Dirty, Sacred Rivers explores South Asia's increasingly urgent water crisis, taking readers on a journey through North India, Nepal and Bangladesh, from the Himalaya to the Bay of Bengal. The book shows how rivers, traditionally revered by the people of the Indian subcontinent, have in recent decades deteriorated dramatically due to economic progress and gross mismanagement. Dams and ill-advised embankments strangle the Ganges and its sacred tributaries. Rivers have become sewage ...

Discover this fascinating country with the most incisive and entertaining guidebook on the market. Whether you plan to wander through Krakow's magnificent medieval Old Town, hike in the Tatra Mountains or relax on the Baltic coast, The Rough Guide to Poland will show you the ideal places to sleep, eat, drink, shop and visit along the way. - Independent, trusted reviews writtenwith Rough Guides' trademark blend of humour, honesty and insight, to help you get the mo...

A collection of captivatingly meditative essays that display a deep understanding of Buddhist belief, wildness, wildlife, and the world from an American cultural force.With thoughts ranging from political and spiritual matters to those regarding the environment and the art of becoming native to this continent, the nine essays in The Practice of the Wild display the deep understanding and wide erudition of Gary Snyder. These essays, first published in 1990,...

The myth of Shangri-la originates in Tibetan Buddhist beliefs in beyul, or hidden lands, sacred sanctuaries that reveal themselves to devout pilgrims and in times of crisis. The more remote and inaccessible the beyul, the vaster its reputed qualities. Ancient Tibetan prophecies declare that the greatest of all hidden lands lies at the heart of the forbidding Tsangpo Gorge, deep in the Himalayas and veiled by a colossal waterfall. Nineteenth-century accounts of this fabled...

Love and marriage brought American anthropologist Elizabeth Enslin to a world she never planned to make her own: a life among Brahman in-laws in a remote village in the plains of Nepal. As she faced the challenges of married life, birth, and childrearing in a foreign culture, she discovered as much about human resilience, and the capacity for courage, as she did about herself.***While the Gods Were Sleeping: A Journey Through Love and Rebellion in Nepal***tells a c...

A travelogue of Bhutan and its neighbors in the Himalayas that introduces readers to a world that has emerged from the middle ages only to find itself peering into the abyss of modernity. "For anyone with a serious interest in Buddhism, it's essential reading" (Washington Post Book World).For more than a thousand years Tibet, Sikkim, Ladakh, and Bhutan were the santuaries of Tantric Buddhism. But in the last half of this century, geopolitics has scoured th...

As one of the world’s leading field biologists, George Schaller has spent much of his life traversing wild and isolated places in his quest to understand and conserve threatened species—from mountain gorillas in the Virunga to pandas in the Wolong and snow leopards in the Himalaya. Throughout his celebrated career, Schaller has spent more time in Tibet than in any other part of the world, devoting more than thirty years to the wildlife, culture, and landscapes that captured his heart and c...

Wade Davis has been called "a rare combination of scientist, scholar, poet and passionate defender of all of life's diversity." In Shadows in the Sun, he brings all of those gifts to bear on a fascinating examination of indigenous cultures and the interactions between human societies and the natural world.Ranging from the British Columbian wilderness to the jungles of the Amazon and the polar ice of the Arctic Circle, Shadows in the Sun is a testament to a world w...

With their elusive and solitary nature, tigers and snow leopards are a challenge for even the most seasoned field biologists to track and study. Yet scientist and conservation leader Eric Dinerstein began his career in the heart of Nepal’s tiger country and the perilous Himalayan slopes of the snow leopard, where he discovered the joys—and frustrations—of studying wildlife in some of the most unpredictable and remote places on Earth. In Discovering Big Cat Country, Dinerstein tell...

At thirty-two, Darla Hillard was working as a secretary, satisfying her love of the outdoors only during vacations. She had no scientific training or obvious qualifications to become a member of the Snow Leopard Project—except for her determination and faith in Rodney Jackson, the wildlife biologist with whom she fell in love. Darla helped Rodney prepare a proposal for the study. It won one of five Rolex Awards for Enterprise, providing the project with its first significant research grant...

Crowded, hot, subject to violent swings in climate, with a government unable or unwilling to face the most vital challenges, the rich and poor increasingly living in worlds apart; for most of the world, this picture is of a possible future. For India, it is the very real present.In this lyrical exploration of life, loss, and survival, Meera Subramanian travels in search of the ordinary people and microenterprises determined to revive India's ravaged natural world: an engineer-turne...

From East Timor to Timbuktu, John Stackhouse has met and lived with hundreds of the world's poor. When he set out on this journey in 1991, he was certain that the new age of global markets and economic reforms would end decades of extreme hardship in the developing world. But as the nineties rolled on, he found poverty still entrenched in dozens of countries -- except where people had some control over their lives.In an intriguing blend of travel writing and analysis, moving portra...