Environment and Nature Books

Excellent review of EPA's Federal Reference Method and new technologies for monitoring fine particulate matter. Well written, easy to read, fun and informative graphics. Nice cover!

I have found this to be a fantastically helpful reference book for everything Monteverde-related. This book isn't meant to be a best-seller, it (seems to be) designed for the subset of people who are interested in Monteverde, Costa Rica. If you have spent some time in Monteverde, or plan to, it has pretty much everything you could ever want to know about natural history and climate. It is also put together in an easy and intuitive manner, which counts for a lot when you are trying to find one specific thing in a book that is about everything. It is aimed more towards science, but it also has quite a bit about the history of the town. This is the first place I would look for helpful tidbits of information about Monteverde like yearly rainfall/mist, neat graphs that break down the number of species of plants of various life forms ("X% of plants in MV are climbers, Y% are epiphytes, Z% canopy trees"), and the such. I would strongly suggest it to anyone interested in Monteverde natural history. This is not a field guide, it won't help you identify anything to species, but it will be a very good supplement to pretty much any field guide, so you can see what ever you are interested in the large framework of its ecosystem.

It is also just plain fun read.

A product of sixteen years of tracking of over three hundred marked mountain goats, "Mountain Goats: Ecology, Behavior, and Conversation of an Alpine Ungulate" is the first educated and scholarly assessment of the ecology and behavior of mountain goats. The long years of study pay off, tackling every bit of the goat's lives, including their reproductive strategies and population dynamics. It also reads into their sensitivity to human disturbance and uses it to examine and develop excellent conservation strategies. An invaluable source for ecologists and wildlife conservationists, "Mountain Goats: Ecology, Behavior, and Conservation of an Alpine Ungulate" is highly recommended for community libraries with a focus on wildlife everywhere.

Most nature writing talks entirely too much about spiritual matters for my taste. I prefer a technical, scientific approach citing "hard" observed data rather than "soft" emotional data. Gehlbach suits my tastes. He calculates the density of fish in a pond, lizards in the desert, and measures the impact on vegetation of people walking on trails. But it's not all dry science. There are interesting passages on the adapatable coyote, the less adaptable grizzly bear and wolf, the geographic expansion of the coatimundi and the armadillo, the extinction of ice age mammals, and many other subjects. It's a real feast.

The subject is the Mexican/US borderlands from the Gulf of Mexico to the Colorado River. This is a mostly desert area, but with a number of "sky islands" -- green mountains that rise above the deserts.

Two criticisms of the book. First, some of it is dated -- written as it was in the 1970s. For example, the author talks about the impact of DDT, a pesticide that has been banned for many years. Secondly, he presumes the reader has a pretty fair knowledge of species of plants and animals. When he embarks on a discussion of the trogon for example he doesnt tell you that it's a colorful, sub-tropical bird. He expects you to know that much about it.

This book ranks at the top of my favorite nature writing. It's informative, well written, and covers a lot of subjects relating to the fascinating barren lands along the border.

Smallchief

I received this book as a Christmas gift from my father-in-law, who very conscientiously purchased the book from a locally-owned, independent bookseller. What a delightful book it is! My husband and I read it together, and we very much enjoyed every page. Bowers writes beautifully, fluidly and with wonderfully astute scientific insight. It is always a pleasure to read the writings of a scientist so inspired by her work that she shares her passion with laypeople; scientific passion is nothing less than infectious, regardless of the discipline. Bowers' essays are accessible, insightful prose that leave the reader hungry for more. A pure delight to read.

The Mystery of the Round Rocks is an educational children's picturebook about the mysterious and powerful forces of nature that have affected our planet for millions years. When a boy and a girl discover a stacked mound of smooth, round stones, their grandfather tells them the amazing true story of how the stones came to be. The force of a glacier once crept across the land, shaping the earth and smoothing rocks; when the glacier retreated, the humans who came much later to farm the land stacked the rocks in a pile so they could plow the earth. The simple, shaded color illustrations add a visual touch to this geological tale. Highly recommended.

If you're looking for spun sugar literary confection, and easy comfort, move on. But if you want to encounter
poetry that disturbs you in the best possible way, keeps you up at night, demands that you respond with your
heart and your mind, read both Naked Wanting and Raven Eye.

Margo Tamez is a poet whose work is not easy, clearly born of experience raw and real, making the reader touch that place of pain, of personal wounding far, far, away from the romance of the Southwest and the stereotype of the "stoic noble" on the rez. Her writing forces us to look where the bodies are buried, when we want to turn a blind eye to the violence wreaked upon the individual and environment. Both Naked Wanting and Raven Eye gave me that gnawing feeling in the pit of my stomach, the tight, clenched first buried in the chest. Bless her for that.

And bless her, too, for somehow still weaving threads of redemption and reemergence in the face of soulbreaking sorrow, for offering real mythos and confronting false spirituality.

In My Mother Returns to Calaboz, there is a visceral longing for home, for groundedness in the deepest and most literal sense. It reflects an abiding love for la tierra, but not the convenient, fantasy-laden Southwest. It is a personal, damaged homeland, smelling of chemicals, shot through with run-off that is still somehow, unquestionably sacred. Tamez writes of border dwellers unbowed, unabsorbed, defiant, and ultimately triumphant - not noble, but stubbornly flawed and human.

Lisa Alvarado, poet, editor, literary critic

Rosemary Deen (co-author of 2 composition texts with the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry prize winner Marie Ponsot) has now published her own book of lyric yet poetic non-fiction essays "Naming the Light A Week of Years". Naming the Light is about places and people, books and music and travel, gardening and astronomy. Some essays examine Rosemary's Deen's experience finding herself well placed, at home in an old house in the New York's Catskill region. Others travel out to remote worlds, then bring them next door through the author's power of imagination. Mrs. Deen see human experience as part of a system alive with continuity between nature and culture-its worms and its catherdrals,its weather and its cantatas-all one, like a giant plant or a richly woven tapestry. In prose elegant and deep as poetry, she explores how we want to be named, and how we want to name as a way of trying to be true, how light in which we see governs our seeing, how history is always present, how language survives translation, how women behave, and men, and what it might mean to be nigh or near someone-to be a neighbor, what tools (language or spades) mean to work, how roots balance us, and how what gardens really grow are metaphors for human life.

Naming the Light will find a welcome place on the shelf of garden literature...Anyone who enjoys natural history of any kind would enjoy this book -Mary Swander, coauthor of "Parsnips in the Snow: Interviews with Midwestern Gardeners".

This book covers a wide range of topics for anyone interested in Madagascar. I've found it especially useful for general information about the island's paleo-history, as well as more specific information in my field of zoology. The editors have done an excellent job of organizing the material into a good flow of reading. Seems to be an easier read than the earlier "Key Environments: Madagascar" (1984). The "gloomy" outlook that may exist for the wildlife of Madagascar is not just presented to depress the reader, instead they present a positive outlook in their last chapter using Ranomafana National Park as an example. A must-have for anyone interested in this unique island (and with its interesting people, history, and animals, that should be everyone!).

This book is an amazing compilation of the natural history of Indiana. Well illustrated and very informative. A must have for any hoosier as well as environmentalists living in the Great Lakes Region.