Conservation Science

The term "guerrilla" may bring to mind a small band of armed soldiers, moving in the dead of night on a stealth mission. In the case of guerilla gardening, the soldiers are planters, the weapons are shovels, and the mission is to transform an abandoned lot into a thing of beauty. Once an environmentalist's nonviolent direct action for inner-city renewal, this approach to urban beautification is spreading to all types of people in cities around the world.

Our world is infinitely richer than previously guessed, yet it is so ravaged by human activity that half its species could be gone by the end of the century. In this dazzlingly intelligent and ultimately hopeful work, biologist E.O. Wilson describes what treasures of the natural world we are about to lose forever—in many cases animals, insects, and plants we have only just discovered—and what we can do to save them. Wilson explores the ethical and religious bases of the conservation movement and deflates the myth that environmental policy is antithetical to economic growth.

Sharks are some of the most fascinating and ecologically important, yet most threatened and misunderstood animals on Earth. More often feared than revered, their role as predators of the deep has earned them a reputation as a major threat to humans. But the truth is that sharks are not a danger to us—they’re in danger from us. In Why Sharks Matter, marine conservation biologist Dr. David Shiffman urges us to overcome our misconceptions and embrace sharks as the imperiled and elegant ocean guardians they really are.

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.

Oak Flat is a serene high-elevation mesa that sits above the Southeastern Arizona desert, 15 miles to the west of the San Carlos Apache Indian Reservation. For the San Carlos tribe, Oak Flat is a holy place, an ancient burial ground and religious site where Apache girls celebrate the coming-of-age ritual known as the Sunrise Ceremony. In 1995, a massive untapped copper reserve was discovered nearby.

In his new book Meltdown, Jorge Daniel Taillant takes listeners deeper into the cryosphere, connecting the dots between climate change, glacier melt, and the impacts that receding glacier ice brings to livability on Earth, to our environments, and to our communities. Taillant walks us through the little-known realm of the periglacial environment, a world of invisible subsurface rock glaciers that will outlive exposed glaciers as climate change destroys surface ice.

Get the main key insights from this summary of Donella H. Meadows’ Thinking in Systems in just a short listen.

Four decades ago, the areas around Yellowstone and Glacier National Parks sheltered the last few hundred surviving grizzlies in the lower 48 states. Protected by the Endangered Species Act, their population has surged to more than 1,500, and this burgeoning number of grizzlies now collides with the increasingly populated landscape of the 21st-century American West. Montana journalist Robert Chaney chronicles the resurgence of this charismatic species against the backdrop of the country's long history with the bear.

The climate crisis, mass extinctions, political polarization, extreme inequality - the world faces terrifying challenges that threaten to divide us, yet Lily Cole argues that it is up to us to actively choose optimism, collaborate, make changes, and define what is possible. Cole writes: "We are the ancestors of our future. The choices we make now and the actions we take today will define and transform future generations." Having collaborated with experts working on solutions to humanity's biggest challenges, Cole distills a vision for a sustainable and peaceful future.

Beginning in the vast North American Boreal Forest that stretches through Canada, and roving across the continent, from the Northern Sierra to Alabama's Paint Rock Forest, from the Appalachian Trail to a ranch in Mexico, Tony Hiss sets out on a journey to take stock of the "superorganism" that is the earth: its land, its elements, its plants and animals, its greatest threats - and what we can do to keep it, and ourselves, alive.

Pick an environmental issue. Maybe air pollution, toxic waste, or deforestation. These all seem like solid choices, but none of these is actually an environmental problem—at least, not at its heart. Deep down, they are economic problems. Nearly all the issues we classify as environmental stem from defects in the DNA of America's current market system. This is emphatically true of our greatest environmental threat: global warming. With a focus on climate change, journalist and author Robert S. Devine reveals the fundamental flaws in the economy that enable environmental degradation.

Rebirding takes the long view of Britain’s wildlife decline, from the early taming of our landscape and its long-lost elephants and rhinos, to fenland drainage, and the removal of cornerstone species such as wild cattle, horses, beavers and boar. Forward in time, it also covers the intensification of our modern landscapes and the collapse of invertebrate populations.

Roy was instrumental in returning the osprey, red kite and golden eagle to the British Isles, but the road to reintroduction isn’t an easy one. In what will surely be the seminal book on British reintroductions, Roy details the painstaking process of returning the Goldeneye to Scotland, one duckling at a time, the die-hard determination needed to make a dazzling success of the red kite reintroduction and the leap of faith we will all need to make to accept sharing our forests and skies with large carnivores again.

Oil and Honey is McKibben's account of two necessary and mutually reinforcing sides of the global climate fight - from the center of the maelstrom and from the growing hive of small-scale local answers. With empathy and passion he makes the case for a renewed commitment on both levels, telling the story of raising one year’s honey crop and building a social movement that’s still cresting.

Deepwater Horizon, das Abschmelzen des Polareises oder Fracking - der Mensch betreibt Raubbau an seiner Lebensgrundlage: der Erde. Die bekannte Umweltaktivistin Naomi Klein hat mit "Green New Deal" ihr bislang wichtigstes Buch geschrieben: Angesichts der unverminderten Zerstörung unserer Umwelt und laxen Gesetzen zeigt sie, warum die Vision einer grünen Zukunft nicht nur nötig, sondern absolut unumgänglich ist. Wir leben bereits mitten in der Klima-Katastrophe.

Like many of us, Lisa Wells has spent years overwhelmed by news of apocalyptic-scale climate change and a coming sixth extinction. She did not need to be convinced of the stakes. But what can be done? Wells embarked on a pilgrimage, seeking answers in dedicated communities - outcasts and visionaries - on the margins of society.

Into our trash cans go dead batteries, dirty diapers, bygone burritos, broken toys, tattered socks, eight-track cassettes, scratched CDs, banana peels.... But where do these things go next? In a country that consumes and then casts off more and more, what actually happens to the things we throw away? In Garbage Land, acclaimed science writer Elizabeth Royte leads us on the wild adventure that begins once our trash hits the bottom of the can.

Kerri Arsenault grew up in the rural working class town of Mexico, Maine. For over 100 years, the community orbited around a paper mill that employs most townspeople, including three generations of Arsenault’s own family. Years after she moved away, Arsenault realized the price she paid for her seemingly secure childhood. The mill, while providing livelihoods for nearly everyone, also contributed to the destruction of the environment and the decline of the town’s economic, physical, and emotional health in a slow-moving catastrophe.

Birds, Beasts and Bedlam recounts the adventures of farmer-turned-rewilder Derek Gow, who is saving Britain’s much-loved but dangerously threatened species, from the water vole to beaver, wildcat to white stork, and tree frog to glow worm. Derek tells us all about the realities of rewilding: how he reared delicate roe deer and a sofa-loving wild boar piglet, moved a raging bison bull across the country, got bitten by a Scottish wildcat, returned honking skeins of graylag geese to the land and water that was once theirs, and restored the white stork to the Knepp Estate.

Having access to natural, green spaces is vital to our physical and mental wellbeing. But, as urban development spreads, grey has become the new green. Already, concrete outweighs every tree, bush and shrub on Earth. Nature deprivation is a fast-growing epidemic, harming the health and happiness of hundreds of millions of people worldwide—especially vulnerable and marginalized groups.