Environmental History

From “tomorrow’s greatest designer” (The Atlantic), a deeply researched “essential guide” (Chelsea Clinton) to how humankind designs its world and how those decisions shape us. For the majority of the world, purposefully designed spaces are often only available for those who can afford...

WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE Winner of The New York Public Library’s Helen Bernstein Book Award “A new classic of science reporting.”—The New York Times The riveting true story of a small town ravaged by industrial pollution, Toms River melds hard-hitting investigative...

Few of us have any conception of the enormous timescales in our planet's long history, and this narrow perspective underlies many of the environmental problems we are creating for ourselves. Our everyday lives are shaped by processes that vastly predate us, and our habits will in turn have consequences that will outlast us by generations. Timefulness reveals how knowing the rhythms of Earth's deep past and conceiving of time as a geologist does can give us the perspective we need for a more sustainable future.

A dazzling journey into the hidden lives of synanthropes, the wild animals who've found ingenious ways to survive and thrive in human communities—from award-winning writer and epidemiologist Dan Werb Synanthropes have always been an immutable part of the tapestry of our lives. They are the...

The definitive story of the California redwoods, their discovery and their exploitation, as told by an activist who fought to protect their existence against those determined to cut them down. Every year millions of tourists from around the world visit California’s famous redwoods. Yet few who...

In Car Country, Wells rejects the idea that the nation's automotive status quo can be explained as a simple byproduct of an ardent love affair with the automobile. Instead, he takes listeners on a tour of the evolving American landscape, charting the ways that transportation policies and land-use practices have combined to reshape nearly every element of the built environment around the easy movement of automobiles. Wells untangles the complicated relationships between automobiles and the environment, allowing listeners to see the everyday world in a completely new way.

A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK The dramatic story of the Flint water crisis, by a relentless physician who stood up to power. “Stirring . . . [a] blueprint for all those who believe . . . that ‘the world . . . should be full of people raising their voices.’”—The New York Times...

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...

A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice | A Kirkus Reviews Best Nonfiction Book of the Year In the tradition of Katherine Boo and Tracy Kidder, The Hungry Season is a “lyrical” narrative with "real suspense" (New York Times): a nonfiction drama that “reads like the best of...

**Kirkus Best Books of the Year (2013)** **Kansas City Star Best Books of the Year (2013)** A passionate student of Japanese poetry, theater, and art for much of her life, Gretel Ehrlich felt compelled to return to the earthquake-and-tsunami-devastated Tohoku coast to bear witness, listen to...

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...

From the national bestselling author of The Food Explorer comes the untold story of Alice Hamilton, a trailblazing doctor and public health activist who took on the booming auto industry—and the deadly invention of leaded gasoline, which would poison millions of people across America. At noon...

From St. Louis to New Orleans, from Baltimore to Oklahoma City, there are poor and minority neighborhoods so beset by pollution that just living in them can be hazardous to your health. Due to entrenched segregation, zoning ordinances that privilege wealthier communities, or because businesses have found the "paths of least resistance", there are many hazardous waste and toxic facilities in these communities, leading residents to experience health and wellness problems on top of the race and class discrimination most already experience.

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.

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.

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...

WINNER OF THE TENNESSEE BOOK AWARD FOR NONFICTION A NEW YORKER BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR A riveting courtroom drama about the victims of one of the largest environmental disasters in U.S. history—and the country lawyer determined to challenge the notion that, in America, justice can be...

The world is encountering multiple crises—climate, droughts, floods, energy, food, and pandemics, to name a few. We have a problem, this is the solution. Capitalism and Crises is about how capitalism can fix them—how it can solve not cause them. The reason why it has caused them is that we have misconceived the nature of our capitalist system. We have failed to understand the key institution at the heart of it—business—and as a result we have allowed it to cause as well as solve problems. This book describes why this has happened and what needs to change to address it.

A Nature Best Book of 2025 A Wall Street Journal Holiday Gift Pick An elegantly written exploration of the cutting edge science of the strangest and most remarkable creatures on our planet by a leading marine biologist Hundred-year-old giant clams, coral kingdoms that rival human cities, and...

The explosive true story of a secret group of radicals who launched a clandestine battle to save the planet—and what their legacy illuminates about the past, present, and future of the environmental movement In the early hours of October 28, 1996, a driver in rural Oregon spotted flames rising...