Environment and Nature Books

This a beautifully illustrated story that should appeal to adults as well as children. We will be taking a copy to our grandson in the next week or so and will see if someone about to turn 5 years old can appreciate it. He will no doubt love the drawings; not sure about the story.

I enjoyed the book and it is beautifully illustrated but my daughter (9) was not as thrilled with it.

This book is a must for your book shelf, whether you are a cat-lover or not, whether you have children or not, whether you are young or old. In our relentless pursuit of material pleasures and more, more, more, we are becoming increasingly alienated from the power and beauty of the natural world. This book ever so subtly promotes a compassionate relationship with the creatures of this earth, all the while subtly embracing the subject of species endangerment due to global warming. Beautiful illustrations and the language of myth bring the story alive.

I work for a wild cat sanctuary, have known a snow leopard, and this book truly captures their incredible above-the-world spirit. The story is as an old legend retold and the illustrations capture all the magic in the story.

What a wake up and smell the coffee kind of book. Not only is it well written, but it makes you stop and THINK. This book, though it appears to be small, is packed with a punch! Bravo to the author! Beautifully written with some of the best illustration I've seen in a long time! I'm getting copies for all my friends and family! I suggest everyone go out and get a copy or two! I have a feeling this is a book that will be around for a very long time!

A timeless and timely environmentally awakening book which
once read cannot leave the mind of the reader! The illustrations
accent well the written words of Anthony Donnelly in conveying
one man's opinion of what "progress" has done to our fragile world. A small book with a powerful message that needs to be read often , and to many. Though this book is said to be written for the young adult, I for one, as an adult , became engrossed quickly with all that it had to say. I would recommend this book to all readers especially Christian people who care about the environment. The ending is so refreshing and caused me to feel I was taking a deep, fresh breath of clean air.

When the Trees Held Their Breath By Anthony James Donnelly Antix Press Incorporated

Man is known for technologically advancing his world and not giving a damn what the consequences may be. In his debut illustrated children’s novel, “When the Trees Held Their Breath,” Anthony James Donnelly presents the future landscape of a dying world and the drastic measures nature takes in seeing to its survival.

The story begins with the planet battered by acid rain, pollution contaminating our land and water and debris littering our cities. Man’s ignorance causes Mother Earth to rebel. Nature would no longer be silent. Unwilling to end their time upon this earth, the trees forced their roots deeper in search of water. All matter of creatures cried out to Mother Earth sharing her torment.

And man walks through his life as if nothing is wrong. He does not see the permanent destruction his advancements are causing. How days are lost in darkness, lakes are turning into toxic waste pools.

The trees wonder how they can end the suffering? Will anything survive? It is decided throughout nature’s realm that the animals will nest in the earth, that birds would refuse to sing and that the trees would hold their breath. Surely, someone would take notice.

As in most books written in the past and today, only when man is near that “no-turning back stage” does he take notice? In Donnelly’s book, it was only when the temperature of the planet rose did the people look to the trees and pray for forgiveness.

“When the Trees Held their Breath” is a book that needed to be written. The illustrations by Larry Whitler are haunting. He presents the dark cloak we cast upon our world and in the end the beauty of hope. Put aside the animal character tales and read this book to your children. Having already educated them on the subject of recycling, conservation, long-term planning for the future, this book will serve as a bold reminder of what we are capable of. We must teach these future developers, scientists, and parents of the world, for we are the voice of nature.

--Denise Fleischer, GWN Online, editor ...

An excellent book for young readers to be introduced to the basic concept of environmental issues - the negative impacts mankind has had, and the role that trees have as oxygen providers. The accompanying artwork brings the simple message to life.

The Mom's Choice Awards® honors excellence in family-friendly media, products and services. An esteemed panel of judges includes education, media and other experts as well as parents, children, librarians, performing artists, producers, medical and business professionals, authors, scientists and others. A sampling of the panel members includes: Dr. Twila C. Liggett, Ten-time Emmy-winner, professor and founder of Reading Rainbow; Julie Aigner-Clark, Creator of Baby Einstein and The Safe Side Project; Jodee Blanco, New York Times Best-Selling Author; LeAnn Thieman, Motivational speaker and coauthor of seven Chicken Soup For The Soul books; Tara Paterson, Certified Parent Coach, and founder of The Just For Mom Foundation(tm) and the Mom's Choice Awards®. Parents and educators look for the Mom's Choice Awards® seal in selecting quality materials and products for children and families. This book has been honored by this distinguished award.

Reviewed by Lake Furney (age 9) for Reader Views (1/08)

Riley goes to Antarctica, the coldest place on Earth, with his Uncle Max, Aunt Martha and his cousin Alice for this adventure. They go there to study penguins and their food supply because the Earth's temperature is rising. They study the Arctic food chain to find out if the penguins are getting enough.

This book is educational but a story as well. I learned that when Antarctica was discovered, everyone wanted to claim it. An agreement was made that it belongs to no one and anyone can go there.

I think "Adventures of Riley: South Pole Penguins" is good for kids ages 6-10.

Penguins are all over the place on TV and at the movies these days, and here is a great picture book to take home to your kids that shows the real plight of penguins in Antarctica! The Riley books blend fantastic action with artwork that blends illustrations and photographs together in a very realistic way. Plus, all of his adventures are scientifically accurate and peppered with kid-friendly fun facts on all the major animals he comes across. If your child loves penguins, he or she will LOVE this book! (Endorsed by Jack Hanna, the Smithsonian Institution, World Wildlife Fund and Wildlife Conservation Society.)

I enjoy travel and have just returned from a wonderful trip to Baja, CA. Well, I didn't actually get to go in person but I did the next best thing. I just finished reading Berger's story of his experiences over three decades in the remotest region of the Sonoran desert, Baja, CA. Berger is a prolific writer and author of numerous books including There Was a River and The Telling Distance, which won both a Western States Book Award and a Colorado Book Authors award. He has an ongoing love affair with Baja(30 years) and it shows no sign of abating. Almost an Island is not your typical travel book.They are a dime a dozen. This book is a collection of stories, history, politics and reminiscence of the real Baja. It's a human story about real characters, agonizingly beautiful and harsh geography, and a future as uncertain as the paved highway recently built in part to encourage "economic development" and bring the "advantages" of modern living to the populace via tourism. When you go with Berger you are a traveler rather than a tourist. You will visit remote places and meet people that most tourists never see. The characters are unforgettable and, well, eccentric to say the least. Come along and meet Brandy, a Marine Corps veteran with scarred lungs, that traverses the desert in a dune buggy and oxygen tanks. How about spending some time with an innkeeper from Hollywood, nuns that raise pigs under questionable circumstances, and a former Detroit auto executive that walked away from a career and settled on a beach. The story of the activities surrounding a total eclipse is hilarious. There are stories of a pet tarantula, pronghorn antelope, and a million points of light in between. Berger is a keen observer of every thing he sees and experiences. He brings you the feel, the smell, the taste of the incredible diversity of the eight hundred mile long peninsula of desert surrounded by the sea we know as Baja. It is remote, close to the United States, famous, and little known. If you want to meet this area up close and personal, go with Bruce Berger. It is a trip you will never forget and you can't beat the price.

I loved this book! It is very informative as well as an interesting read.

The double vanishing points of personality and place create travel writing. They make a literature that runs from eccentric guidebooks to the geographies of ecstatics and tortured souls. Bruce Berger's Almost an Island occupies the middle ground where composition graces its sometimes dramatic spans with no show of force, no telltale ripple of perspective. His method is the sidewalk artist's whose drama is the blank space scored quickly and economically to sketch, then with return visits turning lines to 3-D webs, armature modeled and eventually blending in the final surprises of local color. It's the outline method out of predigested sequence. His flashes forward and retrospectives follow the natural learning curve of discovery, or its artful analog. Berger is obviously taken with the whole peninsula, and it shows. "Lovingly detailed," bled of sentimentality, describes his renderings of Baja California's barely adulterated bedrock, its vegetable adventurers, and its animal life scheming and occasionally teeming in the face of obstacles redolent of a whimsical and marginally malign experimenter. Particulars are best read in the original, a representative sample of which is feeding time at the evaporation ponds of a vast saltworks: "... We paused to watch more than two hundred waders making an angular design with the spindly legs that give them their English name, stilt, and the white bellies and black backs that give them the Spanish monjita, little nun. Eared grebes skimmed the surface by the hundreds in lines of smoke; northern shovelers and lesser scaups gathered in separate flotillas; flocks of sandpipers turned in flight like filings of a single mind-dark and striped backs that pivoted en masse, nearly disappearing, to reform as clouds of pale breasts. Certain areas featured a preponderance of white: white pelicans with their black wingtips hidden in folds, great and snowy egrets, blue herons in the white phase, as if they had all been dipped in salt. Marbled godwits suddenly burst from the surface with perfect spacing between each bird, forming an elongated cloud that swelled, shrank and drew itself out like a single sky serpent in a shifting lens. Some rectangles of water were so wide, their horizons so low, that they seemed the sea itself, and their spume blew onto our tracks like meringue. Occasionally we were jolted by having to make room for yellow trucks whose tires were as big as our jeep and whose gondolas were blinding with salt. Over subsequent censuses this skimming of the salt ponds became my favorite driving anywhere, and Fernando remarked that he had a colleague who drove the 30 kilometers of causeways for sport, attaining nonbirdwatching speeds of up to 120 kilometers per hour." Gradually, from four-wheel forays in the 60s to half-year residency in the 90s, Berger became an unofficial dual citizen, part observer and part protagonist in local battles over pronghorn preserves, whale breeding grounds and myopic multicultural change. Friends and all-too-understandable adversaries complete his moral landscape and anchor what is in the end the author's real and fully imagined almost-island.

While the information presented here may not be "new news," plenty of interesting facts are made available, including the breakdown of water usage in the U.S. An astounding 41.2% of all water usage is attributed to toilet flushing!!! Also included in the water chapter is a list of synthetic chemicals in our water supply, and from which industries they come.

Some very interesting facts are supplied which are new news, at least to me; did you know that hazardous waste can be legally injected into the ground???

Easy to read, easily understandable, with pie charts, a guaranteed visual aid!

This book is a real surprise! Dr. Harvey Blatt's "America's Environmental Report Card" (AERC) sounds heavy, but it is crisply written, entertaining, and loaded with quotable facts. It is well-researched and I was repeatedly startled by its revelations. Blatt is a fine storyteller who cannot resist humor and puns (from good to groaners).
Blatt presents his distillation of America's environmental performance as a report card: we get a lackluster "C" average overall, from a healthy "A" in ozone mitigation to a "D" for energy conservation and a "D" for global warming. AERC bristles with hundreds of facts, such as:
> Half of Americans distrust tap water and thus drink bottled water (even though 25% of bottled water IS tap water that costs 120 to 7500 times more, suckers!)
> 16% of Washington, DC's water pipes are toxic lead metal (explains Congressional behavior?)
> Oil supplies about 40% of U.S. energy, but our declining production means we import 60% of it, and drilling in Alaska would make a difference for only 6 months.
> To create your 16-ounce sirloin, a cow donated not only its life but 53 pounds of manure-urine blend that polluted a stream.
> A few inches of dirt is all the separates us from mass starvation, and our agricultural soil is fast-eroding.
> America produces 25% of Earth's food, but consumes so much of it that a casket maker now offers a triple-wide coffin.
> If all the planet's ice sheets melt, FL, LA, NJ, DE, CT, RI, and MA will be completely submerged, and half of the Carolinas, and most major coastal cities.
> Enjoying second-hand smoke indoors, with its 4,000 chemicals and 40 carcinogens, increases your risk of heart disease 20-70%.
> Remember Chernobyl? Now-bankrupt Belarus, which received 70% of the radiation, has over 50,000 children with thyroid cancers, & spends 25% of its budget alleviating Chernobyl's after effects.
We are wired to confront immediate threats like spilled gasoline, snarling dogs, and armed robbers. But we respond sluggishly to abstract, remote-seeming hazards like hurricanes & earthquakes, toxic waste & landfills, pollution & erosion, global warming & energy shortage, floods & droughts. It's tough for scientists to make voters and politicians listen, or for teachers to educate students about our fragile environment, or for Americans to change our lifestyles. But among Blatt's many nifty quotes is the insightful Lakota Sioux proverb: "We didn't inherit this land from our ancestors, we borrow it from our children."
Blatt takes no side, liberal or conservative; he simply presents the facts, colorfully. AERC's many graphics, maps, and pithy quotes make great slides and handouts for teaching and meetings. AERC is so accessibly written that it forms a broadly versatile primer for everyone: teachers and students (AERC is an engaging reader for an environment or ecology course), leaders, businesspeople, attorneys, politicians, naturalists, activists, health & safety people, scientists, academics.
It's a great read and reference. You'll leave America's Environmental Report Card with a solid perspective and new appreciation for our planet and what we are doing to it.

Deep down you know we are in trouble. But up until now you figured "what I don't know won't hurt me." That is human nature I suppose but the fact of the matter is that there is an ever increasing body of evidence that the world in which we live is in peril. Perhaps the bizarre weather events that have occured in the past year have convinced you. Or maybe global warming or a nearby toxic waste dump has gotten your attention. "America's Environmental Report Card: Are We Making The Grade?" is an excellent way to get up to speed on the major environmental issues of our day. While this book should appeal to just about anyone concerned with these matters, author Harvey Blatt appears to have targeted those readers with no ax to grind who simply want to find out just what is going on. "America's Environmental Report Card" is a straight forward, matter of fact book that resists the sensationalism that is found in most other books on this subject. Author Harvey Blatt, a geologist by trade, discusses the topics that are important to all of us like clean water, clean air, climate, solid waste, fossil fuels, nuclear energy and more. But beyond just enumerating the myriad problems we face, Blatt also suggests possible solutions. And he goes one step further.
Blatt encourages each of us to hold up a mirror and ask ourselves what we can do to make our world a better and safer place to live. To quote one Edward H. Hale from the beginning of Chapter 10: "I am only one; but still I am one. I cannot do everything, but still I can do something. I will not refuse to do the something I can do".
"America's Environmental Report Card" is presented in clear and easy to understand language and is supplemented by a great number of excellent graphs and illustrations throughout the book. Recommended.

This book proved immesely useful in a research paper I had to write. It did a wonderful job at providing key articles written on the history and effectiveness of the Antiquities Act after 100 years of being in existence. This is by far the best book on the Antiquities Act, since my research revealed that there are very few books on the subject.

This book illustrates the politics and bureaucracy of a century of efforts to preserve our land and its beauty

Ably compiled and co-edited by the team of David Harmon (Executive Director of the George Wright Society), Francis P. McManamon (Chief Archaeologist of the National Park Service), and Dwight T. Pitcaithley (former Chief Historian of the National Park Service and current teacher at the New Mexico State University), The Antiquities Act: A Century Of American Archaeology, Historic Preservation, And Nature Conservation is an exceptionally impressive collection of informed and informative essays and writings by academicians and experts focusing upon the Antiquities Act of 1906 and its contributions to American archaeology, the preservation of historic buildings, and its role in nature conservancy. The Antiquities Act has been involved with the preservation of natural and cultural treasures ranging from Thomas Edison's laboratory and the Olympic National Park, to such awe-inspiring sights as the Devil's Tower National Monument. A core addition to academic and community library reference collections, The Antiquities Act is very strongly recommended reading, especially for students of American history, archaeology, and park systems.

You can tell that this is not a typical law book from the beginning, as Freyfogle opens the book with a discussion of Frost's poem, "Mending Wall." He also spends an entire chapter (5) on the relationship between a fictional character and the land - Wendell Berry's Mat Feltner.

More traditionally, Freyfogle also provides a critical overview of land-use legislation and agencies, such as the Wilderness Act of 1964, the Endangered Species Act of 1973, or the multiple-use policies of the US Forest Service. In case after case, Congress's efforts at regulating the environment run up against private property rights.

This brings Freyfogle to a review of private property and the justification for it. He argues that the only defensible justification for the institution of private property is that it leads to social benefits. While he concedes the importance of these social benefits, he also insists that private property comes with obligations and may be limited by social needs. In addition, property law should not treat all parcels alike but recognize distinctions such as dry land versus wetland, slopes versus flat fields, bedrock versus aquifers.

From this social perspective, Freyfogle tries to wed environmental protection and property rights. The needs of the community serve preside over this wedding, providing an affirmation of property rights within a community while recognizing obligations both to the human and to the natural community. He illustrates his vision with Berry's fiction, Aldo Leopold's land ethic, and the work of the Land Institute of Salina, Kansas, to develop more ecologically sound methods of agriculture. Like others, he has an image of self-sufficient communities.

Freyfogle idealizes community, and I suspect that he believes that people like being with one another a lot more than they really do. In addition, there are practical objections. Having self-sufficient communities means that we lose the gains from trade between communities. These gains from trade let us use existing resources more efficiently to produce goods. Self-sufficient communities are less efficient, which means that they use more resources - - which is bad for the environment, and thus ultimately bad for the land and for communities as well. The real way to reduce humanity's footprint on the land is to have fewer people.

Overall, this is a really well written book despite its potentially dry topic. Freyfogle livens up his discussion of legal issues with a mix of poetry, literature, law, economics, and stories from central Illinois. For that, I am happy to forgive him an idealization of community that has an overly optimistic view of both economics and human nature.

Readers who are familiar with environmental writing will recognize the homage to Aldo Leopold in the subtitle (envisioning a new land ethic). Surprisingly, the landscape that produced what must be among Leopold's most pessimistic essays (Illinois Bus Ride [Sand County Almanac]) also produced this author and inspired him to a hopeful vision concerning the evolution of our relationship to the land we live on. Freyfogle argues for stengthening the relationships between communities and their environment. He presents a philisophical defence to radical individualism and unrestrained free-market capatalism that would have us few the the environment as just so many natural resources to be exploited. A legal expert in property law, Freyfogle walks us through history, precedents, and implications with remarkalble clarity. Read this book for its hopefulness - and you will learn something in the bargain.

Freyfogle's volume is a little-known classic, a wide-ranging, thoughtful, even lyrical inquiry into the ways we see the land and understand our place in it. The book is hard to categorize, for it transcends all academic fields and conventional ways of thinking about environmental issues. Freyfogle's well-grounded premise is that our environmental problems are, at root, cultural ones, having to do with our over-reliance on liberal individualism in all its forms. Step by step, he encourages us to rethink our cultural presumptions, and urges us in a gentle, reflective way to imagine landscapes that healthier, for nature and people. At the center of his own vision is the idea of "land health," which he proposes as an alternative to sustainable development and its alternatives. Some readers will conclude that he is too ambitious in calling for a reshaping of our dominant culture; others that he is too hesitant to assign blame to bad actors, rather than to society as a whole. But many will agree with the observation of historian Don Worster that "among the many voices trying to articulate an environmental philosophy for our time, Eric Freyfogle is unsurpassed."

`Dancing with the Tiger' is a useful and well-written contribution to the growing body of literature that attempts to answer the question so many of us are asking today - what can I do about creating a sustainable world? A world in which we give back to life instead of just taking. This book is particularly helpful for those people within organizations who want to change consciousness from what Paul Hawken has called the 'take-make-waste' culture, to a self-regenerating and life-affirming way of being.

The authors compare this process to 'dancing with a tiger', hence the title. The tiger takes many forms, for example the intensely competitive business environment many companies find themselves in. They give case studies of companies they have worked with as 'sustainability consultants', including Nike and Starbucks. It is encouraging to see the distance these multinational corporations have gone in their efforts...a journey of a thousand miles begins with one step, and steps are being taken on the long journey to real sustainability. They emphasize the complexity and interconnectedness of the challenge, and at the same time give credit to the many people within organizations who are passionately committed to creating a better world.

Brian Nattrass and Mary Altomare's work is a helpful and informative counterbalance to the often critical reviews of corporate behavior. Their work is based on 'The Natural Step' framework, an enlightened and straightforward approach that any organization can use in their efforts to align their purpose and mission with sustainability.

It is inspiring to read quotes from employees and executives who have participated in this process within their organizations. I highly recommend this book to thoughtful readers who want to discover how to take responsibility for healing the planet.

This successor to The Natural Step for Business is essentially a set of four extended case studies, preceded and followed by statements of principles derived from The Natural Step framework and case study experience.
Your reaction to it will depend on your appetite for case studies - mine is not great. The wider exposition of principles is mainly a restatement - and sometimes an elaboration - of principles that can be found elsewhere, including on the Internet sites of The Natural Step.
Those who are working directly with the framework as consultants or part of an internal team will pick up useful ideas and tips. The general reader would do better to start with the authors' first book or with Karl-Henrik Robèrt's The Natural Step Story: Seeding A Quiet Revolution.

I'm more optimistic about the future, and inspired, after reading Dancing with the Tiger, which profiles sustainability measures introduced by - get ready for it - Nike, Starbucks, Whistler and CH2M Hill, a worldwide engineering company.

Dancing follows on the heels of The Natural Step for Business (NSP, 1997) in which Nattrass and Altomare profiled The Natural Step, a Swedish-rooted initiative to improve corporate environmental and social practices. In that first book, I was titillated to learn about the efforts of companies like Ikea to improve working conditions and reduce the scale of their environmental footprint. Nonetheless, I remained deeply skeptical that other corps, and suits in general, were even remotely interested in grokking social and environmental problems and lining up on the solution side of the equation.

Well, kudos to Nattrass and Altomare (and New Society) for titillating me again. In the first three chapters Dancing provides a current, comprehensive overview of environmental degradation while illuminating the beguiling, complex nature of so many environmental problems. One reason we are befuddled by sustainability problems, the authors say, is because the problems are generally systematic and characterized by uncertainty. In order to overcome problems, we must think systematically and evolve beyond conventional scientific thinking.

Nattrass and Altomare assert that we must also develop a new vocabulary and story-culture linked to sustainability to supplant the warrior-take-all mentality that presently guides much of our thoughts, actions and business. This leads into the remainder of the book, with subsequent chapters profiling the corporate actions on behalf of sustainability taken by Nike, Starbucks, the municipality of Whistler and CH2M Hill Engineering.

It is in this section where I found the biggest surprises. For example, I have longed linked Nike with all-too-common practices of environmental and social exploitation in service of corporate profits. Some of Nike's exploitative practices were revealed years ago, but clearly, the company has made efforts to evolve in more progressive directions. From cutting energy emissions to reducing pollution to helping improve educational opportunities for foreign workers, Nike is evolving, driven in large part because many of the suits, including CEO Phil Knight, instituted policies following the tenets of the Natural Step.

Ditto for Starbucks, CH2M Hill Engineering (with more than 9,500 staff worldwide) and the municipality of Whistler. That's right, Whistler. Evidently, if you can look beyond the SUV-choked parking lots, the groomed hotel ashtrays and some of the most garish displays of conspicuous consumption seen since the decline of the Roman Empire, something remarkable is going on at Whistler. In fact, Whistler now ranks as one of the most environmentally sustainable municipalities on earth.

Naturally, embracing sustainability didn't happen by accident here but falls out of the Whistler Environmental Strategy, crafted several years ago. Like the other examples, the WES was inspired by The Natural Step, and now guides municipal legislation. Addressing pollution reduction, landscape design, water use, environmental conservation, bear management and other issues, Whistler municipal practices are increasingly recognized as among the most progressive worldwide.

Common to the examples cited by Nattrass and Altomare were "ordinary people doing the extraordinary", visionary leaders and staff who persevered in service of sustainability and a core set of principles. The authors refer to them as "evolutionary pioneers, the forerunners who are exploring and drawing the maps of previously uncharted territory, making it easier for others to follow with more certainity." These people have the courage to look beyond the fear of disrupting corporate culture and strike out in a direction not commonly found in the world of business suits and bottom-line profits. This book makes a welcome and significant contribution to nudging the corporate world in the direction of a more sustainable world. I recommend buying a copy as a gift for the corporate executive or municipal planner of your choice.

- Michael Maser; Gibsons BC Canada

- END -

I read this book years ago and now will order it for my personal library.
An excellent book in my opinion. I am also a wilderness canoeist but have never done a trip as ambitious as this.

I love the far north, can't wait to get back there for another trip next summer.

A a story of tragedy and self-discovery. Haunting and poignant. Grinnell jumps around a bit, and sometimes it is hard to know where he is--on the river or in his head. But all and all, a great read. And the water colors are wonderful.

Bob Muth
Flathead Valley Montana

This book is very well written. It tells about a journey that many men would love to take but do not dare. These men dare, or at least attempt, to conquer nature only to learn that it is nature and the power of God which controls us. Grinnell has a gifted way of telling what will happen yet leaving the reader wondering how it will happen. He also cleverly points out different worldviews and how they can change and be manipulated when humility before God is the only option. If you take this journey along with Grinnell under the leadership of Art Moffat, you may never return as the same person.