Social Environment

Learn how sea levels rise (SLR) is unstoppable for many centuries, due to excess heat already stored in our oceans - and how soon our shorelines will go underwater. Understand how disastrous SLR will profoundly affect more than 10,000 coastal communities as soon as 2050, both in the US and around the world. What will happen where you live? How much will the water rise? And when? Find out why extreme weather events, forest fires, and flooding share the same causes as catastrophic SLR, but weather disruptions are temporary and SLR permanent.

Sibylle Berg sagt: "Einer der cleversten Aktivisten, die ich kenne." Sie meint den Aktionskünstler und investigativen Journalisten Jean Peters, der hier von seinen wahnwitzigsten, skurrilsten, mutigsten und kreativsten Versuchen, die Welt zum Besseren zu verändern, erzählt. Als sich abzeichnete, dass die Rechten auf dem Vormarsch sind, als Klimaforscher*innen vor den Folgen exponenziellen Wachstums warnten und alle weitermachten wie bisher, da verspürte Jean Peters das Gefühl politischer Ohnmacht.

The third book in Charles Bowden’s “accidental trilogy” that began with Blood Orchid and Blues for Cannibals, Some of the Dead Are Still Breathing attempts to resolve the overarching question: How can a person live a moral life in a culture of death? As humanity moves further into the 21st century, Bowden continues to interrogate our roles in creating the ravaged landscapes and accumulated death that still surround us, as well as his own childhood isolation, his lust for alcohol and women, and his waning hope for a future.

The Copernican view of the universe is mistaken. The Earth continues to be the center of the universe, because here there is life, and plenty of it. From the very limited exploration of our solar system, we have learned that there is no complex meaningful life. For humanity to survive in this century, we need to change the paradigm back to the Earth is the center of the universe. The nearest star system, Proxima Centuri, is at least 4.2 light years, (over 20 trillion miles) and unreachable. It would take approximately 70,000 years with present technology to get there.

What if saving the Earth were a game? Not just any game, but the greatest game we’ve ever played. This workbook helps social and environmental change professionals learn how to implement powerful techniques from the fields of game design, behavioral psychology, design, data science, and storytelling, that are not only proven to have impact, but also can make your project fun. In a 10-step framework of exercises, tutorials, and case studies, How to Save the World will teach you the art of changing the world — and it’s often not what you think.

William Henry Hudson (1841-1922) was an author, naturalist, and ornithologist. Born in Argentina, he spent his youth studying the local fauna and flora and observing the natural and human dramas on what was then a lawless frontier. Far Away and Long Ago is a record of the years 1840-50 on the Pampas. The abundant wildlife was easily observed and the author became a naturalist with a great talent for description. Hudson observed the birds, beasts and plants: the cowbird - the red willow, the armadillo, and the opossum - where adventurous Gauchos herded cattle.

Neither an advocate nor a critic of cultured meat, Benjamin Aldes Wurgaft spent five years researching the phenomenon. In Meat Planet, he reveals how debates about lab-grown meat reach beyond debates about food, examining the links between appetite, growth, and capitalism. Could satiating the growing appetite for meat actually lead to our undoing? Are we simply using one technology to undo the damage caused by another? Like all problems in our food system, the meat problem is not merely a problem of production. It is intrinsically social and political.

For most San Franciscans, April 18, 1906 started at 5:12 a.m. with 65 seconds of violent quaking followed by a relentless, raging fire that left 98% of the structures in the most populated part of the city in ruins. However, while everyone felt the earthquake equally, they did not all suffer to the same degree. In Saving San Francisco, Andrea Rees Davies, a former firefighter, tells a new story of the 1906 catastrophe. Saving San Francisco challenges the long-lived myth that the fire brought out altruism and leveled class distinctions among residents.

In Car Country, Wells rejects the idea that the nation's automotive status quo can be explained as a simple byproduct of an ardent love affair with the automobile. Instead, he takes listeners on a tour of the evolving American landscape, charting the ways that transportation policies and land-use practices have combined to reshape nearly every element of the built environment around the easy movement of automobiles. Wells untangles the complicated relationships between automobiles and the environment, allowing listeners to see the everyday world in a completely new way.

As climate change becomes an international crisis, more and more industries are looking for a sound model for creating successful environmentally friendly companies, and a new generation of young leaders are eager for inspiration and guidance on creating sustainable businesses. Mid-Course Correction Revisited advocates why we need to create prototypical green companies and a new economy - not based on non-renewable resources, but on renewable energy, aggressive recycling, innovative technology, and sustainable business practices.

Maverick environmental writers William J. Kelly and Chip Jacobs follow up their acclaimed Smogtown with a provocative examination of China’s ecological calamity already imperiling a warming planet. Toxic smog most people figured was obsolete needlessly kills as many there as the 9/11 attacks every day, while sometimes Grand Canyon-sized drifts of industrial particles aloft on the winds rain down ozone and waterway-poisoning mercury in America. Vivid, gonzo prose blends first-person reportage with exhaustive research and a sense of karma, describing the horror of "Cancer Villages", spellbinding "peasant revolts" against cancer-spreading plants, and much more....

From Joseph Romm, Chief Science Advisor for National Geographic's Years of Living Dangerously series and one of Rolling Stone's "100 people who are changing America," Climate Change offers user-friendly, scientifically rigorous answers to the most difficult (and commonly politicized) questions surrounding what climatologist Lonnie Thompson has deemed "a clear and present danger to civilization."

When the terrorist attacks struck New York City on September 11, 2001, boat operators and waterfront workers quickly realized that they had the skills, the equipment, and the opportunity to take definite, immediate action in responding to the most significant destructive event in the United States in decades. For many of them, they were “doing what needed to be done”. American Dunkirk shows how people, many of whom were volunteers, mobilized rescue efforts in various improvised and spontaneous ways on that fateful date.

Eminent ecologist Jeremy B. C. Jackson and award-winning journalist Steve Chapple traveled the length of the Mississippi River interviewing farmers, fishermen, scientists, and policymakers to better understand the mounting environmental problems ravaging the United States. Along their journey, which quickly expanded to California, Florida, and New York, the pair uncovered surprising and profound connections between ecological systems and environmental crises across the country.

Mals, Italy, has long been known as the breadbasket of the Tyrol. But recently the tiny town became known for something else entirely. A Precautionary Tale tells us why, introducing readers to an unlikely group of activists and a forward-thinking mayor who came together to ban pesticides in Mals by a referendum vote, making it the first place on Earth to accomplish such a feat, and a model for other towns and regions to follow. For hundreds of years, the people of Mals had cherished their traditional foodways and kept their local agriculture organic. Their town had become a mecca for tourists drawn by the alpine landscape, the rural and historic character of the villages, and the fine breads, wines, cheeses, herbs, vegetables, and the other traditional foods they produced.

The family farm lies at the heart of our national identity, and yet its future is in peril. Rick Hammond grew up on a farm, and for 40 years he has raised cattle and crops on his wife's fifth-generation homestead in Nebraska, in hopes of passing it on to their four children. But as the handoff nears, their small family farm - and their entire way of life - are under siege.

Caradonna's unique and concise history broadens our understanding of what "sustainability" means, revealing how it progressed from a relatively marginal concept to an ideal that shapes everything from individual lifestyles, government and corporate strategies, and even national and international policy. For anyone seeking understand the history of those striving to make the world a better place to live, here's a place to start.

When philosophy professor Adam Briggle moved to Denton, Texas, he had never heard of fracking. Only five years later, he would successfully lead a citizens' initiative to ban hydraulic fracturing in Denton - the first Texas town to challenge the oil and gas industry. On his journey to learn about fracking and its effects, he leaped from the ivory tower into the fray. In beautifully narrated chapters, Briggle brings us to town hall debates and neighborhood meetings where citizens wrestle with issues few fully understand.

Climate change is today's news, but it isn't a new phenomenon. Centuries-long cycles of heating and cooling are well documented for Europe and the North Atlantic. These variations in climate, including the Medieval Warm Period (MWP), AD 900 to 1300, and the early centuries of the Little Ice Age (LIA), AD 1300 to 1600, had a substantial impact on the cultural history of Europe.

Yellowstone National Park looks like a pristine western landscape populated by its wild inhabitants: bison, grizzly bears, and wolves. But the bison do not always range freely, snowmobile noise intrudes upon the park's profound winter silence, and some tourist villages are located in prime grizzly-bear habitat. Despite these problems, the National Park Service has succeeded in reintroducing wolves, allowing wildfires to play their natural role in park forests, and prohibiting a gold mine that would be present in other more typical western landscapes.