Peter J. Marchand's Life in the Cold remains the one book that offers a comprehensive picture of the interactions of plants and animals--including humans--with their cold-weather environment. Focusing on the problems of winter-active organisms, Marchand illuminates the many challenges of sustaining life in places that demand extraordinary adaptations. The fourth edition of this classic text includes a new chapter on climate change and its effects on plants and animals wintering in the North.

Rarely visited by outsiders, the ranchers of Sierra de la Giganta in Baja California Sur live much as their ancestors have for the past two centuries. They raise goats and cattle and grow a magnificent variety of fruits, vegetables, and flowers in one of the driest places on the continent. The men, women, and children depicted in this book have never known the luxury of municipal water or electricity on their ranches. Yet, as Marchand's photographs show, they are remarkably self-sufficient in their use of technologies that would be considered archaic by most standards today. Some ranches now have solar panels, generators, a light bulb or two, a radio or TV, and, most recently, a cell phone charger. But water is supplied either by gravity or a gasoline-powered pump (though windmills still turn at some ranches), cooking is most often by wood fire, machaca is ground on a stone metate or pounded on a stump, and coffee is ground in a hand-cranked mill. Plowing is still done mostly with mules, and planting, harvesting, and milking are all done by hand.

With a revealing memoir and striking photographs, Peter J. Marchand reflects on the Beja nomads of the Red Sea Hills and contemplates the fate of nomadic peoples the world over, as population growth and economic forces chip away at the edges of indigenous cultures everywhere. Little by little, he writes, these encroachments exact their toll on the voiceless and invisible, sapping the life of their culture like an ancient tree silently dying one root at a time. It is a regretable loss, Marchand suggests, as indigenous cultures preserve a rich store of ideas and values that might one day come to our rescue.