Natural Science

America was built on white pine. From the 1600s through the Civil War and beyond, it was used to build the nation's ships and houses, barns, and bridges. Yet this popularity came at a cost: by the end of the nineteenth century, clear cutting had decimated much of America's white pine forests. In White Pine, ecologist and writer John Pastor takes listeners on walk through history, connecting the white pine forests that remain today to a legacy of destruction and renewal.

Picture an early scene from The Wizard of Oz: Dorothy hurries home as a tornado gathers in what was once a clear Kansas sky. Hurriedly, she seeks shelter in the storm cellar under the house, but, finding it locked, takes cover in her bedroom. We all know how that works out for her.Many investors these days are a bit like Dorothy, putting their faith in something as solid and trustworthy as a house (or, say, real estate). But market disruptions - storms - seem to arrive without warning, leaving us little time to react.

Finalist, Balsillie Prize for Public Policy and Victoria Butler Book Prize A Globe and Mail Top 100 Book The Big One and what we can do to get ready for it. Mention the word earthquake and most people think of California. But while the Golden State shakes on a regular basis, Washington State...

Evie Black and her demon imp partner, Cass, are two of the most fearsome supernatural bounty hunters on the West Coast. But when Evie’s beloved grandmother dies, her world shatters. After finding the bottom of a bottle of tequila, Evie breaks the one rule she knows better than to ignore: Never hook up with a werewolf.

Perpetually bored, anxious, fatigued, and overweight, modern society has failed to deliver the happiness it promised. The remedy, Jevan Pradas argues, is in a unique synthesis of a Paleolithic lifestyle and Buddhist meditation. A sprawling journey, featuring Jevan's adventures with naked Amazonian tribes and retreats with enlightened monks to learn the secrets of optimal well-being, The Awakened Ape will teach you how to achieve deep states of bliss. All while shaping your body into the fit and healthy animal millions of years of evolution programmed you to be.

The Everglades was America's last frontier, a wild country long after the West was won. In this book Michael Grunwald chronicles how a series of visionaries tried to drain and "reclaim" it and how Mother Nature refused to bend to their will; in the most harrowing tale, a 1928 hurricane drowned 2,500 people in the Everglades. But the Army Corps of Engineers finally tamed the beast with levees and canals, converting half the Everglades into sprawling suburbs and sugar plantations.

Every spring, billions of birds sweep north, driven by ancient instincts to return to their breeding grounds. This vast parade often goes unnoticed, except in a few places where these small travelers concentrate in large numbers. One such place is along Lake Erie in northwestern Ohio. There, the peak of spring migration is so spectacular that it attracts bird watchers from around the globe, culminating in one of the world’s biggest birding festivals. Now climate change threatens to disrupt patterns of migration and the delicate balance between birds, seasons, and habitats.

On July 4, 1999, Marlin Bree was caught in the storm of the century that ripped through the boundary waters of Minnesota and across the Canadian north shores of Lake Superior. Winds on the lake were clocked at 100 miles per hour in a gale that many dubbed the "green storm" because of the unusual color of the sky. Although Bree's treasured wooden sailboat was damaged, he continued in pursuit of his goal of sailing the largest freshwater island archipelago in the world.

A Natural History of North American Trees gives us a picture of life in America from its earliest days to the middle of the last century. The information is always interesting, though often heartbreaking. While Peattie looks for the better side of man's nature, he reports sorrowfully on the greed and waste that have doomed so much of America's virgin forest.

Ofelia Archer thought she’d faced off with every paranormal enemy known to man. She was wrong. She’s about to fight something even bigger than she ever imagined. The weird thing is the packaging is somewhat smaller. When at a Carnival parade, goblins descend and take Ofelia and her fiancé Zach Sully by surprise. The attack is quick and brutal. When the dust clears, one of New Orleans’ richest men is dead. Was that an accident or by design? As Ofelia and Sully start digging, they find a tangled web of deceit.

Most people associate storms and other big weather with death - with the kind of force that makes each of us wonder about life, time, and the nature of our surroundings. Some people go out looking for bad weather or go to places where they're likely to encounter it. Others have the misfortune of being at the wrong place at the wrong time. Still, the stories in Storm have more to say than that.

""His groundbreaking work has changed the very ways we consider our health and examine disease.” —Barack Obama From Dr. Francis Collins, director of the National Institute of Health, 2007 recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and 15-year head of the Human Genome Project, comes one...

As a twenty-three-year-old college dropout, Clark Crane has nothing to show for himself but three dead-end jobs. So when he becomes the unlikely intern for enigmatic celebrity Charisma Saintly and her "coven" of personal assistants, he's prepared to do whatever it takes to succeed. Only, he has no idea who—or what—Charisma really is....

An insightful, personal, and timely exploration into the wonderful world of seeds. In What We Sow, Jennifer Jewell brings readers on an insightful, year-long journey exploring the outsize impact one of nature's smallest manifestations—the simple seed. She examines our skewed notions where...

Reflecting on family, identity and nature, Belonging is a personal memoir about what it is to have and make a home. It is a love letter to nature, especially the northern landscapes of Scotland and the Scots pinewoods of Abernethy—home to standing dead trees known as snags, which support the overall health of the forest. Belonging is a book about how we are held in thrall to elements of our past. It speaks to the importance of attention and reflection, and will encourage us all to look and observe and ask questions of ourselves.

Why are more parents choosing natural immunity for their children? When I first heard that people were purposefully not vaccinating their children, I was shocked. Vaccines have been described as the most incredible medical invention of all time - a miracle of science and technology that has saved the lives of untold millions.

It is difficult to conceive of the vast scale of the history of life on Earth, from the very first living organisms sparking into life in hydrothermal deep-sea vents to the dizzying diversity of life today. The evolution of life is a sweeping epic of a tale, with twists and turns, surprising heroes and unlikely survivors. The Earth beautifully distils this complex story into a meaningful scale. In taking a closer look at 47 carefully selected organisms over 15 periods in our planetary history, this audiobook tells the whole story of life on Earth.

Winner of the 2015 PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award: “Horwitz’s dogged reporting…combined with crisp, cinematic writing, produces a powerful narrative…. He has written a book that is instructive and passionate and deserving a wide audience” (PEN Award Citation). Six years...

In a world plagued by devastating storms, Gavin and his team find themselves thrust into a life-or-death struggle in the gripping second installment of the series. Captured by ruthless looters, their survival hinges on an impossible task: mending the shattered atmosphere before time runs out.

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...