Central Park Trees and Landscapes
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This is the ultimate field guide to the trees and landscapes of Central Park, with a lively, authoritative text and over 900 color photographs, botanical plates, and extraordinarily detailed maps. Under the direction of the Central Park Conservancy, the park's landscapes have been painstakingly restored to achieve the effects envisioned more than 150 years ago by the park's designers, Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux. This book highlights the leading role that trees play in defining 22 of these landscapes and chronicles the history of each of more than 200 tree species and varieties present in the park--where it came from and where the most outstanding specimens are located. Besides being a superb guide to the world's greatest center-city park, this book is a highly informative guide to most of the tree species commonly encountered in the eastern United States. Anyone who loves trees will find this book a very rewarding read, full of fascinating details and beautiful illustrations. Central Park Trees and Landscapes is divided into two major sections: "The Landscapes" opens with a geological account of Manhattan Island--from its position 500 million years ago on the edge of the proto-North American continent to its emergence about 15,000 years ago from the Laurentide Ice Sheet. The effects that human inhabitants had on the ecology of the island are described--from the burning of field stubble by Native Americans to the clearing of forest trees by Europeans. Next, the narrative focuses on the land that would eventually become Central Park--how it was saved from being dissected by John Randel's rigid street grid and how Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux became the park's designers. The heart of the section is devoted to the construction of the park in the late 1850s and 1860s. Twenty-two of the park's grand landscapes are pictured in dozens of photographs and in seven detailed maps pinpointing nearly 20,000 trees. Readers can identify each tree on the maps by species using the Tree Maps Key (located on the back of the front flap). "The Tree Guide" contains informative essays full of intriguing botanical and historical facts on over 200 of the park's tree species and varieties. Each two-page entry features illustrations of leaves, fruits, flowers, and bark as well as a striking portrait photograph of a park tree. The entries are organized into groups by leaf shapes shown on an easy-to-use identification key (located inside the front cover).
Seeing Trees
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A fascinating and beautifully illustrated volume that explains what street trees tell us about humanity's changing relationship with nature and the city . "A deep . . . dive into urban society's need for--and relationship with--trees that sought to return the natural world to the concrete jungle."--Adrian Higgins, Washington Post Winner of the Foundation for Landscape Studies' 2019 John Brinckerhoff Jackson Prize
Trees of New York State
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Leopold's botanical descriptions for each species include a summary of its key identification characteristics and extensive information on its leaves, flowers, fruit, winter characteristics, and bark. Additional material is provided on each tree's habit, habitat and range, and uses, including wood properties and value, landscaping, and restoration projects. Also provided are summer keys to each genus and numerous other aids to identifying these species. Line drawings depict the many fine diagnostic characteristics of each species. Of the 350 color photographs, those of bark should readily facilitate field identification of mature specimens of most tree species. Color photos show the beautiful ornamental attributes that make so many native species excellent landscape choices. This book offers much to both the tree novice and the expert, casual and accomplished outdoor enthusiasts alike.
Climate Justice and Community Renewal
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This book brings together the voices of people from five continents who live, work, and research on the front lines of climate resistance and renewal. The many contributors to this volume explore the impacts of extreme weather events in Africa, the Caribbean and on Pacific islands, experiences of life-long defenders of the land and forests in Brazil, India, Indonesia, and eastern Canada, and efforts to halt the expansion of fossil-fuel infrastructure from North America to South Africa. They offer various perspectives on how a just transition toward a fossil-free economy can take shape, as they share efforts to protect water resources, better feed their communities, and implement new approaches to urban policy and energy democracy. Climate Justice and Community Renewal uniquely highlights the accounts of people who are directly engaged in local climate struggles and community renewal efforts, including on-the-ground land defenders, community organizers, leaders of international campaigns, agroecologists, activist-scholars, and many others. It will appeal to students, researchers, activists, and all who appreciate the need for a truly justice-centered response to escalating climate disruptions.
Repowering Cities
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The conceptualization and execution of Repowering Cities are terrific, and provides readers with a deep understanding of why, how, and to what effect cities have mobilized to mitigate the effects of climate change.â*Michael J. Rich, Emory University, coauthor of Collaborative Governance for Urban Revitalization City governments are rapidly becoming society's problem solvers. As Sara Hughes shows, nowhere is this more evident than in New York City, Los Angeles, and Toronto, where the cities' governments are taking on the challenge of addressing climate change. Repowering Cities focuses on the specific issue of reducing urban greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, and develops a new framework for distinguishing analytically and empirically the policy agendas city governments develop for reducing GHG emissions, the governing strategies they use to implement these agendas, and the direct and catalytic means by which they contribute to climate change mitigation. Hughes uses her framework to assess the successes and failures experienced in New York City, Los Angeles, and Toronto as those agenda-setting cities have addressed climate change. She then identifies strategies for moving from incremental to transformative change by pinpointing governing strategies able to mobilize the needed resources and actors, build participatory institutions, create capacity for climate-smart governance, and broaden coalitions for urban climate change policy.
Teaching the Literature of Climate Change
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Essays on teaching the global climate crisis through cli-fi Over the past several decades, writers such as Margaret Atwood, Paolo Bacigalupi, Octavia E. Butler, and Kathy Jetn?il-Kijiner have explored climate change through literature, reflecting current anxieties about humans' impact on the planet. Emphasizing the importance of interdisciplinarity, this volume embraces literature as a means to cultivate students' understanding of the ongoing climate crisis, ethics in times of disaster, and the intrinsic intersectionality of environmental issues. Contributors discuss speculative climate futures, the Anthropocene, postcolonialism, climate anxiety, and the usefulness of storytelling in engaging with catastrophe. The essays offer approaches to teaching interdisciplinary and cross-listed courses, including strategies for team-teaching across disciplines and for building connections between humanities majors and STEM majors. The volume concludes with essays that explore ways to address grief and to contemplate a hopeful future in the face of apocalyptic predictions. This volume contains discussions of Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake and Year of the Flood, Paulo Bacigalupi's "Pocketful of Dharma," Chantal Bilodeau's Sila, Octavia E. Butler's Parable of the Sower, Michel Faber's Under the Skin, Kathy Jetn?il-Kijiner's "Dear Matafele Peinam" and "Two Degrees," Barbara Kingsolver's Flight Behavior, Elizabeth Kolbert's Field Notes from a Catastrophe, Cormac McCarthy's The Road, David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas and The Bone Clocks, Mayra Montero's In the Palm of Darkness, M. NourbeSe Philip's Zong!, Richard Powers's The Overstory, Nathaniel Rich's Odds against Tomorrow, Virginia Woolf's Orlando, and more.
Field Guide to the Neighborhood Birds of New York City
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New York City's favorite naturalist is back with a guided tour of the Big Apple that unveils the beautiful birds living in its midst. Winner of the Hardcover Nonfiction (Design) of The New York Book Show, Illustrated Text of the Washington Publishers Look around New York, and you'll probably see birds: wood ducks swimming in Queens, a stalking black-crowned night-heron in Brooklyn, great horned owls perching in the Bronx, warblers feeding in Central Park, or Staten Island's purple martins flying to and fro. You might spot hawks and falcons nesting on skyscrapers or robins belting out songs from trees along the street. America's largest metropolis teems with birdlife in part because it sits within the great Atlantic flyway where migratory birds travel seasonally between north and south. The Big Apple's miles of coastline, magnificent parks, and millions of trees attract dozens of migrating species every year and are also home year-round to scores of resident birds. There is no better way to identify and learn about New York's birds than with this comprehensive field guide from New York City naturalist Leslie Day. Her book will quickly teach you what each species looks like, where they build their nests, what they eat, the sounds of their songs, what time of year they appear in the city, the shapes and colors of their eggs, and where in the five boroughs you can find them--which is often in the neighborhood you call home. The hundreds of stunning photographs by Beth Bergman and gorgeous illustrations by Trudy Smoke will help you identify the ninety avian species commonly seen in New York. Once you enter the world of the city's birds, life in the great metropolis will never look the same.
Urban Ornithology
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Urban Ornithology is the first quantitative historical analysis of any New York City natural area's birdlife and spans the century and a half from 1872 to 2016. Only Manhattan's Central and Brooklyn's Prospect Parks have preliminary species lists, not revised since 1967, and the last book examining the birdlife of the entire New York City area is now more than fifty years old. This book updates the avifaunas of those two parks, the Bronx, and other New York City boroughs. It treats the 301 bird species known to have occurred within its study area--Van Cortlandt Park and the adjacent Northwest Bronx--plus 70 potential additions. Its 123 breeding species are tracked from 1872 and supplemented by quantitative breeding bird censuses from 1937 to 2015. Gains and losses of breeding species are discussed in light of an expanding New York City inexorably extinguishing unique habitats.
Field Guide to the Natural World of New York City
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"This little gem fills you in on everything finned, furred, feathered, or leafed, and how to find it, in all five boroughs."--House and Garden Second place for scholarly/reference books (design), Bookbinders' Guild of New York 2008 New York Book Show. New York just might be the most biologically diverse city in temperate America. The five boroughs sit atop one of the most naturally rich sites in North America, directly under the Atlantic migratory flyway, at the mouth of a 300-mile-long river, and on three islands--Manhattan, Staten, and Long. Leslie Day, a New York City naturalist, reveals this amazing world in her Field Guide to the Natural World of New York City. Combining the stunning paintings of Mark A. Klingler with a variety of photographs and maps, this book is a complete guide for the urban naturalist--with tips on identifying the city's flora and fauna and maps showing the nearest subway stop. Here is your personal guide to the real wild side of America's largest city. Throw it in your backpack, hop on the subway, and explore.
How to Be a Good Savage and Other Poems
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The latest in the Seedbank series, the debut in English of a groundbreaking Indigenous poet of the Americas. In a fiercely personal yet authoritative voice, prolific contemporary poet Mikeas Sánchez explores the worldview of the Zoque people of southern Mexico. Her paced, steely lyrics fuse cosmology, lineage, feminism, and environmental activism into a singular body of work that stands for the self and the collective in the same instant. "I am woman and I celebrate every vein," she writes, "where I guard my ancestors' secrets / every Zoque man's word in my mouth / every Zoque woman's wisdom in my spit." How to Be a Good Savage and Other Poems examines the intersection of Zoque struggles against colonialism and empire, and those of North African immigrants and refugees. Sánchez encountered the latter in Barcelona as a revelation, "spreading their white blankets on the ground / as if they'll soon return to sea / flying the sail of the promised land / the land that became a mirage." Other works bring us just as close to similarly imperiled relatives, ancestors, gods, and archetypal Zoque men and women that Sánchez addresses with both deeply prophetic and childlike love. Coming from the only woman to ever publish a book of poetry in Zoque and Spanish, this timely, powerful collection pairs the bilingual originals with an English translation for the first time. This book is for anyone interested in poetry as knowledge, proclaimed with both feet squarely set on ancient ground.
A Thousand Mornings
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"Her compact poems are conversational and teasing, yet their taproots reach deeply into the aquifers of religion, philosophy, and literature . . . Oliver is funny and renegade as she protests cultural vapidity, greed, violence, and environmental decimation and ravishing in her close readings of nature." --Booklist "If you're one of the many, many fans of National Book Award- and Pulitzer-winning poet Mary Oliver, you'll very much welcome A Thousand Mornings." --Shelf Awareness The New York Times Bestselling collection of poems from celebrated poet Mary Oliver In A Thousand Mornings, Mary Oliver returns to the imagery that has come to define her life's work, transporting us to the marshland and coastline of her beloved home, Provincetown, Massachusetts. Whether studying the leaves of a tree or mourning her treasured dog Percy, Oliver is open to the teachings contained in the smallest of moments and explores with startling clarity, humor, and kindness the mysteries of our daily experience.
You Are Here: Poetry in the Natural World
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"Published in association with the Library of Congress and edited by the twenty-fourth Poet Laureate of the United States, a singular collection of fifty poems reflecting on our relationship to the natural world by our most celebrated writers"-- Provided by publisher.