Bøger af Steven Hawley

Do you recall the first time you saw someone else naked? When you work in the care industry, your first time probably wasn't the candle-lit romantic encounter you had imagined. Cattle Market is a novelette which tracks one young man's experiences from 1960 and throughout his working life in an English "Institute" where abuse, neglect and the dehumanisation of life are commonplace. Our conscientious protagonist tries his best to cope in this environment whilst holding onto his humanity. But times, and the industry, are changing. Institutes are phased out and care homes take up the torch to lead the care industry out of the dark ages. But our protagonist finds that abuse, neglect and dehumanisation are once again, and perhaps always will be, all too common.

During the first two decades of the twenty-first century, the whole messy truth about the legacy of last century's big dam building binge has come to light. What started out as an arguably good government project has drifted oceans away from that original virtuous intent. Governments plugged the nation's rivers in a misguided attempt to turn them into revenue streams. Water control projects' main legacy will be one of needless ecological destruction, fostering a host of unnecessary injustices.

A powerful argument for why dam removal makes good scientific, economic, and environmental senseand requires our urgent attentionThe Snake River, flowing through the Northwest, was once one of the world's greatest salmon rivers. As recently as a hundred years ago, it retained some of its historic bounty with seven million fish coming home to spawn there. Now, due to damming for hydroelectricity over the past fifty years, the salmon population has dropped close to extinction. Efforts at salmon recovery, through fish ladders, hatcheries, and even trucking them over the dams, have failed. Hawley argues that the solution for the Snake River lies in dam removal, pitting the power authority and Army Corps of Engineers against a collection of conservationists, farmers, commercial and recreational fishermen, and the Nez Perce tribe. He also demonstrates the interconnectedness of the river's health to Orca whales in Puget Sound, local economies, fresh water rights, and energy independence. This regional battle has garnered national interest, and is part of a widespread river-restoration movement that stretches from Maine's Kennebec to California's Klamath. In one instance, Butte Creek salmon rebounded from a paltry fourteen fish to twenty thousand within just a few years of rewilding their river, showing the incredible resiliency of nature when given the slightest chance. In this timely book, Hawley shows how river restoration, with dam removal as its centerpiece, is not only virtuous ecological practice, but a growing social and economic enterprise.