Ah Spring… the flowers are blooming, the birds are singing, and the publishers are holding amazing sales on their books.
Two that have most recently come to my attention are from Cornell University Press and the University of California Press.
When it comes to green American cities, “put a bird on it” Portland is likely to be at or near the top of most any list – any list, that is, that doesn’t take into account the health of the large river that bisects it. I mean, of course, not the Columbia, which flows along the city’s northern border, but rather one of its major tributaries: the Willamette.
The moment I drew the copy of Marilyn Sigman’s new “Entangled; People and Ecological Change in Alaska’s Kachemak Bay” from it’s University of Chicago Press envelope, I had a bit of a flashback. As a young man, my father and I made the annual summer journey with so many of the other north Oregon coast commercial fisherman to work in the salmon fishery in Bristol Bay – a mere hundred miles and change to the west of Kachemak.
When it comes right down to it, science communication is a modern development in the ancient art of rhetoric. However as rhetoric is, at its heart, interested in how an audience may be convinced of a writer’s or speaker’s argument, the question eventually must be asked as to what ethical considerations must be taken into account when communicating scientific information to an audience.