A River Lost: The Life and Death of the Columbia
10 best books like A River Lost: The Life and Death of the Columbia (Blaine Harden): The Riverkeepers: Two Activists Fight to Reclaim Our Environment as a Basic Human Right, A Great Aridness: Climate Change and the Future of the American Southwest, DNA USA: A Genetic Biography of America, The Good Rain: Across Time & Terrain in the Pacific Northwest, The Sound of Mountain Water, Grizzly Years: In Search of the American Wilderness, Going to Extremes, Water: The Epic Struggle for Wealth, Power, and Civilization, When Smoke Ran Like Water: Tales Of Environmental Deception And The Battle Against Pollution, Prophets and Moguls, Rangers and Rogues, Bison and Bears: 100 Years of the National Park Service
A modern-day David and Goliath tale, The Riverkeepers is an impassioned firsthand account by two advocates who have taken on powerful corporate and government polluters to win back the Hudson River. John Cronin and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., tell us how we too can fight for our fundamental right to enjoy...
A Great Aridness: Climate Change and the Future of the American Southwest
Author | William deBuys |
ISBN | 0199778922 |
With its soaring azure sky and stark landscapes, the American Southwest is one of the most hauntingly beautiful regions on earth. Yet staggering population growth, combined with the intensifying effects of climate change, is driving the oasis-based society close to the brink of a Dust-Bowl-scale...
DNA USA: A Genetic Biography of America
Author | Bryan Sykes |
ISBN | 0393078043 |
The best-selling author of The Seven Daughters of Eve now turns his sights on the United States, one of the most genetically variegated countries in the world. From the blue-blooded pockets of old-WASP New England to the vast tribal lands of the Navajo, Bryan Sykes takes us on a historical genetic tour,...
Author | Timothy Egan |
ISBN | 0679734856 |
Personally I found this book created the seminal event that influenced the remaining course of my life; both as a lifelong resident of Washington State, and particularly as an Aquatic Scientist. My work has caused me to travel many parts of Washington State that Timothy Egan mentions in this book, so...
Author | Wallace Stegner |
ISBN | 0140266747 |
A book of timeless importance about the American West, our "native home of hope."
The essays, memoirs, letters, and speeches in this volume were written over a period of twenty-five years, a time in which the West witnessed rapid changes to its cultural and natural heritage, and Wallace Stegner...
Author | Doug Peacock |
ISBN | 0805045430 |
For nearly twenty years, alone and unarmed, author Doug Peacock traversed the rugged mountains of Montana and Wyoming tracking the magnificent grizzly. His thrilling narrative takes us into the bear's habitat, where we observe directly this majestic animal's behavior, from hunting strategies,...
Author | Joe McGinniss |
ISBN | 0452263018 |
This is the fourth edition of a work that always has been controversial in Alaska. Yet, it is an important and highly readable classic work that captures a portrait frozen in time of a raw state in turmoil during the oil boom. McGinnis went north to find out if there was anything left of the "last frontier."...
Author | Steven Solomon |
ISBN | 0060548304 |
“I read this wide-ranging and thoughtful book while sitting on the banks of the Ganges near Varanasi—it's a river already badly polluted, and now threatened by the melting of the loss of the glaciers at its source to global warming. Four hundred million people depend on it, and there's no backup...
Author | Devra Davis |
ISBN | 0465015220 |
In When Smoke Ran Like Water, the world-renowned epidemiologist Devra Davis confronts the public triumphs and private failures of her lifelong battle against environmental pollution. She documents the shocking toll of a public-health disaster-300,000 deaths a year in the U.S. and Europe from...
Author | Heather Hansen |
ISBN | 9781594858 |
Anyone who has stood beneath a redwood, neck craned to see its top rising far above; or who has heard ghostly whispers of residents long-past among the burnt-red cliff dwellings of Mesa Verde; or who has climbed the stairs to gaze out from the Statue of Liberty’s crown, would agree that our National...
Author | Nicholas Johnson |
ISBN | 0922915997 |
When Johnson went to work for the U.S. Antarctic Program (devoted to scientific research and education in support of the national interest in the Antarctic), he figured he'd find adventure, beauty, penguins and lofty-minded scientists. Instead, he found boredom, alcohol and bureaucracy. As a dishwasher...
Author | Donald Worster |
ISBN | 0195078063 |
When Henry David Thoreau went for his daily walk, he would consult his instincts on which direction to follow. More often than not his inner compass pointed west or southwest. "The future lies that way to me," he explained, "and the earth seems more unexhausted and richer on that side." In his own imaginative...
Author | Bruce Barcott |
ISBN | 1400062934 |
First read in June 2008. Reread in December 2016. I liked the book just as well the second time, I'm happy to say. Below is my original review written in 2008. Since that time I have, in fact, visited Belize, though we stayed on a caye and never visited the zoo or saw most of the places mentioned in the book.
I'm...
King of Fish: The Thousand-Year Run of Salmon
Author | David R. Montgomery |
ISBN | 0813342996 |
The salmon that symbolize the Pacific Northwest's natural splendor are now threatened with extinction across much of their ancestral range. In studying the natural and human forces that shape the rivers and mountains of that region, geologist David Montgomery has learned to see the evolution and...
Dam Nation: How Water Shaped the West and Will Determine Its Future
Author | Stephen Grace |
ISBN | 0762770651 |
Overall Assessment: Return To Sender
Commentary:
Interestingly enough, Dam Nation is quite readable. So why the Return to Sender assessment? Well there are two essential reasons.
The first reason is that Dam Nation provides no real new insights or information over what Marc...
Author | Andrew Ross |
ISBN | 0199828261 |
Phoenix, Arizona is one of America's fastest growing metropolitan regions. It is also its least sustainable one, sprawling over a thousand square miles, with a population of four and a half million, minimal rainfall, scorching heat, and an insatiable appetite for unrestrained growth and unrestricted...
Author | Julia Whitty |
ISBN | 0618119817 |
At the center of Deep Blue Home, a penetrating exploration of the ocean as single vast current and of the creatures dependent on it, is Whitty's description of the three-dimensional ocean river, far more powerful than the Nile or the Amazon, encircling the globe. It's a watery force connected to the...
Letters from the Hive: An Intimate History of Bees, Honey, and Humankind
Author | Stephen Buchmann |
ISBN | 0553382667 |
They work hard, are devoted to family, love sex, and know the importance of a good piece of real estate. Honey bees, and the daily workings of their close-knit colonies, are one of nature's great miracles. And they produce one of nature's greatest edible bounties: honey. More than just a palate pleaser,...
The Final Forest: The Battle for the Last Great Trees of the Pacific Northwest
Author | William Dietrich |
ISBN | 0140177507 |
Phenomenal. One of the first times I have really taken time to listen to diverse perspectives in the conservation/preservation debate and suddenly found myself on the side of the loggers in Forks,WA. It made me feel more connected to the diverse perspectives people come from in relating to the natural...
Author | Rick Bass |
ISBN | 0395877466 |
The Yaak Valley of northwestern Montana is one of the last great wild places in the United States, a land of black bears and grizzlies, wolves and coyotes, bald and golden eagles, wolverine, lynx, marten, fisher, elk, and even a handful of humans. It is a land of magic, but its magic may not be enough to save...
There is an occasional meme going around about how so many things we refer to have lost all mooring from any possible meaning. Who today knows how black pitch is, or has personally heard a broken record?
But this is simply the story of language. If you write with a pen you are figuratively writing...
Wildlife Wars: The Life and Times of a Fish and Game Warden
Author | Terry Grosz |
ISBN | 1555662455 |
Environmentalism meets Indiana Jones in these rip-snorting tales of a former wildlife conservation officer. The bad guys here are illegal deer hunters, law-breaking drag-boat fishermen who pilfer the ocean depths, poachers who kill elk, anglers who disrupt historic salmon spawning grounds and...
Author | Jack Nisbet |
ISBN | 1570616132 |
Jack Nisbet first told the story of British explorer David Thompson, who mapped the Columbia River, in his acclaimed book Sources of the River, which set the standard for research and narrative biography for the region. Now Nisbet turns his attention to David Douglas, the premier botanical explorer...
Like Hidden Fire: The Plot to Bring Down the British Empire
Author | Peter Hopkirk |
ISBN | 1568361270 |
A GRIPPING STORY OF IMPERIAL AMBITION, SWASHBUCKLING ADVENTURE, AND THE KAISER'S OWN JIHAD.
An acclaimed historian tells, for the first time, the full story of the conspiracy between the Germans and the Turks to unleash a Muslim holy war against the British in India and the Russians in the...