Selling Power - Marketing Energy Under Deregulation is a comprehensive look at the issues confronting energy companies preparing marketing strategies. Specific marketing solutions are provided with case studies.

The Northern Spotted Owl - An Oregon View tells the story of a battle to save the forests in a backdrop of economic troubles in the Pacific Northwest.

"The economy in the Pacific Northwest is a disaster," says the author. In January 2003, newspapers in Portland and Salem, Oregon, featured reports on the deplorable financial situation in state and local governments. Funds for social services have been slashed as state tax revenues continue to fall below projected levels on which all budgets are based. School funding is in crisis, with drastic spending cuts in schools, colleges and universities, resulting in cutbacks and even wholesale elimination of many high quality educational programs. Unemployment is at record levels, consistently placing Oregon with the fiftieth highest level of the fifty United States. News stories suggest that greatly reduced timber harvest on national forests may be a contributing factor to the economic problems of the region.

Rightly or Wrongly, it was the Northern Spotted Owl that brought about that reduction in timber harvests.

This book is the story of the spotted owl and its role in the interplay of environmentalism, the timber industry, the economy and ultimately the quality of life in the Pacific Northwest. This volume traces the battles that were fought and the pain and anguish of affected people from the vantage point of one Oregon state representative, Representative Liz VanLeeuwen, to preserve the forests and protect the owl. The book is based on resource material from 360 different sources, including government reports, news articles, correspondence and letters to the editors, Liz VanLeeuwen used to support her political position.

Groups interested in making preservation of all forests in the Pacific Northwest their highest priority needed a means of legally preventing all or most timber harvest. They sought an issue on which to focus their legal battle. The Northern Spotted Owl ended up serving that purpose. Congress had passed the Endangered Species Act in 1973. A young biologist, Eric Forsman, had selected the Northern Spotted Owl for the subject of his graduate research, the conclusion of which was that the owl needed old growth forest for survival. Environmentalists took this conclusion and combined it with the legal power of the Endangered Species Act to stop timber harvests on federal land in the region. This book maps out just how successful the environmental campaign was in shutting down federal timber harvests-and also the devastating effect this process has had on the Pacific Northwest.

Citizens in rural communities in western Washington and Oregon and northern California warned against the consequences of reduced federal timber harvest. These communities had developed and grown economically and socially based in large measure on jobs and infrastructure generated by the harvest of timber from the federally owned national forests. State and local governments in these regions also became dependent on the payments in lieu of taxes from the federal government for these timber harvests. The size of those payments was based on the amount of timber harvested. The funds, in the tens of millions of dollars, were used to support schools and build and maintain roads. The economy of the Pacific Northwest was based on this natural resource based economy.

Citizens of these so-called timber-dependent communities understood that not only their local economies, but also those of their entire states and regions depended on the natural resource base. In fact, they understood this better than their counterparts in the region's cities and populous suburbs. While small town residents and the politicians representing them warned of the dire consequences of closing down the timber industry, residents of the more populous areas felt confidant that they were justified in closing down timber. They congratulated themselves for having successfully moved the Northwest into modern prosperity on the back of companies like Microsoft (WA), Intel and Tektronix (OR). For many years, the devastating effects of eliminating the timber-based economies were masked by what is now known as the high-tech bubble,

But when that bubble burst at the end of the 90's, it soon became apparent that the spotted owl had been used not only to shut down most federal timber harvests in the Northwest, but also to decimate the economic and social infrastructure of the Pacific Northwest. In this book, completed in January, 2003, the author attempts to trace the unfortunate developments that have led to the economic disaster that is Oregon today.

Skokholm is a remote island nature reserve located off the southwest coast of Pembrokeshire, Wales. Home to over 100,000 seabirds (including the third-largest Manx shearwater colony in the World), it was made famous by pioneer naturalist Ronald Mathias Lockley in the 1930s and 1940s as a result of the many books that he wrote about it. He leased Skokholm for 20 years from 1928 until 1948, during which time he established Britain's first Bird Observatory (in 1933). The field outing of the 8th International Ornithological Congress was held on the island in the following year. The Pembrokeshire Bird Protection Society (now the Wildlife Trust of South & West Wales), of which Lockley was a founder, took over the lease in 1948, and ran the island as a ringing station and nature reserve. In 1954 it was notified as a Site of Special Scientific Interest.

A huge number of studies have been carried out looking into the lives of the various birds, the House Mice and Rabbits, invertebrates, plants and plant communities. In 1963 the Edward Grey Institute for Field Ornithology became involved and began a number of studies looking at seabird biology and populations. The Council for the Promotion of Field Studies (now the Field Studies Council) was, at this time, running the island under license from the Wildlife Trust. The Medical Research Council and then the Royal Free Hospital School of Medicine undertook a study on the genetically unique island House Mouse, and the Ministry of Agriculture studied the Rabbit population as the disease Myxomatosis swept across Britain, but did not affect the island animals at all, making the site even more interesting.

Skokholm ceased to be recognised by the Bird Observatories Council as an official Bird Observatory in 1976 following the cessation of ringing (banding) activities. This came about as a result of the landlord hearing news that he did not want to hear about goings-on there, including the way birds and animals were being treated during the studies, so he then insisted that the trapping of animals should stop.

This is the most complete work on Skokholm ever. All of the discoveries about the principle bird and mammal species are explained. The book gives a true insight into the site's management over the years. It also questions the ethics of the aforementioned studies, which included "twinning" experiments (auks being given a second youngster to feed, when they actually only lay one egg), relocation (birds transported hundreds or even thousands of miles from their nest, to see if they can re-find their home), refrigeration (can mice tolerate cold?), removal (exclusion of a bird from its territory to see if another takes it over), egg-swapping (between species, to see if migration is a learned behaviour or innate) and even killing (of those species not favoured at the time) - and all this on a "nature reserve"!

The author's own observations form a significant part, with him having lived there for 9 years as the Island Warden. The records have been sifted through, and annotated lists of plants and birds found on the island in the past century are complete and fully up-to-date. Lists of insects, lichens, fungi, mosses and liverworts have all been painstakingly updated with regard to current nomenclature - no easy task! It comes complete with 32 photographs, appendices, a list of references and an index.

There are many other threats faced by the island's inhabitants, and these are also examined:


• Situated close to the entrance of one of one of Britain's busiest ports - the Milford Haven waterway - and its associated oil industry, the island has had its share of man-made disasters over the years through large oil spillages, most recently with the grounding of the Sea Empress in 1996. What steps have been taken by UK and other governments since then to prevent such disasters from reoccurring?
  
  
• Fishing is also a major industry, the waters in the region being extremely rich in marine life - hence the presence of the seabirds. As usual, this activity also impacts on the birds and marine mammals found there, by way of entanglement in nets and direct competition for food resources.
  
  
• A lighthouse situated at the south-western tip of the island has caused a huge number of difficulties for birds over recent years, due to the change in colour of its light (the author successfully campaigned for remedial work to be carried out for the sake of the birds), and also because of the activities of some of the staff that visited to maintain it, most of whom obviously had little respect for wildlife, even those species that they knew were specially protected by law.
  
  
• The newest threats to Skokholm's birds have arisen as a result of Man's increasing amount of leisure time and disposable income. Pleasure-boating, canoeing, "sea safaris", scuba-diving, flying of light aircraft and general "playing about" are all putting the wildlife under extra pressure.
  
  
  Will it all end unhappily for nature? Not necessarily, hope remains, but only if proper action is taken NOW to protect what still exists.

Tucson Water, contains the author's water related email letters to the elected Mayor and Council Members of Tucson, the Tucson Water Department, Tucson Pima Water Study Members, and several governmental agencies. Potable water and reclaimed effluent concerns are discussed as pertains to water quality and quantity. Human health concerns and alternate sources of water are investigated as relates to the City of Tucson. Actions and lack of actions by elected officials and governmental employees are analyzed for sustainability of the total available water supply in contradistinction to the potable water supply within the total available water supply. Colorado River surface water containing Las Vegas effluent is tagged to Tucson by perchlorate water monitoring data some of which was done in 2004 by the Arizona Department of Environmental Quality (ADEQ0 in its evaluation of per chlorate dispersal throughout Arizona.