Environmental History

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...

A prize-winning science writer reveals the intricate ways that the elements are woven into our culture, history, and language in stories of discovery and discoverers; of rituals and values; of exploitation and celebration; and of superstition as well as science Like the alphabet, the calendar or...

In this landmark work of environmental history, William Cronon offers an original and profound explanation of the effects European colonists' sense of property and their pursuit of capitalism had upon the ecosystems of New England. Reissued here with an updated afterword by the author and a new preface by the distinguished colonialist John Demos, Changes in the Land provides a brilliant interdisciplinary interpretation of how land and people influence one another.

“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...

On April 18, 1906, a 7.8-magnitude earthquake shook the San Francisco region, igniting fires that burned half the city. The disaster in all its elements - earthquake, fires, and recovery - profoundly disrupted the urban order and challenged San Francisco's perceived permanence. The crisis temporarily broke down spatial divisions of class and race and highlighted the contested terrain of urban nature in an era of widespread class conflict, simmering ethnic tensions, and controversial reform efforts.

This clearly written and engrossing book presents a global narrative of the origins of the modern world from 1400 to the present. Unlike most studies, which assume that the “rise of the West” is the story of the coming of the modern world, this history, drawing upon new scholarship on Asia, Africa, and the New World and upon the maturing field of environmental history, constructs a story in which those parts of the world play major roles, including their impacts on the environment.

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...

In this "immersive, densely reported, and altogether remarkable first book [with] the texture and color of a first-rate novel" (New York Times), journalist Doug Bock Clark tells the epic story of the world's last subsistence whalers and the threats posed to a tribe on the brink. A New York Times...

A sweeping, lyrical debut about the love and longing between humanity and the earth itself, by a major new literary talent from India “A marvel of magical realism.”—O: The Oprah Magazine A spellbinding work of literature, Latitudes of Longing follows the interconnected lives of characters...

"The road in life forks in every moment, with one path leading toward confusion, separateness, and entanglement, and the other toward clarity, connection, and mental freedom. With mind whispering, the choice can be ours." Why sometimes do even the smallest events send us into a downward spiral?...

In the spring of 1983 Terry Tempest Williams learned that her mother was dying of cancer. That same season, The Great Salt Lake began to rise to record heights, threatening the Bear River Migratory Bird Refuge and the herons, owls, and snowy egrets that Williams, a poet and naturalist, had come to gauge her life by. One event was nature at its most random, the other a by-product of rogue technology: Terry's mother, and Terry herself, had been exposed to the fallout of atomic bomb tests in the 1950s.

The harrowing story of five men who were sent into a dark, airless, miles-long tunnel, hundreds of feet below the ocean, to do a nearly impossible job—with deadly results A quarter-century ago, Boston had the dirtiest harbor in America. The city had been dumping sewage into it for...

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...

In the mid-1930s, North America's Great Plains faced one of the worst man-made environmental disasters in world history. Donald Worster's classic chronicle of the devastating years between 1929 and 1939 tells the story of the Dust Bowl in ecological as well as human terms. Twenty-five years after his book helped to define the new field of environmental history, Worster shares his more recent thoughts on the subject of the land and how humans interact with it.

Field notes from an age of extinction, tracking the ever-shifting meaning of America’s animals throughout history to understand the current moment Journalist Jon Mooallem has watched his little daughter’s world overflow with animals—butterfly pajamas, appliquéd owls—while the actual...

From the author of the enduring classic The Solace of Open Spaces, here is a wondrous meditation on how water, light, wind, mountain, bird, and horse have shaped her life and her understanding of a world besieged by a climate crisis. Amid species extinctions and disintegrating ice sheets...

While Americans have been deeply absorbed with the topic of immigration for generations, emigration from the United States has been almost entirely ignored. Following the US Civil War, an estimated 10,000 Confederates left the US South, most of them moving to Brazil, where they became known as Confederados, Portuguese for “Confederates”. These Southerners were the largest organized group of White Americans to ever voluntarily emigrate from the United States.

A riveting, urgent account of the explorers and scientists racing to understand the rapidly melting ice sheet in Greenland, a dramatic harbinger of climate change “Jon Gertner takes readers to spots few journalists or even explorers have visited. The result is a gripping and important book...

From Vietnam to the Southern Strategy, from the opening of China to the scandal of Watergate, Pat Buchanan—speechwriter and senior adviser to President Nixon—tells the untold story of Nixon’s embattled White House, from its historic wins to it devastating defeats. In his inaugural...

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.