seasons, her horses, the bonds of family. Unflinching and understated, Daum breaks the silence that for too long has marked (and marred) the lives of western women. Her essays start in the present (she raises sport horses on a piece of what was a 13,000 acre spread) and cycle back through her childhood, with stories about her father, blizzards, a coyote, the White River that whipsaws their land, the differences between people, and the artifacts left by others who have tried to scrape a living out of the land. With humor and insight, her essays touch on different aspects of rural life and convey her vision for a good life in the west.
Download or read book Cross pollinations written by Gary Paul Nabhan and published by Milkweed Editions. This book was released on 2004 with total page 130 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A pioneering ethnobotanist, Gary Paul Nabhan credits the arts with sparking unlikely scientific breakthroughs and believes that such "cross-pollination" engenders new forms of expression that are essential to discovery. In this highly readable book, he tells four stories to illustrate this idea. In the first, coping with color blindness in art class leads to his career as a scientist; in the second, ancient American Indian songs, when translated, reveal an understanding of plants and animals that rivals modern research; in the third, a poem inspires an approach to diabetes using desert plants; and in the fourth, a coalition of scientists and artists creates the Ironwood Forest National Monument in the Sonoran Desert.
Download or read book The Frog Run written by John Elder and published by Milkweed Editions. This book was released on 2001 with total page 170 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Annotation "Teacher and writer John Elder, a man who loves both literature and the outdoors, describes in The Frog Run how he found a way to balance these passions in building a sugarhouse with his sons in the Vermont woods. He celebrates the moment between winter and spring - known to sugarmakers as "the frog run"--When the tree frogs begin to be heard and the last run of sap good for making syrup flows from the maples. For Elder, who also writes in this book about the resurgence of New England forests and about his life as a reader, the frog run is a time to savor and celebrate the fleeting beauties of his family's place on earth."--BOOK JACKET. Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved
Download or read book At the End of Ridge Road written by Joseph Bruchac and published by Milkweed Editions. This book was released on 2005 with total page 164 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A noted teller of the traditional tales of the Adirondacks and of Native peoples everywhere, Joseph Bruchac has performed throughout the world. That gift for narrative informs this revealing autobiography.
Download or read book The Pine Island Paradox written by Kathleen Dean Moore and published by Milkweed Editions. This book was released on 2011-12-18 with total page 267 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Can the love reserved for family and friends be extended to a place? “Luminous essays” on nature and environmental stewardship (Booklist). Named one of the Top Ten Northwest Books of the Year by the Oregonian In this book, acclaimed author Kathleen Dean Moore, a winner of the Sigurd Olson Nature Writing Award for Holdfast, reflects on how deeply the environment is entrenched in the human spirit, despite the notion that nature and humans are somehow separate. Moore’s essays, deeply felt and often funny, make connections in what can appear to be a disconnected world. Written in parable form, her stories of family and friends—of wilderness excursions with her husband and children, camping trips with students, blowing up a dam, her daughter’s arrest for protesting the war in Iraq—affirm an impulse of caring that belies the abstract division of humans from nature, of the sacred from the mundane. Underlying these wonderfully engaging stories is the author’s belief in a new ecological ethic of care, one that expands the idea of community to include the environment, and embraces the land as family. “Stands with the best tradition of nature writing.” —The Oregonian
Download or read book The Barn at the End of the World written by Mary Rose O'Reilley and published by Milkweed Editions. This book was released on 2014-02-28 with total page 345 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “About the subtlest, most sane-making book on contemporary spirituality that I’ve read in years. It’s also the funniest.”—Joanna Macy, author of Active Hope Deciding that her life was insufficiently grounded in real-world experience, Mary Rose O’Reilley, a Quaker reared as a Catholic, embarked on a year of tending sheep. In this decidedly down-to-earth, often-hilarious book, O’Reilley describes her work in an agricultural barn and her extended visit to a Buddhist monastery in France, where she studied with Thich Nhat Hanh. She seeks, in both barn and monastery, a spirituality based not in “climbing out of the body” but rather in existing fully in the world. “O'Reilley has obviously mastered the craft of writing. Her rich, allusive prose draws on Catholicism, Quakerism, Buddhism, monastic tradition, Shakespeare and the Bible. Her short vignettes are luminous with faith matters, yet full of the earthy details of animal husbandry, resulting in a style that's a cross between Kathleen Norris and James Herriot.”—Publishers Weekly “This enjoyable book offers lingering pleasure.”—Library Journal
Download or read book No Place Like Home written by Linda M. Hasselstrom and published by University of Nevada Press. This book was released on 2010-08-28 with total page 302 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In No Place Like Home, Linda Hasselstrom ponders the changing nature of community in the modern West, where old family ranches are being turned into subdivisions and historic towns are evolving into mean, congested cities. Her scrutiny, like her life, moves back and forth between her ranch on the South Dakota prairie and her house in an old neighborhood at the edge of downtown Cheyenne, Wyoming. The vignettes that form the foundation of her consideration are drawn from the communities she has known during her life in the West, reflecting on how they have grown, thrived, failed, and changed, and highlighting the people and decisions that shaped them. Hasselstrom’s ruminations are both intensely personal and universal. She laments the disappearance of the old prairie ranches and the rural sense of community and mutual responsibility that sustained them, but she also discovers that a spirit of community can be found in unlikely places and among unlikely people. The book defines her idea of how a true community should work, and the kind of place she wants to live in. Her voice is unique and honest, both compassionate and cranky, full of love for the harsh, hauntingly beautiful short-grass prairie that is her home, and rich in understanding of the intricacies of the natural world around her and the infinite potentials of human commitment, hope, and greed. For anyone curious about the state of the contemporary West, Hasselstrom offers a report from the front, where nature and human aspirations are often at odds, and where the concepts of community and mutual responsibility are being redefined.
Download or read book Ecology and Literatures in English written by Françoise Besson and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2018-12-14 with total page 545 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In all latitudes, writers hold out a mirror, leading the reader to awareness by telling real or imaginary stories about people of good will who try to save what can be saved, and about animals showing humans the way to follow. Such tales argue that, in spite of all destructions and tragedies, if we are just aware of, and connected to, the real world around us, to the blade of grass at our feet and the star above our heads, there is hope in a reconciliation with the Earth. This may start with the emergence, or, rather, the return, of a nonverbal language, restoring the connection between human beings and the nonhuman world, through a form of communication beyond verbalization. Through a journey in Anglophone literature, with examples taken from Aboriginal, African, American, English, Canadian and Indian works, this book shows the role played by literature in the protection of the planet. It argues that literature reveals the fundamental idea that everything is connected and that it is only when most people are aware of this connection that the world will change. Exactly as a tree is connected with all the animal life in and around it, texts show that nothing should be separated. From Shakespeare’s theatre to ecopoetics, from travel writing to detective novels, from children’s books to novels, all literary genres show that literature responds to the violence destroying lands, men and nonhuman creatures, whose voices can be heard through texts.
Download or read book Sisters of the Earth written by Lorraine Anderson and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2003-12-09 with total page 498 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sisters of the Earth is a stirring collection of women’s writing on nature: Nature as healer. Nature as delight. Nature as mother and sister. Nature as victim. Nature as companion and reminder of what is wild in us all. Here, among more than a hundred poets and prose writers, are Diane Ackerman on the opium of sunsets; Ursula K. Le Guin envisioning an alternative world in which human beings are not estranged from their planet; and Julia Butterfly Hill on weathering a fierce storm in the redwood tree where she lived for more than two years. Here, too, are poems, essays, stories, and journal entries by Emily Dickinson, Alice Walker, Terry Tempest Williams, Willa Cather, Gretel Erlich, Adrienne Rich, and others—each offering a vivid, eloquent response to the natural world. This second edition of Sisters of the Earth is fully revised and updated with a new preface and nearly fifty new pieces, including new contributions by Louise Erdrich, Pam Houston, Zora Neale Hurston, Starhawk, Joy Williams, Kathleen Norris, Rita Dove, and Barbara Kingsolver.
Download or read book Dwellings of Enchantment written by Bénédicte Meillon and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2020-10-27 with total page 395 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Dwellings of Enchantment: Writing and Reenchanting the Earth offers ecocritical and ecopoetic readings that focus on multispecies dwellings of enchantment and reenchant our rapport with the more-than-human world. It sheds light on the marvelous entanglements between humans and other life forms coexisting with us–entanglements that, when fully perceived, call onto humans to shift perspectives on both the causes and solutions to current ecological crises. Working against the disenchantment of humans’ relationships with and perceptions of the world entailed by a modern ontology, this book illustrates the power of ecopoetics to attune humans to the vibrant matter both within and outside of us. Braiding indigenous with non-indigenous worldviews, this book tackles ecopoetics emerging from varying locations in the world. It underscores the postmodernist, remythologizing processes going on in many ecopoetic texts, via magical realist modes and mythopoeia.
