English Environmental History

An extraordinary exposé of the industry flooding our world with plastic—and now ramping up to make more than ever “Deeply researched, sharply written, and totally compelling.” —Elizabeth Kolbert, author of the The Sixth Extinction “It is impossible not to compare Beth Gardiner’s...

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...

The date is January 11, 1911. A young German paleontologist, accompanied only by a guide, a cook, four camels, and a couple of camel drivers, reaches the lip of the vast Bahariya Depression after a long trek across the bleak plateau of the western desert of Egypt. The scientist, Ernst Freiherr...

Bees are like oxygen: ubiquitous, essential, and, for the most part, unseen. While we might overlook them, they lie at the heart of relationships that bind the human and natural worlds. In Buzz, the beloved Thor Hanson takes us on a journey that begins 125 million years ago, when a wasp first dared to feed pollen to its young. From honeybees and bumbles to lesser-known diggers, miners, leafcutters, and masons, bees have long been central to our harvests, our mythologies, and our very existence. They've given us sweetness and light, the beauty of flowers, and as much as a third of the foodstuffs we eat. And, alarmingly, they are at risk of disappearing.

A vivid tour into the subterranean that encourages us to look downwards, revealing how the earth's most biodiverse frontier sustains all life above the soil surface The ground beneath us hums with a staggering abundance of winding roots, interconnecting fungal networks, wriggling creatures, and...

A revelatory dive into the overlooked history of grass and the astonishing ways it has shaped human history Try, if you can, to imagine a world without grass. There would be no lawns or athletic fields, no blooming meadows or rolling wheat fields, no sweeping savannas or steppes. Gone too would...

“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...

In its 4.5 billion–year history, life on Earth has been almost erased at least half a dozen times: shattered by asteroid impacts, entombed in ice, smothered by methane, and torn apart by unfathomably powerful megavolcanoes. And we know that another global disaster is eventually headed our way...

“Masterful reporting. As riveting as any thriller. Reads like a nonfiction novel starring idealistic radicals, righteously incensed by environmental injustice, on a doomed trajectory towards confrontation with the capitalist state. A forgotten prequel to 9/11 that couldn't be more relevant...

The decade-long Great Depression, a period of shifts in the country's political and social landscape, forever changed the way America eats. Before 1929, America's relationship with food was defined by abundance. But the collapse of the economy, in both urban and rural America, left a quarter of all Americans out of work and undernourished - shattering long-held assumptions about the limitlessness of the national larder.

A leading ecologist argues that if humankind is to survive on a fragile planet, we must understand and obey its iron laws Our species has amassed unprecedented knowledge of nature, which we have tried to use to seize control of life and bend the planet to our will. In A Natural History of the...

Why are the airlines always in a crisis? Everyone has a horror story about air travel—cancellations, delays, lost baggage, tiny seats, poor service. In this day and age, there is no reason that flying should be this bad. In Why Flying Is Miserable, Ganesh Sitaraman, a law professor and policy...

The year is 2393, and the world is almost unrecognizable. Clear warnings of climate catastrophe went ignored for decades, leading to soaring temperatures, rising sea levels, widespread drought, and the disaster now known as the Great Collapse of 2093. Dramatizing science in ways traditional nonfiction cannot, The Collapse of Western Civilization reasserts the importance of scientists and the work they do, providing a welcome moment of clarity amid the cacophony of climate-change literature.

A hard-hitting look at the battle now raging over the fate of the public lands in the American West--and a plea for the protection of these last wild places The public lands of the western United States comprise some 450 million acres of grassland, steppe land, canyons, forests, and mountains...

New York Public Library Best of 2022 A gripping, twisting account of a small town set on fire by hatred, xenophobia, and ecological disaster—a story that weaves together corporate malfeasance, a battle over shrinking natural resources, a turning point in the modern white supremacist movement...

The gripping story of one American lawyer’s obsessive crusade—waged at any cost—against Big Oil on behalf of the poor farmers and indigenous tribes of the Amazon rainforest. Steven Donziger, a self-styled social activist and Harvard educated lawyer, signed on to a budding class action...

“An in-depth and compelling account of diverse Americans living off the grid.” —Los Angeles Times The radical search for the simple life in today’s America. On a frigid April night, a classically trained opera singer, five months pregnant, and her husband, a former marine biologist...

The essential pocket primer on climate change that will leave an indelible impact on everyone who reads it. “Jahren asks the central question of our time: how can we learn to live on a finite planet?" —Elizabeth Kolbert, New York Times bestselling author of The Sixth Extinction "The...

“[Kathleen Jamie’s] essays guide you softly along coastlines of varying continents, exploring caves, and pondering ice ages until the narrator stumbles over — not a rock on the trail, but mortality, maybe the earth’s, maybe our own, pointing to new paths forward through the forest.”...

From “tomorrow’s greatest designer” (The Atlantic), a personal and deeply researched look at how the choices we build into our environment reflect and determine the way we think, connect, and live. We've been led to believe that purposefully designed spaces are something reserved only for...