English Environmental History

In the beginning, Earth was an inhospitably alien place—in constant chemical flux, covered with churning seas, crafting its landscape through incessant volcanic eruptions. Amid all this tumult and disaster, life began. The earliest living things were no more than membranes stretched across microscopic gaps in rocks, where boiling hot jets of mineral-rich water gushed out from cracks in the ocean floor. In A (Very) Short History of Life on Earth, Henry Gee zips through the last 4.6 billion years with infectious enthusiasm and intellectual rigor.

Bold is a radical, how-to guide for using exponential technologies, moonshot thinking, and crowd-powered tools to create extraordinary wealth while also positively impacting the lives of billions.

Unsettling Canada, a Canadian best seller, is built on a unique collaboration between two First Nations leaders, Arthur Manuel and Grand Chief Ron Derrickson.Both men have served as chiefs of their bands in the B.C. interior and both have gone on to establish important national and international reputations. But the differences between them are in many ways even more interesting. Arthur Manuel is one of the most forceful advocates for Aboriginal title and rights in Canada and comes from the activist wing of the movement.

Award-winning author Thom Hatch presents the definitive biography of George Bird Grinnell (1849-1938), who was recognized in his time as "The Father of American Conservation." This book chronicles not only Grinnell's life, but also offers a history of his accomplishments in saving the wildlife and natural resources of this country. A remarkable man, Grinnell was known as a model of intellectual diversity, integrity, and professional dedication.

The environment is collapsing at a rapid rate, and in increasingly unpredictable ways. Everyone knows that this is happening, and yet the only politics that is emerging to tackle it are coming from the increasingly nativist far-right. How should the left respond? In Planet on Fire, two rising stars of the British left lay down a set of proposals for a fundamental re-shaping of the global economy and offer a road map for tackling climate breakdown.

Sacred Economics traces the history of money from ancient gift economies to modern capitalism, revealing how the money system has contributed to alienation, competition, and scarcity; destroyed community; and necessitated endless growth. Today, these trends have reached their extreme - but in the wake of their collapse, we may find great opportunity to transition to a more connected, ecological, and sustainable way of being.

Black Snake is the story of four leaders - LaDonna Allard, Jasilyn Charger, Lisa DeVille, and Kandi White - and their fight against the pipeline. It is the story of a new generation of environmental activists, galvanized at Standing Rock, becoming the protectors of America's natural resources.

In 1908, near Folsom, New Mexico, a cowboy discovered the remains of a herd of extinct giant bison. By examining flint points embedded in the bones, archeologists later determined that a band of humans had killed and butchered the animals 12,450 years ago. This discovery vastly expanded America's known human history but also revealed the long-standing danger Homo sapiens presented to the continent's evolutionary richness. Distinguished scholar Dan Flores's ambitious history chronicles the epoch in which humans and animals have coexisted in the "wild new world" of North America.

An "epoch-defining book" (The Guardian) and "this generation’s Silent Spring" (The Washington Post), The Uninhabitable Earth is both a travelogue of the near future and a meditation on how that future will look to those living through it - the ways that warming promises to transform global politics, the meaning of technology and nature in the modern world, the sustainability of capitalism and the trajectory of human progress. The Uninhabitable Earth is also an impassioned call to action.

The grid is an accident of history and of culture, in no way intrinsic to how we produce, deliver and consume electrical power. Yet this is the system the United States ended up with, a jerry-built structure now so rickety and near collapse that a strong wind or a hot day can bring it to a grinding halt. The grid is now under threat from a new source: renewable and variable energy, which puts stress on its logics as much as its components.

The world is desperate for cobalt. It drives the proliferation of digital and clean technologies. But this "demon metal" has a horrific present and a troubled history. The modern search for cobalt has brought investors back to a small town in Northern Canada, a place called Cobalt. Like the demon metal, this town has a dark and turbulent history.

George Bird Grinnell, the son of a New York merchant, saw a different future for a nation in the thrall of the Industrial Age. With railroads scarring virgin lands and the formerly vast buffalo herds decimated, the country faced a crossroads: Could it pursue Manifest Destiny without destroying its natural bounty and beauty? The alarm that Grinnell sounded would spark America's conservation movement. Yet today his name has been forgotten - an omission that John Taliaferro's commanding biography now sets right with historical care and narrative flair.

From the author of the New York Times best seller Prisoners of Geography, the highly anticipated follow-up that uses 10 maps of crucial regions around the globe to explain the geopolitical strategies of today’s world powers and what it means for our future.

In an astonishing, tough firsthand reportage, Chris Hedges draws on stories from inside communities across America and reveals how the hurricanes of change have allowed an array of pathologies to arise: the opioid crisis, the retreat into gambling, the corporate coup d'état of government, the pornification of culture, the rise of magical thinking, the emboldening of violence and hate, the plagues of suicides, and the global upheaval caused by catastrophic climate change.

In the spring of 1983 Terry Tempest Williams learned that her mother was dying of cancer. That same season, The Great Salt Lake began to rise to record heights, threatening the Bear River Migratory Bird Refuge and the herons, owls, and snowy egrets that Williams, a poet and naturalist, had come to gauge her life by. One event was nature at its most random, the other a by-product of rogue technology: Terry's mother, and Terry herself, had been exposed to the fallout of atomic bomb tests in the 1950s.

Lois Gibbs, Luella Kenny, and other mothers loved their neighborhood on the east side of Niagara Falls. It had an elementary school, a playground, and rows of affordable homes. In the spring of 1977, pungent odors began to seep into these little houses, and it didn’t take long for worried mothers to identify the curious scent. It was the sickly-sweet smell of chemicals.

In the fall of 1973, the Greek oil shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis, husband of President John F. Kennedy's widow, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, and arguably the richest man in the world, proposed to build an oil refinery on the New Hampshire coast, in the town of Durham. But three women vehemently opposed the project. Small Town, Big Oil is the story of how the residents of Durham, led by three women, out-organized, out-witted, and out-maneuvered the governor, media, and Onassis cartel to hand the powerful Greek billionaire the most humiliating defeat of his business career.

Best-selling author Chris Turner brings listeners onto the streets of Fort McMurray, showing the myriad ways the oil sands of Alberta impact our lives and demanding that we ask the question: To both fuel the world and to save it, what do we do about the Patch? This is no conventional story about the oil business. Rather, it is a portrait of the life cycle of the Patch, showing just how deeply it continues to impact the lives of everyone around the world.

The story of Native peoples’ resistance to environmental injustice and land incursions and a call for environmentalists to learn from the indigenous community’s rich history of activism.

Growth has been both an unspoken and an explicit aim of our individual and collective striving. It governs the lives of microorganisms and galaxies; it shapes the capabilities of our extraordinarily large brains and the fortunes of our economies. Growth is manifested in annual increments of continental crust, a rising gross domestic product, a child's growth chart, the spread of cancerous cells. In this magisterial book, Vaclav Smil offers systematic investigation of growth in nature and society, from tiny organisms to the trajectories of empires and civilizations.