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Le grand livre du climat
By Greta Thunberg. 2022
Plus de cent experts, écrivains, activistes ou scientifiques évoquent les enjeux de la crise écologique. Ils abordent notamment les extrêmes…
météorologiques, la montée des eaux, la pollution, les maladies, entre autres.Nomadland: Surviving america in the twenty-first century
By Jessica Bruder. 2017
From the beet fields of North Dakota to the wilderness campgrounds of California to an Amazon warehouse in Texas, people…
who once might have kicked back to enjoy their sunset years are hard at work. Underwater on mortgages or finding that Social Security comes up short, they're hitting the road in astonishing numbers, forming a new community of nomads: RV and van-dwelling migrant laborers, or "workampers." Building on her groundbreaking Harper's cover story, "The End of Retirement," which brought attention to these formerly settled members of the middle class, Jessica Bruder follows one such RVer, Linda, between physically taxing seasonal jobs and reunions of her new van-dweller family, or "vanily." Bruder tells a compelling, eye-opening tale of both the economy's dark underbelly and the extraordinary resilience, creativity, and hope of these hardworking, quintessential Americans?many of them single women?who have traded rootedness for the dream of a better lifeHome Gardens for Improved Food Security and Livelihoods (Earthscan Food and Agriculture)
By D. Hashini Galhena Dissanayake, Karimbhai M. Maredia. 2021
Home Gardens for Improved Food Security and Livelihoods demonstrates how home gardens hold particular significance for resource-poor and marginalized communities…
in developing countries, and how they offer a versatile strategy toward building local and more resilient food systems.With food and nutritional security being a major global challenge, there is an urgent need to find innovative ways to increase food production and diversify food sources while increasing income-generating opportunities for communities faced with hunger and poverty. This book shows that when implemented properly, home gardens can become just such an innovative solution, as well as an integral part of sustainable food security programs. It provides a conceptual overview of social, economic, environmental and nutritional issues related to home gardening in diverse contexts, including gender issues and biodiversity conservation, and presents case studies from Africa, Asia and Latin America highlighting home gardening experiences and initiatives. The volume concludes with a synthesis of key lessons learned and ways forward for further enhancing home gardens for sustainable food security and development.This book will be a useful read for students and scholars working on local food systems, food security, sustainable development and more broadly development strategy.Amazonian Mammals: Current Knowledge and Conservation Priorities
By Wilson R. Spironello, Adrian A. Barnett, Jessica W. Lynch, Paulo E. D. Bobrowiec, Sarah A. Boyle. 2023
The mammal fauna of the Brazilian Amazon is one of the most diverse on Earth with over 450 known species.…
Bringing together more than 70 of the world’s top experts on Amazonian mammals, this book unites, for the first time, up-to-date data on the current state of knowledge on the ecology of all groups of non-rodent mammals in the Brazilian Amazon, analyses the effectiveness of current conservation programmes and identifies research and conservation priorities for the future.Bonobos and People at Wamba: 50 Years of Research
By Takeshi Furuichi, Gen'Ichi Idani, Daiji Kimura, Hiroshi Ihobe, Chie Hashimoto. 2023
This book reviews all the findings about bonobos and the local people of Wamba village in the Luo Scientific Reserve…
in the Democratic Republic of the Congo over the last 50 years. In 1973, Takayoshi Kano, a Japanese primatologist, traveled across a vast area of the Congo Basin with a bicycle and found Wamba village to be a promising site to start his first studies on wild bonobos. Since then, many researchers from Japan and all over the world have been working at Wamba, now the longest standing study site, to uncover various aspects of the ecology and behavior of this most recently identified great ape species. The researchers study bonobo behaviors and carry out various activities for the conservation of bonobos. They also conduct anthropological studies of local people who live with bonobos and believe them to be distant relatives from the same family, living in the forest. This book is published in commemoration of 2023 marking the 50th year of study. The main chapters are contributed by active researchers studying bonobos and the local people at Wamba. The book also includes contributions from various eminent researchers who have carried out short-term research or have supported research at Wamba, which helps place these studies of bonobos in a broader primatological or anthropological perspective. This book will be a useful resource for professional researchers in primatology and anthropology, as well as graduate or undergraduate students interested in these research fields.“Lobster is served three ways in this fascinating book: by fisherman, scientist and the crustaceans themselves. . . . Corson,…
who worked aboard commercial lobster boats for two years, weaves together these three worlds. The human worlds are surely interesting; but they can’t top the lobster life on the ocean floor.” — Washington PostIn this intimate portrait of an island lobstering community and an eccentric band of renegade biologists, journalist Trevor Corson escorts the reader onto the slippery decks of fishing boats, through danger-filled scuba dives, and deep into the churning currents of the Gulf of Maine to learn about the secret undersea lives of lobsters.This P.S. edition features an extra 16 pages of insights into the book, including author interviews, recommended reading, and more.Silent Earth: Averting the Insect Apocalypse
By Dave Goulson. 2021
“A terrific book…A thoughtful explanation of how the dramatic decline of insect species and numbers poses a dire threat to…
all life on earth.” (Booklist, Starred Review)In the tradition of Rachel Carson’s groundbreaking environmental classic Silent Spring, an award-winning entomologist and conservationist explains the importance of insects to our survival, and offers a clarion call to avoid a looming ecological disaster of our own making.Drawing on thirty years of research, Goulson has written an accessible, fascinating, and important book that examines the evidence of an alarming drop in insect numbers around the world. “If we lose the insects, then everything is going to collapse,” he warned in a recent interview in the New York Times—beginning with humans’ food supply. The main cause of this decrease in insect populations is the indiscriminate use of chemical pesticides. Hence, Silent Earth’s nod to Rachel Carson’s classic Silent Spring which, when published in 1962, led to the global banning of DDT. This was a huge victory for science and ecological health at the time.Yet before long, new pesticides just as lethal as DDT were introduced, and today, humanity finds itself on the brink of a new crisis. What will happen when the bugs are all gone? Goulson explores the intrinsic connection between climate change, nature, wildlife, and the shrinking biodiversity and analyzes the harmful impact for the earth and its inhabitants. Meanwhile we have all read stories about hive collapse syndrome affecting honeybee colonies and the tragic decline of monarch butterflies in North America, and more. But it is not too late to arrest this decline, and Silent Earth should be the clarion call. Smart, eye-opening, and essential, Silent Earth is a forceful call to action to save our world, and ultimately, ourselves.Silent Earth includes approximately 20 black-and-white illustrations and charts and graphs.The Big, Bad Book of Beasts: The World's Most Curious Creatures
By Michael Largo. 2013
The world's wildest collection of animal knowledge and lore!Lions, and tigers, and bears . . . and dinosaurs, dragons, and…
monsters. Oh my!For hundreds of years, the most popular books in the Western world next to the Bible were "bestiaries," fanciful encyclopedias collecting all of human knowledge and mythology about the animal kingdom. In these pages, eagles and elephants lived next to griffins and sea monsters. Now, in The Big, Bad Book of Beasts, award-winning author Michael Largo has updated the medieval bestsellers for the twenty-first century, illuminating little-known facts, astonishing secrets, and bizarre superstitions about the beasts that inhabit our world—and haunt our imaginations. You'll learn about the biggest bug ever, the smallest animal in the world, and the real creatures that inspired the fabled unicorns. You'll discover how birds learned to fly, why cats rub against your legs, and a thousand other facts that will make you look at nature in a wonderfully new way.Did you know?The fastest animal in the world is the peregrine falcon, which reaches speeds of over 200 miles per hours.Circus ringmaster P.T. Barnum fooled many when he displayed a "mermaid" carcass that was later proved to be monkey bones sewed together with the body of a fish.Discovered in a remote volcanic crater in New Guinea, the Bosavi wolly rat grows to the size of a cat.President Andrew Jackson bought an African gray parrot to keep his wife company. The bird outlived them both and was removed from Jackson's funeral for cussing in both English and Spanish.A to Z: From Aardvark to Zooplankton!For all ages!Includes 289 illustrations!The Body of God: An Ecological Theology
By Sallie McFague. 1993
Award-winning theologian Sallie McFague here develops a striking and novel vision of the universe, one that takes seriously and radically…
both contemporary science and the incarnational commitments of the Christian tradition.The Old Pro Turkey Hunter
By Gene Nunnery. 2018
During his life, Gene Nunnery was recognized as a master turkey hunter and an artisan who crafted unique, almost irresistible…
turkey calls. In The Old Pro Turkey Hunter, the vaunted sportsman shares over fifty years of personal experience in Mississippi and surrounding states, along with the decades-old wisdom of the huntsmen who taught him. Throughout the book, his stories make clear that turkey hunting is more than just killing the bird—it is about matching wits with a wild and savvy adversary. As Nunnery explains, “To me that’s what it’s all about: finding a wise old gobbler who will test your skill as a turkey hunter.” Through his stories, Nunnery reveals that the true reward for successful turkey hunting lies in winning the contest, not necessarily exterminating the foe. Real sportsmen know that every now and then the turkey should and will elude the hunter. As Nunnery looks back on his extensive career, he analyzes vast differences in practice, old and new. The shift, he decides, came during his last twenty years on the hunt, and that difference has only increased in the decades since this book was originally published. Michael O. Giles, Bass Pro staff team member, master turkey hunter, and award-winning outdoors writer and author of Passion of the Wild, writes a new foreword that brings the practice of turkey hunting into the present day. Filled with a tested mixture of common sense and specific examples of how master turkey hunters honor their harvest and heritage, The Old Pro Turkey Hunter is the perfect companion for the novice or the adept.Lewis Island in Lambertville, New Jersey, is the site of the Lewis Fishery, the last haul seine American shad fishery…
on the nontidal Delaware River. The Lewis family has fished in the same spot since 1888 and operated the fishery through five generations. The extended Lewis family, its fishery’s crew, and the Lambertville community connect with people throughout the region, including environmentalists concerned about the river. It was a Lewis who raised the alarm and helped resurrect a polluted river and its biosphere. While this once exclusively masculine activity is central to the tiny island, today men, women, and children fish, living out a sense of place, belonging, and sustainability.In Another Haul: Narrative Stewardship and Cultural Sustainability at the Lewis Family Fishery, author Charlie Groth highlights the traditional, vernacular, and everyday cultural expressions of the family and crew to understand how community, culture, and the environment intersect. Groth argues there is a system of narrative here that combines verbal activities and everyday activities.On the basis of over two decades of participation and observation, interviews, surveys, and a wide variety of published sources, Groth identifies a phenomenon she calls “narrative stewardship.” This narrative system, emphasizing place, community, and commitment, in turn, encourages environmental and cultural stewardship, tradition, and community. Intricate and embedded, the system appears invisible, but careful study unpacks and untangles how people, often unconsciously, foster sustainability. Though an ethnography of an occupation, the volume encourages readers to consider what arises as special about all cultures and what needs to be seen and preserved.While there were many protests in the 1950s—against racial segregation, economic inequality, urban renewal, McCarthyism, and the nuclear buildup—the movements…
that took off in the early 1960s were qualitatively different. They were sustained, not momentary; they were national, not just local; they changed public opinion, rather than being ignored. Women Who Invented the Sixties tells the story of how four women helped define the 1960s and made a lasting impression for decades to follow. In 1960, Ella Baker played the key role in the founding of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, which became an essential organization for students during the civil rights movement and the model for the antiwar and women’s movements. In 1961, Jane Jacobs published The Death and Life of Great American Cities, changing the shape of urban planning irrevocably. In 1962, Rachel Carson published Silent Spring, creating the modern environmental movement. And in 1963, Betty Friedan wrote The Feminine Mystique, which sparked second-wave feminism and created lasting changes for women. Their four separate interventions helped, together, to end the 1950s and invent the 1960s.Women Who Invented the Sixties situates each of these four women in the 1950s—Baker’s early activism with the NAACP and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, Jacobs’s work with Architectural Forum and her growing involvement in neighborhood protest, Carson’s conservation efforts and publications, and Friedan’s work as a labor journalist and the discrimination she faced—before exploring their contributions to the 1960s and the movements they each helped shape.Asian-Cajun Fusion: Shrimp from the Bay to the Bayou (America's Third Coast Series)
By Carl A. Brasseaux, Donald W. Davis. 2022
Shrimp is easily America’s favorite seafood, but its very popularity is the wellspring of problems that threaten the shrimp industry’s…
existence. Asian-Cajun Fusion: Shrimp from the Bay to the Bayou provides insightful analysis of this paradox and a detailed, thorough history of the industry in Louisiana. Dried shrimp technology was part of the cultural heritage Pearl River Chinese immigrants introduced into the Americas in the mid-nineteenth century. As early as 1870, Chinese natives built shrimp-drying operations in Louisiana’s wetlands and exported the product to Asia through the port of San Francisco. This trade internationalized the shrimp industry. About three years before Louisiana’s Chinese community began their export endeavors, manufactured ice became available in New Orleans, and the Dunbar family introduced patented canning technology. The convergence of these ancient and modern technologies shaped the evolution of the northern Gulf Coast’s shrimp industry to the present. Coastal Louisiana’s historic connection to the Pacific Rim endures. Not only does the region continue to export dried shrimp to Asian markets domestically and internationally, but since 2000 the region’s large Vietnamese immigrant population has increasingly dominated Louisiana’s fresh shrimp harvest. Louisiana shrimp constitute the American gold standard of raw seafood excellence. Yet, in the second decade of the twenty-first century, cheap imports are forcing the nation’s domestic shrimp industry to rediscover its economic roots. “Fresh off the boat” signs and real-time internet connections with active trawlers are reestablishing the industry’s ties to local consumers. Direct marketing has opened the industry to middle-class customers who meet the boats at the docks. This “right off the boat” paradigm appears to be leading the way to reestablishment of sustainable aquatic resources. All-one-can-eat shrimp buffets are not going to disappear, but the Louisiana shrimp industry’s fate will ultimately be determined by discerning consumers’ palates.The Poacher's Nightmare: Stories of an Undercover Game Warden
By Kennie Prince. 2023
Raccoons are not the only bandits wearing masks in the wilderness. Growing up, author Kennie Prince spent most of his…
time in the woods and creeks near his home in Rankin County, Mississippi. A highly skilled outdoorsman, Prince began his career with the Mississippi Department of Wildlife Conservation in 1983 and dedicated his life to protecting Mississippi’s fish and wildlife resources in dangerous undercover work. The Poacher’s Nightmare: Stories of an Undercover Game Warden contains dozens of hair-raising accounts of covert wildlife operations, often spanning years, requiring ingenious planning, complicated secrecy, and deft coordination.Prince infiltrated bloody-minded, wary criminal groups, winning their trust. When his traps were fully set, he involved other state and federal law enforcement officials to bring an abrupt halt to abominable thefts of vast fish and wildlife resources from the public trust. Smart, creative, knowledgeable, tenacious, disciplined, passionate, and a natural-born actor, Prince bore a unique skillset that made him an ideal fit for this perilous undertaking. This memoir details how Prince gained the confidence of tightly knit circles of loyal, leery poachers and put an end to their destructive evil.Swamp Rat: The Story of Dixie's Nutria Invasion (America's Third Coast Series)
By Theodore G. Manno. 2017
Theodore G. Manno traces the history of nutria from their natural range in South America to their status as an…
invasive species known for destroying the environmentally and economically important wetlands along the Gulf Coast. In this definitive book on “swamp rats,” Manno vividly recounts western expansion and the explosion of the American fur industry. Then he details an apocalyptic turn—to replace an overhunted beaver population in North America, humans introduced nutria. With an eclectic repertoire of true stories that read like fiction and are played out by larger-than-life characters, Manno conveys the legend of empire-seeking fur trappers, the bizarre miscommunications that led to nutria releases, and the sadness that comes with killing millions of nutria whose ancestors were never meant to leave their South American habitat. He tells of disastrous interactions among hungry nutria, storm surges from Hurricane Katrina, and major oil spills. His extensively researched and epic narrative, accompanied by more than thirty photographs and entertaining interviews with biologists, historians, fashion designers, and chefs, weaves a poignant tale of empire, conquest, fortune, and even Tabasco Sauce. Manno provides a full overview of what is currently known about nutria—a species now aggressively hunted with a bounty program because of their reputation for wetland destruction.The Lakes of Pontchartrain: Their History and Environments
By Robert W. Hastings. 2009
A vital and volatile part of the New Orleans landscape and lifestyle, the Lake Pontchartrain Basin actually contains three major…
bodies of water—Lakes Borgne, Pontchartrain, and Maurepas. These make up the Pontchartrain estuary. Robert W. Hastings provides a thorough examination of the historical and environmental research on the basin, with emphasis on its environmental degradation and the efforts to restore and protect this estuarine system. He also explores the current biological condition of the lakes. Hastings begins with the geological formation of the lakes and the relationship between Native Americans and the water they referred to as Okwa'ta, the “wide water.” From the historical period, he describes the forays of French explorer Pierre Le Moyne D'Iberville in 1699 and traces the environmental history of the basin through the development of the New Orleans metropolitan area. Using the lakes for transportation and then recreation, the surrounding population burgeoned, and this growth resulted in severe water pollution and other environmental problems. In the 1980s, the Lake Pontchartrain Basin Foundation led a concerted drive to restore the lakes, an ongoing effort that has proved significant.Discovering Cat Island: Photographs and History
By John Cuevas. 2018
Cat Island, just off the Mississippi Gulf Coast shoreline, has been home to some of the most dramatic events and…
remarkable stories in the nation's history. While some of these stories are fact, others are colorful fables passed down through the ages with such conviction they have become true in the hearts and minds of many. Between fact and fiction is the undeniable reality: Cat Island is one of the most historically significant landmarks on the Mississippi Gulf Coast.Featuring over 160 black-and-white photographs by Jason Taylor and a foreword by Mississippi's Secretary of State Delbert Hosemann, John Cuevas's Discovering Cat Island guides readers through Cat Island with stories and histories of twenty-nine sites--both real and imagined--of the legendary barrier island. Originally owned by the Cuevas family as part of a Spanish land grant to Juan de Cuevas in 1781, Cat Island boasts a colorful history that includes events related to the notorious pirate Jean Lafitte and the outlaw James Copeland, both of whom were thought to have buried their stolen treasure somewhere on the island; the Battle of New Orleans; and the War of 1812. The island served as one of the staging areas for the Seminole forced to abandon their homes and take part in the Trail of Tears. In the twentieth century, the island was a convenient transfer point for gangsters and local bootleggers shipping booze during Prohibition before becoming a US military training camp site during World War II. In 1988, Cat Island became the location of the first oil drilling ever in the Mississippi Sound and in 2010 was one of the islands devastated by the BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill.Hydrocarbon Hucksters: Lessons from Louisiana on Oil, Politics, and Environmental Justice
By Ernest Zebrowski, Mariah Zebrowski Leach. 2014
Hydrocarbon Hucksters is the saga of the oil industry's takeover of Louisiana—its leaders, its laws, its environment, and, by rechanneling…
the flow of public information, its voters. It is a chronicle of mindboggling scientific and technical triumphs sharing the same public stew with myths about the “goodness” of oil and bald-faced public lies by politicians and the captains of industry. It is a story of money and power, greed and corruption, jingoism and exploitation, pollution and disease, and the bewilderment and resignation of too many of the powerless. Most importantly, Hydrocarbon Hucksters is a case study of what happens when a state uncritically hands the oil and petrochemical industries everything they desire. Today, Louisiana ranks at or near the bottom of the fifty states on virtually every measure related to the quality of life—income, health, education, environment, public services, public safety, physical infrastructure, and vulnerability to disasters (both natural and man-made). Nor, contrary to the claims of the hydrocarbon sector, has there been much in the way of job creation to offset all of this social grief. The authors (one a scientist, the other an environmental lawyer) have woven together the science, legal history, economic issues, and national and global contexts of what has happened. Their objective is to raise enough national awareness to prevent other parts of the United States from repeating Louisiana's historical follies. The authors are uncle and niece, a generation apart, who have melded their conclusions from two separate tracks.Ain't There No More: Louisiana's Disappearing Coastal Plain (America's Third Coast Series)
By Carl A. Brasseaux, Donald W. Davis. 2017
Winner of the 2018 Louisiana Literary Award given by the Louisiana Library AssociationFor centuries, outlanders have openly denigrated Louisiana's coastal…
wetlands residents and their stubborn refusal to abandon the region's fragile prairies tremblants despite repeated natural and, more recently, man-made disasters. Yet, the cumulative environmental knowledge these wetlands survivors have gained through painful experiences over the course of two centuries holds invaluable keys to the successful adaptation of modern coastal communities throughout the globe. As Hurricane Sandy recently demonstrated, coastal peoples everywhere face rising sea levels, disastrous coastal erosion, and, inevitably, difficult lifestyle choices.Along the Bayou State's coast the most insidious challenges are man-made. Since channelization of the Mississippi River in the wake of the 1927 flood, which diverted sediments and nutrients from the wetlands, coastal Louisiana has lost to erosion, subsidence, and rising sea levels a land mass roughly twice the size of Connecticut. State and national policymakers were unable to reverse this environmental catastrophe until Hurricane Katrina focused a harsh spotlight on the human consequences of eight decades of neglect. Yet, even today, the welfare of Louisiana's coastal plain residents remains, at best, an afterthought in state and national policy discussions.For coastal families, the Gulf water lapping at the doorstep makes this morass by no means a scholarly debate over abstract problems. Ain't There No More renders an easily read history filled with new insights and possibilities. Rare, previously unpublished images documenting a disappearing way of life accompany the narrative. The authors bring nearly a century of combined experience to distilling research and telling this story in a way invaluable to Louisianans, to policymakers, and to all those concerned with rising sea levels and seeking a long-term solution.Beyond Control: The Mississippi River’s New Channel to the Gulf of Mexico (America's Third Coast Series)
By James F. Barnett Jr.. 2017
Beyond Control reveals the Mississippi as a waterway of change, unnaturally confined by ever-larger levees and control structures. During the…
great flood of 1973, the current scoured a hole beneath the main structure near Baton Rouge and enlarged a pre-existing football-field-size crater. That night the Mississippi River nearly changed its course for a shorter and steeper path to the sea. Such a map-changing reconfiguration of the country’s largest river would bear national significance as well as disastrous consequences for New Orleans and towns like Morgan City, at the mouth of the Atchafalaya River. Since 1973, the US Army Corps of Engineers Control Complex at Old River has kept the Mississippi from jumping out of its historic channel and plunging through the Atchafalaya Basin to the Gulf of Mexico. Beyond Control traces the history of this phenomenon, beginning with a major channel shift around 3,000 years ago. By the time European colonists began to explore the Lower Mississippi Valley, a unique confluence of waterways had formed where the Red River joined the Mississippi, and the Atchafalaya River flowed out into the Atchafalaya Basin. A series of human alterations to this potentially volatile web of rivers, starting with a bend cutoff in 1831 by Captain Henry Miller Shreve, set the forces in motion for the Mississippi’s move into the Atchafalaya Basin. Told against the backdrop of the Lower Mississippi River’s impending diversion, the book’s chapters chronicle historic floods, rising flood crests, a changing strategy for flood protection, and competing interests in the management of the Old River outlet. Beyond Control is both a history and a close look at an inexorable, living process happening now in the twenty-first century.