Vanishing Sands

In a time of accelerating sea level rise and increasingly intensifying storms, the world’s sandy beaches and dunes have never been more crucial to protecting coastal environments. Yet, in order to meet the demands of large-scale construction projects, sand mining is stripping beaches and dunes, destroying environments, and exploiting labor in the process. The authors of Vanishing Sands track the devastating impact of legal and illegal sand mining over the past twenty years, ranging from Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean to South America and the eastern United States. They show how sand mining has reached crisis levels: beach, dune, and river ecosystems are in danger of being lost forever, while organized crime groups use deadly force to protect their illegal mining operations. Calling for immediate and widespread resistance to sand mining, the authors demonstrate that its cessation is paramount for saving not only beaches, dunes, and associated environments but also lives and tourism economies everywhere.

Drum Bailey's latest adventure begins once again at his Serendipity Island in the Assawoman Bay just west of Ocean City, Maryland. Preperations have begun for his wedding to Kat Matarozza that is only a little more than a week away. When the bloated, headless body of a young teenager named Patel washes up on Drum's beach, the proverbial "monkey wrench" is thrown into the plans. After locating the dead boy's father, the grief-stricken man hires Drum to find his son's killer. Drum accepts the task but added to his original mission is another "black flag" mission by his former I.C.E. partner, Colonel Donny Trew. But there's a catch. Colonel Trew has Drum hooking up with a grizzled former Vietnam Vet named Funk to accomplish two things. First, find the killer of the young Patel and assist Sergeant Funk in locating the man known as the "Sandman" who runs an international sand pirating cabal. The "Sandman" operates teams dredging sand from ocean beaches and river bottoms situated around the world. These sand pirates are causing devastating effects on the earth's ecology. Before the mission begins, Drum meets Dr. Goldfarb, a respected geophysicist who is on the verge of discovering a way to convert as of yet unusable desert sand into a new form of sand for concrete that can revolutionize the entire international construction industry. When Drum learns that the person who patents the formula could make billions he knows this could be a dangerous adventure. Knowing he might need more than simple weaponry, Drum brings his friend, Jimmy "The Teenage Prick" and his trunk full of drones to be safe. They meet Colonel Trew's man, Sergeant Funk, and the team is complete. The journey takes them to the distant shores of the Far East where Drum runs into an old nemesis. Buck Morrisey, known in South-east Asia as the "Cowboy", wants nothing more than to kill Drum whom he blames for the death of his daughter a few years ago in Colorado. Tension mounts as Drum and his team pursue the "Sandman", the "Cowboy" and young Patel's killer through the Vietnamese jungle and eventually back to the United States where the final conflict explodes into a plot-twisting finale.

The Big Island, world famous for its active volcanoes and coral gardens, has many wonderful beaches. In fact its shoreline is as diverse and dynamic as the rest of this massive island and includes more than 100 black, green, and white sand beaches. The Beaches series by John R. K. Clark include Beaches of Maui County, Beaches of the Big Island, Beaches of Kauai and Niihau, and The Beaches of Oahu. The author, an ocean recreation consultant, includes comprehensive site descriptions of hundreds of beaches in the Hawaiian Islands and shares his extensive knowledge of, and deep respect for, Hawaii's shorelines.

Industrial and agricultural greenhouse gas emissions are rapidly warming Earth’s climate, unleashing rising seas, ocean acidification, melting permafrost, powerful storms, wildfires, floods, deadly heat waves, droughts, tsunamis, food shortages, and armed conflict over shrinking water supplies while reducing nutritional levels in crops. Billions of people will become climate refugees. Hotter temperatures will allow tropical diseases to spread into temperate regions. Higher levels of CO2, allergens, dust, and other particulate matter will impair our physical and mental health and even reduce our cognitive abilities. Climate change disproportionately affects the world’s poor. It also harms Nature, and could ultimately trigger a sixth mass extinction. In Escaping Nature, Orrin H. Pilkey and his coauthors offer concrete suggestions for how to respond to the threats posed by global climate change. They argue that while we wait for the world’s governments to get serious about mitigating climate change we can adapt to a hotter world through technological innovations, behavioral changes, nature-based solutions, political changes, and education.

From individual grains to desert dunes, from the bottom of the sea to the landscapes of Mars, and from billions of years in the past to the future, this is the extraordinary story of one of nature's humblest, most powerful, and most ubiquitous materials. Told by a geologist with a novelist's sense of language and narrative, Sand examines the science—sand forensics, the physics of granular materials, sedimentology, paleontology and archaeology, planetary exploration—and at the same time explores the rich human context of sand. Interwoven with tales of artists, mathematicians, explorers, and even a vampire, the story of sand is an epic of environmental construction and destruction, an adventure in staggering scales of time and distance, yet a tale that encompasses the ordinary and everyday. Sand, in fact, is all around us—it has made possible our computers, buildings and windows, toothpaste, cosmetics, and paper, and it has played dramatic roles in human history, commerce, and imagination. In this luminous, kinetic, revelatory account, we do indeed find the world in a grain of sand.

This abridged and updated version of Place Names of Hawaii is an indispensible guide for both visitor and resident. The names provide insight into the culture and history of Hawaii.

Just a few days away from his wedding, Drum Bailey is pulled back into service to discover who murdered Ravi Patel, the son of a prominent Mumbai transplanted shop owner in Ocean City, Maryland. He learns about the global threat to the ecology by "sand pirates" and gets roped into working for the clandestine government agency, Canopy and Colonel Donny Trew. He and a bitter Viet Nam veteran named Funk find themselves dropping "in country" close to the Mekong Delta to find the killers and the men behind the theft of the world's most coveted item for the burgeoning building market in the Far East...SAND!