San Antonio College Library

Publisher's description: The earth is continuously changing and evolving yet it is unclear how environmental changes will affect us in years to come. What changes are inevitable? What changes, if any, are beneficial? And what can we do as citizens of this planet to protect it and our future generations? Larry Slobodkin, one of the leading pioneers of modern ecology, offers compelling answers to these questions in A Citizen's Guide to Ecology. He provides...

Nature: the wilderness that environmentalists try to protect from industrial despoliation; the spectacular national parks where people seek refuge from their everyday urban lives; the endangered plants and animals that now need the shelter of science and law to survive; the rain forests, mountains, deserts, oceans, rivers, and lakes we would like to see as unspoiled, unchanging. These conceptions of nature, so familiar and powerful that we take them...

This book describes the many ways in which invention affects the environment (here defined broadly to include all forms of interaction between humans and nature). The book starts with nature itself and then leads readers to examine the built environment and then specific technologies in areas such as public health and energy. Each part focuses on a single environmental issue. Topics range widely, from the role of innovation in urban landscapes to...

"What brought the ape out of the trees, and so the man out of the ape, was a taste for blood. This is how the story went, when a few fossils found in Africa in the 1920s seemed to point to hunting as the first human activity among our simian forebears-the force behind our upright posture, skill with tools, domestic arrangements, and warlike ways. Why, on such slim evidence, did the theory take hold? In this engrossing book Matt Cartmill searches out...

"In early America, every sound had a living, willful force at its source. Sometimes these forces were not human or even visible. In this fascinating and highly original work of cultural history, Richard Cullen Rath re-creates in rich detail a world remote from our own, one in which sounds were charged with meaning and power." "This book's stunning evidence of the importance of sound in early America - even among the highly literate New England Puritans...