Environment and Nature Books

Imagine a world where humankind is considered part of the environment and our elected leaders consider the needs of the commons when making decisions. Imagine a world where neither unbridled communism or capitalism reign. This is the world described in Wally Hickel's new book, "Crisis in the Commons: The Alaska Solution."
If you haven't read this book yet, you should. It is a well-written lesson for every citizen of the planet. Even if you don't agree with all of his ideas, Wally Hickel's book will make you think about how we can co-exist with nature and how our potential as residents and stewards of the planet is limited only by our imagination.
The story he tells is a lesson in Alaska's battle for statehood and the world's struggle to find balance between bottom-line exploitation and lock-it-up environmentalism.
It is a story every student should read. Our youth need to understand the battles that were fought by some of Alaska's greatest leaders to win statehood. They need to learn about how the federal government has broken its promises to the people of Alaska. They need to read about how outside commercial interests have exploited Alaska's resources at the expense of Alaska's citizens and the environment. They need to learn about how the environmental movement is trying to lock up Alaska and take humans out of nature's equation.
Everyone should listen to his message of entitlement. He explains with refreshing clarity how the creation of Alaska's Permanent Fund has fostered an atmosphere of doubt, greed, and narrow-sightedness. And his theory that the Permanent Fund has stolen Alaska's pioneering spirit is worthy of consideration. As Alaska faces its current fiscal crisis, it would do every Alaskan good to understand that the Permanent Fund was established as a "rainy day account" and not as a giant trust fund.
Our local, state, and federal leaders would serve us well to read this book, debate its ideas and concepts, and consider the arguments. Perhaps then they would move beyond the rancor of political jousting and act in the best interests of Alaska, the nation and the world.
Wally Hickel's life has been one of challenges, victories, defeats, vision, leadership, and controversy. This book is the culmination of an amazing life. It brings into focus an idea that has been nurtured over 50 years - an idea from a man respected around the globe for his vision and straight forward manner.
"Crisis in the Commons: The Alaska Solution" is a textbook - a textbook for the present and the future.

Don Stolworthy
Juneau, Alaska

Walter J. Hickel's "Crisis in the Commons" is must reading for anyone interested in land use patterns and environmental issues. Hickel's analysis is truly a view from the top as he has shaped land use policy both as an advocate for Alaska statehood,as governor of Alaska, and as U.S. Secretary of the Interior under Richard Nixon.

Hickel takes the reader through his trials in negotiating a state land grant for Alaska in the 1958 statehood bill. We then move to the builidng of the trans-Alaska pipeline and later examine the issue of oil drilling in the Santa Barbara channel when Hickel was Secretary of the Interior. Hickel provides insightful analysis into various crises in the Nixon administration, including an account of his own firing.

The book is also a view from the top in its discussion of a new form of land ownership that has emerged in America's most northern state. Hickel calls this the "owner state." In Alaska the state, rather than the federal government or private individuals, owns a vast portion of land, including the Prudhoe Bay Oil field. Unlike earlier American states, Alaska's goal is not to place such land in private hands, but to develop it for the benefit of all the people of Alaska.

All readers may not agree with every policy that Hickel developed to "manage" the owner state. But there is no question that the "owner state" points to a new concept and vision of the public lands.

Finally the personality of Hickel, a fascinating state and national figure, comes through with vibrance in this volume. The reader will truly come to know Walter Hickel by reading "Crisis in the Commons."

Profound science combined with wit and the subtlety of Dickinson. Not to be missed..Nature loves this book!

"Dazzle gradually" is another great book by Margulis and Sagan. It engages your intellect and emotions in bringing together and taking apart myriads of the living world's dazzling puzzles, or (quoting the famous Russian poet Nikolay Gumilev) "as if not all stars are yet counted, as if our world is not yet all discovered".

Let me add to one of those dazzles by commenting on kefir, the Caucasian drink and a wonderful symbiotic consortium of yeast and bacteria.

There indeed is a Caucasian legend about "Muhammad pellets" (or "Prophet's grain") but it talks about the Prophet bringing it (in his hollowed staff) to Muslim people of Caucasus - definitely not to the Christians!

The legend comes from the Karachay, a Sunni Muslim people still inhabiting the valleys of northern Caucasus north of the (Orthodox Christian) Georgia, indeed near Mt Elbrus.
In fact, the legend said explicitly that the secret of kefir has to be hidden from the infidels, and its disclosure will bring Allah's anger and the destruction of Karachay people.
The kefir secret was held so tightly that it became known outside of Caucasus only in early 20th century through Russian dairy producers.

We even know exactly how this happened: Ten pounds of kefir culture were given by a Karachay nobleman Bekmurza Baichorov to a young Russian dairy researcher Irina Sakharova in 1906. The story of their love can be now read on every packet of kefir in Russia!

The entire Karachay people (80,000), along with a number of other ethnic groups, were exiled by Stalin to Central Asia in 1943. Out of 28,000 exiled children, 22,000 died. The Karachay were allowed to return to the Caucasus in 1957. The world never noticed.

Victor Fet,
Marshall University,
Huntington, West Virginia

This is a book we have been waiting for. It is not action packed and sensationalized like the `Perfect Storm', but that is not what Eric Wickham's book is about. It is very well written and thought out, and makes for an easy read in it's story book style. Only it's not just a story... this book shows the true picture of what really has happened to the once prolific commercial fisheries along the North West Coast of the United States and Canada. Eric Wickham is not afraid to call it like it is, and lay blame where blame is due. He recounts events about bureaucratic decisions and practices that led to the demise of these fisheries and aptly calls it "drastically dysfunctional" management. With 50 years of commercial fishing experience his knowledge is factual and enlightening. The only fault that I could find in this book is the author's narrow-mindedness towards the small dragger boats. He needs to research this fishery more before he makes the statements he made about their effects on the fishery. These small boats are capable of fishing with minimal environmental impact while keeping the fishery viable and sustainable, just the same as the fisheries that Mr. Wickham participated in. Many of these smaller boats work in the same manner as Mr. Wickham... near shore, supporting the local communities, and providing fresh caught seafood for stores and restaurants. I hope that Mr. Wickham enjoys his well earned retirement in Australia and considers writing more books about his life experiences as a commercial fisherman along the North Eastern Pacific Ocean. With 25 years of experience in the commercial fishing industry myself, I am grateful for Eric Wickham's book and I would like to personally thank him for writing it and getting the truth out there for everyone to read. It has been a sad and frustrating ordeal for us to watch our livelihoods taken away by bureaucracy that is based on politics and has nothing to do with factual data. Before Eric Wickham's book only those of us in the industry have experienced the havoc that this mismanagement has produced, now maybe many others will read and understand. It is truly the end of an era and a lifestyle. I highly recommend this book to everyone... it is engaging reading, enlightening, and thought provoking.

Lee Ann Hightower
F/V Sea Otter

Well, I have never picked up a fishing rod before in my life and was quite dubious when someone gave me a copy of this book for my birthday.

However, I am interested in how we go about managing our natural resources. Dead Fish and Fat Cats is an amazing journey that examines how Canada has mis managed its fisheries, surely one of its most precious natural resources.

It is interesting, thou not suprising to take a journey through the bureaucracy that seems to plague the Department of Fisheries in Canada.

It seems that Eric Wickham, while clearly a professional fisherman, not a professional writer has a passion for the preservation of this resource. His passion while evident is not over stated and it is this that makes the book very readable. It left this reader shaking his head and saying "how could they do that".

Additionally, Wickham unlike so many of us who complain about the state of things actually proposes a solution and gives us a great example of how the fisheries should be managed. The success of the Black Cod fishery is evidence that brain wins over braun.

Read it, I am sure that you will enjoy it.

Cheers

Steve

I went to serveral book stores looking for the book I needed - to no avail. I came home and looked through the phone book to obtain book stores who might have the book I needed - to no avail. I went on line to Amazon.com and what to my wondering eyes - the book I needed. I received it in two day's time and lived happily ever after. Thank you Amazon!

This story details how people suffer and die from the repressive labor practices of pesticide-addicted agribusiness. It should give pause to people eating foods produced and harvested in places whose labor practices are known to be repressive. It should spur support for "fairly-traded" foods and also should spur investigations into the activities of agribusinesses using pesticides but probably won't because the power these corporations have over people and political systems continues to increase.

This should be considered essential reading for anyone working in the areas of public health and occupational health. It is a modern but 'classic' occupational health story, which illustrates again, that when workers are repressed, forced by economic circumstances to accept their working conditions as their employers dictate, significant health problems follow.

And the long screw of history keeps on turning...

I read this book as a bedtime story for my young son. The text flows nicely and the pictures are soothing and natural. He usually asks to read it again when we're finished, sometimes a third time. I think he has been dreaming about being in the desert in the pictures.

This book has very good illustrations of the typical American desert animals (gila monster, jackrabbit, etc.) My six-year old has requested it every night for the past week. I tried it out on a cub scout group yesterday, and they were rapt at attention. Their favorite is "find the hidden animal." I recommend it.

Interesting, informative, .............a delight. Yes, "Discovering the Geology of Baja California" is a pleasure and the guided tours that Markes takes one through, will in the end leave the reader with a renewed sense of wonder and appreciation for our planet. In my own case, even before I had gotten to making the actual pilgrimage to Punta Chivato, my eyes had been newly sensitized enough through the reading alone, that I was able to offer up a discovery of my own, which I more or less stumbled upon well south of Professor Johnson's "Living Museum"of Punta Chivato. I can't tell you what a thrill it has been for a novice like myself to help shed even a tiny bit more light on the solution of the geological puzzle of this fascinating penninsula! Since then, between pondering "my site" and actually walking through time at the awesomely beautiful Chivato, I realize that my life has, through exposure to this book, been fundamentally changed for the better. I wasn't looking for a new hobby but it will indeed be hard to shake this one. I therefore highly recommend this book to anyone who might be interested in the geology of Baja California and the associated birth of the Gulf of California. May it broaden your horizons as well.

This book is like a nice walk with a good friend who has a talent for telling great stories. You go along for the pleasantness of the walk, and find yourself transported right into the middle of the story. Here you are, some forty feet above the current level of the sea, standing on a shelf of land that contains the perfectly preserved remains of a coral reef. In another area, some 260 feet above sea level you come across a fossilized seabed jammed with the shells of thousands of oysters. Ancient shark teeth litter the ground on top of a 130-foot high mesa. Your friend walks on a few yards and, with infectious enthusiasm, reads the next chapter of the story to you.

Six hikes around the Punta Chivato area on Baja's Gulf coast introduce you to the fascinating story of Baja's geologic history. If you love Baja, love geology, or just love a nice hike, you'll LOVE this book!

We've all heard the statistics. As Vileisis puts it, "Overall, 221 million acres of wetlands once graced our nation's lower forty-eight states with a rich mosaic of life. More than half of these important landscapes no longer exist." This book traces a history of loss and chronicles the changing attitudes of the settlers from Europe and their descendants about wetlands. Caught up as we frequently are in controversies about how to identify wetlands, how to preserve them and mitigate their loss, this book provides a long perspective and calls for no less than a change in culture if we are to stop the inexorable downward trend.

Vileisis describes how, to the first European settlers, what we call wetlands were "dismal swamps," linked by images such as Pilgrim Progress' "slough of despond" to whatever is dark and evil. Later wetlands represented opportunity: drain them and make a lot of money, whether selling real estate in Florida or planting more and more crops.

This is more than a book about wetlands, however. It is a history of water policy in the United States. It tells the history of the great American institutions that grew up to deal with wetlands issues: the Soil Conservation Service, the U.S. Corps of Army Engineers, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and others. She also tells of the federal legislation that shapes our current ways of dealing with wetlands; how these laws got passed and how they have been enforced. Anyone attempting to understand the changing role of the Corp of Engineers in wetland protection, for example, should read this book.

The book is also gracefully written and filled with great stories about entrepreneurs and dreamers who saw opportunities in controlling the rivers and draining the swamps, and how their plans almost always went awry. It also tells of those who helped change the cultural attitude toward wetlands, people like Mrs. Augustus Hemenway of Boston, who, with William Brewster, founded the Audubon Society and groups like Ducks Unlimited, who saw dramatic decreases of wildlife in their favorite hunting areas. When scientists began to understand the values of wetlands in the early 20th century, long-entrenched attitudes began to change.

Vileisis points to the essential difficulty for understanding and dealing with wetlands: land is property, and our thinking is guided by concepts of "property rights." The waters of the country, on the other hand, have been understood as belonging to all of us. But wetlands are both land -- we can put a fence around it -- and water -- it flows and knows no boundaries. This is the key to why it has been so hard to shape public policy and attitudes about wetlands. As Vileisis puts it, "Americans were stuck somewhere between the conventional view of wetlands as property and the ecological view of wetlands as a life-support system."

Vileisis takes heart from the resiliency of nature, but in her closing chapter she says, "...while there have been changes in attitudes, policies, and laws, and marked decrease in the rate of wetlands loss, the destruction of wetlands continues because powerful interests cling to the status quo that calculates its profits in the ledger of short-term private gain with little concern for the common good." For those of us who work to change this cultural attitude, this book extends our sense of interconnectedness to those who lived before us. Vileisis says, "Informed by history, we can remember the trade-offs already made and turn away from the mistakes and misunderstandings of a time when we knew no better."

This is a great primer for anyone interested in the history of our wetland ecosystems- from armchair ecologists to the PhDs. It helped me enormously in understanding how our wetlands came to be what they are today. Vileisis' style is engaging and clear, making this a real page turner. I didn't want to put it down.

My 9 year old grandson loves this book. It isn't very often that he will read a book over and over but this one he does. He had checked it out at the school library and had a hard time taking it back so I searched for one on this sight and luckily I found one! It is great.

My son really enjoyed this book! LEGOs is his favorite pastime. He really enjoyed seeing the characters which he plays with come to life. It is so hard finding books for boys in the age range 8-10 and this book helps fill in the some of that missing gap. I really liked the glossary in the back where scientific terms are introduce to children as they read about the LEGO adventure. I will be looking forward to seeing more adventures on the lego character. The art in the books is so realistic to LEGOs. Great Book!

Dreams of Dolphins Dancing tells of a young girl, much like anyone's daughter, who encounters a solitary Spinner dolphin while snorkeling. This chance meeting leads to an adventure, perhaps real, perhaps imagined, in which the youth discovers much about the fragile relationship between mankind and the environment, the strength of love and the wonders of the ocean's rich variety of life. Although it deals with a disturbing subject, the environmental assault against our oceans from pollution and questionable fishing practices, it is ultimately a story that empowers the reader to act, rather than despair. The watercolor illustrations are exquisite and in themselves more than worth the price of the book. Don't be fooled by the category "children's book." It is appealing to all ages.

As a mother, scuba diver and teacher I appreciate this book in so many ways.This book inspires children to get involved. Environmentally correct, vividly descriptive narrative stimulates curiosity and promotes an early love of sea life. Professionally painted, full page illustrations celebrate the undersea world in visual explosions that call to children's senses and awaken emerging imaginations and fantasies. But, it is the gentle flow of the tale itself that peaks children's interests while sending a strong emotional message that calls each child to personal environmental action. This very special book is sure to tug at the heart strings of young and old alike as it empowers the human spirit to dare to believe that maybe, just maybe one very small person really can make a difference. To share this book with your family is to embark on an adventure that might just change your life." - Lisa Feeney, MS Edu.

My daughter loved this book. She enjoyed how Steve turns trash into treasure. She laughed out loud at his silly creations. I like the fact that the book promotes recycling.

Her fifth birthday is coming up and I am have been asked to read her favorite book to her class at school for her birthday. I asked my daughter what her favorite book is and she picked The Dumpster Diver. Interestingly, we don't own this book, but we checked it out from the library about a year ago. She still remembers this book as her favorite!

Inspired by Kerry Wade, an artist who takes old skis and turns them into chairs, Janet S. Wong crafted this colorful (thanks to illustrator David Roberts) story about Steve the electrician, also known as The Dumpster Diver. Every month, Steven dons his special dumpster diving suit, dives right in to the big trash bin, and counts on three young friends to assist him: one turns on the faucet, another keeps the hose from getting tangled up, and the other aims the nozzle at all of the nasty bugs and spiders that evacuate the dumpster in the wake of Steve's invasion - and then at Steve once he emerges from the dumpster. They turn "junk" into all kinds of neat toys, gizmos, and furniture.

Lest you think otherwise, the book doesn't really encourage young children to follow in Steve's dumpster-diving footsteps. In fact, Steve ends up sustaining an injury from this little hobby of his. The real point of the story, I believe, is to pass along the idea that you can have fun by turning materials you might normally throw away or just have lying around the house somewhere into useful, fun things. In other words, one man's trash can be another man's treasure.

This is a fairly large and colorful little book that young children should really enjoy - probably little boys more than little girls. Parents would do well to talk to their children about the story, though, not only because it could lead to some fun adventures that the parents can share with the child but also because you really don't want to come home from a hard day's work to find little Johnny sitting there surrounded by a bunch of broken toys and other junk he's collected from the neighbors.