Conservation History

A revelatory account of how water has shaped the course of human life and history, and a positive vision of what the future can hold—if we act now From the very creation of the planet billions of years ago to the present day, water has always been central to existence on Earth. And since long...

America was built on white pine. From the 1600s through the Civil War and beyond, it was used to build the nation's ships and houses, barns, and bridges. Yet this popularity came at a cost: by the end of the nineteenth century, clear cutting had decimated much of America's white pine forests. In White Pine, ecologist and writer John Pastor takes listeners on walk through history, connecting the white pine forests that remain today to a legacy of destruction and renewal.

A vivid, searching journey into California's capture of water and soil—the epic story of a people's defiance of nature and the wonders, and ruin, it has wrought Mark Arax is from a family of Central Valley farmers, a writer with deep ties to the land who has watched the battles over water...

Once, farmers knew how to make a living hedge and fed their flocks on tree-branch hay. Rural people knew how to prune hazel to foster abundance: both of edible nuts, and of straight, strong, flexible rods for bridges, walls, and baskets. No place could prosper without its inhabitants knowing how to cut their trees so they would sprout again. This created the healthiest, most sustainable, and most diverse woodlands that we have ever known. In this journey from the English fens to Spain, Japan, and California, William Bryant Logan rediscovers what was once an everyday ecology.

Treasure Hunters: Danger Down the Nile: Booktrack Edition adds an immersive musical soundtrack to your audiobook listening experience!The sequel to James Patterson's Treasure Hunters is another hilarious, hair-raising adventure for the First Family of Action! Bick Kidd and his globe-trotting...

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...

Christopher Knowlton, author of Cattle Kingdom and former Fortune writer, takes an in-depth look at the spectacular Florida land boom of the 1920s and shows how it led directly to the Great Depression. The 1920s in Florida was a time of incredible excess, immense wealth, and precipitous collapse...

A dramatic tale of gentlemen-explorers of the 1930s racing to find and harvest a poisonous Amazon vine, and how their work plundered local tribes and spurred the invention of new medicines. In the fall of 1938, a young, frail American explorer set off down a river in the western Amazon in search...

“An inspiring reminder of the incredible resource that is our public lands.” —Brendan Leonard, author of The Camping Life and Surviving the Great Outdoors Across 193 million acres of forests, mountains, deserts, watersheds, and grasslands, national forests provide a multitude of uses as...

The sequel to James Patterson's Treasure Hunters is another hilarious, hair-raising and highly-illustrated adventure for the First Family of Action as they set off on a quest for the riches of King Solomon's mines! Bick Kidd and his globe-trotting siblings Beck, Storm and Tommy may have...

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.

Called "one of the greatest men alive" by the Times of London, E. O. Wilson proposes an historic partnership between scientists and religious leaders to preserve Earth's rapidly vanishing biodiversity.

In the tradition of Peter Matthiessen's Wildlife in America or Aldo Leopold, Brenda Peterson tells the 300-year history of wild wolves in America. It is also our own history, seen through our relationship with wolves. The earliest Americans revered them. Settlers zealously exterminated them. Now, scientists, writers, and ordinary citizens are fighting to bring them back to the wild. Peterson, an eloquent voice in the battle for 20 years, makes the powerful case that without wolves, not only will our whole ecology unravel, but we'll lose much of our national soul.

From the author of the enduring classic The Solace of Open Spaces, here is a wondrous meditation on how water, light, wind, mountain, bird, and horse have shaped her life and her understanding of a world besieged by a climate crisis. Amid species extinctions and disintegrating ice sheets...

“This is the book where self-help turns into helping the world—and then turns back into helping yourself find a better life. Fascinating and timely!”—Bill McKibben, author of Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet What does it take to achieve a successful and satisfying life? Not...

SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2025 WAINWRIGHT PRIZE FOR CONSERVATION WRITING A poignant personal narrative about family, cultural history and ecology, and a quest to understand what we owe our ancestors and our descendants from an unforgettable new voice. Every spring during the Qingming Festival, people...

Winner of the inaugural Theodore Roosevelt Association Book Prize A captivating account of how Theodore Roosevelt’s lifelong passion for the natural world set the stage for America’s wildlife conservation movement and determined his legacy as a founding father of today’s museum naturalism...

In this "immersive, densely reported, and altogether remarkable first book [with] the texture and color of a first-rate novel" (New York Times), journalist Doug Bock Clark tells the epic story of the world's last subsistence whalers and the threats posed to a tribe on the brink. A New York Times...

From the acclaimed author of The Night Portrait comes a stunning historical novel about two women, separated by five hundred years, who each hide Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa—with unintended consequences. France, 1939 At the dawn of World War II, Anne Guichard, a young archivist employed...

From the front lines of the movement for safer products, environmental health expert Lindsay Dahl takes us on her journey from skeptic to activist, exposing the secret forces that keep toxic chemicals in our homes, bodies, and environment—showing us how to fight back and keep our families safe...