Earth Environment

From a light breeze cooling a hot brow to a gale that blows apart buildings, no other natural phenomenon affects people as directly as wind. DeBlieu explores how wind has aided the rise and fall of empires, the discovery of continents, and the establishment of religions. Wind provides surprising, delightful insights into a force that constantly reshapes who we are and how we live. Suzanne Toren’s narration lends a voice of quiet, thoughtful authority to a subject you’ll never view the same again.

Patagonia. The name connotes the exotic and a distance that seems nearly mythical. Tucked toward the toe of South America, this largely unsettled landscape is among the most varied and breathtaking in the world - aching in its beauty as it sweeps from the Andes through broad, arid steppes to pristine beaches and down to a famously violent sea. It is also home to a vast array of rare wildlife as diverse and fascinating as the region itself.

In April 1970, twenty million people grabbed their rakes, gloves, and recycling bins to celebrate the first Earth Day. Since that environmental kickoff, nature has never been in better shape. RIGHT? WRONG! The real deal is a bit muddier than that. It’s true that the first Earth Day encouraged people around the globe to clean up their act when it came to the environment. But activists have been working for centuries to save the planet! Join the History Smashers team to bust history's biggest misconceptions and figure out what really went down before (and after!) the first Earth Day.

A prominent seafaring environmentalist and researcher shares his shocking discovery of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch in the Pacific Ocean, which inspired a fundamental rethinking of the Plastic Age and a growing global health crisis.

Meteorologist and Peabody Award-winning journalist Bonnie Schneider looks at how climate change is already threatening our mental and physical health and offers helpful tips to tackle these challenges.

Focusing the environmental debate on the principle of common commitment, former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich and eminent conservationist Terry L. Maple present A Contract with the Earth. They declare a need for bipartisan environmentalism: a new era of environmental stewardship with principles that they believe most Americans will share.

Inspired by Nathaniel Rich’s Losing Earth: A Recent History, the acclaimed book that grew out of an August 2018 issue of the New York Times Magazine solely dedicated to it, Saving Earth tells the human story of the climate-change conversation from the recent past into the present day. It wrestles with the long shadow of our failures, what might be ahead for today’s generation, and crucial questions of how we understand the world we live in—and how we can work together to change the outlook for the better.

Journalist Christopher Ketcham has been documenting the confluence of commercial exploitation and governmental misconduct in this region for over a decade. His revelatory book takes the listener on a journey across these last wild places, to see how capitalism is killing our great commons.

Across the planet, the futures of young people hang in the balance as they face the harsh realities of the environmental crisis. This urgent book chronicles the lives of the diverse young people on the frontlines of the environmental crisis around the world, amplifying the stories of those living at the heart of the crisis. Advocating for the protection of both people and the planet, Bella restores the beating heart to global environmental issues, from air pollution, to deforestation and overconsumption by telling the stories of those most directly affected.

Climate change is with us, and we need to think about the next big disturbing idea - the potentially disastrous consequences of massive numbers of environmental refugees at large on the planet. In 2020, the United Nations projects that we will have 50 million environmental refugees mostly from Africa, Asia, and Latin America. How will people be relocated and settled? Is it possible to offer environmental refugees temporary or permanent asylum? Will these refugees have any collective rights in the new areas they inhabit?

Finally, a practical, realistic plan to rescue, preserve and enhance nature. This is an economist's approach to environmentalism, including a summary of Britain's green assets, a look towards possible futures and an achievable 25-year plan to a green and prosperous world. News about Britain’s wildlife and ecosystems tends to be grim. In Green and Prosperous Land, Dieter Helm, a member of the Department of Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) and advisor to the government, shares a radical but tangible plan for positive change.

The weather is the foundation of our daily lives. It’s a staple of small talk, the app on our smartphones, and often the first thing we check each morning. Yet behind all these humble interactions is the largest and most elaborate piece of infrastructure human beings have ever constructed - a triumph of both science and global cooperation. But what is the weather machine, and who created it?

Rewilding is restoring natural processes and species, then stepping back so that nature can express its own will. In essence, rewilding means giving the land back to wildlife and wildlife back to the land. Recalling the late, great Wild Earth journal, this provocative anthology showcases the most notable original articles published by Rewilding Earth (rewilding.org) in 2018. Rewilding Earth Unplugged is an inspiring, informative, and user-friendly guide for how to protect and restore wild places and their residents.

This Very Short Introduction takes listeners into the inferno of a racing pyroclastic current, and the heart of a moving lava flow, as understood through the latest scientific research. Exploring how volcanologists forensically decipher how volcanoes work, Michael Branney and Jan Zalasiewicz explain what we do (and don't) understand about the fundamental mechanisms of volcanism, and consider how volcanoes interact with other physical processes on the Earth, with life, and with human society.

In an easy conversational style, The Restless Northwest provides a brief overview of the remarkable geological processes that have shaped the Pacific Northwest. The narrative is also sprinkled with firsthand accounts of the people involved in recent exciting, scientific discoveries. Williams enlivens this story of long-ago geologic events, with a variety of fascinating asides, on everything from enormous undersea tubeworms, to the Willamette meteorite.

What can we, as ordinary citizens, do about climate change? While countless environmental books focus on the causes of our current crisis, Advocating for the Environment is one of the first to focus on advocacy and policy-based solutions, arming listeners with the tools they need to take action and enact change.

With seven million early deaths a year linked to air pollution, air quality is headline news around the world. But even though we breathe in and out every few seconds, few of us really know what’s in the air all around us. In Every Breath You Take, air-quality specialist - and full-time breather - Dr. Mark Broomfield connects the dots from the atmosphere on distant planets to the holes in the ozone layer to the particles in our lungs.

Historischer Blick und Zukunftsbild–Bestsellerautor Jeremy Rifkin kann beides. Er zeigt, wie industrielles Effizienzdenken alle Bereiche des Lebens durchdrungen und uns an den Rand des Abgrunds geführt hat. Ist die Menschheit noch zu retten? Ja, aber dafür bedarf es eines radikalen Wandels unseres Selbstbilds und unseres Denkens.

Beyond what we already know about "food miles" and eating locally, the global food system is a major contributor to climate change, producing as much as one-third of greenhouse gas emissions. How we farm, what we eat, and how our food gets to the table all have an impact. And our government and the food industry are willfully ignoring the issue rather than addressing it. In Anna Lapp's controversial new book, she predicts that unless we radically shift the trends of what food we're eating and how we're producing it, food-system-related greenhouse gas emissions will go up and up and up.

Elixir spans five thousand years, from the beginnings of civilization to the parched American Sun Belt of today. It is a story of human endeavor: our present-day interaction with this most essential resource has deep roots in the remote past, and every human culture has been shaped by its relationship to water.