Sports Environment

In his best-selling first book, Jeremy Wade, the star of the hit TV series River Monsters, memorably recounted his adventures on six continents in pursuit of fish of staggering proportions and terrifying demeanor. Now "the greatest angling explorer of his generation" (Independent on Sunday) returns to delight listeners with a book of an entirely different sort, the book he was always destined to write - the distillation of a life spent fishing. Thoughtful and funny, brimming with wisdom and above all, adventure, these are pitch-perfect reflections....

As development and subsequent habitat destruction accelerate, there are increasing pressures on wildlife populations. But there is an important and simple step toward reversing this alarming trend: Everyone with access to a patch of earth can make a significant contribution toward sustaining biodiversity. Bringing Nature Home has sparked a national conversation about the link between healthy local ecosystems and human well-being, and this audio edition will help broaden the movement. By acting on Douglas Tallamy's practical recommendations, everyone can make a difference.

Both a captivating narrative and a book of environmental and historical significance, American Buffalo tells us as much about ourselves as Americans as it does about the creature who perhaps best of all embodies the American ethos.

In The Secret Wisdom of Nature, master storyteller and international sensation Peter Wohlleben takes listeners on a thought-provoking exploration of the vast natural systems that make life on Earth possible. In this tour of an almost unfathomable world, Wohlleben describes the fascinating interplay between animals and plants.

A "normal" Caribbean hurricane travels from east to west, but Lenny was anything but normal. Spawned south of Cuba in 1999, this late-season storm defied all predictions by moving steadily east toward the Leeward Islands. Eventually building almost to Category 5 strength, Lenny squatted for two days between the Virgin Islands and St. Martin, whipping the ocean with 155 mile-per-hour winds and sixty-foot seas.

Well-known nature and conservation writer Ted Williams is an avid fisherman who has devoted many years to writing about the sport and advocating the preservation of bodies of water and species of fish. Here, he brings together his love of angling with his profound sense of responsibility for the environment.

The world J.R.R. Tolkien created is one of the most beloved in all of literature, and continues to capture hearts and imaginations around the world. From Oxford to ComiCon, the Middle Earth is analyzed and interpreted through a multitude of perspectives. But one essential facet of Tolkien and his Middle Earth has been overlooked: science.

Emma Gatewood told her family she was going on a walk and left her small Ohio hometown with a change of clothes and less than $200. The next anybody heard from her, this genteel, farm-reared, 67-year-old great-grandmother had walked 800 miles along the 2,050-mile Appalachian Trail. And in September 1955, atop Maine's Mount Katahdin, she sang the first verse of "America, the Beautiful" and proclaimed, "I said I'll do it, and I've done it."

In what he says is the most important piece of environmental writing in his long and award-winning career, Mark Kurlansky, best-selling author of Salt and Cod, The Big Oyster, 1968, and Milk, among many others, employs his signature multi-century storytelling and compelling attention to detail to chronicle the harrowing yet awe-inspiring life cycle of salmon.

A global tragedy is unfolding. Even as we are coming to understand them, the number of seabirds on our planet is in free fall, dropping by nearly 70% in the last 60 years, a billion fewer now than there were in 1950. Of the 10 birds in this audiobook, seven are in decline, at least in part of their range. Extinction stalks the ocean and there is a danger that the grand cry of the seabird colony, rolling around the bays and headlands of high latitudes, will this century become little but a memory.

Most people associate storms and other big weather with death - with the kind of force that makes each of us wonder about life, time, and the nature of our surroundings. Some people go out looking for bad weather or go to places where they're likely to encounter it. Others have the misfortune of being at the wrong place at the wrong time. Still, the stories in Storm have more to say than that.

The Shotgun Conservationist doesn’t teach us how to hunt, it explores why we should hunt. As public lands remain imperiled, factory farms pollute the earth and subject animals to inhumane conditions, and global uncertainty presses us all to be more self-sufficient, there has never been a better time to take up hunting. Writer, natural historian, and public speaker Brant MacDuff has done just that. An avid animal lover and raised as a non-hunter, MacDuff started his journey intending to investigate the claim that “hunting is conservation.”

Outdoor writer Mike Arnold takes us on an impressionistic journey through Coutada 11, a once again magnificent natural area in Mozambique's Zambeze Delta. Mike leads us from its poached-out days as a source of bush meat for starving villagers and civil war military troops to the arrival in the early '90s of hunting outfitter Mark Haldane and his partners, on their often perilous, sometimes hilarious, travails to take the defiled and uninhabitable place and make it whole again.

What if running in beautiful places was paradoxically contributing to the destruction of those precious environments and causing irreversible global harm to people and animals, too? In We Can’t Run Away from This, ultrarunner Damian Hall examines the impact of running in our climate and ecological emergency. Packed with insights from experts, it is an enlightening book that will prompt us all to really think about our kit, food, and travel and to identify simple changes we can make to our running and wider lives.

We have lived with seabirds for at least 300,000 years. From the beginning our view of them has been double, as creatures that are both deeply distant and yet strangely connected to us, both oceanic in what they represent and a mirror of what we are. They stand in for our relationship with nature as a whole. We use them and love them, nurture them and destroy them, revere them and make toys and hats and dinner out of them. It is a pattern that has evolved over history, and our relationship with seabirds has moved through these phases like steps in a game of hopscotch.

Rising from the depths of the North Pacific lies a fabled island, now submerged just 15 feet below the surface of the ocean. Rumors and warnings about Cortes Bank abound, but among big wave surfers, this legendary rock is famous for one simple (and massive) reason: this is the home of the biggest rideable wave on the face of the earth.

A century ago, mountain lions were vilified as a threat to livestock and hunted to the verge of extinction. Its recovery has led to an unexpected conundrum: Do more mountain lions mean they're a threat to humans and domestic animals? Or, are mountain lions still in need of our help and protection as their habitat dwindles? Mountain lion biologist and expert Mark Elbroch welcomes these tough questions. He dismisses long-held myths about mountain lions and uses groundbreaking science to uncover important new information about their social habits.

A world-leading sport ecologist, Madeleine interviews athletes, coaches, politicians and thought-leaders to learn more about the inevitable consequences for this trillion-dollar industry. From the front lines of climate change, Warming Up takes listeners through a play-by-play of how global warming is already impacting sport, and how the sports world can fight back.

Leinster House had been burned to the ground. All that was left was a smouldering ruin and the blackened remains of an Irish flag. The old man was trying to pin the blame on Brussels, but I knew the actual truth? Unfortunately, Sorcha was too angry with me for having sex with our daughter's Irish teacher to listen. But I had, like, other irons in the—pardon the pun—fire. I'd just become Head Coach of the Ireland rugby team—albeit, women. The country might well have been focked. But very soon, we had everyone believing in fairy tales again.

Every spring, billions of birds sweep north, driven by ancient instincts to return to their breeding grounds. This vast parade often goes unnoticed, except in a few places where these small travelers concentrate in large numbers. One such place is along Lake Erie in northwestern Ohio. There, the peak of spring migration is so spectacular that it attracts bird watchers from around the globe, culminating in one of the world’s biggest birding festivals. Now climate change threatens to disrupt patterns of migration and the delicate balance between birds, seasons, and habitats.