Wilderness Wars

What if nature fights back?In a daze, I take it all in: the wind, the leaden skies, the churning moody sea.And, far in the distance, a misty outline.Skelsay.Wilderness haven. Building-site. Luxury-retreat-to-be.And now, home. When her father's construction work takes Em's family to the uninhabited island of Skelsay, she is excited, but also a little uneasy. Soon Em and her friend Zac realise that the setbacks, mishaps and accidents on the island point to something altogether more sinister: the wilderness all around them has declared war.Danger lurks everywhere. But can Em and Zac persuade the adults to believe it before it's too late?

The Wilderness War is the eagerly awaited fourth volume in Allan W. Eckert's acclaimed series of narratives, The Winning of America. the violent and monumental description of the wrestling of the North American continent from the Indians. Two hundred fifty years had elapsed since the Five Nations, the greatest of the Indian tribes, ceased their continual warfare among themselves and banded together for mutual defense. Their union had created the feared and formidable Iroquois League; their empire stretched from Lake Champlain, across New York to Niagara Falls. Theirs was a remarkable form of representative government that presaged our own, and their wealth lay in the vast, beautiful lands abundant with crops. As warriors they were unsurpassed - even the depredations of the recent French and Indian War could not diminish their prowess. But by 1770, the white men living in their land were fighting among themselves again, and war came once more to the Iroquois land.

"The book has a double value in the text of the author and the annotation by the editor. The author adds to . . . our knowledge of the peninsula warfare and gives probably the best extant account of operations in the north central region of Florida and in southern Georgia."-Journal of Southern History "The reader gets a good feeling of what campaigning in Florida meant to one used to the comforts of Charleston and Cambridge. . . . Lively, humorous, and very easy to read. In style the book is far above most descriptions of the Seminole Wars written by participants."-Florida Historical Quarterly In 1836, 24-year-old Jacob Rhett Motte, a Harvard-educated southern gentleman with a literary flair, departed his hometown of Charleston to serve as an Army surgeon in wars against the Creek and Seminole Indians. He found himself transported from aristocratic social circles into a wild frontier. Motte recorded his experiences in a lively journal, presented in full in Journey into Wilderness. In his journal, Motte relates observations of Indian warfare from southern Georgia and eastern Alabama to Key Largo in Florida. He reports his impressions of pioneer settlements, military fortifications, towns, roads, frontier life and society, and geography. His journal also offers glimpses of the economic, political, and religious trends of the time. A fascinating story and travelogue, it is a rare firsthand account of life on the Georgia-Alabama-Florida frontier.

It all began simply enough. In 1976 the Point Reyes Wilderness Act granted the highest protection in America to more than 33,000 acres of California forest, grassland and shoreline – including Drakes Estero, an estuary of stunning beauty. Inside was a small, family–run oyster farm first established in the 1930s. A local rancher bought the business in 2005, renaming it The Drakes Bay Oyster Company. When the National Park Service informed him that the 40–year lease would not be renewed past 2012, he vowed to keep the farm in business even if it meant taking his fight all the way to the Supreme Court. Environmentalists, national politicians, scientists, and the Department of the Interior all joined a protracted battle for the estuary that had the power to influence the future of wilderness for decades to come. Were the oyster farmers environmental criminals, or victims of government fraud? Fought against a backdrop of fear of government corruption and the looming specter of climate change, the battle struck a national nerve, pitting nature against agriculture and science against politics, as it sought to determine who belonged and who didn't belong, and what it means to be wild.

Noah and his friends spend their summers in the Wilderness making dens, sleeping under the stars, and toasting marshmallows over an open fire until the land is sold to make way for houses.

“This is the roadmap out of climate crisis that Canadians have been waiting for.” — Naomi Klein, activist and New York Times bestselling author of This Changes Everything and The Shock Doctrine • One of Canada’s top policy analysts provides the first full-scale blueprint for meeting our climate change commitments • Contains the results of a national poll on Canadians’ attitudes to the climate crisis • Shows that radical transformative climate action can be done, while producing jobs and reducing inequality as we retool how we live and work. • Deeply researched and targeted specifically to Canada and Canadians while providing a model that other countries could follow Canada needs to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions by 50% to prevent a catastrophic 1.5 degree increase in the earth’s average temperature — assumed by many scientists to be a critical “danger line” for the planet and human life as we know it. It’s 2020, and Canada is not on track to meet our targets. To do so, we’ll need radical systemic change to how we live and work—and fast. How can we ever achieve this? Top policy analyst and author Seth Klein reveals we can do it now because we’ve done it before. During the Second World War, Canadian citizens and government remade the economy by retooling factories, transforming their workforce, and making the war effort a common cause for all Canadians to contribute to. Klein demonstrates how wartime thinking and community efforts can be repurposed today for Canada’s own Green New Deal. He shares how we can create jobs and reduce inequality while tackling our climate obligations for a climate neutral—or even climate zero—future. From enlisting broad public support for new economic models, to job creation through investment in green infrastructure, Klein shows us a bold, practical policy plan for Canada’s sustainable future. More than this: A Good War offers a remarkably hopeful message for how we can meet the defining challenge of our lives. COVID-19 has brought a previously unthinkable pace of change to the world—one which demonstrates our ability to adapt rapidly when we’re at risk. Many recent changes are what Klein proposes in these very pages. The world can, actually, turn on a dime if necessary. This is the blueprint for how to do it.

A Civil War historian recounts the first battle between Ulysses S. Grant and Robert E. Lee—a bloody and horrifying conflict in the Wilderness of Virginia. Known simply as the Wilderness, soldiers called the seventy square miles of dense Virginian forest one of the “waste places of nature” and “a region of gloom.” Yet here, in the spring of 1864, the Civil War escalated to a new level of horror. Ulysses S. Grant, commanding all Federal armies, opened the Overland Campaign with a vow to never turn back. Robert E. Lee, commanding the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia, moved into the Wilderness to block Grant’s advance. Thick underbrush made for difficult movement and low visibility. And these challenges were terrifyingly compounded by the outbreak of fires that burned casualties and left both sided blinded in a sea of smoke. Driven by desperation, duty, confusion, and fire, soldiers on both sides marveled that anyone might make it out alive. “This, viewed as a battleground, was simply infernal,” a Union soldier later said. Another called it “Hell itself.”