New Books - August

Just in time for you to plan your Labor Day weekend reading activities, here are some books added to the library collection in the past few months. Not travelling anywhere but want to imagine you are? Try Douglas H. Chadwick's Yellowstone to Yukon: a portrait of a 500,000 square mile region spanning from the U.S. to northern Canada with one of the most remarkable collections of wildlife in the world that is facing increasing challenges from an expanding human presence.

Also consider the books below, and don't forget to peruse our catalog at library.thoreau.org.

Tyche Hendricks. The Wind Doesn't Need a Passport: Stories from the U.S. - Mexico Borderlands. (2010)

Tyche Hendricks is an editor for The California Report on KQED Public Radio, and she reported on immigration and immigrant communities at the San Francisco Chronicle for many years. For this book, she traveled throughout the U.S.-Mexico border region, talking to cowboys, environmentalists, nurses, nuns, factory workers, and other ordinary people who live and work in this dynamic, complex, often misunderstood area. They share a deep sense of their history and culture, and their stories bring to life and bring understanding to heatedly debated issues of immigration, drug violence, trade, manufacturing, and more.

Peter H. Gleick. Bottled & Sold: The Story Behind Our Obsession with Bottled Water. (2010)

Thirty billion plastic bottle of water are sold in a year in the United States alone, while billions of people around the world still lack access to safe water and sanitation. Peter Gleick, President of the Pacific Institute for Studies in Development, Environment, and Security, examines the reasons behind the explosive worldwide growth of the bottled water industry in recent years and what it means for the future of drinking water, society, and the environment.

Julian Crandall Hollick. Ganga: A Journey Down the Ganges River. (2007)

Running from high in the Himalayas, through northern India, down to the sea, the Ganges for millions of Indians is not just a river but also a goddess. Hollick travels its length, exploring its mythology, ecology, economy, and the lives of the people who live along it, portraying a paradoxical relationship in which religious devotion goes hand in hand with increased ecological degradation and economic exploitation.

Cristina Eisenberg. The Wolf's Tooth: Keystone Predators, Trophic Cascades, and Biodiversity. (2010)

Based on her fieldwork with wolves and on research findings by other scientists around the world in recent decades, Eisenberg surveys the latest thinking on trophic cascades, or the effects created in an ecosystem when top-level predators or other keystone species are removed. Examples from Yellowstone, the Aleutian Islands, Amazon rain forests, and coral reefs show how such effects can be complex, wide-ranging, and unexpected with potentially catastrophic implications for local biodiversity. She also looks at how resource managers are using this knowledge to guide ecosystem recovery, including how it could be applied to move forward a vision of rewilding the North American continent.

Lane H. Kendig with Bret C. Keast. Community Character: Principles for Design and Planning. (2010)

The character of a community is what makes it unique, livable, and inviting. These elements can be difficult to define, yet are often what people want to preserve or to create when planning. Moving beyond simplistic measures of density and land use, the authors here provide a comprehensive system for planning and zoning communities that incorporates a wide range of measures to define character and that reflects the complexity of the interaction of the built environment with its social and economic functions.

Joe Romm. Straight Up: America's Fiercest Climate Blogger Takes on the Status Quo Media, Politicians, and Clean Energy Solutions. (2010)

Climate expert, physicist, former official in the U.S. Department of Energy, and senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, Joe Romm draws from his influential blog, ClimateProgress.org, to discuss climate science, clean energy solutions, global warming politics, and how the mainstream media have failed in their coverage of these issues. Proposing technological and other measures to reach a low-carbon, low-oil, low-net-material use economy, he argues that any efforts to avert catastrophic global warming will ultimately require citizen action to bring public pressure to bear on governments that have historically been reluctant to act.