The sky is truly falling on many fish species. Nets come up empty, and fish-based economies collapse. But the Maine lobster seems almost immune to such disaster; a growing number of Maine lobstermen continue to haul in a grand 20 million pounds a year of delectable crustacean with no shortage looming on the horizon. Why? Two new books on Maine’s lobster The Lobster Coast: Rebels, Rusticators, and the Struggle for a Forgotten Frontier by Colin Woodard (Viking, $24.95, 384 pages, ISBN 0670033243) and The Secret Life of Lobsters: How Fishermen and Scientists Are Unraveling the Mysteries of Our Favorite Crustacean by Trevor Corson explain how Maine lobstermen voluntarily conserve their lobster population and keep the industry sustainable.

The stereotype of the Maine fisherman as stoic, independent and not easily impressed is apparently well deserved. Both Corson and Woodard suggest that Maine’s lobsters benefit from small, traditional, often ancient, fishing communities that jealously guard their resource. Though anyone can theoretically obtain a license to fish for lobster in Maine, the pros protect their harbors from interlopers, snubbing neophytes with no ancestral ties to the community, and even vandalizing their traps. Maine lobstermen have also protected their lobster population by making the breeding female lobster almost sacred. Both Woodard and Corson laud the lobstermen’s practice of “V-notching” egg-bearing females punching a small hole in their tail fins before releasing them back into the ocean. Notching is code for “Cherished breeder not for sale.” Lobstermen have agreed among themselves to throw back the V-notched lobsters even when they are eggless. Maine’s lobstering community also tosses back outsized male lobsters a practice unique among fishing industries. In the inimitable words of Trevor Corson: “by throwing back any lobster with a carapace over five inches, the lobstermen were populating a sort of sex resort for retirees, open to both male studs and experienced females.” Undersea sex Corson is one of those rare writers who can make the reproductive systems of lower life forms seem positively racy. Even readers with only a passing interest in marine ecosystems will find the chapter “Sex, Sizes, and Videotape,” which chronicles the fascinating mating habits of lobsters, a riveting page turner. Corson’s secret is to suggest human analogs for lobster behaviors without anthropomorphizing too flagrantly. Corson also keeps his pages interesting to a wide range of readers by drifting back and forth between the sex lives of lobsters and those of lobstermen like Bruce Fernald, whose romance and marriage to Barb Shirey blossoms between scientific studies.

Corson also aptly traces the sometimes adversarial, but often collaborative relationship between lobstermen and scientists. Bob Steneck, who also appears prominently in Woodard’s book, emerges as the hero of this conflict. Steneck is a renegade scientist who believes in actually getting out in the water and counting lobsters before making predictions. His practical field approach which involves studying lobsters in their natural setting vindicates the conservation practices of Maine’s lobstermen and helps bridge the gap between fishing and science.

Woodard writes ambitiously about the whole state of Maine and its history, starting with its pre-Pilgrim inhabitation by Europeans. Throughout his book, he keeps an eye on lobstering, the industry that has been the backbone of Maine’s economy, the ever-present default option as other industries, such as ice and granite, failed. Woodard reports not only on the conflict between lobstermen and government scientists, but also on the friction between ancient lobster communities and encroaching suburbia what he calls the “Massification” of southern Maine, i.e. the tendency of Boston professionals to sprawl northward, driving lobstermen out of their ancestral homes with tax increases, beach access restrictions and noise ordinances. Woodard’s chapter, “The Triumph of the Commons,” is, itself, a triumph. Science has declared that, by and large, shared natural resources are doomed to overharvesting, but Woodard shows how Maine’s lobster community has defied that trend through religious self-regulation. Woodard takes as his focal point the beautiful and largely undeveloped Monhegan Island. On Monhegan, lobstermen have taken resource conservation a quantum step further: they only fish for lobsters December through June. Monhegan is not only a model of conservation; for Woodard, it is also a symbol of Maine and lobstering culture at its very best. Monhegan, he writes, is “an ancient, self-governing village, essentially classless and car-less, whose homes, sheds, and footpaths appear to have thrust themselves out of the wild and arrestingly beautiful landscape. . . . [B]eing immersed in it pulls at something deep within our civic being, a hint of a simpler, perhaps nobler world that might have been, but can never be again.”

The sky is truly falling on many fish species. Nets come up empty, and fish-based economies collapse. But the Maine lobster seems almost immune to such disaster; a growing number of Maine lobstermen continue to haul in a grand 20 million pounds a year of delectable crustacean with no shortage looming on the horizon. Why? Two new books on Maine’s lobster The Lobster Coast: Rebels, Rusticators, and the Struggle for a Forgotten Frontier by Colin Woodard and The Secret Life of Lobsters: How Fishermen and Scientists Are Unraveling the Mysteries of Our Favorite Crustacean by Trevor Corson (HarperCollins, $24.95, 304 pages, ISBN 0060555580) explain how Maine lobstermen voluntarily conserve their lobster population and keep the industry sustainable.

The stereotype of the Maine fisherman as stoic, independent and not easily impressed is apparently well deserved. Both Corson and Woodard suggest that Maine’s lobsters benefit from small, traditional, often ancient, fishing communities that jealously guard their resource. Though anyone can theoretically obtain a license to fish for lobster in Maine, the pros protect their harbors from interlopers, snubbing neophytes with no ancestral ties to the community, and even vandalizing their traps. Maine lobstermen have also protected their lobster population by making the breeding female lobster almost sacred. Both Woodard and Corson laud the lobstermen’s practice of “V-notching” egg-bearing females punching a small hole in their tail fins before releasing them back into the ocean. Notching is code for “Cherished breeder not for sale.” Lobstermen have agreed among themselves to throw back the V-notched lobsters even when they are eggless. Maine’s lobstering community also tosses back outsized male lobsters a practice unique among fishing industries. In the inimitable words of Trevor Corson: “by throwing back any lobster with a carapace over five inches, the lobstermen were populating a sort of sex resort for retirees, open to both male studs and experienced females.” Undersea sex Corson is one of those rare writers who can make the reproductive systems of lower life forms seem positively racy. Even readers with only a passing interest in marine ecosystems will find the chapter “Sex, Sizes, and Videotape,” which chronicles the fascinating mating habits of lobsters, a riveting page turner. Corson’s secret is to suggest human analogs for lobster behaviors without anthropomorphizing too flagrantly. Corson also keeps his pages interesting to a wide range of readers by drifting back and forth between the sex lives of lobsters and those of lobstermen like Bruce Fernald, whose romance and marriage to Barb Shirey blossoms between scientific studies.

Corson also aptly traces the sometimes adversarial, but often collaborative relationship between lobstermen and scientists. Bob Steneck, who also appears prominently in Woodard’s book, emerges as the hero of this conflict. Steneck is a renegade scientist who believes in actually getting out in the water and counting lobsters before making predictions. His practical field approach which involves studying lobsters in their natural setting vindicates the conservation practices of Maine’s lobstermen and helps bridge the gap between fishing and science.

Woodard writes ambitiously about the whole state of Maine and its history, starting with its pre-Pilgrim inhabitation by Europeans. Throughout his book, he keeps an eye on lobstering, the industry that has been the backbone of Maine’s economy, the ever-present default option as other industries, such as ice and granite, failed. Woodard reports not only on the conflict between lobstermen and government scientists, but also on the friction between ancient lobster communities and encroaching suburbia what he calls the “Massification” of southern Maine, i.e. the tendency of Boston professionals to sprawl northward, driving lobstermen out of their ancestral homes with tax increases, beach access restrictions and noise ordinances. Woodard’s chapter, “The Triumph of the Commons,” is, itself, a triumph. Science has declared that, by and large, shared natural resources are doomed to overharvesting, but Woodard shows how Maine’s lobster community has defied that trend through religious self-regulation. Woodard takes as his focal point the beautiful and largely undeveloped Monhegan Island. On Monhegan, lobstermen have taken resource conservation a quantum step further: they only fish for lobsters December through June. Monhegan is not only a model of conservation; for Woodard, it is also a symbol of Maine and lobstering culture at its very best. Monhegan, he writes, is “an ancient, self-governing village, essentially classless and car-less, whose homes, sheds, and footpaths appear to have thrust themselves out of the wild and arrestingly beautiful landscape. . . . [B]eing immersed in it pulls at something deep within our civic being, a hint of a simpler, perhaps nobler world that might have been, but can never be again.”

“People see alligators in the park and think everything is good. That’s ridiculous,” a naturalist tells travel journalist W. Hodding Carter. In the pages of Stolen Water: Saving the Everglades from Its Friends, Foes and Florida, Carter describes what visitors do not see: a monumental battle between nature and civilization that began more than a century ago. The Everglades, a shallow, slow-moving river, was mistakenly despised as a swamp in the early 1900s. Since then, state and federal officials have built canals, levees and dams to drain it “and by the time certain people realized it was a river, we’d already turned it into a swamp,” says Carter, thereby creating precisely what they were trying to eliminate in the first place. Carter says civilization’s interference causes 1.7 billion gallons of fresh water to be dumped wastefully every day into the Atlantic Ocean and the Gulf of Mexico. Among the consequences: 90 percent of the Everglades’ wading birds have vanished, more than 60 species of animals face extinction, and mercury levels in fish are seven times higher than considered safe by the government. After weighing such issues as industrial pollution, population growth and flood control, Carter, who went into the Everglades “knowing nothing,” deplores what he sees as a “half-assed” management program. Written in a conversational manner and splashed with humor, this book deserves a wide readership, especially among legislators who still have a chance to save an area unlike any other on Earth.

Remembering a deadly hurricane, 35 years later Philip Hearn was a young UPI reporter stationed in Birmingham, Alabama, the night of August 17, 1969, when Hurricane Camille roared across Mississippi’s Gulf Coast, sweeping away virtually everything in its course. In Mississippi, the vicious Category 5 storm killed 172 people. As it continued into Tennessee, Kentucky, Ohio, West Virginia and Virginia with its still lethal winds and flash floods, it slaughtered another 175. Apart from the cost in human lives, Camille also destroyed an estimated $8.6 billion worth of property. Even today, signs of its devastation remain. Now, 35 years later, Hearn brings readers a cinematic reconstruction of the devastating storm in Hurricane Camille: Monster Storm of the Gulf Coast.

“I had no special interest [in hurricanes] at that time, except for the same interest that everyone else did in this area,” Hearn tells BookPage from his office at Mississippi State University, where he is a research writer. “Later on, when I went to the University of Southern Mississippi as news director for the public relations office, I came across the oral histories of the survivors of Camille. I found some of the accounts to be riveting. After I went through them, I realized that maybe I could do a series of newspaper stories [on the storm]. I did that in 1989, to coincide with the 20th anniversary of Camille. That was my starting point.” In 2000, at the urging of the chairman of USM’s history department, Hearn began his formal work on the book.

To manage the surfeit of eyewitness stories, Hearn focused on the accounts of 15 survivors. Eyewitness accounts are notoriously unreliable, particularly in times of excitement and stress. But Hearn says he found the survivors’ stories basically consistent and in accord with the news reports of the disaster. “They were the people,” he explains, “who had to struggle mightily for their own lives and who saw family and friends perish all around them.” One man, who had sought refuge in a church with his family, lost his wife, 11 of his children and one grandchild that terrible night. Another victim heard the double-doors of his house snap open and turned to see his new Oldsmobile floating in. An apartment building the inhabitants thought was storm-proof was quickly shredded to the foundation.

Although racial tensions were still running high in Mississippi in the late ’60s, there is no mention of them in the book. “I did not run into any unusual situation that involved the races,” says Hearn. “I think pretty much everyone who lived along that area [where the storm came ashore] was in the same boat. The devastation was so complete. As a matter of fact, it seemed like the people really rallied around one another.” There’s always a problem in sustaining drama with an event that’s brief and whose outcome is already known. But Hearn handles it deftly by holding the ravages of Camille at bay while he gives a brief history of hurricanes, describes how this particular one formed and then follows its killing winds as they roar into the Gulf, sweep over the barrier islands and collide catastrophically with the coast. He demonstrates time and again that he still has a reporter’s eye for precise detail, as in this passage: “The atomic-bomb effect of Camille’s 200-miles-per-hour wind gusts and 25-foot storm surge destroyed 100 years of growth and progress along the Mississippi coast in just three hours. Ancient oak trees were uprooted and washed into the mix with piers, signs, vehicles, boats, power poles, roofs, floors, walls, furniture, appliances, and other scattered residue of civilization. A variety of vessels, including large barges, were lifted from the Gulf and deposited on the beach as sand washed over the seawall, covering or crumbling large portions of U. S. Highway 90.” While Hearn’s descriptions of the storm’s aftermath are less dramatic, they are no less poignant. We learn that the man who lost most of his family coped with his grief by helping rescue workers recover their bodies and then tenderly laying them out side by side. “We’ve got to go on living,” Hearn quotes him as saying. “You can’t run away from it.” Thousands of animals perished in the storm, and hundreds of domesticated ones were killed deliberately “because no facilities or food existed for their care.” In the weeks and months that followed, Hearn reports, many of the survivors suffered severe emotional problems. One woman stepped out of her trailer, surveyed the destruction and shot herself. A psychiatrist estimated that divorces in the area “probably quadrupled” after Camille.

In spite of the formidable research skills and narrative flair he brought to the book, Hearn says that any credit for the book’s impact lies elsewhere. “These people told the story with their personal accounts. I just hoped I could blend it all together.” That he has done.

Throughout the millennia, human beings have existed in a delicate balance with water, beset sometimes by drought, sometimes by flood. In her new book Water Wars: Drought, Flood, Folly, and the Politics of Thirst, Diane Ward observes that today “1.4 billion [people], almost twenty percent of those living on the planet, don’t have an adequate supply of clean water.” At the same time, “an overload of water endangers other peoples and places.” Venice is sinking into the sea, Holland’s delta is threatened as never before, and in Louisiana more than a million acres an area larger than the state of Rhode Island has disappeared into the sea. Floods increasingly threaten the majority of the world’s people who live in coastal areas or on floodplains.

Ward, whose rich background includes science writing, has surveyed water systems throughout the world including India, Pakistan, Egypt, China, Holland and many parts of the U.S. Her description of their strengths and weaknesses makes interesting reading. She looks at two momentous changes that are aggravating our eternal struggle for water. We add 90 million people each year to the world’s population, which both increases the water needed and makes less water available, dirtied by inevitable human, industrial and agricultural wastes. And global climate change, arguably “the biggest story of our lifetimes,” Ward observes, may fundamentally alter the planet on which we live, causing a catalog of calamities. Ward’s insights will be valuable as we confront worsening water crises in the future. Small hydroelectric power plants that can cleanly meet the energy needs of communities, although certainly not a complete solution, can be extremely helpful, she notes.

Near its conclusion, Water Wars cites tensions, skirmishes and full-blown wars over water. The attempt by Jordan and its Arab neighbors to divert water from Israel for their own use was a major cause of the Six Days War. Subsequent water agreements in the Middle East, and in the South Asian trouble spot of India and Pakistan, have prevented new conflicts, but throughout the world demand keeps rising and supply keeps falling.

Of course the water dilemma too much in some places, too little in others is beginning to affect us right here in the U.S. Ward emphasizes the need for public involvement in the critical decisions about water that will have to be made in the future. Water Wars can help us make those decisions wisely. Albert Huebner, a physicist, writes widely on science.

See if this sounds familiar: A terrible disaster occurs, killing throngs of innocent people; the warning signs were there, but those in authority were asleep at the switch, either because of ego or ineptitude. Congressional committees are formed, but the party in power doesn’t want the country to know that they were partly responsible, so they bend the rules and bury the truth. No, we’re not talking about 9/11; we aren’t referring to Oklahoma City, either. This was a natural disaster, and one of epic proportions. Storm of the Century: The Labor Day Hurricane of 1935 by Willie Drye, a regular contributor to American History and Historic Traveler, is the story of the most powerful hurricane in U.S. history. In 1935 it devastated the Florida Keys, and the inaction of those in power led to the deaths of more than 400 people. Later, they quite successfully covered it up.

Told from the perspectives of the veterans and the locals who weathered the storm, the book documents the creation of a WPA project to create a highway between Key West and Miami to put unemployed WWI veterans to work (as far away from Washington as possible). At the same time, he also details the formation and path of an unnamed killer hurricane that inexorably made its way through the Florida straits, then turned north into the Keys. While locals such as Ernest Hemingway warned that trouble was coming, the men in charge of the project didn’t try to evacuate their workers, and a massive loss of life resulted. Alternately a stirring tale of nature’s power and an exposŽ of government ineptitude, Willie Drye’s Storm of the Century is compelling reading. James Neal Webb does copyright research for Vanderbilt University in Nashville.

What kind of advice columnist advocates incest, cannibalism and polygamy? One whose clientele includes moths, slime molds and elephants, among other non-human correspondents. In Dr. Tatiana’s Sex Advice to All Creation (Metropolitan, $24, 272 pages, ISBN 0805063315), biologist Olivia Judson introduces us to the fictional Dr. Tatiana, the only advice columnist to focus on romance in the animal kingdom. The reader might be startled by some of the questions (“I’m a queen bee . . . all my lovers leave their genitals inside me and then drop dead. Is this normal?”) but the purpose of the parody soon becomes clear. What appears to be a collection of tongue-in-cheek advice columns quickly develops into a fascinating study of evolutionary biology.

Judson uses Dr. Tatiana as a vehicle for in-depth discussion of sexual practices that may seem brutal, immoral or even counterintuitive to the casual observer, but are, in fact, essential to species survival. Although she covers complex concepts, Judson keeps her explanations simple, creating a readable and entertaining guide that explains what those birds and bees are up to.

While the more bizarre mating rituals have a sort of morbid appeal, the most amusing letters are from animals who share human concerns: the self-conscious peacock with less than spectacular plumage who can’t get a date might remind you of an insecure friend. And if the dating scene is getting you down, take heart in comparison with some species, humans have it made. If your blind date turns out to be a disaster, at least she won’t try to bite your head off when the evening ends. Emily Morelli

Tim Flannery’s The Weather Makers: How Man Is Changing the Climate and What It Means for Life on Earth may well be the most reader-friendly book to date on the science and consequences of climate change. Flannery breaks down the types of greenhouse gases, where they come from, and what they do to the air and ocean. He shows how warming ocean waters gave Hurricane Katrina the added strength to blow right through Florida and on to New Orleans, and he documents worst-case scenarios for accelerated change.

Flannery and other scientific writers have identified 1976 as the year when the earth’s climate took a serious turn under specifically human influences, when the ocean’s surface waters warmed and its salt content fell. Flannery writes of humanity’s commitment to global warming. We are moving inexorably toward a serious climate shift, due around 2050, based on gases that have already been released into the atmosphere. Like those characters in the Sixth Sense and Jacob’s Ladder who haven’t noticed that they’re dead yet, most of us live in a short-term bubble, blind to what is increasingly obvious and alarming to scientists. Warm the ocean by a degree or two and disaster strikes. Take for example the number of vanishing animal species. Roughly half our rich panoply of creatures could go the way of the dodo by the end of this century. Nor can we any longer ignore the threat of water shortages and famine that may pit us against formerly friendly neighbors and nations in a desperate quest for our personal survival, Flannery notes. We have been running the environmental equivalent of a deficit budget, which is sustained only by plundering our capital base, he writes.

No longer young, Bruce Stutz undergoes risky heart surgery which leaves him in the depths of post-operative depression, something physicians call pumphead when their patients aren’t listening. He wakes up strangling on a breathing tube. His hospital roommate screams to be taken to the animal hospital. Welcome to aging. In just a few pages of Chasing Spring: An American Journey Through a Changing Season, Stutz somehow captures the whole experience of sickness and hospitalization the disenchantment with humanity, the loss of confidence in the future, the sense that the party is over and it’s all downhill from here. But Stutz doesn’t settle into his rocker and start decaying, he fights for his recovery. Not so much a physical recovery, which has been more or less secured by successful surgery, but a spiritual recovery. What’s the cure for spiritual winter? Spring, of course. So Stutz sets out to experience spring its symbols, indicators and rituals. He begins in Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania, home of the famed groundhog oracle. Next stop is a rural Mardi Gras celebration in which local Cajuns start drinking and chasing chickens at around 10 in the morning. In a vintage Chevrolet Impala, a fit companion and analogue for our hero himself, he chases frogs, salamanders, morels and caribou in a trip that spans the North American continent. Stutz chases not only an ever-changing horizon, he also tracks scientists who can show him the biological meaning of spring. From West Virginia to Arizona, Montana, Oregon and Alaska, he pursues the magical chemistry of warmth and light, the mystical parents of life itself. Stutz’s journey ends in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. With 96 hours of unbroken daylight, Stutz swears the wildflowers are actually blossoming before his eyes. And, at this point in the story, the reader notices something. Stutz’s style now reflects the awe and reverence he feels in the presence of life’s raw force. He’s drunk on spring. In his own words, I’ve begun to identify my existence with that of the season’s, imagining that all of spring’s transformations, enticements, multivarious sensual and fragile beauties (for which I’ve been an obsequious sucker) have all been proffered for my benefit. . . . I’ve fallen in love with the spring of my own being.

While fossil evidence shows that the voracious Rocky Mountain locust was rampant in what is now North America as early as the 12th century, it didn’t reach its peak of collective destructiveness there until the 1870s. Miles-long clouds of the insects blanketed the territory between the Mississippi River and the Rocky Mountains by then, destroying untold acres of crops and bringing tens of thousands of settlers to the brink of starvation. By the dawn of the 20th century, however, the dreaded marauder had become extinct. Jeffrey Lockwood, a professor of natural sciences and humanities at the University of Wyoming, describes the locust’s impact on American agriculture, science and social policy, and chronicles his own discovery of how the species died off so quickly in the wide-ranging book Locust: The Devastating Rise and Mysterious Disappearance of the Insect that Shaped the American Frontier.

At the height of their depredations, the locusts swept in like summer storms. “They came rattling and pattering on the houses, and against the windows, falling in the fields, on the prairies and in the waters everywhere and on everything,” wrote a Kansas observer, who told of an invasion of his land that began at one in the afternoon. “By about 4 o’clock,” he continued, “every tree and bush, buildings, fences, fields, roads, and everything, except animated beings, was completed covered.” Once on the ground, these creatures would reduce flourishing cornfields “into a desolate stretch of bare, spindling stalks and stubs.” The devastation was so widespread, Lockwood reports, that local communities could not provide sufficient relief. The state and national governments had to intervene, thus beginning a pattern of farm assistance that continues to this day. Then, as now, some politicians were reluctant to offer help, not for budgetary limitations only but because they thought charity would lead to moral corrosion and dependence. While the state governments argued the pros and cons of relief, they also called for official days of prayer, seeing in the disasters echoes of the biblical plagues. Some of the forward-looking states hired scientists to apply reason to the problem. In the meantime, entrepreneurs poured forth a tide of machines and potions, all designed to obliterate the invaders, but none of which proved very effective. Although he touches on all these side effects, Lockwood concentrates on profiling the major entomologists who took on the locusts and assessing their findings, theories and achievements.

After it became apparent that the Rocky Mountain locust was either extinct or monumentally dormant, scientists undertook to find the cause. Some thought it could be explained by the introduction of alfalfa crops (not a locust favorite). Others argued that it proceeded from changes in weather patterns or the decimation of the buffalo herds. But Lockwood, taking his cue from the fate of the monarch butterflies, whose regeneration zone in Mexico is rapidly being destroyed, contends that it was the settlers’ cultivation of the high fields in the Rocky Mountain river valleys, where the locusts retreated between invasions, that ultimately did in these ravenous creatures.

In spite of the complexity of his subject, Lockwood relates his story with simplicity and humor. Readers with an interest in science and history particularly that of the frontier will enjoy this well-told entomological mystery. Edward Morris reviews from Nashville.