A study of America's changing attitude toward wilderness, discussing efforts to protect the Alaskan wilderness, trends in wilderness management, and the international perspective.

"In The Comfort of Crows, Margaret Renkl presents a literary devotional: fifty-two chapters that follow the creatures and plants in her backyard over the course of a year. As we move through the seasons -- from a crow spied on New Year's Day, its resourcefulness and sense of community setting a theme for the year, to the lingering bluebirds of December, revisiting the nest box they used in spring -- what develops is a portrait of joy and grief: joy...

In [this book, the author] talks with parents, children, teachers, scientists, religious leaders, child-development researchers, and environmentalists who recognize the threat and offer solutions. [He] shows us an alternative future, one in which parents help their kids experience the natural world more deeply - and find the joy of family connectedness in the process. -Dust jacket.

"All over the country, there are words disappearing from children's lives. These are the words of the natural world--dandelion, otter, bramble and acorn, all gone. The rich landscape of wild imagination and wild play is rapidly fading from our children's minds. The Lost Words stands against the disappearance of wild childhood. It is a joyful celebration of nature words and the natural world they invoke. With acrostic spell-poems by award-winning writer...

"From African American to Asian American, indigenous to immigrant, "multiracial" to "mixedblood," the diversity of cultures in today's world is reflected in our richly various stories--stories of creation and destruction, displacement and heartbreak, hope and mystery. For centuries, this richness has been widely overlooked by readers of environmental literature. Including work from more than thirty contributors of widely diverse backgrounds, this...

Kevin Armitage presents the first comprehensive history of the nature study movement, demonstrating its significance to American environmental thought and politics. He shows how nature study, as both a pedagogic and popular idea, has had a lasting effect on American culture and society, and his reevaluation of the movement has much to tell us about the American relationship with the nonhuman world.

"Living at the border between life and non-life, fungi use diverse cocktails of potent enzymes and acids to disassemble some of the most stubborn substances on the planet, turning rock into soil and wood into compost, allowing plants to grow. Fungi not only help create soil, they send out networks of tubes that enmesh roots and link plants together in the "Wood Wide Web." Fungi also drive many long-standing human fascinations: from yeasts that cause...

An award-winning best-seller from the UK recounts how the author, an experienced falconer grieving the sudden death of her father, endeavored to train for the first time a dangerous goshawk predator as part of her personal recovery. "As a child Helen Macdonald was determined to become a falconer. She learned the arcane terminology and read all the classic books, including T.H. White's tortured masterpiece, The Goshawk, which describes White's struggle...