Arcadia Public Library

OF THE LAND is a detailed exploration into our current food supply as well as a variety of organic options available to people who want to support sustainable farming methods.

Peter Dunning has spent 37 years working a 187-acre farm. His charismatic exterior has been peeled back after 38 harvests, the departure of three wives and four children, revealing a man in the throes of a personal crisis.

Visit Theodore Roosevelt, Badlands, and Mount Rushmore National Parks in the Dakotas, beholding the landscape that inspired Theodore Roosevelt to become an ardent conservationist. Learn how the fantastic forms of the badlands are the product of deposition, uplift, and erosion..

The march towards the dominance of GM products in agriculture started 15 years ago but where will it end? Today in Argentina all agriculture is transgenic but after 15 years the weeds have adapted and the Glyphosate no longer works. In response farmers have started using hazardous chemicals in an indiscriminate and unregulated manner. In some areas the rate of serious genetic deformities in children has exploded. We meet the families and doctors convinced...

If you have a garden in the U.S., chances are you're familiar with the damage caused by English ivy, kudzu, purple loosestrife, and/or the tamarisk tree. Each of these hardy plants can quickly create a monoculture, driving out other plant species and limiting the availability of diverse animal habitat. Learn the best science-based mechanisms to control these plants.

If you can't trust the Internet home remedy or the local gardening salesperson, whom can you trust? Make science-based gardening decisions by assessing the credibility, relevance, accuracy, and purpose of the information you read. Learn the role played by peer review, the crucial difference between correlation and causation, and how to watch out for over-extrapolation and misapplied science.

When scientists examine home gardens and landscapes, one fact stands out: The leading cause of landscape failure is not disease and it’s not pests - it’s our own gardening practices. Create a beautiful and sustainable home garden guided by the newest information from applied plant physiology, biology, soils science, climatology, hydrology, chemistry, and ecology.

Survey the discoveries made and hardships suffered during centuries of scientific exploration in Antarctica, including a research expedition that sought viable emperor penguin eggs in an attempt to unlock an evolutionary mystery. See how Antarctic research helped create the modern sciences of oceanography, climatology, and glaciology, and is still driving scientific progress.

Explore parks where geology supported the settlement of people in North America. Begin at the Mesa Verde cliff dwellings, cleverly engineered to exploit natural shelter and rock seeps. Then survey other cliff dwellings and pueblos in the Southwest..

The grassland ecosystem - steppe, prairie, savanna, and rangeland - is found on every continent except Antarctica. Estimated to cover almost one-third of the land area of the planet, grasses developed unusual adaptations related to the location of their growth tissue and their specific mechanism of photosynthesis. Learn how grasses play a major role in the development of human society.