Showing results for "Rivers" in Nature & Ecology

Over 60 years after Virginia Woolf drowned in the River Ouse, Olivia Laing set out one midsummer morning to walk its banks, from source to sea. Along the way, she explores the roles that rivers play in human lives, tracing their intricate flow through literature, mythology, and folklore. Lyrical and stirring, To the River is a passionate investigation into how history resides in a landscape - and how ghosts never quite leave the places they love.

River Magic: Tales from a Life on 1000 Rivers takes the listener on an amazing global adventure by river. Mark Angelo, one of the world's most acclaimed paddlers and river conservationists, who has paddled more rivers than perhaps anyone on Earth, recounts a selection of his encounters with amazing animals, big fish, unique cultures, and wild rivers.

River of Lakes weaves together the biological, cultural, anthropological, archaeological, and ecological aspects of the St. Johns, capturing the essence of its remarkable history and intrinsic value as a natural wonder.

Bright Rivers chronicles the angling passions and frustrations of one of fly-fishing's greatest men of letters. A city dweller trapped in the complexities of modern life, Nick Lyons has always found solace in his pilgrimages to great rivers. It is there that he fishes for trout, and in Bright Rivers, Lyons recounts the sometimes moving, sometimes hilarious experiences of his expeditions to the Delaware, Beaverkill, Madison, Big Hole, and Yellowstone rivers, sharing reminiscences of trout taken, released, and sometimes lost.

Few books have captured the haunting world of music and rivers and of the sport they provide as well as A River Never Sleeps. Roderick L. Haig-Brown writes of fishing not just as a sport, but also as an art. He knows moving water and the life within it - its subtlest mysteries and perpetual delights. He is a man who knows fish lore as few people ever will, and the legends and history of a great sport. Month by month, he takes you from river to river, down at last to the saltwater and the sea.

Free-flowing rivers in the United States are an endangered species. With more than 500,000 dams in place, we've dammed and diverted almost every major river, straightening curves and blocking passage for fish and other aquatic animals, pushing many to the brink. Now a heartening new movement is helping to demolish harmful or obsolete structures and restore new life to rivers and the communities that depend on them. In doing so, it offers a pathway to undoing environmental harm to nature—and to ourselves.

A meditation on movement of both society and nature, based on the author’s experiences as an activist. In short, aphoristic chapters, Marquis explores the power of force and collectivity through the metaphor of water. As an activist, David Marquis founded the Oak Cliff Nature Preserve in Dallas, and has consulted with the Texas Conservation Alliance since 2011. He brings an unerring belief in the connective and healing power of nature to The River Always Wins.

Rivers, on a long view, are alive. They are born; they change; they shift their channels; they forge new routes to the sea; they move both gradually and violently; they can teem (usually) with life; they may die a quasi-natural death; they are frequently maimed and even murdered. It is the annual flood pulse—the brief time when the river occupies the floodplain—that gives a river its vitality, but it is human engineering that kills it, suppressing the flood pulse with dams, irrigation, siltation, dikes, and levees.

Over thousands of years, the Mississippi watershed was home to millions of Indigenous people who regarded "the great river" with awe and respect, adorning its banks with astonishing spiritual earthworks. But European settlers and American pioneers had a different vision: the river was a foe to conquer. In this landmark work of natural history, Boyce Upholt tells the epic story of human attempts to own and contain the Mississippi River, from Thomas Jefferson's expansionist land hunger through today's era of environmental concern

Two different peoples, each laying claim to the same territory. Dark Water, the keeper of her tribe's history, the Yiwiyawa, has no love for the whites. Barr Conner, a loner, an outcast among his own people, has no love for the Rogue's. Yet these two must work together, fighting treachery and bigotry, to reconcile two ways of life - while fighting their own growing love.

Southern Rivers is a thoroughly crafted exploration of the perilous state of the Southeast's rivers and the urgent need to safeguard their vitality. The region's rivers are the epicenter of North American freshwater biodiversity and are the top global hotspot for important aquatic animals, including mussels, turtles, snails, crayfish, and fish.

Dirty, Sacred Rivers explores South Asia's increasingly urgent water crisis, taking readers on a journey through North India, Nepal and Bangladesh, from the Himalaya to the Bay of Bengal. The book shows how rivers, traditionally revered by the people of the Indian subcontinent, have in recent decades deteriorated dramatically due to economic progress and gross mismanagement.

Steve Nicholls makes an epic journey along the River Tees in north-east England, from the industrial complexes near its estuary to its source high in the Pennine Hills. The Tees estuary was where Steve’s life-long passion for nature was born, launching a long career as a documentary maker. As he travels the length of the eighty-mile river, he uses his years of travelling the world and his work on nature films to place the fauna and flora he encounters along the Tees in a wider context.

River Songs is rich with bracing, authentic, generous stories-writing that revels in language and spirit. Avoiding most of fly fishing's cliches—the romantic elegies, the Moby-Dick-like conquests, the play-by-play detailing a "victory" over a fish—Steve Duda instead offers pieces that breathe lived experience, reveal vulnerabilities, and convey a broad perspective of what it means to have "a long run with a tight crew."

A dozen years into his dream job keeping watch over the Gila National Forest of New Mexico, Philip Connors bore witness to the blaze he had always feared: a megafire that forced him off his mountain by helicopter and forever changed the forest and watershed he loved. It was one of many transformations that arrived in quick succession, not just fire and flood, but the death of a fellow lookout in a freak accident and a tragic plane crash that rocked the community he called home.

On the West Coast of the South Island, past deep fjords, glassy lakes, forested valleys and snow-capped mountains, lies the Long family cabin. It was here that Chris Long spent the first 17 years of his life, two days' hike from the nearest road. In this heartfelt and captivating audiobook, Chris describes childhood with nature on his doorstep—helping his father catch crayfish and his mother grow vegetables, dreaming of helicopter visits, playing with toys crafted from driftwood and jade and learning to survive in the wild.

The St. Croix River is a 169-mile ribbon of blue that cleaves the land between Minnesota and Wisconsin. Exploring the St. Croix River Valley provides a tour of the St. Croix Riverway and its 8,000-square-mile watershed. Environmental educator Angie Hong recommends specific places to explore the varied habitats and shows us myriad ways to get out and enjoy by hiking, paddling, biking, skiing, fishing, and more.

Wisdom River: Meditations on Fly Fishing and Life Midstream is a collection of stories, poetry, photos, art, recipes, and jokes that celebrate the wonders of fly fishing and the wisdom that can be gained from spending time on the river. Contributors from Montana, Alberta, and Nova Scotia each bring a unique perspective and voice as they share adventures and memories from times they have spent riverside and midstream.

When Chris Dombrowski burst onto the literary scene with Body of Water, the book was acclaimed as “a classic” (Jim Harrison) and its author compared with John McPhee. Dombrowski begins the highly anticipated The River You Touch with a question as timely as it is profound: “What does a meaningful, mindful, sustainable inhabitance on this small planet look like in the anthropocene?”