Conservation Science

Imagine It! is a handbook for those who want to begin or advance a journey toward living in better balance with our planet. It inspires, supports, and offers easy ways to replace old, planet-hurting habits with new healthy ones. Documentary filmmakers Laurie David and Heather Reisman highlight the need to change some of our food, clothing, and transportation habits and meaningfully lower our use of plastic, paper, water, and harmful chemicals.

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.

Richard Rashke leads us through the myriad of charges and countercharges, theories and facts, and reaches conclusions based solely on the evidence in hand. Originally published in 1981, his audiobook offers a vivid, edgy picture of the tensions that racked this country in the 1970s. However, the volume is not only an important historical document. Complex, fascinating characters populate this compelling insider's view of the nuclear industry.

The organic grower's guide to planting, propagation, culture, and ecology. Trees are our allies in healing the world. Partnering with trees allows us to build soil, enhance biodiversity, increase wildlife populations, grow food and medicine, and pull carbon out of the atmosphere, sequestering it in the soil. Author Akiva Silver is an enthusiastic tree grower with years of experience running his own commercial nursery. In this audiobook, he clearly explains the most important concepts necessary for success with perennial woody plants.

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.

From the 1992 Rio Earth Summit to the 2009 Copenhagen Climate Conference there was a concerted international effort to stop climate change. Yet greenhouse gas emissions increased, atmospheric concentrations grew, and global warming became an observable fact of life. In this book, philosopher Dale Jamieson explains what climate change is, why we have failed to stop it, and why it still matters what we do.

Biodiversity, the diversity of life, is not only fascinating and beautiful, it is the engine of all the world's natural cycles, and the source of many of the resources on which humanity depends. Concern about biodiversity conservation is, therefore, not merely the preoccupation of a few enthusiastic naturalists—it is the lifeline business of everybody.

Create amazing inventions and help the environment at the same time. In Repurpose It, you’ll invent a solar still, a bug robot, a textbook safe, and many other resourceful contraptions. When it comes to inventing, your imagination has no limits!

Learn about endangered and threatened animals.

America's Nuclear Wastelands presents an expert, yet straightforward overview of this complex topic, including nuclear weapons history and contamination issues. The author, a government consultant with a long career in Pacific Northwest nuclear waste issues, also explores the current institutional and political environment, demonstrating the critical role of public participation for past and future generations.

Soil is the unlikely story of our most maligned resource as swashbuckling hero. A saga of bombs, ice ages and civilisations falling. Of ancient hunger, modern sicknesses and gastronomic delight. It features poison gas, climate collapse and a mind-blowing explanation of how rain is formed. For too long, we've not only neglected the land beneath us, we've squandered and debased it, by over-clearing, over-grazing and over-ploughing.

Jim and Elaine Larison spent years studying, exploring, and living in wild places, making more than 30 environmental films, most for the National Geographic Society. These films won more than 40 international awards from leading environmental and broadcast organizations. This memoir tells the story behind the adventure and describes the rather substantial personal costs of this career.

Our precious archipelago is ravaged by climate change, bereft of natural ecosystems and lies at the mercy of global warming, flooding, drought and catastrophic biodiversity loss. But could restoring species that once helped protect our islands help turn this crisis around? From familiar yet imperilled honeybees and ancient oak woods to returning natives like beavers and boars, Britain’s cornerstone species may hold the key to recovering our biodiversity on land and in our seas.

Our insatiable demand for animals - for jewelry, pets, medicine, meat, trophies, and fur - is driving a worldwide poaching epidemic, threatening the continued existence of countless species. Rachel Nuwer, an award-winning science journalist with a background in ecology, takes listeners on a narrative journey to the front lines of the trade: to killing fields in Africa, traditional medicine black markets in China, and wild meat restaurants in Vietnam. Through exhaustive first-hand reporting that took her to 10 countries, Nuwer explores the forces currently driving the demand.

The second volume of William T. Vollmann's epic book about the factors and human actions that have led to global warming begins in the coal fields of West Virginia and Eastern Kentucky. Over the course of four years, Vollmann finds hollowed out towns with coal-polluted streams and acidified drinking water; makes covert visits to mountaintop removal mines; and offers documented accounts of unpaid fines for federal health and safety violations and of miners who died because their bosses cut corners to make more money.

At a time when countless communities are resisting powerful corporations - from Flint, Michigan, to the Standing Rock Reservation, to Didipio in the Philippines, to the Gualcarque River in Honduras - The Water Defenders tells the inspirational story of a community that took on an international mining corporation at seemingly insurmountable odds and won not one but two historic victories.

A Silent Spring for our era, this eloquent, urgent, fascinating book reveals how just 50 years of swift and dangerous oceanic change threatens the very existence of life on Earth. Legendary marine scientist Sylvia Earle portrays a planet teetering on the brink of irreversible environmental crisis.

At stake in 1896 was the new idea that some landscapes should be collectively, permanently owned by a democratic government. Although many people today think of public lands as an American birthright, their very existence was then in doubt and dependent on a merger of the talents of these two men. Natural Rivals examines a time of environmental threat and political dysfunction not unlike our own and reveals the complex dynamic that gave birth to America’s rich public lands legacy.

The world needs to change. We have unleashed an ecological mega-crisis which is threatening the future of life on Earth. The actions we take over the next decade are critical. They will determine the destiny of our descendants and the fate of our world. How Soon Is Now presents a compelling manifesto for personal and planetary change. It proposes a revolutionary new narrative for a unified social movement. Through global cooperation, we can face this collective threat ecologically, socially, politically and spiritually.

A follow-up to Ohlson’s previous book, The Soil Will Save Us (Rodale 2014), Sweet in Tooth and Claw extends the concept of cooperation in nature to the life-affirming connections among microbes, plants, fungi, insects, birds, and animals—including humans—in ecosystems around the globe.