Product Description: In 1976, the influential journalist and National Geographic editor John G. Mitchell published a book in the hopes of saving a precious part of Staten Island, where he and his family had lived for many years. The book, High Rock: A Natural and Unnatural History, helped to save a beloved tract of land―a Girl Scout camp known as High Rock―from becoming the roadbed for a major highway being proposed by Robert Moses...read more

Product Description: This is a pre-1923 historical reproduction that was curated for quality. Quality assurance was conducted on each of these books in an attempt to remove books with imperfections introduced by the digitization process. Though we have made best efforts - the books may have occasional errors that do not impede the reading experience...read more

Product Description: Fragile kingdoms of innumerable organisms and rich beauty, forests today are both our most plentiful and our most endangered natural resource. Understanding their workings and how to sustain them is imperative to ensuring the future of humanity...read more

Product Description: This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of the original. Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment for protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature in affordable, high quality, modern editions that are true to the original work...read more

From rock art in New Mexico to a recently uncovered shaman's cave in the Mojave, this loving tribute to Native American spirituality documents U.S. sites considered sacred by Indian people.

In this book of sixty black-and-white panoramas, photographer Laurie Brown documents the changing landscape along the western edge of Southern California. These stark, compelling images reveal a world scraped and reshaped by construction equipment--boulders pushed aside, stretches of earth flattened and then measured with surveyor sticks. High-tech housing developments rise in these places, lines of identical homes that simultaneously offer a pleasing vision of order and a numbing prospect of sterile conformity. Recent Terrains: Terraforming the American West is a thoughtful sequence of photographs that consider how the planet's surface has been transformed to meet the needs of our consumer society.The term terraforming originated in Kim Stanley Robinson's science fiction trilogy about the colonization of Mars, in which that planet is reshaped for human settlers. The panoramic format of Brown's photographs is partly inspired by space photography--with their long and low perspectives of the horizon, these photos give us views of our own planet as it might be seen by the Mars explorer. But if many of the images look like alien landscapes, they reveal a familiar shift in American geography: the wild, agricultural terrain of our early frontier gives way to densely built suburban communities.Brown's photographs are neutral about what they record, dramatizing some of the tensions and dualities that comprise our society's complex relationship to nature. She shows the invasion of unspoiled territory by the high-tech developments we so often label with the pejorative term suburban sprawl. At the same time, however, she uncovers surreal stillness and beauty in the built environment, searching for a postindustrial idea of the sublime.Taken during the last decade of the twentieth century, these photographs serve as an archive of change at a specific place on the coastal edge of California at the turn of the millennium. But these images have larger relevance for all of us, exploring our ideas about what constitutes a home and what defines our sense of community.The book is divided into three sections, each prefaced by a poem by Los Angeles poet Martha Ronk; it concludes with an essay by renowned writer and conservationist Charles E. Little. Recent Terrains is a major photographic work--a thoughtful, serious book of time and place. (view table of contents)

Documents the damage that air pollution has done to trees along the Appalachian Trail (view table of contents)

Examines the loss of trees from New England to California; details causes including acid rain, ozone, ultraviolet rays, and clear-cutting; and discusses responses from scientists, government officials, and citizens

Product Description: The magnificent national parks of the United States draw visitors eager to witness scenic beauty--from the wind-honed shapes of Arches National Park in Utah to the crashing shoreline of Acadia Naitonal Park in Maine. This book combines prosaic text with stunning photography to provide a glorious tribute to the cultural, political, and natural history of America, as seen through its natural parks...read more

Describes the characteristics of greenways, or linear open spaces; shows how they restore contact with nature; and offers advice on planning, engineering, and politics

Tells the stories of individuals across the country who are working to preserve the land, and argues that we need a federal land use policy

Essays discuss the rewards and responsibilities of farming, the dangers of chemical pesticides, and the future of the family farm

Green Fields Forever changes the way Americans think about agriculture. It is the story of 'conservation tillage'--a new way to grow food for the first time that works with, rather than against, the soil. Farmers who are revolutionizing the course of American agriculture explain how conservation tillage works.