Colorado Parks & Wildlife Research Library

The author describes how scientists studying the growth of complexity in nature are discovering order and pattern in chaos. He explains concepts such as nonlinearity, the Butterfly Effect, universal constants, fractals, and strange attractors, and examines the work of scientists such as Mitchell J. Feigenbaum, Edward Lorenz, and Benoit Mandelbrot.

A botanical description of edible plants in the Rocky Mountain region, with ethnobotanical information about their historical uses and with recipes for cooking and the making of dyes.

Explores the winter survival tactics of animals, including flying squirrels, grizzly bears, torpid turtles, and insects, revealing how these animals alter and adapt to an array of extraordinary conditions.

Learning to identify unwanted plants around the home, farm or ranch will be much easier with this book published by the Western Society of Weed Science and co-sponsored by the Cooperative Extension of the United States. Weeds of the West will help you identify weeds that compete with native plants, horticultural and agricultural crops, as well as those that can poison livestock and people.

Environmental journalist Ben Goldfarb reveals that our modern idea of what a healthy landscape looks like and how it functions is wrong, distorted by the fur trade that once trapped out millions of beavers from North America's lakes and rivers. The consequences of losing beavers were profound: streams eroded, wetlands dried up, and species from salmon to swans lost vital habitat. Today, a growing coalition of "Beaver Believers", including scientists,...

Brian Goodwin is Professor of Biology and Coordinator of Holistic Science at Schumacher College, Devon, UK. He is the editor of Theoretical Biology: Epigenetic and Evolutionary Order from Complex Systems and the coauthor of Form and Transformation and Signs of Life. Do genes explain life? Can advances in evolutionary and molecular biology account for what we look like, how we behave, and why we die? In this powerful intervention into current biological...