Green Environment

A natural history of the wilderness in our homes, from the microbes in our showers to the crickets in our basements Even when the floors are sparkling clean and the house seems silent, our domestic domain is wild beyond imagination. In Never Home Alone, biologist Rob Dunn introduces us to the nearly 200,000 species living with us in our own homes, from the Egyptian meal moths in our cupboards and camel crickets in our basements to the lactobacillus lounging on our kitchen counters. You are not alone.

What is the difference between a savanna and a prairie? How do bison, zebras, and other grazers avoid hungry grassland predators? Trek across the plant-covered landscape of this book, and find out what makes grasslands one of Earth's treasures.

What happens when the trash you throw out is picked up by the garbage truck? Where does it go? Once the garbage truck picks up the trash in your neighborhood, it goes on a journey to be broken down. A recycling truck might pick it up and make new things or it may be used for a compost heap, or maybe it goes to a landfill where it’s covered with dirt. Find out what happens when a landfill is full!

Travel through Rumpke’s recycling center to find a plastic jug? Trash that can be recycled takes a ride on the conveyor belt to become something new! Try to find the milk jug on the conveyor belt! Trash at the factory goes through many machines to make sure it can be recycled. Can you guess what the milk jug will help make once it leaves the factory? What other types of trash go on the conveyor belt?

What happens to trash after the garbage truck picks it up? Where does it go? The problem of too much trash is hurting the planet. Recycling, reusing, composting and creating new ways to make less trash is a start! Learn to recycle old furniture, and how safer materials are being developed that can easily decompose. People are working hard every day on new ways to have a trash-free future! Are you?

Making a compost pile is a simple way to dispose of waste—like leaves, grass clippings, fruit, and vegetable peels—and turns them into healthy food for plants! Cece notices how nice Jane’s flowers are and wants to make a compost pile, too! Jane and Click show their friends how to make compost and you can learn too! What else is needed to help the compost decompose?

Yo helps his father recycle garbage and learns what types of trash go into the recycling bin. Yo learns his fleece vest is made of plastic and that special factories recycle the plastic and melt it down into new things like toys and his favorite fleece vest! Can you guess which trash goes into the blue bins? Yo wants to surprise his mother with a special present–knowing how to recycle!

Got a pair of old tights, an empty can or a plastic bottle that you plan to throw away? You can upcycle those old things and turn them into new items you can use! Upcycling is recycling in a better way! Learn how to make a decorative pencil holder, a draft dodger to keep the cold out, or turn plastic bottles into bowling pins. What things can you create to reduce the use of plastic and metal?

Did you know about 8 million tons of plastic enter the ocean each year? Learn about the Washed Ashore project that helps to clean up beaches through re-use of collected plastic—and then is recycled into art! Which sculpture in the project is your favorite?

Reusing your trash to make toys can be lots of fun–and decrease pollution and waste! Things we use around the house get old and we throw them away. What if you use them to make toys or gadgets that make life better? Experts think reusing things may be better than recycling! Learn how to make a piggy bank from a plastic can or a train with egg cartons. What things can you create by reusing?

With chronic disorders among American children reaching epidemic levels, hundreds of thousands of parents are desperately seeking solutions to their children's declining health, often with little medical guidance from the experts. What's Making Our Children Sick? convincingly explains how agrochemical industrial production and genetic modification of foods is a culprit in this epidemic.

Water scarcity is on everyone's mind. Long taken for granted, water availability has entered the realm of economics, politics, and people's food and lifestyle choices. But as anxiety mounts - even as a swath of California farmland has been left fallow and extremist groups worldwide exploit the desperation of people losing livelihoods to desertification - many are finding new routes to water security with key implications for food access, economic resilience, and climate change.

It is estimated that the earth's population will expand to an unprecedented nine billion people over the next century. This explosion in population is predicted to place further stress on our environment, deplete our natural resources, and lead to increases in anxiety and depression due to overcrowding. In this visionary and uplifting audiobook, Teresa Coady offers listeners new hope. Rebuilding Earth is her blueprint for designing and building the cities, buildings, and homes of tomorrow, resulting in more conscious, sustainable, and humane living.

The Russian invasion of Ukraine is a wake-up call: The all-in stance in favor of renewables has rendered Europe's economy and national security vulnerable to Russian President Vladimir Putin. And America is in danger of making the same catastrophic energy mistake as Europe. Award-winning author Bill Herrington delivers the truth about U.S. energy, national security, and the environment—and exposes the misrepresentations of fossil fuels protestors and climate change activists.

In this remarkable challenge to conventional thinking about the environment, David Owen argues that the greenest community in the United States is not Portland, Oregon, or Snowmass, Colorado, but New York City.

Using the lens of ecopsychology, Returning the Self to Nature shows that the pervasive and extreme forms of narcissism we find in many modern societies are fundamentally the result of alienation from the natural world. But it doesn't have to be that way. Returning the Self to Nature is written for the person who no longer wishes to function in a world that revolves around selfish, disconnected identity models and yearns to step into healthy relationships with one's self, one's community, and our planet.

Having access to natural, green spaces is vital to our physical and mental wellbeing. But, as urban development spreads, grey has become the new green. Already, concrete outweighs every tree, bush and shrub on Earth. Nature deprivation is a fast-growing epidemic, harming the health and happiness of hundreds of millions of people worldwide—especially vulnerable and marginalized groups.

Hummingbirds are a glittering, sparkling collective of over 300 wildly variable species. For centuries, they have been revered by indigenous Americans, coveted by European collectors, and admired worldwide for their unsurpassed metallic plumage and immense character. Traveling the full length of the hummingbirds' range, from the cusp of the Arctic Circle to near-Antarctic islands, acclaimed nature writer Jon Dunn encounters birders, scientists, and storytellers in his quest to find these beguiling creatures, immersing us in the world of one of Earth's most charismatic bird families.

When Arjan Dwarshuis first heard of the “Big Year”—the legendary record for birdwatching—he was twenty years old, it was midnight, and he was sitting on the roof of a truck in the Andean Mountains. In that moment he promised himself that, someday, somehow, he would become a world-record-holding birder. Ten years later, he embarked on an incredible, arduous, and perilous journey that took him around the globe; over uninhabited islands, through dense unforgiving rainforests, across snowy mountain peaks and unrelenting deserts—in just a single year.

Join four children in a little boat as they discover the magnitude of The Mess That We Made. With rhythmic language and captivating language, this cumulative tale portrays the terrible impact of trash on the ocean and marine life, inspiring us to make changes to save our seas.