Las Animas - Bent County Library District

"The public lands of the western United States comprise some 450 million acres of grassland, steppe land, canyons, forests, and mountains. It's an American commons, and it is under assault as never before. Journalist Christopher Ketcham has been documenting the confluence of commercial exploitation and governmental misconduct in this region for over a decade. His revelatory book takes the reader on a journey across these last wild places, to see how...

"In 1995, the gray wolf was reintroduced to Yellowstone National Park after a seventy-year absence. All these years later, we can clearly see the cascading effects this has had on the park's ecosystem. This is a spectacular example of a trophic cascade, the term used when an important member of an ecosystem goes missing and many other living things are indirectly affected, causing a chain reaction of events. In the case of the reintroduced wolves...

"A personal, lyrical, and idiosyncratic ode to our national parks"-- "For years, America's national parks have provided public breathing spaces in a world in which such spaces are steadily disappearing, which is why close to 300 million people visit the parks each year. Now, to honor the centennial of the National Park Service, Terry Tempest Williams, the author of the beloved memoir When Women Were Birds, returns with The Hour of Land, a literary...

"As different as we all are in situations, needs, and views, we hold the world in common. In this brilliant ethnography, Colin Jerolmack vividly highlights this basic environmental conundrum with his compelling account of the local conflicts over fracking in the countryside around Williamsport, Pennsylvania." -- "A riveting portrait of a rural Pennsylvania town at the center of the fracking controversy. Shale gas extraction--commonly known as fracking--is...

"In the Pre-Dawn Hours of October 19, 1998, a commando-style arson destroyed or damaged $12 million worth of chair lifts and mountaintop buildings at Vail, Colorado, the largest ski resort in the United States. The timing of the fires indicated a calculated attack, since the fires were set on the same day the ski area's owners were about to begin construction for a controversial expansion into an old-growth forest on federally owned land. Within days,...

Maverick environmental writers William J. Kelly and Chip Jacobs follow up their acclaimed Smogtown with a provocative examination of China's ecological calamity already imperling a warming planet. Toxic smog most people figured was obsolete needlessly kills as many there as the 9/11 attacks every day, while sometimes Grand Canyon-sized drifts of industrial particles aloft on the winds rain down ozone and waterway-poisoning mercury in America. In vivid,...

Full-color photographs and text document the ecosystem of the Florida Everglades, describing its unique plant and animal life and efforts to reverse the environmental abuse in the area.

"Michael Branch built his home on a remote hilltop in the Great Basin Desert of northwestern Nevada, a wild and extreme landscape where he lives with his wife and two curious little girls. Moving between pastoral passages on the beauty found in the desert and humorous tales of the humility of being a father, Raising Wild offers an intimate portrait of a landscape where mountain lions and ground squirrels can threaten in equal measure.." -- Provided...

In this coming-of-middle-age memoir, Kim Heacox, writing in the tradition of Abbey, McPhee, and Thoreau, discovers an Alaska reborn from beneath a massive glacier, where flowers emerge from boulders, moose swim fjords, and bears cross crevasses with Homeric resolve. In such a place Heacox finds that people are reborn too, and their lives begin anew with incredible journeys, epiphanies, and successes. All in an America free of crass commercialism and...

Read along as animal expert Jeff Corwin tells you about the Florida Everglades and his experiences there. Over forty photos bring this fascinating region to life! From the American alligator of the freshwater marsh to the West Indian manatee of the Florida Bay, kids will love learning about the captivating plants and animals in the Everglades.