A detailed and comprehensive contribution to ongoing discussions about the future of the ESA.
A collection of think pieces about the future of the Endangered Species Act in the United States.
Attorney Baier follows up the examination of the ESA from Volume I: The First Fifty Years (2023) with a look toward the future. Since the passage of the comprehensive ESA legislation in 1973, the listing and delisting of different species as endangered has led to discussions, court cases, and political disputes. This volume, over the course of 14 chapters, features figures from academia and government contributing ideas about where the ESA is going and how to improve its impact. One chapter specifically looks at how to “change the culture within the professional wildlife community” to further the goals of conservation. Suggestions include implementing “pay for success” programs, such as those seen with water-quality programs in some states. Another chapter examines lessons from the 2012 conflict over the endangered dusky gopher frog, which numbered just 135 individuals in the entire state of Mississippi. Another engaging chapter is devoted to a practical workshop on the ESA, overseen by the University of Wyoming and Texas A&M University, that and aims “to develop…tangible action items to improve species conservation in the United States at the state and federal level.” Although the use of highly technical terminology tends to be limited, not every chapter will appeal to the casual reader; one, for instance, includes a passage about a resource equivalency analysis allowing “plan proponents to convert estimated take of individual species into equivalent habitat metrics to inform mitigation commitments.” But the book also digs into specifics about the ESA that laypeople might not otherwise encounter, as in the aforementioned discussion of the dusky gopher frog; the authors assert that several lessons can be gleaned by analyzing the fight over frog habitats and the resulting 2018 U.S. Supreme Court case, including “how to best encourage habitat creation and restoration.” Overall, this lengthy work offers insightful views on the importance of wildlife and the means to ensure its appropriate protection.
A detailed and comprehensive contribution to ongoing discussions about the future of the ESA.Pub Date: Nov. 15, 2023
ISBN: 978-1538180143
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Review Posted Online: Oct. 25, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
A revelatory meditation on shattering journeys.
Bearing witness to oppression.
Award-winning journalist and MacArthur Fellow Coates probes the narratives that shape our perception of the world through his reports on three journeys: to Dakar, Senegal, the last stop for Black Africans “before the genocide and rebirth of the Middle Passage”; to Chapin, South Carolina, where controversy erupted over a writing teacher’s use of Between the World and Me in class; and to Israel and Palestine, where he spent 10 days in a “Holy Land of barbed wire, settlers, and outrageous guns.” By addressing the essays to students in his writing workshop at Howard University in 2022, Coates makes a literary choice similar to the letter to his son that informed Between the World and Me; as in that book, the choice creates a sense of intimacy between writer and reader. Interweaving autobiography and reportage, Coates examines race, his identity as a Black American, and his role as a public intellectual. In Dakar, he is haunted by ghosts of his ancestors and “the shade of Niggerology,” a pseudoscientific narrative put forth to justify enslavement by portraying Blacks as inferior. In South Carolina, the 22-acre State House grounds, dotted with Confederate statues, continue to impart a narrative of white supremacy. His trip to the Middle East inspires the longest and most impassioned essay: “I don’t think I ever, in my life, felt the glare of racism burn stranger and more intense than in Israel,” he writes. In his complex analysis, he sees the trauma of the Holocaust playing a role in Israel’s tactics in the Middle East: “The wars against the Palestinians and their Arab allies were a kind of theater in which ‘weak Jews’ who went ‘like lambs to slaughter’ were supplanted by Israelis who would ‘fight back.’” Roiled by what he witnessed, Coates feels speechless, unable to adequately convey Palestinians’ agony; their reality “demands new messengers, tasked as we all are, with nothing less than saving the world.”
A revelatory meditation on shattering journeys.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2024
ISBN: 9780593230381
Page Count: 176
Publisher: One World/Random House
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change.
Artist and activist Vaid-Menon demonstrates how the normativity of the gender binary represses creativity and inflicts physical and emotional violence.
The author, whose parents emigrated from India, writes about how enforcement of the gender binary begins before birth and affects people in all stages of life, with people of color being especially vulnerable due to Western conceptions of gender as binary. Gender assignments create a narrative for how a person should behave, what they are allowed to like or wear, and how they express themself. Punishment of nonconformity leads to an inseparable link between gender and shame. Vaid-Menon challenges familiar arguments against gender nonconformity, breaking them down into four categories—dismissal, inconvenience, biology, and the slippery slope (fear of the consequences of acceptance). Headers in bold font create an accessible navigation experience from one analysis to the next. The prose maintains a conversational tone that feels as intimate and vulnerable as talking with a best friend. At the same time, the author's turns of phrase in moments of deep insight ring with precision and poetry. In one reflection, they write, “the most lethal part of the human body is not the fist; it is the eye. What people see and how people see it has everything to do with power.” While this short essay speaks honestly of pain and injustice, it concludes with encouragement and an invitation into a future that celebrates transformation.
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change. (writing prompt) (Nonfiction. 14-adult)Pub Date: June 2, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-09465-5
Page Count: 64
Publisher: Penguin Workshop
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
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