Native Environment

As a botanist and professor of plant ecology, Robin Wall Kimmerer has spent a career learning how to ask questions of nature using the tools of science. As a Potawatomi woman, she learned from elders, family, and history that the Potawatomi, as well as a majority of other cultures indigenous to this land, consider plants and animals to be our oldest teachers.

Several years ago, ecologist Lauren E. Oakes set out from California for Alaska's old-growth forests to hunt for a dying tree: the yellow-cedar. With climate change as the culprit, the death of this species meant loss for many Alaskans. Oakes and her research team wanted to chronicle how plants and people could cope with their rapidly changing world. Amidst the standing dead, she discovered the resiliency of forgotten forests, flourishing again in the wake of destruction, and a diverse community of people who persevered to create new relationships with the emerging environment.

Traditionally, Americans learned in school that the ancestors of the people who inhabited the Western Hemisphere at the time of Columbus' landing had crossed the Bering Strait 12,000 years ago; existed mainly in small nomadic bands; and lived so lightly on the land that the Americas were, for all practical purposes, still a vast wilderness. But as Charles C. Mann now makes clear, archaeologists and anthropologists have spent the last 30 years proving these and many other long-held assumptions wrong.

As development and subsequent habitat destruction accelerate, there are increasing pressures on wildlife populations. But there is an important and simple step toward reversing this alarming trend: Everyone with access to a patch of earth can make a significant contribution toward sustaining biodiversity. Bringing Nature Home has sparked a national conversation about the link between healthy local ecosystems and human well-being, and this audio edition will help broaden the movement. By acting on Douglas Tallamy's practical recommendations, everyone can make a difference.

Max Liboiron presents a framework for understanding scientific research methods as practices that can align with or against colonialism. Focusing on plastic pollution, the book models an anticolonial scientific practice aligned with Indigenous, particularly Metis, concepts of land, ethics, and relations. Liboiron draws on their work in the Civic Laboratory for Environmental Action Research—an anticolonial science laboratory—to illuminate how pollution is not a symptom of capitalism but a violent enactment of colonial land relations that claim access to Indigenous land.

Honey bees get all the press, but the fascinating story of North America's native bees - an endangered species essential to our ecosystems and food supplies - is just as crucial. Our Native Bees is the result of Paige Embry's yearlong quest to learn more about these forgotten, yet fundamental, creatures. Through interviews with farmers, gardeners, scientists, and bee experts, Embry explores the importance of native bees and focuses on why they play a key role in gardening and agriculture.

Corn. Chocolate. Fishing hooks. Boats that float. Insulated double-walled construction. Recorded history and folklore. Life-saving disinfectant. Forest fire management. Our lives would be unrecognizable without these, and countless other, scientific discoveries and technological inventions from Indigenous North Americans. Spanning topics from transportation to civil engineering, hunting technologies, astronomy, brain surgery, architecture, and agriculture, Indigenous Ingenuity is a wide-ranging STEM offering that answers the call for Indigenous nonfiction by reappropriating hidden history.

John Muir was an early proponent of a view we still hold today—that much of California was pristine, untouched wilderness before the arrival of Europeans. But as this book demonstrates, what Muir was really seeing when he admired the grand vistas of Yosemite and the gold and purple flowers carpeting the Central Valley were the fertile gardens of the Sierra Miwok and Valley Yokuts Indians, modified and made productive by centuries of harvesting, tilling, sowing, pruning, and burning.

Throughout the centuries, the Amazon has yielded many of its secrets, but it still holds a few great mysteries. In 1996 experts got their first glimpse of one: a lone Indian, a tribe of one, hidden in the forests of Southwestern Brazil. Previously uncontacted tribes are extremely rare, but a one-man tribe was unprecedented. And like all of the isolated tribes in the Amazonian frontier, he was in danger.

The story of Native peoples’ resistance to environmental injustice and land incursions and a call for environmentalists to learn from the indigenous community’s rich history of activism.

Learning Native Wisdom explains why achieving a sustainable culture is more important than any other challenge we face today. Although there are many measures of a society's progress, Holthaus warns that only a shift away from our current culture of short-term abundance, founded on a belief in infinite economic growth, will represent true advancement. In societies that value the longevity of people, culture, and the environment, subsistence and spirituality soon become closely allied with sustainability.

Known as the Thanksgiving Address, this Native American good morning message is based on the belief that the natural world is a precious and rare gift - from the moon and the stars to the tiniest blade of grass.

Through the knowledge inherited from their Elders and ancestors, Indigenous Peoples throughout North America have observed, practiced, experimented, and interacted with plants, animals, the sky, and the waters over millennia. Knowledge keepers have shared their wisdom with younger people through oral history, stories, ceremonies, and records that took many forms. In Sky Wolf’s Call, Eldon Yellowhorn and Kathy Lowinger reveal how Indigenous knowledge comes from centuries of practices, experiences, and ideas gathered by people who have a long history with the natural world.

Speaking from the cultural viewpoint of the Lakota of the northern Plains, the author discusses the evolution of native cultures to fit within the environment and adapt to it, as opposed to changing it drastically or wholesale to fit human needs and comforts. He suggests that changing our contemporary thinking in relating to the earth in a less harmful way does not mean a drastic change in lifestyles....

In this book, Frid tackles the big questions: Who, or what, represents our essential selves, and what stories might allow us to shift the collective psyche of industrial civilization in time to avert the worst of the climate and biodiversity crises? In seeking the answers, he draws from a deep well of personal experience and that of indigenous colleagues, finding a glimmer of hope in indigenous cultures that, despite the ravishes of colonialism, have for thousands of years developed intentional and socially complex practices for resource management that epitomize sustainability.

An epic struggle over land, water, and power is erupting in the American West and the halls of Washington, DC. It began when a 4,000-square-mile area of Arizona desert called Black Mesa was divided between the Hopi and Navajo tribes. To the outside world, it was a land struggle between two fractious Indian tribes; to political insiders and energy corporations, it was a divide-and-conquer play for the 21 billion tons of coal beneath Black Mesa. Today, that coal powers cheap electricity for Los Angeles, a new water aqueduct into Phoenix, and the neon dazzle of Las Vegas.

Climate change is today's news, but it isn't a new phenomenon. Centuries-long cycles of heating and cooling are well documented for Europe and the North Atlantic. These variations in climate, including the Medieval Warm Period (MWP), AD 900 to 1300, and the early centuries of the Little Ice Age (LIA), AD 1300 to 1600, had a substantial impact on the cultural history of Europe.

Oak Flat is a serene high-elevation mesa that sits above the Southeastern Arizona desert, 15 miles to the west of the San Carlos Apache Indian Reservation. For the San Carlos tribe, Oak Flat is a holy place, an ancient burial ground and religious site where Apache girls celebrate the coming-of-age ritual known as the Sunrise Ceremony. In 1995, a massive untapped copper reserve was discovered nearby.

David Deardorff and Kathryn Wadsworth present 100 home projects designed to inspire and empower anyone who wants to help save our native flora and fauna in the face of habitat loss and climate change. This book focuses on saving creatures and plants that are especially vulnerable but that can be successfully helped by our efforts, such as bees, frogs, butterflies, birds, trees, and wildflowers.

According to a 2021 study from the IPCC, conditions of extreme drought are 1.7x more likely than they were 100 years ago. That is, at any given time we are nearly twice as likely to be experiencing an extreme drought than our desert-dwelling ancestors had a century ago. And this problem is not trending in the right direction. Though drought conditions can impact so many areas of our lives, the beauty and diversity of our lawns does not have to be one of them.