As the United States becomes increasingly urbanized, how its citizens experience and interact with the natural world will become more and more influenced by how the nation’s cities are arranged.
New and forthcoming books that are worthy of attention but that have not been fully reviewed.
As the United States becomes increasingly urbanized, how its citizens experience and interact with the natural world will become more and more influenced by how the nation’s cities are arranged.
I’ll admit it; the state of Florida is something of a mystery to me. I’ve been there a few times, hiking and bird watching here and there, but I’ve yet to develop anything more than a rudimentary understanding of it in either a social or an ecological sense. Fortunately, there are people who do understand it – at least ecologically (and if you count Carl Hiaasen, socially as well) – people like Susan Cerulean.
If you’ve studied natural history for very long, you’ve likely by now noticed that a wide variety of plants and animals have the appearance of things much different than what they themselves actually are; caterpillars that look like snakes or hoverflies that look like bees, for example. While it’s fairly obvious that such deceptive traits would be valuable for a range of reasons, how did they come about in the first place? And for that matter, what do such deceptions mean in regard to evolution and adaptation?
A good book should cause one to find a continuous string of further questions arising in the mind while and after reading it. A great one should cause the mind to positively fizz with them. And after only yet reading Elizabeth Marshall Thomas’ forward and Marcus Baynes-Rock’s introduction to his Among the Bone Eaters; Encounters with Hyenas in Harar, I have every reason to believe that my brain will be bubbling like a shaken soda bottle by the time my reading of the book is completed.