The grizzly bear, once the archetype for all that is wild, is quickly becoming a symbol of nature’s fierce but flagging resilience in the face of human greed and ignorance and the difficulty a wealth-addicted society has in changing its ways. 

North America’s grizzlies have been under siege ever since Europeans arrived. They’d survived the arrival of spear-wielding humans 13,000 years ago, outlived the short-faced bear, the dire wolf and the sabre-tooth cat--not to mention mastodons, mammoths and giant ground sloths the size of elephants but grizzly bears in much of Turtle Island succumbed to 375 years of unrelenting commercialization and industrialization, disappearing from the Great Plains and much of the mountain West.

Despite their relatively successful recovery in Yellowstone National Park, the bears decline continues largely unchecked. And the front line in this centuries-old battle for survival has shifted to western Alberta and southern BC, where outdated mythologies, rapacious industry and disingenuous governments continue to push the Great Bear into the mountains and toward a future that may not have room for them at all.

The 100 success stories range from conservation and management to restoration and capacity building.  The commentators of the book included two coordinators (Julia Carabias and José Sarukhán), and two authors: Ivan Trujillo, director of the Guadalajara film festival, and Rosario Ramírez, from Ixtlan de Juárez in Oaxaca, a model indigenous community on sustainable forestry.

“This book nourishes our optimism for the talent of the authors and the satisfying and extraordinary results. It is a book that documents and narrates success stories to be shared, 140 authors and 100 success stories, using knowledge on biological wealth, sometimes older than a 100 years, that allows environmental conservation, social participation, and the incorporation of indigenous, farmers, and fishermen knowledge”, said Miguel Ángel Granados Chapa, one of the main reporters and historians of Mexico. 

The book is illustrated by the contribution of a large number of excellent photographers and it is is available in PDF format athttp://www.biodiversidad.gob.mx/pais/cien_casos/cien_casos.php

This book is a collection of essays, poetry, and observations about South Dakota, about ranching and neighbors, about life and the death of a husband, about being a woman and a neighbor. Hasselstrom deals with both a land ethic and a work ethic, modern life on the grasslands of the high plains. She is a rancher and an environmentalist, planting wildflowers and raising cattle. She is an advocate of the prairies and the people and wildlife who inhabit them. This book shows how those who live off the land often have the greatest love of and respect for the land. This is a treasure of a book about the spirituality of the land.

A collection of poetry, Creatures of the Intertidal Zone, was inspired by Richardson’s journey through Iceland, Greenland and Newfoundland in the footsteps of an intrepid eleventh century female Viking. One of the collection’s central themes is the impact of climate change and other environmental issues on the landscape of the arctic and sub-arctic.

Reviews

Here is poetry...driven from within into the shape best suited to its purpose. Internal rhyme and assonance...sing out when the poems are read aloud. This is free verse at its finest....Poems in this collection fly without difficulty...I can still feel their impact on my heart.          --poet Ann Drysdale