Best of
Environment

1992

The Diversity of Life


Edward O. Wilson - 1992
    Edward O. Wilson eloquently describes how the species of the world became diverse and why that diversity is threatened today as never before. A great spasm of extinction — the disappearance of whole species — is occurring now, caused this time entirely by humans. Unlike the deterioration of the physical environment, which can be halted, the loss of biodiversity is a far more complex problem — and it is irreversible. Defining a new environmental ethic, Wilson explains why we must rescue whole ecosystems, not only individual species. He calls for an end to conservation versus development arguments, and he outlines the massive shift in priorities needed to address this challenge. No writer, no scientist, is more qualified than Edward O. Wilson to describe, as he does here, the grandeur of evolution and what is at stake. "Engaging and nontechnical prose. . . . Prodigious erudition. . . . Original and fascinating insights." — John Terborgh, New York Review of Books, front page review "Eloquent. . . . A profound and enduring contribution." — Alan Burdick, Audubon

The Second Jim Corbett Omnibus.


Jim Corbett - 1992
    In My India, the first volume in the set, Corbett recounts his experiences in the Kumaon Hills. He discusses the villages he visited, the people he got acquainted with, and the lifestyles and customs he encountered. The second book, Jungle Lore, presents an autobiographical account of his initial days and experiences in the Himalayan region, and his frank, farsighted views on various aspects of wildlife conservation. In Tree Tops, the final title in the set, Corbett provides rich, fascinating glimpses of the stark, savage beauty of the Kenyan landscape and wildlife. An account of the 1952 royal visit of Princess Elizabeth is also included in this volume. The collection was released in 2001 by Oxford University Press. It received positive reviews for its remarkable presentation of Jim Corbett in a new light.About the AuthorJim Corbett was a British hunter-turned-conservationist, naturalist, author, and photographer, best-known for hunting several man-eaters in India. He has written several books such as The Jim Corbett Omnibus, Not While I Have Ammo, and Man-Eaters Of Kumaon. Corbett was born on July 25, 1875, in Nainital, India. He served as a Colonel in the British Indian Army for several years. Corbett played a vital role in protecting wildlife, particularly the Bengal tiger of India. He passed away on April 19, 1955, in Nyeri, Kenya. His life has been featured in various media, including a Hollywood movie, a TV movie, and a docudrama.topTable of ContentsMy IndiaIntroductionThe Queen of the VillageKunwar SinghMothiPre-Red-Tape DaysThe Law of the JunglesThe BrothersSultana: India's Robin Hood LoyaltyBudhuLalajeeChamariLife at mokameh GhatJungle LoreIntroductionChapter ThreeChapter FourChapter FiveChapter SixChapter SevenChapter EightChapter NineChapter TenChapter ElevenChapter TwelveTree TopsIntroductionTree Tops

No Nature: New and Selected Poems


Gary Snyder - 1992
    . . . It helps us to go on, having Gary Snyder in our midst."--Los Angeles Times. Snyder is the author of many volumes of poetry and prose, including The Practice of the Wild and the Pulitzer Prize-winning Turtle Island. Reading tour.

Where the Bluebird Sings to the Lemonade Springs


Wallace Stegner - 1992
    With subjects ranging from the writer’s own “migrant childhood” to the need to protect what remains of the great western wilderness (which Stegner dubs “the geography of hope”) to poignant profiles of western writers such as John Steinbeck and Norman Maclean, this collection is a riveting testament to the power of place. At the same time it communicates vividly the sensibility and range of this most gifted of American writers, historians, and environmentalists.

The Final Forest: The Battle for the Last Great Trees of the Pacific Northwest


William Dietrich - 1992
    In a riveting exploration of our connection to all that we cherish and exploit on Earth, a Pulitzer Prize-winning correspondent for The Seattle Times examines the human side of the struggle that looms as the fate of our forest s is determined.

Forests: The Shadow of Civilization


Robert Pogue Harrison - 1992
    Consistently insightful and beautifully written, this work is especially compelling at a time when the forest, as a source of wonder, respect, and meaning, disappears daily from the earth."Forests is one of the most remarkable essays on the human place in nature I have ever read, and belongs on the small shelf that includes Raymond Williams' masterpiece, The Country and the City. Elegantly conceived, beautifully written, and powerfully argued, [Forests] is a model of scholarship at its passionate best. No one who cares about cultural history, about the human place in nature, or about the future of our earthly home, should miss it.—William Cronon, Yale Review"Forests is, among other things, a work of scholarship, and one of immense value . . . one that we have needed. It can be read and reread, added to and commented on for some time to come."—John Haines, The New York Times Book Review

A River Ran Wild: An Environmental History


Lynne Cherry - 1992
    Over 7,000 years ago Native Americans settled on the Nashua River, a beautiful and leafy valley. But the industrialization of nearby areas would lead to the deterioration of natural habitats. Each double spread examines brief periods of time when the river and surrounding areas teemed with wildlife. Lynne Cherry’s contrasting illustrations of the lush valley and the eventual polluted river deliver an astonishing look at our dramatic need for conservation efforts. This pictorial history of the river, edging towards a hopeful scene of modern-day descendants of both Native Americans and European settlers who come together to combat pollution and restore the beauty of the river, is an intelligent tale that shows young readers how they can do their part in taking care of the world around them, one river at a time.

Earthways: Simple Environmental Activities for Young Children


Carol Petrash - 1992
    Ideas for teaching about recycling, composting, and thrift are geared to the learning abilities of young children. Includes a complete teacher unit.

Becoming Native to This Place


Wes Jackson - 1992
    Exploding the tenets of industrial agriculture, Jackson, a respected advocate for sustainable practices and the founder of The Land Institute, seeks to integrate food production with nature in a way that sustains both.Foreword / Richard C. Edwards --1. The problem --2. Visions and assumptions --3. Science and nature --4. Nature as measure --5. Becoming native to our places --6. Developing the courage of our convictions

Practical Entomologist


Rick Imes - 1992
     Beginning with the basics, the text describes what characterizes an insect, including anatomy and the life cycle. It takes an order-by-order look at insects, explaining how each group differs from another and why certain types of insects have been classified together. The book shows you not only what to look for but how and where to look for it -- from capturing and keeping live insects to ways of making a collection and taking photographs. Tips on keeping a field notebook are also included. Packed with more than 200 full-color illustrations, this comprehensive guide is a valuable reference tool for nature enthusiasts.

Voice of the Earth: An Exploration of Ecopsychology


Theodore Roszak - 1992
    Drawing on our understanding of the evolutionary, selforganizing universe, Roszak illuminates our rootedness in the greater web of life and explores the relationship between our own sanity and the largerthanhuman world. The Voice of the Earth seeks to bridge the centuriesold split between the psychological and the ecological with a paradigm which sees the needs of the planet and the needs of the person as a continuum. The Earth's cry for rescue from the punishing weight of the industrial system we have created is our own cry for a scale and quality of life that will free us to become whole and healthy. This second edition contains a new afterword by the author.

Environmental Pollution Control Engineering


C.S. Rao - 1992
    Discusses the origins of pollutants, their effect on man and on the environment, and what methods are available to control them. Stresses the fundamental aspects of these topics and their application, to the design of pollution control equipment including illustrative examples.

Valuing the Earth: Economics, Ecology, Ethics


Herman E. Daly - 1992
    They vividly demonstrate that, contrary to current macroeconomic preoccupations, continued growth on a planet of finite resources cannot be physically or economically sustained and is morally undesirable.Among the issues addressed are population growth, resource use, pollution, theology (east and west), energy, and economic growth. Their common theme is the notion, popular with classical economists from Malthus to Mill, that an economic stationary state is more healthful to life on earth than unlimited growth. A number of essays in the first edition have become classics and have been retained for this edition, which adds six new essays.ContributorsKenneth E. Boulding, John Cobb, Herman E. Daly, Anne H. Ehrlich, Paul R. Ehrlich, Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen, Garrett Hardin, John P. Holdren, M. King Hubbert, C. S. Lewis, E. F. Schumacher, Gerald Alonzo Smith, T. H. Tietenberg, Kenneth N. Townsend

A Shadow and a Song: The Struggle to Save Endangered Species


Mark Jerome Walters - 1992
    The sparrows only habitat lay in the path of the Kennedy Space Center, not far from Disney World. Mark Walters moving narrative describes how the social and political forces of an era forced irrevocable and profound changes in the environment of Brevard County, Florida, and brought about the extinction of a small bird. Walters begins his story in the late 1950s, before Cape Canaveral was renamed the Kennedy Space Center. Against the backdrop of Merritt Island and the marshlands along the Indian, Banana, and St. Johns riversthe only places on the planet where the sparrow thrivedhe chronicles the struggles of many different personalities, strong-minded individuals whose lives and personal fates become inextricably entwined with those of the dusky. The cast of characters includes the head of Brevard County Mosquito Control, bureaucrats and rangers with U.S. Fish & Wildlife, NASA administrators, real estate developers, ranchers, highway engineers, egg collectors, conservationists, and finally, Disney World itself, home of the last duskies and their hybrid offspring. The sparrow, like the spotted owl of the Pacific Northwest, was the victimthe innocent bystanderof an intense human struggle between those who advocate growth and jobs at any cost and those who insist that each life form that is endangered be protected at any cost, and few, if any, winners in the end.

The Social Creation of Nature


Neil Evernden - 1992
    Nature is as much a social entity as a physical one. In addition to the physical resources to be harnessed and transformed, it consists of a domain of norms that may be called upon in defense of certain social ideals. In exploring the consequences of conventional understandings of nature, The Social Creation of Nature also seeks a way around the limitations of a socially created nature in order to defend what is actually imperiled—"wildness," in which, Thoreau wrote, lies hope for "the preservation of the world."

Game Wars: The Undercover Pursuit of Wildlife Poachers


Marc Reisner - 1992
    In America as well as abroad, the counterinsurgency campaign against the poachers and smugglers is being waged by U.S. Fish and Wildlife undercover agents. Game Wars offers a stunningly written, firsthand account of how these agents operate.

In the Spirit of the Earth: Rethinking History and Time


Calvin Luther Martin - 1992
    Calvin Luther Martin's In the Spirit of the Earth is a provocativeaccount of how the hunter-gatherer image of nature was lost—with devastatingconsequences for the environment and the human spirit.According to Martin, our current ideas about nature emerged during neolithictimes, as humans began to domesticate animals and farm the land. In thehunter-gatherer mind, animals and plants were spiritual beings and the earth areliable provider. But in neolithic innovations Martin finds the roots of ourown curiously alienated relationship with other living things and with theearth itself. This alienation is revealed not only in our artifice—thetechnology that moves us further and further away from nature—but even in theway we speak about the world. It is revealed most dramatically, perhaps, inthe horrific destruction we have visited on animals and landscapes. Martin sees the shift to agricultural economies as a change in spiritual imagination. This new approach to food getting meant a new understanding ofourselves and the world—a new, powerful image of the self relative to plantsand animals. It led to food surpluses, a population boom, the appearance ofcities and ceremonial centers, and the emergence of priestly classes and rulingelites—in short, to all the achievements, follies, and horrors of"civilization."Martin argues that history—his own discipline—and human centered historicalconsciousness lie at the heart of this ultimately destructive ideology. Notions of order and progress, of a chosen people and linear time, fuel oursense that the world is ours to improve, exploit, and even destroy. We need torediscover the wisdom and sanity of less presumptuous ideas of nature—aprocess that demands a much larger narrative than historians have been writingand telling. Without calling for a return to hunting and gathering, Martinasks if some of what we lost—or left behind—in the distant past might bereclaimed and used again. To make peace with the earth. To make peace withourselves."Many will respond with that oft heard reply, But we cannot go back! To which I respond, But we never left—never left our true, real context, thatis. Homo is still here on this planet earth, abiding in our most fundamentaland necessary nature by its fundamental and necessary terms. We left all ofthat only, really, in our fevered imagination. It all began as an act ofimagination, an illusory image—most fundamentally, an image of fear—and so thecorrective process must likewise begin with an image. Let us re-learn, as hunter-gatherers knew to the core of their being, that this place and itsprocesses (even in our death) always takes care of us—that Homo's citizenship,and errand, rest not with any creed or state, but with 'that star's substancefrom which he had arisen.'"—from In the Spirit of the Earth

The USA Today Weather Book: An Easy-To-Understand Guide to the USA's Weather


Jack Williams - 1992
    It also includes an updated state-by-state guide to weather patterns and scientifically accurate records. Online promo.

Hard Times in Paradise


David Colfax - 1992
    An account of one family's life in a redwood forest describes how the Colfax's lived without electricity, running water, or a phone, and how they educated their sons, three of whom were accepted to Harvard on full scholarships.

Beyond Beef: The Rise and Fall of the Cattle Culture


Jeremy Rifkin - 1992
    The average American consumes the meat of seven 1,100-pound steers in a lifetime. But how many hamburger-lovers realize that a single boneless beefsteak requires up to 1,200 gallons of precious water to produce, that livestock now consume nearly one third of the world's grain, or that cattle play a central role in species extinction?

Living Philosophy: Eco-Philosophy as a Tree of Life


Henryk Skolimowski - 1992
    He seeks to stop the rot, laying out a detailed argument for a new "ecological consciousness" concerned as much for our inner as our outer environment. Attacking modern analytical philosophy, the author claims it is not so much liberation of the mind as "confinement in the circus of technical virtuosity". Our political systems, he says, rob us of our highest attributes and reduce us to despair. Our architecture violates us, and the vacuum in our values breeds indulgence and indifference. The author foresees the tasks as nothing less than a recycling of our minds. For "without wisdom, we shall be like Don Quixote fighting with the windmills".

Children's Special Places: Exploring the Role of Forts, Dens, and Bush Houses in Middle Childhood


David Sobel - 1992
    In these secret places, children develop and control environments of their own and enjoy freedom from the rules of the adult world. Children's Special Places enters these hidden worlds, reveals their importance to children's development and emotional health, and shows educators, parents, and other adults how they can foster a bond between young people and nature that is important to maturation.

Beyond the Limits: Confronting Global Collapse, Envisioning a Sustainable Future


Donella H. Meadows - 1992
    Twenty years after their influential book, The Limits to Growth, was published to worldwide acclaim, the authors revise several scenarios of growth, concluding that the global industrial system has already overshot some of the Earth's vital ecological limits.

The Moon of the Fox Pups


Jean Craighead George - 1992
    Describes the experiences of five fox pups during the month of June in the farmland of Pennsylvania.

The Moon of the Chickarees


Jean Craighead George - 1992
    Describes the activities of a mother red squirrel during the month of April as she nurtures her newborn babies in the Bitterroot Valley of Montana.

The Moon of the Winter Bird


Jean Craighead George - 1992
    During a cold spell in December, a song sparrow that has not migrated south must adapt to the changes that winter brings.

Endangered Species: Portraits of a Dying Millenium


Dierdre Luzwick - 1992
    The book includes an introduction by David R. Brower, renowned environmentalist, and a foreword by Trent Myers, former curator of the Madison Art Center, along with a quotation selected by the artist for each drawing. 53 black-and-white drawings.

Nature's Silent Music


Philip S. Callahan - 1992
    Why remove a thatched roof to replace it with galvanized tin, only to increase the heating bill? With insightful wisdom, Callahan also examines the mysterious power of round towers, "magic spots," and healers such as Biddy Early. Callahan's study of hedgerows, booley people and Ireland's traditional form of agriculture can teach everyone the value of the land and why not to carelessly destroy it with toxic chemicals.

Evolutionary Ecology and Human Behavior


Eric Alden Smith - 1992
    --American Journal of Human Biology This excellent book can serve both as a text1/4book and as a scholarly reference. --American Scientist

The Olympic Rain Forest: An Ecological Web


Ruth Kirk - 1992
    Coming at a time of public concern and controversy regarding the future of the forest, this book provides a fresh examination of the natural dynamics that have produced the remarkably lush growth characterizing roughly two thousand miles of coast from Coos Bay, Oregon, to the gulf of Alaska--a stretch of greater north-south ecological sameness than exists anywhere else on earth. The rain forest valleys of Washington's Olympic Peninsula stand out as the showpiece of this region. Because the forest's productivity and sheer biomass per square mile are among the world's greatest, it is recognized as a National Park, a World Biosphere Reserve, and a World Heritage Site.Pointing out that ecology and economics share the same root (oikos, meaning "home"), this book evokes the forest's beauty and intricacy while summarizing scientific understanding of components and interactions. We learn that moldering logs produce their own moisture as a by-product of decay, and are virtual reservoirs as well as storehouses of nutrients--qualities that contribute to their role as the rain forest's famed nurse logs, which act as seedbeds for oncoming generations of spruce and hemlock. We also learn that fallen trees affect stream flow and crucially influence the well-being of aquatic organisms (including fish) and that, washed downriver, they modify both beach character and life in the ocean near river mouths.The unique ecological web of this ancient forest--which has existed for at least five thousand years--includes the peculiar above-ground rooting of maple trees, which actually feed from the mossy "upholstery" covering their trunks and branches; the role of elk as "landscape gardners" preventing the understory from becoming a thicket; and a newly discovered life community within the gravel zone of river bottoms and out under the forest floor."Many of the spruce and hemlock trees we walk among today were alive when men like Sir Francis Bacon and Johannes Kepler first recognized the value of objective data over mystical portents," write authors Ruth Kirk and Jerry Franklin. "They have been pushing their roots through the soil and wafting seeds into the air throughout the entire existence of science."This book will be welcomed by resident Northwesterners and travelers as well as by all who are interested in nature. Its prose is both broadly readable and scientifically sound. More than 100 color photographs catch the variety and grandeur of this magnificent forest.

London Calling: V.S. Naipaul, Postcolonial Mandarin


Rob Nixon - 1992
    Naipaul stands as the most lionized literary mediator between First and Third World experience and is ordinarily viewed as possessing a unique authority on the subject of cross-cultural relations in the post-colonial era. In contesting this orthodox reading of his work, Nixon argues that Naipaul is more than simply an unduly influential writer. He has become a regressive Western institution, articulating a set of values that perpetuates political interests and representational modes that have their origin in the high imperial age. Nixon uses Naipaul's travel writing to probe the core theoretical issues raised by cross-cultural representation along metropolitan-periphery lines. With reference to economic theories of dependency, he critiques the vision, popularized by Naipaul, of the post-colonial world as divided between mimic and parasitic Third World nations on the one hand and, on the other, the benignly creative societies of the West.