Natural Resources in The Books Store

"...a book as rich in detail as it is devastating in its argument." -SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN

"Water Follies deserves a place alongside the late Marc Reisner's classic Cadillac Desert." -ENVIRONMENT

"a lively account of hydrology" -NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS

"if you want to scare yourself silly, read Water Follies, by Robert Jerome Glennon. In it you'll learn how America is irrigating itself to death-just like the Sumerians-while sucking its groundwater aquifers dry."-TORONTO GLOBE & MAIL

A week-by-week practical guide to setting up and maintaining a superb living environment

As fishkeeping continues to grow in popularity, hobbyists are looking for authoritative advice and more sophisticated results.

Setting Up a Tropical Aquarium Week-by-Week is an encyclopedic reference that takes a fresh look at setting up and maintaining a tropical freshwater aquarium. New hobbyists are quite often impatient to set up their aquarium and want to add their expensive fish as soon as possible. This common misstep can have disastrous results that may discourage beginners from ever trying again.

To curb such enthusiastic impatience, this book presents clear step-by-step practical advice in a convenient week-by-week progression. The book uses detailed photographic sequences to follow each stage of setting up a warm water freshwater tropical aquarium in real-time over a period of ten weeks.

The set-up procedure starts with the first day, when the substrate and life-support systems are installed and progresses to the point at which the first fish are added - two weeks later. The book then follows the aquarium's development during the next eight weeks as the tank turns from an artificial environment into a living eco-system.

Alongside the main aquarium set-up sequence are photographs that show how to create two different aquascape designs based on a cube and a bow-front tank.

Profile sections show fifty aquarium plants and one hundred popular warm water freshwater aquarium fish at relevant stages of the set-up process. Throughout, the book explains the natural processes that occur so that fishkeepers can ensure ongoing success.

Combining clear text and simple-to-follow illustrations, Setting Up a Tropical Aquarium Week-by-Week is a crucial reference for tropical freshwater fish hobbyists.

The spirit of nineteenth-century naturalistic exploration lives in British historian Thomas Pakenham, who has spent the last decade chronicling the lives of the world's most dramatic trees, many of which are in danger of destruction. After the world-wide success of his previous work, Meetings With Remarkable Trees—a stunning collection of 60 individual trees (and groups of trees) in Britain and Ireland chosen for their unusually strong personalities—Pakenham decided to hunt down and photograph another 60 remarkable trees scattered throughout the globe.

Many of these trees were already famous-champions by girth, height, volume or age-while others had never previously been caught by the camera. Pakenham's five-year odyssey, sweating it out with a 30 pound Linhof camera and tripod, took him to most of the temperate and many of the tropical regions of the world. Although North American trees dominate this book, Pakenham also trekked to remote regions in Mexico, all over Europe, parts of Asia including Japan, northern and southern Africa, Madagascar, Australia and New Zealand.

Despite his expert knowledge, the book owes little to conventional botany. Like its predecessor, Remarkable Trees of the World is arranged according to the characters of the trees themselves. There are Giants and Dwarfs, Methuselahs, Shrines, Dreams, Lovers and Dancers, Ghosts and Trees in Peril. The chief Giant is General Sherman in the Sierra Nevada, California. At over 1400 tons, the grizzled old general, a giant-sequoia, is the world's largest tree, measured by volume - indeed the largest single living thing in the world. The height record, however, goes to another commanding Californian, a 368-foot high Coast redwood recently declared the tallest tree in the world. Among the Methuselahs, Pakenham describes the wind-blasted bristlecone pines of the White Mountains of California. One of them, Old Methuselah himself, was found to be 4,600 years old, making him the oldest tree yet measured by scientists. Shrines include some of the holiest trees in the world, like the immense camphor trees preserved in Shinto shrines in Japan and the 2,200 year old Bo-tree in Sri Lanka, a cutting from the actual tree under which Buddha found enlightenment. Trees in Peril are the trees under attack by predatory loggers and impoverished farmers, including the exotic baobabs of Madagascar, now threatened by intensive farming, and the Great Spruce and Douglas Fir and Redcedars of Pacific North America in whose defense the conservationists have been fighting the loggers for decades.