Drawing on years of investigative reporting, Wyatt Williams offers a powerful look at why we kill and eat animals. In order to understand why we eat meat, the restaurant critic and journalist investigated factory farms, learned to hunt game, worked on a slaughterhouse kill floor, and partook in Indigenous traditions of whale eating in Alaska. In Springer Mountain, he tells about his experiences while charting the history of meat eating and vegetarianism. Williams shows how mysteries springing up from everyday experiences can lead us into the big questions of life while examining the irreconcilable differences between humans and animals. Springer Mountain is a thought-provoking work, one that reveals how what we eat tells us who we are.

"Restaurant-goers in the southeastern United States have likely noted the phrase 'featuring Springer Mountain Farms chicken' proudly displayed on their menu. After working the restaurant beat for years in Atlanta, restaurant critic and writer Wyatt Williams decided to find this fabled farm, to see just what, if anything, made Springer Mountain chicken so special. What he found instead was an elaborate marketing scheme. After some digging and a few interviews, Williams discovered that the Fieldale Farms Corporation, owner of the Springer brand name, sells millions of chickens from 'small family farms' like Springer Mountain that don't really exist. In fact, Fieldale is a huge factory farm producing poultry packaged under several different brand names before shipment to supermarkets and restaurants. After his Springer Mountain discovery, Williams spent a year dedicated to understanding what it meant to work and live meat. He moved to a chicken farm, learned to hunt his own game, worked on a slaughterhouse kill floor, and even traveled to Alaska to partake in Indigenous traditions around eating whale. Along the way, Williams contemplated the ethics and meaning of killing something in order to eat it, and how much work we do to divorce ourselves psychologically from that fact. A mix of investigative journalism, travel narrative, and creative non-fiction, Springer Mountain is not a polemic against nor a defense of meat eating. What we learn from the author's journey is that our modern connection to animals is predicated on why and how we kill them, that killing and eating animals is a human way of organizing and applying order to the world, and that the human pleasure of eating meat is indivisible from the pleasures humans take in assuming control, even over what lives and dies. This book shows how mysteries springing up from everyday experiences can lead us into the big questions of life, while examining the irreconcilable differences between humans and animals"--

A detailed, illustrated guidebook for novice and experienced hikers to hiking the scenic, primitive trail that runs along the western ridges of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Veteran hiker and nature writer Tim Homan guides fellow hikers and backpackers along the scenic, primitive Benton MacKaye Trail, currently a ninety-mile trail that extends from Springer Mountain in Georgia into southern Tennessee. The guidebook is divided into twelve trail sections, each including a map, an elevation profile, and easy-to-use information on length, difficulty, access, and scenic features. Homan describes the surrounding habitat, providing comments on the area's flora and fauna. Also included is an essay on the origins and history of the trail and the Benton MacKaye Trail Association, as well as a timetable for the development of the remainder of the proposed trail, information about the geology of the area, and a brief biography of founder Benton MacKaye. Named in honor of Benton MacKaye, who inspired the creation of the Appalachian Trail, the Benton MacKaye Trail is a trail in progress that will eventually cover more than 270 miles and extend through Tennessee into the Great Smoky Mountains National Park in North Carolina to rejoin the Appalachian Trail.

This textbook explains how mountains are formed and why there are old and young mountains. It provides a reconstruction of the Earths paleogeography and shows why the shapes of South America and Africa fit so well together. Furthermore, it explains why the Pacific is surrounded by a ring of volcanos and earthquake-prone areas while the edges of the Atlantic are relatively peaceful. This thoroughly revised textbook edition addresses all these questions and more through the presentation and explanation of the geodynamic processes upon which the theory of continental drift is based and which have led to the concept of plate tectonics. It is a source of information for students of geology, geophysics, geography, geosciences in general, general natural sciences, as well as professionals, and interested layman.

A 41-year-old engineer quits his job to hike the Appalachian Trail. This is a true account of his hike from Georgia to Maine, bringing to the reader the life of the towns and the people he meets along the way.

Originally published in 2010 with the subtitle Epic adventures on the Appalachian Trail.

This book provides readers with a broad understanding of the fundamental principles driving atmospheric flow over complex terrain and provides historical context for recent developments and future direction for researchers and forecasters. The topics in this book are expanded from those presented at the Mountain Weather Workshop, which took place in Whistler, British Columbia, Canada, August 5-8, 2008. The inspiration for the workshop came from the American Meteorological Society (AMS) Mountain Meteorology Committee and was designed to bridge the gap between the research and forecasting communities by providing a forum for extended discussion and joint education. For academic researchers, this book provides some insight into issues important to the forecasting community. For the forecasting community, this book provides training on fundamentals of atmospheric processes over mountainous regions, which are notoriously difficult to predict. The book also helps to provide a better understanding of current research and forecast challenges, including the latest contributions and advancements to the field. The book begins with an overview of mountain weather and forecasting chal- lenges specific to complex terrain, followed by chapters that focus on diurnal mountain/valley flows that develop under calm conditions and dynamically-driven winds under strong forcing. The focus then shifts to other phenomena specific to mountain regions: Alpine foehn, boundary layer and air quality issues, orographic precipitation processes, and microphysics parameterizations. Having covered the major physical processes, the book shifts to observation and modelling techniques used in mountain regions, including model configuration and parameterizations such as turbulence, and model applications in operational forecasting. The book concludes with a discussion of the current state of research and forecasting in complex terrain, including a vision of how to bridge the gap in the future.