A beautifully detailed exploration of flora and fauna.
Author Ron Larson offers a natural history of a Great Basin landscape that focuses on the northern region including Lake Abert and Abert Rim, and the adjacent area in southcentral Oregon. Although the jewel of this landscape is a lake, the real story is the many plants and animals—from the very primitive, reddish, bacteria-like archaea that thrive only in its high-salinity waters to the Golden Eagles and ravens that soar above the desert. The untold species in and around the lake are part of an ecosystem shaped by ageless processes from massive lava flows, repeated drought, and blinding snowstorms. It is an environment rich with biotic and physical interconnections going back millions of years.
The Great Basin, and in particular the Lake Abert region, is special and needs our attention to ensure it remains that way. We must recognize the importance of water for Great Basin ecosystems and the need to manage it better, and we must acknowledge how rich the Great Basin is in natural history. Salt lakes, wherever they occur, are valuable and provide critically important habitat for migratory water birds, which are unfortunately under threat from upstream water diversions and climate change. Larson’s book will help people understand that the Great Basin is unique and that wise stewardship is necessary to keep it unspoiled. The book is an essential reference source, drawing together a wide range of materials that will appeal to general readers and researchers alike.
Corbin Harney’s long life encompassed remarkable changes in the lives of Native Americans and in the technological and political development of the world. Born into an impoverished Western Shoshone family on the Nevada-Idaho border and orphaned as a newborn, he was brought up by grandparents who taught him the traditional ways of their people and the ancient spiritual beliefs that sustained their culture. As an adult, Harney found his calling as a traditional healer and spiritual leader. Soon he became involved in the Shoshone struggle for civil rights, including their efforts to protect and heal their traditional lands in what became the Nevada Test Site. This involvement led Harney to his eventual role as a leader of the international antinuclear movement.The Nature Way is a rich compendium of Corbin Harney’s experience and wisdom. His account of his life incorporates the tragic history of Native Americans in the Great Basin after the arrival of Euro-Americans, his realization of his own identity as a Native American, and his long study of his people’s traditions and spiritual practices. His summary of the Shoshone and Paiute use of indigenous plants for food and healing highlights their understanding that the Earth and her denizens and products must be respected and protected in order to preserve the connection that all creatures have with sacred Mother Earth. Finally, his account of his role as an antinuclear activist expands on his awareness of the human responsibility to protect the Earth, especially from the extreme danger posed by nuclear technology and nuclear weapons of mass destruction. Corbin Harney’s voice is one of the clearest expressions yet of the values, concerns, and spirituality of contemporary Native America. He offers all of us an eloquent plea that we respect and cooperate with Nature to ensure the survival of the planet.
Since the late 1960s, the Basque insurgent organization ETA (Euzkadi ta Askatasuna, or Basque Homeland and Freedom) has been engaged in a violent struggle against the Spanish state in an effort to gain the independence of the Basque Country. ETA violence has led to the death of hundreds of people, making the organization the most violent insurgent group in Europe. Between 1975 and 1988, nearly thirty attempts to negotiate an end to violence, with a few limited exceptions, all ended in failure. This important book examines why the efforts to negotiate have failed and makes suggestions on how to improve the chances for successful discussion in the future. Although Clark does not disprove the conventional wisdom that negotiation with terrorists is a bad idea, he does begin from the opposing point of view that there may be some positive values to be realized from such negotiation.Negotiating with ETA describes the various factions that are interested in the outcome of such negotiations and the Spanish antiterrorist policy throughout the period under examination. The book also recounts the early attempts to negotiate, the first attempt at "social reintegration," various attempts by the Basque Government to get negotiations started, negotiation efforts under the Spanish socialist government of Felipe González, and the lengthy negotiations that took place in Algeria. A wide range of scholars and specialists will find this book valuable, including those interested in contemporary Spanish politics, ethnic nationalism, Basque affairs, the problem of terrorism, and conflict resolution.
Author and researcher Helen Carlson spent almost fourteen years searching for the origins of Nevada’s place names, using the maps of explorers, miners, government surveyors, and city planners and poring through historical accounts, archival documents, county records, and newspaper files. The result of her labors is Nevada Place Names, a fascinating mixture of history spiced with folklore, legend, and obscure facts. Out of print for some years, the book was reprinted in 1999.
A detailed look at Nevada's printing history from 1858 through 1880. Includes proclamations, pamphlets, menus, government publications, church programs, and more. For Nevada historians, bibliographers, book collectors, and people who are interested in the printed records produced in Nevada toward the end of the nineteenth century.
A detailed look at Nevada's printing history from 1881 through 1890. With over 1400 entries describing books, pamphlets, broadsides, state and local documents, fraternal and church publications, and a variety of other printed matter, this intriguing compilation serves as the companion volume to Armstrong's Nevada Printing History, 1858-1880. Armstrong includes annual summaries of events affecting the printing trade in Nevada as well as the locations and kinds of printing technology in use. This second volume also documents the planning and erection of a state printing office. Of particular interest are the summaries of individual publications that provide the reader with a picture of social, economic, and political viewpoints of the period. The author's research led him to more than 125 public institutions over a period of nearly twenty years. Historians, bibliographers, students of printing history and practice, collectors of Western Americana, antiquarian booksellers, and librarians will find this book to be an invaluable guide to Nevada's printing, its printers, and its history.
For millennia the ecology of the Great Basin has evolved because of climate change and the impacts of human presence. Nevada’s Changing Wildlife Habitat is the first book to explain the transformations in the plants and animals of this region over time and how they came about. Using data gleaned from archaeological and anthropological studies, numerous historical documents, repeat photography, and several natural sciences, the authors examine changes in vegetation and their impact on wildlife species and the general health of the environment. They also outline the choices that current users and managers of rangelands face in being good stewards of this harsh but fragile environment and its wildlife.
Nevada's relatively brief history (it became a state in 1864) has been largely a story of the exploitation of its natural resources. Mining has torn down mountains and poisoned streams and groundwater. Uncontrolled grazing by vast herds of sheep and cattle has denuded grasslands and left them prey to the invasion of noxious plant species and vulnerable to wildfire. Clear-cut logging practices have changed the composition of forests and induced serious soil erosion. More recently, military testing, including hundreds of atomic blasts to determine the efficacy of nuclear weapons, has irreversibly polluted expanses of fragile desert landscape. And rampant development throughout the state over the past four decades, along with the public's growing demand for recreational facilities, has placed intolerable demands on the arid state's limited water resources and threatened the survival of numerous rare plant and animal species. Veteran historian and Nevada native James W. Hulse considers the state's complex environmental history as a series of Faustian bargains between the state's need for economic development and the industries, government agencies, and individuals that have exploited Nevada's natural resources with little concern for the long-term consequences of their activities. His survey covers all these issues, and examines public attitudes about the environment and the role of federal and state agencies in creating, interpreting, and enforcing environmental policies.
The 1950s marked a period of significant changes for Nevada--gambling came under national and local scrutiny, atomic bombs were tested regularly near Las Vegas, and labor disputes made national headlines. Glass examines the events of the decade and their impact on Nevada and on the rest of the country.
An ethnohistory detailing the lives of fifteen generations in a Basque-speaking community in Spain and the result of their diverse contacts with the New World. The Basques’ remarkable role in the establishment and exploitation of Spain’s American empire is well known, but until now the impact of these achievements on the Basque Country itself has received little attention. In this pioneering study, Juan Javier Pescador meticulously examines three centuries of social and economic change in the Oiartzun Valley of Gipuzkoa, a typical Basque peasant community altered by its contacts with the New World.
This new bibliography of Nevada's newspapers supersedes and greatly expands on previous works. More than 800 publications are now included: traditional newspapers, penny shoppers, comic and campaign sheets, entertainment and matrimonial guides, and fictitious newspapers that had life only in the columns of other papers. Also included is a brief appendix of early newspapers from boarder states that reported regularly on Nevada. The authors have provided a brief historical sketch of each publication, together with a list and location of known copies of the original papers, plus current microfilm holdings. The bibliography also documents frequency of publication, proprietorship, title changes, printing locations, and political affiliation. This volume will be of value to historians ranging from scholars to genealogy buffs who need access to the information only newspapers can provide.
In No Place Like Home, Linda Hasselstrom ponders the changing nature of community in the modern West, where old family ranches are being turned into subdivisions and historic towns are evolving into mean, congested cities. Her scrutiny, like her life, moves back and forth between her ranch on the South Dakota prairie and her house in an old neighborhood at the edge of downtown Cheyenne, Wyoming. The vignettes that form the foundation of her consideration are drawn from the communities she has known during her life in the West, reflecting on how they have grown, thrived, failed, and changed, and highlighting the people and decisions that shaped them. Hasselstrom’s ruminations are both intensely personal and universal. She laments the disappearance of the old prairie ranches and the rural sense of community and mutual responsibility that sustained them, but she also discovers that a spirit of community can be found in unlikely places and among unlikely people. The book defines her idea of how a true community should work, and the kind of place she wants to live in. Her voice is unique and honest, both compassionate and cranky, full of love for the harsh, hauntingly beautiful short-grass prairie that is her home, and rich in understanding of the intricacies of the natural world around her and the infinite potentials of human commitment, hope, and greed. For anyone curious about the state of the contemporary West, Hasselstrom offers a report from the front, where nature and human aspirations are often at odds, and where the concepts of community and mutual responsibility are being redefined.
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