Science Ecology

A staggeringly beautiful examination of how stories are passed down through generations and from Mother Nature, Everything Left to Remember brings us the wisdom of who our memories make us under the constellations of the vast Montana sky.

Parce que "l'eau est le sang de la planète" et parce qu'il y a urgence, le capitaine Paul Watson signe un nouveau manifeste coup de poing pour la sauvegarde des océans. En janvier 2016, quelques jours après la COP 21, Paul Watson publiait un manifeste uppercut au titre dramatiquement réaliste : "Urgence ! Si l'océan meurt nous mourrons".

Artists have learnt to pay attention. The rest of us spend most of our time on auto-pilot, rushing from place to place, our overfamiliarity blinding us to the marvellous, life-affirming phenomena of our world. But that doesn't have to be the case. In his typical engaging style, Will Gompertz takes us into the minds of artists - from contemporary stars to old masters, the well-known to the lesser-so, and from around the world - to show us how to look and experience the world with their heightened awareness.

Countless reports from credible individuals suggest that something shocking may be stalking the woods of the southern United States—something massive, bipedal, and covered in hair. Tales of these Southern Sasquatch creatures—such as the one made famous by the 1972 horror movie The Legend of Boggy Creek—date back to the very origins of Deep South history and are reported even today.

Global warming is perhaps the most dramatic example of what Timothy Morton calls "hyperobjects" - entities of such vast temporal and spatial dimensions that they defeat traditional ideas about what a thing is in the first place. In this book, Morton explains what hyperobjects are and their impact on how we think, how we coexist with one another and with nonhumans, and how we experience our politics, ethics, and art.

At the heart of Is a River Alive? is a single, transformative idea: that rivers are not mere matter for human use, but living beings, who should be recognized as such in both imagination and law. Macfarlane takes the reader on a mind-expanding global journey into the history, futures, people and places of the ancient, urgent concept. Around the world, rivers are dying from pollution, drought and damming. But a powerful movement is also underway to recognize the lives and the rights of rivers, and to re-animate our relationships with these vast, mysterious presences whose landscapes we share.

Natural resources empower the world's most coercive men. Autocrats like Putin and the Saudis spend oil money on weapons and repression. ISIS and Congo's militias spend resource money on atrocities and ammunition. For decades resource-fueled authoritarians and extremists have forced endless crises on the West - and the ultimate source of their resource money is us, paying at the gas station and the mall.

In Birding Under the Influence, Dorian Anderson, a neuroscience researcher on a pressure-filled life trajectory, walks away from the world of elite institutions, research labs, and academic publishing. In doing so, he falls in love and discovers he has freed himself to embrace his lifelong passion for birding.

Almir Narayamoga Surui, the Amazonian tribal chieftain of the indigenous Surui people, is a leader in the fight to save the rainforest not only for the preservation of his land and people, but for the Earth's and humanity's survival as well. Joining forces with such high-tech corporations as Apple and Google Earth, Surui has become a guardian of his people and a global activist, despite death threats and million-dollar bounties on his head.

Rivers, more than any road, technology, or political leader, have shaped the course of human civilization. They have opened frontiers, founded cities, settled borders, and fed billions. They promote life, forge peace, grant power, and can capriciously destroy everything in their path. Even today, rivers remain a powerful global force - one that is more critical than ever to our future. In Rivers of Power, geographer Laurence C. Smith explores the timeless yet underappreciated relationship between rivers and civilization as we know it.

It's accepted wisdom today that human beings have permanently damaged the natural world, causing extinction, deforestation, pollution, and of course climate change. But in Inheritors of the Earth, biologist Chris Thomas shows that this obscures a more hopeful truth - we're also helping nature grow and change. Human cities and mass agriculture have created new places for enterprising animals and plants to live, and our activities have stimulated evolutionary change in virtually every population of living species.

In this landmark work of environmental history, William Cronon offers an original and profound explanation of the effects European colonists' sense of property and their pursuit of capitalism had upon the ecosystems of New England. Reissued here with an updated afterword by the author and a new preface by the distinguished colonialist John Demos, Changes in the Land provides a brilliant interdisciplinary interpretation of how land and people influence one another.

Humanity has used asphalt for thousands of years. This humble hydrocarbon may have glued the first arrowhead to the first shaft, but the changes wrought by this material are most dramatic since its emergence as pavement. Since the 1920s the automobile and blacktop have allowed unprecedented numbers of Americans to experience the beauty of their continent from the Adirondacks to the Rockies and beyond, to Big Sur and the Pacific Coast Highway.

In Still Waters, Curt Stager introduces us to the secret worlds hidden within lakes as he travels from the Adirondack wilderness to the wilds of Siberia, from Massachusetts to the Middle East. For him, lakes are both mirrors and windows into history, culture, and our primal connections to all life. Stager fills his narrative with strange and enchanting details about these submerged worlds - diving insects chirping underwater like crickets, African crater lakes that explode, the growing threats to Thoreau's cherished pond - while emphasizing how beautiful and precious our lakes are.

In Once and Future Giants, science writer Sharon Levy digs through the evidence surrounding Pleistocene large animal ("megafauna") extinction events worldwide, showing that understanding this history - and our part in it - is crucial for protecting the elephants, polar bears, and other great creatures at risk today. These surviving relatives of the Ice Age beasts now face an intensified replay of that great die-off, as our species usurps the planet's last wild places while driving a warming trend more extreme than any in mammalian history.

From the chance to live on this planet to the pleasure of listening to the sound of a violin—every story begins with a plant. We animals account for a paltry 0.3% of the planet's biomass while plants add up to 85%. It is obvious that every story on this planet has a plant as its protagonist. Our world is a green world; Earth is the planet of plants. Neurobiologist Stefano Mancuso is back with a book to tell us about the greenprint of our world. He does it through unforgettable stories starring plants; stories combining an inimitable narrative style and remarkable scientific rigor.

Roger Fouts fulfilled humankind's age-old dream of talking to animals by pioneering communication with chimpanzees through sign language. Now, in Next of Kin, Fouts tells the dramatic story of his odyssey from novice researcher to celebrity scientist and caretaker of a family of chimpanzees, to his impassioned awakening as a crusader for the rights of animals.

Yellowstone is America's premier national park. Today Yellowstone is often a byword for conservation, natural beauty, and a way for everyone to enjoy the great outdoors. But it was not always this way. Wonderlandscape presents a new perspective on Yellowstone, the emotions that various natural wonders and attractions evoke, and how this explains the park's relationship to America as a whole.

The Fens is Britain's most distinctive, complex, man-made and least understood landscape. Francis Pryor has lived in, excavated, farmed, walked and loved the Fen Country for more than 40 years: its levels and drains, its soaring churches and magnificent medieval buildings. In The Fens, he counterpoints the history of the Fenland landscape and its transformation with the story of his own discovery of it as an archaeologist.

It is not your imagination: water crises are more frequent. Our twentieth-century systems for providing the water that grows food, sustains cities, and supports healthy ecosystems are failing to meet the demands of growing population and the challenges brought on by climate change. But the grim news reports—of empty reservoirs, withering crops, failing ecosystems—need not be cause for despair, argues award-winning author David Sedlak.