Radical Environmentalists: Radical in Whose Mind?

In just about every other speech he makes, former Senator Rick Santorum, when he’s not proselytizing and driving his religious myths into the electoral process and attempting to erase the distinct line between church and state, cries foul at the “radical environmentalists” who fight and question what the oil, gas and coal companies are doing to our environment. He sneers as he utters the phrase “radical environmentalists” with the same intensity as when he decries Satan’s attack on, and infiltration of, America and American values. He conveniently forgets/ignores/ disregards/conceals the fact that he was a spokesman and defacto lobbyist for the coal industry after his failed attempt at reelection to the Senate in 2006. An online article published by Mother Jones  discusses how, after his defeat, Rick Santorum received $142,500 for fronting for Consol Energy, one of the largest coal mining companies in the country, which Santorum depicted as a local Pennsylvania mining concern. During his tenure in the Senate, Santorum also received more than $73,800 in donations from Consol at the same time the coal company lobbied Congress “on pollution limits, mine reclamation, worker health benefits, and tax policy” and the industry spent millions on its fictitious “clean coal” campaign. Paul Blumenthal’s Huffington Post piece, posted January 5, 2012, links Santorum, while still in office, to disgraced Republican Congressman Tom Delay, convicted lobbyist Jack Abramoff, and the Republican/Christian fundamentalist, anti-environmental lobbying efforts of the K Street Project.

Santorum never mentions any of these connections when he sneers his “radical environmentalist” taunts before his like-minded audiences.  After all, he is just a company man defending his livelihood.

Radical environmentalist is one of those skeletal, value-loaded phrases, without much meat attached to it. It reeks of panic and phobia. It also echoes the labels (and threats) put on a radical environmentalist from the 1960s who, in her book Silent Spring, identified the dangers of saturating our ecosystems and food chains with persistent insecticides. Chemical company executives, using scare tactics, claimed that Rachel Carson, a reserved marine biologist, wished to return to times of crops lost to great insect plagues resulting in national and worldwide famine. They referred to her as a fanatic in the cult of the balance of nature. Some (many) birds, fish, beneficial insects, and other wildlife species were poisoned and brought to the edge of extinction by disrupted reproductive cycles and pitiful chemical-induced birth defects. Entire ecosystems were in danger of destruction, but the millions of pounds of DDT applied to farmlands and forests and ultimately our lakes and rivers, in the name of national interest put fortunes into the pockets of chemical companies.

When did the American public hand over rights to the environment to corporations? Never is when. If Rachel Carson hadn’t spoken out how many species would be gone now and how many more waterways would be poisoned beyond reclamation? How many cancers? How many birth defects? Ask the chemical companies that ridiculed her findings in the face of repeated scientific conclusions.

Today’s “radical environmentalists” fight, among other things, Rick Santorums’s unfounded, anti-environmental, ant-science scare-tactic claims that environmentalists are destroying “clean coal” jobs and endangering our national interest, not to mention his paycheck. Sound familiar?

My book The Double-Crested Cormorant: Symbol of Ecological Conflict is now available in a  hardcover version at www.amazon.com, www.barnesandnoble.com and the University of Michigan Press, www.press.umich.edu which also offers an E-book edition. Also, check your local booksellers for availability.

For insights into the book, log on to my Author Page at Amazon at www.amazon.com/author/dennis-wild.

The Real Value of the "Getting Published" Process

A year or so ago I attended a writer’s conference in New York. I had looked forward to it for a few months and gone through the seminar schedule several times to make the most of my one day there, being careful not to miss the most interesting speakers.  The hotel was wall-to-wall writers, every one excited about the day, and for some the entire weekend. As I checked in, sat through the short orientation, and engaged some of the other attendees, I soon realized that few, if any of them, had ever been published, and fewer yet had any idea of how to go about getting published. They were there at the conference to work the process out in their heads.

The vast majority of the writers worked in fiction – historical, science, romance, horror, mystery, short stories, and novels.  I enjoyed hearing how other writers had chosen their specialties and how they had developed their characters and plot lines. As a nonfiction writer I was definitely in the minority, but I had anticipated as much from the catalogue of speakers and topics. Everyone chatted about their aspirations, but no one showed all their cards; there was certainly a sense of camaraderie, but we were also competitors. I came out, unintentionally, as the battle-scarred veteran with a book contract and publication date, even with the nonfiction tag.

During the lunch break, when I broached the subject of submissions and collections of rejection letters, faces around the table went blank. I sensed no one in my lunch group had ever submitted a manuscript.

 I also surprisingly heard several presenters, including the keynote speaker, discuss how simple, and uncomplicated a matter it was to get published.  This paradigm in no way matched my book or magazine writing experiences, but I was eager to hear of a different paradigm. And shortly out came the secret: self-publishing.

The myth of self-publishing is that it allows writers to see their words, ideas, and characters in print without facing the selective judgment of acquisition editors or the cruel strokes of the copyeditor. The myth of self-publishing also preaches the gospel of absolute control of authors over their words, content, copyright, format, marketing, and sales. The myth doesn’t have much to say about what is lost in by-passing the revision process, incurred costs, advertising campaigns, distribution, reviews, exposure to the know-how of experienced editors, and the fact that few booksellers, especially the chain stores, show little or no interest in self-published works.

One of the most irritating aspects of the self-publishing world is an examination of who promulgates the myth. The conference I spoke of was promoted and organized by Writer’s Digest, publisher of the magazine of the same name and a series of how-to writers’ guides. The same magazine advertises products and supplies without which writers cannot create or exist: coffee mugs, T-shirts, and baseball caps, all emblazoned with the label, “Writer.” The recent addition to Writer’s Digest’s catalogue of goodies is their entry into the world of self-publishing. Aside from the numerous revenue-producing ads inviting authors to publish their own creations, the magazine now offers its own book publishing services to writers. The process offers consulting, publishing, editing, and other services, all with fees attached. And conveniently, the number of articles in the magazine espousing the values and advantages of self-publishing over traditional publishing has markedly increased.

Writers put their efforts, thoughts, and hearts into their evolving manuscripts. In that pouring out of personal visions, promoting the idea that a mug or shirt will make better, more successful writer or will let others know they are writers, puts a smile on everyone’s face, writers included. No harm done. But when vulnerable writers are encouraged by a self-publishing company, which they otherwise consider a reliable source, to self-publish, one has to re-evaluate the integrity of the source.

Self-serving conflicts of interest must always be suspect. But the misrepresentation of self-publishing as a viable alternative to traditional publishing with comparable success, intentionally leads novice writers astray, diminishes their real chances of success, and ruins the priceless learning models discovered through re-writing and revision, probably the real value of the “getting published” process.    

An Atlantic Fishery in Trouble, or Thriving, or Something

Gadus morhua, is a very strange name for what some people see as an even uglier fish. A fish that can reach lengths of over four feet weighing of 55-77 pounds or more, living as long as 20 years, although most fish landed are in the 2-4 year-old class. Millions of this species come to U.S. ports and markets through the efforts of American commercial fishing. We see fillets from this common fish in restaurants’ “fish and chips” platters, in frozen food supermarket coolers, and in the cases of local fish mongers. Its tasty white flesh is accepted and enjoyed even by landlubbers who ordinarily might not seek out fish as their protein source. What is it? It’s the once ubiquitous Atlantic cod.

The head of NOAA’s fisheries section called the Atlantic cod “one of the iconic fisheries.” This is the same fish that fed early European settlers all along America’s northern to mid-Atlantic coast, from near-shore fisheries to the edge of the continental shelf; a species whose overfished stocks collapsed, some in the 1990s, or are in danger of imminent collapse. A stock is considered “collapsed” when it declines by more than 95 percent of its maximum historical biomass. An amazing reversal of fortune.

These commercially valuable fish are tracked, monitored, and managed in the Northwest Atlantic (northeastern U.S. coast) as two defined stocks: (1) the Gulf of Maine and (2) the Georges Bank and Southward. Commercial and recreational cod fishermen are active year round; commercial operators using trawls and gillnets, recreational anglers dropping lines from charter and large overnight party boats. In 2010 the commercial catch was valued at more than $15 million, obviously an important component of the Northeast’s economy.

The New York Times, in a February 11, 2012 article, reported that recent data revealed that the cod faces such enormous fishing pressure that if all human pursuit of the species ended right now, it would not rebound to federally required levels even by 2014. Federal regulators therefore proposed an 82 percent reduction from the previous year’s catch, a limit that would effectively shut down much of the cod fishery and, at least temporarily, retire many of the boats, crews, and skippers. Another drawback to such a large catch reduction in cod is that G. morhua is only one of a group of 20 groundfish species, including flounder and haddock, that are monitored and regulated as one unit because these bottom-dwellers often travel, swim, and feed together, resulting in them turning up in the same nets at the same time. The fate of one of these species often affects the others.

No one doubts that fishing is hard, sometimes dangerous, work performed in every sort of weather and sea conditions. It is also an old industry that has fewer and fewer new entrants. The sons and daughters of owners and captains, searching for careers far away from the cruel seas, increasingly shy away from following in their family’s or father’s footsteps. This aversion to fishing also runs counter to the increasing demand for seafood to feed an ever-growing human population: fewer boats and skippers, fewer fish.

The current cod situation exemplifies how immediate needs often supersede what really has to be done to better protect future needs. It is rare that a fisherman, commercial or sport (and I am a sport fisherman) ever utters that he is catching too many fish. If fact, there is an economic principle called the Tragedy of the Commons, which applies more to the fishing industry than probably any other, which maintains that a fisherman, knowing he is damaging his livelihood in the long run, would prefer to take his share or more of the common bounty just to prevent his competitor from doing the same. It’s a short term self-defense tactic. It is also not unusual for fishermen’s associations to question the science involved in setting fishing limits and seasons, even challenging the idea that certain fish stocks are in trouble at all. They often reject any finding that reflects poorly on their industry practices until the conclusion is proven true to an absolute degree and it’s too late to do anything to effectively correct it.

So, to placate the industry and stall the inevitable, NOAA regulators, adopting a one-year emergency rule, saw fit to reduce the 2012 catch by only 22 percent from the previous year. Fishermen are happier, regulators have the fishermen’s lobby temporarily off their backs, consumers will continue to see cod and their groundfish neighbors in their markets, and the cod stocks will continue to get smaller and smaller, perhaps until they become so scarce that they are no longer worth pursuing, by trawl or rod-and-reel.

My book The Double-Crested Cormorant: Symbol of Ecological Conflict is now available in a  hardcover version at www.amazon.com, www.barnesandnoble.com and the University of Michigan Press, www.press.umich.edu which also offers an E-book edition. Also, check your local booksellers for availability.

For insights into the book, log on to my Author Page at Amazon at www.amazon.com/author/dennis-wild.  

The Sandhill Crane: Tastes Like Pork

Double-crested cormorants faced the challenge of becoming “overabundant.” Their numbers were so low for so long that more than one human generation grew up never seeing large gatherings of cormorants, either at their northern breeding grounds or favorite southern wintering quarters. When cormorant numbers rebounded after DDT was finally banned in 1972, fishermen, politicians and even bird watchers were astonished at their numbers. And for some, even though cormorant populations were probably still below their historic highs, the bird’s large flocks were seen as “out of control” and the birds were eating too many fish. So they, meaning catfish farmers, fishermen, and government technicians, shot them – by the tens of thousands. The remains of the birds were usually composted onsite or elsewhere since the meat is inedible. A cruel, terrible waste of food chain energy and biomass.

Now it is the Sandhill Crane, Grus canadensis, that comes under the gun as an “out-of-control” species. After decades of conservation efforts in many locations to protect thinning numbers of rare sandhill cranes, threatened due to overhunting in the 1930s, conventional wisdom now turns to lethal measures to control a perceived overabundance. The evolutionary line of cranes goes back about 10 million years, with distinct sandhill crane ancestors appearing about 2.5 million years ago. Like cormorants, there are several subspecies of sandhills, but unlike cormorants some are rare or endangered.

Sandhill cranes, typically do not deal with fish in their diets, so they’re not in competition with fishermen or fish farmers. The cranes are basically opportunistic herbivores, living off whatever plants or seeds are available, so they can manage to find food in drier upland areas as well as shallow wetlands. Sandhill cranes dine on wild berries, seeds of many kinds, and when the possibility presents itself, small mammals, reptiles, amphibians, and invertebrates such as snails and insects. What actually brings them into conflict with man, farmers in particular, is their decided taste for cultivated foods such as corn and wheat. Sandhills frequently target recently planted corn and wheat fields, much like cormorants raid the densely stocked catfish ponds in the South in search of an easy meal.

To protect their fields, farmers in Wisconsin are requesting the creation of legal hunting seasons for sandhill cranes. More than a dozen states, with more in the offing, have established seasons, bag limits and takes for this once rare bird. Unlike cormorants, however, the flesh of sandhill cranes is edible and is reported by hunters to taste much like pork chops, so the birds are not merely killed, but also consumed.

Regardless of whether the carcasses are destined for the compost or the dinner table, it seems, at best, inefficient to spend decades reviving a rare, threatened species only to turn around and put it in hunters’ sights. What is really ignored here is the questioning of why the birds feed at agricultural sites rather than at open upland ranges or food-rich shallow wetlands. The one-word answer is habitat. Every day more and more open land is taken out of the natural food chain and converted from prairie or open range or upland habitat or wetland to real estate – development or reclamation projects, leaving wildlife without a natural home, driving it into conflict with humans.

In science fiction literature and physics thought experiments it’s common to postulate what happens when human subjects are locked in suspended animation and time goes on without them. When they awaken the world has changed and there is no place for them in the future. The return of nearly-extinct species sometimes falls into this type of scenario. There often comes a point when threatened wildlife species regain some of their original stature, attempt to re-colonize former territories and expand into new ones, but during the decades of their absence people forgot what they were, how plentiful their numbers had been, and their place in the ecosystem. In that future the returning wildlife has lost its claim to respectable habitat and moves into territory appropriated by humans in its absence, setting the stage once again for lethal control measures of “overabundant” species, even the ones that taste like pork.

My book The Double-Crested Cormorant: Symbol of Ecological Conflict is now available in a  hardcover version at www.amazon.com, www.barnesandnoble.com and the University of Michigan Press, www.press.umich.edu which also offers an E-book edition. Also, check your local booksellers for availability.

For insights into the book, log on to my Author Page at Amazon at www.amazon.com/author/dennis-wild.  

What's Happening to Our Bats

Bats. Thought threatening by some people, our bats, rather than fearsome creatures, are harmless minders of nature and keepers of its balance. Bats, like bees and their cousins are pollinators, not only helping to produce our fruit and decorative flowers, but at the same time devouring millions of insects that might otherwise torment humans or damage fragile, economically important crops. And like other animals such as birds, squirrels, mice, and chipmunks they transport plant seeds as they search for food, ensuring continued plant diversity.

The problem now is they’re dying off, by the millions.

The cause, White-nose Syndrome (WNS), was discovered and photographed in a New York cave in 2006 where hibernating bats were observed with unnatural white noses. It was further documented and named the following year by biologists from the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation (NYSDEC) who witnessed erratic bat behaviors and hundreds of dead bats in scattered bats across the state. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service reported that “more than a million hibernating bats have died since then, making WNS the worst wildlife health crisis in memory.” The disease plagues multiple species of bats in caves and mines in sixteen states and four Canadian provinces with lethality of near 100 percent in hibernating bat populations.

Although the actual cause of death in these bats is not understood, the Fish and Wildlife Service describes the white muzzle growth as a newly discovered cold-loving fungus, Geomyces destructans. In lab experiments, 100 percent of bats exposed to G. destructans developed WNS. The spores of the fungus are apparently spread bat-to-bat, but like many pathogens may have other paths of infection.

G. destructans is undoubtedly the culprit, but where did it come from and why now? Some species of bats in Europe are known to display white noses, but show none of the symptoms of the disease. A paper published in the journal Emerging Infectious Diseases uncovered data showing that the white-nose growth in European bats was caused by G. destructans infection. The authors of the article proposed that the fungus had probably originated in Europe but did not kill the bats because the flying mammals and the fungus had evolved together, with the bats eventually developing immunity to the attacking fungus. North American bats evolved in the absence of G. destructans and so had no such immunity when it attacked.

The question the paper does not attempt to answer, or even propose a theoretical model for, is how the fungus or its spores were introduced to a new continent and how it managed to find its way into the depths of North American  mines and caves. The transport mechanism is still unknown, and may never be understood. It seems though another invasive species has found a new home with no natural controls to keep the fungus in check.

Why be concerned about the bats? Why spend the time and research dollars? The bat’s insect-killing potential replaces tons of insecticides that would be needed to protect crops and eliminate swarms of biting mosquitoes. The same mechanism that allowed the fungus to gain a deadly foothold in the caves could someday be responsible for the introduction of an invasive species that attacks farm stocks, fish farms, agricultural products, or perhaps even humans.

Thriving bat populations are another indication of a healthy environment. Millions of dead bats tell us that something is very wrong.

My book The Double-Crested Cormorant: Symbol of Ecological Conflict is now available in a trade hardcover version at Amazon.com, Barnes and Noble.com, and the University of Michigan Press, which also offers an E-book edition. Also, check your local booksellers for availability.

For insights into the book log on to my Author Page at Amazon at www.amazon.com/author/dennis-wild.

Learning To Be Big

There is a waterway on Cape Cod, actually a number of them by the same name, this one in Wellfleet, called the Herring River. Several towns on the Cape have named streams after the once ubiquitous river herring (now protected and prohibited from use as bait by recreational anglers and from harvests by commercial operators) that enters their tidal streams every spring to spawn. Like many other game fish, striped bass follow and ambush the herring on their spawning run. Herring are to the bass like Snickers bars are to trick-or-treating kids on Halloween.

The tidal Herring River in Wellfleet flows under Chequesset Neck road into Wellfleet Harbor, a beautiful corner of Cape Cod Bay. The river is physically separated from the bay by a dike equipped with self-adjusting tidal gates, creating a tailwater situation on each side as the tide floods and ebbs.

The river side of the dike, because of its warmer water and flow of nutrients and plankton, has become a tidal nursery for juvenile forage fish, particularly menhaden, an oily filter-feeding fish, known locally as “pogies” or in some areas “bunker,” greatly sought after by game fish such as striped bass and toothy bluefish. The Herring River, in nature’s whimsy, is also a summer nursery for “snappers,” juvenile versions of “slammers,” the jumbo adult bluefish that perpetually pursue schools of roaming adult pogies.

It was a clear, bright day in October, Columbus Day actually, when I stood on the river side of the dike observing the interplay between the huge schools of two-inch pogies and the roving schools of voracious snappers.

The pogies when at rest aligned themselves facing into the fast current feeding on the rich plankton crop drifting past. Virtually every single-celled planktonic organism, animal, plant and crossovers, contains a droplet of oil within its membrane or cell wall to help regulate its depth in the water column; the same oil that gives pogy flesh its oily texture. This type of feeding behavior is a rehearsal for later life when, as twelve-inch fish, pogy schools filter millions of plankton on an almost continuous basis. And like the rehearsal by the pogies, the snappers of Herring River prepare for later life as ten-pound-plus marauding predators, by cruising beneath the tiny pogies, individually charging toward the surface attacking a individual pogies from the rear and devouring it, either completely or leaving behind a shocked, bleeding head. The flash of silvery bluefish scales told the story each time a young pogy lost its future prospects.

The pogies somehow, in their own way, recognized the protective benefits of living and feeding in schools, and at the same time, accepted the reality of being converted to omega-rich bluefish flesh at almost any time in their lives.

This snapper -pogy interaction takes place every fall in virtually every bay and estuary on Cape Cod. There is a certain peace that comes while observing the process from atop the Wellfleet dike. In a time of great despair for some people, it’s possible to stand there and imagine the sequence playing out on the Cape for the last hundred centuries, since the last melting glaciers deposited their sandy burdens creating the Cape. It also produces a sense of reassurance, reflecting on how that same predator-prey relationship might continue forever, or at least until the last factory ship grinds up the last pogy for cat food or fish oil capsules.

My book The Double-Crested Cormorant: Symbol of Ecological Conflict is now available in a trade hardcover version at Amazon.com, Barnes and Noble.com, and the University of Michigan Press, which also offers an E-book edition. Also, check your local booksellers for availability.

For insights into the book log on to my Author Page at Amazon at www.amazon.com/author/dennis-wild.

Natural Cormorant Controls

One of the major issues I discuss in my book published by the University of Michigan Press, The Double-Crested Cormorant: Symbol of Ecological Conflict, is the role the southern catfish industry played in the extraordinary recovery of cormorant populations following the species’ near annihilation due to DDT.

The ban of DDT in the United States in 1972 promised a better future for Phalacrocorax auritus, the double-crested cormorant. Every year thereafter the birds would face lower burdens of the persistent insecticides in their food, eggs, offspring, and environment. What effectively was a booster shot to the cormorant recovery was the virtually simultaneous depletion of predators such as Atlantic salmon and lake trout in the Great Lakes due to overfishing and pollution. As the predators disappeared, populations of both native and non-native forage fish species, preferred food of cormorants, bloomed entirely out of proportion. The birds’ higher reproductive success rates coupled with massive schools of prey there for the taking at their breeding grounds drove cormorant numbers toward previous historic highs. One of the remaining population-controlling factors was the food sources at the cormorant’s southern wintering grounds.

At about the same time commercial fisheries crashed on the Great Lakes, southern row-crop farmers turned to the channel catfish as an alternate or supplemental crop. Catfish farmers never anticipated the fantastic growth in cormorant numbers, so gave little thought to protecting the heavily stocked catfish ponds from wintering cormorants. Thousand, perhaps tens of thousands of double-crested cormorants, fed all winter on the millions of unguarded catfish offered up by the growers. With rich plentiful food at both ends of their migration, cormorant numbers surged further – some local populations doubling in three years. Soaring bird numbers brought increased conflicts with Great Lakes fishermen and southern catfish producers resulting in cruel culling programs legally and illegally killing and wounding thousands of wild, federally protected cormorants.

The issue of the catfish industry affecting cormorant numbers should be taken into account when considering future lethal measures in cormorant management. Many catfish farmers facing huge increases in the cost of corn/soy catfish feed products closed some or all of their production ponds. Some were drained, plowed over, and restored to corn and soybean production. Other ponds were converted to the raising of largemouth bass, cultivated in less densely populated ponds, making them more difficult targets for P. auritus to attack. In either case, fewer catfish were available to hungry wintering cormorants, reducing the number of fatted, healthy birds prepared for the arduous migration north. From 2002 to 2011 every southern catfish-producing state experienced large decreases in acreage dedicated to channel catfish cultivation; overall acreage for U.S. catfish production shrank by 49% in those nine years.

This decrease in U.S. catfish production does not at all relate to the continuing, if not increasing, popularity of catfish fillets as table fare. In the seafood game, domestic farm-raised channel catfish products rank sixth in the United States. The gap in the U.S. between lower catfish production and increased consumption has been filled by foreign imports – particularly Pangasius catfish, farm-raised on the Mekong Delta of Vietnam. If the term Pangasius catfish doesn’t ring a bell it’s because domestic catfish producers lobbied U.S. government agencies to prevent importers from calling this product “catfish.” In American stores it is marketed as Basa fish or bocourti, also two unfamiliar names.

On top of cormorant predation, high production costs, low market prices, and foreign competition, American catfish producers faced another opponent with uncontrollable parameters – nature and the epic floods of 2011. Catfish farms along the Mississippi River Delta faced storm-driven waters which flooded roads, reduced feed supplies, topped their catfish pond levies, released their fish stock into the wild, and in some cases flooded their buildings. The damages and loss of production are yet to be tabulated, but surely what it means is, temporarily at least, catfish farming and production will be reduced even further.

So, all in all, what does this have to do with brutal, bloody sanctioned cormorant kills? Double-crested cormorants have little taste for corn or soybeans. They’re not grain-eating crows or geese; cormorants eat fish and have a predilection for catfish, particularly the penned-up, farm-raised variety. Fewer ponds produce fewer catfish – less winter chow for cormorants. The birds will have to return to foraging the Mississippi River and its tributaries for wild bluegills, perch, and wild channel catfish. And the whole package taken together means fewer healthy cormorants producing fewer healthy offspring.

Since the availability of food is a major limiting force for the expansion or contraction of wildlife populations an alternative then to government contract technicians killing tens of thousands of wild birds might be to let nature simply take its course. The birds wintering in the delta migrate from the northeast and mid-west so anything that places limits on their numbers in the South will send fewer cormorants to their traditional northern breeding grounds and cormorant populations may find newer, reduced numbers, naturally. And maybe the rifles and shotguns can be put away – at least for a while.

My book The Double-Crested Cormorant: Symbol of Ecological Conflict is now available in a trade hardcover version at Amazon.com, Barnes and Noble.com, and the University of Michigan Press, http://www.press.umich.edu/  which also offers an E-book edition. Also, check your local booksellers for availability. 

For insights into the book log on to my Author Page at www.amazon.com/author/dennis-wild .