Environment and Nature Books

This is simply one of the best books about the environment and Roman Catholic faith!

This book has a listing in the back giving information about the organzations that are involved in this topic. From there you can look at the author, and then the organization they are representing, to be able to piece together what kind of bias and political perspective each article is representing. It's interesting because by the time you read it you can see how different the opposing sides are and then try to decide who, if anybody, really knows what they are talking about. I loved it!

I took Mike's class at Harvard and found it fascinating. The book is thorough and extremely clear - when I first opened it I was intimidated by the number and complexity of some of the diagrams but all is explained in the book in short order. The chapters on climate change and urban ozone are particularly interesting. I think this book could easily be read even if you don't have a scientific bent by just skipping some of the more technical work - you don't need to understand the photolysis of ozone to understand smog. I don't know of any other text that applies to so well to a fairly broad audience.
THe only group to whom I would not reccommend this book are serious grad-level atmospheric chemists. This would be a little infantile for that group.

Very informative and enlightening book on the environmental decisionmaking, especially when it comes to endangered species programs.

This is an excellent collection -- a festschrift at Barry Commoner's 80th birthday. It includes contributions from Italy on Commoner's important role there in "greening" the left, as well as an article on his early nuclear work in St. Louis. Environmentalists, labor, and academic points of view -- and points of appreciation -- are all evident. An important book about an important figure in science and social action.

Change begins at home and even if you're one lone person, you can make changes in your world that could ripple out to affect the universe: that's the message in a primer of 365 things you can do to effect this change. Plenty of books speak of making a difference, but very few offer up specifics for daily living: here's the starting point for any with ideals who would translate them into action, but don't know how.

Diane C. Donovan
California Bookwatch

Pilkey argues that barrier islands move, whether we like it or not, and that attempts to stabilize them nearly always make things worse. A wonderful read, especially for your next beach vacation. Pilkey is regarded as something close to the devil incarnate by coastal developers and their allies

Trouble in Bear Country? It's the Berenstain Bear Scouts to the rescue!

Giant Bat Cave has been a home to Bear Country's bats for millions of years. But now crooked Ralph Ripoff wants to turn the cave into an underground theme park!

Can the Bear Scouts "save the cave" before the bats become homeless?

No Western woman writer has shared more of her life as a rancher and environmentalist than Linda Hasselstrom, whose books about living and working on her South Dakota ranch have been an important part of my library since the early 1990s. This collection of essays, written between 1985-1999 and revised for this publication, is a splendid sampling of her prose, by turns brash, provocative, passionate, chilling, and funny. If you haven't yet read Hasselstrom's work, Between Grass and Sky is a fine place to start.

The twenty essays in this book are divided into three sections: Learning to See, Hunter and Hunted, and Who Cares for the Land? The first section takes us deeply into Hasselstrom's homeplace--a landscape of birds, cows, grass, sky, and eternal enigmas. But whether she is writing about stacking hay with an antique tractor on the hottest day in July or tracing the tunnels of mice under the snow or finding snakes in the pressure cooker, Hasselstrom sees all with a fine, practiced eye. "What a busy and engrossing place the prairie is," she writes, and her readers must agree. The second section focuses on the predator-prey relationship and the part that humans play. It includes essays about hunting buffalo, sleeping with grizzlies, and living with loss. Section Three takes a hard look at the consequences of thoughtless land development and the promise of new relationships between communities of people and communities of the land.

This book proves what Hasselstrom has been saying for years: that there is no contradiction between being an environmentalist and a rancher. It is an eloquent testimony to the rancher's daily work on the land, with domestic and wild animals, in all sorts of weather, amid every sort of calamity. It is an appreciation of the strong bonds that unite the communities of those who love the land and use it wisely, as many ranchers do, and a warning of the consequences of reckless, exploitative development.

Once I picked up the book, I couldn't stop until I'd read all the essays, but for me, two stand out. "Sleeping with the Grizzly" is about (at least in part) the challenge of being a menstruating woman on a wilderness trek--it's full of Hasselstrom's characteristic perceptive humor. (No male nature writer could ever have written this!) "The Cow is My Totem" includes the hilarious story of what happened when a coyote blundered into a calf nursery. Savor this comic hyperbole: "From every direction, cows were running toward the nursery. Bags swinging, heads raised, they all bellowed in outrage, assuring their calves that rescue was on the way . . . Rumbling threats, [three bulls] galloped up the slope, persuaded some magnificent stranger was seducing their harem. I estimate that at that moment, fifty thousand pounds of fury was stampeding toward one forty-pound coyote."

Linda Hasselstrom writes with a naturalist's perceptive eye, an environmentalist's concern, and a rancher's long and practical experience of working and living on the land. Between Grass and Sky belongs on the bookselves of all who care about our American prairies.

Reviewed by Susan Wittig Albert
for Story Circle Book Reviews
www.storycirclebookreviews.org
reviewing books by, for, and about women

Peter Taylor's BEYOND CONSERVATION: A WILDLAND STRATEGY draws some important connections between conservation and land management issues. It focuses on managing existing wildlands in Britain and discusses the need to restore and repair damaged ecosystems, blending social, wildlife management and spiritual insights into the mix. In focussing on and highlighting specific management projects in different regions of the country, BEYOND CONSERVATION offers many insights on rebuilding ambitions.