Showing titles in Environment

Drawing on decades of work that has helped expand our understanding of what it means to be human and what we all need to do to help build a better world, The Book of Hope touches on vital questions, including: How do we stay hopeful when everything seems hopeless? How do we cultivate hope in our children? What is the relationship between hope and action? Filled with moving and inspirational stories and photographs from Jane’s remarkable career, The Book of Hope is a deeply personal conversation with one of the most beloved figures in the world today.

We all need help centering ourselves to serve ourselves and our world. In this small, beautiful book, the Kogi—a remote and ancient tribe in the mountains of Colombia—offer their learnings. They pose nine provocative questions to help people around the planet to spiritual peace.

A riveting history of America's most beautiful natural resources, The Quiet World documents the heroic fight waged by the U.S. federal government from 1879 to 1960 to save wild Alaska - ;Mount McKinley, the Tongass and Chugach national forests, Gates of the Arctic, Glacier Bay, Lake Clark, and the Coastal Plain of the Beaufort Sea, among other treasured landscapes - from the extraction industries.

As the snow melts and the spring approaches, the animal kingdom awakens. In Summer World, Bernd Heinrich, the best-selling author of Winter World, brings us an up-close and personal view of that awakening and rebirth.

Water scarcity is on everyone's mind. Long taken for granted, water availability has entered the realm of economics, politics, and people's food and lifestyle choices. But as anxiety mounts - even as a swath of California farmland has been left fallow and extremist groups worldwide exploit the desperation of people losing livelihoods to desertification - many are finding new routes to water security with key implications for food access, economic resilience, and climate change.

While everything appears to be collapsing around us - ecodamage, genetic engineering, virulent diseases, water shortages, global famine, wars - we can still do something about it and create a world that will work for us and for our children's children. The inspiration for Leonardo DiCaprio's feature documentary movie The 11th Hour, The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight details what is happening to our planet, the reasons for our culture's blind behavior, and how we can fix the problem.

Hummingbirds are a glittering, sparkling collective of over 300 wildly variable species. For centuries, they have been revered by indigenous Americans, coveted by European collectors, and admired worldwide for their unsurpassed metallic plumage and immense character. Traveling the full length of the hummingbirds' range, from the cusp of the Arctic Circle to near-Antarctic islands, acclaimed nature writer Jon Dunn encounters birders, scientists, and storytellers in his quest to find these beguiling creatures, immersing us in the world of one of Earth's most charismatic bird families.

Are you prepared to face water emergencies head-on? When it comes to survival, having a reliable water source is absolutely crucial. Don't leave your family's safety to chance. Equip yourself with the essential techniques, tools, and tips provided in Water for Survival. Whether you find yourself in the wilderness, facing a natural disaster, or encountering unforeseen water scarcity, this comprehensive guide is your lifeline to ensure you have access to clean water and the peace of mind that comes with it.

With camera in hand, Raboteau goes in search of birds, fluttering in the air or painted on buildings, and ways her children may safely play in city parks while avoiding pollution, pandemics, and the police. She ventures abroad to learn from indigenous peoples, and in her own family and community discovers the most intimate meanings of resilience. Raboteau bears witness to the inner life of Black women/motherhood, and to the brutalities and possibilities of cities, while celebrating the beauty and fragility of nature.

Beware! The sordid lives of plants behaving badly. A tree that sheds poison daggers; a glistening red seed that stops the heart; a shrub that causes paralysis; a vine that strangles; and a leaf that triggered a war. Amy Stewart, best-selling author of Flower Confidential, takes on over two hundred of Mother Nature's most appalling creations in an A to Z of plants that kill, maim, intoxicate, and otherwise offend.

Out of all the trees in the world, the ash is the most closely bound up with who we are. From tool handles to arrows, wheels and bowls to furniture and baseball bats, humans have made more and varied use of ash than any other kind of wood. Journeying across the English-speaking world, Robert Penn meets craftsmen with rare skills and a knowledge of the properties of ash developed over millennia.

When painter Winslow Homer first sailed into the Gulf of Mexico, he was struck by its "special kind of providence." Indeed, the Gulf presented itself as America's sea - bound by geography, culture, and tradition to the national experience - and yet, there has never been a comprehensive history of the Gulf until now. And so, in this rich and original work that explores the Gulf through our human connection with the sea, environmental historian Jack E. Davis finally places this exceptional region into the American mythos in a sweeping history that extends from the Pleistocene age to the 21st century.

A journey around the United States in search of the truth about the threat of earthquakes leads to spine-tingling discoveries, unnerving experts, and ultimately the kind of preparations that will actually help guide us through disasters. It's a road trip full of surprises.

In a remote corner of Oregon, James Pogue found himself at the heart of a rebellion. Granted unmatched access by Ammon Bundy to the armed occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge, Pogue met ranchers and militiamen ready to die fighting the federal government. He witnessed the fallout of communities riven by politics and the danger (and allure) of uncompromising religious belief. The occupation ended in the shooting death of one rancher, the imprisonment of dozens more, and a firestorm over the role of government that engulfed national headlines.

A chronicle of life on the resplendent island. Adele Barker and her son, Noah, settled into the central highlands of Sri Lanka for an 18-month sojourn, immersing themselves in the customs, cultures, and landscapes of the island: its elephants, birds, and monkeys; its hot curries and sweet mangoes; the cacophony of its markets; the resonant evening chants from its temples. When, having returned home to Tucson, Barker awakes on December 26, 2004, to see televised images of the island's southern shore disappearing into the ocean, she decides she must go back.

We have a perennial fascination with sharks. Portrayed in the media and popular culture as killing machines, we are awed by their power and strength. But the shark is so much more—a marvel of the sea, they have evolved over 450 million years into more than 500 species, from the bioluminescent kitefin to the tiny dwarf lantern shark, the sociable lemon shark to the cow shark, which can birth up to 100 pups in one litter. Bringing balance to the ocean’s ecosystem, our planet is at serious risk when these amazing creatures are threatened.

In May 2016, Fort McMurray, the hub of Canada’s oil industry and America’s biggest foreign supplier, was overrun by wildfire. The multi-billion-dollar disaster melted vehicles, turned entire neighborhoods into firebombs, and drove 88,000 people from their homes in a single afternoon. Through the lens of this apocalyptic conflagration—the wildfire equivalent of Hurricane Katrina—John Vaillant warns that this was not a unique event, but a shocking preview of what we must prepare for in a hotter, more flammable world.

Once, farmers knew how to make a living hedge and fed their flocks on tree-branch hay. Rural people knew how to prune hazel to foster abundance: both of edible nuts, and of straight, strong, flexible rods for bridges, walls, and baskets. No place could prosper without its inhabitants knowing how to cut their trees so they would sprout again. This created the healthiest, most sustainable, and most diverse woodlands that we have ever known. In this journey from the English fens to Spain, Japan, and California, William Bryant Logan rediscovers what was once an everyday ecology.

In Storms of My Grandchildren, James Hansen - the nation's leading scientist on climate issues - speaks out for the first time with the full truth about global warming: the planet is hurtling even more rapidly than previously acknowledged to a climatic point of no return. Although Hansen was Al Gore's science adviser for the 2006 documentary An Inconvenient Truth, his recent data shows that our situation is even more dire today.

Every culture is a unique answer to a fundamental question: What does it mean to be human and alive? In The Wayfinders, renowned anthropologist, winner of the prestigious Samuel Johnson Prize, and National Geographic Explorer-in-Residence Wade Davis leads us on a thrilling journey to celebrate the wisdom of the world's indigenous cultures.