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8 Weeks to Optimum Health
A Proven Program for Taking Full Advantage of
Your Body's Natural Healing Power

by Andrew Weil, M.D.

Book Description
In Eight Weeks to Optimum Health, Dr. Andrew Weil translates the brilliant insights and discoveries he outlined in his acclaimed bestseller, Spontaneous Healing, into a practical plan of action: a week-by-week, step-by-step program for enhancing and protecting present and lifelong health. The Eight-Week Program sets up a foundation for healthy living that will keep your body's natural healing system in peak working order. With clearly defined and authoritatively informed recommendations, Dr. Weil explains how to

¸  Build a lifestyle that protects you from premature illness and disability
¸  Fine-tune your current eating habits so that your diet is more nutritious
¸  Walk and stretch in regimens that satisfy weekly exercise requirements
¸  Safeguard your healing system by adding four antioxidant supplements--vitamin C and E, selenium, and mixed carotenes--to your diet
¸  Incorporate five basic breathing exercises for greater relaxation and energy
¸  Benefit from visualization, overcome sleeping problems, and test and filter your water supply
¸  Make art, music, and the natural world more important parts of your life


 

 
50 Ways to Save the Ocean
Inner Ocean Action Guide
by David Helvarg (Author), Philippe Cousteau (Foreword), Jim Toomey (Illustrator)

The oceans, and the challenges they face, are so vast that it’s easy to feel powerless to protect them. 50 Ways to Save the Ocean, written by veteran environmental journalist David Helvarg, focuses on practical, easily-implemented actions everyone can take to protect and conserve this vital resource. Well-researched, personal, and sometimes whimsical, the book addresses daily choices that affect the ocean's health: what fish should and should not be eaten; how and where to vacation; storm drains and driveway run-off; protecting local water tables; proper diving, surfing, and tide pool etiquette; and supporting local marine education. Helvarg also looks at what can be done to stir the waters of seemingly daunting issues such as toxic pollutant runoff; protecting wetlands and sanctuaries; keeping oil rigs off shore; saving reef environments; and replenishing fish reserves.



 

 


100% Pure Florida Fiction

Edited by Susan Hubbard and Robley Wilson

This anthology of modern Florida fiction showcases the work of 21 writers, including such literary lights as Frederick Barthelme, Alison Lurie, Jill McCorkle, Peter Meinke, and Joy Williams, as well as that of new and emerging writers. Sifting through over 600 stories in books, magazines, literary journals, and the internet, the editors selected the best Florida fiction of the century’s last decades.
What these stories have in common, of course, is a Florida setting--but a Florida so strongly evoked that it is more character than place. In these stories Florida is sinister, full of alligators, creeping plants, heavy clouds, noir cops and con artists; it is the surreal spread of theme parks, condominiums, and strip malls; and it is a paradise--lost, regained, and remembered--of sea, sun, hammock, forest, and glade.
100% Pure Florida Fiction is the perfect literary companion for Florida travels, armchair and actual, from the Panhandle to Key West and a dozen places in between. And it is proof that Florida is the stuff good stories are made of.
 


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147 Practical Tips for Teaching Sustainability
by Brian Dunbar and William M Timpson (Author)

All who work with sustainability issues realize that it is a community project. We must decide collectively about the earth and its future. As a community — be it a geographic, social, academic, or professional community — we need to know where to begin, how to collaboratively work, and where to find resources.

Most of us belong to communities that are concerned about sustainability issues, but do not have that as their primary mandate, such as a business, a history class, or a civic group. These groups have a tremendous opportunity to incorporate sustainability awareness into their activities. And this volume will help find those opportunities and make the best use of group resources.



 

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AIA Guide to the Architecture of Washington, D.C.
by Christopher Weeks (Author)

From Library Journal
Washington possesses a rich architectural heritage that spans well over two centuries. This guidebook, initially commissioned by the Washington Metropolitan Chapter of the American Institute of Architects (AIA) in 1965 and last updated in 1974, provides a welcome introduction to the architecture of the nation's capital. Organized into 17 walking tours, over 450 structures are concisely described and professionally photographed. Some of the city's newer, mediocre buildings are given more attention than they deserve; the city's unfortunate penchant for constructing new buildings behind historic facades receives scant criticism; there are no photographs of building interiors; and buildings located outside of the district's boundaries (such as Dulles Airport) have been excluded from this edition. Despite these quibbles, this is a significant reference tool for Washingtonians that fills a major void.
H. Ward Jandl, National Park Svc., Washington, D.C.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
 


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Animal Skins
by Tina Lombard (Author)

Three stories on three continents are intertwined around a central theme of mankind's imminent demise due to irresponsible and reckless behavior. It's also got a bit of romance and humor thrown in. Begun by an English professor on a short trip to Europe shortly before the London terrorist bombings, Animal Skins examines modern terrorism along with human errors over time--primarily errors of arrogance in its treatment of the environment. Sensitive characters express various types of self-loathing as a response. Then there is the source of spiritual strength, a tree, Elixia... http://elixia2.tripod.com/



 

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Animal, Vegetable, Miracle
A Year of Food Life

by Barbara Kingsolver, Camille Kingsolver, Steven L. Hopp

From Bookmarks Magazine
In this very topical memoir, Kingsolver has penned a "heroic story" that demonstrates how "growing your own fruits and vegetables, with people you love, can be as rewarding an experience as any on the face of the earth" (
San Francisco Chronicle). It also may mark the first time fresh asparagus has been documented with such rapture. The author's passion and narrative prowess make Animal an entertaining, often page-turning read. Her biologist husband Steven offers pithy sidebars about the politics of sustainable agriculture, as well as advice on how to make a change at home. Eldest daughter Camille supplies simple, nutritious recipes. Their combined efforts resulted in nearly universal praise from the critics.
Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc.



 

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Aquarium

by Diane Cook (Photographer), Len Jenshel (Photographer), Todd Newberry (Contributor), Lawerence Weschler (Contributor)

From Booklist
Cook and Jenshel, wife and husband, work together on large projects, she in black and white, he in color. Turning to water after a project about volcanoes, they settled on two approaches, one concerned with ice, the other with immense aquariums--hence, one with pure nature, the other with nature humanly constrained. Their aquarium pictures are gorgeous, thoughtful, and provocative. At first the black-and-whites seem more artificial and abstract, especially in the subtly turbulent image of a tiger plunging after a pumpkin, which is virtually impossible to decipher without a written explanation. But it is almost as hard to "decode" the adjacent color image of a spotlighted shark lunging toward the viewer. Other color pictures are forthrightly painterly: illuminist (a redheaded woman watches identically red jellyfish), magical realist (a baby and a turtle in a seeming face-off), and, of course, surrealist (the giant fish-nose "invading" a sunken classical Greek city). Biologist Todd Newberry's essay and the interview-afterword raise piquant questions about the aquarium experience for inhabitants as well as spectators. Ray Olson
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

 


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Architecture in a Climate of Change
by Peter Smith (Author)

From the Publisher
He calls for changes in the way we build. For change to be widely accepted there have to be convincing reasons why long established practices should be replaced. In the first part of the book he sets out those reasons by arguing that there is convincing evidence that climate changes now under way are primarily due to human activity in releasing carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Buildings are particularly implicated in this process and so it is appropriate that the design and construction process should be a prime target in the war against catastrophic climate change. The book is designed to promote a creative partnership between the professions to produce buildings which achieve optimum conditions for their inhabitants whilst making minimum demands on fossil based energy. Peter Smith has written extensively on the subject and is well known in the field. He is responsible for introducing the compulsory sustainable element of the course in the UK. He is Chairman of the RIBA Environment and Energy Committee, the RIBA Sustainable Features Committee and Vice Chairman of the Sustainable Development Committee.
 


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The Art of Spiritual Rock Gardening
by Donna E. Schaper (Author), Simon Dorrell (Author)

Amherst Bulletin
"...full of spirit, intellect and passion, Donna Schaper takes us with her as she walks and works in her garden."

The Blue Guide to Museums and Galleries of New York
"Simon Dorrell is one of England's premier garden painters."

Gunilla Norris, author of Being Home and Journeying in Place: Reflections from a Country Garden
"Donna Schaper skips her stones through historical and horticultural facts, philosophical and human musings in a down-to-earth and lighthearted way."

Beatrice Bruteau, author of What We Can Learn from the East
"A great bedside book and a perfect gift book."

Amherst Bulletin
Her garden meditations surprise, stimulate and sustain us.
 


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The Better World Handbook
From Good Intentions to Everyday Actions

by Ellis Jones, Ross Haenfler, Brett Johnson, Brian Klocke (Contributor)

Book Description
It would be a perfect world if everyone could quit their jobs and devote themselves fully to the causes they believed in. The Better World Handbook shows ordinary, caring people how to live out their values and have a life as well! The principle behind this informative and user-friendly guide is to incorporate everyday activism into even the most mundane areas of our busy lives-like grocery shopping, banking, eating, reading the newspaper, and working.



 

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Beyond the Human Species

The Life of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother
Georges Van Vrekhem

Beyond the Human Species contains many pages that send one’s heart soaring with inspiration. It provided me with one of the richest reading experiences I have ever had on divine transformation of the species in general, and the work of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother in particular. Those who want to embark on and participate in the greatest spiritual adventure of all time will find a lot that rewards in this solidly researched and inspiringly written work.”–Attunement, A Journal of Sound, Vibration, and Divine Transformation, Jan/Feb. 1999

“...I have been reading the book, and have been struck by the readability of this occult account. By the time the reader has read the first half of Van Vrekhem’s book...he or she will be getting into the even more fascinating, at times incredible denouement, its gathering momentum, its climax, and the sequel that shows us humanity as if poised on the crest of a giant wave.... A top quality of Georges Van Vrekhems’ book is truly its clarity. The story it tells is so easy to follow it flows without any block to the reader’s understanding.”–Claire Walker, Ph.D., The Journal of Religion and Psychical Research


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Biomimicry
Innovation Inspired by Nature
By Janine M. Benyus

Biomimicry is a revolutionary new science that analyzes nature's best ideas -- spider silk and prairie grass, seashells and brain cells -- and adapts them for human use. Science writer and lecturer Janine Benyus takes us into the lab and out in the field with the maverick researchers who are applying nature's ingenious solutions to the problem of human survival: stirring vats of proteins to unleash their signaling power in computers; analyzing how spiders manufacture a waterproof fiber five times stronger than steel; studying how electrons in a leaf cell convert sunlight to fuel in trillionths of a second; discovering miracle drugs by observing what animals eat -- and much more.

The products of biomimicry are things we can all use -- medicines, "smart" computers, super-strong materials, profitable and earth-friendly business. Biomimicry eloquently shows that the answers are all around us.

Links to interview with Janine M. Benyus:
http://www.annonline.com/interviews/971218/

Link to information on award winning video based on book:
http://www.bullfrogfilms.com/catalog/bmic.html

 


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Biopiracy
The Plunder of Nature and Knowledge
by Vandana Shiva

Book Description
In her latest book, award-winning scientist and activist Dr. Vandana Shiva argues that genetic engineering and the cloning of organisms, far from being socially useful, are "the ultimate expression of the commercialization of science and the commodification of nature."

"In the era of genetic engineering and patents, life itself is being colonized," says Shiva. She describes the hidden history of genetically engineered organisms, from Herman the transgenic dairy bull, to Tracy, the genetically engineered sheep that "lays golden eggs."--This text refers to the Paperback edition.



 

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Birth of the Chaordic Age

by Dee W. Hock (Author)

From AudioFile
In a powerful memoir, a maverick manager tells how he overcame banking's rigid lending culture to create the electronic payment system we now know as VISA. His strategies for building trailblazing teams are illustrated by fascinating stories, all laced with insights that make the lessons vivid and understandable. The title suggests a broad, abstract agenda for the program--a history of how command and control organizations change into the organic systems required by today's non-linear organizations, organizations he calls "chaordic." But the program is more about the author's journey than the management transformation. It's a riveting story, read with profound understanding by one of today's best voices, a story of a well-lived life at the center of an important societal revolution. T.W. © AudioFile 2001, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.



 

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Black Miami in the Twentieth Century
Florida History and Culture Series
by Marvin Dunn (Author)

The first book devoted to the history of African Americans in south Florida and their pivotal role in the growth and development of Miami, Black Miami in the Twentieth Century traces their triumphs, drudgery, horrors, and courage during the first 100 years of the city's history. Firsthand accounts and over 130 photographs, many of them never published before, bring to life the proud heritage of Miami's black community.

Beginning with the legendary presence of black pirates on Biscayne Bay, Marvin Dunn sketches the streams of migration by which blacks came to account for nearly half the city’s voters at the turn of the century. From the birth of a new neighborhood known as "Colored Town," Dunn traces the blossoming of black businesses, churches, civic groups, and fraternal societies that made up the black community. He recounts the heyday of "Little Broadway" along Second Avenue, with photos and individual recollections that capture the richness and vitality of black Miami's golden age between the wars.

A substantial portion of the book is devoted to the Miami civil rights movement, and Dunn traces the evolution of Colored Town to Overtown and the subsequent growth of Liberty City. He profiles voting rights, housing and school desegregation, and civil disturbances like the McDuffie and Lozano incidents, and analyzes the issues and leadership that molded an increasingly diverse community through decades of strife and violence. In concluding chapters, he assesses the current position of the community--its socioeconomic status, education issues, residential patterns, and business development--and considers the effect of recent waves of immigration from Latin America and the Caribbean.

Dunn combines exhaustive research in regional media and archives with personal interviews of pioneer citizens and longtime residents in a work that documents as never before the life of one of the most important black communities in the United States.
 


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Blessed Unrest
How the Largest Movement in the World Came into Being and Why No One Saw It Coming
by Paul Hawken (Author)

From Booklist
*Starred Review* The profusion of good causes and the nonprofit groups that advance them can seem laughably overwhelming, but without altruistic grass-roots efforts, the world would be a far less merciful place. Environmentalist Hawken believes that we are in the midst of a world-changing rise of activist groups, all "working toward ecological sustainability and social justice." Rather than an ideological or centralized movement, this coalescence is a spontaneous and organic response to the recognition that environmental problems are social-justice problems. Writing with zest, clarity, and a touch of wonder, Hawken compares this gathering of forces to the human immune system. Just as antibodies rally when the body is under threat, people are joining together to defend life on Earth. Hawken offers a fascinating history of our perception of nature and human rights and assesses the role indigenous cultures are playing in the quest for ecological responsibility and economic fairness. Hawken also presents an unprecedented map to this new "social landscape" that includes a classification system defining astonishingly diverse concerns, ranging from farming to child welfare, ocean preservation, and beyond. Fresh and informative, Hawken's inspired overview charts much that is right in the world. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
 


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Born With a Bang

The Universe Tells Our Cosmic Story (Sharing Nature With Children Book)
by Jennifer Morgan (Author), Dana Lynne Andersen (Illustrator)

Edgar Mitchell, Apollo 14 astronaut, author
"When returning from the Moon, I experienced directly and emotionally the personal connection to the Universe described by Jennifer Morgan."

Card catalog description
Presents a history of the universe, from the Big Bang to the formation of Earth, in the form of a letter written by the thirteen-billion-year-old universe itself to an Earth child. --This text refers to the Paperback edition.



 

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The Botany of Desire
A Plant's-Eye View of the World
by Michael Pollan (Author)

From Publishers Weekly
Erudite, engaging and highly original, journalist Pollan's fascinating account of four everyday plants and their coevolution with human society challenges traditional views about humans and nature. Using the histories of apples, tulips, potatoes and cannabis to illustrate the complex, reciprocal relationship between humans and the natural world, he shows how these species have successfully exploited human desires to flourish. "It makes just as much sense to think of agriculture as something the grasses did to people as a way to conquer the trees," Pollan writes as he seamlessly weaves little-known facts, historical events and even a few amusing personal anecdotes to tell each species' story. For instance, he describes how the apple's sweetness and the appeal of hard cider enticed settlers to plant orchards throughout the American colonies, vastly expanding the plant's range. He evokes the tulip craze of 17th-century Amsterdam, where the flower's beauty led to a frenzy of speculative trading, and explores the intoxicating appeal of marijuana by talking to scientists, perusing literature and even visiting a modern marijuana garden in Amsterdam. Finally, he considers how the potato plant demonstrates man's age-old desire to control nature, leading to modern agribusiness's experiments with biotechnology. Pollan's clear, elegant style enlivens even his most scientific material, and his wide-ranging references and charming manner do much to support his basic contention that man and nature are and will always be "in this boat together."

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
 


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Break Through

From the Death of Environmentalism to the Politics of Possibility
by Michael Shellenberger; Ted Nordhaus

Amazon.com Review
In the fall of 2004, two young environmentalists, Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus, triggered a firestorm of controversy with their essay, "The Death of Environmentalism." In it they argued that the politics that dealt with acid rain and smog can't deal with global warming. Society has changed, and our politics have not kept up. Environmentalism must die, they concluded, so that something new can be born. Now, three years later, Break Through delivers on the authors' promise to articulate a new politics for a new century, one focused on aspirations, not complaints, human possibility, not limits.

If environmentalists and progressives are to seize the moment offered by the collapse of the Bush presidency, they must break from the politics of limits, and grapple with some inconvenient truths of their own. The old pollution and conservation paradigms have failed. The nations that ratified the Kyoto protocol have seen their greenhouse gas emissions go up, not down. And tropical rain forest deforestation has accelerated.

What the new ecological crises demand is not that we constrain human power but unleash it. Overcoming global warming demands not pollution control but rather a new kind of economic development. We cannot tear down the old energy economy before building the new one. The invention of the Internet and microchips, the creation of the space program, the birth of the European Union--those breakthroughs were only made possible by big and bold investments in the future.

The era of small thinking is over, the authors claim. We must go beyond small-bore environmentalism and interest-group liberalism to create a politics focused as much on uncommon greatness as the common good.

Break Through offers more than policy prescriptions and demands more than casual consideration. With its challenge to conventional environmentalist, conservative, and progressive thought, and its proposal for a politics of possibility, Break Through will influence the political debate for years to come.
 


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Butterflies Through Binoculars
The East (Butterflies Through Binoculars Series)
by Jeffrey Glassberg

This magnificent field guide is the latest addition to the exciting series that is revolutionizing the way we look at butterflies. Greatly expanding on Butterflies Through Binoculars: The Boston-New York-Washington Region--identified by Defenders of Wildlife Magazine as "the first to focus on netless butterflying" and called " a clear winner" by the Audubon Naturalist--Glassberg here shows us how to find, identify, and enjoy all of the butterflies native to the eastern half of the United States and southeastern Canada. This guide:
*Combines the immediacy and vividness of actual photographs of living butterflies with the traditional field guide format
*Emphasizes conservation over collection
*Includes 630 color photographs, arranged on 72 color plates, of butterflies in the wild
*Provides adjacent color maps that show where each species occurs in a given locality and for how much of the year
*Supplies entirely new field marks for butterfly identification
*Demonstrates how to identify subjects by way of the key characteristics butterflies are likely to display in their natural settings
*Shows how species can be recognized both from above and below
*Explains how to differentiate between males and females.

For butterfly enthusiasts, for bird watchers who want to add a new dimension to their hobby, for anyone who is simply interested in exploring the wilds of their own back yard, this new field guide offers hours of delightful help and instruction.
 


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The Call of Service

by Robert Coles (Author)

From Library Journal
Coles is the prolific and Pulitzer Prize-winning author of such works as The Spiritual Life of Children ( LJ 11/1/90). Here he examines idealism, the drive that leads people to be of service to others. This service takes a variety of forms, from the formal (e.g., the Peace Corps) to simple volunteer work in hospitals, schools, and the like. Coles makes the subject interesting by letting the people who serve talk about their work. These doers, including Coles himself, tell of the satisfactions and the hazards of service. Let it be known that idealism or service is not a one-way street, Coles maintains. Those who give are as much receivers and learners. This engaging and inspiring book is highly recommended. Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 5/15/93.
- John Moryl, Yeshiva Univ. Lib., New York
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
 


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The Calusa and Their Legacy
South Florida People and Their Environment

by Darcie A. MacMahon and William H. Marquardt
 

From the Publisher
"The Calusa and Their Legacy is the first popular book focusing on the Calusa Indians, their ancestors, and the coastal water world in which they lived. It also takes a look at the arts and culture of contemporary south Florida Indian people--the Seminole and Miccosukee. This wonderfully illustrated volume is a delightful rendering of one of the truly unique archaeological and natural areas in the Americas. Anyone interested in North American Indians, Florida, and the natural history of coastal environments of yesterday and today will love this book."--From the foreword, by Jerald T. Milanich

"Finally, a well-researched and entertaining look at the grand procession of life that has been flourishing in south Florida's estuaries for thousands of years. This book masterfully describes the wondrous and little-known stories of its inhabitants--from plankton to mangroves to the ancient Calusa Indians to modern-day people."--Carol Newcomb-Jones, Florida Gulf Coast University
 


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Challenging Nature
The Clash of Science and Spirituality at the New Frontiers of Life
by Lee M. Silver

From Booklist
The archetype of mortal defiance, Prometheus has found a new champion. Outspoken molecular biologist Silver argues that only scientists willing to join Prometheus in challenging divine prohibitions will ever deliver on the promise of new genetic technologies. Although despairing of ever expunging spiritual beliefs from liberal democracies altogether, Silver hopes that a truly open and rational public dialogue will expose the folly of continuing to allow religious fundamentalists to impose needless restrictions on scientific research. It particularly galls Silver that such religionists often confuse an ill-informed public by cleverly wrapping their religious objectives in scientific rhetoric. Surprisingly, Silver sees the Christian obstructionists of the Religious Right finding allies among the left-leaning, post-Christian devotees of nature. Both groups recoil from the prospect of using new science to improve human genes or to reengineer the plants and animals humans rely on for food. Both groups, Silver asserts, fail to realize that humans have been productively intervening in natural reproductive processes for millennia--and should now use available tools to do so more aggressively, both to minimize human suffering and to maximize ecological health. The relentlessness with which Silver disputes the views of his opponents will impress many readers--and alienate others. But this book will surely fuel precisely the kind of debate Silver recognizes as essential in a democracy sorting out perplexing scientific possibilities. Bryce Christensen
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
 


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Children of the Universe

Cosmic Education in the Montessori Elementary Classroom (Paperback)
by Michael Duffy (Author), D'Neil Duffy (Author), Amber Amann (Illustrator), Aline D. Wolf (Introduction)

Written by two Montessori elementary teachers, who are also teacher-trainers, this book describes in detail Maria Montessori's unique program of study for six to twelve year-olds. Montessori believed that children of this age could be properly educated only in the context of the whole of reality. As a unifying element, this curriculum embraces all the academic subjects in a way that leads students to the perspective of the oneness of all things.

In the years when their curiosity is at a peak, cosmic education guides children to examine the questions, "Who am I?" "Where did I come from?" and "Why am I here?" By promoting univeral values that can inspire them to care for the earth and work for peace, Cosmic Education can help children to see themselves, not as self-engrossed consumers in our society but as Children of the Universe with all that this image entails.
 


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Classic Cracker
Florida's Wood-Frame Vernacular  Architecture
By Ronald W. Haase

In this visually delightful book, laced with quotations from one of the best chroniclers of Florida Cracker Life, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, Ronald Haase takes us on an intimate tour of the utilitarian wooden structures constructed by early settlers in North Florida.

 



 

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A Collaboration with Nature

by Andy Goldsworthy (Author)

From Library Journal
A new generation of American and European sculptors is receiving critical and commercial attention for rediscovering, in the spirit of Duchamp's Bicycle Wheel (1913), the wealth of forms in everyday life. Variously labeled "New Object," "Metaphoric Object," "Neo-Geo," or "Simulationist," this new sculpture mimics familiar objects from industrial, domestic, and historical sources. Eight such artists are features in OBJECTives: Robert Gober, Jeff Koons, Annette Lemieux, and Haim Steinbach from New York; Grenville Davis and Judith Opie from London; Katarina Fritsch from Cologne; and Juan Munoz from Madrid. This exhibition catalog, which presents works exhibited at the Newport Harbor Art Museum in California from April to June 1990, includes exhibition histories and a selected bibliography for each artist. Goldsworthy is an extraordinarily innovative British artist who employs a range of natural materials--leaves, bark, twigs, petals, berries, rock, clay, stones, feathers, snow, ice--to create outdoor sculpture that works instinctively in nature. His range of scale is impressive, from grasses and leaves to ice spires and slate stacks. Goldsworthy records his works in the 120 full-color photographs that are the subject of this book. The delicate tensions and balance of his collaborations encourage a sharpened perception of the natural world. Goldsworthy's introduction eloquently explains his working methods and philosophy and convinces the reader that he's doing more than playing the primitive.
- Russell T. Clement, Brigham Young Univ. Lib., Provo, Ut.
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.
 


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Collapse
How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed
by Jared Diamond

From the Publisher
"In his Pulitzer Prize-winning bestseller Guns, Germs, and Steel, Jared Diamond examined how and why Western civilizations developed the technologies and immunities that allowed them to dominate much of the world. Now, Diamond probes the other side of the equation: What caused some of the great civilizations of the past to collapse into ruin, and what can we learn from their fates?" As in Guns, Germs, and Steel, Diamond weaves an all-encompassing global thesis through a series of historical-cultural narratives. Moving from the prehistoric Polynesian culture on Easter Island to the formerly flourishing Native American civilizations of the Anasazi and the Maya, the doomed medieval Viking colony on Greenland, and finally to the modern world, Diamond traces a fundamental pattern of catastrophe, spelling out what happens when we squander our resources, when we ignore the signals our environment gives us, and when we reproduce too fast or cut down too many trees. Environmental damage, climate change, rapid population growth, unstable trade partners, and pressure from enemies were all factors in the demise of the doomed societies, but other societies found solutions to those same problems and persisted.
 


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Community by Design
New Urbanism for Suburbs and Small Communities
By Kenneth B. Hall and Gerald A. Porterfield

From the Back Cover
Community is not an accumulation of buildings with interstate access, neighborhood not a housing project convenient to shopping. Everyone knows what suburban sprawl looks like and the problems is creates. This book knows answers. The First Step to Communities that Work -Create maximum livability, cohesiveness, and style in developments outside cities. In these pages, you’ll find recommendations for creating true neighborhoods within the context of the existing suburban landscape—in an illustrated, step-by-step, case-study format.

 



 

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The Complete Guide to Environmental Careers in the 21st Century

by Environmental Careers Organization (Author)

Chapters examine the entire spectrum of career fields, with each chapter providing an "at a glance" summary of the field; discussion of history and background along with current issues and trends; examination of specific career opportunities and the educational requirements for each; salary ranges by type of employer, level of experience, and responsibility; and an extensive list of resources for further information. Fields profiled include: planning, education and communications, energy management and conservation, fisheries and wildlife management, forestry, land and water conservation, and others.

Written at a broad introductory level, The Complete Guide to Environmental Careers in the 21st Century provides an informative and inspirational starting place from which to learn more about specific fields. For recent college graduates, students, volunteers, librarians, career counselors, or anyone interested in working to protect the environment, it is an essential reference.
 


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The Consumer's Guide to Effective Environmental Choices
By Michael Brower and Warren Leon

From School Library Journal
YA-Brower and Leon, along with input from their colleagues, present statistics, describe solutions, and endorse steps for readers to take to live more ecologically based lifestyles as consumers of the Earth's resources. They encourage individuals to go beyond basic recycling and to look at changing the policies of government and large institutions, explain how negatively consumer choices can affect the environment, and present a quantitative analysis of which items most affect the environment. Important information is dramatically put forth in highlighted boxes of lists. The authors stress the fact that choice is the optimal word for today's consumers and some choices are easier than others. They wisely point out that some consumers don't have the leeway to make what might be considered the most ecological of choices available and present different styles of compromise in a variety of situations. A list of active Web sites for additional information and other pertinent resources is appended. Young adults interested in effecting change will find sources to help in their search as well as proven research to help them make their own decisions.
Pam Johnson, Fairfax County Public Library, VA
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

 


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Converging Stories
Race, Ecology, And Environmental Justice In American Literature
by Jeffrey Myers (Author)

Racism and environmental destruction as convergent literary themes

In American literature, our discourse on the themes of race and ecology is too narrowly focused on the twentieth century and does not adequately take into account how these themes are interrelated, argues Jeffrey Myers. His new study broadens the field by looking at writings from the nineteenth century. This was an era, Myers reminds us, of renewed violence and oppression against people of color and of unprecedented environmental destruction on a continental scale. Myers focuses particularly on works that engage the notion that white racism and alienation from nature sprang from a common source.

Myers first discusses the paradox of Thomas Jefferson’s agrarian vision, by which ideas espoused in his Notes on the State of Virginia can support either environmental destruction or conservation, a democratic or a racist society. Next, by looking race-critically at Thoreau’s Walden and The Maine Woods, then ecocritically at Charles Chesnutt’s The Conjure Woman and Zitkala-Sa’s Old Indian Legends and American Indian Stories, Myers traces the development of a new resistance to racial and ecological hegemony. He concludes by discussing how the antiracist, egalitarian ecocentricity in these earlier writers can be seen in contemporary writer Eddy L. Harris’s Mississippi Solo. Myers’s discussion encompasses other authors as well, including Ralph Waldo Emerson, John Muir, and Willa Cather.

By looking at works by Native Americans, African Americans, European Americans, and others, and by considering forms of literature beyond the traditional nature essay, Myers expands our conceptions of environmental writing and environmental justice.
 


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Cosmo Doogood's Urban Almanac
Celebrating Nature And Her Rhythms In The City
by Eric Utne

From Publishers Weekly
Channeling the spirit of Ben Franklin’s Poor Richard, the founding publisher of Utne magazine (formerly known as the Utne Reader) brings together a delightful assortment of folksy knowledge in this guide for the urban citizen. In charging readers to "Look Up," "Look Out" and "Look In," Utne (aka Cosmo Doogood) hopes that city dwellers will connect better with themselves and their surroundings: "we are always in nature, wherever we are." Opening sections consider the pleasures of walking, the possibilities of gardening and the probabilities of wildlife sighting within city limits; the volume then becomes an eclectic and fascinating day planner, in which one can record one’s engagements on pages that also serve up poems, photographs, trivia (e.g., January is mail-order gardening month), recipes (Caprese salad; baked apples), quotes ("Do not dwell in the past, do not dream of the future, concentrate the mind on the present moment"), travel suggestions (New Orleans’s Magazine Street), thumbnail biographies (Pharrell Williams; Rembrandt), history lessons (on the birth of the Transcendentalist Movement) and "civilizing ideas" (citizen wisdom councils; community gardens). There’s something interesting on every page of this fun and useful guide.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved
 


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Courage for the Earth
Writers, Scientists, and Activists Celebrate the Life and Writing of Rachel Carson
by Peter Matthiessen (Editor)

From Booklist
Rachel Carson is remembered as a hero for raising the alarm over ocean pollution and pesticides, and she is cherished for the sheer beauty of her writing. In introducing this thoughtful tribute to Carson marking the centennial of her birth, Matthiessen writes with stirring insight into Carson's spirit and achievements, setting the tone for the dozen affecting essays that follow. Biographer Linda Lear attests to Carson's "literary genius" and profound sense of responsibility. John Elder delves into Carson's poetic language. Al Gore writes with particular empathy about the vicious attacks Carson endured when Silent Spring was published, in 1962, a work that elegantly yet ferociously questions business as usual in light of environmental concerns. Edward O. Wilson calls Carson "valiant," and Terry Tempest Williams praises Carson's "moral courage." Brought down at 56 by cancer linked to the pollution she decried, Carson wrote exactingly, rhapsodically, and presciently: "It is one of the ironies of our time that, while concentrating on the defense of our country against enemies from without, we should be so heedless of those who would destroy it from within." Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
 


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The Courage to Teach
Exploring the Inner Landscape of A Teacher's Life
By Parker J. Palmer

Teachers choose their vocation for reasons of the heart, because they care deeply about their students and about their subject. But the demands of teaching cause too many educators to lose heart. Is it possible to take heart in teaching once more so that we can continue to do what good teachers always do -- give heart to our students?

In The Courage to Teach , Parker Palmer takes teachers on an inner journey toward reconnecting with their vocation and their students -- and recovering their passion for one of the most difficult and important of human endeavors.



 

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Crackers in the Glade

Life and Times in the Old Evergaldes
By Rob Storter, Betty Savidge Briggs

"A meaningful first hand account of attitudes among a part of American culture during a time and in a location that have received less attention than many other geographical regions of the country. All of it has a simple charm . . . poignant reading."
—J. Whitfield Gibbons, NPR commentator, Living on Earth

"[Storter] closely described his coastal world (often right on the painting itself), so that what he has left to us is not merely quaint or picturesque but a true historical documentation, in word and image, of a precious world and way of life that was fading very rapidly even as he recorded it."
—from the foreword by Peter Matthiessen

"A collection of colorful vignettes . . . [rendered] with haunting clarity . . . A pleasure to leaf through."
—Cleveland Chronicle-Telegram
 


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Cradle to Cradle

Remaking the Way We Make Things
By William McDonough & Michael Braungart

Environmentalists are normally the last people to be called shortsighted, yet that's essentially what architect McDonough and chemist Braungart contend in this clarion call for a new kind of ecological consciousness. The authors are partners in an industrial design firm that devises environmentally sound buildings, equipment and products. They argue that conventional, expensive eco-efficiency measures things like recycling or emissions reduction are inadequate for protecting the long-term health of the planet. Our industrial products are simply not designed with environmental safety in mind; there's no way to reclaim the natural resources they use or fully prevent ecosystem damage, and mitigating the damage is at best a stop-gap measure. What the authors propose in this clear, accessible manifesto is a new approach they've dubbed "eco-effectiveness": designing from the ground up for both eco-safety and cost efficiency. They cite examples from their own work, like rooftops covered with soil and plants that serve as natural insulation; nontoxic dyes and fabrics; their current overhaul of Ford's legendary River Rouge factory; and the book itself, which will be printed on a synthetic "paper" that doesn't use trees. Because profitability is a requirement of the designs, the thinking goes, they appeal to business owners and obviate the need for regulatory apparatus. These shimmery visions can sound too good to be true, and the book is sometimes frustratingly short on specifics, particularly when it comes to questions of public policy and the political interests that might oppose widespread implementation of these designs. Still, the authors' original concepts are an inspiring reminder that humans are capable of much more elegant environmental solutions than the ones we've settled for in the last half-century. (Apr.) Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information
 


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The Creation
An Appeal to Save Life on Earth
by E. O. Wilson (Author)

From Booklist
Famed entomologist, humanist thinker, and cogent writer Wilson issues a forthright call for unity between religion and science in order to save the "creation," or living nature, which is in "deep trouble." Addressing his commonsensical yet ardent discourse to "Dear Pastor," he asks why religious leaders haven't made protecting the creation part of their mission. Forget about life's origins, Wilson suggests, and focus on the fact that while nature achieves "sustainability through complexity," human activities are driving myriad species into extinction, thus depleting the biosphere and jeopardizing civilization. Wilson celebrates individual species, each a "masterpiece of biology," and acutely analyzes the nexus between nature and the human psyche. In the book's frankest passages, he neatly refutes fantasies about humanity's ability to re-create nature's intricate web, and deplores the use of religious belief (God will take care of it) as an impediment to conservation. Wilson's eloquent defense of nature, insights into our resistance to environmental preservation, and praise of scientific inquiry coalesce in a blueprint for a renaissance in biology reminiscent of the technological advances engendered by the space race. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
--This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
 


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The Creek

by J. T. GLISSON (Author)

"I had met only two or three of the neighboring Crackers when I realized that isolation had done something to these people. [three dots] They have a primal quality against their background of jungle hammock, moss-hung against the tremendous silence of the scrub country. The only ingredients of their lives are the elemental things."--Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, March 1930, in a letter to Alfred S. Dashiell of Scribner's Magazine
Except for one extended black family and "one writer from up north," folks from Cross Creek were ornery, independent Crackers, J. T. Glisson writes in this memoir of growing up in the backwoods of north-central Florida. The time spanned the late twenties to the early fifties, and isolation and an abundance of mosquitoes and snakes were their claim to fame. The writer was Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings.

 


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Crimes Against Nature
by Robert F. Kennedy (Author)

From Publishers Weekly
"Of all the debates in the scientific arena… there is none in which the White House has cooked the books more than that of global warming," argues Kennedy in this harsh indictment of what he sees as the Bush administration’s assault on the environment and democracy in general. Kennedy’s investigation focuses on the undue influence of industry lobbyists (read Halliburton) on environmental standards and the government’s alleged suppression of nearly a dozen scientific reports on global warming. He maligns Bush appointees like Interior Secretary Gale Norton ("a champion of corporate welfare for three decades") and offers a cogent analysis of Christine Todd Whitman’s departure from the EPA in 2002. Although Kennedy accuses the Bush administration of using a campaign strategy that revolves around "fear-mongering," he uses fear to drive home his own points, noting things like the lethal mercury levels in tuna, pork industry pollution and insufficiently guarded chemical plants. Nevertheless, he competently ties the survival of democracy to sound environmental policy, contending that corporate power—particularly the power wielded by the oil, beef and lumber industries—must never supersede democratic institutions. Kennedy’s argument is strongest when he sticks to the facts and avoids making the kind of angry, sweeping statements that fill the concluding chapter ("Instead of can-do American ingenuity, this is the administration of "can’t do." It has constructed a philosophy of government based on self-interest run riot: It has borrowed $9 trillion from our children and looted our Treasury…"). Whether or not one agrees with these accusations, Kennedy makes a passionate case for more effective environmental controls and wraps it up with a practical vision of a free-market future "in which businesses pay all the costs of bringing their products to market," including the costs of environmental safeguards.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
 


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Crossing the Unknown Sea

by David Whyte (Author)

From Library Journal
In the midst of all the arid, bullet point-ridden business books, Whyte's stands out with its languid I'll-get-to-the-point-when-I'm-damned-good-and-ready approach. A poet, corporate trainer, and author of The Heart Aroused: Poetry and the Preservation of the Soul in Corporate America, Whyte challenges readers to remember their childhood interests and enthusiasms. He claims that this is necessary in order to escape the deadening influences of adult "musts" and "shoulds" and to recapture the passion that one needs to do good work. Whyte discusses his own career changes, from naturalist to nonprofit executive to writer/presenter/coacher. Echoing Fortgang, his main point is the popular "Do what you love and the money will follow," but he personalizes it by telling his own story and by including snippets of focused poetry (his own and others'), so that it's not as hackneyed as it may sound. Because an excerpt appeared in the March 2001 issue of O: The Oprah Magazine, there's sure to be demand in public libraries.
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
 


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Deep Economy
The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future
by Bill McKibben (Author)

From Bookmarks Magazine
In offering straightforward solutions to the looming environmental crisis, Bill McKibben has marched directly into the middle of a heated debate. Critics' personal beliefs and politics shaped their reviews, which described Deep Economy as, alternately, a "masterfully crafted, deeply thoughtful and mind-expanding treatise" (Los Angeles Times) and a "book-length sermon on what is wrong with the way we live" (San Francisco Chronicle). Some reviewers found McKibben's solutions practical and the author refreshingly unpretentious, while others considered his vision utopian and his attitude self-righteous. However, they did agree that McKibben writes compellingly—with warmth, sincerity, and a sharp sense of humor. His resolute hope for the future will resound with readers no matter where their loyalties lie. But will it change any minds?

Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc.
 


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Defiant Gardens
Making Gardens in Wartime
by Kenneth Helphand

From Booklist
*Starred Review* Gardens that ignored the rules of nature and gardeners who challenged the laws of man are vitally united in Helphand's seminal and revelatory study of life during some of the most lethal conflicts of the twentieth century. From the torturous 475-mile trench line that formed the western front in World War I to the alien landscapes of the Japanese American internment camps in the U.S. during World War II, the sites of unfathomable human brutality also gave rise to acts of uplifting horticultural resistance. Whether they were subsistence vegetable beds improbably tilled beneath barbed wire fences in Nazi-created ghettos or symbolic topiaries artistically carved from brittle desert sagebrush, each audacious example bears solemn testimony to the assertive efforts of determined soldiers, POWs, Holocaust victims, and others to vanquish war's horrors through the spiritually ennobling act of gardening. Helphand's extensively researched history of gardens in wartime illuminates the grotesque juxtaposition of willful devastation and the astonishing tenacity required to create life in the face of death.

Carol Haggas
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
 


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Design Like You Give a Damn
Architectural Responses to Humanitarian Crises
by Architecture for Humanity (Author), Kate Stohr (Editor), Cameron Sinclair (Editor)

Review
San Francisco Chronicle : Heavy on context and images, light on celebrity names, Design Like You Give a Damn is a bracing reminder that there's more to architecture than museums and posh private homes. Instead, the founders of the group Architecture for Humanity round up 77 nimble solutions to real-life problems: There are fiberglass domes for the homeless of Los Angeles, a schoolhouse in Burkina Faso with an arced steel roof that insulates the clay brick classrooms below -- even a water pump in South Africa that is powered by children playing on a merry-go-round. Truly inspirational.



 

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Designing Sustainable Communities
Learning from Village Homes
By Judy Corbett and Michael Corbett

The movement toward creating more sustainable communities has been growing for decades, and in recent years has gained new prominence with the increasing visibility of planning approaches such as the New Urbanism. Yet there are few examples of successful and time-tested sustainable communities.

Village Homes outside of Davis, California offers one such example. Built between 1975 and 1981 on 60 acres of land, it offers unique features including extensive common areas and green space; community gardens, orchards, and vineyards; narrow streets; pedestrian and bike paths; solar homes; and an innovative ecological drainage system. Authors Michael and Judy Corbett were intimately involved with the design, development, and building of Village Homes, and have resided there since 1977.
 


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Developing Ecological Consciousness

Path to a Sustainable World

by Christopher Uhl

Addressing the question, What do students need to know to become more environmentally literate and ecologically conscious?, Christopher Uhl offers an ecological, wonder-filled initiation to the universe and the planet Earth. He examines the ways in which people are damaging the earth and, in the process, their own bodies and spirits, then presents the essential tools necessary for both planetary and personal transformation.


Developing Ecological Consciousness: Paths to a Sustainable Future
 

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A Ding Darling Sampler

The Editorial Cartoons of Jay N. Darling
by Jay N. Darling (Author), Christopher D. Koss (Editor)

The Editorial Cartoons of Pulitzer Prize winning cartooning Jay N.Ding Darling. Dings cartoons provide perspective on the political issues that were prominent during his drawing career (1912-1962). A fifty-year period of incredible transitions & events for the United States, including Civil Rights, Space Exploration & 2 World Wars. 200 of his most representative cartoons in a full page, large format reproductions.



 

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The Divine Milieu

by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (Author), Sion Cowell (Author)

The essential companion to Pierre Teilhard de Chardin's The Phenomenom of Man, The Divine Milieu expands on the spiritual message so basic to his thought. He shows how man's spiritual life can become a participation in the destiny of the universe.

Teilhard de Chardin -- geologist, priest, and major voice in twentieth-century Christianity -- probes the ultimate meaning of all physical exploration and the fruit of his own inner life. The Divine Milieu is a spiritual treasure for every religion bookshelf.



 

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Down to the Waterline

Boundaries, Nature, and the Law in Florida
by Sara Warner (Author)

Do our rights end—or begin—at the water's edge?

In most states the boundary separating public waters from private uplands-the ordinary high water line (OHWL)-is a flashpoint between proponents of either property rights or public-trust protection of our water. Using Florida as a case study, Down to the Waterline is the first book-length analysis of the OHWL doctrine and its legal, technical, and cultural underpinnings. Sara Warner not only covers the historical function of the OHWL but tells how advances in science and our environmental attitudes have led us to a more complex encounter with this ancient boundary.

Florida sees a steady influx of new residents who crowd along its extensive coasts and interior shorelines-yet who also demand pristine water resources. The OHWL establishes public access and private ownership limits on some of the state's most valuable land: in economic terms, waterfront real estate; in ecological terms, marshes and wetlands. Sara Warner brings to life many of the courtroom battles fought over the OHWL through the perspectives of ranchers, outdoors enthusiasts, developers, surveyors, scientists, and policymakers.
 


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Dragon Spirit
How to Self-Market Your Dream--A Zentrepreneur's Guide
by Ron Rubin, Stuart Avery Gold

Publishers Weekly
In the company The Republic of Tea, employees are "ministers" and its tea-buying customers are "citizens." Ministers Rubin and Gold (chairman and COO, respectively) bring the same quirky perspective to their new tome, a motivational handbook that wavers between cute and cloying. The main thesis is similar to that of any number of books designed to inspire budding entrepreneurs : people should be "one with their dream," and to achieve it, they must "sell the hell out of themselves." No surprises there, but at least the authors can write, and press ahead with their insistent brightness. The book briefly gets into more serious details-e.g., the relative advantages of setting up a sole proprietorship or a joint venture-but then returns to bland exhortations. The occasional jolts of Chinese philosophy (invoking classic texts like the I Ching and Tao Te Ching) and the authors' personal stories of their international search for fabulous teas are the (tea)pot's best ingredients. Other than that, the brew is somewhat weak.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

 


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The Dream of the Earth
by Thomas Berry
 
From Publishers Weekly
This first volume in a new series, the Sierra Club Nature and Natural Philosophy Library, explores human-earth relations and seeks a new, non-anthropocentric approach to the natural world. According to cultural historian Berry, our immediate danger is not nuclear war but industrial plundering; our entire society, he argues, is trapped in a closed cycle of production and consumption. Berry points out that our perception of the earth is the product of cultural conditioning, and that most of us fail to think of ourselves as a species but rather as national, ethnic, religious or economic groups. Describing education as "a process of cultural coding somewhat parallel to genetic coding," he proposes a curriculum based on awareness of the earth. He discusses "patriarchy" as a new interpretation of Western historical development, naming four patriachies that have controlled Western history, becoming progressively destructive: the classical empires, the ecclesiastical establishment, the nation-state and the modern corporation. We must reject partial solutions and embrace profound changes toward a "biocracy" that will heal the earth, urges the author who defines problems and causes with eloquence.
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title

h Florida at St. Petersburg Lib. Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information
 


Book Cover

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Earth in Mind
On Education, Environment, and the Human Prospect
by David W. Orr (Author)
 

In Earth in Mind, noted environmental educator David W. Orr focuses not on problems in education, but on the problem of education. Much of what has gone wrong with the world, he argues, is the result of inadequate and misdirected education that:

  • alienates us from life in the name of human domination

  • causes students to worry about how to make a living before they know who they are

  • overemphasizes success and careers

  • separates feeling from intellect and the practical from the theoretical

  • deadens the sense of wonder for the created world



 

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The Earth Knows My Name
Food, Culture, and Sustainability in the Gardens of Ethnic America
by Patricia Klindienst

From Booklist
Klindienst celebrates gardens created by immigrants who resisted the intense pressure to assimilate into mainstream American society, in a lyrical account of her three-year journey to collect the stories of ethnic Americans for whom gardening is tantamount to cultural endurance. Survivors of the Pol Pot regime fled the killing fields of Cambodia for the healing fields of New England, while the Yankee inheritor of land wrested generations ago from Native Americans during the infamous Pequot Massacre of 1637 atones for that atrocity through the simple act of sharing seeds of corn with the tribe's descendants. Klindienst profiles 15 valiant and thoughtful gardeners intent on preserving their native birthright and on restoring and protecting their adopted land, individuals and families evincing a stewardship that not only resists cultural absorption but also sustains an ecological imperative. Carol Haggas
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
--This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
 


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The Earth's Blanket

Traditional Teachings for Sustainable Living (Culture, Place, and Nature)
by Nancy J. Turner

From the Publisher
"A unique and charming book that provides fascinating insights into ways of managing wild plant and animal resources. Drawing on stories and early accounts from Native people throughout northwestern North America and, above all, her own enormously rich and detailed experiences, Nancy Turner shows that these methods have great and increasing relevance for us today." - Eugene Anderson, University of California, Riverside

"The Earth's Blanket is an excellent distillation of traditional teachings and narratives. This thoroughly researched book . . . provides the necessary framework for identifying a resource management grounded in cultural traditions and wisdom and is capable of achieving a sustainable agro-ecology." - Agricultural History

"Nancy Turner has worked with and been befriended by generations of holders of our traditional teachings, and this book is a testament not only to an outstanding career but also to an outstanding human being. The Earth's Blanket demonstrates how science can be used to record Traditional Ecological Knowledge in a way that respects First Nations' cultures." - Kim Recalma-Clutesi, Elected Chief, Qualicum First Nation


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Eco-Economy
Building an Economy for the Earth
By Lester Brown

Publishers Weekly
Eco-economic theory calls for harmony between our economy and natural resources. Our current, untenable, profit-focused economic model, says Brown (Building a Sustainable Society), depletes forests, oil, farmland, topsoil, water, atmosphere and species beyond a sustainable level. Brown, founding director of the Earth Policy Institute, uses the Sumerians as an antimodel: as the land was overworked, water sources eventually disappeared. And he uses forestry as a counterexample: forests secure land and store water, acting as natural dams. Logging delivers paychecks, but doesn't consider flood damage from tree loss. Eco-economists would say that the logger and the town, while temporarily profiting, pay more in the end in rising insurance costs, flood damage to homes and infrastructure, increased taxes and disaster relief funds. The goal, presented here in convincing detail, is to design a profitable economy that accurately reflects the social cost of abuse of resources. Brown suggests shifting "taxes from income to environmentally destructive activities, such as carbon emissions." Individuals and towns should receive tax breaks for deploying solar and wind-generated power. However receptive to Brown's excellent, sophisticated proposals, many readers will wonder how they can become reality; for eco-economics to work, all world leaders would need to agree on what makes practices environmentally unsound. (Nov. 5) Forecast: In light of the current administration's poor reputation for eco-concern and its withdrawal from the Kyoto Protocol, Brown's book will do well among students, activists and the growing environmental movement. Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information
 


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The Eco Guide to Careers

that Make a Difference
By Environmental Careers Organization

Book Description
Developed by The Environmental Careers Organization (ECO, the creators of the popular Complete Guide to Environmental Careers), this new volume is unlike any careers book you've seen before. Reaching far beyond job titles and resume tips, The ECO Guide immerses you in the strategies and tactics that leading edge professionals are using to tackle pressing problems and create innovative solutions.

To bring you definitive information from the real world of environmental problem-solving, The ECO Guide has engaged some of the nation's most respected experts to explain the issues and describe what's being done about them today. You'll explore: Global climate change with Eileen Claussen, Pew Center for Global Climate Change; Biodiversity loss with Stuart Pimm, Nicholas School for the Environment at Duke University; Green Business with Stuart Hart, Kenan-Flager Business School at University of North Carolina; Ecotourism with Martha Honey, The International Ecotourism Society; Environmental Justice with Robert Bullard, Environmental Justice Center at Clark Atlanta University; Alternative Energy with Seth Dunn, Worldwatch Institute; Water Quality with Sandra Postel, Global Water Policy Project; Green Architecture with William McDonough, McDonough + Partners; and twelve other critical issues.
 


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Ecological Literacy
Educating our Children for a Sustainable World (The Bioneers Series)
by Michael K. Stone (Editor), Zenobia Barlow (Editor)

From Booklist
Sustainability is increasingly becoming a buzzword, popping up in advertising campaigns and political promises. This welcome volume, collected by the Center for Ecoliteracy in Berkeley, California, offers authoritative definitions of what sustainable living means and progressive theories for achieving it, beginning with the education of the young. The diverse selections, organized into loose thematic sections such as "Vision," are contributed by well-known leaders on the subject. Chef Alice Waters, who began a successful school-garden program, outlines the differences between fast-food and slow-food values, while educator Maurice Holt calls for a return to "the slow school," in which students are encouraged to think, feel, and understand concepts, not just memorize them. Pamela Michael, founder of River of Words, a unique nonprofit that encourages the integration of art and science in the classroom, contributes a stirring piece entitled "Helping Children Fall in Love with the Earth." Inspired, substantive, and visionary, these selections will help concerned readers focus their own discussions about sustainability and suggest new ways to implement its values in their own communities. Gillian Engberg
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
 


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Ecological Literacy

Education and the Transition to a Postmodern World
By David Orr

"David Orr's Ecological Literacy outlines brillianly and succinctly the changes that must occur in our educational systems if we are to avoid ecological disasters."



 

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The Ecology of Place

Planning for Environment, Economy, and Community
by Timothy Beatley (Author), Kristy Manning (Author)

The Ecology of Place, Timothy Beatley and Kristy Manning describe a world in which land is consumed sparingly, cities and towns are vibrant and green, local economies thrive, and citizens work together to create places of eduring value. They present a holistic and compelling approach to repairing and enhancing communities, introducing a vision of "sustainable places" that extends beyond traditional architecture and urban design to consider not just the physical layout of a development but the broad set of ways in which communities are organized and operate. Chapters examine:

  • the history and context of current land use problems, along with the concept of "sustainable places"

  • the ecology of place and ecological policies and actions

  • local and regional economic development

  • links between land-use and community planning and civic involvement

  • specific recommendations to help move toward sustainability
     


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Ecosystems of Florida

by Ronald L. Myers (Author), John J. Ewel (Editor)

In this first comprehensive guide to the state’s natural resources in sixty years, thirty top scholars describe the character, relationships, and importance of Florida’s ecosystems, the organisms that inhabit them, the forces that maintain them, and the agents that threaten them. From pine flatwoods to coral reef, Ecosystems of Florida provides a detailed, comprehensive, authoritative account of the peninsular state’s complex, fragile environments.

In straightforward text, charts, maps, and illustrations, Ecosystems of Florida offers broad vision and detailed expertise to naturalists, wildlife managers, land use planners, foresters, and other professional and general readers interested in Florida’s environmental resources. For the foreseeable future, it will serve as the authoritative guide to the state’s environment and to those who would work with it.
 


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Empty Cages

Facing the Challenge of Animal Rights
by Tom Regan (Author), Jeffery Moussaieff Masson (Author)

From Publishers Weekly
According to this friendly but uncompromising manifesto, "being kind" and "avoiding cruelty" to animals is not enough. Regan proscribes instead a strict regime of "animal rights," forbidding any exploitation of animals whatsoever-for food, clothing, entertainment or even medical research of great benefit to humans. Regan, a leading philosopher in the animal rights movement, intends the book as a popular companion to his scholarly treatments of the subject. Animal rights activists are, he asserts, "Norman Rockwell Americans," not violent zealots, and while he describes a number of animal rights conversion experiences ("nothing else existed, just the elephant's gaze...looking through him"), his target audience is the unpersuaded "muddler" who needs step-by-step convincing to follow this path. He argues that all animals capable of caring about what happens to them-mammals, birds and (maybe) fish-are "subjects-of-a-life" and therefore on an equal moral footing with humans. The philosophical underpinnings of Regan's analysis are not overly rigorous, his treatment of counter arguments is sometimes impatient and exasperated, and his sentimentalization of animals ("our culture teaches us not to see hens like Penny and Sweet Pea as distinct individuals") can seem cloying. The real force of his appeal comes from his exposés of the heinous cruelty meted out to animals in factory farms, mink ranches, hunting preserves, dolphin shows (they're not having fun, they're desperate for fish) and research labs. Outrage sometimes gets the better of him ("is there no limit to the depths of betrayal to which we humans can sink?"), but many readers will experience equally visceral reactions.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
 


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The End of Nature

by Bill Mckibben

Review
"Whatever we once thought Nature was--wildness, God, a simple place free from human thumbprints, or an intricate machinery sustaining life on Earth--we have now given it a kick that will change it forever. Humanity has stepped across a threshold. In his free-ranging and provocative book, Bill McKibben explores the philosophies and technologies that have brought us here, and he shows how final a crossing we have made." --James Gleick, author of Chaos -- Review --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.



 

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Energy Efficient Buildings
Architecture, Engineering, and Environment
by Dean Hawkes (Author), Wayne Forster (Author)

Exploring the evolving relationship between architecture and engineering, this book examines the environmental function and performance of buildings in the twenty-first century. Critical studies of outstanding recent building projects around the world reveal the many innovative ways designers can integrate architecture and engineering to produce buildings that are both attractive and energy efficient. 180 color and 120 black-and-white illustrations.


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Energy Medicine
The Scientific Basis of Bioenergy Therapies Forward
by Candace, Ph.D. Pert

Book Description
There is growing interest world wide in the field of mind-body medicine and the effect which the natural "energy forces" within the body play in the maintenance of normal health and wellbeing. This in turn has led to interest in how these energies or forces may be channelled to assist in healing and restoration to health. This book, written by a well known scientist with a degree in biophysics and a PhD in biology, brings together for the first time evidence from a wide range of disciplines which is beginning to provide an acceptable explanation for the energetic exchanges that take place in all therapies.



 

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Environment

by Peter H. Raven (Author), Linda R. Berg (Author), David M. Hassenzahl (Author)

From the Back Cover
Environment, Third Edition is for the Environmental Science, Environmental Studies, Natural Resources Conservation, or Ecology and Mankind courses found in the biology, botany, zoology, geology, agriculture, geography, or environmental departments. This book was written to present today's students with the enormous environmental challenges facing our world in the hope that they will read, think, discuss, reach conclusions, and act on these issues. Environment, Third Edition is a serious science text with an appealing writing style that is accessible to students from all disciplines. Rather than preaching, it presents a balanced, solutions-oriented approach to environmental problems. It provides students with the information and critical thinking tools to reach their own conclusions. Environment is filled with many new and unique examples to support each subject as it is developed.

--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

 


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Environmental Science

Creating a Sustainable Future
by Daniel D. Chiras (Author)

Completely updated, the new Seventh Edition of Environmental Science enlightens students on the fundamental causes of the current environmental crisis and offers ideas on how we, as a global community, can create a sustainable future.  It's student-friendly, up-to-date coverage, newly revised Critical Thinking questions and integrated technology package, prompt students to think critically about the key principles of environmental science and sustainability. 



 

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Environmental Science

Working with the Earth (Basic Select)
by Jr., G. Tyler Miller (Author)

How can we sustain our environment? ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCE, 11th Edition, offers bias-free coverage of sustainability, along with the basic science you need as a foundation for understanding environmental issues. "How Would You Vote?" questions appear in the text and allow you to go online to investigate 68 provocative environmental issues and then cast your votes on the Web where the results are tallied and you can see how your opinions compare to your classmates'. You'll also receive online access to Environmental ScienceNow (a powerful online learning tool built around your individual progress that gives you a simple pre-test, and then focuses your learning experience on your studying needs), "How Do I Prepare?" (which gives you tips for test prep, and a review of basic math and chemistry). This book and its online learning tools give you everything you need for success in the course.



 

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The Eternal Frontier
An Ecological History of North America and Its Peoples
by Tim Flannery (Author)

From Publishers Weekly
If Nature itself has a nature, it's the desire for balance. In a fascinating chronicle of our continent's evolution, Flannery shows, however, that this desire must forever be frustrated. Flannery starts his tale with the asteroid collision that destroyed the dinosaurs, ends with the almost equally cataclysmic arrival of humankind and fills the middle with an engaging survey of invaders from other lands, wild speciation and an ever-changing climate, all of which have kept the ecology of North America in a constant state of flux. We see the rise of horses, camels and dogs (cats are Eurasian), the rapid extinction of mammoths, mastodons and other megafauna at the hands of prehistoric man, and the even quicker extinction of the passenger pigeon and other creatures more recently. Flannery also spotlights plenty of scientists at work, most notably one who tries to butcher an elephant as a prehistoric man would have butchered a mastodon, and another who had the intestinal fortitude to check whether meat would keep if a carcass were stored at the bottom of a frigid pond, the earliest of refrigerators. This material might be dense and academic in another's hands, but Flannery displays a light touch, a keen understanding of what will interest general readers and a good sense of structure, which keeps the book moving, manageable and memorable. (May)Forecast: Atlantic Monthly clearly intends to build on the reputation Flannery attained with his previous, highly acclaimed book, Throwim Way Leg and they may have a winner here. The first printing will be 60,000 copies, with a $100,000 promotional budget and a 21-city author tour.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
 


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Ethics for a Finite World
An Essay Concerning a Sustainable Future
by Herschel Elliott (Author)

Herschel Elliott takes traditional environmental ethics to task in this provocative, challenging, and controversial look at the balance between human activity and the environment. His comments on this balance are illustrated by the effects of Hurricane Katrina. He had this to say about the efforts to rebuild: "The whole problem is that the constant population and economic increase can't stand up against natural disasters like this, and until that is addressed, the problem will remain and this will happen again. The constant requests for money is like a band-aid on an open wound, it won't fix it."

This acclaimed philosopher constructs a coherent theory of ethics based on the idea that both self-centered and self-sacrificing behaviors lead to the same end: the total collapse of our environment. Therefore, the first ethical obligation of everyone should be to maintain the endurance and resilience of the Earth's ecosystem. Then, after the environment is secure, ethical attention can be directed towards maintaining the human population at a level that will allow human life to become worth living.
 


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Everglades

An Environmental History
by David McCally
 
From the Publisher
This important work for general readers and environmentalists alike offers the first major discussion of the formation, development, and history of the Everglades, considered by many to be the most endangered ecosystem in North America. Comprehensive in scope, it begins with south Florida's geologic origins--before the Everglades became wetlands--and continues through the 20th century, when sugar reigns as king of the Everglades Agricultural Area.
 
Charting the effects of human intervention upon the region, David McCally traces its habitation from the Calusas and other native groups to the modern period dominated by agribusiness. In between, he discusses the Spanish contact period, the first efforts to farm the region, the first attempts in the 1880s to drain it, and the era of the "engineered" Everglades that was largely created by the state of Florida and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. Today, he declares, the desire to convert the ecosystem to farm use continues to guide American thinking about the region at a tremendous environmental cost.
 
Urging restoration of the Everglades, McCally argues that agriculture, especially sugar growing, must be abandoned or altered. To buy time for public debate over the final form of a sustainable Everglades, he suggests the creation of a park modeled on New York's Adirondack State Park. Sure to be influential in all discussions of Florida's future, The Everglades also will be significant for environmentalists focused on any area of North America.
 
David McCally teaches U.S. history at the University of South Florida, St. Petersburg campus, and environmental history at Eckerd College in St. Petersburg..

h Florida at St. Petersburg Lib. Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information
 


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The Everglades Handbook

Understanding the Ecosystem
by Thomas E. Lodge

From the Publisher
In introducing the 1994 edition, a 99-year-old activist cautioned that efforts to protect Everglades National Park must not be taken for granted. The writer of this edition's introduction lauds other Everglades' advocates. Lodge, a freelance ecologist, provides information on the flora and fauna of this unique ecosystem and human impacts on it. He includes new chapters on The Big Cypress Swamp and Lake Okeechobee, b&w and color illustrations, and 670 references. Annotation ©2004 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR



 

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An Everglades Providence

Marjory Stoneman Douglas and the American Environmental Century
by Jack E. Davis (Author)

Review
"Exceptional. More than just a biography, the book provides an excellent history of the modern environmental movement. I am certain that all who read it will be inspired by the dynamic, pivotal, and courageous life and work of Marjory Stoneman Douglas and will be reminded of how terribly essential the efforts to protect the Florida Everglades and the environment remain." --Senator Bob Graham

"Jack Davis does for Marjory Stoneman Douglas what Linda Lear did for Rachel Carson and Farley Mowat did for Dian Fossey. He gives us the textures of a principled woman, sometimes troubled, sometimes ambitious, always dedicated to an unselfish goal. Davis does justice to both Douglas's life and the incipient days of America's environmental awakening." --Ted Levin, author of Liquid Land: A Journey through the Florida Everglades
 


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The Everglades River of Grass
By Marjory Stoneman Douglas

Originally published in 1947, The Everglades was one of those rare books, like Uncle Tom's Cabin and Silent Spring, to have an immediate political effect: it helped draw public attention to a vast and little-known area that South Florida developers had deemed a worthless swamp and were busily draining, damming, and remaking, and it mustered needed public support for President Harry Truman's controversial order, later that year, to protect more than 2 million acres as Everglades National Park.


Book Cover
 

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Everglades Wildflowers

A Field Guide to Wildflowers of the Historic Everglades, Including Big Cypress, Corkscrew, and Fakahatchee Swamps
by Roger L. Hammer

From the Publisher
Everglades Wildflowers is the ultimate field guide to wildflowers of the ecoregion that stretches from Lake Okeechobee south to the Gulf of Mexico, Florida Bay, and Biscayne Bay, encompassing all of the southern Florida mainland. Packed with vivid color photos and informative text, this valuable reference will help you identify and appreciate the varied flora of this vast watershed. Everglades Wildflowers is perfect for the novice and expert wildflower enthusiast alike. Whether you are lucky enough to view the endangered Wormvine Orchid or the stunning Firebush, this guide will enhance your next journey into the remarkable Everglades.

Synopsis
This guide features stunning color photographs of 300 common wildflowers from Everglades National Park and the Corkscrew, Big Cypress, and Fakahatchee Swamps. Detailed descriptions and line art aid the reader in identifying plants in the field
 


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A Far-Off Place

by Laurens van der Post (Author)

Review
'With a loving, mystical awareness of the physical world, Colonel van der Post creates a compelling vision of small human creatures against a vast landscape...An infinitely subtle book' (Sunday Telegraph - Janice Elliot)


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Fast Food Nation

by Eric Schlosser

From Booklist
Everyone frets about the nutritional implications of excessive dining at America's fast-food emporia, but few grasp the significance of how fast-food restaurants have fundamentally changed the way Americans eat. Schlosser documents the effects of fast food on America's economy, its youth culture, and allied industries, such as meatpacking, that serve this vast food production empire. Starting with a young woman who makes minimum wage working at a Colorado fast-food restaurant, Schlosser relates the oft-told story of Ray Kroc's founding of McDonald's. The author also tells about the development of the franchise method of business ownership and the health and nutrition implications of fast-food consumption. In a striking chapter, Schlosser gives a glimpse into the little-known world of chemically engineered flavorings, both natural and artificial. The coming together of so many diverse social, scientific, and economic trends in a single industry makes this book a relevant, compelling read and a cautionary tale of the many risks generated by this ubiquitous industry. Mark Knoblauch
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
--This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
 


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Fields That Dream
A Journey to the Roots of Our Food
by Jenny Kurzweil (Author)

Seattle Post-Intelligencer, November 21, 2005
Engaging and informative look at the small farmers who grow and sell their foodstuffs at this city's beloved Farmers Market.



 

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Fight Global Warming Now

The Handbook for Taking Action in Your Community
by Bill McKibben (Author)

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Introduction

Despite the array of groups and organizations working on global warming, we are still missing a key element: the movement. Along with the hard work of not-for-profit lobbyists, environmental lawyers, green economists, sustainability-minded engineers, and forward-thinking entrepreneurs, it’s going to take the inspired political involvement of millions of Americans to get our country on track to solving this problem. Linked up by the Internet and a common vision, we can start to make change from the local level to the national and global. We hope this book will give you the skills and inspiration you need to jump into this growing movement. It’s hard work, but—take it from us—it can be a lot of fun, too.

In 1968, observing the state of civil rights in America, Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. said, “We are now faced with the fact, my friends, that tomorrow is today. We are confronted with the fierce urgency of now.” Today, we are feeling that fierce urgency again for two reasons. The first is that scientists are telling us that we are running out of time even faster than we thought. If we don’t act within the next few years, we won’t be able to avoid the worst effects of climate change. The second reason is a more hopeful one. Recent political changes in Washington DC and around the country have finally created an opportunity for genuine political action on global warming. There is no guarantee that this situation will last. If you’ve been a little paralyzed by the sheer size and horror of global warming, now is the time to start moving forward, fast.

Copyright © 2007 by Bill McKibben. All rights reserved.
 


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Fighting for Love in the Century of Extinction

How Passion and Politics Can Stop Global Warming
by Eban Goodstein (Author)

Review
"Goodstein provides a good nonscientific account of the global climate change problem that is an informative read for nonscience audiences at all levels." --Choice

"Fighting for Love radiates with Eban Goodstein's genuine awe at the exquisite interconnectedness of our natural world. It focuses our attention on our spiritual connections with all forms of life. And it encourages us to engage in the rough and tumble realities of American politics. This book moves Goodstein from being a pied-piper of the climate movement to one of its prophets."--Ross Gelbspan, author, The Heat Is On and Boiling Point


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Florida
A Short History
by Michael Gannon
 
From the Publisher
In introducing the 1994 edition, a 99-year-old activist cautioned that efforts to protect Everglades National Park must not be taken for granted. The writer of this edition's introduction lauds other Everglades' advocates. Lodge, a freelance ecologist, provides information on the flora and fauna of this unique ecosystem and human impacts on it. He includes new chapters on The Big Cypress Swamp and Lake Okeechobee, b&w and color illustrations, and 670 references. Annotation ©2004 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR



 

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Florida Butterfly Caterpillars and Their Host Plants
by Marc C. Minno, Jerry F. Butler, and Donald W. Hall  

This book will become the classic guide to southern butterfly caterpillars and their host plants.
With hundreds of color photographs and concise information in a format that can easily be carried into the field, it offers an unprecedented tool for all butterfly gardeners, teachers, naturalists, students, and scientists in the southern United States.

No other book offers such a comprehensive discussion of Florida butterfly caterpillars and their host plants. It covers caterpillar anatomy, biology, ecology, habitat, behavior, and defense, as well as how to find, identify, and raise caterpillars. The book contains sharply detailed photos of 167 species of caterpillars, 185 plants, 18 life cycles, and 19 habitats. It includes 169 maps. Photos of the egg, larva, pupa, and adult of representatives of 18 butterfly families and subfamilies provide life cycle comparisons that have never been illustrated before in such an accessible reference.



 

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Florida Butterfly Gardening
A Complete Guide to Attracting, Identifying and Enjoying Butterflies
By Marc and Maria Minno

"The first comprehensive guide to butterfly gardening in Florida and adjacent states . . . useful to anybody interested in butterfly gardening in Florida, but it is especially useful, even indispensable, for those who plan their garden to be an educational as well as aesthetic experience."—Mark Deyrup, entomologist, Archbold Biological Station


· presents 400+ color photos taken by the authors, showing every butterfly in adult, larva, and pupa stages
· presents practical information on garden plants, installation, and maintenance
· illustrations of both host and nectar plants
· includes inquiry-based science activities and a Florida butterfly checklist
 


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Florida Poems

by Campbell Mcgrath (Author)

From Publishers Weekly
Exuberant description meets political protest and amateur natural history in this fifth volume from MacArthur grant winner McGrath (Road Atlas), whose new poems speak to his adopted state's ills and illusions. The very readable opening sequence adapts Aristophanes to tell the story of a city luxurious, based on tourism, deeply divided that flourishes, then founders, in the clouds: as McGrath's poem unfolds, his cloud metropolis comes to resemble first the United States, then Florida, complete with rampant hedonism, alligators and struggling immigrants. Awe and resentment alternate throughout short poems in the middle of the volume, which view specific locales: a long-lined lyric evokes "jasmine, egret in moonlight, trade wind through the jacaranda," while a comical villanelle explores "the annual State Fair, a very weird place." More discursive poems tag along with an early explorer or visit McGrath's wrath on Orlando, "city with the character of a turnpike restroom." Last, best and longest, "The Florida Poem" takes readers on a vatic tour of the whole state, through "technocrats and mousketeer apparatchiks" to "indigenous culture ripped from the walls/ by the wind of European arrival." Though some passages sound clunky or rushed, McGrath's gregarious phraseologies and expandable forms (one based on the alphabet, another on journals) suit his odd blend of comedy and jeremiad. Readers who take special pleasure in Billy Collins or in Florida itself will find McGrath's book something to remember. (Feb.)Forecast: Topical and colloquial enough to garner review attention, this book should also generate profiles in glossies and seems an NPR natural,, given McGrath's solid mid-career stage. The volume's theme seems guaranteed to snag home-state media: look for regional interest, and perhaps even (given the dis of Disney) some controversy.

Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
 


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Florida Stories
by Kevin McCarthy (Editor)

Like an album of snapshots from a tropical vacation, this collection of seventeen stories captures Florida places and characters transformed by the literary imagination of some of America’s finest short fiction writers: Stephen Crane,

The stories range widely across Florida history and landscapes—St. Petersburg in the 20s, Key West and Alachua County in the 30s, Coconut Grove and Jacksonville in the 50s, Miami Beach in the 60s, and Ft. Lauderdale in the 70s. Andrew Lytle recounts violent events in an Indian village during the Spanish rule. Sarah Orne Jewett and Stephen Crane treat maritime Florida in the 19th century while Hemingway and Philip Wylie present stories of the 20th century. From the pinewoods of northern Florida, through cracker farms, boom towns, and coastal suburbs, to the swamps and the Keys, we meet characters both common and extraordinary: moonshiners, socialites, carnies, sailors, scavengers, and fugitives.
 


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Florida's Best Native Landscape Plants

200 Readily Available Species for Homeowners and Professionals
by GIL NELSON (Author), DAVID CHIAPPINI (Editor)

"This beautifully illustrated book is loaded with practical information that professionals and homeowners will find very useful."—Jeffrey G. Norcini, University of Florida


"Gil Nelson's book provides a very good selective overview of native plants readily available in the nursery trade that can be used in landscaping and the best ways to utilize them."—Richard P. Wunderlin, author of Guide to the Vascular Plants of Florida and Flora of Florida, Volume 1

 



 

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Florida's Lost Tribes

by JERALD T. MILANICH (Author), Theodore Morris (Illustrator)

The Florida Times-Union, 09/19/2004
Engaging new excursion into Florida's Indian past.

KNLS Bookwatch, February 2005
The pairing of a painter with an archaeologist produces a wonderful blend of scholarship and visual color displays.



 

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Florida's Paved Bike Trails

by JEFF KUNERTH (Author), GRETCHEN KUNERTH (Author)

Florida’s Paved Bike Trails offers the most comprehensive guide available to more than 40 paved bicycle trails stretching from Pensacola Beach to the Florida Keys, with information on projects in progress or in the planning stages.
Location maps and a geographical and historical description of each trail are included, as well as access listings of trailside facilities and parking and information on basic bicycle safety and bicycle shops. And, unlike other bicycling books, this guide also provides information about parks, beaches, lakes, recreational areas, wildlife refuges, historic sites, and museums along the trails or in close proximity to them.



 

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Florida's Pioneer Naturalist

The Life of Charles Torrey Simpson
by ELIZABETH O. ROTHRA (Author)

"Elizabeth Rothra's excellent biography of Charles Torrey Simpson restates his philosophies about the intrinsic value of natural ecosystems like the Everglades.  No one knew better than he the history of the plants and animals of South Florida or conveyed it with more humor and enthusiasm."--Marjory Stoneman Douglas

"Absorbing, informative, and useful. . . . Simpson is the primary source of information for all scholars wishing to learn about ecological conditions in south Florida at the turn of the century."--Larry D. Harris, School of Forest Resources and Conservation, University of Florida

"A needed, timely contribution to scholarship in the form of a very enjoyable, readable volume. . . .  Much of the natural wealth enjoyed by our citizens today is due to the early efforts of pioneer naturalists such as Charles Torrey Simpson, working in a 'labor of love' nearly a century ago."--David H. Stansbery, Curator of Bivalve Mollusks, Museum of Zoology, Ohio State University


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Flower Confidential

The Good, the Bad, and the Beautiful

by Amy Stewart

From Publishers Weekly
Stewart, an avid gardener and winner of the 2005 California Horticultural Society's Writer's Award for her book The Earth Moved: On the Remarkable Achievements of Earthworms, now tackles the global flower industry. Her investigations take her from an eccentric lily breeder to an Australian business with the alchemical mission of creating a blue rose. She visits a romantically anachronistic violet grower, the largest remaining California grower of cut flowers and a Dutch breeder employing high-tech methods to develop flowers in equatorial countries where wages are low. Stewart follows a rose from the remote Ecuadoran greenhouse where it's grown to the American retailer where it's finally sold, and visits a huge, stock –exchange–like Dutch flower auction. These present-day adventures are interspersed with fascinating histories of the various aspects of flower culture, propagation and commerce. Stewart's floral romanticism—she admits early on that she's "always had a generalized, smutty sort of lust for flowers"—survives the potentially disillusioning revelations of the flower biz, though her passion only falters a few times, as when she witnesses roses being dipped in fungicide in preparation for export. By the end, this book is as lush as the flowers it describes. (Feb.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
 


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Food Not Lawns
How to Turn Your Yard into a Garden And Your Neighborhood into a Community
by Heather C. Flores

From Publishers Weekly
For Flores, "practicing ecological living is a deeply subversive act," and while most gardening books do not include warnings that COINTELPRO "can and will...rape you," it is only because most gardening books do not encourage "guerilla gardening" after describing the basics of garden planning and pruning. More advanced topics range from integrating barnyard birds into a garden to getting more mileage out of the home water cycle to the benefits of a balanced insect population. The illustrations are amusing as well as helpful, and though the index is not extensive, the book, overall, is a much better read than the average gardening book, both in terms of range and entertainment value.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.


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Forest & Garden

Traces of Wildness in a Modernizing Land, 1897-1949
by Melanie Louise Simo

"In wildness is the preservation of the world," wrote Henry David Thoreau. But how the wild and the managed or artificially arranged environments coexist has been a matter of intense debate among foresters and landscape professionals at least since the era of Frederick Law Olmsted Sr.

In Forest and Garden, Melanie L. Simo ranges through a period of landscape history that has been underexamined, between Olmsted and mid-twentieth-century modernism, when the contours of the debate were formed and the landscape professions came of age. Simo's book spans half a century, from the year that Charles Sprague Sargent's influential Garden and Forest magazine ceased publication in 1897 to the appearance in 1949 of two unusual books about land and landscape--Aldo Leopold's Sand County Almanac and Jens Jensen's The Clearing--that marked the beginning of a new ecological awareness.
 


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Forest Plants Of The Southeast And Their Wildlife Uses

by James H. Miller (Author), Karl V. Miller (Author), Ted Bodner (Photographer)

Progressive Farmer's Sportman's Gear May/June 2001
"This has become one of my most-used resource books on plants and wildlife."

The Forum Spring 2001
"It is a must-have reference work for vegetation managers in the southeastern United States."

Forest Science May 2000
"[P]rovides information critical to the management and conservation of forest vegetation and wildlife . . . practical in field, classroom, and boardroom applications."

Southeastern Naturalist May 1, 2006
"Packed with 650 glossy color photos, this field guide will be useful to students, landowners, and anyone interested in plant identification."

Alabama Wildlife Federation Magazine Spring 2001
"In this ...field guide the authors help readers to understand the intricate and often unexpected interrelationships between flora and fauna."
 


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Fossiling in Florida

A Guide for Diggers and Divers
by OLIN MARK RENZ (Author)

County Edition (Macclenny)
[This] guide...will fill you in on what animals lived here before man stepped foot in Florida--and after.

County Edition (Macclenny)
A friendly read.

Indian Artifact Magazine
If you like fossils, even a little bit, YOU SHOULD HAVE THIS BOOK!

Outdoor Adventure
This very readable book will make a dull subject anything but dull.

Hendry-Glades Sunday News
Renz's book is scientifically accurate, and so much more.
 


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Frogs and Toads of the Southeast

by Mike Dorcas and Whit Gibbons (Author)

Review
[An] exquisite book...on the herpetofauna of the southeastern United States.... [H]igh-quality, clearly written, with an attractive layout.... [H]as solid introductory information, detailed species descriptions, excellent range maps and color photographs, line drawings showing defining features, and a strong conservation message. There is an explanation as to how to use the species accounts which will be of value to the lay reader. --Herpetological Review, Fall 2008



 

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Fueling Our Future
An Introduction to Sustainable Energy
by Robert L. Evans (Author)

One of the most important issues facing humanity today is the prospect of global climate change, brought about primarily by our prolific energy use and heavy dependence on fossil fuels. Fueling Our Future: An Introduction to Sustainable Energy provides a concise overview of current energy demand and supply patterns. It presents a balanced view of how our reliance on fossil fuels can be changed over time so that we have a much more sustainable energy system in the near future. Written in a non-technical and accessible style, the book will appeal to a wide range of readers without scientific backgrounds.



 

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Gaia

The Practical Science of Planetary Medicine

by James Lovelock

Review

"This is the most accessible of Lovelock's three Gaia books...Lovelock is a brilliant writer."--New Scientist
"Brightly illustrated with color...on nearly every page, to appeal to the general reader, armchair ecoterrorist, and science fiction fan."--Book News, Inc.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

 



 

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Global Sociology

Introducing Five Contemporary Societies
by Linda Schneider (Author), Arnold Silverman (Author)

An effective supplement to any standard sociology text, this broad and comprehensive sociological description of five diverse contemporary societies with wide geographic distribution - Japan, Mexico, Egypt, Germany, and the Bushmen of Namibia - is organized around basic sociological topics: culture, social structure, group life, socialization, deviance, social institutions, social stratification, and social change. Fictional vignettes of individuals in each country help students experience first-person viewpoints on life in five very different societies. By comparing other societies with their own, students read about the range of social variation, learn what makes their own society distinctive, and gain a unique and fascinating vantage point on what sociology offers in a world of rapid social change. The fifth edition has been fully updated to reflect recent economic and political changes. New and updated data is included in each chapter. Current concerns such as crime, drug trafficking, ethnic diversity, gender, income inequality, political Islam and social change in traditional societies are addressed throughout the book. The impact of and response to global economic changes is a continuing theme in every chapter.

 


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The Great Journey

The Peopling of Ancient America
Brian M. Fagan

From reviews of the first edition:
"Most of us are acquainted with the European discovery of America, but how and when did American Indians occupy the continent? That's the fascinating puzzle Fagan discusses here--and he reveals himself as a meticulous, skeptical researcher. . . . The upshot is an informative, balanced, and often exciting account."--Kirkus

"This is an admirable introduction to questions that have exercised men ever since the discovery of the Americas."--New York Times Book Review

"For fans of Jean M. Auel's best-selling novels, Fagan's book provides a much-needed and up-to-date summary of the facts on which her books about Ice Age humans are loosely based."--Los Angeles Times
 


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The Great Work
Our Way into the Future
By Thomas Berry

The future can exist only if humans understand how to commune with the natural world rather than exploit it, explains author and renowned ecologist Thomas Berry (The Dream of the Earth, The Universe Story). "Already the planet is so damaged and the future is so challenged by its rising human population that the terms of survival will be severe beyond anything we have known in the past."



 

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The Great Turning
From Empire to Earth Community (BK Currents)
by David C. Korten (Author)

Danny Glover, Activist and Actor
"An epic work. Exposes the myths that divide us and frames the stories that can bring us together."



 

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The Green Collar Economy

How One Solution Can Fix Our Two Biggest Problems
by Van Jones

From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. As the "ecological crisis nears the boiling point," human rights activist and environmental leader Jones (president of the national organization Green For All) lays out a visionary, meticulous and practical explanation of the two major challenges the U.S. currently faces-massive socioeconomic inequality and imminent ecological catastrophe-and how the current third wave of environmentalism, the "investment" wave, can solve both. If industry players want to take advantage of growing consumer demand for green solutions, they'll have to follow principles of inclusiveness as well as conservation and inventiveness to create "broad opportunity and shared prosperity" for citizens at all levels of society. Rife with statistics, facts and history lessons, Jones introduces a "Green New Deal," a re-imagining of FDR's original New Deal that makes the government "a partner" (as opposed to a "nanny" or "bully") of the people, and sets about defining the principles of a "smart, supportive, reliable" partnership. Jones examines success stories from around the world (included close looks at Chicago and Milwaukee), defines government priorities at national and local levels and offers concrete solutions; one major positive step for any "significant U.S. metropolis" is to "invest massively in constructing buses, light rail cars, and mass-transit projects," creating good jobs while cutting greenhouse gases. With both caution and hope, Jones concludes that "tens of thousands of heroes at every level of human society" will be needed to carry off this third, and perhaps ultimate, green initiative.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
 


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Green Empire

The St. Joe Company and the Remaking of Florida's Panhandle
by KATHRYN ZIEWITZ (Author), JUNE WIAZ (Author)

H-Net, May 2004
"A thought-provoking look at an unfolding chapter in the history of a state and country." --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

E-Streams, August 2004
"Does not whitewash over the reasons the company is controversial today, and yet it does not read as a diatribe." --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

Tallahassee Democrat, June 6, 2004
"A persuasive call to citizens and government to insist upon a greater public interest." --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

Choice, October 2004 Vol. 42, No. 2
Highly recommended. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

The Polish American Journal, January 2005
Anyone concerned with land use and growth management, Florida’s fragile wildlife and natural resources will learn a great deal... --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
 


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Green Plans
Greenprint for Sustainability (Our Sustainable Future)
by Huey D. Johnson

"Green Plans" provides an effective strategy to move from industrial environmental deterioration to postindustrial sustainability. Huey D. Johnson provides the first detailed and understandable examination of the theory, implementation, and performance of green plans in the Netherlands, Canada, and New Zealand. Plans being considered in Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Austria, the United Kingdom, Germany, Singapore, and the European Community are also discussed. Huey D. Johnson is founder and president of the Resource Renewal Institute in San Francisco.

 



 

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Green Psychology
Transforming Our Relationship to Earth
By Ralph Metzner

A visionary eco-psychologist examines the rift between human beings and nature and shows what can be done to bring harmony to both the ecosystem and our own minds.  This book shows that the solution to our ecological dilemma lies in our own consciousnesses.

It is becoming more and more apparent that the causes and cures for the current ecological crisis are to be found in the hearts and minds of human beings. For millennia we existed within a religious and psychological framework that honored the Earth as a partner and worked to maintain a balance with nature. But somehow a root pathology took hold in Western civilization--the idea of domination over nature--and this led to an alienation of the human spirit that has allowed an unprecedented destruction of the very systems which support that spirit.



 

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Green Urbanism
Learning from European Cities
By Timothy Beatley

From Book News, Inc.
Beatley (urban and environmental planning, U. of Virginia-Charlottesville) takes examples from 25 innovative European cities on how to preserve green space, ease traffic congestion, and make cities more livable livable in other ways. He looks at the sustainable cities movement, transit systems and policies, renewable energy, sustainable forms of economic development, sustainable building, and generally green thinking in all decision making. Book News, Inc.®, Portland, OR

 

 



 

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Greening the College Curriculum
A Guide to Environmental Teaching in the Liberal Arts
Edited by Jonathan Collett and Stephen Karakashian

Greening the College Curriculum provides the tools college and university faculty need to meet personal and institutional goals for integrating environmental issues into the curriculum. Leading educators from a wide range of fields, including anthropology, biology, economics, geography, history, literature, journalism, philosophy, political science, and religion, describe their experience introducing environmental issues into their teaching.

  • a rationale for including material on the environment in the teaching of the basic concepts of each discipline

  • guidelines for constructing a unit or a full course at the introductory level that makes use of environmental subjects

  • sample plans for upper-level courses

  • a compendium of annotated resources, both print and nonprint

Contributors to the volume include David Orr, David G. Campbell, Lisa Naughton, Emily Young, John Opie, Holmes Rolston III, Michael E. Kraft, Steven Rockefeller, and others


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The Hidden Heart of the Cosmos

by Brian Swimme

From the Publisher
What does it mean to be human, to live on planet Earth, in the universe as it is now understood? In The Hidden Heart of the Cosmos best-selling author and mathematical cosmologist Brian Swimme takes us on a journey through the cosmos in search of the "new story" that is developing in answer to this age-old question. The Hidden Heart of the Cosmos opens up not only the exhilarating truths that science reveals of the birth of the universe, but how these truths can transform our lives. In such a view the cosmos appears as awesome and meaningful, its dynamics revelatory, and in this revelation can be found the wisdom humanity needs to face and overcome its present crises, particularly the soul-numbing consumerism that threatens to overwhelm not only individuals, families or societies, but the Earth itself. The Hidden Heart of the Cosmos helps us to grasp the larger significance of the human enterprise in this evolving university. Upon meeting that challenge rests much of the vitality of Earth community, and the future quality of life, for ourselves and our children.
 


Book Cover

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High Jungles and Low

by Archie F. Carr (Author)

"Illuminated by the same joyful curiosity and erudition, lyric writing, and plain love of life that made a classic of Archie Carr’s The Windward Road."--Peter Matthiessen
 

"Archie Carr shows that he can write about people and forests engagingly and accurately without recourse to fake adventures or gringo condescension."--New York Times
 

Archie Carr’s story is his love for the rural high tropics of Central America, revealed with grace and humor in the personal account of the years (1945-49) that he spent in Honduras with his family as a teacher at the Agricultural School run by the United Fruit Company.

 High Jungles and Low has four parts, each written in a distinctive style. "The Land" is descriptive and includes a candid chapter on Yankee relations with Latin America. "People in the Land" is anecdotal, with sketches of the hill people of Honduras. "The Sweet Sea," a short history of Nicaragua, reveals the biological drama of four centuries of turmoil in that country. "Hall of the Mountain Cow" is Carr’s one-month diary of a 100-mile walk along the Mosquito Shore, the rain forest of the Caribbean coast.
 


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History of Florida in Forty Minutes
by Michael Gannon (Author)

"Michael Gannon, a towering figure in Florida history, richly deserves his reputation as the 'dean of Florida studies.'"--Gary Mormino, author of Land of Sunshine, State of Dreams

"One of the state's foremost historians."--Miami Herald

"Mike Gannon [is] one of Florida's gifted historians and authors."--Gulf Coast Historical Review

"Gannon is a lifelong student of the history of his state, an acclaimed teacher, a masterful and tireless raconteur, and a superb stylist."--Paul S. George, Florida Historical Quarterly



 

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The Home Planet
by Kevin W. Kelley (Editor)

From Library Journal
This is an oversized browsing book filled with magnificent pictures taken from space. As can be guessed from its title, most of the photographs are of portions of the earth's surface. The concise text consists of short quotations from astronauts and cosmonauts describing the emotional impact of being in space. Naturally, the comments are predominantly from Americans and Soviets, but among the 18 nations represented are France, Germany, Syria, and India. Each commentary is given in the speaker's native language with an English translation. A truly beautiful book. Harold D. Shane. Baruch Coll., CUNY
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.



 

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Humanity's Environmental Future
Making Sense in a Troubled World
by William Ross McCluney

“We Are Taking Apart the Life-support System of Planet Earth!” So writes Dr. Ross McCluney in his new book published this year, Humanity’s Environmental Future. “Without a major change in direction, we may be the first species to extinguish itself,” he says.



 

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Hummingbird Gardens

by Barbara Nielsen (Author), Nancy Newfield (Author), Roger Tory Peterson (Foreword)

From Booklist
An undeniable element of magic surrounds the unexpected discovery of a hummingbird paying a visit to one's own backyard. With that goal in mind, Newfield and Nielsen offer a compilation of material full of sensible advice for gardeners in all parts of the country who share the desire to attract hummingbirds to the home garden environment. Although the guide can be counted on to provide specific recommendations for the best varieties of flowers to plant in order to attract the lovely creatures, the appealing text integrates gardening ideas and designs with an informative introduction to the general habits (migrating and nesting patterns, etc.) of hummingbirds. A final section provides a detailed identification guide to various species and to plants (as designated by regional appropriateness). Alice Joyce --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.



 

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Ignition

What You Can Do to Fight Global Warming and Spark a Movement
by Jonathan Isham (Editor), Sissel Waage (Editor), Bill McKibben (Introduction)

From Booklist
It is one thing for citizens to recognize a problem; it is quite another for them to compel legislators to actually do something about it. Like the civil rights and women's campaigns before it, the climate movement, despite its so-called birth with the first Earth Day celebration in 1970, is still in its nascency; and like its forerunners, it, too, must rely heavily on the grassroots efforts of individuals to pressure government at every level, from local to international, to create and enforce the laws and regulations critical to stopping the eco-destruction of the planet. To learn what works and what doesn't in this basic form of activism, the editors have assembled a veritable who's who of scholars, student leaders, and civic officials that includes such environmental heavy hitters as Bill McKibben, Ted Nordhaus, and Jared Duval. The goal is to create a persuasive and constructive handbook designed to turn a groundswell of environmental awareness into a tidal wave of strategic initiatives specifically formulated for twenty-first-century issues and opportunities. Haggas, Carol
 


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In Defense of Food
An Eater's Manifesto
by Michael Pollan (Author)

From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. In his hugely influential treatise The Omnivore's Dilemma, Pollan traced a direct line between the industrialization of our food supply and the degradation of the environment. His new book takes up where the previous work left off. Examining the question of what to eat from the perspective of health, this powerfully argued, thoroughly researched and elegant manifesto cuts straight to the chase with a maxim that is deceptively simple: Eat food, not too much, mostly plants. But as Pollan explains, food in a country that is driven by a thirty-two billion-dollar marketing machine is both a loaded term and, in its purest sense, a holy grail. The first section of his three-part essay refutes the authority of the diet bullies, pointing up the confluence of interests among manufacturers of processed foods, marketers and nutritional scientists—a cabal whose nutritional advice has given rise to a notably unhealthy preoccupation with nutrition and diet and the idea of eating healthily. The second portion vivisects the Western diet, questioning, among other sacred cows, the idea that dietary fat leads to chronic illness. A writer of great subtlety, Pollan doesn't preach to the choir; in fact, rarely does he preach at all, preferring to lets the facts speak for themselves. (Jan.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
 


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Intimate Nature

The Bond Between Women and Animals

by Barbara Peterson (Author), Brenda Peterson (Author), Deena Metzger (Author)

From Library Journal
This book brings together stories, poems, essays, and meditations by the editors and more than 70 other prominent female nature writers and field scientists, including Gretel Ehrlich, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Terry Tempest Williams, to show how women are reestablishing their relationship with animals on a basis of respect and empathy. Wildlife researchers like Jane Goodall or Cynthia Moss integrate compassion and intuition with the data they report. Native American women explore the wisdom of tribal elders for lessons on sharing the earth with animals. Women who have nurtured or trained individual animals recount, sometimes humorously, how they learned to communicate across the species barrier. All the contributors celebrate animals as our peers on this planet; many also warn against the loneliness and silence of the wasteland we are creating as we push ever more species to the brink of extinction. This collection should appeal to young adults as well as general adult readers. Recommended for academic and public libraries.?Joan S. Elbers, formerly Montgomery Coll., Rockville, Md.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
 


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Investing From The Heart
The Guide to Socially Responsible Investments and Money Management
by Jack A. Brill

From Library Journal
Financial consultant Brill and freelance writer Reder thoroughly discuss the concept of socially responsible investing, which involves the "channeling of personal, community, or workplace capital toward just, peaceful, healthy, environmentally sound purposes and away from destructive uses." Investments that can be considered for these purposes are discussed in detail; what is available, sources for information, and performance data for certain investments are provided. While Brill and Reder's investment philosophy is similar to Ritchie Lowry's Good Money: A Guide to Profitable Social Investing in the '90s ( LJ 5/1/91) , their book stands out because of its useful primer on investing and money management and glossary of terms. A good addition to any money management/investment collection.
- Steven J. Mayover, Free Lib. of Philadelphia
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
 


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Investing with your Values
Making Money and Making a Difference
By Hal Brill, Jack A. Brill and Cliff Feingenbaum

From the Publisher
The fact is that you can make money and make a difference at the same time! Now in paperback, this step-by-step guide answers all the financial basics and makes it easy to link your money with your values in a high-performance portfolio.

Includes:
- The philosophy and fascinating history that built SRI (socially responsible investing)
- An explanation of the visionary new framework of "Natural Investing"
- How to outperform the market and be a force for social change
- Shareholder activism and community investing
- Detailed information on socially responsible stocks, mutual funds, and bonds
- Stories, lists of funds and companies, worksheets, and scores of resources

Author Biography: The authors are dedicated financial activists who have had a long involvement with SRI. Hal Brill and Jack Brill have been values-based investment consultants for ten years. Cliff Feigenbaum is the editor of GreenMoney Journal. Hal Brill lives is Paonia Colorado; Jack Brill lives in San Diego, California; and Cliff Feigenbaum lives in Spokane Washington. All three authors have been interviewed extensively on radio, TV, and print
 


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Ishmael
An Adventure of the Mind and Spirit
by Daniel Quinn

From Publishers Weekly
Quinn ( Dreamer ) won the Turner Tomorrow Award's half-million-dollar first prize for this fascinating and odd book--not a novel by any conventional definition--which was written 13 years ago but could not find a publisher. The unnamed narrator is a disillusioned modern writer who answers a personal ad ("Teacher seeks pupil. . . . Apply in person.") and thereby meets a wise, learned gorilla named Ishmael that can communicate telepathically. The bulk of the book consists entirely of philosophical dialogues between gorilla and man, on the model of Plato's Republic. Through Ishmael, Quinn offers a wide-ranging if highly general examination of the history of our civilization, illuminating the assumptions and philosophies at the heart of many global problems. Despite some gross oversimplifications, Quinn's ideas are fairly convincing; it's hard not to agree that unrestrained population growth and an obsession with conquest and control of the environment are among the key issues of our times. Quinn also traces these problems back to the agricultural revolution and offers a provocative rereading of the biblical stories of Genesis. Though hardly any plot to speak of lies behind this long dialogue, Quinn's smooth style and his intriguing proposals should hold the attention of readers interested in the daunting dilemmas that beset our planet. 50,000 first printing; major ad/promo.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.--This text refers to the Hardcover edition
 


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It’s All for Sale

The Control of Global Resources
by James Ridgeway (Author)

From Publishers Weekly
Purportedly an alarming account of the "commoditization of natural resources and of life itself," this volume is actually something tamer—a comprehensive guide to the world’s major commodities, from diamonds and human beings to the skies and oceans. Ridgeway, a staff writer for the Village Voice, professes horror that a small number of corporations would ever seek to form cartels and exploit the fundamental necessities of life (even though he notes in his introduction and elsewhere that this has always been the case) and observes that things are getting worse. Maybe. It is disturbing to read that, after World War I, America and Britain created a joint venture known as the Iraq Petroleum Company and that "with modernized industry Iraq could produce quantities of oil sufficient to rival Saudi Arabia." Still, Ridgeway doesn’t balance his accounts of cartels and exploitation with an examination of the economic forces that drive commoditization, the advantages of economic development for developing countries or the process of economic evolution. Worse, Ridgeway discusses only problems, not solutions. The book is organized commodity by commodity. Ridgeway gives a brief, and sometimes fascinating, description of the usefulness and history of each substance, its exploitation by the few and its inevitable depletion. But he stops short of suggesting any wise or fair methods of allocating resources, and this omission seems to suggest that corrupt markets are inevitable. Perhaps Ridgeway’s largest failing is his tacit suggestion that commoditization is necessarily evil. Things have an economic as well as a spiritual existence, and the recognition of their market value is a useful, and necessary, first step in determining their true price.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

 


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The JFK Conspiracy

By David Miller

David Miller, in this, his most recent book The JFK Conspiracy, has not only amassed a wealth of facts in connection with the greatest conspiracy of our age, but he has also succeeded in connecting the dots, adding new ones in turn, unearthing fact upon fact heretofore conveniently ignored or, what is more likely, intentionally buried, and not only by all the usuall suspects.



 

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Journal of Light
The Visual Diary of a Florida Nature Photographer
by John Moran (Author)

Orlando Weekly, December 2, 2004
Moran captures...our state's rapidly evaporating natural beauty in a way that's inspiring.

St. Petersburg Times, February 13, 2004
Journal of Light is an unusual look at Florida--unusual and refreshingly honest.

Charleston Post and Courier, March 13, 2005
...a vivid billet-doux to [Moran's] adopted home, reminding us of what survives the onslaught, at least for now...


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Land Conservation Financing
by The Conservation Fund, Mike McQueen, Edward T. McMahon

Book Description
Written by two of the nation's leading experts on land conservation, Land Conservation Financing provides a comprehensive overview of successful land conservation programs -- how they were created, how they are funded, and what they've accomplished -- along with detailed case studies from across the United States.

The authors present important new information on state-of-the-art conservation financing, showcasing programs in states that have become the nation's leaders in open-space protection: California, Colorado, Florida, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, and New Jersey. They look at key local land protection efforts by examining model programs in DeKalb County, Georgia; Douglas County, Colorado; Jacksonville, Florida; Lake County, Illinois; Lancaster County, Pennsylvania; Marin County, California; the St. Louis metro area in Missouri and Illinois, and on Cape Cod, Massachusetts.

 


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Landscaping for Florida's Wildlife

Re-creating Native Ecosystems in Your Yard
by JOSEPH M. SCHAEFER (Author), GEORGE TANNER (Author)

As the natural landscape becomes more humanized, the habitat for many wildlife species has been lost or degraded. In a clear, step-by-step format, this book tells how to create a wildlife-friendly landscape that takes into account both people and nature. The authors' theme--"put back what you don't need"--allows the gardener to reduce maintenance costs while providing a habitat that offers wildlife the essentials of food, cover, water, and space.
*The book addresses such fundamental questions as which ecosystem is appropriate to a particular piece of property and how to determine which species use the property.
*It discusses how to consider soils, drainage patterns, utility lines, adjacent land uses, and existing native vegetation.
*It describes how to prepare a base map; add plant and non-plant elements such as birdhouses, burrows, and tree frog houses; and calculate the cost of materials.
*It tells how to install, maintain, and evaluate the new yard.
 


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Last Child in the Woods
Saving Our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder
by Richard Louv (Author)

From Publishers Weekly
Today's kids are increasingly disconnected from the natural world, says child advocacy expert Louv (Childhood's Future; Fatherlove; etc.), even as research shows that "thoughtful exposure of youngsters to nature can... be a powerful form of therapy for attention-deficit disorder and other maladies." Instead of passing summer months hiking, swimming and telling stories around the campfire, children these days are more likely to attend computer camps or weight-loss camps: as a result, Louv says, they've come to think of nature as more of an abstraction than a reality. Indeed, a 2002 British study reported that eight-year-olds could identify Pokémon characters far more easily than they could name "otter, beetle, and oak tree." Gathering thoughts from parents, teachers, researchers, environmentalists and other concerned parties, Louv argues for a return to an awareness of and appreciation for the natural world. Not only can nature teach kids science and nurture their creativity, he says, nature needs its children: where else will its future stewards come from? Louv's book is a call to action, full of warnings—but also full of ideas for change. Agent, James Levine. (May 20)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
 


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The Last Ghost Dance
A Guide for Earth Mages
by Brooke Medicine Eagle

Book Description
In the celebrated Buffalo Woman Comes Singing, Brooke Medicine Eagle revealed her extraordinary spiritual odyssey from her first guided steps on the medicine path to her ongoing work as one of the most respected Native American teachers of the modern era. Now she shares a groundbreaking approach to spiritual transformation--by revitalizing the powerful ancient ritual The Ghost Dance.

Four centuries ago, when European invaders were ruthlessly plundering indigenous cultures, a Paiute tribesman received a vision of hope and resurrection, given by Father Spirit, to help survivors of the onslaught create a beautiful new life in the face of defeat, broken dreams, and death. That vision was celebrated in an ecstatic ghost dance honoring those who had perished.

Brooke Medicine Eagle explains how and why we are profoundly connected to The Ghost Dance. As she herself becomes initiated into the "illusion of death" and the wisdom of "heart-centered ascension," she teaches us how to confront our deepest fears, overcome our resistance to change, and renew our lives. Through prayer, music, and dance, Medicine Eagle provides us with the tools to bring about the final fulfillment of this profound ritual--by living in harmony with earth's rhythms, practicing sustainable living, honoring and sharing with all our relations, and freeing ourselves from the burden of possessions and possessiveness.

Perceptive, practical, and luminous, The Last Ghost Dance is a call to action, a challenge to raise up from the ashes of our desecrated planet a world that welcomes the full flowering of the spirit--and a new age of abundance, love, and peace.
 


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The Last Refuge
Patriotism, Politics, and the Environment in an Age of Terror, Revised and Updated Edition
by David W. Orr

From Publishers Weekly
In 13 essays, Orr, professor of environmental studies and politics at Oberlin, critiques what he says is the current Bush administration's lack of environmental policy and calls for a more engaged citizenry. Orr sets the scene by relating a 2001 meeting with noncommittal White House staffers in which he and other leading environmentalists presented an environmental status report, entitled "Common Ground/Common Futures." "The news was delivered," he writes. "But no one was home." The present state of environmental affairs, he says, reflects "an unconstrained managerial and well-armed plutocracy intent on global plunder." Orr advocates a coherent environmental agenda, vigorous public information, restored political leadership and increased emphasis on environmental study in higher education. Specific essays focus on particular figures in the debate: one exposes Bjorn Lomberg, a favorite author of Dick Cheney's, as "scientifically dishonest," while another praises writer Wendell Berry's commitment to agrarian ideals. Perhaps the most informative essay in the collection, entitled "Leverage," examines the meager patchwork of U.S. environmental regulations and the nation's libertarian tendencies. Orr's politics will be familiar to all left-wing readers. There is little originality in his criticisms of the right and its attitude toward natural resources and energy efficiency. Orr's writing is steeped in sometimes utopian antimodern longings for small family farms, ecologically sound urban planning, increased public transportation and ecological diversity. While it's not hard to imagine how these essays might energize a readership committed to Orr's brand of politics, their rhetoric is too repetitive and ponderously moralizing to win wider audiences for their ideas.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.--This text refers to the
Hardcover edition.
 


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Leading Change Toward Sustainability
A Change-Management Guide for Business, Government and Civil Society
by Bob Doppelt

Book Description
Although an increasing number of organizations have embraced the idea of sustainability in the last decade, why do so many initiatives fail, leading to wasted resources, frustration and cynicism? Why have so few organizations successfully adopted more sustainable policies or practices? And when they do get launched, why do so many efforts plateau after a short time and fail to ascend to the next level of excellence? What process is required to create change within organizations to move them towards sustainability?

Because so few resources are available to answer these questions, Bob Doppelt spent three years researching how the leaders of both private and public organizations that have initiated and sustained significant sustainability programs designed and approached them. His findings, presented in this hugely readable book, will demystify the sustainability-change process by providing a theoretical framework and a methodology that managers can use to successfully transform their organizations to embrace sustainable development.


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Let Your Life Speak
Listening for the Voice of Vocation
by Parker J. Palmer (Author)

From Publishers Weekly
A gifted academic who formerly combined a college teaching career with community organizing, Palmer took a year's sabbatical to live at the "intentional" Quaker community of Pendle Hill in Pennsylvania. Instead of leaving at year's end, he became the community's dean of studies and remained there for 10 years. Palmer (The Courage to Teach) shares the lessons of his vocational and spiritual journey, discussing his own burnout and intense depression with exceptional candor and clarity. In essays that previously appeared in spiritual or educational journals and have been reworked to fit into this slim volume, he suggests that individuals are most authentic when they follow their natural talents and limitations, as his own story demonstrates. Since hearing one's "calling" requires introspection and self-knowledge (as suggested by the eponymous Quaker expression), Palmer encourages inner work such as journal-writing, meditation and prayer. Recognizing that his philosophy is at odds with popular, essentially American attitudes about self-actualization and following one's dreams, Palmer calls vocation "a gift, not a goal." He deftly illustrates his point with examples from the lives of people he admires, such as Rosa Parks, Annie Dillard and Vaclav Havel. A quiet but memorable addition to the inspirational field, this book has the quality of a finely worked homily. The writing displays a gentle wisdom and economy of style that leaves the reader curious for more insight into the author's Quaker philosophy. (Oct.)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
 


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Liquid Land

A Journey through the Florida Everglades
by Ted Levin

Library Journal
Unimaginable numbers of birds, over a million alligators, 400 American crocodiles, and fewer than 100 Florida panthers roam the Florida Everglades. In this fragile landscape, survival depends on a precise balance of nutrients, salinity, and water levels that is now imperiled by Florida's politically powerful real estate and agribusiness interests. Levin, a naturalist and journalist, profiles the natural history, geology, and climate of this unique ecosystem and the passionate scientists who don their snake boots and fight to preserve it. His writing style is lyrical and engaging, but the text is grounded in extensive research that is detailed in a useful bibliography. Like Marjory Stoneman Douglas, author of the classic The Everglades: River of Grass, Levin is an experienced journalist with a knack for making science accessible to a popular audience. Highly recommended in public and academic libraries where ecology is of interest.-Kathy Arsenault, Univ. of South Florida at St. Petersburg Lib. Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information
 


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Literature for Composition
Essays, Fiction, Poetry, and Drama (8th Edition)
by Sylvan Barnet (Author), William E. Burto (Author), William E. Cain (Author)

From the Back Cover
Literature for Composition offers the finest writing and argument coverage, helpful discussions of the literary elements, compelling case studies, and a diverse array of selections. The book includes complete coverage of the writing process, three chapters devoted to argument, complete chapters on interpretation and evaluation, coverage of the literary elements and the study of visual images, and case studies. The book opens with five chapters devoted to reading, writing, and argument. An entire chapter on critical thinking equips readers with a foundation upon which to study the chapters on the literary forms that follow. An anthology is organized around six engaging themes. Special chapters on visuals and film along with ten case studies offer additional resources. For those interested in the study and composition of literature. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
 



 

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Living on Wilderness Time

by Melissa Walker (Author)

Jennifer Ackerman, author of Chance in the House of Fate
A compelling travel narrative and meditation on the value of wilderness in the spirit of Rick Bass and Gretel Ehrlich. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.



 

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Mid-Course Correction
By Ray C. Anderson

Book Description
Of value to business people, environmentalists, and educators alike, Mid-Course Correction is a business book about the enviornment that's written from a personal perspective. With passion and pride, Ray Anderson, Founder, Chairman and CEO of one of the world's largest interior furnishings companies, recounts his awakening to the importance of environmental issues and outlines the steps his petroleum-dependent company, Atlanta-based Interface, Inc., is taking in its quest to become a sustainable enterprise -- one that will never have to take another drop of oil from the Earth. Thought-provoking and thoughtful, Anderson's story is told from the heart.. .



 

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Mindfully Green
A Personal and Spiritual Guide to Whole Earth Thinking
by Stephanie Kaza

From Publishers Weekly
Kaza, a biologist and professor of Environmental Studies at University of Vermont, combines Zen Buddhist practices and teachings with her 40 years as an environmentalist for this guide to enlightened environmentalism, proposing a belief in the interdependence of people and nature as the genuine way to "go green": "When we come to see ourselves as part of the green web of life... we are naturally drawn to respond with compassion." In three parts, she guides readers through the principles of Buddhism as they apply to taking responsible action toward the earth: reducing harm, understanding suffering, seeing the big picture, letting go of desire and being in the moment. In parts two and three, she advises practical steps for joining in and taking action in everyday life and community. Kaza's measured, focused text and clear command of Buddhism and ecology should shore up convictions and commitment in the newly green, and help secular environmentalists connect with their spiritual side.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
 


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Mirage
Florida and the Vanishing Water of the Eastern U.S.
by Cynthia Barnett (Author)

From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. In recent decades, severe droughts in New England and the Mid-Atlantic states, along with shrinking aquifers, dried-up lakes and sluggish rivers in the Southeast have induced bitter East Coast fights over what was once an exclusively Western concern: water scarcity. What happened? Barnett, the long-time environmental reporter for Florida Trend magazine, answers that question in a rigorous look at the relentless pressure of development and burgeoning human populations on natural water supplies, particularly in the wetlands of Florida. Chapter by chapter, Barnett documents the enlarging sinkholes, loss of ancient lakes, pollution of water tables and river systems, aquifer mining and negligent politics that have led to Florida's perpetual water crisis-including a disastrous shift in weather patterns. Considering such crises elsewhere in the U.S., Barnett finds that successful allocation agreements are rare, lessons learned are quickly forgotten and an ever-growing population spells more trouble to come. Though it may lack popular appeal, this comprehensive and well-referenced volume does feature appearances from well-known figures like Walt Disney, Jeb Bush and Hurricane Katrina, and should become vital reading for citizens and policymakers as global concerns over water scarcity grow.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
 


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Molecules of Emotion
The Science Behind Mind-Body Medicine
by Candace, Ph.D. Pert

Book Description
There is growing interest world wide in the field of mind-body medicine and the effect which the natural "energy forces" within the body play in the maintenance of normal health and wellbeing. This in turn has led to interest in how these energies or forces may be channelled to assist in healing and restoration to health. This book, written by a well known scientist with a degree in biophysics and a PhD in biology, brings together for the first time evidence from a wide range of disciplines which is beginning to provide an acceptable explanation for the energetic exchanges that take place in all therapies.

 



 

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A Movable Feast
Ten Millennia of Food Globalization
by Kenneth F. Kiple (Author)

From Publishers Weekly
Recycling much historical material from the magisterial Cambridge World History of Food (which the author co-edited), this slender volume distills 10,000 years of food history into just 300 pages. While the first work was notable for its rich multiplicity of voices and deeply informed scholarship, this one is a bit of a hash, owing to its author's insistence on squeezing a far-ranging narrative into the narrow framework of globalism. Far from being a new economic concept, the globalization of food, asserts Kiple, is as old as agriculture itself (globalization being murkily defined as "a process of homogenization whereby the cuisines of the world have been increasingly untied from regional food production, and one that promises to make the foods of the world available to everyone in the world"). The strongest material examines the spread of agriculture and its ramifications: it's a paradox of civilization that increased food production encourages population growth, which invariably creates food shortages and disease. That said, gastronomes will find scraps to nibble on here and there—who knew, for example, that the Egyptians trained their monkeys to harvest grapes? (June)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
 


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My Name is Chellis
and I'm in Recovery from Western Civilization
by Chellis Glendinning

From Booklist
This brilliant, offbeat, and ultimately provocative book is nothing short of revolutionary. Its title, of course, is off-putting; indeed, the concept of recovering from Western civilization sounds rather arrogant. But Glendinning hits the nail on the head, making the connection between the recovery movement and the environmental movement so well that their concurrent emergence makes sense. She digs into the aspects of Western civilization we desperately need to recover from--our technological addictions, fast pace, daily and lifelong traumas, dissociation from the natural world and ourselves--and ably shows why the way of life they constitute is so unhealthy. She uses examples from nature-based cultures to show how to reconnect with the world, and by probing into her own as well as our collective psyche, she courageously takes the leap toward emotional, spiritual, and physical health that she invites the rest of us to follow. Mary Ellen Sullivan --This text refers to the Paperback edition.
 


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My Weeds

A Gardener's Botany
by SARA B. STEIN (Author), LOIS WALLACE (Translator)

From Library Journal
Reading like a series of articles for a horticultural magazine, this book seems better suited for publication in that format. It's tough to hold even an avid gardener's interest with a range of writing that includes botany, lore, and personal experiences with plants considered to be weeds. Stein ( The Science Book ) is an adequate writer, but the subject is not that compelling unless weeds have been the major interest of your gardening life. Even then, how many gardeners will take time to read about weeds they have sprayed, pulled, or ignored? Dale Luchsinger, Athens Area Technical Inst. Lib., Ga.
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.



 

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My Year of Meats

by Ruth L. Ozeki

From Library Journal
As a writer, Ozeki draws upon her knowledge in documentary filmmaking cleverly to bring the worlds of two women together by utilizing the U.S. meat industry as a central link. Alternating between the voices of Jane (in the United States) and Akiko Ueno, the wife of Jane's boss (in Japan), Ozeki draws parallels in the lives of these two women through beef, love, television, and their desire to have children. Ozeki skillfully tackles hard-pressing issues such as the use and effects of hormones in the beef industry and topics such as cultural differences, gender roles, and sexual exploitation. Her work is unique in presentation yet moving and entertaining. Highly recommended for general fiction collections. [BOMC alternate selection.]?Shirley N. Quan, Orange Cty. P.L., Stanton, C.
-?Shirley N. Quan, Orange Cty. P.L., Stanton, CA
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
 


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National Audubon Society Field Guide to Florida
by National Audubon Society (Corporate Author), Peter Alden (Author), Rick Cech (Author)

From the Inside Flap
Filled with concise descriptions and stunning photographs, the National Audubon Society Field Guide to Florida belongs in the home of every Florida resident and in the suitcase or backpack of every visitor. This compact volume contains:

An easy-to-use field guide for identifying 1,000 of the state's wildflowers, trees, mushrooms, mosses, fishes, amphibians, reptiles, birds, butterflies, mammals, and much more;

A complete overview of Florida's natural history, covering geology, wildlife habitats, ecology, fossils, rocks and minerals, clouds and weather patterns and night sky;

An extensive sampling of the area's best parks, preserves, beaches, forests, islands, and wildlife sanctuaries, with detailed descriptions and visitor information for 50 sites and notes on dozens of others.

The guide is packed with visual information -- the 1,500 full-color images include more than 1,300 photographs, 14 maps, and 16 night-sky charts, as well as 150 drawings explaining everything from geological processes to the basic features of different plants and animals.

For everyone who lives or spends time in Florida, there can be no finer guide to the area's natural surroundings than the National Audubon Society Field Guide to Florida.
 


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Native Florida Plants, Revised Edition

Low Maintenance Landscaping and Gardening
by Robert G. Haehle (Author)

Many counties in Florida now require that new commercial landscapes contain a percentage of native plants. Native landscapes are easier to maintain, use less water and thrive without chemical pesticides and fertilizers. Native Florida Plants describes every type of regional flora---from seaside foliage and wildflowers to grassy meadows, shrubs, vines, and aquatic gardens---in 301 profiles and accompanying color photographs.



 

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Natural Capitalism
Creating the Next Industrial Revolution
By Paul Hawken, Amory Lovins, L. Hunter Lovins

Publishers Weekly
Hawken (The Ecology of Commerce) and Amory and Hunter Lovins of the Rocky Mountain Institute, an environmental think tank, have put together an ambitious, visionary monster of a book advocating "natural capitalism." The short answer to the logical question (What is natural capitalism?) is that it is a way of thinking that seeks to apply market principles to all sources of material value, most importantly natural resources. The authors have two related goals: first, to show the vast array of ecologically smart options available to businesses; second, to argue that it is possible for society and industry to adopt them. Hawken and the Lovinses acknowledge such barriers as the high initial costs of some techniques, lack of knowledge of alternatives, entrenched ways of thinking and other cultural factors. In looking at options for transportation (including the development of ultralight, electricity-powered automobiles), energy use, building design, and waste reduction and disposal, the book's reach is phenomenal. It belongs to the galvanizing tradition of Frances Moore Lapp 's Diet for a Small Planet and Stewart Brand's The Whole Earth Catalog. Whether all that the authors have organized and presented so earnestly here can be assimilated and acted on by the people who run the world is open to question. But readers with a capacity for judicious browsing and grazing can surely learn enough in these pages to apply well-reasoned pressure. Charts and graphs, with accompanying CD-ROM. (Oct.) Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.
 


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The Natural Step for Business
Wealth, Ecology and the Evolutionary Corporation
By Brian Nattrass and Mary Altomare

From Library Journal
Financial consultant Brill and freelance writer Reder thoroughly discuss the concept of socially responsible investing, which involves the "channeling of personal, community, or workplace capital toward just, peaceful, healthy, environmentally sound purposes and away from destructive uses." Investments that can be considered for these purposes are discussed in detail; what is available, sources for information, and performance data for certain investments are provided. While Brill and Reder's investment philosophy is similar to Ritchie Lowry's Good Money: A Guide to Profitable Social Investing in the '90s ( LJ 5/1/91) , their book stands out because of its useful primer on investing and money management and glossary of terms. A good addition to any money management/investment collection.
- Steven J. Mayover, Free Lib. of Philadelphia
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
 


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Nature of Design
Ecology, Culture, and Human Intention
By David W. Orr

From the Publisher
The environmental movement has often been accused of being overly negative-trying to stop "progress". The Nature of Design, on the other hand, is about starting things, specifically an ecological design revolution that changes how we provide food, shelter, energy, materials, livelihood, and deal with waste. Ecological design is an emerging field aiming to recalibrate what humans do in the world with how the world works as a biophysical system. Design in this sense is a large concept having to do as much with politics and ethics as with buildings and technology. This is a book that combines theory, practicality, and action.



 

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The Necessary Revolution

How individuals and organizations are working together to create a sustainable world.
by Peter M. Senge (Author), Bryan Smith (Author), Sara Schley (Author), Joe Laur (Author), Nina Kruschwitz (Author)

Review
Review: A "Senge is best know for The Fifth Discipline ... this book is far better: it is better written and more powerful. On the evidence presented here, the case for business sustainability is overwhelming. Although the authors never say so directly, it seems clear that the business case for sustainability is so strong that the personal beliefs of the CEO and the board do not really matter. Even the most adamant climate-change denier must recognise where the market is going. Forget the environment: this is business. ... Their arguments are compelling and there are plenty of examples of businesses already leading the way. A "The Financial Times An interesting and important contribution to the burgeoning literature on the implications of climate change for business. Senge and his co-authors have produced an excellent volume, which deserves to find a place on the shelves of any thoughtful manager. The book is an example of what is is about, since it is both innovative and radical. "Lord Anthony Giddens, professor emeritus at the Centre for the Study of Global Governance and the London School of Economics writing in Management Today, August 2008

 



 

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Nine Florida Stories by Marjory Stoneman Douglas (Florida Sand Dollar Books)

by KEVIN MCCARTHY (Editor)

The subjects that would fire Marjory Stoneman Douglas’s enthusiasm for the rest of her life first appeared in her short fiction published in the 1920s. Florida’s most celebrated environmentalist, the author of The Everglades: River of Grass, wrote even then about protecting South Florida’s fragile ecosystem and the state’s endangered species, about the dangers of short-sighted land development, and about Florida history.
The nine stories in this first collection take place in a scattering of South Florida settings--Miami, Ft. Lauderdale, the Tamiami Trail, the Keys, the Everglades—and reveal the drama of hurricanes and plane crashes, of kidnappers, escaped convicts, and smugglers.
Editor Kevin McCarthy relates each story to Douglas’s life and points out the autobiographical touches which surface frequently in her stories.


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The Omnivore's Dilemma
A Natural History of Four Meals
by Michael Pollan (Author)

From Bookmarks Magazine
In The Botany of Desire (2001), about how people and plants coevolve, Michael Pollan teased greater issues from speciously small phenomena. The Omnivore's Dilemma exhibits this same gift; a Chicken McNugget, for example, illustrates our consumption of corn and, in turn, agribusiness's oil dependency. In a journey that takes us from an "organic" California chicken farm to Vermont, Pollan asks basic questions about the moral and ecological consequences of our food. Critics agree it's a wake-up call and, written in clear, informative prose, also entertaining. Most found Pollan's quest for his foraged meal the highlight, though the Los Angeles Times faulted Pollan's hypocritical method of "living off the land." Many also voiced a desire for a more concrete vision for the future. But if the book doesn't outline a diet plan, it's nonetheless a loud, convincing call for change.<BR>Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc.
--This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
 


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Once Were Warriors

by Alan Duff

From Publishers Weekly
Part of Hawaii's Talanoa Contemporary Pacific Literature imprint, this first novel won the 1991 PEN Best First Book Award amid controversy over Duff's perceived condemnation of Maori society as largely responsible for the hopelessness plaguing its communities. In a Maori ghetto of urban New Zealand, Jake and Beth Heke battle entrenched poverty, racism and other ills that overwhelm their traditional Maori culture. With a gritty, realistic eye, Duff portrays Jake and Beth, who because of alcoholism, abuse and poverty can provide little protection against the gangs, drugs and violence that menace their children. Most vulnerable is Grace who dreams of escape into the Pakeha (white) world and whose brutal rape triggers the downward spiral of events. Duff's choppy sentences, repeated phrasing and use of Maori slang may require some adjustment for American readers, but ultimately his staccato prose style is ideally suited to a world of not-so-quiet desperation. Regardless of one's position on the controversy, the half Pakeha /half Maori Duff provides a compelling and insightful glimpse into the overwhelming struggles faced by the disenfranchised poor of any urban society--including America's own inner cities.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.--This text refers to an out  of print or unavailable edition of this title.
 


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One at a Time

A Week in an American Animal Shelter
by Diane Leigh,
Marilee Geyer (Author)

Review
"Amazing, heartbreaking, tragic, loving, magical..." -- Sherman Alexie, director, poet, author of Ten Little Indians

One of the most beautiful books on animals ever produced... A magnificent work, and one that gets my highest recommendation. -- John Robbins, author of Diet for a New American and The Food Revolution

Presenting life and death in an animal shelter in unvarnished, uncompromising terms … an emotionally moving and profound piece. -- Midwest Book Review, December, 2003

Riveting, stilling, chilling and intensely motivating... shows clearly that each and every one of us can make a difference. -- Marc Bekoff, author of The Ten Trusts (with Jane Goodall)

This book has the potential to save millions of lives - if only we would open our hearts to its message. -- Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson, author of The Nine Emotional Lives of Cats

You will be breathless from cover to cover. -- Jim Mason, author of Animal Factories (with Peter Singer)
 


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Parable of the Sower

by Octavia E. Butler

From Publishers Weekly
Hugo and Nebula Award-winner Butler's first novel since 1989's Imago offers an uncommonly sensitive rendering of a very common SF scenario: by 2025, global warming, pollution, racial and ethnic tensions and other ills have precipitated a worldwide decline. In the Los Angeles area, small beleaguered communities of the still-employed hide behind makeshift walls from hordes of desperate homeless scavengers and violent pyromaniac addicts known as "paints" who, with water and work growing scarcer, have become increasingly aggressive. Lauren Olamina, a young black woman, flees when the paints overrun her community, heading north with thousands of other refugees seeking a better life. Lauren suffers from 'hyperempathy," a genetic condition that causes her to experience the pain of others as viscerally as her own--a heavy liability in this future world of cruelty and hunger. But she dreams of a better world, and with her philosophy/religion, Earthseed, she hopes to found an enclave which will weather the tough times and which may one day help carry humans to the stars. Butler tells her story with unusual warmth, sensitivity, honesty and grace; though science fiction readers will recognize this future Earth, Lauren Olamina and her vision make this novel stand out like a tree amid saplings.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
 


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Paradise Lost?
The Environmental History of Florida (Florida History and Culture)
by JACK EMERSON DAVIS (Editor), RAYMOND ARSENAULT (Editor)

The Journal of Southern History
...situate[s] Florida's environmental problems as central topics...in state and regional history [and] in the broader environmental history of the nation.



 

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Passage
by Andy Goldsworthy (Author)

From Booklist
*Starred Review* "I don't know what will happen but look forward to whatever changes occur," writes sculptor Goldsworthy, a statement that can stand as his credo. An artist who works with nature in nature, he creates astonishingly subtle, ephemeral, seemingly impossible, and elegantly mysterious works out of stone, sticks, leaves, stalks, ice, and sand, constructions vulnerable to sun, wind, storms, tides, and time. Documentation is an integral aspect of his art, and, consequently, Goldsworthy, the subject of the gorgeously meditative, award-winning documentary Rivers and Tides (2004), has created a number of beautiful books. His newest covers many recent works--including Garden of Stones, a Holocaust memorial in New York City and the subject of an essay by Simon Schama--and tracks his ongoing involvement with an ancient tradition, the building of cairns. His are not mere stacks of stones marking a trail but rather elaborately constructed and gracefully balanced egg-shaped forms that bring into focus the beauty of their surroundings. Magical and exquisite, Goldsworthy's sculptures move us to look more carefully at the world around us and consider more deeply our place within the fine mesh of life. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
 


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Paths to a Green World
The Political Economy of the Global Environment
by Jennifer Clapp (Author), Peter Dauvergne (Author)

"Paths to a Green World provides the most theoretically sophisticated and sustained study to date on the relationship between economic globalization and environmental well-being. Rather than write a diatribe, Clapp and Dauvergne present conflicting views on this relationship and, in doing so, call on each of us to appreciate the diversity of environmental thought and probe our own understandings to work humbly yet urgently for a more sustainable global future."
--Paul Wapner, School of International Service, American University


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Patriotism and the American Land (The New Patriotism Series, Vol. 2)

by Lopez Barry (Author)

Excerpted from Patriotism and the American Land by Richard Nelson, Barry Lopez, Terry Tempest Williams. Copyright © 2002. Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Chief Joseph, leader of the Nez Perce Indians, expressed it in the following words: "The earth and myself are of one mind. The measure of the land and the measure of our bodies are the same." Sentiments like these, offered in many native voices over many generations, should be recognized as the bedrock of American patriotism and the foundation for a human commitment to stand in defense of the earth.
–"Patriots for the American Land" by Richard Nelson

Historically, tyrants have sought selectively to eliminate firsthand knowledge when its sources lay outside their control. By silencing those with problematic firsthand experiences, they reduced the number of potential contradictions in their political and social designs, and so they felt safer.
–"The Naturalist" by Barry Lopez

Do we have the moral courage to step forward and openly question every law, person, and practice that denies justice toward nature?

Do we have the strength and will to continue in this American tradition of bearing witness to beauty and terror which is its own form of advocacy?

And do we have the imagination to rediscover an authentic patriotism that inspires empathy and reflection over pride and nationalism?
–"One Patriot" by Terry Tempest Williams
 


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Peak Experiences

Walking Meditations on Literature, Nature, and Need (Under the Sign of Nature)
by Ian Marshall (Author)

Nature’s ability to satisfy deep human needs is familiar to anyone who has hiked up a mountain, canoed a river, or hung a bird feeder outside the kitchen window. In Story Line, his groundbreaking work of narrative ecocriticism, Ian Marshall explores how natural surroundings inspired works of literature set along the Appalachian Trail. In his new work, Peak Experiences, Marshall sets out on a far more personal and at the same time far-reaching journey, to discover how our modern estrangement from the natural world has affected our mental well-being.

Taking as his starting point the psychologist Abraham Maslow’s “hierarchy of human needs”—a pyramid familiar to anyone who ever cracked a textbook for Psych 101—Marshall asks how his own experience of deep satisfaction in nature may or may not fit Maslow’s theory. In chapters focused on the needs identified by Maslow, Marshall finds evidence for the healing power of nature in literature and in his own experiences in the wild.

“I offer myself as test subject,” Marshall writes: “recently divorced, a father sharing custody of two children, someone with a high regard for the written word, . . . a little too stressed-out these days, no more self-actualized than the next person but just as curious about it—and what I have going for me are a lot of well-read books, a good pair of broken-in hiking boots, and a thing for mountains.”

Embracing the exciting new field of ecopsychology, Marshall leads us on a personal and intellectual odyssey, from the dream mountain of Henry David Thoreau to the high slopes of John Muir’s beloved Mount Shasta. Always, Marshall returns to his own challenges as father and reader, and to his own humble but rewarding mountain, Bald Eagle Ridge, in the Pennsylvania countryside outside his back door.
 



 

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The Phenomenon of Man

by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (Author)

Bernard Towers, Blackfriars
"Marks the most significant achievement in synthetic thinking since that of Aquinas."

Abraham J. Heschel
"A most extraordinary book, of far-reaching significance for the understanding of man's place in the universe."



 

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Plan B 3.0

Mobilizing to Save Civilization
by Lester R. Brown (Author)

Review
"How to build a more just world and save the planet... We should all heed Brown's advice." Bill Clinton "This book provides excellent insights for academics, students and lay readers alike... in tackling a host of pressing issues in a single book, Plan B 2.0 makes for an eye-opening read." The Times Higher Education Supplement "Brown is an effective Cassandra. His picture of climate-change-induced chaos is terrifying and convincing." Andrew Simms, New Scientist" --This text refers to the Paperback edition.



 

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Planet U
Sustaining the World, Reinventing the University
by Michael M'Gonigle (Author), Justine Starke (Author)

Planet U places the university at the forefront of the sustainability movement. Questioning the university's ability to equip society to deal with today's serious challenges such as economic growth, democratic citizenship and planetary survival, it calls for a new social movement to take a lead in reforming the university - the world's largest industry.

The book reviews the university's 900-year history from medieval religious philosopher, to Renaissance nation-builder, to its modern function as training grounds for the world's managerial class and the world's largest industry. It examines diverse campus initiatives across North America and Europe and their traditional concerns of green buildings, renewable energy and transportation demand management. But it also demonstrates the promise for social and ecological progress open to the "planetary university" once the university takes its place seriously and discovers its new mission: to create diverse models of local and global innovation centered around tough new questions about what universities - and their societies - can achieve:

  • How might the university help move us to a post-automobile, energy-saving society?

  • How might universities help refashion the city to be sustainable?

  • How might universities be governed for sustainability?

 


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Plenty
One Man, One Woman, and a Raucous Year of Eating Locally
by Alisa Smith, J.B. Mackinnon

From Booklist
Smith and MacKinnon revolt against the industrial model of food distribution and determine to spend a year eating nothing raised or cultivated beyond a 100-mile radius of their British Columbia home. They seek not just health benefits and fuel efficiencies but they also want to reconnect with small, local growers, millers, fishermen, and ranchers to create a community where the consumer knows both where the food comes from and who has produced it. British Columbia, with its Marine West Coast climate, its rivers full of salmon, and its proximity to the sea, offers unique opportunities to pursue this resolve. Along the way, the authors learn a lot about nutrition and uncommon varieties of fruits, vegetables, and herbs, and all the data is shared with the reader. Satisfying all their family's hungers proves daunting but scarcely impossible. Entries for each month conclude with a recipe reflecting use of seasonal ingredients. Knoblauch, Mark
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
 


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The Post-Corporate World
By Lester Brown

From the Publisher
A deep gap is growing between the promises of the new global capitalism and the reality of the social breakdown, inequality, insecurity, spiritual emptiness, and environmental destruction left in its wake. What went wrong, and why? In The Post-Corporate World, David C. Korten makes a well-documented case that the new global capitalism is delivering a fatal blow not only to life but to democracy and the market. But rather than simply presenting a doomsday scenario, Korten shows that it isn't too late for change. Drawing on the new biology and a growing understanding of living systems, the book argues that the most promising alternative is a world of healthy market economies that function as extensions of healthy local ecosystems to meet the needs of people and communities. .
 


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Proceed and Be Bold
Rural Studio After Samuel Mockbee
by Andrea Oppenheimer Dean (Author), Timothy Hursley (Photographer)

From Publishers Weekly
The first title documenting Samuel Mockbee's architectural practice, Rural Studio (2002), has been through five printings; it is beginning to have an impact similar to that of Christopher Alexander's A Pattern Language 30 years ago on the ways architects and designers conceive of what they do, how they might go about doing it—and for whom. Mockbee, who died in 2001, believed that great architecture could be made from simple materials (as well as unorthodox and recycled: tires, windshields, hay), for people who were often living in far from ideal conditions; he put his ideas into practice via his studio in out-of-the-way southwestern Alabama. This book documents the studio's work under Andrew Freear in the years since Mockbee's death, including the gorgeously simple Antioch Baptist Church in Perry Co., Ala., which rose like a phoenix from within its century-old predecessor, and a totally heterodox, perfectly calibrated house for a man called Music Man. (Apr. 21)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
 


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Rare Earth
Why Complex Life is Uncommon in the Universe
by Peter D. Ward

From Library Journal
Renowned paleontologist Ward (Univ. of Washington), who has authored numerous books and articles, and Brownlee, a noted astronomer who has also researched extraterrestrial materials, combine their interests, research, and collaborative thoughts to present a startling new hypothesis: bacterial life forms may be in many galaxies, but complex life forms, like those that have evolved on Earth, are rare in the universe. Ward and Brownlee attribute Earth's evolutionary achievements to the following critical factors: our optimal distance from the sun, the positive effects of the moon's gravity on our climate, plate tectonics and continental drift, the right types of metals and elements, ample liquid water, maintenance of the correct amount of internal heat to keep surface temperatures within a habitable range, and a gaseous planet the size of Jupiter to shield Earth from catastrophic meteoric bombardment. Arguing that complex life is a rare event in the universe, this compelling book magnifies the significance A and tragedy A of species extinction. Highly recommended for all public and academic libraries. AGloria Maxwell, Penn Valley Community Coll. Lib., Kansas City
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
 


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Ready, Set, Green

Eight Weeks to Modern Eco-Living

by Graham Hill, Meaghan O'Neill (Author)

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Chapter 1

The Future Is Green

WHAT YOU CAN DO

Look out your window. What do you see? A paved street and electrical wires? Meadows and birds? A farm full of cows? Whatever surrounds you, that's the environment. And whether it was created by Mother Nature or the municipal works department, humans aren't separate from it. Just as hurricanes, floods, and tornadoes have an effect on our well-being, we have an effect on nature, polluting water via our factories and homes, reducing mountains to piles of coal that we burn for energy, packing landfills with our used-up cars and electronics packaging. Luckily, it turns out we also have the power to clean up after ourselves.

At TreeHugger.com, the website dedicated to modern green living, we believe that cutting-edge ideas, technology, and design-and, more important, people with the right attitude-can help save the environment. This book was conceived to help readers develop an understanding of existing eco dilemmas, and to empower them to help reverse the problems. We don't have all the answers; no one does. But we believe that individuals do have the power to "green" the planet. Your dollars count. Your vote counts. Your actions count. And when millions of people do the right thing, it can have a serious impact.
 


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The Rebirth of Nature
The Greening of Science and God
by Rupert Sheldrake

Publishers Weekly
This frontal assault on conventional science embodies a radical rethinking of humanity's place in the scheme of things.

Book Description
Rupert Sheldrake, one of the world's preeminent biologists, has revolutionized scientific thinking with his vision of a living, developing universe. In The Rebirth of Nature Sheldrake transports us to the threshold of a new paradigm in which traditional wisdom, intuitive experience, and scientific insight can co-exist and be mutually enriching.

 



 

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Recycling the City
The Use and Reuse of Urban Land
Edited by Rosalind Greenstein and Yseim Sungu-Eryilmaz

This collection of essays examines underutilized, abandoned and vacant urban land within political, economic, institutional and policy contexts. In the volume’s three sections, the authors consider the issues at the national, regional, local and site levels; examine redevelopment processes and policies; and describe some potential uses of vacant and abandoned land, including urban agriculture, green development, and the preservation of an industrial landscape for cultural uses.
 



 

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River of Lakes

A Journey on Florida's St. Johns River
By Bill Belleville

Eighteen of Florida’s best-loved writers here share with you their affection for Florida’s wild side--the beautiful heart of a state under siege from development. Carl Hiaasen, Randy Wayne White, Al Burt, Patrick Smith, the late Archie Carr, and others evoke a Florida thick with pinewoods, alligators, and palmetto scrub; ribboned by miles of coast and dune; blessed with backcountry lakes, rivers, creeks, and springs. Strip malls and concrete cannot tame this wild Florida, but they can kill it. These essays offer passionate argument why that should not be allowed to happen.



 

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The Rodale Book of Composting
Easy Methods for Every Gardener
by Grace Gershuny (Editor), Deborah L. Martin (Editor)

From Library Journal
This is an update of Jerry Minnich and others' The Rodale Guide to Composting ( LJ 5/1/79), which itself updated J.L. Rodale's Complete Book of Composting (Rodale Pr., 1960. o.p.). The broad spectrum of information given will be useful from backyard urban gardening on up to industrial, municipal, and farm recycling. The first quarter of the book gives you all you ever wanted to know on the science of composting--and more--along with some history. A discussion of materials, methods, structures, equipment, and uses is followed by a brief look at large-scale composting. The writing is an uneven mix of scientific detail and the anecdotal. Chemical reactions are described in exquisite detail, and yet most quotes, while attributed, are neither dated nor their source given. Stu Campbell and Kathleen Bond Borie's Let It Rot: The Gardener's Guide to Composting ( LJ 1/91) is more readable and inviting for the individual gardener. While useful for its in-depth, detailed coverage, Rodale's almost-textbook is recommended only for comprehensive gardening collections.
- Sharon Levin, Univ. of Vermont Lib., Burlington
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
 


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The Sacred Balance

Rediscovering Our Place in Nature
by David Suzuki

From the Publisher
This powerful, deeply felt book gives concrete suggestions for how we can meet our basic needs and create a way of life that is ecologically sustainable, fulfilling and just. It offers the seeds of a new direction for us all, one in which we can rediscover our place in nature and live in balance with our surroundings.



 

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The Sacred Depths of Nature
by Ursula Goodenough

From Publishers Weekly
In eloquent prose, Goodenough, a noted molecular biologist, offers a scientist's insight into the dialogue between science and religion. The book's structure is similar to the Daily Devotionals found in some Protestant denominations, but with a decidedly broader approach to the vast ontological questions being pursued. Beginning with an autobiographical sketch, Goodenough moves resolutely through the major questions of being. Her inquiries cut across the boundaries of cosmology, astrophysics, cell biology, evolutionary theory, sexuality and death, moving into the realms of philosophy and theology. The author, while no theist, recognizes the eternal human quest for meaning engendered by the essentially non-quantifiable mystery of consciousness. Displaying open-mindedness to non-scientific approaches in her search for ultimate understanding, she writes with equal respect of Taoism's enigmatic, ironical credo and of 19th-century Transcendentalists' humanistic vision. This spiritual diversity, accompanied by scientific observations drawn from such authorities as Stephen Hawking and Edward O. Wilson, makes for a stirring, enlightening read. In part a reverential memoir by a dedicated scientist, this book provides a meeting place for the revelations of advanced science and technology and the universal, unanswerable questions of humanity. 18 line drawings.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to the Hardcover edition


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Samuel Mockbee and the Rural Studio

Community Architecture
by David Moos (Editor), Gail Trechsel (Contributor), Samuel Mockbee (Contributor)

The architect and teacher Samuel Mockbee, founder of Auburn University's Rural Studio, was an idealist who put into action one of the boldest programs in contemporary architecture. Mockbee led his students in the design and construction of homes, community centers and other essential structures in Hale County, Alabama--one of the poorest counties in the United States. Mockbee believed that architecture could play a determining role in combating the brutalities of poverty. He inspired students to create vanguard designs and utilize an array of innovative, cost-effective building materials that included scraps of carpet baled into rectangular building blocks. This combination of ingenuity and enterprise informed the unique character of Mockbee's undertaking. Samuel Mockbee and the Rural Studio appraises Mockbee's unique contribution, assessing how he believed that architecture, practiced as a community-oriented undertaking, could transform the social environment.


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The Sea, The Storm, and The Mangrove Tangle

By Lynne Cherry

From School Library Journal
Grade 1-3–Using a beautifully balanced format that combines panoramic illustrations with a storylike narrative, Cherry imagines the life cycle of a mangrove over a period of more than 100 years, from propagules (sprouting seeds) to a single tree to a tangle (a cluster of trees) to an island. As the unusual tree slowly increases in size, it sends out dozens of visible prop roots that anchor it to the sea floor at the edge of a Caribbean lagoon and becomes both shelter and food source for an amazing array of living things. Richly hued watercolor-and-colored-pencil paintings show birds, fish, and sea creatures in sufficient detail to allow for easy identification. The endpapers feature maps of mangroves around the world surrounded by borders containing a small, labeled painting of each species. An introduction and author's note explain the importance of mangroves to their ecosystem and encourage their preservation. Although Cherry has chosen to anthropomorphize a few of the animals by including snippets of conversation, the information is well researched and clearly presented, and the lesson in ecology is an important one.–Susan Scheps, Shaker Heights Public Library, OH
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserve
 


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Second Nature
A Gardener's Education
by Michael Pollan (Author)

From Library Journal
Pollan, executive editor of Harper's and self-proclaimed amateur gardener, has written a book that is by turns charming and annoying, insightful and shallow, droll and banal. His collection of a dozen essays arranged by season is based on his experiences over a seven-year period in his Connecticut garden, along with vignettes from garden history. Unfortunately, Pollan's text is characterized by dubious and unsupported generalities, self-conscious humor, and extended, labored metaphors, and his lack of gardening authority dooms the book to superficiality. Experienced gardeners and devotees of garden literature will find little here that is original. Only for comprehensive gardening collections.
- Richard Shotwell, Hancock Shaker Village, Pittsfield, Mass.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.


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Seeds of Deception
Exposing Industry and Government Lies About the Safety of the Genetically Engineered Foods You're Eating
by Jeffrey M. Smith

From Publishers Weekly
Recent news headlines have focused on the disagreement between the U.S. and Europe over genetically modified foods: the U.S. exports them, but the European Union doesn't want to import them, believing their safety remains unproven. Are genetically modified foods safe? Longtime anti-GM foods campaigner Smith presents the "opposing" case. He offers cases where GM produced results that were at best unexpected (increased starch content in potatoes), at worst grotesque (pigs without genitals). He describes how one corporation reportedly tried to bribe Canadian government scientists into approving genetically engineered bovine growth hormones they deemed unsafe; how some scientists have reported their careers were threatened as a result of their refusal to approve certain GM products in the U.S.; and how "conflicts of interest, sloppy science, and industry influence" can distort the approval process. The cases Smith presents are scary and timely, but he explores only one side of the story. Readers looking for a balance consideration of genetically modified foods will want to look elsewhere.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.--This text refers to the Hardcover edition


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The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People

Powerful Lessons in Personal Change
By Stephen R. Covey

Stephen R. Covey's book, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, has been a top-seller for the simple reason that it ignores trends and pop psychology for proven principles of fairness, integrity, honesty, and human dignity. Celebrating its fifteenth year of helping people solve personal and professional problems, this special anniversary edition includes a new foreword and afterword written by Covey exploring the question of whether the 7 Habits are still relevant and answering some of the most common questions he has received over the past 15 years.

Follow the link to listen to audio samples from the book
http://shopping.franklincovey.com/shopping/catalog/productbooks.jsp?id=prod610022


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Shades of Green
Environment Activism Around the Globe (International Environmental History)
by Christof Mauch (Author)

Shades of Green examines the impact of political, economic, religious, and scientific institutions on environmental activism around the world. The book highlights the diversity of national, regional and international environmental activism, showing that the term "environmentalism" covers an entire range of perceptions, values and interests. It demonstrates that each instance of environmental activism is shaped by historically unique circumstances, highlighting within each chapter the ideological, social, and political origins of efforts to protect the environment. Discussing issues unique to different parts of the world, Shades of Green shows that environmentalism around the globe has been strengthened, weakened, or suppressed by a variety of local, national, and international concerns, politics, and social realities.


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Shades of Green

Visions of Nature in the Literature of American Slavery, 1770-1860
by Ian Frederick Finseth (Author)

Review
"Finseth's attention to the convergence of antebellum views of slavery and rising appreciation of the sociopolitical import of the natural world (what we have come nowadays to call 'ecocriticism') provides a unique and welcome new departure in the study of slavery and abolitionism." --Eric J. Sundquist, author of Empire and Slavery in American Literature, 1820-1865

"This is a rich and insightful study that makes a significant contribution to our understanding of debates on slavery and race, particularly in relation to historically shifting conceptions of 'nature' and the human." --Robert S. Levine, associate general editor of The Norton Anthology of American Literature


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A Short History of Nearly Everything
by Bill Bryson (Author)

From Publishers Weekly
As the title suggests, bestselling author Bryson (In a Sunburned Country) sets out to put his irrepressible stamp on all things under the sun. As he states at the outset, this is a book about life, the universe and everything, from the Big Bang to the ascendancy of Homo sapiens. "This is a book about how it happened," the author writes. "In particular how we went from there being nothing at all to there being something, and then how a little of that something turned into us, and also what happened in between and since." What follows is a brick of a volume summarizing moments both great and curious in the history of science, covering already well-trod territory in the fields of cosmology, astronomy, paleontology, geology, chemistry, physics and so on. Bryson relies on some of the best material in the history of science to have come out in recent years. This is great for Bryson fans, who can encounter this material in its barest essence with the bonus of having it served up in Bryson's distinctive voice. But readers in the field will already have studied this information more in-depth in the originals and may find themselves questioning the point of a breakneck tour of the sciences that contributes nothing novel. Nevertheless, to read Bryson is to travel with a memoirist gifted with wry observation and keen insight that shed new light on things we mistake for commonplace. To accompany the author as he travels with the likes of Charles Darwin on the Beagle, Albert Einstein or Isaac Newton is a trip worth taking for most readers.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to the Hardcover edition.


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Silent Spring (Special Edition)
by Rachel Carson (Author)

From The WomanSource Catalog & Review: Tools for Connecting the Community for Women; review by SH
In 1960, a woman noticed the birds had stopped singing and their population had severely decreased in her neighborhood. She summoned a friend, biologist/writer Rachel Carson, to investigate this wildlife mystery. Subsequently, in 1962, Rachel's discoveries and efforts were brought to the forefront in her book, Silent Spring, which revealed the atrocities of pesticide poisoning. The over-spraying of DDT, dieldrin and other pest killers was poisoning the entire world of living things, humanity included. Rachel's work not only left chemical companies casting about trying to discredit her findings, but, most importantly, prompted an enormous environmental movement which continues today. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.


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Small Wonder
by Barbara Kingsolver (Author)

In this collection of essays, the author of High Tide in Tucson brings to us (out of one of history's darker moments) an extended love song to the world we still have. From its opening parable gleaned from recent news about a lost child saved in an astonishing way, the book moves on to consider a world of surprising and hopeful prospects ranging from an inventive conservation scheme in a remote jungle to the backyard flock of chickens tended by the author's small daughter.

Whether she is contemplating the Grand Canyon, her vegetable garden, motherhood, adolescence, genetic engineering, TV-watching, the history of civil rights, or the future of a nation founded on the best of all human impulses, these essays are grounded in the author's belief that our largest problems have grown from the earth's remotest corners as well as our own backyards, and that answers may lie in those places, too. In the voice Kingsolver's readers have come to rely on - sometimes grave, occasionally hilarious, and ultimately persuasive - Small Wonder is a hopeful examination of the people we seem to be, and what we might yet make of ourselves.


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Snakes Of The Southeast (Wormsloe Foundation Nature Book)
by Whit Gibbons (Author), Michael E. Dorcas (Author), J. Whitfield Gibbons (Author)

Augusta Chronicle, Augusta, GA February 6, 2005
"There aren't many places where you can find all 52 species of snakes known to inhabit the Southeast."

Weekly Reader August 2005
"Really fascinating."

Augusta Chronicle, Augusta, GA November 20, 2005
"An eye-catching new nature guidebook melding good descriptive writing, a dapper design and strikingly crisp photographs."

Wildlife Activist Summer 2005
"Each account is illustrated with excellent color photos, range maps and a wealth of facts."

Bulletin of the Maryland Herpetological Society March 2006
"A treasure to anyone having an interest in becoming a herpetologist, and any child having an inclination for learning more."


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Some Kind of Paradise

A Chronicle of Man and the Land in Florida
by Mark Derr

Publishers Weekly
Ambitious, comprehensive and generally successful, Derr's study of the country's most-visited state combines ecological, demographic, economic information with political and cultural history. In his account of the area's exploration, colonization and development, the author also portrays the developers, migrants and foreign laborers who shaped the state, primarily for the benefit of winter residents, retirees and tourists. Chief among the 19th-century entrepreneurs were friends and rivals Henry Plant and Henry Flagler, master builders of cities and resorts, whose vast rail systems opened up the peninsula and fostered exploitation of all kinds, including plantation slavery. The panoramic narrative is animated by anecdotes, novel details and flavorful images of Florida's motley settlers. Freelance writer Derr cautions that the outcome of the current war between developers and environmentalists will depend on ``controlled'' growth and wise administration of the state's resources. Photos not seen by PW. (Oct.)

h Florida at St. Petersburg Lib. Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information


Book Cover

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Spirit of the Shuar
Wisdom from the Last Unconquered People of the Amazon
by John Perkins

John Perkins (Author) Shakaim Mariano Shakai Ijisam Chumpi (Author), Ehud C. Sperling (Author), Mariano Shakai Ijisam Chumpi (Author)


Review
After you have read it, you will know why Spirit of the Shuar has been nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. -- June Rouse, The Monthly Aspectarian, December 2001

Anyone interested in indigenous wisdom, different ways of living, or shapeshifting will definitely be fascinated by this excellent. -- Cynthia Larson, RealityShifters News, September 2001

We have much to learn from the Shuar; reading this book could change your world. -- Susan Dobra, Magical Blend, Winter 2002
 


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Spontaneous Healing
How to Discover and Enhance Your Body's Natural Ability to Maintain and Heal Itself
By Andrew Weil, M.D.

From the Publisher
In this book, Dr. Andrew Weil, one of the most authoritative, and important voices in the field of health and healing, makes clear the reality of spontaneous healing. He illuminates the mechanisms and processes of the body's healing system, delineates the ways in which an individual can optimize the functioning of his or her own system, and outlines the alternative medicines and treatments available to aid the healing system, not only in the remission of life-threatening diseases but also in response to everyday illnesses and in day-to-day upkeep of basic health. In clear, concise language, Dr. Weil explains how the healing system operates, its interactions with the mind, its biological organization, its systems of self-diagnosis, self-repair, and regeneration.


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Stolen Water
Saving the Everglades from its Friends, Foes and Florida
By W. Hodding Carter

From the Publisher
In December 2000, President Clinton signed into law a $7.8 billion restoration plan for the Everglades that garnered national attention and has since become America's touchstone for environmental issues. Enter W. Hodding Carter, a man already bemused by the state of Florida and determined to see what, if any, progress has been made with the Everglades. For reasons unclear even to him, this amazing, remote, mosquito-infested, hard-to-love region has captured Carter's imagination and won't let go. So, for the past few years, Carter has examined the Everglades from all angles -- social, political, cultural, environmental -- culminating in an ungodly canoe trip through the heart of the Everglades. Always humane, often controversial, and highly readable, Hodding Carter has brought to life this murky, alluring place through his powerful eyewitness account and swampy mishaps. Stolen Water is narrative nonfiction at its best, from one of our most talented and funny writers.
 


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Surrounded on Three Sides (Florida Sand Dollar Books)

by JOHN KEASLER (Author)

Review
"Forsaking the frantic world of a New York public relations firm, Paul Higgins moves his family to the rustic, undeveloped Florida midlands. Peace and quiet are assured until a celebrated author moves into the neighborhood. Paul then sets in motion a public relations project geared to protect the community from Progress and an invasion of sightseers. The effort boomerangs with farcical results". -- Library Journal


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Sustainable Planet
Solutions for the Twenty-first Century
by Juliet Schor (Editor), Betsy Taylor (Author)

From Library Journal
The mission of the Center for a New American Dream (CNAD) is to "help people consume responsibly to protect the environment, enhance quality of life and promote social justice." Schor, author of The Overworked American and a member of CNAD's advisory board, and CNAD executive director Taylor present 16 essays that contain case studies, illustrations, and examples in support of that mission. The diverse essayists, some better known than others, include a congresswoman (Nydia M. Vel zquez, D-NY), a CEO (Jeffrey Hollender, Seventh Generation), an economist (John Cavanagh), and an author (Bill McKibben). But all have an abiding interest in the concept of sustainability, and practical action suggestions abound. Several of the articles will raise the awareness of those who are not fully alert to the impact of their consumer choices and how interwoven with environmental and social quality the purchase of a piece of clothing or an overly equipped car really is. This is a positive, informative, hopeful, and concrete anthology. Highly recommended for most environmental collections, public and academic, though those who might benefit the most may be those least likely to read it.
Nancy Moeckel, Miami Univ. Libs., Oxford, OH
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.


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The Swamp
The Everglades, Florida and the Politics of Paradise
By Michael Grunwald

From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. Washington Post reporter Grunwald brings the zeal of his profession—and the skill that won him a Society of Environmental Journalists Award in 2003—to this enthralling story of "the river of grass" that starry-eyed social engineers and greedy developers have diverted, drained and exploited for more than a century. In 1838, fewer than 50 white people lived in south Florida, and the Everglades was seen as a vast and useless bog. By the turn of this century, more than seven million people lived there (and 40 million tourists visited annually). Escalating demands of new residents after WWII were sapping the Everglades of its water and decimating the shrinking swamp's wildlife. But in a remarkable political and environmental turnaround, chronicled here with a Washington insider's savvy, Republicans and Democrats came together in 2000 to launch the largest ecosystem restoration project in America's history. This detailed account doesn't shortchange the environmental story—including an account of the senseless fowl hunts that provoked abolitionist Harriet Beecher Stowe's 1877 broadside "Protect the Birds." But Grunwald's emphasis on the role politics played in first despoiling and now reclaiming the Everglades gives this important book remarkable heft. 18 pages of b&w photos; 7 maps. (Mar.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved