{"product_id":"adios-to-the-brushlands-wardlaw-books-9780890967690","title":"Adios to the Brushlands (Wardlaw Books)","description":"\u003cp\u003eIn a little-known area of South Texas  extending across the Rio Grande into Mexico  a mysterious  lush land once harbored mighty trees  bushes  and grasses--brushland home to a plethora of wildlife. In Adios to the Brushlands native son Arturo Longoria remembers this chapparal land of his childhood: hot summer days and frigid winter mornings walking with his grandfather or his best friend through the dense underbrush  watching birds  studying reptiles  identifying plants. Boyhood hunting and varmint calling  encounters with rattlesnakes and fierce pamorana ants  hours spent with his grandfather  Papagrande  and cousins bring to life another time and place. A trained biologist and one-time investigative reporter  Longoria brings his skills of observation and expression to sing the song of this vanishing habitat that once covered nearly four million acres of the Rio Grande Valley. In moving but understated prose he captures the wonder of the brushland and symbolically and emotionally links its loss  through rootplows and bulldozers  to the death of his grandfather  who had introduced him to that world. He reports as well the public policies and private actions that have reduced the brushland to less than five percent of its former extent. He chronicles the efforts to publicize the brushlands destruction and to save the remaining richness for future generations. At once a celebration of a regions nature and a call to preserve the little bit of it still left today  this book is to the South Texas Brushlands what Rachel Carsons Silent Spring was to the nations wetlands or John Gravess Goodbye to a River was to the Brazos River. Rife with the natural history of an endangered ecology and capturing as well the binational culture of the region  Adios to the Brushlands draws readers into a land as raw  beautiful  and complex as life itself. A unique descriptive documentary of a disappearing natural treasure  it is a slice of the new natural history that weds the details of the physical world with their significance to the human heart.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"My Store","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":45651830014005,"sku":"ByrdShop_0890967695","price":164.07,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0627\/8139\/0901\/files\/9780890967690.jpg?v=1781841616","url":"https:\/\/atxbooks.com\/products\/adios-to-the-brushlands-wardlaw-books-9780890967690","provider":"ATX Books","version":"1.0","type":"link"}