Cookbook List Addition: Backcountry Cooking

Goodbye to mundane, expensive, freeze-dried camping food and welcome to tasty, environmentally conscious, inexpensive dishes. Seasoned outdoor cook Sierra Adare spices her creative and easy-to-follow recipes with Western culinary history and first accounts that are informed by the traditions of the trail.

Inside the book are lists of grocery items you can buy beforehand at your local store, along with instructions to dehydrate your own food to avoid the high prices of outdoor markets.

Backcountry Cooking

The Ultimate Guide to Outdoor Cooking

by Sierra Adare

Skyhorse Publishing, 2011

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Book List Addition: Environmental Politics and the Creation of a Dream

The Apostle Islands National Lakeshore is a breathtakingly beautiful archipelago of twenty-two islands in Lake Superior, just off the tip of northern Wisconsin. For years, the national park has been a favorite destination for tourists and locals alike, but the remarkable story behind its creation is little known.

In Environmental Politics and the Creation of a Dream, Harold Jordahl, one of the primary advocates for designating the islands as a national park, discloses the full story behind the effort to preserve their natural beauty for posterity.

Environmental Politics and the Creation of a Dream

Establishing the Apostle Islands National Lakeshore

by Harold C. Jordahl Jr. and Annie L. Booth

University of Wisconsin Press, 2011

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Book List Addition: Darwin's Sacred Cause

Celebrated for his famous theory of evolution tracing all of life back to a common ancestor, Charles Darwin held an overlooked passion that fired his belief in life’s unity.

The thesis of this book is that Darwin's commitment to the abolition of slavery – his “sacred cause” – led him from a recognition of the shared racial roots of black and white people to the ‘common descent’ of all organisms. This belief in the brotherhood of races – whether animals, plants or people – was the seed that grew into his revolutionary theory.

Darwin's Sacred Cause

Race, Slavery and the Quest for Human Origins

by Adrian Desmond

University Of Chicago Press, 2011

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Good Old Books: Adventures and Misadventures with Rod and Gun

"My name isn't well known, such as Winston Churchill, Dick Nixon, or many others. So the name is not of particular significance, but the era and the unusual and interesting happenings gleaned over a sixty-year span, when outdoor activity was unsurpassed, may be of interest.

"If we don't reduce events of the "good old days" to print they will soon be forgotten; and it must be that future generations will be more interested in this lifetime.


"It is with this in mind I write, not Dave Gardner's experience, but about a rich period in time for the outdoorsman that otherwise will be forgotten."

- from the Preface

Adventures and Misadventures with Rod and Gun

by David L. Gardner

The Record-Courier, 1981

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Nature Book List Addition: Canyon Crossing

There’s the Grand Canyon as seen from one of the rims. Spectacular. Awe-inspiring. Dramatic. And there’s the Grand Canyon below the rims, a very different place steeped in wilderness, bus-sized boulders, tumbling streams, knee-shredding switchbacks, solitude, and the cataract-punctuated Colorado River. The trails in Grand Canyon National Park attract more than 80,000 permitted overnight backpackers annually, as well as an untold number of day hikers and mule riders.

Join author Seth Muller on a grand adventure, searching for the Grand Canyon’s soul along miles of canyon trails. Muller profiles rangers, artists, volunteers, hikers, ultra-marathoners, mule skinners, and others who regularly experience the inner canyon, presenting the Corridor Trails in intimate, creative prose that will carry the reader into the depths of the canyon and back out again.

Canyon Crossing

Experiencing Grand Canyon from Rim to Rim by Seth Muller

Grand Canyon Association, 2011

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Nature Book List Addition: Bird Watch

From the tufted puffin in the Pacific Northwest to the hook-billed hermit in the Brazilian rainforest, birds suffer from the effects of climate change in every corner of the globe. Scientists have found declines of up to 90 percent in some troubled bird populations and unprecedented reproductive failure in others. The most recent studies suggest dire prospects: 1,227 avian species are threatened with extinction and an additional 838 near-threatened species are urgent priorities for conservation action.

As much an indispensable guide as a timely call to action, Bird Watch is an illustrated tour of these endangered birds and their habitats.

Bird Watch
A Survey of Planet Earth's Changing Ecosystems
by Martin Walters
University Of Chicago Press, 2011

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Good Old Books: Ski Touring

This timely panoramic introduction to the joys of ski touring enhances the overall winter recreation prospect for downhill skiers and beckons to the fireside winter "sportsman" to leave the nest and join the flock. All the dos and don'ts that can make a saunter on  skis out into the winter wonderland an exhilarating and memorable experience are authoritatively and sometimes humorously set forth.

Chapter One sets the scene, and the ensuing chapters consecutively cover the essentials of the planning stage, paraphernalia, basic skiing techniques, safety and first aid, and the setting up of a winter camp if an overnight tour is planned.

Ski Touring

An Introductory Guide

by William E. Osgood and Leslie J. Hurley

Charles E. Tuttle Company, 1969

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Book List Addition: A Student's Guide to the Seashore

This unique, concise and beautifully illustrated guide allows students to identify over 650 of the common, widespread animals and seaweeds of the shore. User-friendly dichotomous keys are supported by details of diagnostic features and biology of each species.

Now enhanced with 32 pages of colour, this much acclaimed guide is invaluable to students of marine biology at any level.

A Student's Guide to the Seashore

by J. D. Fish and S. Fish

Cambridge University Press, 2011

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Good Old Books: Household Ecology

With industry and government reluctant - or even unwilling -  to help clean up pollution, the responsibility of saving the environment falls increasingly on the individual.

Household Ecology is the long-awaited and desperately needed comprehensive guide to ecologicallly "safe" living. Instead of the hackneyed "don'ts," here are hundreds of imaginative, positive suggestions that any consumer can put into practice immediately - and effectively.

Here are scores of natural, efficient, and biodegradable substitutes for laundry detergents, furniture polish, and other chemical household cleansers.

Non-toxic beauty aids, medicines, and tranquilizers that are guaranteed free of side effects, as nature intended them. (Use olive oil as a skin-softener and coffee as a laxative!)... Insect sprays and repellants that work against insects instead of people and all of whose ingrediewnts come from the country store.

Household Ecology
by Julia Percivall and Pixie Burger
Prentice-Hall, 1971

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Book List Addition: Grasses of South Texas

The vast rangelands of south Texas—that portion of the state lying south of San Antonio and extending west and south to the Rio Grande and east to the Gulf of Mexico—are home to many species of grasses, some beneficial and some noxious. Careful identification is important for ranch and farm management, conservation, and scientific study.

This field guide catalogs 250 taxa, representing 9 subfamilies, 15 tribes, and 88 genera. Detailed descriptions, accompanied by color photographs, cover 175 native species and 75 that were introduced.

Grasses of South Texas

A Guide to Identification and Value 

by James H. Everitt, D. Lynn Drawe, Christopher R. Little and Robert I. Lonard

Texas Tech University Press, 2011

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Book List Addition: Planning Paradise

“Sprawl” is one of the ugliest words in the American political lexicon. Virtually no one wants America’s rural landscapes, farmland, and natural areas to be lost to bland, placeless malls, freeways, and subdivisions. Yet few of America’s fast-growing rural areas have effective rules to limit or contain sprawl.

Oregon is one of the nation’s most celebrated exceptions. In the early 1970s Oregon established the nation’s first and only comprehensive statewide system of land-use planning and largely succeeded in confining residential and commercial growth to urban areas while preserving the state’s rural farmland, forests, and natural areas.

This is the first book to tell the story of Oregon’s unique land-use planning system from its rise in the early 1970s to its near-death experience in the first decade of the 2000s.

Planning Paradise

Politics and Visioning of Land Use in Oregon 

by Peter A. Walker and Patrick T. Hurley

University of Arizona Press, 2011

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Book List Addition: After Custer

Between 1876 and 1877, the U.S. Army battled Lakota Sioux and Northern Cheyenne Indians in a series of vicious conflicts known today as the Great Sioux War. After the defeat of Custer at the Little Big Horn in June 1876, the army responded to its stunning loss by pouring fresh troops and resources into the war effort. In the end, the U.S. Army prevailed, but at a significant cost.

In After Custer, Paul L. Hedren examines the war’s effects on the culture, environment, and geography of the northern Great Plains, their Native inhabitants, and the Anglo-American invaders.

After Custer
Loss and Transformation in Sioux Country
by Paul L. Hedren
University of Oklahoma Press, 2011

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