Archive of posts filed under the Environmental Studies category.

Interview: T. DeLene Beeland, author of The Secret World of Red Wolves

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Red wolves are shy, elusive, and misunderstood predators. Until the 1800s, they were common in the longleaf pine savannas and deciduous forests of the southeastern United States. However, habitat degradation, persecution, and interbreeding with the coyote nearly annihilated them. Today, reintroduced red wolves are found only in peninsular northeastern North Carolina within less than 1 percent of their former range. In The Secret World of Red Wolves: The Fight to Save North America’s Other Wolf, nature writer T. DeLene Beeland shadows the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s pioneering recovery program over the course of a year to craft an intimate portrait of the red wolf, its history, and its restoration.

Interview: Tom Earnhardt on Crossroads of the Natural World

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The first essay, “Three Elephants in the Basement,” allowed me to transport the reader back to a time not very long ago—just a comma and three zeroes ago—when the land that would become North Carolina was populated by three species of elephant and a menagerie of strange animals as large as any in Africa today.

Award-winning books from UNC Press (updated)

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We are honored and delighted to share the news of some of our most recent award-winning books. Hope you’ll join us in congratulating these fine authors. And you may want to consider using some of these books in your classroom or kitchen. Click the cover images or book titles to go to the book page …

Continue reading ‘Award-winning books from UNC Press (updated)’ »

North Carolina Icons: Appalachian Trail, Part 2: Nature

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Our featured North Carolina icon this week is the Appalachian Trail. There are thousands of different species of plants and animals along the Appalachian Trail, varying as the trail goes through different climates. There are 2,000 rare, threatened, endangered, and sensitive plant and animal species.

Gordon M. Sayre: The Founding of New Orleans: A City of Floods

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A large portion of New Orleans lies below sea level, although the historic and touristic French Quarter, the part of the city that dates to the French period in the mid-eighteenth century, is just barely above sea level and suffered the least from Katrina. The reasons for New Orleans’ vulnerability, and the reasons why the city was established where it is, are revealed in the narrative of Jean-François Benjamin Dumont de Montigny.

North Carolina Icons: Longleaf Pine

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This week in our North Carolina Icons series, we jump to #94 on Our State Magazine’s list of 100 North Carolina Icons: the Longleaf Pine. Our book recommendations are to be enjoyed with your favorite beverage, a glass of which you should raise high as you recite the North Carolina State Toast (yes, we have one!).

North Carolina Icons: Loggerhead Sea Turtles

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This week we continue our NC Icons series with loggerhead sea turtles, number nine on Our State magazine’s 100 North Carolina Icons list. Loggerhead sea turtles are an endangered species that nest along North Carolina’s coast (and as far south as Florida and north to Virginia).

Interview: Christopher C. Sellers on the origins of American environmentalism

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During the post-WWII period in the United States, a new generation of pollutants proved especially mobile and persistent. Overriding a widespread segregation of neighborhoods by class as well as race, these pollutants proved capable of pervading entire suburban metropolises. Americans, especially around our largest cities, were forced to confront just how shared the burden of pollution had become.

Excerpt: Crabgrass Crucible, by Christopher C. Sellers

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In the United States, even from Bunner’s time, what nourished the nature love of the more and less scientifically qualified alike was a shared suburban experience. It was one not so much of home buying as home owning. Nor was it reducible to suburban dwellers’ relationship with “the land,” however fraught. What finally secured the breadth of environmentalism’s appeal was how nature love itself had become ever more suffused with anxieties about human health.

Sarah S. Elkind: The Allure of an Inefficient Government

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“Beltway politics” are not the only barrier to efficiency in government. Despite what they say, the American people have long preferred an inefficient federal government that they could shape rather than an efficient government that they could not.

Sarah S. Elkind: Los Angeles and the History of Air Pollution

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We have become so used to hearing of regulations–particularly consumer protections like banking rules or the proposed controls on mercury emissions—as threats to prosperity that it has become nearly impossible to imagine these debates in any other way. But in 1940s Los Angeles, controlling air pollution and creating a healthy environment was understood as essential to prosperity, and the business community led the regulatory effort.

Robert Lippson: Wading in the shallows and loving it!

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The shallows are a hub of biological activity. This is where many species of fishes spawn and where small fish seek haven from larger ones looking for lunch. Plants also grow in the shallows, and where there are plants there will be snails and small harmless insect-like crustaceans such as isopods and amphipods and shrimp and occasionally everyone’s favorite—a seahorse—and their close relatives, pipefishes, clinging, crawling, and slithering over the stems and blades of the vegetation.

Book Excerpt: DDT & the American Century, by David Kinkela

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Müller’s discovery generated little international publicity. Europe was engulfed in a continental war, and the United States remained an interested observer. But as the United States entered the war, which expanded across continents and into the tropics, where the threat of insect-borne diseases increased, military health officials on all sides of the conflict demanded new methods to control disease, and DDT was positioned to play an important role in the war effort.

Stan Ulanski: A Floating Jungle: The Sargassum Community

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Stan Ulanski explains how sargassum attracts fish, and therefore fishers, and why these floating jungles are important to protect.

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