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"In the mid-1800s seventy-five million buffalo roamed in North America. In little more than fifty years, there would be almost none." The death of the buffalo and the settlers' farming and ranching practices endangered the prairie, as drought made the farmland crumble to dust. To help repair the land, the buffalo had to be saved.
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"A history of the first race to Antarctica that weaves the great polar discoveries of the nineteenth century with scientific breakthroughs of the modern era. Antarctica, the ice kingdom hosting the South Pole, looms large in the human imagination. The secrets of this vast frozen desert have long tempted explorers, but its brutal climate and glacial shores notoriously resist human intrusion. Land of Wondrous Cold tells a gripping story of the pioneer...
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Longtime residents of the Sonoran Desert, the Tohono O'odham people have spent centuries living off the land—a land that most modern citizens of southern Arizona consider totally inhospitable. Ethnobotanist Gary Nabhan has lived with the Tohono O'odham, long known as the Papagos, observing the delicate balance between these people and their environment. Bringing O'odham voices to the page at every turn, he writes elegantly of how they husband scant...
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The Colorado River is a crucial resource for a surprisingly large part of the United States, and every gallon that flows down it is owned or claimed by someone. David Owen traces all that water from the Colorado's headwaters to its parched terminus, once a verdant wetland but now a million-acre desert. He takes readers on an adventure downriver, along a labyrinth of waterways, reservoirs, power plants, farms, fracking sites, ghost towns, and RV parks,...
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"Archetypal wild man Edward Abbey and proper, dedicated Wallace Stegner left their footprints all over the western landscape. Now, ... nature writer David Gessner follows the ghosts of these two remarkable writer-environmentalists from Stegner's birthplace in Saskatchewan to the site of Abbey's pilgrimages to Arches National Park in Utah, braiding their stories and asking how they speak to the lives of all those who care about the West"--Dust jacket...
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The environmental history of the Colorado River delta during the past century is one of the most important—and most neglected—stories of the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands. Thanks to entrepreneurs such as William E. Smythe, the surrounding desert in Arizona, California, Sonora, and Baja California has been transformed into an agricultural oasis, but not without significant ecological, political, economic, and social consequences.Evan Ward explores the...
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"A memoir from permafrost scientist Katey Walter Anthony on her pioneering research studying methane emissions in Arctic lakes-which has made significant contributions to the climate change dialogue-as well as her search for family, faith, and belonging,on her journey to becoming a scientist"--
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"In the 1990s, researchers in the Arctic noticed that floating summer sea ice had begun receding. This was accompanied by shifts in ocean circulation and unexpected changes in weather patterns throughout the world. The Arctic's perennially frozen ground, known as permafrost, was warming, and treeless tundra was being overtaken by shrubs. What was going on? Brave New Arctic is Mark Serreze's riveting firsthand account of how scientists from around...
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Ellen Meloy describes a corner of desert hard by the San Juan River in southeastern Utah, a place long forsaken as implausible and impassable, of little use or value - a place that she calls home. Despite twenty years of carefully nurtured intimacy with this red-rock landscape, Meloy finds herself, one sunbaked morning, staring down at a dead lizard floating in her coffee and feeling suddenly unmoored, estranged.
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America's Missouri River may be the nation's longest and most historically significant river, encompassing many of America's natural wonders between Missouri and Montana, draining almost 600,000 square miles in ten states and part of Canada, and, after Lewis and Clark's expedition 200 years ago, opening the West to a frenzied rush of expansion.
But the Missouri is also the site of a vast, politically driven drama. It tops a list of emerging big-stakes...
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"Catherine Flowers grew up in Lowndes County, Alabama, a place that's been called "Bloody Lowndes" because of its violent, racist history. Once the epicenter of the voting rights struggle, today it's Ground Zero for a new movement that is Flowers's life'swork. It's a fight to ensure human dignity through a right most Americans take for granted: basic sanitation. Too many people, especially the rural poor, lack an affordable means of disposing cleanly...
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"Plugged by no fewer than twenty-five dams, the Colorado is the world's most regulated river, providing most of the water supply of Las Vegas, Tucson, and San Diego, and much of the power and water of Los Angeles and Phoenix, cities that are home to more than 25 million people. In this remarkable blend of history, science, and personal observation, acclaimed author Wade Davis tells the story of America's Nile, how it once flowed freely and how human...
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A sweeping history of the California coastline documents its changing culture and ecology while exploring its role in the state's efforts to counter environmental disasters, citing the influence of the international border fence and the rich animal and plant life that depend on the coast for survival.
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"All spring, Dr. Elizabeth Hilborn watched as her family fruit farm of many years rapidly diminished, suffering from a lack of bees and other insects. The plentiful wildlife, so abundant just weeks before, was gone. Everything was still, silent. As an environmental scientist trained to investigate disease outbreaks, she rose to the challenge. Step by step, day by day, despite facing headwinds from skeptical neighbors, environmental experts, and agricultural...
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During the 2014 world cup, an isolated Amazon tribe emerged from the rain forest on the misty border of Peru and Brazil, escaping massacre at the hands of loggers who wanted their land. A year later, in the jungle capital of Manaus, a bloody weekend of reprisal killings inflame a drug war that has blurred the line between cops and kingpins. Both events reveal the dual struggles of those living in and around the world's largest river. As indigenous...
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"In 1995, the gray wolf was reintroduced to Yellowstone National Park after a seventy-year absence. All these years later, we can clearly see the cascading effects this has had on the park's ecosystem. This is a spectacular example of a trophic cascade, the term used when an important member of an ecosystem goes missing and many other living things are indirectly affected, causing a chain reaction of events. In the case of the reintroduced wolves...
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"David Almerin Ames and his brothers, Link and Simon, believed the wild patch of Maine where they lived along the Penobscot River belonged to them. Their affinity for the natural world derives from their parents: Arnoux, a romantic artist and Vietnam War deserter who builds boats by hand, and Falon, an activist journalist who runs The Lowering Days, a community newspaper which gives equal voice to indigenous and white issues. Then a bankrupt paper...
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