Here is a grouping of titles that explore land and water conflicts. From a travelogue and a storytelling of the past and present along the the Río Magdalena to the ordinary people in El Salvador who rallied together to prevent the poisoning of the country’s main water source to Ingrid Rojas Contreras’ intimate family history in Colombia to an Apache family struggling to protect sacred land from corporate interests, these books tell stories about the land, water, surrounding nature, and the people who aim to pay tribute to its value. These books capture the stories of those who frequent these different areas and describe how the history of the land and how their personal lives intertwine.
An exhilarating travelogue for a new generation about a journey along Colombia’s Magdalena River, exploring life by the banks of a majestic river now at risk, and how a country recovers from conflict. "Richly observed." —Liesl Schillinger, The New York Times Book Review
Magdalena is a captivating new book that brings vividly to life the story of the great Río Magdalena, illuminating Colombia’s complex past, present, and future.
A powerful work of visual nonfiction about three generations of an Apache family struggling to protect sacred land from a multinational mining corporation, by MacArthur "Genius" and National Book Award finalist Lauren Redniss, the acclaimed author of Thunder & Lightning.
Mike Tidwell knew nothing of the disappearing bayou country when he first visited the Cajun coast of Louisiana, but the evidence was all around him: the skeletons of oak trees killed by the salinity of the groundwater, whole cemeteries sinking into swampland and out of sight, telephone poles in deep, standing water. Thanks to human hands, the storied Louisiana coast was eroding, subsiding, and joining the Gulf of Mexico—making it the fastest disappearing landmass on Earth. Yet no one seemed to know how to talk about the problem. Tidwell, a celebrated travel and environmental writer, decided to begin the much-needed conversation, and this vivid, elegiac book is the result.
The Dreamt Land is a vivid, searching journey into California’s capture of water and soil—the epic story of a people’s defiance of nature and the wonders, and ruin, it has wrought.
There has been much written about the impact of polarization on elections, political parties, and policy outcomes. But Keith Payne’s goal is more personal: to focus on what our divisions mean for us as individuals, as families, and as communities. This book is about how ordinary people think about politics, why talking about it is
From the Introduction: John Steinbeck wasn’t necessarily talking about being an adolescent when he wrote his acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize for Literature, which he received in 1962, but some things in that speech still resonate with my students. “Humanity has been passing through a gray and desolate time of confusion,” he said, alluding
