In Blue Lake,David Sornig examines how the 8km-square zone to the west of central Melbourne became the city's blind spot. Once a fertile wetland with a large blue saltwater lagoon, it passed through various incarnations- from boneyards and rubbish tips; through the Depression-era Dudley Flats shanty town; to the modern-day docks. Through it all, one thing that has persisted is its uncanny, liminal quality. As well as being a social history and a psychogeographic contemplation, Blue Lake is a biography of three specific characters- Elsie Williams, a Bendigo-born singer of Afro-Caribbean origin; Jack Peacock, the king of Dudley Flats' tip-scavenging economy; and Lauder Heinrich Rogge, a German hermit who lived for decades with sixty dogs on a stranded ship. By charting the rises and falls in their individual fortunes, Sornig reveals much about the race and class divides of their times and explores questions about those strange and singular places in the urban fabric where chaos is difficult to contain. In masterful prose, Sornig reveals cracks in the colonial mythology of the ordered vision of progressive, urban Melbourne - a place where identities, both personal and public, have never quite been resolved. In doing so, he encourages readers to look harder at the places they live in - at the streets they walk, the buildings they enter, the empty spaces they pass - and to see in them intricate layers of time and history that have been hidden from view.

Summarizes the science of climate change and impacts on the United States, for the public and policymakers.

Northern Australia stands out as one of the largest natural areas remaining on Earth - alongside such global treasures as the Amazon rainforests, the boreal conifer forests of Alaska and Canada, and the polar wilderness of Antarctica. Nature remains in abundance in 'the North'. Its intact tropical savannas, rainforests, and free flowing rivers provide a basis for much of the economic activity and the quality of life for residents of the area. THE NATURE OF NORTHERN AUSTRALIA details the latest science on the Northern environment. With increasing debate over the future of Australias often forgotten North, this is a timely examination of its environmental significance, the ecological processes that make it function, and the economies that are compatible with maintaining healthy communities and people and healthy country into the future.

Gangs continue to commit criminal activity, recruit new members in urban, suburban, and rural regions across the United States, and develop criminal associations that expand their influence over criminal enterprises, particularly street-level drug sales. The most notable trends for 2011 have been the overall increase in gang membership, and the expansion of criminal street gangs' control of street-level drug sales and collaboration with rival gangs and other criminal organizations.

In Wetlands and Western Cultures: Denigration to Conservation, Rod Giblett examines the portrayal of wetlands in Western culture and argues for their conservation. Giblett’s analysis of the wetland motif in literature and the arts, including in Beowulf and the writings of Tolkien and Thoreau, demonstrates two approaches to wetlands—their denigration as dead waters or their commendation as living waters with a potent cultural history.

"To travel this long, lonely road is to traverse a stretch of brutal history and to enter a gigantic crime scene. The landscape itself holds a million clues to a horror story blazing across two centuries. Winding through a haunted place that is forever frontier territory, this road is the scene of casual as well as callous murder whether from the 1970s, the 1960s or the 1860s. Not for nothing is it known as the 'Horror Stretch'. In this compulsively readable new book, Ross Gibson drives right back along that dangerous stretch and finds himself deep in the Badland. Part road movie, part memoir, part murder mystery, Seven Versions of an Australian Badland embarks on an enthralling journey through time, into the realms of myth and magic, narcissism and genocide."--Publisher's website.