Nature Conservation

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.

For centuries, we have known that getting outside is good for us. Yet we have become increasingly disconnected from the earth that nourishes us, with most of us spending 87% of our days indoors. In response, writer and environmentalist Emma Loewe demonstrates the power of nature’s healing properties in a guidebook organized by eight landscapes. In each chapter, you'll find research-backed ways to explore that landscape right now and protect it in the future, so that it can be healthy and nurturing for generations to come.

Whether disillusioned by the dominant church or unfulfilled by traditional expressions of faith, many of us long for a deeper spirituality. Victoria Loorz did. Coping with an unraveling vocation, identity, and planet, Loorz turned to the wanderings of spiritual leaders and the sanctuary of the natural world. With an ecospiritual lens on biblical narratives and a fresh look at a community larger than our own species, Church of the Wild uncovers the wild roots of faith and helps us deepen our commitment to a suffering earth by falling in love with it—and calling it church.

In this inspiring manifesto, an internationally renowned ecologist makes a clear case for why protecting nature is our best health insurance, and why it makes economic sense.

There is no animal in the world that can run faster than a cheetah. Yet, no matter how quickly they run from trouble, cheetahs may not roam the African plains forever. They have lost much of their habitat to farmland, and some are killed by farmers who worry about their livestock. But cheetahs have important friends - like Dr. Laurie Marker and the Cheetah Conservation Fund in Namibia. Rosanna Hansen - who spent time working at the CCF - shares the fascinating story of cheetah preservation in this book young listeners will find irresistible.

More than 70 percent of Earth is covered in water. Yet only about 3 percent of it is freshwater that people can use. Every year, parts of the world suffer through severe droughts, and millions of people don’t have easy access to clean drinking water. Why is there a shortage of clean and healthy water? Max Axion and the Society of Super Scientists travel around the world to learn the reasons behind the global water crisis. Young listeners can tag along to discover what causes water scarcity and find out ways they can help preserve this precious resource.

When acclaimed naturalist Sy Montgomery and wildlife artist Matt Patterson arrive at Turtle Rescue League, they are greeted by hundreds of turtles recovering from injury and illness. Endangered by cars and highways, pollution and poachers, these turtles—with wounds so severe that even veterinarians would have dismissed them as fatal—are given a second chance at life. The League’s founders, Natasha and Alexxia, live by one motto: Never give up on a turtle.

A lifelong acolyte of the natural world, Annie Proulx brings her witness and research to the subject of wetlands and the vitally important role they play in preserving the environment—by storing the carbon emissions that accelerate climate change. Fens, bogs, swamps, and marine estuaries are crucial to the earth’s survival, and in four illuminating parts, Proulx documents their systemic destruction in pursuit of profit. Proulx describes the fens of 16th-century England, Canada’s Hudson Bay lowlands, Russia’s Great Vasyugan Mire, and America’s Okeefenokee National Wildlife Refuge.

John Muir was an early proponent of a view we still hold today—that much of California was pristine, untouched wilderness before the arrival of Europeans. But as this book demonstrates, what Muir was really seeing when he admired the grand vistas of Yosemite and the gold and purple flowers carpeting the Central Valley were the fertile gardens of the Sierra Miwok and Valley Yokuts Indians, modified and made productive by centuries of harvesting, tilling, sowing, pruning, and burning.

Humans versus Nature tells a history of the global environment from the Stone Age to the present, emphasizing the adversarial relationship between the human and natural worlds. Nature is cast as an active protagonist rather than a mere backdrop or victim of human malfeasance. Daniel R. Headrick shows how environmental changes - epidemics, climate shocks, and volcanic eruptions - have molded human societies and cultures, sometimes overwhelming them.

The most recent research tells us that seaweed is one possible solution for our future on the planet. It could feed human beings, reduce plastic pollution, absorb enough carbon to cool the atmosphere, reconstruct generative ecosystems, treat certain illnesses that are incurable today, replace land livestock farming that exhausts the environment, and give jobs to coastal populations. The seaweed revolution is a hope for tomorrow!

With vivid, observant reporting, veteran environmental journalist Fred Pearce transports listeners to the remote cloud forests of Ecuador, the remains of a forest civilization in Nigeria, a mystifying mountain peak in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, and the boreal forests of western Canada and the United States, where devastating wildfires are linked to suppressing the natural fire cycles of forests and the maintenance practices of Indigenous peoples. Throughout the book, Pearce interviews the people who traditionally live in forests.

Many people think penguins live only in cold, icy places. But the Galapagos penguins live in the blazing heat of the tropics. While this may seem like paradise, the Galapagos penguins are always on the lookout for ways to stay cool and comfortable. Learn more about these adorable animals, including how they got to the tropics, what they eat, other challenges they face in their lives, and what you can do to help.

Are the snowy owls in trouble? Venture into the Alaskan arctic and the summer realm of these predator birds to find out. Discover the diverse species necessary to owl survival, how climate change is affecting the landscape of their nesting site of past millennia, and what it takes to do field research in this action-packed addition to the award-winning Scientists in the Field series.

"The climate crisis may at times appear to be happening slowly, but in fact it is happening very quickly - and has become a true planetary emergency....[I]nconvenient truths do not go away just because they are not seen. Indeed, when they are not responded to, their significance doesn't diminish; it grows." -Al Gore

Transporting listeners into the field with scientists tackling these profound challenges, Emma Marris tells the affecting and inspiring stories of animals around the globe - from Peruvian monkeys to Australian bilbies, rare Hawai'ian birds to majestic Oregon wolves. And she offers a companionable tour of the philosophical ideas that may steer our search for sustainability and justice in the non-human world. Revealing just how intertwined animal life and human life really are, Wild Souls will change the way we think about nature-and our place within it.

The exquisite and thought-provoking new book from the multiaward-winning, internationally best-selling creator of Lost and Found, Oliver Jeffers. Well, hello. And welcome to this planet. We call it Earth. Our world can be a bewildering place, especially if you've only just got here. Your head will be filled with questions, so let's explore what makes our planet and how we live on it. From land and sky to people and time, these notes can be your guide and start you on your journey. And you'll figure lots of things out for yourself. Just remember to leave notes for everyone else....

Mother nature has a lot to teach us, if only we open our eyes. Pigeons and dolphins offer creative strategies for preserving our memories and warding off dementia, while squirrels and pigs harbor secrets for managing chronic pain. In The Book of Animal Secrets, visionary physician and biomedical researcher David B. Agus, MD, explores all these ways—and more—that we can harness the wonders of the animal kingdom in our own, very human lives.

"I am hopelessly and forever a mountaineer," John Muir wrote. "Civilization and fever and all the morbidness that has been hooted at me has not dimmed my glacial eye, and I care to live only to entice people to look at Nature's loveliness. My own special self is nothing". In Donald Worster's magisterial biography, John Muir's "special self" is fully explored as is his extraordinary ability, then and now, to get others to see the sacred beauty of the natural world.

Talking to women from around the world, Philippa studies and celebrates what it means to be a wild woman. From the sixteenth-century botanist who was the first woman to circumnavigate the globe to modern-day women responding to bear attacks in Yellowstone, working to rewild reserves in South Africa, photographing Caribou in the Arctic and more, Philippa examines how these women benefit from a life spent in the wilderness and also considers what the natural world gains from them.