Environment

TV critic David Bianculli reviews the new nature documentary miniseries by Sir David Attenborough. Life of Mammals is in ten parts and begins tonight on the Discovery Channel.

Scientist and conservationist Dr. Alan Rabinowitz. He’s been called the “Indiana Jones” of wildlife science. He is Director of the Science and Exploration Program at the Wildlife Conservation Society, based at the Bronx Zoo in New York. In 1985 his research in Belize resulted in the world’s first jaguar sanctuary. Since then he has spearheaded the preservation of vast tracts of wilderness land around the globe. The survival of the Jaguar is now in jeopardy.

His new book is Heat Wave: A Social Autopsy of Disaster in Chicago. It*s about a 1995 heat wave in that city which proved to be an insidious natural disaster. Streets buckled, electric power blew, and over 700 people died. Klinenberg is an associate professor of Sociology at New York University.

Freelance firefighter Peter Leschak has battled forest fires in the Northwoods and the West for over 20 years. Hes written several works of nonfiction as well as a memoir, Hellroaring. His new book is Ghost of the Fireground: Echoes of the Great Peshtigo Fire and the Calling of a Wildland Firefighter. (HarperSanFrancisco). Its about the 1871 wildfire in Peshtigo, Wisconsin which was the deadliest fire in North American history. Coincidentally it started the very day and hour as the Great Chicago Fire.

An expert in climate change research, Paul Mayewski led the National Science Foundation's Greenland Ice Sheet Project 2. The project extracted ice cores chronicling 100,000 years of climate history. Mayewski, with co-author Frank White, writes about their expeditions in the new book, The Ice Chronicles: The Quest to Understand Global Climate Change (University Press of New England). Mayewski is also co-director of the Institute of Quaternary and Climate Studies at the University of Maine.

Botanist Margaret Lowman. She's a pioneer in research on forest canopies, i.e, the treetops - their inhabitants, flowers, fruits and morality. Her new book is "Life in the Treetops: Adventures of a Woman in Field Biology" (Yale Book News). LOWMAN is director of research and conservation at the Marie Selby Botanical Gardens in Sarasota, Florida.

Journalist Mark Hertsgaard. He traveled around the world examining environmentally-damaged places. His new book about it is, "Earth Odyssey: Around the world in Search of Our Environmental Future" (Broadway Books). Hertsgaard also writes for the New York times, The New Yorker, the Atlantic Monthly, and the Nation.

Phillips is the project leader of the Yellowstone National Park Wolf Restoration Program. Last year, 14 gray wolves were transported from the Canadian wilderness to Wyoming. It marked the beginning of the project to restore wolves to an area from where they had been absent for nearly 100 years. Phillips provides an update on the program. Phillips has co-authored a book with Douglas Smith titled "The Wolves of Yellowstone."

Peacock has devoted the last 20 years to saving the grizzly bear. Like many veterans, he had trouble adjusting when he returned from Vietnam. He sought a life of seclusion in the mountains and it was then that he first encountered grizzly bears. Now, he performs research alone through the mountains of Wyoming and Montana studying the behavior, social hierarchy, and communication methods of grizzlies in their natural habitat. In addition to his several books, he recently contributed to "Mark of the Bear: Legend and Lore of An American Icon."

Author Jonathan Harr has written a new nonfiction book: "A Civil Action: A Real-Life Legal Thriller." (Random House). The Boston Globe describes it as "a narrative as deeply involving as one of the earliest of its genre, "In Cold Blood." A fascinating work of literary reportage."