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The Wild Trees: A Story of Passion and Daring
(more) »rank: 57910by: Richard Preston
: :Hidden away in foggy, uncharted rain forest valleys in Northern California are the largest and tallest organisms the world has ever sustained–the coast redwood trees, Sequoia sempervirens. Ninety-six percent of the ancient redwood forests have been destroyed by logging, but the untouched fragments that remain are among the great wonders of nature. The biggest redwoods have trunks up to thirty feet wide and can rise more than thirty-five stories above the ground, forming cathedral-like structures in the air. Until recently, redwoods were thought to be virtually impossible to ascend, and the canopy at the tops of these majestic trees was undiscovered. In ...
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Unbowed: A Memoir (Vintage)
(more) »rank: 49193by: Wangari Maathai
: :In Unbowed, Nobel Prize winner Wangari Maathai recounts her extraordinary journey from her childhood in rural Kenya to the world stage. When Maathai founded the Green Belt Movement in 1977, she began a vital poor people’s environmental movement, focused on the empowerment of women, that soon spread across Africa. Persevering through run-ins with the Kenyan government and personal losses, and jailed and beaten on numerous occasions, Maathai continued to fight tirelessly to save Kenya’s forests and to restore democracy to her beloved country. Infused with her unique luminosity of spirit, Wangari Maathai’s remarkable story of courage, faith, and the power of persistence ...
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Reading the Forested Landscape: A Natural History of New England
(more) »rank: 968430by: Tom Wessels
: :Landscape is much more than scenery to be observed or even terrain to be traveled, as this fascinating and many-layered book vividly shows us. Etched into the land is the history of how we have inhabited it, the storms and fires that have shaped it, and its response to these and other changes. An intrepid sleuth and articulate tutor, Wessels teaches us to read a landscape the way we might solve a mystery. What exactly is the meaning of all those stone walls in the middle of the forest? Why do beech and birch trees have smooth bark when the bark of ...
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Remarkable Trees of the World
(more) »rank: 410171by: Thomas Pakenham
: :A landmark volume celebrating the most remarkable trees on our planet. The spirit of nineteenth-century naturalistic exploration lives in British historian Thomas Pakenham, who has spent the last decade chronicling the lives of the world's most dramatic trees, many of which are in danger of destruction. After the world-wide success of his previous work, Meetings With Remarkable Trees—a stunning collection of 60 individual trees (and groups of trees) in Britain and Ireland chosen for their unusually strong personalities—Pakenham decided to hunt down and photograph another 60 remarkable trees scattered throughout the globe. Many of these trees were already famous-champions by girth, height, ...
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The Golden Spruce: A True Story of Myth, Madness, and Greed
(more) »rank: 205960by: John Vaillant
: :A tale of obsession so fierce that a man kills the thing he loves most: the only giant golden spruce on earth. As vividly as Jon Krakauer put readers on Everest, John Vaillant takes us into the heart of North America's last great forest, where trees grow to eighteen feet in diameter, sunlight never touches the ground, and the chainsaws are always at work. When a shattered kayak and camping gear are found on an uninhabited island, they reignite a mystery surrounding a shocking act of protest. Five months earlier, logger-turned-activist Grant Hadwin had plunged naked into a river in British Columbia's ...
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American Chestnut: The Life, Death, and Rebirth of a Perfect Tree
(more) »rank: 53991by: Susan Freinkel
: :The American chestnut was one of America's most common, valued, and beloved trees--a 'perfect tree' that ruled the forests from Georgia to Maine. But in the early twentieth century, an exotic plague swept through the chestnut forests with the force of a wildfire. Within forty years, the blight had killed close to four billion trees and left the species teetering on the brink of extinction. It was one of the worst ecological blows to North America since the Ice Age--and one most experts considered beyond repair. In American Chestnut, Susan Freinkel tells the dramatic story of the stubborn optimists who refused to ...
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Legacy of Luna: The Story of a Tree, a Woman and the Struggle to Save the Redwoods
(more) »rank: 627582by: Julia Butterfly Hill
: :On December 18, 1999, Julia Butterfly Hill's feet touched the ground for the first time in over two years, as she descended from 'Luna,' a thousandyear-old redwood in Humboldt County, California.Hill had climbed 180 feet up into the tree high on a mountain on December 10, 1997, for what she thought would be a two- to three-week-long 'tree-sit.' The action was intended to stop Pacific Lumber, a division of the Maxxam Corporation, from the environmentally destructive process of clear-cutting the ancient redwood and the trees around it. The area immediately next to Luna had already been stripped and, because, as many believed, ...
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Fire on the Mountain: The True Story of the South Canyon Fire
(more) »rank: 670070by: John N. Maclean
: :When, on the morning of July 3, 1994, the site of a forest fire on Storm King Mountain in Colorado was wrongly recorded as taking place at South Canyon, it became the first of a series of seemingly small human errors that, three days later, led to the deaths of fourteen fire fighters, including four women. Fire on the Mountain sets out to answer three mysteries that surrounded the blaze: Why wasn't the fire, which could be seen clearly from an interstate highway, put out earlier? Why did Don Mackey, a smoke jumper who was already a legend in his own time, ...
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The Woodlot Management Handbook: Making the Most of Your Wooded Property For Conservation, Income or Both
(more) »rank: 218539by: Stewart Hilts, Peter Mitchell
: : The Woodlot Management Handbook will show you how to get the most out of your land; whether you are interested in growing trees for timber, generating income from selling firewood, or sheltering wildlife.
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Illumination in the Flatwoods
(more) »rank: 1396895by: Joe Hutto
: Review:Turkeys, Joe Hutto writes, have gotten a bad rap for being, well, stupid creatures. In his account of a year spent studying a flock of wild turkeys in the loblolly pine woods of Florida, he aims to improve their reputation. They are, he notes, masters of disguise, blending in with their surroundings in ways so subtle as to make the work of predators--especially human hunters--difficult. And, he writes, they are 'curious to a fault, want a working understanding of every aspect of their surroundings, and their memory is impeccable.' His affectionate portrait may not convince English speakers to stop calling each other ...
