Order Without Law: How Neighbors Settle Disputes.
This is a remarkable book, part ethnography and social history, part legal scholarship, part provocative if not totally successful social science. It offers a good introduction to law and economics and law and society approaches to social analysis, and to the power and limitations of parsimoniously "thin" game theoretic depictions...

Focus: restoring watersheds, rebuilding communities.
Three thousand miles separate the urbanized Anacostia River watershed in metropolitan Washington from the rural Mattole watershed in California. The Anacostia has been called one of the nation's most polluted rivers, robbed of its basic functions by channelization, riparian and wetland loss, forest removal, sewer overflows, and other pollution. ...

The Return of the Great Plains Puma.
Abstract With the advent of European settlement over a century ago, the northern Great Plains became the site of extremely rapid landscape change. Most large mammals, including the wapiti or elk (Cervus elephas), bison (Bison bison), wolf (Canis lupus), puma (Puma concolor), grizzly bear (Ursus arctos horribilus),...

Too Good To True: Alcan's Kemano Completion Project.
Once, the answer was obvious: a river is raw material, latent power, input for industry. In the early 1950s Alcan Aluminum built the Kenney dam across the Nechako River in northwestern British Columbia, reversing much of its flow to create a reservoir and generate power for its smelter at...

High Drama: Colorado's Historic Theatres.
High Drama: Colorado's Historic Theatres. By Daniel and Beth R. Barrett. Montrose, Colo.: Western Reflections Publishing Company, 2005. 208 pp. $19.95 cloth. Ah, the old West. First explorers, then mountain men, miners, ministers, ranchers, and farmers. Soiled doves and schoolmarms. Silver kings and railroad magnates. A place...

Peten crafts a future.
In Guatemala's Maya Biosphere Reserve, residents are becoming pioneers in new techniques of sustainable living Islands, by their very nature, are fragile environments--surrounded, sometimes engulfed, other times stranded. The ancient Maya of northern Guatemala called their island capital in Lake Peten Itza "El Peten," or the big island. This...

A country affair with national pride.
GAUCHOS AND CITY DWELLERS MINGLE AT THE FERIA RURAL, A CELEBRATION OF ARGENTINA'S PRIZED LIVESTOCK, FARM MACHINERY AND TRADITIONAL PRODUCTS COUNTRY COMES TO CITY AND VICE versa is perhaps the best way to describe Argentina's annual Exposicion de Ganaderia, Agricultura e Industria, Internacional, or La Feria Rural as it...

A Halloween tree killer.
It has taken a year for the real impact to sink in--Great Plains towns with few live trees, no shade, nothing to break the wind or lift the spirit. The fall of 1991 had been warm and mild in Colorado and neighboring states. But on October 27, a deadly...

Reclamation, Ranching, and Reservation: Environmental, Cultural, and Governmental Rivalries in Transitional Arizona.
In the spring of 1996, Tonto National Forest burned spectacularly. The Lone Fire swept over 61,000 acres, much of which was within the Four Peaks Wilderness Area. During the week of the fire, the issue of appropriate land use captured the media's attention, as well as the attention of...

Leading-edge science for imperiled bonytail.
The grasslands of southeastern New Mexico, known mostly for cattle, crops, and an occasional UFO crash report, seem an unlikely place for leading-edge biotechnology. But the little town of Dexter, essentially a service center for ranchers and farmers, is host to a state-of-the-art National Fish Hatchery and Technology Center....