A search for the endangered beluga whales of Cook Inlet, Alaska, becomes a personal journey and an expose of the forces arrayed against this fascinating-and troubled-species. Living in waters adjacent to Anchorage, Alaska, the beluga whales of Cook Inlet are an isolated and genetically distinct population. Thought to number more than 1000 in the early 1990s, a sharp population decline has brought them near extinction.Original in approach and incisive in its questions, Beluga Days explores how conservation laws, management policies, and human behaviors have affected the shrinking beluga population. From hunters, regulators, environmentalists, researchers, and businesspeople to whale enthusiasts, Lord encounters an ongoing debate wrestling with the immediate need to protect the whales, as well as a respect for the centuries-old tradition of Native subsistence hunting. Beyond its compelling characters and particulars, Lord's story offers readers a deeper understanding of the often uncomfortable, often rewarding, juxtaposition of humans and the natural world.

When marine biologist Ray Berringer and his student crew embark on an oceanographic cruise in the Gulf of Alaska, the waters are troubled in more ways than one. Ray's co-leader, a famed chemist, is abandoning ship just as the ocean's pH is becoming a major concern. Something at their university is corrosive, and it's going to take more than science to correct. Powerful bonds are forged among offbeat characters studying the effects of ocean acidification on pteropods, a tiny, keystone species, in this cutting-edge CliFi novel. (Includes author Q&A and reading group discussion questions.)

When marine biologist Ray Berringer and his student crew embark on an oceanographic cruise in the Gulf of Alaska, the waters are troubled in more ways than one. Ray's co-leader, a famed chemist, is abandoning ship just as the ocean's pH is becoming a major concern. Something at their university is corrosive, and it's going to take more than science to correct. Powerful bonds are forged among offbeat characters studying the effects of ocean acidification on pteropods, a tiny, keystone species, in this cutting-edge CliFi novel. (Includes author Q&A and reading group discussion questions.)

In Shishmaref, Alaska, new seawalls are constructed while residents navigate the many practical and bureaucratic obstacles to moving their entire island village to higher ground. Farther south, inland hunters and fishermen set out to grow more of their own food--and to support the reintroduction of wood bison, an ancient species well suited to expected habitat changes. First Nations people in Canada team with conservationists to protect land for both local use and environmental resilience.
In Early Warming, Alaskan Writer Laureate, Nancy Lord, takes a cutting-edge look at how communities in the North--where global warming is amplified and climate-change effects are most immediate--are responding with desperation and creativity. This beautifully written and measured narrative takes us deep into regions where the indigenous people who face life-threatening change also demonstrate impressive conservation ethics and adaptive capacities. Underpinned by a long acquaintance with the North and backed with scientific and political sophistication, Lord's vivid account brings the challenges ahead for us all into ice-water clarity.

For Nancy Lord, what began as a yearning for adventure and a childhood fascination with a wild and distant land culminated in a move to Alaska in the early 1970s. Here she discovered the last place in America "big and wild enough to hold the intact landscapes and the dreams that are so absent today from almost everywhere else." In Rock, Water, Wild, Lord takes readers along as she journeys among salmon, sea lions, geese, moose, bears, glaciers, and indigenous languages and ultimately into a new understanding, beyond geographic borders, of our intricate and intimate connections to the natural world. Vast and beautiful, and much more than a mere place, Alaska is nonetheless inescapably a land of natural extremes and exquisite subtleties. In Lord's explorations, "the country" of Alaska evokes reflections on the importance of place and space in our lives; arguments over roads carved in the wilderness; musings on the role of location and landscape in the Dena'ina Athabascan language; accounts of sport fishing in the Russian Far East in the first days of perestroika and of climbing in the Arrigetch Peaks of Alaska's Brooks Range; and considerations of the politics of whaling. In the tradition of naturalists John Muir and John Burroughs, Lord proves an excellent guide to the challenges and pleasures of making oneself at home on this Earth.

In 1899 Edward Harriman, the railroad tycoon and most powerful man in America, assembled an elite crew of scientists and artists and took them on a two month survey of the Alaskan coast. Its 126 members included mountaineer John Muir, nature writer John Burroughs, biologist C. Hart Merriam, naturalist and Alaskan expert William Dall, bird artist Louis Agassiz Fuertes, ornithologist George Bird Grinnell, and photographer Edward Curtis. The expedition returned with 100 trunks of specimens and over 5000 photographs and coloured illustrations. The scientists produced 13 volumes of data that took 12 years to compile.

Nancy Lord celebrates a great good place-Cook Inlet, Alaska, where she and her partner have made a life together for more than twenty years.. With poetic cadence and magical tone, Lord writes of her life from June to August, days filled with the mending of nets, the muscle-wrenching labor of the catch, the exquisite pleasure of an improvised hot-tub, and the often subtle beauty of the inlet's flora and fauna.Woven throughout Lord's adventures is the deeper history of the region's stories and legends of the native Denaina people; anecdotes about past and current residents; and descriptions of their neighbors, both human and animal.