Social Environment

In her first book, How to Do Nothing, Jenny Odell wrote about the importance of disconnecting from the “attention economy” to spend time in quiet contemplation. But how can we reclaim our time? In order to answer this seemingly simple question, Odell took a deep dive into the fundamental structure of our society and found that the clock we live by was built for profit, not people. This is why our lives, even in leisure, have come to seem like a series of moments to be bought, sold, and processed ever more efficiently.

In Blue Mind, Wallace J. Nichols revolutionizes how we think about these questions, revealing the remarkable truth about the benefits of being in, on, under, or simply near water. Combining cutting-edge neuroscience with compelling personal stories from top athletes, leading scientists, military veterans, and gifted artists, he shows how proximity to water can improve performance, increase calm, diminish anxiety, and increase professional success.

This book will explore whether we can successfully align our politics with climate science and the conditions under which it may be possible to act boldly. Canada’s WWII experience, Klein contends, provides a reminder that we have mobilized in common cause and retooled our economy in a few short years.

An "epoch-defining book" (The Guardian) and "this generation’s Silent Spring" (The Washington Post), The Uninhabitable Earth is both a travelogue of the near future and a meditation on how that future will look to those living through it - the ways that warming promises to transform global politics, the meaning of technology and nature in the modern world, the sustainability of capitalism and the trajectory of human progress. The Uninhabitable Earth is also an impassioned call to action.

Called “one of the nation's most effective communicators on climate change” by The New York Times, Katharine Hayhoe knows how to navigate all sides of the conversation on our changing planet. A Canadian climate scientist living in Texas, she negotiates distrust of data, indifference to imminent threats, and resistance to proposed solutions with ease. Over the past 15 years, Hayhoe has found that the most important thing we can do to address climate change is talk about it - and she wants to teach you how.

On the morning of April 26, 1986, Europe witnessed the worst nuclear disaster in history: the explosion of a reactor at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in Soviet Ukraine. Dozens died of radiation poisoning, fallout contaminated half the continent, and thousands fell ill. In Chernobyl, Serhii Plokhy draws on new sources to tell the dramatic stories of the firefighters, scientists, and soldiers who heroically extinguished the nuclear inferno. He lays bare the flaws of the Soviet nuclear industry....

On March 11, 2011, an earthquake large enough to knock the earth from its axis sent a massive tsunami speeding toward the Japanese coast and the aging and vulnerable Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power reactors. Over the following weeks, the world watched in horror as a natural disaster became a man-made catastrophe: fail-safes failed, cooling systems shut down, nuclear rods melted.

World renowned scientist Carl Sagan and acclaimed author Ann Druyan have written a Roots for the human species, a lucid and riveting account of how humans got to be the way we are. It shows with humor and drama that many of our key traits - self-awareness, technology, family ties, submission to authority, hatred for those a little different from ourselves, reason, and ethics - are rooted in the deep past, and illuminated by our kinship with other animals.

When we talk about human history, we often focus on great leaders, population forces, and decisive wars. But how has the earth itself determined our destiny? Our planet wobbles, driving changes in climate that forced the transition from nomadism to farming. Mountainous terrain led to the development of democracy in Greece. Atmospheric circulation patterns later on shaped the progression of global exploration, colonization, and trade. Even today, voting behavior in the southeast United States ultimately follows the underlying pattern of 75 million-year-old sediments from an ancient sea.

Most works about the environment build on dire threats warning of the possible extinction of humanity. Alan Weisman avoids frightening off readers by disarmingly wiping out our species in the first few minutes. He then continues with an astounding depiction of how Earth will fare once we're no longer around. The World Without Us is a one-of-a-kind work that sweeps through time from the moment of humanity's future extinction to millions of years into the future.

The Great Lakes - Erie, Huron, Michigan, Ontario, and Superior - hold 20 percent of the world's supply of surface fresh water and provide sustenance, work, and recreation for tens of millions of Americans. But they are under threat as never before, and their problems are spreading across the continent. The Death and Life of the Great Lakes is prize-winning reporter Dan Egan's engaging portrait of an ecological catastrophe happening right before our eyes.

The Origin of Species sold out on the first day of its publication in 1859. It is the major book of the 19th century and one of the most readable and accessible of the great revolutionary works of the scientific imagination. Though, in fact, little read, most people know what it says—at least they think they do. The Origin of Species was the first mature and persuasive work to explain how species change through the process of natural selection. Upon its publication, the book began to transform attitudes about society and religion.

Together, we can change the world. There is little doubt that our beautiful planet is now under huge threat; our weather is more extreme, plastic litters our oceans, industrial production and farming methods wreak havoc on the environment and mass deforestation has led to the extinction of many species. Carry on this way and it’s almost certain that sea levels will continue to rise, there will be extreme heatwaves, loss of the polar ice caps and mass pollution.

While everything appears to be collapsing around us - ecodamage, genetic engineering, virulent diseases, water shortages, global famine, wars - we can still do something about it and create a world that will work for us and for our children's children. The inspiration for Leonardo DiCaprio's feature documentary movie The 11th Hour, The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight details what is happening to our planet, the reasons for our culture's blind behavior, and how we can fix the problem.

How Real Estate Developers Think considers developers from three different perspectives. Brown profiles the careers of individual developers to illustrate the character of the entrepreneur; considers the roles played by innovation, design, marketing, and sales in the production of real estate; and examines the risks and rewards that motivate developers as people.

Growth has been both an unspoken and an explicit aim of our individual and collective striving. It governs the lives of microorganisms and galaxies; it shapes the capabilities of our extraordinarily large brains and the fortunes of our economies. Growth is manifested in annual increments of continental crust, a rising gross domestic product, a child's growth chart, the spread of cancerous cells. In this magisterial book, Vaclav Smil offers systematic investigation of growth in nature and society, from tiny organisms to the trajectories of empires and civilizations.

In the absence of motorized boats and gondolas, Venice’s waters have returned to a sparkling blue color. Deer have been spotted roaming cities in Italy, and mountain goats recently took over a small seaside town in Wales. Taking advantage of the decreased boat traffic, whales have returned to roaming Vancouver’s harbours. The absence of “regular” human activities has dramatically affected our environment. In this book, Bob McDonald turns his focus to global energy sources, and shows how the global shutdowns may have been exactly what we needed to show us that a greener future is achievable.

For decades, discerning listeners have turned to journalist and historian Gwynne Dyer for his unparalleled acumen in serving up hard geopolitical truths. Intervention Earth is built around Dyer’s interviews with one hundred climate scientists from around the globe, including the leading figures in the geoengineering field. One of the most interesting topics: the pros and cons of Solar Radiation Management, a possible planetary Hail Mary that is rife with political risks. But Intervention Earth is about more than technological mega-projects.

When HurricaneKatrina struck New Orleans, Abdulrahman Zeitoun - a prosperous Syrian-American and father of four - chose to stay through the storm to protect his house and contracting business. In the eerie days after the storm, he traveled the flooded streets in a secondhand canoe, passing on supplies and rescuing those he could. A week later, on September 6, 2005, Zeitoun abruptly disappeared.

Global warming is perhaps the most dramatic example of what Timothy Morton calls "hyperobjects" - entities of such vast temporal and spatial dimensions that they defeat traditional ideas about what a thing is in the first place. In this book, Morton explains what hyperobjects are and their impact on how we think, how we coexist with one another and with nonhumans, and how we experience our politics, ethics, and art.