Showing titles in Nature & Ecology

An Irish Nature Year is a filled with plants, animals, birds and creepy-crawlies from all over the island of Ireland. With one short entry for every day of the year, nature columnist Jane Powers serves up five minutes worth of wonderment to enjoy on your coffee break, on your commute or to relax with at bedtime.

We are bombarded by doomsday headlines that tell us the soil won't be able to support crops, fish will vanish from our oceans, that we should reconsider having children. But in this bold, radically hopeful book, data scientist Hannah Ritchie argues that if we zoom out, a very different picture emerges. The data shows we've made so much progress on these problems, and so fast, that we could be on track to achieve true sustainability for the first time in history. Packed with the latest research, this book will make you rethink almost everything you've been told about the environment.

From a garden shed laboratory where he manufactured the greatest stink in the world to a tent high in the Arctic in pursuit of fossils, this is a story of obsession and love of nature, flavoured with the peculiarities and restrictions of post-war Britain. Fortey tells the story of following his father down riverbanks to fish for trout, and also of his father's shocking death. He unfolds his early passions–fungi, ammonite hunting and eyeing up bird's eggs. He evokes with warmth and wit how the natural world started out as his playground and refuge, then became his life's work.

Fossil fuels and livestock grazing are often targeted as major culprits behind climate change and desertification. But Allan Savory, cofounder of the Savory Institute, begs to differ. The bigger problem, he warns, is our mismanagement of resources. Livestock grazing is not the problem; it's how we graze livestock. If we don't change the way we approach land management, irreparable harm from climate change could continue long after we replace fossil fuels.

A preeminent geneticist hunts the Neanderthal genome to answer the biggest question of them all: what does it mean to be human? What can we learn from the genes of our closest evolutionary relatives? Neanderthal Man tells the story of geneticist Svante Pbo’s mission to answer that question, beginning with the study of DNA in Egyptian mummies in the early 1980s and culminating in his sequencing of the Neanderthal genome in 2009.

In Light to Life, biologist Raffael Jovine takes us on a journey of discovery into the intricate, beautiful and often surprising processes that convert energy from the sun into life and how all-important these are to our survival. Despite the unprecedented challenges the Earth faces from global warming, habitat loss, air pollution and population growth; Jovine shows us that there is hope to be found. Photosynthesis is the very source of life: it has the power not just to produce food, but to reshape continents, drive biogeochemical cycles, stabilise the climate and regulate weather.

This modern classic of nature writing by the author of The Once and Future King was an inspiration for and featured in Helen Macdonald's prize-winning H Is for Hawk. "No hawk can be a pet. There is no sentimentality. In a way, it is the psychiatrist's art. One is matching one's mind against another mind with deadly reason and interest. One desires no transference of affection, demands no ignoble homage or gratitude. It is a tonic for the less forthright savagery of the human heart."

We live such busy lives and have completely lost touch with nature. This is a handbook for reconnecting back with nature's energy, wisdom and a natural way of living. It will make you more observant, pausing to take stock of each season and how it's making you feel so you can take care of yourself all year round. Packed with nourishing rituals, practices and Kirsty's trademark wisdom, Sacred Seasons will show you how to draw on inspiration from nature's events, including the spring equinox, the summer solstice, the autumn equinox and Imbolc.

By the Wainwright-Conservation-Prize-winning author of Rebirding Spend a year in an orchard, celebrating its imperilled, overlooked abundance of life. England's ancient orchards, collaborations between people and nature, are sources of hope for the future. Protecting them promises a far richer England for the centuries to come, for wildlife and for us.

This book supports and develops the flat Earth perspective, but with a twist. It describes how the flat Earth view is enhanced by certain discoveries made during the space age, a time that we are still in, which includes the former race to the Moon between the US and the USSR during the 1960s and early 1970s. Most people accept the global Earth media narrative without question, but the actual configuration of the world is as strange and surprising as it is true. This book provides plentiful new evidence that the world is not a spinning globe, but a flat and immovable plane.

The problem of agriculture is as old as civilization. Throughout history, great societies that abused their land withered into poverty or disappeared entirely. Now we risk repeating this ancient story on a global scale due to ongoing soil degradation, a changing climate, and a rising population. But there is reason for hope. David R. Montgomery introduces us to farmers around the world at the heart of a brewing soil health revolution that could bring humanity's ailing soil back to life remarkably fast.

One of the inspirations for the major motion picture Everest, starring Jake Gyllenhaal and Keira Knightley. This is the true story of a 24-hour period on Everest when members of three separate expeditions were caught in a storm and faced a battle against hurricane-force winds, exposure, and the effects of altitude, which ended the worst single-season death toll in the peak's history.

In 1865 a broken Admiral Robert FitzRoy locked himself in his dressing room and cut his throat. His grand meteorological project had failed. Yet only a decade later, FitzRoy’s storm-warning system and ‘forecasts’ would return, the model for what we use today. In an age when a storm at sea was evidence of God’s great wrath, 19th-century meteorologists had to fight against convention and religious dogma.

Looking to the skies above, we have variously worshipped them as gods, hunted them for sustenance, adorned ourselves in their feathers, studied their wings to engineer flight and, more recently, attempted to protect them. Award-winning writer and ornithologist Tim Birkhead takes us on an epic and dazzling journey through this mutual history with birds, from the ibises mummified and deified by Ancient Egyptians to Renaissance experiments on woodpecker anatomy, from Victorian obsessions with egg-collecting to the present fight to save endangered species and restore their habitats.

Mother deer that grieve? Horses that feel shame? Squirrels that adopt their grandchildren? We humans tend to assume that we are the only living things able to experience feelings intensely and consciously. But have you ever wondered what's going on in an animal's head? From the leafy forest floor to the inside of a beehive, The Inner Life of Animals takes us from microscopic levels of observation to the big philosophical, ethical and scientific questions.

When we talk about human history, we focus on great leaders, mass migration and decisive wars. But how has the Earth itself determined our destiny? How has our planet made us? As a species we are shaped by our environment. Geological forces drove our evolution in East Africa; mountainous terrain led to the development of democracy in Greece; and today voting behaviour in the United States follows the bed of an ancient sea. The human story is the story of these forces, from plate tectonics and climate change, to atmospheric circulation and ocean currents.

Paul Whitehouse and John Bailey have been devout fishermen for longer than they care to remember. A hobby, past time or sport – call it what you want – they have felt the pull of the water ever since they were kids and have never missed the chance to set up on the bank and try their luck. In this wonderful book, the two fishermen collaborate to celebrate the rich tapestry that is fishing – from mentors to memories; from philosophy to modern jargon; from watercraft to becoming self-styled ‘Fishing Detectives’.

‘It didn’t matter that they were now three miles beyond their target site, that communications were dropping out and that they were running low on fuel. All that mattered to Neil as he searched for a safe spot to land was that boulders littered the surface below. “Thirty seconds,” called mission control. In truth, the flight controllers were now no more than spectators, just like everybody else. No more needed to be said. It was down to Armstrong

1816 was a remarkable year - mostly for the fact that there was no summer. As a result of a volcanic eruption at Mount Tambora in Indonesia, weather patterns were disrupted worldwide for months, allowing for excessive rain, frost, and snowfall through much of the Northeastern US and Europe in the summer of 1816.

Soil is the unlikely story of our most maligned resource as swashbuckling hero. A saga of bombs, ice ages and civilisations falling. Of ancient hunger, modern sicknesses and gastronomic delight. It features poison gas, climate collapse and a mind-blowing explanation of how rain is formed. For too long, we've not only neglected the land beneath us, we've squandered and debased it, by over-clearing, over-grazing and over-ploughing.