Gary Paul Nabhan
Gary Paul Nabhan is a Lebanese American ecologist, agrarian activist, Ecumenical Franciscan Brother, and bilingual essayist whose work focuses primarily on the arid binational Southwest. He is the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, a Lannan Literary Award, and an Utne Reader’s annual visionary award, and he is the author of thirty-two books, beginning with The Desert Smells Like Rain. His most recent book is Agave Spirits. He resides in Patagonia, Arizona, and Desemboque del Sur, Sonora.
Woodlands in Crisis
A Legacy of Lost Biodiversity on the Colorado Plateau
Enduring Seeds
Native American Agriculture and Wild Plant Conservation
The Desert Smells Like Rain
A Naturalist in O'odham Country
Arab/American
Landscape, Culture, and Cuisine in Two Great Deserts
- Copyright year: 2008
Against the American Grain
A Borderlands History of Resistance
- Copyright year: 2024
Aridland Springs in North America
Ecology and Conservation
Desert Terroir
Exploring the Unique Flavors and Sundry Places of the Borderlands
- Copyright year: 2012
Food from the Radical Center
Healing Our Land and Communities
America has never felt more divided. But in the midst of the acrimony comes one of the most promising movements in our country’s history. In Food from the Radical Center, Gary Nabhan tells the stories of diverse communities who are bringing back North America's unique fare: bison, sturgeon, camas lilies, ancient grains, turkeys, and more. These restoration efforts have united people from the left and right, rural and urban, in game-changing collaborations. As a leading thinker and seasoned practitioner in biocultural conservation, Nabhan offers a key perspective on the movement. His most enduring legacy may be his message of hope: a vision of a new environmentalism that is just and inclusive, allowing former adversaries to commune over delicious foods.
- Copyright year: 2018
Counting Sheep
Imagine sending a number of nature writers out into the same unrelenting stretch of Sonoran Desert. Then consider telling them to focus their attention on just one animal—Ovis canadensis, popularly called the desert bighorn or borrego cimarrón—and have them write about it. Have them write from makeshift blinds or from behind a gun barrel. Have them write while walking across the Cabeza Prieta at night, or while flying over it trying to radio-collar the creatures. Have them write from actual sightings of the animals or simply from their tracks and droppings.
What would result from such an exercise is Counting Sheep, an unusual anthology that demonstrates the range of possibilities in nature writing. While ostensibly a collection of writings about these desert sheep that live along the U.S.-Mexico border, it also represents an attempt to broaden the scope of the natural history essay.
Writers trained in a wide range of disciplines spanning the natural and social sciences here offer a similarly diverse collection of writings, with women's, Hispanic, and Native American views complementing those in a genre long dominated by Anglo men. The four sections of the anthology comprise pre-Anglo-American tradition, examples of early nature writing, varied responses by modern writers to actually counting sheep, and a selection of essays that place bighorns in the context of the larger world.
Counting Sheep celebrates the diversity of cultural responses to this single animal species in its Sonoran Desert habitat and invites readers to change the way in which they view their relationship to wild creatures everywhere. It also shows how nature writers can delight us all by the varied ways in which they practice their craft.
Contributors:
Charles Bowden
David E. Brown
Bill Broyles
Julian Hayden
William T. Hornaday
Paul Krausman
Danny Lopez
Eric Mellink
Mauricio Mixco
Gale Monson
Gary Paul Nabhan
Doug Peacock
Kermit Roosevelt
Harley G. Shaw
Charles Sheldon
Peter Steinhart
Anita Alvarez de Williams
Terry Tempest Williams
Ann Zwinger
- Copyright year: 1993