Ecology, Botany and Nature Book List
Hershey’s Children’s Garden
A Place to Grow
Since its opening in 1999, the Hershey Children's Garden at Cleveland Botanical Garden has been considered one of the best of the new public children's gardens that are being built throughout the country.…
Highland Sanctuary
Environmental History in Tanzania's Usambara Mountains
For more than a century, the world has recognized the extraordinary biological diversity of the forests of Tanzania’s Usambara Mountains. As international attention has focused on forest conservation, farmers, foresters, biologists, and the Tanzanian state have realized that only complex negotiations will save these treasured, but rapidly disappearing, landscapes.…
How Green Were the Nazis?
Nature, Environment, and Nation in the Third Reich
Edited by Franz-Josef Bruggemeier, Mark Cioc and Thomas Zeller
The Nazis created nature preserves, championed sustainable forestry, curbed air pollution, and designed the autobahn highway network as a way of bringing Germans closer to nature. How Green Were the Nazis?: Nature, Environment, and Nation in the Third Reich is the first book to examine the Third Reich's environmental policies and to offer an in-depth exploration of the intersections between brown ideologies and green practices.…
How to Identify Grasses and Grasslike Plants
Sedges and Rushes
There is no easy way to identify grasses. And no one understands this better than H.D. Harrington, who observed thousands of students struggle and learn. His clear, concise, and well-organized guide will continue to be a basic and essential text for use in the classroom or in the field.…
How to Identify Plants
First issued in 1957 by Swallow Press, this classic guide to the art of plant identification is now familiar to an entire generation of students. Harrington who was Professor of Botany and Curator of the Herbarium at Colorado State University, gives step-by-step instructions and definitions to help readers recognize and classify plants.…
Imagining Serengeti
A History of Landscape Memory in Tanzania from Earliest Times to the Present
Many students come to African history with a host of stereotypes that are not always easy to dislodge. One of the most common is that of Africa as safari grounds—as the land of expansive, unpopulated game reserves untouched by civilization and preserved in their original pristine state by the tireless efforts of contemporary conservationists.…
Imperial Gullies – On Sale
Soil Erosion and Conservation in Lesotho
Once the grain basket for South Africa, much of Lesotho has become a scarred and degraded landscape. The nation’s spectacular erosion and gullying have concerned environmentalists and conservationists for more than half a century.…
Inventing Global Ecology – On Sale
Tracking the Biodiversity Ideal in India, 1947–1997
Blue jeans, MTV, Coca-Cola, and… ecology? We don't often think of conservation sciences as a U.S. export, but in the second half of the twentieth century an astounding array of scientists and ideas flowed out from the United States into the world, preaching the gospel of conservation-oriented ecology.…
Islands of Intensive Agriculture in Eastern Africa – On Sale
Edited by Mats Widgren and John E.G. Sutton
Islands of intensive agriculture are areas of local cultivation surrounded by low-density livestock herders or extensive cultivators. Along the line of the East Africa Rift Valley, and in the highlands on either side, communities of considerable historical depth have developed highly specialized agricultural regimes, employing such labor-intensive devices as furrow irrigation, hillside terracing, and stall-feeding of cattle.…
The Man Who Created Paradise
A Fable
By Gene Logsdon
Gene Logsdon’s The Man Who Created Paradise is a message of hope at a time when the sustainability of the earth appears to many to be hopeless. The fable, inspired by a true story, tells how young Wally Spero looked at one of the bleakest places in America—the strip-mined spoil banks of southeastern Ohio—and saw in it his escape from the drudgery of his factory job.…
Marshes of Southwestern Lake Erie
The marshes along the Ohio shore of Lake Erie represent less than ten percent of the vast wetlands that were there two hundred years ago. Virtually unknown outside the region and, indeed, little known even by area residents, the western Lake Erie marshes are among the most mysterious, beautiful, and vulnerable of all the wild lands remaining in Ohio.…
The Midwestern Pastoral
Place and Landscape in Literature of the American Heartland
The midwestern pastoral is a literary tradition of place and rural experience that celebrates an attachment to land that is mystical as well as practical, based on historical and scientific knowledge as well as personal experience.…
Natures of Colonial Change
Environmental Relations in the Making of the Transkei
In this groundbreaking study, Jacob A. Tropp explores the interconnections between negotiations over the environment and an emerging colonial relationship in a particular South African context—the Transkei—subsequently the largest of the notorious “homelands” under apartheid.…
The Ohio Gardening Guide
It's all in here—step-by-step instructions for gardening success in Ohio. Veteran garden writer Jerry Minnich presents practical direction for growing all the vegetables, herbs, flowers, landscaping plants, and house plants you need for a complete garden.…
Out of the Woods
A Bird Watcher’s Year
By Ora E. Anderson
Edited by Deborah Griffith
Out of the Woods: A Bird Watcher’s Year is a journey through the seasons and a joyous celebration of growing old. In fifty-nine essays and poems, Ora E. Anderson, birder, bird carver, naturalist, and nature writer, reveals the insights and recollections of a keen-eyed observer of nature, both human and avian.…
Resurrecting the Granary of Rome
Environmental History and French Colonial Expansion in North Africa
Tales of deforestation and desertification in North Africa have been told from the Roman period to the present. Such stories of environmental decline in the Maghreb are still recounted by experts and are widely accepted without question today.…
Season of Promise
Wild Plants In Winter, Northeastern United States
Ohio University Press is pleased to announce the publication of another beautifully illustrated reference work by June Carver Roberts. On the publication of her first botanical guide, Born in Spring: A Collection of Spring Wildflowers (Ohio University Press, 1976), Roberts’ work was enthusiastically received: “Roberts combines outstanding artistic talent, a love of wildflowers, and an engaging writing style to produce a uniquely charming volume on spring wildflowers.…
Social History and African Environments – On Sale
West African Strategies
Edited by William Beinart and JoAnn McGregor
The explosion of interest in African environmental history has stimulated research and writing on a wide range of issues facing many African nations. This collection represents some of the finest studies to date.…
South Africa’s Environmental History – On Sale
Cases and Comparisons
Edited by Stephen Dovers, Ruth Edgecombe and Bill Guest
Environmental history in southern Africa has only recently come into its own as a distinct field of historical inquiry. While natural resources lie at the heart of all environmental history, the field opens the door to a wide range of inquiries, several of which are pioneered in this collection.…
The Tangled Roots of Feminism, Environmentalism, and Appalachian Literature – On Sale
Contemporaries were shocked when author Mary Noailles Murfree revealed she was a woman, but modern readers may be more surprised by her cogent discussion of community responses to unwanted development.…



















