Kategoria BISAC: Nature >> Essays

Like nearly every area of scholarly inquiry today, the biological sciences are broken into increasingly narrow fields and subfields, its practitioners divided into ecologists, evolutionary biologists, taxonomists, paleontologists, and much more. But all these splintered pieces have their origins in the larger field of natural history-and in this era where climate change and relentless population growth are irrevocably altering the world around us, perhaps it's time to step back and take a new, fresh look at the larger picture.

"The Essential Naturalist" offers exactly that: a...

Here, Ken Lamberton finds his way through a lifetime of exploring southern Arizona's Santa Cruz River. This river--dry, still, and silent one moment, a thundering torrent of mud the next--serves as a reflection of the desert around it: a hint of water on parched sand, a path to redemption across a thirsty landscape.

With his latest book, Lamberton takes us on a trek across the land of three nations--the United States, Mexico, and the Tohono O'odham Nation--as he...

The essays collected in Cultivating the Colonies demonstrate how the relationship between colonial power and nature revealsthe nature of power. Each essay explores how colonial governments translated ideas about the management of exoticnature and foreign people into practice, and how they literally "got their hands dirty" in the business of empire.

The eleven essays include studies of animal husbandry in the Philippines, farming in Indochina, and indigenous medicine in India. They are global in scope, ranging from the Russian North to Mozambique, examining the...

"Potluck" homes in on the everyday gatherings that, over time, define a community: a makeshift wedding, an art gallery opening, a farewell potluck, a work party, a campfire, a political caucus, a funeral. "What connects us?" Spagna asks, and she reveals, again and again, the gift of community--easy and uneasy, deep and enduring and essential.

Forests have always been more than just their trees. The forests in Michigan (and similar forests in other Great Lakes states such as Wisconsin and Minnesota) played a role in the American cultural imagination from the beginnings of European settlement in the early nineteenth century to the present. Our relationships with those forests have been shaped by the cultural attitudes of the times, and people have invested in them both moral and spiritual meanings.

Author John Knott draws upon such works as Simon Schama's Landscape and Memory and Robert Pogue Harrison's...