Books by Daniel Botkin
BOOKS BY DANIEL B. BOTKIN
New! Botkin, D. B. and E. A. Keller, Environmental Science: Earth as a Living Planet, 6th edition published February 2007 by John Wiley & Sons.
Forthcoming: E. A. Keller and D. B. Botkin, Essentials of Environmental Science, fall 2007, John Wiley & Sons.
Forthcoming: Energy Forever: A Voter’s Guide to Energy (in progress).
Published:
Botkin, D. B. 2004. Beyond the Stony Mountains: Nature in the American West from Lewis and Clark to Today, Oxford University Press, N. Y.
Botkin, D. B., 2003 Strange Encounters: Adventures with a Renegade Naturalist, Penguin (Tarcher) Books, NY.
Botkin, D. B. , 2001, No Man’s Garden: Thoreau and a New Vision for Civilization and Nature, Island Press, Washington, D. C.
Botkin, D. B., 1999. Passage of Discovery: The American Rivers Guide to The Missouri River of Lewis and Clark, Perigee Books (a Division of Penquin-Putnam), N.Y.
Skinner, B., S. Porter, and D.B. Botkin, 1999, The Blue Planet, John Wiley & Sons, N.Y.
Botkin, D. B., 2003, Our Natural History: The Lessons of Lewis and Clark, Oxford University Press, N.Y. (paper)
Botkin, D. B., 1993, JABOWA-II: A Computer Model of Forest Growth, Oxford University Press, N.Y. (Software and manual)
Botkin, D.B., 1993. Forest Dynamics: An Ecological Model, Oxford University Press, N.Y..
Botkin, D.B., 1990, Discordant Harmonies: A New Ecology for the 21st Century, Oxford University Press.
Botkin, D.B., Caswell, M., Estes, J.E., and A. Orio, (Eds.) 1989, Changing the Global Environment: Perspectives on Human Involvement, Academic Press, N.Y.
West, D.C., H.H. Shugart and D.B. Botkin (eds.), 1981, Forest Succession: Concepts and Applications, Springer- Verlag, NY., 517 pp.
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Daniel Botkin’s latest –
BEYOND THE STONY MOUNTAINS:
Nature in the American West from Lewis and Clark to Today
by Daniel B. Botkin
Oxford University Press, NY 2004
ISBN 0-19-516243-9
Botkin takes a journey that, while not as harrowing as Lewis and Clark’s, is still entertaining, thought-provoking, and well worth it. The conservation message is trong and urgent.
— The Library Journal
Beyond the Stony Mountains awarded an honorable mention by the American Association of Publishers in 2005.
Excerpt from Chapter 8 America’s Serengeti: Lewis and Clark Meet Grizzly Bears {Copyright Daniel B. Botkin 2004 All Rights Reserved. Do not copy, circulate, or publish without the author’s or publisher’s consent.}
Surprisingly, the best estimate of the number of grizzly bears ever made may be the one based on what Lewis and Clark recorded in 1805 — even though the grizzly is a listed endangered species and a recovery plan for it is required by law. Maybe we need to improve our monitoring and counting of the nature around us.
On May 11, 1805, when the expedition was northeast of what is now the Pine Recreation Area near Fort Peck Dam in eastern Montana, Bratton, one of the members of the expedition, went for a walk along the shore. Soon after, he rushed up to Lewis “so much out of breath that it was several minutes before he could tell what had happened.” Bratton had met and shot a grizzly bear, he told Lewis, but the bear didn’t fall; instead it ran after him for about half a mile and was still alive.
Lewis took seven men and trailed the bear about a mile by following its blood in the shrubs and willows near the shore. Finding it, they killed the bear with two shots through the skull. Upon cutting it open, they found that Bratton had shot the bear in the lungs, after which the bear had chased him a total of a mile and a half. “These bear being so hard to die rather intimidates us all,” Lewis wrote. “The wonderful power of life which these animals possess,” the journals continued, “renders them dreadful; their very track in the mud or sand, which we have sometimes found 11 inches long and 7 1/4 wide, exclusive of the talons, is alarming.”
On approximately twenty days between April 17 and the end of July they saw these bears — about one encounter or sighting every five days. Most of their sightings were upstream from the confluence of the Yellowstone and Missouri rivers. They were especially troubled by them when they were portaging their equipment around the Great Falls. Their last sighting was near Three Forks, Montana, the headwaters of the Missouri. No grizzlies were found east of Pierre, South Dakota, nor west of a north-south line passing through Missoula, Montana; the grizzlies were confined to two regions of the trip – the upper Missouri and adjacent short-grass prairies, and the Rocky Mountain forests -– the dry plains and the cold mountains.
Also in the spring of 1805, not far from where Bratton was chased by a grizzly, Lewis wrote the first scientific description of this species, although it did not receive its scientific name, Ursus horribilis, until 1815. Lewis described a male “not fully grown” that he estimated weighed 300 pounds, which they had killed after shooting it many times. He wrote that the grizzly had longer legs than the black bear, that its color was “yellowish brown, the eyes small, black, and piercing; the front of the fore legs near the feet is usually black; the fur is finer thicker and deeper than that of the black bear.”
Because grizzlies are so big and dangerous, Lewis and Clark recorded the number of bears (usually one) in each encounter. Reading their accounts, I realized that it was possible to use the journals to estimate the original abundance of these dangerous animals and to learn about their original range. The expedition encountered a total of thirty-seven grizzlies over a distance of approximately 1,000 miles, or an average of about four grizzlies per 100 miles traveled. . .
Assuming on average that the men of the expedition could see about a half mile on each side of the river, the density of the bears was about four for every 100 square miles. Multiplying this by the assumed presettlement range of the bears, about 530,000 square miles, suggests that there might have been as many as 20,000. . .
Strangely, with the sole exception of information gathered in Yellowstone National Park, our present knowledge about the abundance and density of grizzlies is not much better than what someone could have surmised by a careful reading of Lewis and Clark’s journals when the expedition returned to St. Louis in 1806. If this is what we know about one of the most famous, most readily reported, legally threatened and therefore protected species, whose abundance and whereabouts are of considerable interest to outdoorsmen as well as government agencies, what could be our knowledge of other species? The answer is, in most cases, much worse. . .
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1Quotations from the Lewis and Clark journals edited by Gary Moulton and published by the University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln, volumes 2 through 8, with various publication dates beginning in 1986. Where reference is made to information in the notes to that edition, these are listed as Moulton, followed by the volume and pages. Moulton II: 152.