Adios to the Brushlands (Wardlaw Books)

Amazon.com Price: $15.95 (as of 20/04/2019 09:41 PST- Details)

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Description

In a little-known area of South Texas, extending across the Rio Grande into Mexico, a mysterious, lush land once harbored mighty trees, bushes, and grasses–brushland home to a plethora of flora and fauna. In Adios to the Brushlands native son Arturo Longoria remembers this chapparal land of his childhood: hot summer days and frigid winter mornings walking with his grandfather or his best friend through the dense underbrush, watching birds, studying reptiles, identifying plants. Boyhood hunting and varmint calling, encounters with rattlesnakes and fierce pamorana ants, hours spent with his grandfather, Papagrande, and cousins bring to life over again and place. A trained biologist and one-time investigative reporter, Longoria brings his skills of commentary and expression to sing the song of this vanishing habitat that once covered nearly four million acres of the Rio Grande Valley. In moving but understated prose he captures the wonder of the brushland and symbolically and emotionally links its loss, through rootplows and bulldozers, to the death of his grandfather, who had introduced him to that world. He reports as well the public policies and private actions that have reduced the brushland to not up to five percent of its former extent. He chronicles the efforts to publicize the brushland’s destruction and to save the remainder richness for future generations. At once a celebration of a region’s nature and a call to preserve the little bit of it still left as of late, this book is to the South Texas Brushlands what Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring used to be to the nation’s wetlands or John Graves’s Good-bye to a River used to be to the Brazos River. Rife with the natural history of an endangered ecology and capturing as well the binational culture of the region, Adios to the Brushlands draws readers into a land as raw, beautiful, and complex as life itself. A unique descriptive documentary of a disappearing natural treasure, this can be a slice of the new natural history that weds the main points of the physical world with their significance to the human heart.

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