Adios to the brushlands

by Arturo Longoria

In an area of South Texas extending across the Rio Grande into Mexico, the land was once lush and mysterious, harboring trees, shrubs, and grasses that were home to an abundance of wildlife. In Adios to the Brushlands native son Arturo Longoria remembers this chaparral land of his childhood. At once a celebration of a region's nature and a call to preserve the little bit of it still left today, Adios to the Brushlands is to South Texas what Rachel Carson's Silent Spring was to the nation's wetlands or John Graves's Goodbye to a River was to the Brazos River. Rife with the natural history of an endangered ecology and capturing as well the binational culture of the region, Adios to the Brushlands draws readers into a land as raw, beautiful, and complex as life itself. A unique descriptive documentary of a disappearing natural treasure, it is a slice of the new natural history that weds the details of the physical world with their significance to the human heart.