Ecoviews: Snakes, Snails, and Environmental Tales

By J. Whitfield Gibbons, John Cairns, Jr. and Anne R. Gibbons

The authors offer a fun-to-read perspective on natural history, ecology as a field of study, and the current environmental issues that face our communities and the world.
This lively and entertaining book provides a fascinating and thought-provoking look at the ecology of animals, plants, and their habitats and promotes awareness of pressing environmental issues. The eight informative chapters deliver effective environmental messages and supply compelling insight into the natural world and the ecologists who investigate its many mysteries.
From a concerned ecological stance, the authors show that human relationship with other organisms and the environment is always complex and can be exhilarating, inspiring, humorous, and irritating, depending on perspectives and circumstances. Writing truly to inform and delight, they give a captivating variety of examples from the natural world in hopes of making readers of all ages more compassionate, more tolerant, and more sensitive to other living organisms and their interrelationships. The book celebrates the intrinsic worth of all plants and animals in order to motivate people in a unified effort to preserve the Earth's rich array of life forms. The preservation of the integrity of our planet's biodiversity is, the authors illustrate, critical to our own survival.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University Alabama Press
• Release date: May 5, 2017
• ISBN: 9780817391713

Book preview

1

Do Trees Own Themselves? Thoughts to Ponder

We by-and-by discovered, however, what I thought well worth my trouble, a pair of those splendid birds, the Ivory-billed Woodpeckers. . . . They were engaged in rapping some tall dead pines, in a dense part of the forest, which rang with their loud notes. These were not at all like the loud laugh of the Pileated . . . , nor the cackle of the smaller species, but a single cry frequently repeated, like the clang of a trumpet. . . . We succeeded in shooting both, which I skinned and dissected.

The ivory-billed woodpecker is now presumed extinct in North America. The above account was written in southern Alabama in the late 1830s. No illegal act was committed and no environmental harm was intended by the writer, Philip Henry Gosse. His 1859 book, Letters from Alabama, reissued in 1993, contains verbal portraits and is an excellent addition to our knowledge of plants, animals, and natural habitats in the 1800s.

William Bartram is generally recognized as having written the most thorough accounts of natural history in the southern regions of the country during the early colonization period, in the late 1700s. More than half a century after Bartram, Gosse’s views as a naturalist give intriguing insight into the natural history of the developing region. Gosse arrived in Mobile, Alabama, in 1838, and his writings disclose environmental, as well as social, attitudes of the times. An Englishman who had lived in Philadelphia, Gosse came to Alabama with prospects of being a teacher. His letters are notes and sketches based on his observations of the region, its people, and its