Today's Hours:
Back from the Collapse by
2024 Wildlife Society's Publication Award shortlist Back from the Collapse is a clarion call for restoring one of North America's most underappreciated and overlooked ecosystems: the grasslands of the Great Plains. This region has been called America's Serengeti in recognition of its historically extraordinary abundance of wildlife. Since Euro-American colonization, however, populations of at least twenty-four species of Great Plains wildlife have collapsed--from pallid sturgeon and burrowing owls to all major mammals, including bison and grizzly bears. In response to this incalculable loss, Curtis H. Freese and other conservationists founded American Prairie, a nonprofit organization with the mission of supporting the region's native wildlife by establishing a 3.2-million-acre reserve on the plains of eastern Montana, one of the most intact and highest-priority areas for biodiversity conservation in the Great Plains. In Back from the Collapse Freese explores the evolutionary history of the region's ecosystem over millions of years, as it transitioned from subtropical forests to the edge of an ice sheet to today's prairies. He details the eventual species collapse and American Prairie's work to restore the habitat and wildlife, efforts described by National Geographic as "one of the most ambitious conservation projects in American history."
Food in a Just World by
Food in a Just World examines the violence, social breakdown, and environmental consequences of our global system of food production, distribution, and consumption, where each step of the process is built on some form of exploitation. While highlighting the broken system's continuities from European colonialism, the authors argue that the seeds of resilience, resistance, and inclusive cultural resurgence are already being reflected in the day-to-day actions of communities around the world. Calling for urgent change, the book looks at how genuine democracy would give individuals and communities meaningful control over the decisions that impact their lives when seeking to secure humanely this most basic human need. Drawing on the perspectives of advocates, activists, workers, researchers, and policymakers, Harris and Gibbs explore the politics of food in the context of capitalist globalization and the climate crisis, uncovering the complexities in our relationships with one another, with other animals, and with the natural world.
Making Maps by
Prized for its creative design, original art, and playful, accessible writing, Making Maps is now in a thoroughly updated fourth edition. The text is restructured to emphasize the importance of the map making process. All components of map making are covered and are brought to life in the expanded graphic novella threaded through the text. Updates include new coverage of data aggregation, artificial intelligence, feminist and Indigenous perspectives, map making workflow, and more. Design choices are emphasized and linked to the reasons for making a map. Featuring more than 80 color illustrations and a unique layout, the book includes an annotated map exemplar used throughout the text, extensive map examples, and a companion website. New to This Edition *New or expanded topics: graduated symbol maps, multivariate choropleth maps, visual storytelling, maps and gerrymandering, artificial intelligence, workflow, and more. *Integration of practical ideas from Indigenous and feminist perspectives. *Coverage of color and type is shifted earlier in the book, and the chapters on map symbolization and abstraction now conclude the book, with many compelling new maps.
Retail Inequality by
Retail Inequality examines the failure of recent efforts to improve Americans' diets by increasing access to healthy food. Based on exhaustive research, this book by Kenneth H. Kolb documents the struggles of two Black neighborhoods in Greenville, South Carolina. For decades, outsiders ignored residents' complaints about the unsavory retail options on their side of town--until the well-intentioned but flawed "food desert" concept took hold in popular discourse. Soon after, new allies arrived to help, believing that grocery stores and healthier options were the key to better health. These efforts, however, did not change neighborhood residents' food consumption practices. Retail Inequality explains why and also outlines the history of deindustrialization, urban public policy, and racism that are the cause of unequal access to food today. Kolb identifies retail inequality as the crucial concept to understanding today's debates over gentrification and community development. As this book makes clear, the battle over food deserts was never about food--it was about equality.
Toxic Water, Toxic System by
The tireless resistance of local communities fighting for ownership of America's third largest water system Toxic Water, Toxic System exposes the consequences of a seemingly anonymous authoritarian state willing to maintain white supremacy at any cost--including poisoning an entire city and shutting off water to thousands of people. Weaving together narratives of frontline activists along with archival data, Michael Mascarenhas provides a powerful exploration of the political alliances and bureaucratic mechanisms that uphold inequality. Drawing from three years of ethnographic fieldwork in Flint and Detroit, this book amplifies the voices of marginalized communities, particularly African American women, whose perspectives and labor have been consistently overlooked. Toxic Water, Toxic System offers a fresh perspective on the ties between urban austerity policies, environmental harm, and the advancement of white supremacist agendas in predominantly Black and brown cities.
Lead Babies and Poisoned Housing by
Drawing on historic sources as well as present-day interviews, Lead Babies and Poisoned Housing is a story about systemic racism, environmental injustice, and the failure of government. In 2016, 1,100 mainly minority residents of a low-income housing complex in East Chicago, Indiana, received a letter from the city forcibly evicting them from their homes because a high level of lead was found in the soil under their houses. The residents were given two months to move. Many could not find safe housing nearby. The site was designated by the Environmental Protection Agency as a Superfund site because of the large amount of toxic material on it. More than 1,300 similar sites are located throughout the United States. Over 70 million people live within three miles of one of these sites. Five years later, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development Office of Inspector General charged three federal agencies?EPA, HUD, and CDC?with causing the lead poisoning of children living in the complex. The EPA, responsible for the cleanup, had been aware of the situation for 35 years. The director of the local housing authority admitted to building the complex over a demolished lead smelter. When health issues arose, the housing authority blamed the residents? sanitary habits rather than its own failure to maintain the structures. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention?s testing of blood lead levels was revealed to be faulty. In short, the very agencies that were supposed to protect these people instead neglected, ignored, and blamed them. But this isn?t just a story of victimization; it is also about empowerment and community members insisting their voices be heard. Lead Babies and Poisoned Housing records the human side of what happens when the industries responsible for polluting leave, but the residents remain. Those residents tell their stories in their own words?not just what happened to them, but how they acted in response. We should listen, not only for justice, but as a cautionary tale against repeated history.
Cold Breath of Sleeping Volcanoes by
This work, written in an understandable way for the interested layperson, introduces into the unknown world of the CO 2 gas volcanoes, the so-called mofettes. A little explored world that lets animals die in the middle of Europe, changes the flora, influences soils and the atmosphere and can provide clues for upcoming volcanic eruptions. With the help of the botanical bioindication, such degassing points can also be found in the field and even used economically, e.g. in mineral water and fire extinguishers, for the preservation of food and for the healing of heart and skin diseases. In this biological-geological mofette guide, Prof. Hardy Pfanz explains where such phenomena can be found in Germany, but also worldwide, and what they tell us. He also reveals - with a wink - one or the other extraordinary and legendary thing about mofettes.
Skin Theory by
Honorable Mention, Rachel Carson Prize, given by the Society for the Social Studies of Science Finalist, 2023 ASAP Book Award, given by the Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present Studies the intersections of incarceration, medical science, and race in postwar America In February 1966, a local newspaper described the medical science program at Holmesburg Prison, Philadelphia, a "golden opportunity to conduct widespread medical tests under perfect control conditions." Helmed by Albert M. Kligman, a University of Pennsylvania professor, these tests enrolled hundreds of the prison's predominantly Black population in studies determining the efficacy and safety of a wide variety of substances, from common household products to chemical warfare agents. These experiments at Holmesburg were hardly unique; in the postwar United States, the use of incarcerated test subjects was standard practice among many research institutions and pharmaceutical companies. Skin Theory examines the prison as this space for scientific knowledge production, showing how the "perfect control conditions" of the prison dovetailed into the visual regimes of laboratory work. To that end, Skin Theory offers an important reframing of visual approaches to race in histories of science, medicine, and technology, shifting from issues of scientific racism to the scientific rationality of racism itself. In this highly original work, Cristina Mejia Visperas approaches science as a fundamentally racial project by analyzing the privileged object and instrument of Kligman's experiments: the skin. She theorizes the skin as visual technology, as built environment, and as official discourse, developing a compelling framework for understanding the intersections of race, incarceration, and medical science in postwar America.
The War on the West by
An Instant New York Times Bestseller! China has concentration camps now. Why do Westerners claim our sins are unique? It is now in vogue to celebrate non-Western cultures and disparage Western ones. Some of this is a much-needed reckoning, but much of it fatally undermines the very things that created the greatest, most humane civilization in the world. In The War on the West, Douglas Murray shows how many well-meaning people have been fooled by hypocritical and inconsistent anti-West rhetoric. After all, if we must discard the ideas of Kant, Hume, and Mill for their opinions on race, shouldn't we discard Marx, whose work is peppered with racial slurs and anti-Semitism? Embers of racism remain to be stamped out in America, but what about the raging racist inferno in the Middle East and Asia? It's not just dishonest scholars who benefit from this intellectual fraud but hostile nations and human rights abusers hoping to distract from their own ongoing villainy. Dictators who slaughter their own people are happy to jump on the "America is a racist country" bandwagon and mimic the language of antiracism and "pro-justice" movements as PR while making authoritarian conquests. If the West is to survive, it must be defended. The War on the West is not only an incisive takedown of foolish anti-Western arguments but also a rigorous new apologetic for civilization itself.