Las Animas - Bent County Library District

In 2009, filmmaker Josh Fox learned his land was on top of the Marcellus Shale, a giant reservoir of natural gas that stretches across huge stretches of the northeast United States, and that he would be paid to lease his land for natural gas extraction. Fox documented his cross-country trek to find out if the controversial process of hydraulic fracturing (or fracking) is actually safe. What he unearthed was a discovery about a practice that is understudied...

Traces the history and eventual cleanup of the ecological disaster known as Love Canal, which resulted from building a neighborhood over a chemical dumpsite that poisoned the environment and endangered the health of residents.

"Oak Flat tells the story of a race-against-time struggle for a swath of American land, which pits one of the poorest communities in the United States against the federal government and two of the world's largest mining conglomerates. The book follows the fortunes of two families with profound connections to the contested site: the Nosies, an Apache family whose teenage daughter is an activist and leader in the Oak Flat fight, and the Gorhams, a mining...

Contains essays that offer a variety of perspectives on the issue of factory farming, debating whether factory farming is economically beneficial, ethical, or harmful to human health or the environment, and considering the future of the industry.

Americans use 60,000 plastic bags every five minutes that we then throw away. But where is 'away?' Where do the bags and other plastics end up, and at what cost to our environment, marine life and human health? Follows 'everyman' Jeb Berrier as he navigates our plastic world. Jeb is not a radical environmentalist, but an average American who decides to take a closer look at our cultural love affair with plastics.

"John Nichols was raised among naturalists and nurtured by a family as American as the Stars and Stripes. His great (times five) grandfather signed the Declaration of Independence for New York State. Nichols sailed happily through a top-notch private school education and sold his first novel, The Sterile Cuckoo, a best-seller, at age twenty-three. He considered himself "a child blessed by the culture and fated for delirious success." But then a short...