Nature Conservation

For the last three billion years or so, life on Earth was shaped by natural forces. Evolution tended to happen slowly, with species crafted across millennia. Then, a few hundred thousand years ago, along came a bolshie, big-brained, bipedal primate we now call Homo sapiens, and with that, the Earth’s natural history came to an abrupt end. We are now living through the post-natural phase, where humans have become the leading force shaping evolution. This audiobook considers the many ways that we’ve altered the DNA of living things and changed the fate of life on earth.

Finally, a practical, realistic plan to rescue, preserve and enhance nature. This is an economist's approach to environmentalism, including a summary of Britain's green assets, a look towards possible futures and an achievable 25-year plan to a green and prosperous world. News about Britain’s wildlife and ecosystems tends to be grim. In Green and Prosperous Land, Dieter Helm, a member of the Department of Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) and advisor to the government, shares a radical but tangible plan for positive change.

There are more than 180 exotic species in the Great Lakes. Some, such as the Asian tapeworm, have had little or no impact so far. But a handful of others - sea lamprey, alewife, spiny water flea, rusty crayfish, and more - have conducted an all-out assault on the Great Lakes and are winning the battle. Here, William Rapai focuses on the impact of these invasives. Rapai begins with a brief biological and geological history of the Great Lakes. He examines new policies and the tradeoffs that must be weighed, and ends with an inspired call for action.

Humans take more than their geological share of water, but they do not benefit from it equally. This imbalance has created an era of intense water scarcity that affects the security of individuals, states, and the global economy. For many, this brazen water grab and the social inequalities it produces reflect the lack of a coherent philosophy connecting people to the planet. Challenging this view, Jeremy Schmidt shows how water was made a “resource” that linked geology, politics, and culture to American institutions.

This book shows that the quantitative mathematical models policy makers and government administrators use to form environmental policies are seriously flawed. Based on unrealistic and sometimes false assumptions, these models often yield answers that support unwise policies. Writing for the general, nonmathematician reader, the authors begin with a riveting account of the extinction of the North Atlantic cod on the Grand Banks of Canada.

A century of industrial development is the briefest of moments in the half billion years of the Earth's evolution. And yet our current era has brought greater changes to the Earth than any period in human history. The biosphere, the globe's life-giving envelope of air and climate, has been changed irreparably. In A World to Live In, the distinguished ecologist George Woodwell shows that the biosphere is now a global human protectorate and that its integrity of structure and function are tied closely to the human future.

Hunting squirrels on an autumn morning, probing the woods, rifle in hand, Jackson reveals an attention to nature too often neglected. Following a bird dog into the damp and mysterious places where woodcock settle on their southbound migrations; chasing hounds on the trail of raccoons on a frosty winter night; stalking deer in a quiet corner of a small farm; fishing for carp in a creek, bass and bluegill in ponds, catfish in a murky river, and reef fish in the Gulf, Jackson reminds that we are stewards of not only resources but also a past that defines us as hunters and fishers.

Most of us have heard of such popular butterflies as the Monarch or Painted Lady. But what about the Fender's Blue? Or the St. Francis' Satyr? Because of their extreme rarity, these butterflies are not well-known, yet they are remarkable species with important lessons to teach us. The Last Butterflies spotlights the rarest of these creatures - some numbering no more than what can be held in one hand.

In Unnatural Companions, journalist Peter Christie issues a call to action for pet owners. If we hope to reverse the alarming trend of wildlife decline, pet owners must acknowledge the pets-versus-conservation dilemma and concede that our well-fed and sheltered cats too often prey on small backyard wildlife and seemingly harmless reptiles released into the wild might be the next destructive invasive species. We want our pets to eat nutritionally healthy food, but how does the designer food we feed them impact the environment?

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.

4 histoires de Mission Animaux à découvrir ! Sos tortues à la dérive, Sauvons les bébés lynx, SOS bébé ours perdu et Sauvons le bébé dauphin!

There is a growing crisis in our oceans as rates of infectious disease outbreaks are on the rise. A warmer world is a sicker world for humans and wild biota. Marine epidemics have caused mass die-offs of wildlife from the bottom to the top of the food chains, impacting the health of ocean ecosystems as well as lives on land. Fueled by a warming ocean and accelerated by sewage dumping, unregulated aquaculture, and drifting plastic, ocean outbreaks are sentinels of impending global environmental disaster.

Over the past 100 years, gulls have been brought ashore by modernity. They now live not only on the coasts, but in our slipstream following trawlers, barges, and garbage trucks. They are more our contemporaries than most birds, living their wild lives among us in towns and cities. In many ways, they live as we do, walking the built-up world and grabbing a bite where they can. Yet this disturbs us. We’ve started fearing gulls for getting good at being among us. We see them as scavengers, not entrepreneurs; oceangoing aliens, not refugees.

A dozen years into his dream job keeping watch over the Gila National Forest of New Mexico, Philip Connors bore witness to the blaze he had always feared: a megafire that forced him off his mountain by helicopter and forever changed the forest and watershed he loved. It was one of many transformations that arrived in quick succession, not just fire and flood, but the death of a fellow lookout in a freak accident and a tragic plane crash that rocked the community he called home.

They are trees of life and trees of knowledge. They are wish-fulfillers, rain forest royalty, more precious than gold. They are the fig trees, and they have affected humanity in profound but little-known ways. Gods, Wasps and Stranglers tells their amazing story. Fig trees fed our prehuman ancestors, influenced diverse cultures, and played key roles in the dawn of civilization.

In 2005, the United States imported 12 billion dollars' worth of seafood, nearly double what we had imported 10 years earlier. During that same period, our seafood exports rose by a third. In American Catch, our foremost fish expert Paul Greenberg looks to New York oysters, gulf shrimp, and Alaskan salmon to reveal how it came to be that 91 percent of the seafood Americans eat is foreign.

Yes, the world faces substantial environmental challenges - climate change, pollution, and extinction. But the surprisingly good news is that we have solutions to these problems. In the past 50 years, a remarkable number of environmental problems have been solved while substantial progress is ongoing on others. The Optimistic Environmentalist chronicles these remarkable success stories. Endangered species - from bald eagles to gray whales - pulled back from the precipice of extinction.

Climate is an informative introduction to the subject of climate change. Written in a clear, accessible manner, this book addresses how people must use energy more efficiently, develop alternative energy sources, and lower emissions technologies.

It's no secret that our planet is in crisis. Environmental threats such as climate change, pollution, habitat loss, and land degradation threaten the survival of thousands of plant and animal species. In 100 Heartbeats, Jeff Corwin provides an urgent portrait of the wildlife teetering on the brink. From the forests slipping away beneath the stealthy paws of the Florida panther, to the giant panda’s plight to climb ever higher in the mountains of China, Corwin takes you on a global tour to witness firsthand the critical state of our natural world.

Take a walk in the park. Or explore a forest, gorge, campground, even a historic site. Spend a week or a weekend. Go biking, hiking, fishing, boating, hunting or cross-country skiing. Or just relax and enjoy the most beautiful scenery in the West! This is a guide to the state and the national parks throughout California, the wildlife refuges, nature and bike trails, historic sites, facilities and activities at each site, and contact information. Nearly 100 state parks are described, six national parks, plus 28 other points of interest.