Signing & Presentation with James McCommons

Join Front Street Books at the Alpine Public Library for a book signing and presentation with author James McCommons!!! The signing will be on Tuesday, March 24th from 6 – 8 PM at Alpine Public Library.

James McCommons is a veteran journalist, specializing in ecology, environmental, and travel topics. He has written hundreds of general interest magazine articles for Audubon, the History Channel, NYT, Wildlife Conservation, and so many more. He has also written three books: Waiting on a Train, Camera Hunter, and The Feather Wars (out on March 17th)

The Feather Wars tells the dramatic story of America’s early conservation movement—a decades-long struggle around the turn of the 20th century to save birds from extinction when Americans, intoxicated by Manifest Destiny’s excesses, treated wildlife as a commodity to be monetized and consumed.  Bird numbers plummeted; some species went extinct. The book chronicles the birth of the Audubon movement, the passage of the Migratory Bird Act, the emergence of ethics in sport hunting, the transition of ornithology from shotgun to sight-recognition, and the transformation in American culture that ushered in the conservation era. That transformation, of course, remains unfinished. Today, one-third of all North American bird species are still at risk. While the causes differ from a century ago, the lessons of that earlier crusade offer both inspiration and a practical template for addressing today’s environmental challenges.