Social Environment

Sixteen-year-old climate activist Xiuhtezcatl Martinez and his group the Earth Guardians believe that choices made now will have a lasting impact on the world of tomorrow, and they want to ensure a positive, just, and sustainable future. Beginning with their empowering story, We Rise explores many aspects of effective activism and provides step-by-step information on how to start and join solution-oriented movements.

Many people think wild tigers are on the road to recovery, but they are in greater danger than ever - from a menace few experts saw coming. There may be only three thousand wild tigers left in the entire world. More shocking is the fact that twice that many - some six thousand - have been bred on farms, not for traditional medicine but to supply a luxury-goods industry that secretly sells tiger-bone wine, tiger-skin decor, and exotic cuisine enjoyed by China's elite.

In Getting to Green, Frederic C. Rich argues that meaningful progress on urgent environmental issues can be made only on a bipartisan basis. Rich reminds us of American conservation's conservative roots and of the bipartisan political consensus that had Republican congressmen voting for, and Richard Nixon signing, the most important environmental legislation of the 1970s.

Beyond images of emaciated polar bears and drought-cracked lakes, there remains a major part of climate change's impact that the media has neglected: how our health will suffer from higher temperatures and extreme weather. From spiraling rates of asthma and allergies and spikes in heatstroke-related deaths to swarms of invasive insects carrying diseases like dengue or West Nile and increases in heart and lung disease and cancer, the effect of rising temperatures on human health will be far-reaching, and is more imminent than we think.

Friedman brings a fresh outlook to the crises of destabilizing climate change and rising competition for energy - both of which could poison our world if we do not act quickly and collectively. His argument speaks to all of us who are concerned about the state of America in the global future.

Toyota would like us to think that Mother Nature drives a Prius, Ford wants us to Join the Green Revolution,” and McDonald’s has painted its golden arches green. But are big brands and the celebrities endorsing them really as green as they claim? In The Greenwash Effect, Guy Pearse looks behind the corporate façade in the tradition of Fast Food Nation and No Logo - and what he finds will startle you.

One morning in 2000, Dr. Jane Hightower walked into her exam room to find a patient with disturbing symptoms she couldn’t explain. The woman was nauseated, tired, and had difficulty concentrating, but a litany of tests revealed no apparent cause. She was not alone. Dr. Hightower saw numerous patients with similar, inexplicable ailments, and eventually learned that there were many more around the nation and the world.

The Digital Age was expected to usher in an era of clean production, an alternative to smokestack industries and their pollutants. But as environmental journalist Elizabeth Grossman reveals in this penetrating analysis of high tech manufacture and disposal, digital may be sleek, but it's anything but clean. Deep within every electronic device lie toxic materials that make up the bits and bytes, a complex thicket of lead, mercury, cadmium, plastics, and a host of other often harmful ingredients.

When most Americans think of environmentalism, they think of the political left, of vegans dressed in organic-hemp fabric, lofting protest signs. In reality, writes Jacob Darwin Hamblin, the movement - and its dire predictions - owe more to the Pentagon than the counterculture.

Imagine walking into a restaurant and finding chlorinated hydrocarbon pesticides, or neonicotinoid insecticides listed in the description of your entree. They may not be printed in the menu, but many are in your food.These are a few of the literally millions of pounds of approved synthetic substances dumped into the environment every day, not just in the US but around the world.

In the mid-1990s, residents of Anniston, Alabama, began a legal fight against the agrochemical company Monsanto over the dumping of PCBs in the city's historically African American and white working-class west side. Simultaneously, Anniston environmentalists sought to safely eliminate chemical weaponry that had been secretly stockpiled near the city during the Cold War. In this probing work, Ellen Griffith Spears offers a compelling narrative of Anniston's battles for environmental justice.

The Agile City engages the fundamental question: what to do about it? Journalist and urban analyst James S. Russell argues that we'll more quickly slow global warming - and blunt its effects - by retrofitting cities, suburbs, and towns. The Agile City shows that change undertaken at the building and community level can reach carbon-reduction goals rapidly. Adapting buildings (39 percent of greenhouse-gas emission) and communities (slashing the 33 percent of transportation related emissions) offers numerous other benefits that tax gimmicks and massive alternative-energy investments can't match.

Melting ice, a military arms race, the rush to exploit resources at any cost - the Arctic is now the stage on which our future will be decided. And as temperatures rise and the ice retreats, Vladimir Putin orders Russia's oil rigs to move north. But one early September morning in 2013, 30 men and women from 18 countries - the crew of Greenpeace's Arctic Sunrise - decide to draw a line in the ice and protest the drilling in the Arctic.

The discovery of the Americas around AD 1500 was an extraordinary watershed in human experience. It gave rise to the modern period of human ecology, a phenomenon global in scope that set in motion profound changes in almost every society on Earth. This new period, which saw the depletion of the lands of the New World, proved tragic for some, triumphant for others, and powerfully affecting for all.

How an underground fire turned a Pennsylvania community into a ghost town. On May 27, 1962, a fire set to clean up the town dump outside Centralia, Pennsylvania, spread by accident into abandoned coal mines beneath the small town. This spawned the environmental disaster known around the world today as the Centralia Mine Fire.

Award-winning journalist Eugene Linden has written numerous critically acclaimed works on the environment. In The Ragged Edge of the World, Linden recounts his experiences in locales ranging from Vietnam to Antarctica, offering an intimate look at creatures and cultures struggling to adapt to globalization.

This is the shocking true-life story of how PFAS—a set of toxic chemicals most people have never heard of—poisoned the entire country. Based on original, shoe-leather reporting in four highly contaminated towns and damning documents from the polluters’ own files, Poisoning the Well traces an ugly history of corporate greed and devastation of human lives.

Journalist Diana Kapp has crisscrossed this country writing for and about empowered girls, girls who expect to be leaders, founders, and inventors. This book takes it a step further. It says to girls: While you’re striving to be CEOs and world leaders, consider solving the biggest challenge of our lifetime, too - because you can do both at the same time, and here are 34 women doing just that.

A declaration of independence, and a call for systemic change, from the generation that will be most impacted by climate change. If anyone doubted the potential political power of the Millennial generation, Bernie Sanders' campaign put it in the spotlight. Are We Screwed? makes clear that the ardour for change defines this generation, especially when it comes to climate change, and they are willing to consider options that their elders might think naïve and impractical....

Deniers of climate change sometimes quip that claims about global warming are more about political science than climate science. They are wrong on the science, but may be right with respect to its political implications. A hotter world, writes Andrew Guzman, will bring unprecedented migrations, famine, war, and disease. It will be a social and political disaster of the first order.