Showing titles in Environment

When Rick Lamplugh reports for work at the historic Lamar Buffalo Ranch on New Year's Eve, he has one goal: to learn as much as possible about the ecology of the Lamar Valley and how wolves fit in. He has three frigid months to explore on skis and snowshoes, to observe with all his senses, and to listen to and talk with experts. Lamplugh's story takes you with him as he watches winter-hungry elk and bison migrate to the Lamar Valley to graze. Wolves, coyotes, and mountain lions stalk the grazers while eagles, ravens, and magpies wait to scavenge.

The enormity of climate change and biodiversity loss can leave us feeling overwhelmed. How can an individual ever make a difference? Isabella Tree and Charlie Burrell know firsthand how spectacularly nature can bounce back if you give it the chance. And what comes is not just wildlife in super-abundance, but solutions to the other environmental crises we face. The Book of Wilding is a handbook for how we can all help restore nature.

Leif Bersweden has always been fascinated by wild plants. From a young age, his afternoons were spent hunting for and cataloguing the plants in his local area. But it is a landscape that is fast disappearing. Climate change, habitat destruction and declining pollinator populations mean that the future for plant life looks bleaker than ever before. Many of us are also unable to identify, or even notice, the plants that grow around us. Now a botanist, Leif decides to go on a mission, to explore the plants that Britain and Ireland have to offer.

A book to be listened to for pleasure as well as a practical identification guide, The Edge of the Sea introduces a world of teeming life where the sea meets the land. A new generation of listeners is discovering why Rachel Carson's books have become cornerstones of the environmental and conservation movements.

Forced to accept that intensive farming on the heavy clay of their land at Knepp was economically unsustainable, Isabella Tree and her husband, Charlie Burrell, made a spectacular leap of faith: they decided to step back and let nature take over. Thanks to the introduction of free-roaming cattle, ponies, pigs and deer - proxies of the large animals that once roamed Britain - the 3,500 acre project has seen extraordinary increases in wildlife numbers and diversity in little over a decade.

Interweaving a grand historical narrative with cutting-edge climate science and genetic discoveries, Kyle Harper traces how the fate of Rome was decided not just by emperors, soldiers, and barbarians but also by volcanic eruptions, solar cycles, climate instability, and devastating viruses and bacteria. He takes listeners from Rome's pinnacle in the second century, when the empire seemed an invincible superpower, to its unraveling by the seventh century, when Rome was politically fragmented and materially depleted.

In a prizewinning five-year investigation, authors Simen Sætre and Kjetil Østli took an in-depth look at Norway’s role in the global salmon industry and, for the first time, produced a comprehensive evaluation of the detrimental effects of salmon farming. From lice to escapees, from concentrating the waste of sea pens in the fjords through which wild salmon swim to their natal streams to the fact that salmon farming causes a net reduction of protein reaped from the ocean, the results don’t look good.

This book exposes the truth that the climate change hoax is a political movement aimed at eliminating capitalism by spreading alarming disinformation that in order to "save the Earth" from global warming, we must reduce carbon dioxide emissions by switching from hydrocarbon fuels to renewable energies. The Truth About Energy, Global Warming, and Climate Change: Exposing Climate Lies in an Age of Disinformation reveals a science-based understanding of Earth's climate and temperature that Green New Deal proponents are trying to hide.

In 2015, wildlife filmmaker Tom Mustill was whale watching when a humpback breached onto his kayak and nearly killed him. A video clip of the event went viral, and Tom found himself inundated with theories about what happened. He became obsessed with trying to find out what the whale had been thinking. He wished he could just ask it. In the process of making a film about his experience, he discovered that might not be such a crazy idea.

Maybe it's the weirdness of the weather. Maybe it's another way to pour scorn on politicians. Maybe the steady stream of headlines about fires, floods and droughts is finally starting to get to us. Whatever it is, for more and more of us, climate change is shifting from a shadowy fear in the backs of our minds to something we feel we need to get a handle on. Climate change may be a horror story, but, as Our Biggest Experiment shows, the tale of how we discovered it isn't.

The more we know about the catastrophic implications of climate change, the more fossil fuels we burn. How did we end up in this mess? In this masterful new history, Andreas Malm claims it all began in Britain with the rise of steam power. But why did manufacturers turn from traditional sources of power, notably water mills, to an engine fired by coal? Contrary to established views, steam offered neither cheaper nor more abundant energy - but rather superior control of subordinate labor.

Critical Path is Fuller's master work - the summing up of a lifetime's thought and concern - as urgent and relevant as it was upon its first publication in 1981. Critical Path details how humanity found itself in its current situation - at the limits of the planet's natural resources and facing political, economic, environmental, and ethical crises.

In 1926, Henry Beston spent two weeks in a two-room cottage on the sand dunes of Cape Cod. He had not intended to stay longer, but, as he later wrote, "I lingered on, and as the year lengthened into autumn, the beauty and mystery of this earth and outer sea so possessed and held me that I could not go."

In late September 2015, Hurricane Joaquin swept past the Bahamas and swallowed a pair of cargo vessels in its destructive path: El Faro, a 790-foot American behemoth with a crew of 33, and the Minouche, a 230-foot freighter with a dozen sailors aboard. From the parallel stories of these ships and their final journeys, Tristram Korten weaves a remarkable tale of two veteran sea captains from very different worlds, the harrowing ordeals of their desperate crews, and the Coast Guard’s extraordinary battle against a storm that defied prediction.

In his provocative new book, evolutionary biologist Jerry A. Coyne lays out in clear, dispassionate detail why the toolkit of science, based on reason and empirical study, is reliable, while that of religion - including faith, dogma, and revelation - leads to incorrect, untestable, or conflicting conclusions.

This Is Planet Earth is dedicated to the wonders of planet Earth, the most amazing place in the known universe. The ancient Greeks called it Gaia, the Romans Terra. We know it simply as Earth, the planet we call home. And what a planet it is. Formed around 4.6 billion years ago from the debris of the big bang and long-dead stars, at first it was nothing special, but somehow it evolved to become the most amazing place in the known universe.

The environmental crisis under way is unique in human history. It is a true existential crisis. Those alive today will decide the fate of humanity. Meanwhile, the leaders of the most powerful state in human history are dedicating themselves with passion to destroying the prospects for organized human life. At the same time, there is a solution at hand, which is the Green New Deal.

The restoration agriculture system described in this award-winning book works! It is possible for humans to produce staple foods using perennial agricultural ecosystems that actually improve the quality of the environment. This can be done on a backyard, farm, or ranch scale and is needed right now - on a global scale. Restoration Agriculture explains how we can have all of the benefits of natural, perennial ecosystems and create agricultural systems that imitate nature in form and function while still providing for our food, building, fuel, and many other needs.

In its 4.5 billion–year history, life on Earth has been almost erased at least half a dozen times: shattered by asteroid impacts, entombed in ice, smothered by methane, and torn apart by unfathomably powerful megavolcanoes. And we know that another global disaster is eventually headed our way. Can we survive it? How?

As a species, Homo sapiens is at a crossroads. Study of our planet’s turbulent past suggests that we are overdue for a catastrophic disaster, whether caused by nature or by human interference.
It’s a frightening prospect, as each of the Earth’s past major disasters—from meteor strikes to bombardment by cosmic radiation—resulted in a mass extinction, where more than 75 percent of the planet’s species died out. But in Scatter, Adapt, and Remember, Annalee Newitz, science journalist and editor of the science Web site io9.com explains that although global disaster is all but inevitable, our chances of long-term species survival are better than ever. Life on Earth has come close to annihilation—humans have, more than once, narrowly avoided extinction just
during the last million years—but every single time a few creatures survived, evolving to adapt to the harshest of conditions.
This brilliantly speculative work of popular science focuses on humanity’s long history of dodging the bullet, as well as on new threats that we may face in years to come. Most important, it explores how scientific breakthroughs today will help us avoid disasters tomorrow. From simulating tsunamis to studying central Turkey’s ancient underground cities; from cultivating cyanobacteria for “living cities” to designing space elevators to make space colonies cost-effective; from using math to stop pandemics to studying the remarkable survival strategies of gray whales, scientists and researchers the world over are discovering the keys to long-term resilience and learning how humans can choose life over death.
Newitz’s remarkable and fascinating journey through the science of mass extinctions is a powerful argument about human ingenuity and our ability to change. In a world populated by doomsday preppers and media commentators obsessively forecasting our demise, Scatter, Adapt, and Remember is a compelling voice of hope. It leads us away from apocalyptic thinking into a future where we live to build a better world—on this planet and perhaps on others. Readers of this book will be equipped scientifically, intellectually, and emotionally to face whatever the future holds.

Geology is often thought of as simply the study of rocks. In reality, geology is the study of our planet on all scales, from microscopic to planet-wide, and ranging in time from almost instantaneous events, like earthquakes, to the glacially slow motion of the tectonic plates. Everything we know about our world from a geologic perspective is based on information locked into the rock record and the job of a geologist is to tease out that story through a wide variety of observations. This insightful course explores a range of topics that help to tell the story of Earth and to explain the discipline of Geology and the role of the geologist.