Showing titles in Ecology

There are more crows now than ever. Their abundance is both an indicator of ecological imbalance and a generous opportunity to connect with the animal world. Crow Planet reminds us that we do not need to head to faraway places to encounter "nature". Rather, even in the suburbs and cities where we live we are surrounded by wild life such as crows, and through observing them we can enhance our appreciation of the world's natural order.

Most of us are familiar with probiotics added to milk or yogurt to improve gastrointestinal health. In this ambitious and original work, Jamie Lorimer offers a sweeping overview of diverse probiotic approaches and an insightful critique of their promise and limitations.

Le zéro déchet, l'essayer c'est l'adopter ! Réduire ses déchets pour la planète, pour sa santé, pour le porte-monnaie, c'est le moment ! Mais comment s'y prendre ? En marchant dans les pas de Jérémie et Bénédicte. Ce livre audio, à la fois carnet de bord pas triste, et guide pratique, vous mènera au but en vous épargnant bien des pièges ! Avec humour et autodérision, les auteurs vous proposent un plan d'action détaillé et 10 défis Zéro Déchet pour vous lancer.

As dawn breaks across your back garden, if you were paying attention, you would notice that the robin and the blackbird are always the first birds to arrive. These ground hunters have large eyes, so don’t mind the dim light of the early morning. And that’s just the beginning of what you can learn watching your own back garden. Ornithologist Mike Toms has spent a year avidly observing his own garden and the result is a comprehensive picture of the lives of garden birds.

How serious are the threats to our environment? Here is one measure of the problem: if we continue to do exactly what we are doing, with no growth in the human population or the world economy, the world in the latter part of this century will be unfit to live in. Of course human activities are not holding at current levels—they are accelerating, dramatically—and so, too, is the pace of climate disruption, biotic impoverishment, and toxification.

Pianeta Terra, anno 2050. Le nazioni non hanno mantenuto gli impegni presi, le emissioni di carbonio non sono diminuite e il riscaldamento globale ha reso il mondo un posto invivibile, scosso da rivolte politiche e fenomeni naturali catastrofici. Questo scenario può ancora essere evitato. Attraverso un'analisi dei rischi, delle possibilità che ci restano e un decalogo di attivismo civico, Christiana Figueres e Tom Rivett-Carnac, artefici dell'Accordo di Parigi del 2015, delineano le basi per salvare il pianeta e scegliere così il futuro che ci aspetta.

One bright day in December 2001, sixty-two-year-old Germaine Greer found herself confronted by an irresistible challenge in the shape of sixty hectares of dairy farm, one of many in southeast Queensland, Australia, which, after a century of logging, clearing, and downright devastation, had been abandoned to their fate. She didn’t think for a minute that by restoring the land she was saving the world. She was in search of heart’s ease.

Most plants can’t survive the demands of “wet feet.” Usually, too much water causes them to wilt and virtually “meltdown,” as they become bloated and soggy. But there are a few hardy plants that know exactly how to deal with this problem—in fact wetland grasses, sedges, rushes, mosses, ferns, horsetails were the first plants to evolve on Earth and are, indeed, the ancestors of the garden trees, bushes, and flowers that we grow today.

Qualcuno si ostina a liquidare i cambiamenti climatici come fake news, ma la gran parte di noi è ben consapevole che se non modifichiamo radicalmente le nostre abitudini l'umanità andrà incontro al rischio dell'estinzione di massa. Lo sappiamo, eppure non riusciamo a crederci. E di conseguenza non riusciamo ad agire. Il problema è che l'emergenza ambientale non è una storia facile da raccontare e, soprattutto, non è una buona storia: non spaventa, non affascina, non coinvolge abbastanza da indurci a cambiare la nostra vita.

In its 2001 report on global climate, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change of the United Nations prominently featured the "Hockey Stick", a chart showing global temperature data over the past 1,000 years. The Hockey Stick demonstrated that temperature had risen with the increase in industrialization and use of fossil fuels. The inescapable conclusion was that worldwide human activity since the industrial age had raised CO2 levels, trapping greenhouse gases in the atmosphere and warming the planet.

We should thank a pollinator at every meal. These diminutive creatures fertilize a third of the crops we eat. Yet half of the 2,000 species of pollinators are threatened. Birds, bats, insects, and many other pollinators are disappearing, putting our entire food supply in jeopardy. In North America and Europe, bee populations have already plummeted by more than a third and the population of butterflies has declined 31 percent. Protecting Pollinators explores why the statistics have become so dire and how they can be reversed.

Un diptyque essentiel pour comprendre le monde d'aujourd'hui et de demain. "Dans Où atterrir ?" Comment s'orienter en politique, l'hypothèse est qu'on ne comprend rien aux positions politiques si l'on ne donne pas une place centrale à la question du climat et à sa dénégation. Tout se passe comme si une partie importante des classes dirigeantes était arrivée à la conclusion qu'il n'y aurait plus assez de place sur terre pour elles et pour le reste de ses habitants.

Cosa accade negli allevamenti e nei macelli del nostro Paese? È veramente sicuro ciò che mangiamo? In un'inchiesta sull'industria italiana della carne e dei formaggi dell'eccellenza "Made in Italy", Giulia Innocenzi affianca animalisti, veterinari e allevatori per svelare un mondo oscuro in cui gli animali sopravvivono a malapena in spazi microscopici, sporchi, senz'aria; costretti a vere e proprie torture, malati e imbottiti di antibiotici che finiscono sulle nostre tavole.

As climate change continues to intensify, the outlook for life on Earth often seems bleak. Yet hope for the future can be found in the “rescue effect,” which is nature’s innate ability to help organisms persist during hard times. Like a thermostat starting the air conditioning when a room gets too warm, the rescue effect automatically kicks in when organisms are stressed or declining. In The Rescue Effect, Michael Mehta Webster reveals the science behind nature’s inherent resilience, through compelling stories of species that are adapting to the changing world.

Elephants are as unique as people. They can be clever and curious or headstrong and impulsive, shy or sociable. Learn to know them as individuals as well as a species in this evocative account of years spent studying elephant behaviour in the wild. Watching a family out for a swim on a hot day, Dr Hannah Mumby notes grandmothers, mothers, sisters and children exchanging noisy greetings, a consistent stream of close-range vocalisations, intermittent touching, co-operative herding of babies and frequent stopping for snacks. A close and interconnected family.

Increasingly, cracks are appearing in the capacity of communities, ecosystems, and landscapes to provide the goods and services that sustain our planet's well-being. The response from most quarters has been for "more of the same" that created the situation in the first place: more control, more intensification, and greater efficiency. "Resilience thinking" offers a different way of understanding the world and a new approach to managing resources. It embraces human and natural systems as complex entities continually adapting through cycles of change.

A collection of probing essays and weekly meditations, this book addresses how to prepare emotionally and spiritually for the impending collapse of industrial civilization. Author Carolyn Baker offers wisdom, inspiration, and a sense of spiritual purpose for anyone who is concerned about the daunting future humankind has created.

This book shows that the quantitative mathematical models policy makers and government administrators use to form environmental policies are seriously flawed. Based on unrealistic and sometimes false assumptions, these models often yield answers that support unwise policies. Writing for the general, nonmathematician reader, the authors begin with a riveting account of the extinction of the North Atlantic cod on the Grand Banks of Canada.

Naturalist Joe Hutto’s latest adventures in wildlife observation take him to Wyoming’s Wind River Mountains. Hutto is living in a tent at 12,000 feet, where blizzards occur in July and where human wants become irrelevant—and human needs can become a matter of life and death—to study the Rocky Mountain bighorn sheep.

Insects might make us recoil in repugnance, but they also manufacture - or make possible in other ways - many of the things we take for granted in our daily lives. When we bite into a shiny apple, listen to the resonant notes of a violin, try on the latest fashions, receive a dental implant, or get a manicure, we are mingling with the by-products of their everyday lives.