A natural division between the eastern and western slopes of the San Juans is the north-south line that runs approximately through Lake City, south of the crossing of the Piedra River by US Highway 160. In this super guidebook, twenty-seven contributors--all experts in their fields--artfully bring the geology, hydrology, animal and plant life, human histories, and travel routes of these eastern slopes to life. Designed to inform researchers, educators, and students about the region's complex systems, The Eastern San Juan Mountains also serves as an informative guidebook to accompany visitors along their travels on the Silver Thread National Scenic Byway, which stretches between South Fork and Lake City.

The Eastern San Juan Mountains deserves a place next to The Western San Juan Mountains on the bookshelf of every naturalist, researcher, resident, educator, student, and tourist seeking a greater understanding of this marvelous place and its history.

These writers reveal that the land is a character: sometimes a mother, sometimes a joker, never an enemy, though one must take care. The space can be refreshing or oppressive, as the paradox of openness is that it tends to control and confine as much as free us. The weather plans your day. Snowstorms don't negotiate.

The West makes people acutely aware of the absurdity of their smallness, and this feeling is the source of much of the humor in the anthology. The sensation of being tiny, that crazed adrenalin rush and the feeling of your heart beating in your throat, has to make you laugh out loud like a roller coaster. The twenty authors in this collection will take you for an interesting ride.

Contributors to the anthology include: Kirstin Abraham, Genevieve Betts, Shirley Brewer, David Coy, Elizabeth Creely, Mary Christine Delea, Jen Edwards, Thea Gavin, John Haggerty, Brad Johnson, Neal Lewing, Robert McBrearty, Margaret Ozemet, Francis Raven, Greg Robillard, Heather Sappenfield, Sam Smith, Laura Snyder, Caroline Sposto, and Scott Starbuck.

First published as Systems Ecology in 1983, Ecological and General Systems proposes principles of self-organization and the designs that prevail by maximizing power and efficiency. Comparisons to fifty other systems languages are provided. Innovative presentations are given on earth homeostasis (Gaia); the inadequacy of presenting equations without network relationships and energy constraints; the alternative interpretation of high entropy complexity as adaptive structure; basic equations of ecological economics; and the energy basis of scientific hierarchy.

Part I introduces energetics, hierarchy, and systems modeling. Part II features design elements: intersections, autocatalytic modules, loops, series, parallel elements, and webs. Part III includes embodied energy, spectra of energy quality, temperature, complexity, spatial distribution, and diversity. Part IV discusses production, consumption, ecosystems, succession, economic systems, anthropological models, urban and regional models, global biogeochemistry, and the universe.

Contributors include Warren B. Ballard, Arnold H. Boer, Anthony B. Bubenik, M. E. Buss, Kenneth N. Child, Vincent F.J. Crichton, Albert W. Franzmann, Kris J. Hundertmark, Patrick D. Karns, Murray W. Lankester, Richard E. McCabe, James M. Peek, Henry M. Reeves, Wayne L. Regelin, Lyle A. Renecker, William M. Samuel, Charles C. Schwartz, Robert W. Stewart, Ian D. Thompson, H. R. Timmermann, and Victor Van Ballenberghe. A Wildlife Management Institute book

In The Ecology of Pastoralism, diverse contributions from archaeologists and ethnographers address pastoralism’s significant impact on humanity’s basic subsistence and survival, focusing on the network of social, political, and religious institutions existing within various societies dependent on animal husbandry.

Pastoral peoples, both past and present, have organized their relationships with certain animals to maximize their ability to survive and adapt to a wide range of conditions over time. Contributors show that despite differences in landscape, environment, and administrative and political structures, these societies share a major characteristic—high flexibility. Based partially on the adaptability of various domestic animals to difficult environments and partially on the ability of people to establish networks allowing them to accommodate political, social, and economic needs, this flexibility is key to the survival of complex pastoral systems and serves as the connection among the varied cultures in the volume.

In The Ecology of Pastoralism, a variety of case studies from a broad geographic sampling uses archaeological and contemporary data and offers a new perspective on the study of pastoralism, making this volume a valuable contribution to current research in the area.

Drawn from quantitative and qualitative work of practitioners in the field, this edited collection provides an update to the Staples and Ornatowski's influential Foundations of Teaching Technical Communication (1997). The collection is organized around the broad themes of expanding pedagogy, shaping curriculum, incorporating technology, and engaging community. In each section, authors illustrate their experiences with teaching in the university technical communication classroom, addressing topics such as rethinking the role of internships, redesigning student learning outcomes for assessment practices, incorporating ethics into the technical communication classroom, using visual communication in community context, and engaging plain language. These sixteen chapters, taken as a whole or individually, provide readers with insights and examples into teaching technical communication in the 21st century.

Enriched by case studies of the organizations and decision making processes in several major U.S. watersheds (the Delaware River Basin, San Gabriel River, Platte River, and the Columbia River Basin), Embracing Watershed Politics presents a reasoned explanation of why there are so few watershed-scale integrated management agencies and how the more diverse multi-organizational arrangements found in the vast majorities of watersheds work. Although the presence of multiple organizations representing a multitude of communities of interest complicates watershed management, these institutional arrangements can-under certain conditions-suit the complexity and uncertainty associated with watershed management in the twenty-first century.

While events in the Middle East-North Africa region dominate world news, it is an area little understood by the rest of the world—not only historically, politically, and culturally but also within the discipline of Rhetoric and Composition and Second Language Writing. The editors and contributors to this collection share scholarship that addresses how writing programs and writing-across-the-curriculum initiatives—in the region and outside of it—are responding to the increasing globalization of higher education and contributing to international discussions about World Englishes and other language varieties as well as translingual approaches to writing and writing pedagogy.

Contributors: Samer Annous, James P. Austin, William DeGenaro, Rula Diab, Michele Eodice, Juheina Fakhreddine, Aneta Hayes, Tom Highley, Amy Hodges, Rima Iskandarani, Najla Jarkas, Holly Johnson, Brenda Kent, Malakeh Raif Khoury-Khayat, Nasser Mansour, Ryan T. Miller, Maureen O’Day Nicolas, Saman Hussein Omar, Silvia Pessoa, Mysti Rudd, Zane Siraj Sinno, Michael Telafici, Connie Kendall Theado, Martha Townsend, Hacer Hande Uysal, Margaret Willard-Traub

—The Sciences

Zachary A. Smith and John Freemuth bring together a roster of top scholars to explicate the issues noted above as well as other key questions in this new edition of Environmental Politics and Policy in the West, which was first published in 1993. This thoroughly revised and updated edition offers a comprehensive and current survey.

Contributors address the policy process as it affects western states, how bureaucracy and politics shape environmental dialogues in the West, how western states innovate environmental policies independently of Washington, and how and when science is involved (or ignored) in management of the West's federal lands. Experts in individual resource areas explore multifaceted issues such as the politics of dam removal and restoration, wildlife resource concerns, suburban sprawl and smart growth, the management of hard-rock mining, and the allocation of the West's tightly limited water resources. Contributors include: Leslie R. Alm, Carolyn D. Baber, Walter F. Baber, Robert V. Bartlett, Hugh Bartling, Matthew A. Cahn, R. McGreggor Cawley, Charles Davis, Sandra Davis, John C. Freemuth, Sheldon Kamieniecki, Matt Lindstrom, William R. Mangun, Denise McCain-Tharnstrom, Daniel McCool, Jaina L. Moan, and Zachary A. Smith.

Whether fulfilling subsistence needs or featured in stories of grand adventure, hunting loomed large in the material and the imagined landscape of the nineteenth-century West. Epiphany in the Wilderness explores the social, political, economic, and environmental dynamics of hunting on the frontier in three “acts,” using performance as a trail guide and focusing on the production of a “cultural ecology of the chase” in literature, art, photography, and taxidermy.

Using the metaphor of the theater, Jones argues that the West was a crucial stage that framed the performance of the American character as an independent, resourceful, resilient, and rugged individual. The leading actor was the all-conquering masculine hunter hero, the sharpshooting man of the wilderness who tamed and claimed the West with each provident step. Women were also a significant part of the story, treading the game trails as plucky adventurers and resilient homesteaders and acting out their exploits in autobiographical accounts and stage shows.

Epiphany in the Wilderness informs various academic debates surrounding the frontier period, including the construction of nature as a site of personal challenge, gun culture, gender adaptations and the crafting of the masculine wilderness hero figure, wildlife management and consumption, memorializing and trophy-taking, and the juxtaposition of a closing frontier with an emerging conservation movement.

 

The University Press of Colorado gratefully acknowledges the generous support of the Charles Redd Center for Western Studies at Brigham Young University toward the publication of this book.

From the moment of a marriage’s heated inception to its period of luminous crowding and onward into distance and darkness, Bonnie Arning’s Escape Velocity asks if it’s possible to exist outside the only universe we’ve ever known. In modes both lyric and narrative, we are given a peephole into the height and decline of a marriage that begins beneath the moving lights of Las Vegas, Nevada, and traverses the devastating terrain of gambling, miscarriage, infidelity, and violence.

Arning gives voice to divergent aspects of love and violence through her use of math problems, erasures, dictionary entries, structured stanzas, and sprawling free verse. This multiplicity of forms comes together to explore everything from pop culture references of domestic violence to cultural notions of victims and victimhood. However dark, collectively these poems tell a love story—an acceptance of our capability to love those who hurt us, but also the love-of-self required to slowly and steadily reach "the velocity to be everleaving."

In the tradition of Eavan Boland and Louise Glück, Arning wrestles down and examines the terrible without flinching. We journey with her, engrossed by each difficult truth: a precipice near which we are both terrified to stand and transfixed by its unnerving insistence on beauty.

Hornborg and Hill argue that the tendency to link language, culture, and biology--essentialist notions of ethnic identities--is a Eurocentric bias that has characterized largely inaccurate explanations of the distribution of ethnic groups and languages in Amazonia. The evidence, however, suggests a much more fluid relationship among geography, language use, ethnic identity, and genetics. In Ethnicity in Ancient Amazonia, leading linguists, ethnographers, ethnohistorians, and archaeologists interpret their research from a unique nonessentialist perspective to form a more accurate picture of the ethnolinguistic diversity in this area.

Revealing how ethnic identity construction is constantly in flux, contributors show how such processes can be traced through different ethnic markers such as pottery styles and languages. Scholars and students studying lowland South America will be especially interested, as will anthropologists intrigued by its cutting-edge, interdisciplinary approach.

The cowboy that emerges from this collection is multifaceted, as the book juxtaposes cowboys spraying longhorns at a car wash to cowboys advertising services on Craigslist and Pepsi-drinking cowboys riding Amtrak trains. There are portraits of the old cowboys, crotchety coffee-swigging men with too many stories about how things were better four decades ago. However, the figure remains one constructed of loyalties—loyalty to work, loyalty to family, loyalty to animals, loyalty to the land.

The image of the cowboy is vivid in our imagination, insperable from Western mythology, a means to connect ourselves with the wild and rugged individuals we dream we used to be. In this age of computers and cubicles we want to touch and preserve that history, but we must allow for shifting traditions. As the thirty-five authors in this collection will remind you, even cowboys carry cell phones.

Although several kinds of production units developed, households were the most persistent units of production in spite of massive social change and the reorientation of pottery production to the tourist market. Entrepreneurial workshops, government-sponsored workshops, and workshops attached to tourist hotels developed more recently but were short-lived, whereas pottery-making households extended deep into the nineteenth century. Through this continuity and change, intermittent crafting, multi-crafting, and potters' increased management of economic risk also factored into the development of the production organization in Ticul.

Illustrated with more than 100 images of production units, The Evolution of Ceramic Production Organization in a Maya Community is an important contribution to the understanding of ceramic production. Scholars with interests in craft specialization, craft production, and demography, as well as specialists in Mesoamerican archaeology, anthropology, history, and economy, will find this volume especially useful.

Originally published in 1995, soon after Death Valley National Park became the fifty-third park in the US park system, The Explorer's Guide to Death Valley National Park was the first complete guidebook available for this spectacular area.

Now in its third edition, this is still the only book that includes all aspects of the park. Much more than just a guidebook, it covers the park's cultural history, botany and zoology, hiking and biking opportunities, and more. Information is provided for all of Death Valley's visitors, from first-time travelers just learning about the area to those who are returning for in-depth explorations.

The book includes updated point-to-point logs for every road within and around the park, as well as more accurate maps than those in any other publication. With extensive input from National Park Service resource management, law enforcement, and interpretive personnel, as well as a thorough bibliography for suggested reading, The Explorer's Guide to Death Valley National Park, Third Edition is the most up-to-date, accurate, and comprehensive guide available for this national treasure.