One of the world's most remarkable outdoor art treasures lies hidden in plain sight along Chicago's Lake Michigan shoreline. For most of its length it is lined with thousands of works of art -- carvings in stone, many of them spectacular, most by anonymous creators, and almost none of them noticed by the millions of people who enjoy the city's unobstructed shore. This book documents some of the best of the carvings with a rich selection of photos, and it tells the story of the carvings, the carvers and the lakefront where they worked.

How did Chicago, a city known for commerce, come to have such a splendid public waterfront—its most treasured asset? Lakefront reveals a story of social, political, and legal conflict in which private and public rights have clashed repeatedly over time, only to produce, as a kind of miracle, a generally happy ending. Joseph D. Kearney and Thomas W. Merrill study the lakefront's evolution from the middle of the nineteenth century to the twenty-first. Their findings have significance for understanding not only Chicago's history but also the law's part in determining the future of significant urban resources such as waterfronts. The Chicago lakefront is where the American public trust doctrine, holding certain public resources off limits to private development, was born. This book describes the circumstances that gave rise to the doctrine and its fluctuating importance over time, and reveals how it was resurrected in the later twentieth century to become the primary principle for mediating clashes between public and private lakefront rights. Lakefront compares the effectiveness of the public trust idea to other property doctrines, and assesses the role of the law as compared with more institutional developments, such as the emergence of sanitary commissions and park districts, in securing the protection of the lakefront for public uses. By charting its history, Kearney and Merrill demonstrate that the lakefront's current status is in part a product of individuals and events unique to Chicago. But technological changes, and a transformation in social values in favor of recreational and preservationist uses, also have been critical. Throughout, the law, while also in a state of continual change, has played at least a supporting role.

Lakes of New York State, Volume I: Ecology of the Finger Lakes describes the state of Finger Lakes, which is a group of eleven elongated bodies of water of glacial origin in the west-central portion of New York, and its respective watershed. This book assesses the structure of the Finger Lakes’ plant and animal communities and how these communities interact with the abiotic components of the environment. The condition of the lakes from the standpoint of fish population dynamics are also analyzed, including an examination of the various physical, chemical, and biological aspects of the lakes' ecosystem. This text ranks the Finger Lakes into a unilateral trophic list by tabulating their trophic information according to three commonly used indicator measurements— average summer Secchi disc depth, average summer chlorophyll a concentration, and average winter total phosphorus level. This publication is valuable to limnologists and ecologists working on temperate zone freshwater lakes.

The concept of environmental justice has offered a new direction for social movements and public policy in recent decades, and researchers worldwide now position social equity as a prerequisite for sustainability. Yet the relationship between social equity and environmental sustainability has been little studied in Canada. Speaking for Ourselves draws together Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal scholars and activists who bring equity issues to the forefront by considering environmental justice from multiple perspectives and in specifically Canadian contexts.