To me there is a connection to something larger than myself, an overriding sense of spirit that I only seem to encounter in the outdoors, beneath the canopy of old-growth forest, or within the gaze of ancient snow-capped peaks. Since arriving in Alaska over 30 years ago it is something I have continually sought among this state’s striking landscape and in many of my own adventures here. It's an attitude, a sensibility I also seek in the stories I read, an authenticity tied to place, but also an inclination toward hope and optimism, even a tenuous one, that we can all relate to; a sentiment I have always tried to incorporate into my own writing.
Faith of Cranes leans more on the inspiration than being an outright adventure, but an adventure it is. It’s a quiet, lilting, beautifully written memoir about home and community, and a former wildlife biologist’s attempt to recover his own sense of hope amidst the ravages of climate change. His story is adeptly tied to the history and lifecycle of the sandhill cranes he chronicles throughout the book, as well as his community, its natural beauty and the eccentric neighbors he shares it with. Ultimately, with the birth of his daughter, his hope is restored, at least to a point.
Faith of Cranes weaves together three parallel narratives: the plight and beauty of sandhill cranes, one man's effort to recover hope amid destructive climate change, and the birth of a daughter.
CLICK HERE to download the first chapter from Faith of Cranes
"Faith of Cranes is a love song to the beauty and worth of the lives we are able to lead in the world just as it is, troubled though it be. Lentfer's storytelling achieves its joys and universality not via grand summations but via grounded self-giving, familial intimacy, funny friendships, attentive griefs, and full-bodied immersion in the Alaskan…
I am a historian of early modern Europe, especially 16th- and 17th-century England, and my work pulls together threads from different historical disciplines, including political history, the history of science and technology, and environmental history. I am fascinated by the ways that human history is intimately linked with the environment, and I am most interested in how early modern European states and empires worked to understand, manage, and profit from the natural world, especially with respect to using and conserving natural resources such as water, wood, and wildlife. I have chosen books that explore these issues in innovative and exciting ways.
Mulry also takes Britain and its trans-Atlantic empire as her focus.
What most impressed me about the book was the exciting way she shows how individual health and personal character, public health, the natural environment, and statecraft were all strangely intertwined in the 17th century.
She argues that the many schemes for “improving” the landscape of both England and its overseas colonies were intended not only to yield a profit for investors, but also to foster public health and knit together the far-flung empire into a healthy body politic. I find myself recommending this book on a regular basis.
Examines the efforts to bring political order to the English empire through projects of environmental improvement
When Charles II ascended the English throne in 1660 after two decades of civil war, he was confronted with domestic disarray and a sprawling empire in chaos. His government sought to assert control and affirm the King's sovereignty by touting his stewardship of both England's land and the improvement of his subjects' health. By initiating ambitious projects of environmental engineering, including fen and marshland drainage, forest rehabilitation, urban reconstruction, and garden transplantation schemes, agents of the English Restoration government aimed to transform both places…
I have lived in Florida since 1969, attended public school here, and received my Master’s degree from a state college. My husband, Bob Randall, a photographer and an entrepreneur, and I have written six nonfiction books about Florida. An Ocklawaha River Odyssey is our favorite. Kayaking the 56 miles of winding waterways became less of a research expedition and more of a spiritual journey as the ancient river cast its spell on us. From wildlife, including manatees and monkeys, to wild orchids and pickerelweed, the Ocklawaha provides more than exercise and recreation; it also touches your soul. I hope my writing and Bob’s photography provide that experience for our readers.
I love this book because I learned so much about the quality and quantity of water in Florida. Because of this book and the knowledge I gained, I was able to publicly refute a former senator’s op-ed extolling the benefit of holding tanks for water underground, which, as Barnett explains, causes arsenic infiltration.
The quality of Florida’s water has been a serious concern since 2007 when the book was published and continues to be today.
Part investigative journalism, part environmental history, Mirage reveals how the eastern half of the nation-historically so wet that early settlers predicted it would never even need irrigation-has squandered so much of its abundant freshwater that it now faces shortages and conflicts once unique to the arid West.
Florida's parched swamps and supersized residential developments set the stage in the first book to call attention to the steady disappearance of freshwater in the American East, from water-diversion threats in the Great Lakes to tapped-out freshwater aquifers along the Atlantic seaboard.
Told through a colorful cast of characters including Walt Disney, Jeb…
Throughout my life, I have been fascinated by humanity’s place within deeper time. As a boy, I collected rocks and fossils, and at university studied geology. The long term has also been a theme running throughout my journalism career at New Scientist and the BBC, and it inspired my research during a recent fellowship at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the US. I believe we need to embrace a deeper view of time if we are to navigate through this century’s grand challenges – and if we can, there’s hope, agency, and possibility to be discovered along the way.
Vincent is a social anthropologist who spent a number of years in Finland completing a truly fascinating piece of fieldwork: he studied the people involved in planning the spent nuclear waste depository at Onkala.
This is a huge undertaking and responsibility, requiring its architects to project their minds tens of thousands of years into the future. Through his fieldwork, Vincent drew out various broader lessons for how to think longer-term.
What’s striking about Onkala is that the people involved in the planning are simply normal Finnish people tasked with an extraordinary job. To me that shows that deep time can be accessible to everyone, and indeed this is a theme that Vincent explores himself: seeking out long-term time in everyday experience can be cathartic, he argues.
A guide to long-term thinking: how to envision the far future of Earth.
We live on a planet careening toward environmental collapse that will be largely brought about by our own actions. And yet we struggle to grasp the scale of the crisis, barely able to imagine the effects of climate change just ten years from now, let alone the multi-millennial timescales of Earth's past and future life span. In this book, Vincent Ialenti offers a guide for envisioning the planet's far future—to become, as he terms it, more skilled deep time reckoners. The challenge, he says, is to learn…
I was drawn to the topic because I love everything about New York City. But, I also loved how the topic seemed at odds with itself. New York City wildlife felt like a contradiction of terms. Sure, there might be some rats, pigeons, and cockroaches here, but that was it. Well I was very wrong. Learning about the city’s natural history and legacy of wildlife allowed me to learn about the city in a whole new way. It’s also a great comeback story and it has been so inspiring to learn – and see! – how effective a few short decades of environmental regulations have been in making this a greener city.
This book revealed a pastoral Manhattan few of us could imagine, including feral pigs that roamed the streets, and horses that transported everything and everyone around town. Set in the transformative 1800s when New York City underwent unprecedented urbanization, this book shows how farmers and other New Yorkers who worked the land were ultimately squeezed from Manhattan for more profitable tenants, and how Central Park, and other open spaces, sought to replicate all that recently displaced nature.
George Perkins Marsh Prize, American Society for Environmental History VSNY Book Award, New York Metropolitan Chapter of the Victorian Society in America Hornblower Award for a First Book, New York Society Library James Broussard Best First Book Prize, Society for Historians of the Early American Republic
With pigs roaming the streets and cows foraging in the Battery, antebellum Manhattan would have been unrecognizable to inhabitants of today's sprawling metropolis. Fruits and vegetables came from small market gardens in the city, and manure piled high on streets and docks was gold to nearby farmers. But as Catherine McNeur reveals in this…
I’m a scholar of environmental history with a focus on human-animal relationships. I’ve also studied the histories of slavery and the African Diaspora, and in my book I’ve fused approaches from these two fields to look at how human-animal relations and networks shaped the expansion of slavery and slave trading from West Africa to the Caribbean in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. My scholarship is also an outgrowth of my teaching, and I regularly teach American environmental and cultural history at California State University, Northridge. I finished my PhD in history at Rutgers University, and my research has recently been funded by the Special Collections Research Center at the College of William & Mary.
Cows are not typically centered in histories of imperialism and colonialism, but John Ryan Fischer presents the case that bovines transformed the societies of California Indians and native Hawaiians in the nineteenth century.
This book helped me think about how to connect histories of livestock and land seizures, and helps us think about animals as malleable creatures of empire that are repurposed by Indigenous nations.
In the nineteenth century, the colonial territories of California and Hawai'i underwent important cultural, economic, and ecological transformations influenced by an unlikely factor: cows. The creation of native cattle cultures, represented by the Indian vaquero and the Hawaiian paniolo, demonstrates that California Indians and native Hawaiians adapted in ways that allowed them to harvest the opportunities for wealth that these unfamiliar biological resources presented. But the imposition of new property laws limited these indigenous responses, and Pacific cattle frontiers ultimately became the driving force behind Euro-American political and commercial domination, under which native residents lost land and sovereignty and faced…
I have been researching and writing about the era of the American Civil War for something over half a century. My passion for the subject remains strong today, having just published my seventh book. Given the seemingly endless amounts of material from soldiers and civilians alike, I have enjoyed deeply researching neglected subjects and writing about them in a way that appeals to both historians and general readers. For me the Civil War never grows stale, there are always little-used sources to research and fresh ideas to consider. The American Civil is omnipresent in my life—not excluding weekends and holidays!
Weather has always been a constant topic of conversation, and this was certainly true for the Civil War generation. But it was also a matter of serious concern as it greatly affected the conduct of military campaigns.
With careful attention to the science of weather and meticulous research, Kenneth Noe has crafted what amounts to a “weather history” of the American Civil War that brings new perspectives to the war’s course and would certainly have resonated with everyone from generals to privates to the folks at home.
Noe’s book makes a striking contribution that assesses the impact of weather along with certain unusual climate conditions on the conduct of the war generally and specifically on strategy and logistics. For students of the Civil War, and with apologies to Bob Dylan, we need Ken Noe to know which way the wind blows.
Traditional histories of the Civil War describe the conflict as a war between North and South. Kenneth W. Noe suggests it should instead be understood as a war between the North, the South, and the weather. In The Howling Storm, Noe retells the history of the conflagration with a focus on the ways in which weather and climate shaped the outcomes of battles and campaigns. He further contends that events such as floods and droughts affecting the Confederate home front constricted soldiers' food supply, lowered morale, and undercut the government's efforts to boost nationalist sentiment. By contrast, the superior equipment…
As a law professor, I always regretted one aspect of the severely edited case reports in the textbooks that I taught from. Eager to get to the main point— analyzing the law that would govern the decision—they seemed to give only the most cursory account of the interesting parts of the story: what happened, who made it happen, and whom did it happen to? I worried that students would take on board the implicit message that the people whose lives were entangled in the law didn’t matter much compared to the law’s lofty majesty. This list and my own book represent my protest against this mistaken idea.
Fifty years ago, a federal judge in Washington State issued a decision that upended the fishing economy and culture of the Pacific Northwest. United States v. Washington, which was eventually upheld by the Supreme Court, held that treaties between the government and the tribal peoples of that region must be respected and ruled that the tribes had a right to 50% of the annual catch.
Wilkinson, one of the lawyers who advised and represented the tribal peoples, imbues his account of the lawsuit and its aftermath with Indian values and culture. Importantly, this form of storytelling includes numerous oral histories. They could serve the right reader as a sort of spiritual guide to how to behave when you, a peaceful person, find that your rights are being violated with apparent impunity.
'Billy Frank, Jr., has been celebrated as a visionary, but if we go deeper and truer, we learn that he is best understood as a plainspoken bearer of traditions, a messenger, passing along messages from his father, from his grandfather, from those further back, from all Indian people, really. They are messages about the natural world, about societies past, about this society, and about societies to come. When examined rigorously - not out of any romanticism but only out of our own enlightened self-interest - these messages can be of great practical use to us in this and future years'…
I like to say I'm a born-again pedestrian. After a childhood in car-friendly Southern California, I moved first to the San Francisco Bay Area and then to Montreal. There I discovered the pleasures of living in walkable cities, and over the years I've explored them in a series of books about people, nature, and urban spaces in which the problems of spread-out, concrete-heavy cities take a front-row seat. The impact of the way we've built our cities over the last 100 years is becoming apparent, as carbon dioxide rises, driving climate changes. We must change the way we live, and the books I suggest give some insights about what to do and what not to do.
David Owen cares about cities and climate change, but the solution he suggests may seem counter-intuitive. At least it seemed so to me, until I began to look around at my own relatively sustainable city, Montreal. Owen argues that dense cities are really more environmentally friendly than spread out ones, and if we're going to get a handle on carbon emissions we are going to have to live closer together. He doesn't advocate high rises all over as Le Corbusiier would, but a mixture of housing heights tied to effective public transportation. He presents workable ideas that can change the world.
In this remarkable challenge to conventional thinking about the environment, David Owen argues that the greenest community in the United States is not Portland, Oregon, or Snowmass, Colorado, but New York, New York. Most Americans think of crowded cities as ecological nightmares, as wastelands of concrete and garbage and diesel fumes and traffic jams. Yet residents of compact urban centers, Owen shows, individually consume less oil, electricity, and water than other Americans. They live in smaller spaces, discard less trash, and, most important of all, spend far less time in automobiles. Residents of Manhattan- the most densely populated place in…
I am a highly experienced outdoorsman, musician, songwriter, and backcountry guide who chose teaching as a day job. As a writer, however, I am a promoter of creative and literary nonfiction, especially nonfiction that features a thematic thread, whether it be philosophical, conservation, historical, or even unique experiential. The thread I used for thirty years of teaching high school and honors English was the thread of Conservation, as exemplified by authors like Aldo Leopold, Rachel Carson, Edward O. Wilson, Al Gore, Henry David Thoreau, as well as many other more contemporary authors.
I felt like I was actually in the Alaskan wilds, ocean kayaking, hiking, camping, and exploring while reading Kim Heacox’s book. His descriptions, sensory imagery, and recounting of adventure and experiences both on and off the water made me feel like I was on the trip with him.
His interaction with wild animals was amazing and often was so exciting that it gave me chills. In addition, I enjoyed learning much about the amazing cultural and natural history of Alaska. The places, the people, and even the ancient past all came to life as I lost myself in this wonderful compilation of essays.
Throughout the book ran the poignant thread of human impact and change, which made me more aware and ready to vote for and write for change.
In this coming-of-middle-age memoir, Kim Heacox, writing in the tradition of Abbey, McPhee, and Thoreau, discovers an Alaska reborn from beneath a massive glacier, where flowers emerge from boulders, moose swim fjords, and bears cross crevasses with Homeric resolve. In such a place Heacox finds that people are reborn too, and their lives begin anew with incredible journeys, epiphanies, and successes. All in an America free of crass commercialism and overdevelopment.
Braided through the larger story are tales of gold prospectors and the cabin they built sixty years ago; John Muir and his intrepid terrier, Stickeen; and a dynamic geology…
