American Environment

One of the most distinguished voices in American letters, Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist and poet N. Scott Momaday has devoted much of his life to celebrating and preserving Native American culture, especially its oral tradition. In this wise and wonderous work, Momaday shares stories and memories throughout his life, stories that have been passed down through generations, stories that reveal a profound spiritual connection to the American landscape and reverence for the natural world.

Here is the inspiring story of how Dr. Mona Hanna-Attisha, alongside a team of researchers, parents, friends, and community leaders, discovered that the children of Flint, Michigan, were being exposed to lead in their tap water - and then battled her own government and a brutal backlash to expose that truth to the world. Paced like a scientific thriller, What the Eyes Don’t See reveals how misguided austerity policies, broken democracy, and callous bureaucratic indifference placed an entire city at risk.

Why would a successful American physician choose to live in a twelve-foot-by-twelve-foot cabin without running water or electricity? To find out, writer and activist William Powers visited Dr. Jackie Benton in rural North Carolina. No Name Creek gurgled through Benton’s permaculture farm, and she stroked honeybees’ wings as she shared her wildcrafter philosophy of living on a planet in crisis. Powers, just back from a decade of international aid work, then accepted Benton’s offer to stay at the cabin for a season while she traveled.

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.

From acclaimed actor and producer Wendell Pierce, an insightful and poignant portrait of family, New Orleans and the transforming power of art. On the morning of August 29, 2005, Hurricane Katrina barreled into New Orleans, devastating many of the city's neighborhoods, including Pontchartrain Park, the home of Wendell Pierce's family and the first African American middle-class subdivision in New Orleans. The hurricane breached many of the city's levees, and the resulting flooding submerged Pontchartrain Park under as much as 20 feet of water.

This book is written to help the average person learn what is necessary to survive SHTF, natural disasters, off-grid living, civil unrest, and martial law. This book gives solid advice and strategy to help keep you and your family safe in even the worst situation.

Many of the men and women doing today's most consequential environmental work - restoring America's grasslands, wildlife, soil, rivers, wetlands, and oceans - would not call themselves environmentalists; they would be too uneasy with the connotations of that word. What drives them is their deep love of the land - the iconic terrain where explorers and cowboys, pioneers, and riverboat captains forged the American identity. They feel a moral responsibility to preserve this heritage and natural wealth.

Humans have been farming for thousands of years, and yet agriculture has undergone more fundamental changes in the past 80 years than in the previous several centuries. In 1900, 30 million American farmers tilled the soil or tended livestock; today there are fewer than 4.5 million farmers who feed a population four times larger than it was at the beginning of the century.

In Anna Clark's full account of this American tragedy, The Poisoned City recounts the gripping story of Flint’s poisoned water through the people who caused it, suffered from it, and exposed it. It is a chronicle of one town, but could also be about any American city, all made precarious by the neglect of infrastructure and the erosion of democratic decision making. Places like Flint are set up to fail - and for the people who live and work in them, the consequences can be fatal.

The Accidental Ecosystem tells the story of how cities across the United States went from having little wildlife to filling, dramatically and unexpectedly, with wild creatures. Today, many of these cities have more wild animals living in them than at any time in at least the past 150 years. Why have so many cities—the most artificial and human-dominated of all Earth's ecosystems—grown rich with wildlife, even as wildlife has declined in most of the rest of the world? And what does this paradox mean for people, wildlife, and nature on our increasingly urban planet?

In Losing Eden award-winning historian Sara Dant debunks the myth of the American West as “Eden” and instead embraces a more realistic and complex understanding of a region that has been inhabited and altered by people for tens of thousands of years. In this lively narrative Dant discusses the key events and topics in the environmental history of the American West, from the Beringia migration, Columbian Exchange, and federal territorial acquisition to post–World War II expansion, resource exploitation, and current climate change issues.

From increasingly severe storms to collapsing coral reefs to the displacement of Syrian citizens, in this audiobook we examine the effects of Earth’s changing climate on weather systems, ecosystems, and human habitability and what this means for our future.

In 1980, the United States suffered the deadliest and most destructive volcanic eruption in its history when Mount St. Helens literally blew its lid off, the result of seismic activity during the eruption. What made the eruption all the more remarkable was that a fair amount of preparations had gone into anticipating it, after an earthquake in the area a few months earlier alerted federal geologists to the possibility of activity there. In fact, Mount St. Helens had been the cause of the earthquake itself, the result of its own lava flows under the surface.

Russell Gold, a brilliant and dogged investigative reporter at The Wall Street Journal, has spent more than a decade reporting on one of the biggest stories of our time: the spectacular, world-changing rise of "fracking". Recognized as a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and a recipient of the Gerald Loeb Award for his work, Gold has traveled along the pipelines and into the hubs of this country’s energy infrastructure; he has visited frack sites from Texas to North Dakota; and he has conducted thousands of interviews with engineers and wildcatters, CEOs and roughnecks, environmentalists and politicians.

Hemp, the non-psychoactive variant of cannabis and one of humanity's oldest plant allies, has quietly become the fastest industry ever to generate a billion dollars of annual revenue in North America. From seed to fiber to the currently ubiquitous cannabinoid CBD, hemp is leading the way to a new regenerative economy that contributes to soil and climate restoration – but only if we do it right.

Inspired by the still-revolutionary theories of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, James E. McWilliams argues for a more harmonious and rational approach to our relationship with insects, one that does not harm our environment and, consequently, ourselves along the way.

At the age of 33, Erik Reece's father, a Baptist minister, took his own life, leaving Erik in the care of his grandmother and his grandfather - also a fundamentalist Baptist preacher and a pillar of his rural Virginia community. While Erik grew up with a conflicted relationship with Christianity, he unexpectedly found comfort in the Jefferson Bible. Inspired, he undertook what would become a spiritual and literary quest to identify an "American gospel" coursing through the work of both great and forgotten American geniuses, from William Byrd to Walt Whitman to Lynn Margulis.

Bird-watching is not only an eco-friendly hobby, but it is also definitely enjoyable. It is addicting and educational. Bird-watching is not only for professionals and ornithologists; it is also recommended for all people who love nature. As easy as it may seem, bird-watching has certain requirements, such as skills, patience, strategy, and basic knowledge of birds and their behavior. There are certain tools necessary to make this activity more fun and more fulfilling.

The Russian invasion of Ukraine is a wake-up call: The all-in stance in favor of renewables has rendered Europe's economy and national security vulnerable to Russian President Vladimir Putin. And America is in danger of making the same catastrophic energy mistake as Europe. Award-winning author Bill Herrington delivers the truth about U.S. energy, national security, and the environment—and exposes the misrepresentations of fossil fuels protestors and climate change activists.

Wild American ginseng, America's most famous medicinal plant, is in trouble. In plain prose, James McGraw explains why as he translates the latest in ecological and conservation science findings on this unassuming understory herb. As the world's foremost authority on wild ginseng, McGraw is uniquely poised to present this story based on more than twenty years of uninterrupted field research.