Environment Food

An “important and deeply researched” (The Wall Street Journal) exploration of allergies, from their first medical description in 1819 to the cutting-edge science that is illuminating the changes in our environment and lifestyles that are making so many of us sick Hay fever. Peanut allergies...

The Ayahuasca Test Pilots Handbook provides a practical guide to ayahuasca use, aiding seekers in making right—and safe—decisions about where to go, who to drink with, and what to expect. Ayahuasca, the Amazonian psychoactive plant brew, has become vastly popular. Once the sole purview of...

In May 1967, internationally renowned activist Fannie Lou Hamer purchased 40 acres of land in the Mississippi Delta, launching the Freedom Farms Cooperative (FFC). Life on the cooperative farm presented an alternative to the second wave of northern migration by African Americans - an opportunity to stay in the South, live off the land, and create a healthy community. Freedom Farmers expands the historical narrative of the Black freedom struggle to embrace the work, roles, and contributions of Southern Black farmers and the organizations they formed.

Eat more fish, the doctors say. But is the salmon you are consuming really healthy? In the early 1970s, a group of scientists researched how to make more food for the growing population of the world. They looked to the sea. They sampled genes from salmon in 41 Norwegian and Swedish rivers and...

An authoritative, accessible guide to how our lungs work and how to protect them. Most of us pay little attention to the workings of our lungs, but the COVID-19 pandemic has sparked interest in their functioning and fear about the risks they face. Dr. MeiLan K. Han, a leading pulmonologist and a...

Award-winning journalist Hannah Nordhaus tells the remarkable story of John Miller, one of America's foremost migratory beekeepers, and the myriad and mysterious epidemics threatening American honeybee populations.

An authoritative and eye-opening history that examines how Monsanto came to have outsized influence over our food system. Monsanto, a St. Louis chemical firm that became the world’s largest maker of genetically engineered seeds, merged with German pharma-biotech giant Bayer in 2018—but its...

Drawing on findings from leading health researchers as well as conversations with both chemical and organic farmers from coast to coast, Maria Rodale irrefutably outlines the unacceptably high cost of chemical farming on our health and our environment. She traces the genesis of chemical farming and the rise of the immense companies that profit from it, bringing to light the government's role in allowing such practices to flourish.

Project Animal Farm provides a riveting and revealing look at what truly happens behind farm doors, as discovered by a fearless young woman. Sonia Faruqi, a 25-year-old Ivy League graduate and investment banker, had no idea that the night she arrived at the doorstep of an organic dairy farm would mark the beginning of a journey that would ultimately wind all the way around the world. Instead of turning away from the animal cruelty she would come to witness, Sonia made the most courageous decision of her life.

Charles Dowding puts feeding the soil at the heart of his No Dig method of growing. He explains how to use your kitchen and garden waste to make homemade compost so that your plants can truly flourish. Discover what you can compost, how to get the perfect balance, and different ways to compost...

Finalist for the Washington State Book Award From the award-winning author of The Mushroom Hunters comes the story of an iconic fish, perhaps the last great wild food: salmon. For some, a salmon evokes the distant wild, thrashing in the jaws of a hungry grizzly bear on TV. For others...

"If you want to understand the strange workings of the human body, and the future of medicine, you must read this illuminating, engaging book." —Siddhartha Mukherjee, author of The Gene In 2014, James Hamblin launched a series of videos for The Atlantic called "If Our Bodies Could Talk." ...

Listeners will go deep into a Vermont sugar bush and its web of plastic tubes, mainline valves, and collection tanks. They will visit sugarhouses crammed with gas evaporators and reverse-osmosis machines. And they will witness encounters between sugar makers and the tourists eager to invest Vermont with mythological fantasies of rural simplicity.

In Stolen Harvest: The Hijacking of the Global Food Supply, Vandana Shiva explores the devastating effects of commercial agriculture and genetic engineering on the food we eat, the farmers who grow it, and the soil that sustains it. This prescient critique and call to action covers some of the most pressing topics of this ongoing dialogue, from the destruction of local food cultures and the privatization of plant life, to unsustainable industrial fish farming and safety concerns about corporately engineered foods.

Deciduous forest ecosystems can be found on nearly every continent. Countless animals and plants live in them. So what difference could the loss of one animal species make? Follow the chain reaction, and discover how important gray wolves are.

Grassland ecosystems can be found on nearly every continent. Countless animals and plants live in them. So what difference could the loss of one animal species make? Follow the chain reaction, and discover how important honey bees are.

The ocean ecosystem is huge, covering most of our planet. Countless animals and plants live there. So what difference could the loss of one animal species make? Follow the chain reaction, and discover how important sea otters are.

The tundra ecosystem is vast, covering a large part of the far north. Countless animals and plants live there. So what difference could the loss of one animal species make? Follow the chain reaction, and discover how important lemmings are.

Acclaimed across the world, prescribed in over 100 universities and colleges, and included in part in The Century's Greatest Reportage (Ordfront, 2000), alongside the works of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Studs Terkel and John Reed, Everybody Loves a Good Drought is the established classic on rural...

How a mysterious, super-powerful—yet long-neglected—microbe rules our world and can rescue our health in the age of antibiotic resistance. At every moment, within our bodies and all around us, trillions of microscopic combatants are waging a war that shapes our health and life on Earth...