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Here’s the second Acquiring Eye post from Executive Editor Chuck Crumly, this time taking a good look at our Freshwater Ecology books and journals.
“The times, they are a changin’ “ — this cultural mantra is now becoming an ecological and environmental reality. Climate change is creating challenges that cross almost every imaginable barrier. The University of California Press is at the forefront of providing information needed by scientists, researchers, scholars and the citizens of California and the World who all face these daunting challenges. Our commitment is represented by Climate Change in California: Risk and Response (to be published September 2012) a succinct summary of how changes in the climatic regimes of the eighth largest economy in the world will affect everything from agriculture and transportation to public health and tourism. In the pages of BioScience – published in partnership with the American Institute of Biological Sciences — dialogue and dialectic have been fluid both literally and figuratively. Recent articles have dealt with changes in species ranges coincident with climate change (DOI:10.1525/bio.2011.61.10.5), detection of invasive species (DOI:10.1525/bio.2011.61.10.6) and locally implemented management and technology options for regionally reducing carbon footprints (DOI:10.1525/bio.201.62.1.7).
   
Anyone interested in the daunting and devastating impact of invasive species ought to check out the Encyclopedia of Biological Invasions edited by Simberloff and Rejmanek — a soup to nuts reference on all things invasive.
   
Among the most serious problems intimately connected to climate change is the availability and global distribution of freshwater resources, which is why UC Press has established the Freshwater Ecology book series. Another volume in this series will appear this coming fall dealing specifically with how to manage the distribution of water throughout ecosystems taking into account other needs for water. This volume — Environmental Flows: Saving Rivers in the Third Millennium by Arthington (to be published September 2012) provides a model for managing a resource that is becoming increasingly scarce due to climate change.
Among the most anticipated books for UC Press will be the Batzer & Baldwin edited Wetland Habitats of North America — a comprehensive review of the all the different types of wetlands from sea to shining sea, from tidal wetlands of the North Atlantic Coast to tropical freshwater swamps, everything and anything wet is found herein. But if you are short on time and want to dip into a river, there is no better guide than David Strayer’s The Hudson Primer: The Ecology of an Iconic River. Or maybe you “left your heart in San Francisco” and want full immersion; if so, this coming Fall you can discover the Ecology, Conservation, and Restoration of the Tidal Marshes edited by Palaima.
West Coast or East Coast and everywhere in between, water is going to be on the minds of scientists and citizens and UC Press is where to go for the best information available.
 Charles Saylan  Dan Blumenstein (Credit: Reed Hutchinson) Congratulations to Charles Saylan and Dan Blumenstein, the authors of The Failure of Environmental Education (And How We Can Fix It) for being invited to The White House Summit on Environmental Education this Monday, April 16, 2012.
They’ll be participating in the panel discussion “21st Century Environmentalism – Shaping the Emerging Vision for Environmental Education” which, considering the title of their book, seems pretty darn appropriate.
And while we’re praising people, congratulations are also due to the organizers of the event for having the foresight to invite the right people to their summit.
This looks to be a fantastic, and important, event. You can follow the goings on through Twitter using #EEweek and @EPAgov and on the EPA’s Facebook page.
 A People’s Guide to Los Angeles offers an assortment of eye-opening alternatives to L.A.’s usual tourist destinations. It documents 115 little-known sites in the City of Angels where struggles related to race, class, gender, and sexuality have occurred. They introduce us to people and events usually ignored by mainstream media and, in the process, create a fresh history of Los Angeles. Roughly dividing the city into six regions—North Los Angeles, the Eastside and San Gabriel Valley, South Los Angeles, Long Beach and the Harbor, the Westside, and the San Fernando Valley—this illuminating guide shows how power operates in the shaping of places, and how it remains embedded in the landscape.
And here’s a capsule review of A People’s Guide to Los Angeles from our friends at Booklist to give you a bit more context about the book.
 Arthur Nelson is a remarkable man. Late last year we published his book, In Your Eyes a Sandstorm: Ways of Being Palestinian. Starting with the basic question: “Who are the Palestinians?”, this compelling book of interviews reaches beyond journalistic clichés to let a wide variety of Palestinians answer the question for themselves. Beginning in the present with Bisan and Abud, two traumatized children from Jenin’s refugee camp, the book’s narrative arcs backwards through the generations to come full circle with two elderly refugees from villages that the children were named after.
As compelling as this is, and what isn’t compelling about someone willing to contribute understanding and perspective to the ongoing Palestinian discussion, it wasn’t what ultimately moved me to push “Publish” on this post.
What did, and I certainly hope you find it compelling as well, is this article from The Guardian. In 2009, while working in Gaza, Arthur was attacked on the street by a knife-wielding stranger. Last year, the Guardian commissioned him to interview the man who attacked him. This is the resulting feature article.
That said, Arthur has put together a first-rate website to give readers deeper context to his articles and books. Speaking of books, here are reviews of In Your Eyes a Sandstorm from The Jewish Daily orward and The National.
 Calories—too few or too many—are the source of health problems affecting billions of people in today’s globalized world. Although calories are essential to human health and survival, they cannot be seen, smelled, or tasted. They are also hard to understand. In Why Calories Count, Marion Nestle and Malden Nesheim explain in clear and accessible language what calories are and how they work, both biologically and politically. As they take readers through the issues that are fundamental to our understanding of diet and food, weight gain, loss, and obesity, Nestle and Nesheim sort through a great deal of the misinformation put forth by food manufacturers and diet program promoters. They elucidate the political stakes and show how federal and corporate policies have come together to create an “eat more” environment. Finally, having armed readers with the necessary information to interpret food labels, evaluate diet claims, and understand evidence as presented in popular media, the authors offer some candid advice: Get organized. Eat less. Eat better. Move more. Get political.
In this UC Press podcast, Marion talks to Chris Gondek about the ideas and issues behind Why Calories Count.
And for a bit more information about Why Calories Count, here is a review of the book from the San Francisco Chronicle.
 Manel Baucells and Rakesh Sarin have been conducting ground-breaking research on happiness for more than a decade, and in this book they distill their provocative findings into a lively, accessible guide for a wide audience of readers. Integrating their own research with the latest thinking in the behavioral and social sciences—including management science, psychology, and economics—they offer a new approach to the puzzle of happiness. Woven throughout with wisdom from the world’s religions and literatures, Engineering Happiness has something to offer everyone—regardless of background, profession, or aspiration—who wants to better understand, control, and attain a more joyful life.
In the newest UC Press podcast, Chris Gondek talks to Engineering Happiness co-author Manel Baucells about the theories and patterns behind the book.
 For the second post in our Acquiring Eye series, Executive Editor Chuck Crumly has written about the Ornithology books and journals he has his eye on:
Almost all of us have experienced the delight of watching birds –  listening to birds calling mournfully or happily or even unexpectedly, and enjoying their antics. For many, birds are the avenue through which science is experienced. The science of birds – Ornithology – is a central focus of publishing for the University of California Press. We work with the American Ornithologists Union to publish The Auk and Ornithological Monographs, and we work with the Cooper Ornithological Society to publish The Condor and the book series Studies in Avian Biology. Together, these publications make UC Press one of the most important publishers of the latest and most influential ornithological science. The study of birds has been  central to some of the most influential ideas in ecology, evolution and comparative biology. For example, a recent study in The Condor reviewed the biogeographic region of Central America potentially altering perceptions of the ecological and evolutionary history of entire North and South American biota’s. A paper in The Auk suggested a novel way to integrate behavior, neurobiology, and environmental perturbation into an alternative way of the impact of change on biodiversity.
    
In just the past year, UC Press is pleased to have published 4 volumes in the Studies in Avian Biology. The first, edited by Knick & Connelly, Greater Sage Grouse, was published with the cooperation of federal officials involved in the endangered and threatened species listing of this charismatic symbol the plains of western North America. An impressive team of more than two dozen scholars cooperated on the next volume, Population Demography of Northern Spotted Owls, to determine the real status of this endangered bird at the center of a complex and sometimes volatile debate regarding forest management. Another team led by Sandercock, Martin and Segelbacher worked with 80 researchers to review all grouse and related birds (Tetraoninae) in Ecology, Conservation, and Management of Grouse. And most recently, Wells edited Boreal Birds of North America: A Hemispheric View of Conservation Links and Significance, which reports on long term studies of birds that migrate often thousands of miles to take up temporary residence in the vast boreal forests representing the largest uninterrupted wilderness area on the planet.
In addition to these four interesting and important volumes, four others are currently nearing publication: Paul/Emerging Avian Disease, Bart & Johnston/Arctic Shorebirds of North America, Lepcyzk & Warren/Urban Bird Ecology and Conservation, and Ribic et al./Video Surveillance of Nesting Birds. Expect to hear more on these books in the months to come.
 
 Are conservation and protecting animals the same thing? In Game Changer, award-winning environmental reporter Glen Martin takes a fresh look at this question as it applies to Africa’s megafauna. Martin assesses the rising influence of the animal rights movement and finds that the policies championed by animal welfare groups could lead paradoxically to the elimination of the very species—including elephants and lions—that are the most cherished. In his anecdotal and highly engaging style, Martin takes readers to the heart of the conflict. He revisits the debate between conservationists, who believe that people whose lives are directly impacted by the creation of national parks and preserves should be compensated, versus those who believe that restrictive protection that forbids hunting is the most effective way to conserve wildlife and habitats. Focusing on the different approaches taken by Kenya, Tanzania, and Namibia, Martin vividly shows how the world’s last great populations of wildlife have become the hostages in a fight between those who love animals and those who would save them.
To give you an idea of how Game Changer is being received, we have a review from Booklist, which reads, in part: “Martin’s work incisively probes complexities most wildlife lovers have likely never considered, but urgently need to, before some of their beloved species utterly disappear from the earth.”
 One of the greatest virtues of science and the scientific method lies not in the many points of agreement and common ground but rather in the places where there isn’t agreement and how competing hypotheses can be understood, discussed, tested and, ultimately, either proven or dis-proven. As it has often been said about the making of laws, this process can be a bit messy, but it certainly seems to beat out any of the alternatives.
This brings us to how people understand how humans originally came to North America. As said by Nature, in their capsule review of Across Atlantic Ice: “North America’s first peoples were long thought to be Asians who migrated over the Bering land bridge some 12,000 years ago, bringing with them the tools of the Clovis culture. Now archaeologists Dennis Stanford and Bruce Bradley have radically recast the story. Drawing on climatic, genetic and archaeological evidence, they argue that the roots of Clovis culture rest in the Solutrean people of Spain and France, who sent some of their number across the Atlantic in boats 18,000 years ago.”
Their book, Across Atlantic Ice, has generated a number of very well thought through reviews, all positive enough to warrant the publisher spreading them far and wide:
The capsule review from Nature
The Daily Mail Online
The Independent
The Belfast Telegraph
Smithsonian Science
The Washington Post
What most interested me, and the reason I opened this post the way I did, was this response from non other than Joel Achenbach expressing doubt over the Solutrean hypothesis. What I find most encouraging in it is how he closes the piece:
“Show me some skeletons, or at least some teeth. Show me some campfires, some well-dated artifacts, maybe the favorite comfy chair of the Top Dawg Solutrean. Come on, persuade me.” You’ll want to read the entire thing.
Stay tuned, folks. This issue is bound to only get more interesting as it develops.
 May 27, 2012 will mark the 75th anniversary of the construction of the Golden Gate Bridge. One of the most iconic structures in the world, the bridge combines amazing engineering, breathtaking views and everyday utility along with the much darker secret that it is the world’s top suicide spot.
Weaving drama, tragedy, and politics against the backdrop of a world-famous city, The Final Leap is the first book ever written about Golden Gate Bridge suicides.
From the remarkable site that John Bateson has assembled to compliment his book:
In 1996, after I became executive director of a 24-hour crisis center in the Bay Area, everything changed. I learned facts about the bridge that astonished me, mainly because I felt I should have known them already. For instance, I learned that the original design included a higher railing specifically to protect against suicides. In a last-minute decision, it was scrapped to enhance the view. Also, at one time the bridge had a safety net. It was installed during construction and saved the lives of 19 workers who fell into it accidentally. When the bridge was completed, the net was removed.
Another thing I learned was that one section of the bridge has had a barrier for years. It’s chain-link, eight feet high and 350 feet long. It’s not pretty and it’s not there to prevent suicides; its function is to keep people from dumping garbage onto Fort Point. Similarly, all of the surveillance equipment on the bridge isn’t intended to prevent suicides. Rather, it’s for security purposes since the Golden Gate Bridge is considered to be a potential target for terrorists.
I also learned facts about the people who jump that surprised me. For instance, the vast majority live nearby. Despite the myth that the bridge attracts troubled and depressed souls from around the world, its lure is largely local. Also, the average age of Golden Gate Bridge jumpers is considerably younger than that of other suicide victims. More than 10 percent are teens. Perhaps most disturbing of all, because of the short railing, three young children have been thrown over the side by parents who jumped after them.
The most important fact I learned was that the Golden Gate Bridge is the top suicide site on earth and the only international landmark without a suicide barrier. When I mentioned this to friends and colleagues, they were stunned. That’s why I wrote The Final Leap. It’s intended to educate readers about Golden Gate Bridge suicides with the hope that more people will realize that this tragedy can’t continue, it has to end. And it can, with the erection of a suicide deterrent. A taller railing or a well-designed net will save lives. If you don’t believe it, if you think suicidal people who are stopped from jumping will kill themselves another way, then I encourage you to read this book—and learn more facts.
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