Environmental Engineering

Jamie Sayen approaches the story of northern New England's undeveloped forests from the viewpoints of the previously unheard: the forest and the nonhuman species it sustains, the First Peoples, and, in more recent times, the disenfranchised human voices of the forest, including those of loggers, mill workers, and citizens who, like Henry David Thoreau, wish to speak a kind word for nature.

Sally Sierer Bethea was one of the first women in America to become a "riverkeeper"—a vocal defender of a specific waterway who holds polluters accountable. In Keeping the Chattahoochee, she tells stories that range from joyous and funny to frustrating—even alarming—to illustrate what it takes to save an endangered river. Her tales are triggered by the regular walks she takes through a forest to the Chattahoochee over the course of a year, finding solace and kinship in nature.

In Canopy of Titans, Paul Koberstein and Jessica Applegate examine the global importance of the Pacific Coastal Temperate Rainforest that stretches from Northern California to Alaska. Their urgent and authoritative account sets out the threats facing a vital environmental resource, and celebrates the beauty and complexity of one of the world's great forests.

When biologist Hanna Bjørgaas spots a fairy cup lichen in Antarctica, she is surprised to recognize it from her own backyard in Oslo. When she returns home, she embarks on a journey into urban nature, visiting city parks, cemeteries, and concrete rooftops to investigate the species that live in urban spaces. Along the way, she meets corvids, songbirds, ants, pigeons, bats, sparrows, fungi, and linden trees—and the experts who study their surprising abilities to survive, and thrive, in the city.

A straightforward and fact-based exploration of how weather happens, how it relates to climate, and how science answers major questions about Earth as a system.

How to Live Plastic Free will teach you everything you need to know about reducing your plastic usage on a daily basis. The chapters start with a typical morning routine and take you through your day, giving you tips and practical advice for removing unnecessary plastic at every possible opportunity. From the moment you wake up to the time you go to bed, you will learn how easy it can be to use plastic-free cosmetics, how to have plastic-free mealtimes, how to change your shopping habits and how to consider your use of plastic items at work.

Within every company, there lies a sleeping giant. Companies have long been viewed as either the primary cause of environmental destruction, or as a deep-pocketed funding source for people trying to confront it. But with their access to innovation, new technology, and intellectual firepower, most companies are built to tackle the challenges our planet faces in a way smaller organizations and foundations can’t. What would happen if executives stopped looking at sustainability as a side project for the PR team and saw it instead as a way to benefit the planet and their profits?

The Unnatural World chronicles a disparate band of unlikely heroes: an effervescent mad scientist who would fertilize the seas, a pigeon obsessive bent on bringing back the extinct, a low-level government functionary in China doing his best to clean up his city, and more. These scientists, billionaires, and ordinary people are all working toward saving the best home humanity is ever likely to have.

The sky has always held significance for humanity, in both cultural and scientific terms. And yet we persistently pollute it with sometimes unnecessary light in our obsessive desire to chase away the darkness. This effectively switches off the stars, hampering our ability to enjoy one of the most inspiring sights nature has to offer to humankind. In addition, too much light is hazardous to both our health and that of the fauna and flora of this planet.

This audiobook narrated by Jennifer Woodward explains why acknowledging diverse eco-social relationships can help us overcome the political polarization that undermines our ability to protect the environment.

This book chronicles the creation of Everglades National Park, the largest subtropical wilderness in the United States. Prior to the park's creation, the Everglades was seen as a reviled and useless swamp, unfit for typical recreational or development projects. Park advocates drew on new ideas concerning the value of biota and ecology, the importance of wilderness, and the need to protect habitats, marine ecosystems, and plant life to redefine the Everglades. Using these ideas, the Everglades began to be recognized as an ecologically valuable and fragile wetland.

From an award-winning adventure and science journalist comes an eye-opening exploration of a burgeoning environmental phenomenon and the science coalescing around it. Leslie Anthony leads listeners on adventures physical and philosophical as he explores how and why invasive species are hijacking ecosystems around the globe.

The Pasagoula River is the largest unobstructed river in the continuous United States. Because of this lack of restraint, the river has been left to rise and fall naturally with the seasons, overflowing annually into the adjoining bottomland surrounded by some of the most ecologically diverse woodlands, in North America. Herman Murrah lived his entire life on the banks and in the swamp surrounding this river in southeast Mississippi. In this book, Herman's son Davy details the adventures that continue to inspire young conservationists in the fight to protect our remaining natural ecosystems.

Conservationist and marine biologist Maddalena Bearzi made her career studying the wild creatures of the deep, but when COVID-19 made landfall on the California coast this seafaring scientist found herself shuttered up ashore, her wide blue world constricted by pandemic lockdown. Never good at sitting idle, she despaired at the confines of her Los Angeles flat—until she began to find wonder in the wilderness of her own backyard. Stranded charts Bearzi's discovery of both rapture and resilience in the unsung wildlife of urban LA.

As a mother and a professor of environmental education, Mallory McDuff wanted to give her two daughters and her students a roadmap to engage in climate justice in their communities, rather than be left feeling paralyzed by the enormity of the problem. She set out to find women of diverse ages, backgrounds, and vocations—one from each of the fifty US states—as inspiration for a new kind of leadership focused on the heart of the climate crisis.

From fatal heatwaves and cruel droughts to devastating floods and fast-depleting water tables, climate change is the greatest disruptor of our time - and it can no longer be ignored. For most of us the odds seem overwhelming and solutions out of reach. Yet, in this forcefully argued book, climate-change practitioner, teacher and investor Mridula Ramesh emphasizes that while the situation is grim, it is not without hope.

Grassroots Rising is a passionate call to action for the global body politic, providing practical solutions for how to survive - and thrive - in catastrophic times. Author Ronnie Cummins aims to educate and inspire citizens worldwide to organize and become active participants in preventing ecological collapse. This audiobook offers a blueprint for building and supercharging a grassroots regeneration movement based on consumer activism, farmer innovation, political change, and regenerative finance.

How serious are the threats to our environment? Here is one measure of the problem: if we continue to do exactly what we are doing, with no growth in the human population or the world economy, the world in the latter part of this century will be unfit to live in. Of course human activities are not holding at current levels—they are accelerating, dramatically—and so, too, is the pace of climate disruption, biotic impoverishment, and toxification.

In Secondhand, Adam Minter delves into the vast, multibillion-dollar industry that resells used stuff around the world. He follows the trail of unwanted objects from the closets, garages, and storage units of Middle America to epic used-goods markets in Canada, Mexico, Japan, Ghana, India, Malaysia, and beyond. Secondhand takes us through the often painful and heartbreaking process of cleaning out a lifetime’s worth of possessions and shows that used stuff still has a place in a world that values the new and shiny.

In the dramatic narratives that comprise The Republic of Nature, Mark Fiege reframes the canonical account of American history based on the simple but radical premise that nothing in the nation's past can be considered apart from the natural circumstances in which it occurred. Revisiting historical icons so familiar that schoolchildren learn to take them for granted, he makes surprising connections that enable readers to see old stories in a new light.