While researching and writing a story about some recent books about New Mexico’s environment, I spent a lot of time perusing my bookshelves and revisiting some old favorites.  Below is a makeshift–and undoubtedly incomplete–list of some of those favorites, as well as some suggestions from other readers.

Please be sure and add your favorites in the comments section. Or, you can email me at laura.paskus@gmail.com. (And no, these aren’t in any particular order.)

By the way, I’m itching to get my hands on Paul Bauer’s guidebook, The Rio Grande, A River Guide to the Geology and Landscapes of Northern New Mexico. Bauer just won the 2011 award for Outstanding Outdoor Guide Book from the National Outdoor Book Association and a John P. Taylor Lifetime Achievement Award from the New Mexico Riparian Society. (Read more about that here.)

New Mexico Environmental Bibliography:

The Orphaned Land: New Mexico’s Environment Since the Manhattan Project, by VB Price

A Great Aridness, by William deBuys

Reining in the Rio Grande, by Fred Phillips, Mary Black, and G. Emlen Hall

The Rio Grande: An Eagle’s View (Photographs by Adriel Heisey)

Eco-Tracking: On the Trail of Habitat Change, by Dan Shaw

The Tree Rings’ Tale: Understanding Our Changing Climate, by John Fleck

Great River: The Rio Grande in North American History, by Paul Horgan

Rio Grande, Edited by Jan Reid

Rio Grande, by Harvey Fergusson

High and Dry: The Texas-New Mexico Struggle for the Pecos River, by G. Emlen Hall

Land, Wind and Hard Words: A Story of Navajo Activism, by John W. Sherry

The Navajo People and Uranium Mining, Edited by Doug Brugge, Timothy Benally, and Esther Yazzie-Lewis (with intro by Stewart Udall)

Mayordomo: Chronicle of an Acequia in Northern New Mexico, by Stanley Crawford

The River in Winter: New and Selected Essays, by Stanley Crawford

A Sand County Almanac and Sketches Here and There, by Aldo Leopold

Aldo Leopold’s Southwest, Edited by David E. Brown and Neil B. Carmony

The Walk, by William deBuys

Valles Caldera: A Vision for New Mexico’s National Preserve, By William deBuys and Don J. Usner

Enchantment and Exploitation: The Life and Hard Times of a New Mexico Mountain Range, by William deBuys

The Mountains of New Mexico, by Robert Julyan

The Chaco Coal Scandal: The People’s Victory over James Watt, by Jeff Radford

Related to Los Alamos National Laboratory:

The Nuclear Borderlands: The Manhattan Project in Post-Cold War New Mexico, by Joseph Masco

In the Shadow of Los Alamos: Selected Writings of Edith Warmer, edited by Patrick Burns

Nuclear Rites: A Weapons Laboratory at the End of the Cold War, by Hugh Gusterson

Inventing Los Alamos: The Growth of an Atomic Community, by Jon Humner

Now It Can Be Told: The Story of the Manhattan Project, by General Leslie M. Groves

The Myths of August, by Stewart Udall

UPDATE:

Roadside Geology of New Mexico, by Halka Chronic

A Field Guide to the Plants and Animals of the Middle Rio Grande Bosque, by Jean-Luc E. Cartron, et al.

Field Guide to the Sandia Mountains, ed. by Robert Julyan and Mary Stuever

ANOTHER UPDATE

From a SRF reader:

Captives and Cousins, Slavery, Kinship, and Community in the Southwest Borderlands, by James Brooks

Understories: The Political Life of Forests in New Mexico, By Jake Kosek

Manifest Destinies, The Making of the Mexican American Race, by Laura Gomez

Land, Water, and Culture: New Perspectives on Hispanic Land Grants, edited by Charles Briggs and John Van Ness