Our planet would be a much different place without its richly diverse ecosystems full of plants, animals and microorganisms. What poses the biggest danger to the millions of species that call Earth home?
Saving the rainforest used to be about protesting the number of trees that were cut down. But some researchers propose that reforestation could combat habitat loss and animal extinction. Can we really bring a decimated rainforest back to life?
Prices: Barrier Island Books
From the Carolina Outer Banks to New York's Fire Island, from Iceland to the Netherlands and Colombia to Vietnam, barrier islands protect much of the world's coastlines from the ravages of the sea. Although these islands are vastly different in many ways, they also share many common features. Most dramatic among these is their dynamism -- barrier islands are in almost constant motion, their advances and retreats powerful testimony to the force and beauty of nature -- and their vulnerability in the face of a different kind of force, commercial and residential development.This first-of-its-kind survey of barrier islands around the globe had its genesis in 1993, when geologist Orrin Pilkey met artist Mary Edna Fraser at Cape Lookout National Seashore in North Carolina. They soon realized they shared a passion for the barriers, one heightened by the many threats the islands face from development and global warming. These fragile and irreplaceable jewels, Pilkey and Fraser determined, needed to be better understood, and, as important, to be seen in a new way, if they were to be saved. Every bit as dynamic as the islands they depict, Mary Edna Fraser's spectacular original batik artwork (silk cloth colored by hand using a modern variation of an ancient dyeing technique) has been exhibited in both science and art museums. Combined with Orrin Pilkey's engaging and informative text, they create a treasure of a book that is at once beautiful and rigorously scientific. Pilkey identifies three major types of barriers -- coastal plains, Arctic, and delta -- each with its own geological characteristics and particular morphologies, which are themselves shaped by several factors, including the absence or presence of underlying rock formations, tidal patterns, and vegetation. Employing the latest advances in geological mapping, Pilkey also identifies traces of ancient barriers marking long-lost shorelines -- a further reminder that in the geological dance of land and sea, change is the only constant.Praise for Mary Edna Fraser and her art:"Pilot with a palette... as much of an artist in the midst of the creative process as Picasso laboring over his easel." -- Michael Kilian, Chicago Tribune"Fraser's works depict an organization and sensuousness in the land that is visible only from the air." -- Susan Lawson-Bell, National Air & Space Museum"Exhibited and collected around the world, her batiks have a common theme: promoting the awareness of environmental beauty and change on the planet as seen from the air. " -- Carolyn Russo, Women and Flight
$56.58
"This was the smell of a new nation -- a free, proud, and hard-working people. It was the smell of burgeoning confidence, of optimism, of enterprise. It seemed as if the very air shimmered with promise." So thought Moses Howland Grinnell as he walked up the Street of Ships in Lower Manhattan on the morning of November 23rd, 1857. Just days later, one of his prized vessels, Young America, returning from a trading voyage to China, wrecked off the coast of Fire Island. This shipwreck changed forever the life of the captain of the vessel William Trask. He lost his son, his crew, and one of his legs, but it also set him on a strange new course in his life that he could never have guessed. Fire Island tells the story of Trask, Grinnell and a host of other characters from the time in a gripping new historical novel from author John J. Stevens. Real historical facts and authentic people from the past are interwoven here with fictional people and events, in a beautifully-written tale of historical drama. It is a dramatic and well-written tale from the Age of Sail that artfully portrays the character of people who helped to make America what it was then, and what it is today. The story takes place from November 1857 to November 1858 on Fire Island, a barrier beach off the coast of Long Island, New York, and in lower Manhattan. A 10-mile stretch of ocean just off Fire Island became known as Wreck Valley because of the frequency of shipwrecks that occurred there. Numerous lives, ships and cargo were lost in these wrecks so close to shore. Volunteer humanitarian societies were formed to rescue and comfort survivors of shipwrecks, and the families of those who were lost. Out of those societies grew the United States Lifesaving Service, an early federal effort to formalize these volunteers into a type of civil service, much like today's fire-fighting companies. The "surfmen" were employed from October to May each year, the storm season. They performed drills, walked a "beach watch" at night, and, when called upon, executed dramatic rescues of shipwreck survivors, often in the midst of the most ferocious storms. These are the times and the people who come alive on the pages of Fire Island on an epic scale. It is a story in which you will get happily lost.
$10.95
Feeling lonely and isolated on Clarendon Island, 14-year old Charlotte Yorke soon learns that a remote barrier island can be a uniquely exciting place to live. Encounters with robbers, an eccentric neighbor, a ghost, and a most unlikely hero change her perspective. The South Carolina Lowcountry is a region alive with history of wars, pirates, moonshiners, and heroes. Local legends include ghosts, voodoo, and strange creatures of the night, such as boo-hags. Clarendon Island is intended to acquaint Lowcountry adolescents with their rich history and culture through the adventures of an adolescent girl in the 1880s.
$9.94
