Environment and Nature Books

A facinating overview of the biology of adaptation to winter. Of interest to students, teachers, and outdoors people who wish to understand interaction between life and the winter environment.

Thorough and scientific, this a good companion volume to Jim Halfpenny's excellent book on the same subject. Whereas Halfpenny's book is an excellent introduction for students and teachers of ecology, Marchand's book goes into more detail on physiological, behavioral, and biochemical adaptations to winter. It is therefore best suited to biology majors, graduate students, and naturalists with a desire for a complete explanation of how animals and plants adapt and survive in cold weather.

I started wondering one day what do animals do in the winter? How does thgis whole cycle continue. Then I got on Amazon, did a search and came up with this book. Its neat! It tells you about different hibernation methods (for example some insects turn their body fluids into a sort of antifreeze!) It also tells about plants and how they cope. Pretty interesting.

Herring's book is in inquisitive and thorough examination of the literature regarding America's national parks. His work analyzes the literature of writers who saw the good, the bad, and the ugly concerning national parks. While some writers saw parks as a necessity, others saw them as something to be feared and loathed. What was to initially preserve and inspire became nothing more than Disneyland.

In speaking with the author, who taught a few classes I took, he told me that this work would normally be reviewed in literary journals and digests, not in commercial circles, which is understandable. Works about literature have a far more limited readership range than literature itself. But hey, I purchased the book immediately when it was released and after reading it, thought I would provide my $0.02. I was curious to see his work. He spoke about Yellowstone on occasion, and had an interesting approach to teaching-- making pop culture references to literature and so forth. This book nevertheless reveals those very qualities in print.

Anyway, if you want some articulate, well-thought insight into the works of authors who wrote about national parks, _Lines On The Land_ is where you should go.

This book really would go better in the "nature essay" section of the bookstore than "literary criticism" (who reads that, really?). The best parts of the book are the sections where Herring talks about living in Yellowstone National Park. They make you want to head off to Wyoming, like, right now. Highly recommended.

Scott Herring writes beautifully about the asthetics and quinessential qualities of the national parks. He traces the historical background of national parks while at the same time, speaks of the great writers of our time and their contributions to both national parks and the beauty of nature.

"Lines on the Land" is a book that demonstrates the importance of national parks to the American Heritage. A collection of historical accounts, literature,poetry as well as personal insights, this book is for the scholar, the climber, and the nature lover within all people. Herring gives great insight on the importance of the land in relation to the American people.

...Ms Bolgiano is both a skilled researcher and a talented writer.

The newest of Ms Bolgiano's books, Living in the Appalachian Forest, zeros in on relationships between man and the wooded lands of our eastern mountains. In its pages, the reader meets people who care enough about the trees to dedicate their lives and often to risk their livelihoods to develop sustainable ways for humans to live with the forests, to use them wisely and in ways that keep the woods growing more and more healthy instead of descending into destruction. Of course, the folks who care about nothing but a quick profit appear here and there. The emphasis of Living in the Appalachian Forest, however, is on the conscientious, caring people who love the forest and the hope their activities inspire.

There's some interesting history in this book. Though I grew up in West Virginia, I had never before heard the real stories of the 1920 Matewan Massacre or the famous feud between the Hatfields and McCoys. Ms Bolgiano shares well written accounts of both these incidents, and many more.

In the pages of Living in the Appalachians, I learned quite a bit about forestry. I also became aware of several government and private organizations that involve themselves in the forest industries. Some are harmful, while many others are working diligently for sustainability.

There is a fine account with a lot of excellent description of the odious practice of mountaintop removal. This mining technique, a giant step beyond the destructiveness of even poorly managed strip mining, is used widely in the Appalachians by supposedly legitimate mining companies under the watch of supposedly honest government agencies.

Living in the Appalachian Forest is truly a fine book. It is a work of considerable insight and love and of hard research and fine writing. It holds the reader's interest like a really good novel...

Fun, serious, and thoroughly readable. Chris Bolgiano weaves grounded environmentalism and ecological awareness with history and stories/case studies to bring our awareness to a complex subject. This book presents solid Appalachian forest information to the reader in a manner that keeps one reading. Forests are complex, there are many approaches and techniques to sustainability, and Ms. Bolgiano seems to get to most. Simply, I found this book a delight to read and I learned so much from it.

Those of us who own and/or treasure portions of Appalachia's forest will find in Chris Bolgiano's concise 200 pages a wealth of useful information. She interviews a wide spectrum of foresters, loggers, strip-miners, nature lovers, and other "shareholders"---bringing us up-to-date about the use (and too often the abuse) of what might be the most diverse temperate forest in the world. When Bolgiano visited mountaintop- removal stripmine sites, she found that over 99 percent of the natural diversity had been destroyed---but that western elk had been imported to the stripmined land as a sort of fig leaf to cover the devastation. She describes ways that land can be put in trust and legally protected against such abuse--including against abuse by future owners. One of the book's main themes is sustainable logging---which can best be done with horses rather than machines, and which increasingly now rejects the "high-grading" system of timber selection in favor of "low-grading"---thereby leaving the best trees in place to reproduce. These practices are spreading fast in Appalachia with the help of Smartwood certification and also thanks to professional forestry consultants such as Appalachian Sustainable Development, based in southwestern Virginia. In first-person prose that often sparkles, Bolgiano relates her adventures while visiting all sorts of people whose lives and livelihoods revolve around the forest. She embeds a major delivery of crucial history and current facts in a light-hearted telling of her personal adventures. Her book is not only a pleasure to read but highly informative. It's a major resource for anyone who wants to pitch in and try to save some special part of the Appalachian region from becoming a national sacrifice area. -Paul Salstrom

An inspiring, original, and thought provoking attack on today's environmental problems. Moreover, solutions are suggested rather than the average "go green" book that lists off the world's problems and leaves the reader with the question of "Now what?" I whole heartedly agree with the major themes of this book- they challenge the average American to be conscious- a trait each citizen is completely capable of having.

Thomas Princen presents a unique view on sustainability, introducing and developing the concept of sufficiency while using a creative and original style of writing.

This is a very well-written book, whose importance cannot be emphasized strongly enough. It deserves to be read widely, not only by academics and policy makers, but by all those who are concerned with the status quo and know that something has to change in our way of doing things, but have a hard time seeing how. As a whole, the book presents a detailed and compelling response to those who think there is ultimately no better way to solve the world's problems than to create better technologies, expand the economy, and let the markets solve the problems of displaced or hidden costs to the environment.

Princen shows, first, that the logic of efficiency (according to which maximizing goods and minimizing costs tends to be the ultimate argument for doing things) is only one among many approaches to good reasoning, and that its predominance came about as a result of a good deal of struggle and support by a wide range of institutions. It is also deceptive, in that there are always hidden costs and unexpected outcomes when a given efficiency is instituted. Suppose, for example, that we achieve the goal of more fuel efficient cars. Does that guarantee we will have less pollution and use less gas? Maybe it will mean more people will drive more often (using more energy and creating greater pollution in total even if not individually) and there will be a greater need for roads and higher numbers of fatalities on these roads. Moreover, such an achievement may help obscure and prolong some the many problems that are at least in part caused and supported by global fuel dependency and the need to constantly find new oil sources and to transport oil across the world: oil spills, destruction of ecosystems, not to mention worldwide conflict and economic inequality, even religious strife. The point is that we live in a complex world, where maximizing one variable can have an unexpected impact on other variables; or worse, where the choice of which variable gets maximized can be deliberately picked in order to obscure other outcomes that are less palatable. The "logic of efficiency" and "cost-benefit analysis" approaches to decision making are in the end not efficient and rarely take into account the real costs of the practices they endorse.

As an alternative (not as a replacement, but as a viable but different approach), Princen offers the logic of sufficiency, a principled extension of the commonsense intuition that sometimes enough is enough. Just because we can build faster cars, does that mean we should? Just because we can extract oil from the Alaskan wilderness, does that mean it is incumbent upon us to do so? The answers to these questions are complicated, but sometimes, under the sway of the logic of efficiency, we seem to forget to ask or we assume that the answers are obvious: if it makes things cheaper, or faster, or gets us more of what we want, then of course we should! But we are often unprepared for the "side effects" of such improvements -- like urban sprawl and increased crime, or (to pick another example) the spread of disease that came as a side effect of our convenient and inexpensive new methods for delivering fresh spinach.

What is perhaps most distinctive and worthwhile about Princen's book is that he shows the logic of sufficiency is not just a principle. It underlies what a number of flourishing communities have done in order to avoid the losses to their livelihoods and communities that they saw would follow if they followed the trends of maximizing profits and goods. They saw that in order to maintain their lifestyles they had to draw limits and restrain themselves. He deliberately chooses what he terms "hard cases" -- not those who deliberately isolate themselves from the modern world for ideological or religious reasons -- but companies and communities who, for both reasons of self-interest and as a result of their unique circumstances were led to make decisions that go against the grain of "progress" and "growth" and in the direction of sufficiency and sustainability. Princen sees the stories he tells of such peoples as reason to hope that as the rest of us grasp our own increasing dependence on a precarious and limited set of natural resources we will also begin to think differently and will come also to decide that enough is enough. Thomas Princen has written a very important and hopeful book, full of insight and thoughtful argument that can help guide us through such a transition. Highly recommended.

Bill Belleville is a documentary filmmaker and author specializing in conservation: how work has appeared extensively in magazines, has been anthologized in collections, and he's written many books, but LOSING IT ALL TO SPRAWL: HOW PROGRESS ATE MY CRACKER LANDSCAPE hits closer to home than many of his other books. Bill Belleville writes of his historic Cracker farmhouse and old neighborhood of central Florida even as it's being wiped out: any who have visited the area in the last few years will readily acknowledge the truths and observations in LOSING IT ALL TO SPRAWL. In addition to documenting the underlying social, political and economic forces at work in promoting sprawl, Belleville offers Floridians and others hope for appreciating nature.

Diane C. Donovan
California Bookwatch

Fifteen years the author lived in a 'cracker' house at the end of a dirt road and shared the solitude enjoyed by former occupants for more than seventy years. It was a perfect hide-away for a freelance environmental writer and film maker, where privacy was respected, where nature was sufficient unto itself and its creatures, and where the only compromises with modernity were indoor plumbing and electricity. Even the window unit air conditioner was redundant in a house designed in simpler times, well shaded and with natural cross ventilation.
One day the shrill back-up signal of earth-moving equipment shattered the tranquility, a nails-on-blackboard, unsettling sound that forewarned of loss of innocence to come. A new mega-mall is planned nearby, and already the landscape is denuded and sculpted to accommodate the thousands of cars, SUV's and service vehicles that would respond. "If you build it, they will come." (With apologies to W. P. Kinsella.)
Bill Belleville is an award-winning writer, the author of River of Lakes, A Journey on Florida's St. Johns River, Deep Cuba and Sunken Cities, Sacred Cenotes and Golden Sharks. His film making credits include an Emmy award for Wekiva: Legacy or Loss.
It was Belleville's cracker house and his story, and the story of those who lived there before. But in a larger sense it is my story and yours, all of us who have witnessed the sacrifice of the playgrounds of childhood and the sanctuaries of memory at the altar of 'progress.' But we don't have to write it. Bill Belleville has done it for us with the same beauty and poignancy that marked his earlier works, but this time with righteous anger born of loss.
A wonderful, compelling, intensely personal book that reminds the rest of us of what we, too, have lost, and leaves us asking "What price, progress?"

My grandma says "there won't be a blade of grass left." Belleville explains why. A personal story of man who finds the true Florida, a people who scratched out a living in the early days and survived many hurricanes, only to be swept away today by developers. Highly recommended reading for anyone who is fighting urban sprawl.

A fresh discovery of a new world through the eyes of one of it's new residents - a discovery of our own world. "Luisa's Nature" is a look at family life, written in the creative non-fiction style from the eyes of a newborn baby named Luisa. From her birth, she slowly begins to learn a bout the natural world around her, beginning to understand the concept of family and others, as she looks to the big people that care of her and her understanding of them. A look at family and relationships through a deftly written and charming new perspective, highly recommended to community library collections catering to issues of the family.

A well-written journal of a child's early development that is vibrant with imagination and insights, flavored by European and "green" influences. You will be captivated as Mark Stevens imaginatively shares his young daughter's thoughts, impressions and experiences. He carefully weaves into the narrative the need for and benefits of nature in children's lives. Through Luisa's eyes and perceptions, we witness the developing body and soul of a child whose views will contribute to your deeper appreciation of the mysterious gift and nature of every child.
~ Stevanne Auerbach, Ph.D., a.k.a. Dr. Toy

Anyone who values Family Principles, and enjoys Nature and Wildlife, will really enjoy the experiences they can share, reading this excellent Book. I really recommend reading it. !!

Peter George

"Making the World" illustrates the profoundly spiritual connection between all creatures and their living earth, in a refreshingly non-theistic manner. It speaks poetically to children and adults about the interconnection of all things, reminding us of the effects of and our responsibility for the ripples we send into the world around us. With its beautiful words, images and illustrations, this book is deeply touching for all ages, regardless of spiritual beliefs.

Making The World is a beautifully written book. It begins by telling you a secret that you must promise to tell someone. "The world isn't finished yet, it isn't quite complete." The pictures beautifully portray many aspects of the natural world around us. It reads like a ballad, or a lullaby, rather than a story-book. Making The World is inspiring; it tells the reader that they too are helping to make the world. By "making and castle, humming a secrete song, laughing at the rain, dreaming of home, and saying I love you" you too are helping to make the world. The message in this book is so pure and simple. Yet, the moral of this book is sadly forgotten in the swift passed life we all live. We must all take time to enjoy the world around us, slow down and admire nature. We should feel thankful. We should keep dreaming, and enjoying the world around us. We must take time to say I love you, and be happy. This book has the potential for being a tool in helping children to find a cause to help "make the world". This book has helped me through some pretty tough times. It has helped me to a take a breath, relax and think. I too am helping to make the world. My attitude and ways I touch people each day, help to make and shape the worlds of the people around me. When I think in this way, anything is possible.

This book is utterly beautiful, so stirring. Each time we read it, it gets us pondering aloud together about how the world is, things we wonder, things we've noticed, how we are seeing life, and he tells me about how he would like his life to be. It is a stirring book, and perfect for going on then to dream about life's magic.

Beautiful selections from Muir's writings, paired with spiritual quotes, excerpts.I don't know of anyone else, who manages to put so well into words the profound powers of nature the way Muir has done. John Muir was able to put into writing, the way that nature has always felt in my heart and spirit. Reading this book gives me the goosebumps! Take it into the woods, or open it when you are stranded indoors, and need to get "out"

This book is a simple yet profound collection of words by John Muir and the author's own reflections, masterfully paired. They are beautiful and inspiring. Perfect companion for a walk among the redwoods! I also enjoyed this author's other works on Emerson and Thoreau.

A must!!!
Take this wonderful collection of muirs wisdom with you whether you are walking among trees, meadows, deserts, or just thinking about a saunter. Chris Highland's compilation of varied writings from John Muir are wonderfully editited, capturing muirs wit, humor and peace of mind. I love this book!!

What a wonderful book! My family loves being outdoors and watching wildlife; and this book tells a lovely story about a little duckling on the river and all the other animals he is seeing his first time out on the river. The photography is gorgeous and educational. It's better than an artist's rendering because you're seeing the real thing. My kids, my husband and I love the story and the pictures. This book has become the most frequently asked for story in our household. I highly recommend this book for young and old alike.

This is an excellent book to educate your child on wildlife and mother nature! The photography is wonderful and should excite us all to see her wonderful creatures both large and small. My nephews love it and ask to have it read to them time and time again!

This is a wonderful story with beautiful photos!! I have 2 small boys that love this story and ask me to read it over and over again. It keeps the young reader guessing about what is happening in the forest!! I highly recommend this book to everyone!

The Money Tree offers an alternative view of what is really important in life. Money begets greed is juxtaposed with the enduring rhythms of nature. What is true comfort? What has lasting value? The story spins an answer by following the main character through a calendar year and illustrating her simple pleasures against the backgroud of a strange tree.
The illustrations are magical and the story is timely. One of my very favorites- every 'child' should read it.

This is a great book for putting things in perspective. The main character has a tree in her yard which produces money. She becomes the most popular person in town. Everyone comes to her house to gather it's leaves. By winter she is becoming tired of her greedy neighbors. She cuts the tree down and uses it for something purposeful: to keep warm.

The enchanting tale of Miss McGillicuddy and the unusual tree that grew in her yard. It has a such a strange shape,and grew so fast. One day she realizes that the leaves are dollar bills, how strange! Miss McGillicuddy seems strangely unaffected by the money in the tree, she goes about her normal life. She is relieved that strangers come to pick the dollars off the branches, saving them from breaking from under the weight of the bills. As the seasons change, people are still trying to find money from the tree, which bemused the woman. As winter comes, she has the tree chopped down for firewood. Miss McGillicuddy is jusy as happy and content as she was before the magical tree grew. This book will spark any child's imagination. A wonderful story by Sarah Stewart, matched with delightful illustrations by David Small.