David Rains Wallace

Spanning five hundred million years of evolution, a study of marine life along the Pacific coast of North America captures the remarkable diversity of creatures, past and present, that have made the habitat their home, from ancient giant sea cows and flightless toothed birds, to modern-day orcas and sea otters.

"Edward Drinker Cope was a Philadelphia Quaker from a wealthy family, an old-fashioned naturalist in the Jeffersonian tradition. Othniel Charles Marsh, a farm boy who had risen to a Yale professorship, was the model of a modern scientific entrepreneur. Opposites in personality and background as well as in political orientation and scientific beliefs, they fought over fossils as bitterly as other men fought over gold. With Indian wars swirling around them, they conducted their own personal warfare, staking out territories, employing scouts, troops, and spies. When James Gordon Bennett, the sociopathic publisher of the New York Herald, got wind of their feud, he stirred up an inferno that destroyed the lives of both men and scarred the reputations of many others, including John Wesley Powell, the director of the U.S. Geological Survey. In the aftermath, Powell's environmentally progressive ideas for limiting settlement of the West lost out to his opponents' laissez-faire boosterism, and the repercussions of the Bone War linger in many of the conflicts that rend the country today."--BOOK JACKET.

"When the Panama land bridge between North and South America formed three million years ago, plants and animals surged back and forth in an evolutionary cross-fertilization creating one of the world's richest and most fascinating environments. This is the story of Central America's role as an evolutionary link between continents"--Provided by publisher.

Chronicles the author's fascination with the wild beauty of Bulow Hammock, a subtropical woodland near Daytona, Florida.

An account of Muir's journey into the Alaska wilderness.

Drawing from his frequent forays to Death Valley, Red Rock Canyon, Kelso Dunes, and other locales, the author illuminates the desert's intriguing flora and fauna as he explores a controversial, unresolved scientific debate about the origin and evolution of its unusual ecosystems. Eminent scientists and scholars appear throughout these pages, including maverick paleobiologist Daniel Axelrod, botanist Ledyard Stebbins, and naturalists Edmund Jaeger and Joseph Wood Krutch. Weaving together ecology, geology, natural history, and mythology in his characteristically eloquent voice, the author reveals that there is more to this starkly beautiful landscape than meets the eye.

Costa Rica lost almost half its forest cover from 1950 to 1990, much of it burned to clear pasture for cattle. In the last two decades, however, millions of acres of Costa Rican forests have been saved by a national park system that now ranks as one of the most effective in the world. This achievement holds valuable lessons for conservationists everywhere. In The Quetzal and the Macaw, acclaimed naturalist and award-winning author David Rains Wallace traces the growth of Costa Rica's park system from uncertain beginnings (early park employees weren't even sure what national parks were) to the present, when the park system shelters about ten percent of the nation's land--forests, mountains, beaches, wetlands, and other ecosystems--from destruction or commercial exploitation. Wallace details the unbelievable diversity of life in this rich land: pumas, ocelots, peccaries, howler monkeys--and the scarlet macaws and resplendent quetzals, the birds symbolizing two of Costa Rica's earliest parks. The park system became the nucleus of a socio-political network that has successfully battled loggers, miners, ranchers, and government development agencies. Enlivened throughout by the voices of people actually involved in establishing and managing the parks and preserves, Wallace's narrative is by turns suspenseful, humorous, and inspiring. Here are the stories of well-known and lesser-known figures (both native and foreign-born) who have played important roles, such as Olof Wessberg, a Swede who emigrated in the 1950s and labored to preserve rainforests; Daniel Oduber, President of Costa Rica from 1974-1978; Mario Boza, who became the chief of Costa Rica's fledgling national park service at the age of 27; and Alvaro Ugalde, Park Service director for most of the past two decades. What emerges is a vivid portrait of natural beauty and human commitment that reveals why Costa Rica has become a model for all developing Latin American countries in balancing political enlightenment with environmental concerns. Costa Rica is "biologically a superpower" because of its conservation achievements, said the Costa Rican minister of natural resources in 1989. David Wallace agrees. "If history continues," he says, "power will reside with societies that have conserved their resources, not with those that have spent them. ... The growth of parks systems will be a more important part of?history? than wars."