The Sierra Club Guide To The Natural Areas Of New Mexico Arizona And Nevada

Covering some of America's most popular national parks, and 250 natural sites, and landscapes.

Now completely revised and updated, this authoritative guide provides a comprehensive introduction to New England's more than 350 federal, state, and local parks, forests, wildlife preserves, and lands in the public domain, comprising more than one million acres. An essential planning tool and an invaluable travel companion for quick weekend getaways as well as extended vacations. 7 maps.

Covers 200 natural areas including parks, forests, and wildlife preserves, and lands in the public domain.

Comprehensive guide to hikes of varying difficulty levels and lengths in Nevada.

This is a story that few know, but those who do are its disciples. The story, of the highest and driest of all American deserts, the Great Basin, has no finer voice than that of William Fox. Fox’s book is divided into the three sections of the title. In “The Void,” he leads us through the Great Basin landscape, investigating our visual response to it—a pattern of mountains and valleys on a scale of such magnitude and emptiness and undifferentiated by shape, form, and color that the visual and cognitive expectations of the human mind are confounded and impaired. “The Grid” leads us on a journey through the evolution of cartography in the nineteenth century and the explorations of John Charles Frémont to the net of maps, section markers, railroads, telegraph lines, and highways that humans have thrown across the void throughout history. “The Sign” wends us through the metaphors and language we continue to place around and over the void, revealing the Great Basin as a palimpsest where, for example, the neon boulevards of Las Vegas interplay with ancient petroglyphs. In this one-of-a-kind travel book that allows us to travel within our own neurophysiological processes as well as out into the arresting void of the Great Basin, Fox has created a dazzling new standard at the frontier of writing about the American West. His stunning and broad insight draws from the fields of natural history, cognitive psychology, art history, western history, archaeology, and anthropology, and will be of value to scholars and readers in all these subjects.

Based on the authors' interviews with hundreds of federal, state, and local officials, here are 200 alphabetically arranged entries which identify Florida's quiet places, subtropical natural wonders, plants, animals, salt marshes, forests, beaches, islands, coral reefs, and more in a one-volume, comprehensive, and solidly researched guide. 5 maps.

Gathers the pre-Sand Country Almanac writings of Aldo Leopold, showing that he was not born an ecologist, but evolved over time through experimentation and thought.

Three years after Roger Kennedy retired as director of the National Park Service, from his Santa Fe home he watched as the Cerro Grande Fire moved across the Pajarito Plateau and into Los Alamos. Two hundred and thirty-five homes were destroyed, more than 45,000 acres of forest were burned, and the nation's nuclear laboratories were threatened; even before the embers had died a blame game erupted. Kennedy's career as a public servant, which encompasses appointments under five presidential administrations, convinced him that the tragedy would produce scapegoats and misinformation, and leave American lives at risk. That was unacceptable, even unforgivable. Wildfire and Americans is a passionate, deeply informed appeal that we acknowledge wildfire not as a fire problem but as a people problem. Americans are in the wrong places, damningly because they were encouraged to settle there. Politicians, scientists, and CEOs acting out of patriotism, hubris, and greed have placed their fellow countrymen in harm's way. And now, with global warming, we inhabit a landscape that has become much more dangerous. Grounded in the conviction that we owe a duty to our environment and our fellow man, Wildfire and Americans is more than a depiction of policies gone terribly awry. It is a plea to acknowledge the mercy we owe nature and mankind.