The North American Great Plains is a major global breadbasket but its agriculture is stressed by drought, heat, damaging winds, soil erosion and declining ground water resources. Biomass production and processing on the Plains would partially restore a perennial vegetative cover and create employment opportunities. This book explores the possibility that the ecology and economy of the Plains region, and similar regions, would benefit from the introduction of perennial biomass crops.

In this comprehensive new text, Chris Mayda offers an exciting alternative to conventional North American geographies. Throughout her thorough discussion of the physical and human geography of the United States and Canada, the author weaves in the key themes of environment and sustainability. Combining incisive analysis, rich description, human stories, and vibrant photographs, this text offers a complete and vivid portrait of the region from human, physical, and cultural perspectives. Designed expressly for ease of teaching and learning, the book features color photographs and maps throughout.

Natural Decadal Climate Variability: Societal Impacts is an important work for understanding the natural decadal climate variability (DCV), a phenomenon which has made long lasting impacts on civilizations, especially on water availability and agriculture. This book comprehensively covers multiyear to decadal variations in instrument measured precipitation and temperature, water availability and river flows, crop production, agricultural irrigation, inland water-borne transportation, hydroelectricity generation, and fish and crustacean captures since the 1960s. A longer term perspective is provided with the use of multi-century data on dry and wet epochs based on tree ring information, and corroborating evidence from other literature. This valuable work will benefit climate scientists, meteorologists, hydrologists, agronomists, water transportation planners, resource economists, policymakers, professors, and graduate students and anyone else who has an interest in learning how natural climate phenomena has influenced societies for at least the past 1000 years.

Winner of the Nebraska Center for the Book Award, Travel • A Sigurd Olson Nature Writing Award Notable Book • Honoree of the Society of Midland Authors Annual Literary Award for Biography/Memoir Now that President Donald Trump has revived the Keystone XL pipeline that was rejected by former President Obama, Trespassing Across America is the book to help us understand the kaleidoscopic significance of the project. Told with sincerity, humor, and wit, Ilgunas's story is both a fascinating account of one man’s remarkable journey along the pipeline's potential path and a meditation on climate change, the beauty of the natural world, and the extremes to which we can push ourselves—both physically and mentally. It started as a far-fetched idea—to hike the entire length of the proposed route of the Keystone XL pipeline. But in the months that followed, it grew into something more for Ken Ilgunas. It became an irresistible adventure—an opportunity not only to draw attention to global warming but also to explore his personal limits. So in September 2012, he strapped on his backpack, stuck out his thumb on the interstate just north of Denver, and hitchhiked 1,500 miles to the Alberta tar sands. Once there, he turned around and began his 1,700-mile trek to the XL’s endpoint on the Gulf Coast of Texas, a journey he would complete entirely on foot, walking almost exclusively across private property. Both a travel memoir and a reflection on climate change, Trespassing Across America is filled with colorful characters, harrowing physical trials, and strange encounters with the weather, terrain, and animals of America’s plains. A tribute to the Great Plains and the people who live there, Ilgunas’s memoir grapples with difficult questions about our place in the world: What is our personal responsibility as stewards of the land? As members of a rapidly warming planet? As mere individuals up against something as powerful as the fossil fuel industry? Ultimately, Trespassing Across America is a call to embrace the belief that a life lived not half wild is a life only half lived. It's the perfect travelers gift for fans of Free Solo and Turn Right at Machu Picchu.

This volume discusses gardens as designed landscapes of mediation between nature and culture, embodying different levels of human control over wilderness, defining specific rules for this confrontation and staging different forms of human dominance. The contributing authors focus on ways of rethinking the garden and its role in contemporary society, using it as a crossover platform between nature, science and technology. Drawing upon their diverse fields of research, including History of Science and Technology, Environmental Studies, Gardens and Landscape Studies, Urban Studies, and Visual and Artistic Studies, the authors unveil various entanglements woven in the past between nature and culture, and probe the potential of alternative epistemologies to escape the predicament of fatalistic dystopias that often revolve around the Anthropocene debate. This book will be of great interest to those studying environmental and landscape history, the history of science and technology, historical geography, and the environmental humanities.

In our power-hungry world, all the talk about energy—what’s safe and what’s risky, what’s clean and what’s dirty, what’s cheap and what’s easy—tends to generate more heat than light. What, Julianne Couch wanted to know, is the real story on power production in this country? Approaching the question as a curious consumer, Couch takes us along as she visits nine sites where electrical power is developed from different fuel sources. From a geothermal plant in the Mojave Desert to a nuclear plant in Nebraska, from a Wyoming coal-fired power plant to a Maine tidal-power project, Couch gives us an insider’s look at how power is generated, how it affects neighboring landscapes and the people who live and work there, and how each source comes with its own unique complications. The result is an informed, evenhanded discussion of energy production and consumption on the global, national, regional, local, and—most important—personal level. Knowledge is the real power this book imparts, allowing each of us to think beyond the flip of a switch to the real consequences of our energy use.

This volume provides an up to date overview of climate variability during the 20th century in the context of natural and anthropogenic variability. It compiles a number of contributions to a workshop held in Gwatt, Switzerland, in July 2006 dealing with different aspects of climate change, variability, and extremes during the past 100 years. The individual contributions cover a broad range of topics. The volume fills a gap in this exciting field of research.