Conservation Environment

The story of the ocean is as old as the earth itself. Overfishing, pollution, and oil spills have highlighted the need to take better care of our oceans so that the story can continue to be told.

Tom Brown, Jr., is America's most acclaimed outdoorsman, tracker, and teacher. When he was eight he met Stalking Wolf, an Apache elder who taught the young man how to survive in the wild, and more importantly, how to value our place in the natural order. For more than three decades, Tom Brown, Jr., has shared these insights with the world through teaching, writing, and film. Now, for the first time, he has detailed actions that each of us can take to help heal our ailing planet.

Vince Beiser explores the Achilles’ heel of “green power” and digital technology–that manufacturing computers, cell phones, electric cars, and other technologies demand skyrocketing amounts of lithium, copper, cobalt, and other materials. Around the world, businesses and governments are scrambling for new places and new ways to get those metals, at enormous cost to people and the planet. Beiser crisscrossed the world to talk to the people involved and report on the damage this race is inflicting, the ways it could get worse, and how we can minimize the damage.

In the absence of motorized boats and gondolas, Venice’s waters have returned to a sparkling blue color. Deer have been spotted roaming cities in Italy, and mountain goats recently took over a small seaside town in Wales. Taking advantage of the decreased boat traffic, whales have returned to roaming Vancouver’s harbours. The absence of “regular” human activities has dramatically affected our environment. In this book, Bob McDonald turns his focus to global energy sources, and shows how the global shutdowns may have been exactly what we needed to show us that a greener future is achievable.

Douglas W. Tallamy's first book, Bringing Nature Home, awakened thousands of individuals to an urgent situation: wildlife populations are in decline because the native plants they depend on are fast disappearing. His solution? Plant more natives. In this new book, Tallamy takes the next step and outlines his vision for a grassroots approach to conservation.

In the past two decades, our understanding of the navigational and physiological feats that enable birds to cross immense oceans, fly above the highest mountains, or remain in unbroken flight for months at a stretch has exploded. What we've learned of these key migrations is nothing short of extraordinary. This breathtaking work of nature writing also introduces listeners to those scientists, researchers, and bird lovers trying to preserve global migratory patterns in the face of climate change and other environmental challenges.

In The Soil Will Save Us, journalist and bestselling author Kristin Ohlson makes an elegantly argued, passionate case for "our great green hope"—a way in which we can not only heal the land but also turn atmospheric carbon into beneficial soil carbon—and potentially reverse global warming. Her discoveries and vivid storytelling will revolutionize the way we think about our food, our landscapes, our plants, and our relationship to Earth.

Humankind's relationship with the wolf is the sum of a spectrum of responses ranging from fear to admiration and affection. Lopez's classic, careful study has won praise from a wide range of reviewers and improved the way books on wild animals are written. Of Wolves and Men explores the uneasy interaction between wolves and civilization over the centuries, and the wolf's prominence in our thoughts about wild creatures.

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.

We live in an age when humanity spends 90% of its time indoors, yet the nature around us—especially in America’s cities—has never been more vital. This distancing from nature has sparked crises in mental health, longevity, and hope for the next generation, while also heightening the risks we face from historic floods, heatwaves, and wildfires. Indeed, embracing nature holds untapped potential to strengthen and fortify our cities, suburbs, and towns, providing solutions spanning flood preparation, wildfire management, and promoting longevity.

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.

The real stories behind the scenery of America’s national parks. For 12 years, Andrea Lankford lived in the biggest, most impressive national parks in the world, working a job she loved. She chaperoned baby sea turtles on their journey to sea. She pursued bad guys on her galloping patrol horse. She jumped into rescue helicopters bound for the heart of the Grand Canyon. She won arguments with bears. She slept with a few too many rattlesnakes. Hell yeah, it was the best job in the world! Fortunately, Andrea survived it.

The conservation of natural resources, like that of any other asset, involves trade-offs. Yet, in a world faced with the harsh realities of climate change, crafting the right environmental policies is an increasingly urgent task. In Conservation, Charles Perrings and Ann Kinzig bring together new research in economics and biodiversity to investigate conservation decisions and the theory behind them.

Alexandra Morton has been called "the Jane Goodall of Canada" because of her passionate thirty-year fight to save British Columbia's wild salmon. Her account of that fight is both inspiring in its own right and a roadmap of resistance.

Very few individuals can truthfully say that their work impacts every person on Earth. Forrest Galante is one of them. As a wildlife biologist and conservationist, Galante devotes his life to studying, rediscovering, and protecting our planet’s amazing life-forms. Part memoir, part biological adventure, Still Alive celebrates the beauty and determined resiliency of our world, as well as the brave conservationists fighting to save it.

In 2004, an enigmatic charter captain named Al Anderson caught and tagged one Atlantic bluefin tuna off New England's coast. Fourteen years later that same fish—dubbed Amelia for her ocean-spanning journeys—was caught again, this time in a Mediterranean fish trap. Over his fishing career, Al marked more than sixty thousand fish with plastic tags, an obsession that made him nearly as many enemies as it did friends.

What’s to be done about a jaywalking moose? A bear caught breaking and entering? A murderous tree? Three hundred years ago, animals that broke the law would be assigned legal representation and put on trial. These days, as New York Times best-selling author Mary Roach discovers, the answers are best found not in jurisprudence but in science: the curious science of human-wildlife conflict, a discipline at the crossroads of human behavior and wildlife biology.

David Quammen's book, The Song of the Dodo, is a brilliant, stirring work, breathtaking in its scope, far-reaching in its message - a crucial book in precarious times, which radically alters the way in which we understand the natural world and our place in that world. It's also a book full of entertainment and wonders. In The Song of the Dodo, we follow Quammen's keen intellect through the ideas, theories, and experiments of prominent naturalists of the last two centuries.

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.

The Unlikely Peace at Cuchumaquic is both an epic story and a cry to the heart of humanity based on the author’s realization that human survival depends on keeping alive the seeds of our “original forgotten spiritual excellence.” Prechtel relates our current state of ecological crisis to the rapid disappearance of biodiversity, indigenous cultures, and shared human values. He demonstrates how real human culture is exterminated when real (not genetically modified) seeds are lost.