Nature

Americans have always been fascinated by birds and from the beginning American writers have captured this keen interest in a variety of genres: poems, journals, memoirs, short stories, essays, and travel accounts. Here literature professor and avid birder Andrew Rubenfeld, in collaboration with acclaimed writer Terry Tempest Williams, who provides a foreword, gathers evocative and surprising writings on birds and our fascination with them from an astonishing array of American poets and writers. The result is a literature of singular depth and beauty, with occasional flights of fancy in the mix.

Experience the exquisite beauty of Native American songs about birds. Accompany Lewis and Clark as they encounter new species, Audubon as he sketches near New Orleans, and Emerson and Thoreau birding together around Walden Pond. Delight in Sarah Orne Jewett's poignant tale of a snowy egret in the Maine woods and Florence Merriam's portrait of a winter wren in Central Park. Join Rachel Carson as she watches skimmers along the Atlantic coast and Roger Tory Peterson observing snail kites in the Everglades. And thrill to an impressive roster of modern and contemporary poets, including Robert Frost, Elizabeth Bishop, Sterling A. Brown, Cornelius Eady, Mary Oliver, Linda Hogan, Louise Erdrich, and David Tomas Martinez, as they evoke the magic and haunting beauty of America's birds.

An Inconvenient Truth--Gore's groundbreaking, battle cry of a follow-up to the bestselling Earth in the Balance--is being published to tie in with a documentary film of the same name. Both the book and film were inspired by a series of multimedia presentations on global warming that Gore created and delivers to groups around the world. With this book, Gore, who is one of our environmental heroes--and a leading expert--brings together leading-edge research from top scientists around the world; photographs, charts, and other illustrations; and personal anecdotes and observations to document the fast pace and wide scope of global warming. He presents, with alarming clarity and conclusiveness--and with humor, too--that the fact of global warming is not in question and that its consequences for the world we live in will be disastrous if left unchecked. This riveting new book--written in an accessible, entertaining style--will open the eyes of even the most skeptical.

From the acclaimed author of Theft "A lyrical exploration of the timeless themes of nature, mortality, love, and family" in the American West (Kristen Iverson, author of Full Body Burden).

"Radical, before it meant a person who advocates strong political reform, meant getting to the root of things, the origin. It comes from the Latin radix, radicis, meaning radish, a root vegetable." --BK Loren

These meditative essays range in subject from a transcendental encounter with a pack of coyotes to the irony of a neighbor's claim that nature "has gone out of vogue"; from a mother's slow deterioration from Parkinson's disease to the unexpected way the Loma Prieta earthquake eroded the author's depression by offering her a sense of her small place in our wild and worthwhile world.

Award-winning writer and naturalist BK Loren takes an empathetic and gentle approach to the intricacies of human relationships and the nature of consciousness. Fear of death and time, cooperation born of clashing viewpoints, the beauty of tradition even when it's destructive, a love of language, a sense of loss amid the fast-paced materialistic world--through each of these subjects and more, Loren peels back the layers of her own life, revealing what it means to be a human being in these often inhumane times.

From the Sierra Nevada, the Mojave Desert, the Yucatan Peninsula, and the Bahamas to her home ground on the high plateaus and deep canyons of the Southwest, we journey with Meloy through vistas of both great beauty and great desecration. Her keen vision makes us look anew at ancestral mountains, turquoise seas, and even motel swimming pools. She introduces us to Navajo "velvet grandmothers" whose attire and aesthetics absorb the vivid palette of their homeland, as well as to Persians who consider turquoise the life-saving equivalent of a bullet-proof vest. Throughout, Meloy invites us to appreciate along with her the endless surprises in all of life and celebrates the seduction to be found in our visual surroundings.

By employing the tenets of posthumanism, compassionate conservation, and entangled empathy-and making them accessible through storytelling and narrative-Propen offers new perspectives about how to more compassionately and productively understand ideas about home, connectivity, and coexistence across a range of places and ecosystems. Uniquely conceptualized to include narrative related to the Anthropause, as well as travel and nature writing amidst COVID-19, At Home in the Anthropocene engages with questions about home and belonging in generative ways that attempt to open up possibilities for sustainable futures in which we may productively coexist with our more-than-human kin.

In Available Truth, he guides us further along the path. His unqualified embrace of the Buddha's worldview - in intelligent and deeply thoughtful prose - distinguishes his work from many other Western Buddhist books. Along with reflections on mindfulness, impermanence, and the end of suffering, Bhikkhu Nyanasobhano is not afraid to delve into the topics of rebirth, karma, nonvirtue, and the roles of reasoned faith, ritual, and monasticism, revealing their continuing relevance for today's seeker. His patient awareness of the workings of the mind and the natural world will enable readers to deepen both their practice and their lives.

Available Truth will surely stand the test of time as both sound teaching and elegant writing.

The Bears Ears National Monument in southeastern Utah, created by President Obama in 2016 and eviscerated by the Trump administration in 2017, contains more archaeological sites than any other region in the United States. It's also a spectacularly beautiful landscape, a mosaic of sandstone canyons and bold mesas and buttes. This wilderness, now threatened by oil and gas drilling, unrestricted grazing, and invasion by Jeep and ATV, is at the center of the greatest environmental battle in America since the damming of the Colorado River to create Lake Powell in the 1950s.

In The Bears Ears, acclaimed adventure writer David Roberts takes readers on a tour of his favorite place on earth as he unfolds the rich and contradictory human history of the 1.35 million acres of the Bears Ears domain. Weaving personal memoir with archival research, Roberts sings the praises of the outback he's explored for the last twenty-five years.

David Abram's first book, The Spell of the Sensuous has become a classic of environmental literature. Now he returns with a startling exploration of our human entanglement with the rest of nature.

As the climate veers toward catastrophe, the innumerable losses cascading through the biosphere make vividly evident the need for a metamorphosis in our relation to the living land. For too long we've ignored the wild intelligence of our bodies, taking our primary truths from technologies that hold the living world at a distance. Abram's writing subverts this distance, drawing readers ever closer to their animal senses in order to explore, from within, the elemental kinship between the human body and the breathing Earth. The shape-shifting of ravens, the erotic nature of gravity, the eloquence of thunder, the pleasures of being edible: all have their place in this book.

For some people, even prison cannot shut out the natural world.

A teacher and family man incarcerated in Arizona State Prison--the result of a transgression that would cost him a dozen years of his life--Ken Lamberton can see beyond his desert walls. In essays that focus on the natural history of the region and on his own personal experiences with desert places, the author of the Burroughs Medal-winning book Wilderness and Razor Wire takes readers along as he revisits the Southwest he knew when he was free, and as he makes an inner journey toward self-awareness. Whether considering the seemingly eternal cacti or the desolate beauty of the Pinacate, he draws on sharp powers of observation to re-create what lies beyond his six-by-eight cell and to contemplate the thoughts that haunt his mind as tenaciously as the kissing bugs that haunt his sleep.

Ranging from prehistoric ruins on the Colorado Plateau to the shores of the Sea of Cortez, these writings were begun before Wilderness and Razor Wire and serve as a prequel to it. They seamlessly interweave natural and personal history as Lamberton explores caves, canyons, and dry ponds, evoking the mysteries and rhythms of desert life that elude even the most careful observers. He offers new ways of thinking about how we relate to the natural world, and about the links between those relationships and the ones we forge with other people. With the assurance of a gifted writer, he seeks to make sense of his own place in life, crafting words to come to terms with an insanity of his own making, to look inside himself and understand his passions and flaws.

Whether considering rattlesnakes of the hellish summer desert or the fellow inmates of his own personal hell, Lamberton finds meaningful connections--to his crime and his place, to the people who remained in his life and those who didn't. But what he reveals in Beyond Desert Walls ultimately arises from language itself: a deep, and perhaps even frightening, understanding of a singular human nature.

A marvelously illustrated A-to-Z compendium of bird names from around the globe

The Bird Name Book is an alphabetical reference book on the origins and meanings of common group bird names, from "accentor" to "zeledonia." A cornucopia of engaging facts and anecdotes, this superbly researched compendium presents a wealth of incisive entries alongside stunning photos by the author and beautiful historic prints and watercolors. Myers provides brief biographies of prominent figures in ornithology--such as John Gould, John Latham, Alfred Newton, and Robert Ridgway--and goes on to describe the etymological history of every common group bird name found in standardized English. She interweaves the stories behind the names with quotes from publications dating back to the 1400s, illuminating the shared evolution of language and our relationships with birds, and rooting the names in the history of ornithological discovery.

Whether you are a well-traveled birder or have ever wondered how the birds in your backyard got their names, The Bird Name Book is an ideal companion.

From award-winning author and ornithologist Tim Birkhead, a sweeping history of the long and close relationship between birds and humans

Since the dawn of human history, birds have stirred our imagination, inspiring and challenging our ideas about science, faith, art, and philosophy. We have worshipped birds as gods, hunted them for sustenance, adorned ourselves with their feathers, studied their wings to engineer flight, and, more recently, attempted to protect them. In Birds and Us, award-winning writer and ornithologist Tim Birkhead takes us on a dazzling epic journey through our mutual history with birds, from the ibises mummified and deified by Ancient Egyptians to the Renaissance fascination with woodpecker anatomy--and from the Victorian obsession with egg collecting to today's fight to save endangered species and restore their habitats.

Spanning continents and millennia, Birds and Us chronicles the beginnings of a written history of birds in ancient Greece and Rome, the obsession with falconry in the Middle Ages, and the development of ornithological science. Moving to the twentieth century, the book tells the story of the emergence of birdwatching and the field study of birds, and how they triggered an extraordinary flowering of knowledge and empathy for birds, eventually leading to today's massive worldwide interest in birds--and the realization of the urgent need to save them.

Weaving in stories from Birkhead's life as scientist, including far-flung expeditions to wondrous Neolithic caves in Spain and the bustling guillemot colonies of the Faroe Islands, this rich and fascinating book is an unforgettable account of how birds have shaped us, and how we have shaped them.

The finest, most lavishly illustrated photographic guide to the birds of western North America

Combining informative and accessible text, up-to-date maps, and--above all--stunning color photographs, this is the best and most lavishly illustrated photographic guide to the birds of western North America. All of the images have been carefully selected to convey both the sheer beauty and the key identification features of each bird, and many of the photos are larger than those found in other guides. Wherever possible, a variety of plumages are pictured, providing visual coverage and usefulness matching any artwork-illustrated field guide. And many of the images are state-of-the-art digital photographs by Brian Small, one of North America's finest bird photographers. These pictures, many seen here for the first time, reproduce a previously unimaginable level of detail. Finally, the ranges of nearly all species are shown on maps from the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology, the authority on North American birding. New and experienced birders alike will find this guide indispensable: the clear layout will help novices easily identify the birds they see, while the superb photographs will help seasoned birders confirm identifications.

Paul Hawken has spent more than a decade researching organizations dedicated to restoring the environment and fostering social justice. From billion-dollar nonprofits to single-person dot.causes, these groups collectively comprise the largest movement on earth, a movement that has no name, leader, or location and that has gone largely ignored by politicians and the media.

Blessed Unrest explores the diversity of the movement, its brilliant ideas, innovative strategies, and centuries of hidden history. A culmination of Hawken's many years of leadership in the environmental and social justice fields, it will inspire all who despair of the world's fate, and its conclusions will surprise even those within the movement itself.