Everyone has heard about endangered animals, but many people don't realize that humans can be endangered too. All around the world, groups of indigenous peoples' land and lives are being taken over, putting them at risk of being lost forever. This captivating book encourages readers to be globally conscious and offers a glimpse at what is being done to help save these unique communities. Colorful photographs and accessible text provide readers with a comprehensive look at some of the people and cultures that are at risk. This fascinating volume will attract readers of many levels and is sure to be a popular addition to any library or classroom.

In honor of the United Nations' Year of Indigenous People, these inspiring essays by the author of In the Wake of the Exxon Valdez are presented with one hundred color photographs of native cultures threatened with extinction. 25,000 first printing. -- Amazon.

From National Book Award Finalist Eliot Schrefer comes the compelling tale of a girl who must save a group of bonobos -- and herself -- from a violent coup. Congo is a dangerous place, even for people who are trying to do good.When Sophie has to visit her mother at her sanctuary for bonobos, she's not thrilled to be there. Then Otto, an infant bonobo, comes into her life, and for the first time she feels responsible for another creature.But peace does not last long for Sophie and Otto. When an armed revolution breaks out in the country, the sanctuary is attacked, and the two of them must escape unprepared into the jungle. Caught in the crosshairs of a lethal conflict, they must struggle to keep safe, to eat, and to live. In ENDANGERED, Eliot Schrefer plunges us into a heart-stopping exploration of the things we do to survive, the sacrifices we make to help others, and the tangled geography that ties us all, human and animal, together.

Though life on earth is the history of dynamic interactions between living things and their surroundings, certain powerful groups would have us believe that nature exists only for our convenience. One consequence of such thinking is the apparent fate of the Pacific salmon--a key resource and preeminent symbol of America's wildlife--which is today threatened with extinction. Drawing on abundant data from natural science, Pacific coast culture, and a long association with key individuals on all sides of the issue, Joseph Cone's A Common Fate employs a clear narrative voice to tell the human and natural history of an environmental crisis in its final chapter. As inevitable as the November rains, countless millions of wild salmon returned from the ocean to spawn in the streams of their birth. In the wake of an orgy of dam building and habitat destruction, the salmon's majestic abundance has been reduced to a fleeting shadow. Neglect is the word the author uses to describe more recent losses, "by exactly the ones--state and federal fish managers--who should have acted." To signal a new awareness that action is needed, scientists charged with restocking the Columbia River Basin are receiving significant support, while ordinary citizens are beginning to recognize the relationship between cheap power and the absences of chinook, coho, sockeye, and other species from the coasts of Oregon and Washington and from Idaho's Snake River. As desperate as the salmon's future appears, the book is not an elegy for a lost resource. Instead, it bears witness to hope. In addition to concrete plans for the wild salmon's renewal, the reader will hear a growing chorus of informed individuals of differing values and beliefs who recognize that our fate is inextricably bound to the salmon's; for many it is a new understanding.

This analysis of animal rights movements from a native and northern viewpoint, focusses on Inuit groups and discusses 'cultural imperialism', endangered species and a philosophy of 'wise use' rather than 'no use' of natural resources.

Latin America comprises varied biophysical environments and diverse populations living in widely disparate economic circumstances. Endangered Peoples of Latin America: Struggles to Survive and Thrive includes peoples hit hardest by the current globalization trend. Each chapter profiles a specific people or peoples with a cultural overview of their history, subsistence strategies, social and political organization, and religion and world view; threats to their survival; and responses to these threats. A section entitled Food for Thought provides questions that encourage a personal engagement with the experiences of these peoples, and a resource guide suggests further reading and lists films and videos and pertinent organizations and web sites. As the curriculum expands to include more multicultural and indigenous peoples, this unique volume will be valuable to both students and teachers.

Charting the political, social, and environmental history of efforts to conserve crop diversity. Many people worry that we're losing genetic diversity in the foods we eat. Over the past century, crop varieties standardized for industrial agriculture have increasingly dominated farm fields. Concerned about what this transition means for the future of food, scientists, farmers, and eaters have sought to protect fruits, grains, and vegetables they consider endangered. They have organized high-tech genebanks and heritage seed swaps. They have combed fields for ancient landraces and sought farmers growing Indigenous varieties. Behind this widespread concern for the loss of plant diversity lies another extinction narrative that concerns the survival of farmers themselves, a story that is often obscured by urgent calls to collect and preserve. Endangered Maize draws on the rich history of corn in Mexico and the United States to uncover this hidden narrative and show how it shaped the conservation strategies adopted by scientists, states, and citizens. In Endangered Maize, historian Helen Anne Curry investigates more than a hundred years of agriculture and conservation practices to understand the tasks that farmers and researchers have considered essential to maintaining crop diversity. Through the contours of efforts to preserve diversity in one of the world's most important crops, Curry reveals how those who sought to protect native, traditional, and heritage crops forged their methods around the expectation that social, political, and economic transformations would eliminate diverse communities and cultures. In this fascinating study of how cultural narratives shape science, Curry argues for new understandings of endangerment and alternative strategies to protect and preserve crop diversity.

Endangered Species: Health, Illness and Death among Madagascar's People of the Forest is an ethnographic study of a group of people living in a forested region in Madagascar. These people have been targeted for recent conservation and development initiatives intended to protect species biodiversity. Although international aid dollars are tied to national conservation policy, very little has been written on how these policies are affecting the people who live in Madagascar. Based on anthropological research in a village located on the periphery of a U.S.-funded national park, and further supported with archival and library research, this study shows how concepts of culture have been misused by policy makers to promote park objectives, while misunderstandings arising from the use of ethnic stereotypes have contributed to serious health and economic problems for people living in the forest region. Many policy-makers fail to appreciate the actual ways that people live and farm in the forest, and how they negotiate their quest for health. Janice Harper suggests that lineage and social class rather than ethnic heritage are more relevant to the ways that people access and interact with the land, forest, and strategic resources. How this interaction shapes health and healthcare is one of the most poignant and compelling of many contributions to anthropological knowledge made by this study. This book would be appropriate for use in courses on anthropology, African studies, or environmental studies. This book is part of the Ethnographic Studies in Medical Anthropology Series, edited by Pamela J. Stewart and Andrew Strathern, Department of Anthropology, University of Pittsburgh. "It is one of the clearest and most detailed pictures that I have read about the multiple pressures on 'coastal' Malagasy... It is beautifully and horrifyingly written." -- Alison Jolly, author of Lords and Lemurs and Lucy's Legacy "This is a superb book. Harper's deeply nuanced, and carefully historicized ethnography offers a sophisticated and accessible account of the contradictions that characterize conservationists' desire to protect rainforest flora and fauna while also wreaking havoc on indigenous and highly marginalized human communities... Harper must be commended for her diligence as a researcher: it is astonishing how much knowledge one reaps from so succinct a study." -- International Journal of African Historical Studies, Volume 36, Number 1 "This is an important book because national parks, employing exactly the politics described here, exist all over Madagascar. My hope is that people working in development will read this book and be moved to act against the lack of concern for the well-being of the local population as exhibited by the management of the RNP project." -- The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, Volume 10, Number 1, March 2004