A fascinating compendium of stories chronicling the creation of local nature conservancies, and the people behind them, on seventeen islands on the Salish Sea from the 1990s to the present day. Voices for the Islands brings together the stories and experiences of those who rose to protect areas at risk within their island communities. Narratively linked by author Sheila Harrington’s three-year sailing journey among the islands to interview more than fifty veteran conservationists, the book shares an in-depth view of local protests and the history and evolution of local conservancies from their timely emergence through legal battles and successful partnerships. It highlights how local, provincial, and national support was won, through the collaborative efforts of dedicated locals, resulting in hundreds of new protected areas and parks within one of the most at-risk ecological communities in Canada—the islands of the Salish Sea. Beginning in the 1980s, when logging and development threatened the fragile ecosystems and natural habitats, and culminating in the creation of more than seventeen local conservancies and the Gulf Island National Park Reserve, Voices for the Islands will inspire readers to turn apathy into action and support the cause of conservation and reconciliation in an era of species extinction and climate change. Full of colour photos, maps, and fascinating first-hand stories by unsung heroes of conservation—many of whom are now elders—this book reveals how local people and grassroots movements have the power to transform the future of our precious planet.

These upcoming years are crucial as world leaders will agree on a new sustainable development framework for the next 15 years. The proposed 17 Sustainable Development Goals include targets to end poverty, to ensure healthy lives and quality education and to combat climate change, among others. The decisions taken will undoubtedly have a huge impact on children's lives and rights today as well as the lives and rights of future generations.

William Wall is the first international winner of the Drue Heinz Literature Prize. In this collection of interconnected stories, the beautiful and ravaging forces of sea and land collide with the forces of human nature, through isolation and family, love and loss, madness and revelation. The stories follow the lives of two sisters and the people who come and go in their lives, much like the tides. Dominated by the tragic loss of a third sister at a young age, their family spirals out of control. We witness three stages of the sisters' lives, each taking place on an island—in southwest Ireland, southern England, and the Bay of Naples. Beautifully and sparsely written, the stories deeply evoke landscape and character, and are suffused with a keen eye for detail and metaphor.

Shortlisted for the 2023 Scotiabank Giller Prize Finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction A Hurston Wright Legacy Award Nominee Longlisted for the 2023 New American Voices Award A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice Powerful stories that explore the legacy of colonialism, and issues of race, immigration, sexual discrimination, and class in the lives of Jamaican women across London, Panama, France, Jamaica, Florida and more The Islands follows the lives of Jamaican women—immigrants or the descendants of immigrants—who have relocated all over the world to escape the ghosts of colonialism on what they call the Island. Set in the United States, Jamaica, and Europe, these international stories examine the lives of an uncertain and unsettled cast of characters. In one story, a woman and her husband impulsively leave San Francisco and move to Florida with wild dreams of American reinvention only to unearth the cracks in their marriage. In another, the only Jamaican mother—who is also a touring comedienne—at a prep school feels pressure to volunteer in the school’s International Day. Meanwhile, in a third story, a travel writer finally connects with the mother who once abandoned her. Set in locations and times ranging from 1950s London to 1960s Panama to modern-day New Jersey, Dionne Irving reveals the intricacies of immigration and assimilation in this debut, establishing a new and unforgettable voice in Caribbean-American literature. Restless, displaced, and disconnected, these characters try to ground themselves—to grow where they find themselves planted—in a world in which the tension between what’s said and unsaid can bend the soul.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • Inspired by a profound experience swimming with wild dolphins off the coast of Maui, the bestselling author of The Wave set out on a quest to learn everything she could about dolphins—the other intelligent life on the planet. “Part science, part memoir, part impassioned plea for change.” —People Susan Casey’s journey takes her from a community in Hawaii known as “Dolphinville,” where the animals are seen as the key to spiritual enlightenment, to the dark side of the human-cetacean relationship at marine parks and dolphin-hunting grounds in Japan and the Solomon Islands, to the island of Crete, where the Minoan civilization lived in harmony with dolphins, providing a millennia-old example of a more enlightened coexistence with the natural world. Along the way, Casey recounts the history of dolphin research and introduces us to the leading marine scientists and activists who have made it their life’s work to increase humans’ understanding and appreciation of the wonder of dolphins.

"Three of the women were born before the Pacific War, and their first memories of Americans are of troops coming ashore with bayonets fixed. A second group, now middle-aged, grew up in the 1950s and 1960s, when massive American bases were a fixture of the landscape. The youngest women, for whom the bases are a historical accident, are in their twenties and thirties, raised in a country increasingly confident of its status as a world power.".

Allowing each person's story to stand with its own color, texture, and pattern, Olga Jenkins has created a people's history of The Bahamas. Those interviewed were born between 1900 and 1942, and their voices are as varied as the populations of the eight islands the author visited, including black, white, mixed, and working- and middle-class individuals.

Nearly forty years after researchers first sought to determine the effects, if any, on children adopted by families whose racial or ethnic background differed from their own, the debate over transracial adoption continues. In this collection of interviews conducted with black and biracial young adults who were adopted by white parents, the authors present the personal stories of two dozen individuals who hail from a wide range of religious, economic, political, and professional backgrounds. How does the experience affect their racial and social identities, their choice of friends and marital partners, and their lifestyles? In addition to interviews, the book includes overviews of both the history and current legal status of transracial adoption.

A rich mosaic of photographs, words, and songs, Voices from the Mountains tells the turbulent story of the Appalachian South in the twentieth century. Focusing on the abuses of the coal industry and the grassroots struggle against mine owners that began in the 1960s, Guy and Candie Carawan have gathered quotations from a variety of sources; words and music to more than fifty ballads and songs, laments and satires, hymns and protests; and more than one hundred and fifty photographs of longtime Appalachian residents, their homes, their countryside, the mines they work in, and the labor battles they have fought. The "voices" that speak out in these pages range from the mountain people themselves to such well-known artists as Jean Ritchie, Hazel Dickens, Harriet Simpson Arnow, and Wendell Berry. Together they tell of the damage wrought by strip mining and the empty promises of land reclamation; the search for work and a new life in the North; the welfare rights, labor, antipoverty, and black lung movements; early days in the mines; disasters and negligence in the coal industry; and protest and change in the coal fields. Dignity and despair, poverty and perseverance, tradition and change--Voices from the Mountains eloquently conveys the complex panorama of modern Appalachian life.

Focusing on North Mull - north of Glen More, but excluding Craignure, Torosay and Brolas - this book is an anthology of the tales and traditions of Mull in the words of those who tell them. The writing covers belief and superstitions, pastimes, work, health and cures, tales and proverbs. The subjects are taken from a wide range of sources and periods, from Martin Martin in the 17th century to writing which dates from the end of World War II, a time which saw much change in Gaelic society as a whole. The material covers traditions and accounts of a very practical and often harsh existence, variations on tales which are more obscure as well as those that are well known. The book is a celebration of a people that are often excluded from the standard historical accounts of the clans and Highlands, but who have endured much and safeguarded an important heritage.