Climate disruption is often discussed on a global scale, affording many a degree of detachment from what is happening in their own backyards. Yet the consequences of global warming are of an increasingly acute and serious nature. In Virginia Climate Fever, environmental journalist Stephen Nash brings home the threat of climate change to the state of Virginia. Weaving together a compelling mix of data and conversations with both respected scientists and Virginians most immediately at risk from global warming's effects, the author details how Virginia's climate has already begun to change. In engaging prose and layman's terms, Nash argues that alteration in the environment will affect not only the state's cities but also hundreds of square miles of urban and natural coastal areas, the 60 percent of the state that is forested, the Chesapeake Bay, and the near Atlantic, with accompanying threats such as the potential spread of infectious disease. The narrative offers striking descriptions of the vulnerabilities of the state's many beautiful natural areas, around which much of its tourism industry is built. While remaining respectful of the controversy around global warming, Nash allows the research to speak for itself. In doing so, he offers a practical approach to and urgent warning about the impending impact of climate change in Virginia.

Conserving the Commonwealth is the book that anyone interested in conservation and environmental issues has been waiting for. This history describes the earliest days of Virginia's environmental movement, recounting the efforts of a farsighted group of leaders to preserve Virginia's priceless resources--open land, waterways, and historic sites--and to create new parks within reach of all the state's citizens. In 1965, Governor Albertis Harrison selected State Senator FitzGerald Bemiss to chair a commission-the Virginia Outdoor Recreation Study Commission-to make recommendations for improving the state's outdoor recreation facilities. Inspired by Bemiss's leadership and a newly awakened concern for the environment, the commission reached far beyond its mandate, addressing the entire range of the Commonwealth's natural and man-made resources: open land, pristine waterways, and historic buildings. The result was Virginia's Common Wealth, a publication that inspired the environmental movement for the balance of the twentieth century and served as the framework for Virginia's public efforts to conserve its natural and historic resources. Bemiss gained powerful advocates for Virginia's environment in governors Linwood Holton and Gerald L. Baliles, delegate Tayloe Murphy, attorney George Freeman, and law professor A. E. Dick Howard. Beyond the public administrative and legal history of governmental environmental efforts, Conserving the Commonwealth recounts the efforts of private groups such as the Virginia chapter of The Nature Conservancy, the Piedmont Environmental Council, the Chesapeake Bay Foundation, and the APVA Preservation Virginia, which all fought valiantly to preserve Virginia's fragile open spaces and irreplaceable historic sites and buildings. The book also points out that in spite of all those early efforts, the state of Virginia's environmental health today is deeply threatened. In his afterword, FitzGerald Bemiss reflects on the continuing need for regional planning, an efficient public transportation system, and funding for existing programs. Three appendices provide tabular information on Virginia's state parks and conservation easements, and include the text of a 1965 article by FitzGerald Bemiss on urban political needs. The book will be of interest to planners, environmentalists, and preservationists, and to all who care about preserving Virginia's natural resources.

How power is wielded in environmental policy making at the state level, and how to redress the ingrained favoritism toward coal and electric utilities. The United States has pledged to the world community a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 26–28 percent below 2005 levels in 2025. Because much of this reduction must come from electric utilities, especially coal-fired power plants, coal states will make or break the U.S. commitment to emissions reduction. In Climate of Capitulation, Vivian Thomson offers an insider's account of how power is wielded in environmental policy making at the state level. Thomson, a former member of Virginia's State Air Pollution Control Board, identifies a “climate of capitulation” in state government—a deeply rooted favoritism toward coal and electric utilities in states' air pollution policies. Thomson narrates three cases involving coal and air pollution from her time on the Air Board. She illuminates the overt and covert power struggles surrounding air pollution limits for a coal-fired power plant just across the Potomac from Washington, for a controversial new coal-fired electrical generation plant in coal country, and for coal dust pollution from truck traffic in a country hollow. Thomson links Virginia's climate of capitulation with campaign donations that make legislators politically indebted to coal and electric utility interests, a traditionalistic political culture tending to inertia, and a part-time legislature that depended on outside groups for information and bill drafting. Extending her analysis to fifteen other coal-dependent states, Thomson offers policy reforms aimed at mitigating the ingrained biases toward coal and electric utilities in states' air pollution policy making.