Nature Conservation

Learn about endangered and threatened animals.

You can't recycle a banana peel...can you? Learn about how composting your food scraps, egg cartons, and other wastes helps make Earth a greener place.

The news about wildlife is dire—more than 900 species have been wiped off the planet since industrialization. Against this bleak backdrop, however, there are also glimmers of hope and crucial lessons to be learned from animals that have defied global trends toward extinction: bears in Italy, bison in North America, whales in the Atlantic. These populations are back from the brink, some of them in numbers unimaginable in a century. How has this happened? In crisp, transporting prose, Christopher Preston reveals the mysteries and challenges at the heart of these resurgences.

As global rates of plant and animal extinctions mount, anxieties about the future of the earth's ecosystems are fueling ever more ambitious efforts at conservation, which draw on Western scientific principles to manage species and biodiversity. In Revenant Ecologies, Audra Mitchell argues that these responses not only ignore but also magnify powerful forms of structural violence like colonialism, racism, genocide, extractivism, ableism, and heteronormativity, ultimately contributing to the destruction of unique life forms and ecosystems.

In this delightful poem, children learn to do their part and help keep the park clean.

This books looks at what happens to old clothes when you throw them in the trash, and then looks at alternative things that the listener could make out of them instead of throwing the old clothes away.

This books looks at what happens to old buttons and beads when you throw them in the trash, and then looks at alternative things that the listener could make out of them instead of throwing the buttons and beads away.

This books looks at what happens to cardboard when you throw it in the trash, and then looks at alternative things that the listener could make with the cardboard instead of throwing it away.

Leatherback sea turtles face one of their lives’ biggest challenges as soon as they’re hatched. Crawling out of their eggs on the sandy shore, they hurry to the sea in a race to escape those who see them as a tasty meal. If they survive and thrive, they can grow longer than an adult male is tall and weigh as much as a small car!

What’s that red-haired animal swinging through the rain forest’s trees seemingly without a care in the world? It’s an orangutan! Aside from all that red hair, these beautiful beasts look almost human, but they’re a lot stronger. Learn more about these colorful animals, including how they live, how clever they are, how they’re dealing with a shrinking habitat, and what you can do to help.

This is an incredible story of adventure, human ingenuity, persistence, and resilience that shows firsthand what it is to adventure as a woman in the most dangerous of circumstance, what it is to be truly alone in the wild, and why someone would challenge themselves with an expedition others would call crazy. For Marquis, her story is about freedom, being alive and wild by nature.

Susan Knilans and Jacqueline Freeman are in love with bees. So in love that they observe their bees - their work, communication, seasonal activity, and more - for hours each day. And with observation came realization: When bees are allowed to live as they would in nature (with smaller hives, no chemicals, freedom to swarm, and little-to-no human interference), they will thrive. Accordingly, Knilans and Freeman have spent decades perfecting the revolutionary practice of preservation beekeeping, guided by the simple question, "What do the bees want?"

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.

A first field guide to the adorable pygmy hippo from expert Dr. Fiona Sach. Pygmy Hippo (Young Zoologist) features sound design and special effects to enhance your listening enjoyment. Listen out for the crunching bites of pygmy hippos eating and the musical sounds of the rainforest! You might...

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.

The cod is a large, ugly fish that spends its life with its big mouth wide open for food. For centuries, so many cod lived in the Atlantic Ocean they couldn’t swim without bumping into each other. They were so plentiful that they became the most important fish in many cultures. Best-selling author Mark Kurlansky brings history to life with this entertaining story of how a single fish changed the world.

Who can forget the sense of wonder with which they discovered the creatures of the deep? In this vibrant hymn to the sea, Callum Roberts - one of the world’s foremost conservation biologists - leads listeners on a fascinating tour of mankind’s relationship to the sea, from the earliest traces of water on Earth to the oceans as we know them today. In the process, Roberts looks at how the taming of the oceans has shaped human civilization and affected marine life. Like Four Fish and The Omnivore’s Dilemma, The Ocean of Life takes a long view to tell a story in which each one of us has a role to play.

Critically acclaimed children’s author Jonah Winter reimagines a true story from 1987. The small Long Island town of Islip has a big problem - 3,168 tons of garbage and no place to put it! So workers pile the smelly refuse on a large barge, hire a tug boat, and send the stuff south to find a final resting place. But as the barge travels from North Carolina to New Orleans and from Mexico to Belize - nobody wants Islip’s rotting mountain of garbage.

The most recent research tells us that seaweed is one possible solution for our future on the planet. It could feed human beings, reduce plastic pollution, absorb enough carbon to cool the atmosphere, reconstruct generative ecosystems, treat certain illnesses that are incurable today, replace land livestock farming that exhausts the environment, and give jobs to coastal populations. The seaweed revolution is a hope for tomorrow!

The complete text of the landmark encyclical letter from Pope Francis that, as Time magazine reported, “rocked the international community” In the Encyclical on Climate Change and Inequality, the beloved Pope exhorts the world to combat environmental degradation and its impact on the poor...