Environment and Nature Books

Jim Arnosky scores a home run with a wonderful book about why we, especially children, should care about endangered animals. He tells us there is hope, and that "each small act of kindness toward the natural world helps better the environment in which we all live." This is an excellent selection for an Earth Day message, or any time of year. Thanks Jim!

John Grande's new book Art Nature Dialogues is not only informative, but it presents the scuptors and artists ideas, points of view without the usual critical control or monologue.
Included are David Nash, Nils-Udo, Hamish Fulton, Patrick Dougherty, Bruni Babarit, Bill Vazan, Alan Sonfist, Betty Beaumont, Ursula von Rydingsvard, Peter von Tiesenhausen and herman de vries (apioneer of earth art from the 1950s in Holland)
'
This is one book thatshakes the art world softly, gently and with a sense of the physical, realworld of nature . Bye Bye PostModernsim. Hello respect for the Earth.




It is about time a writer focusssed on earth sensitive artists instead of the od generation of minimalist earth movers like Smithson, Heizer who destroyed the earth for art./.

Rebecca Solnit's Savage Dreams is one of my favorite books, and this compilation of essays covers some of the same territory. She writes insightfully about the visual arts, the environment, and feminism in a way that causes us to look at the world differently. Her passion for the desert and its fragile ecosystems is especially evocative. I particularly liked her essays on dirt and Carlsbad Caverns.

Unlike a lot of criticism, her writing isn't overly difficult to read, and she infuses much of it with humor. She covered some artists whose work I love and introduced me to new ones. While reading this book, I have found myself thinking about language and space in new ways. The writer also asks us to question our relationship to the world in a powerful way.

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.

BATS IN FORESTS: CONSERVATION AND MANAGEMENT is a pick for any college-level library strong in natural history and conservation issues and offers a narrowed environmental focus on forest bats. Bats in caves are the common focus, but more than half of bat species in North America depend upon and uses forests for roosting, so forest health is essential to bat conservation, and this in-depth coverage of both will prove a key reference for any collection strong in ecology issues in general and bat conservation in particular.

An entire ecosystem is revealed in this work; a look inside a true "natural wonder", the Chesapeake Bay. I picked up this nature/local interest book at a small store on Smith Island, Maryland, and began reading it on the boat trip back to Crisfield. I found "The Bay" to be a surprising page-turner -- along with detailed descriptions of the life cycles of familiar wildlife such as ospreys, eagles and great blue herons, and the ubiquitous Maryland blue crabs and jellyfish, there are facets of bay life in this book which I'd never even considered -- sea creatures that light up with natural phosphorescence, animals that regress as they develop from infancy to adulthood, and one beautifully descriptive chapter entitled "The Chesapeake Marshes" which came alive as I read it! I loved this book! One need not be a scientist nor a naturalist to appreciate this superbly written tribute to one of the most beautiful places on earth. The final chapter, "Compensation", clearly illustrates the symbiotic relationships of living creatures within an ecosystem and their interdependence upon one another for the continuation of life, not only in the Chesapeake Bay region, but as a representation of life systems everywhere. The writing was spellbinding; Mr. Klingel wrote so well that I found myself reading on and on for the sheer pleasure of experiencing his words. Although "The Bay" was written nearly 50 years ago, its story is as timeless as the nature it so aptly describes.