Presents a narrative nonfiction that examines the human impact upon the earth and how it would respond without the pressure of human presence.

So pervasive are human impacts on the planet that it's said we live in a new geological epoch: the Anthropocene. Kolbert takes a hard look at the new world we are creating. One way to look at human civilization, she says, is as a ten-thousand-year exercise in defying nature. He she explores the ways in which our capacity for destruction has reshaped the natural world. From the Mojave to Iceland and Australia, she examines how the very sorts of interventions...

An Air Force loadmaster in the Vietnam War is shot out of the sky, then saved by falling into a banyan. An artist inherits a hundred years of photographic portraits, all of the same doomed American chestnut. A hard-partying undergraduate in the late 1980s electrocutes herself, dies and is sent back into life by creatures of air and light. A hearing- and speech-impaired scientist discovers that trees are communicating with one another. These four,...

While John McPhee was working on his previous book, Rising from the Plains, he happened to walk by the engineering building at the University of Wyoming, where words etched in limestone said: "Strive on—the control of Nature is won, not given." In the morning sunlight, that central phrase—"the control of nature"—seemed to sparkle with unintended ambiguity. Bilateral, symmetrical, it could with equal speed travel in opposite

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NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • “An imperative call to action” (Nick Offerman) to get children off their screens and into nature, with tips for bonding activities that teach the importance of outside time and build tough, curious, competent kids—from the host of the Netflix series and podcast MeatEater
“A revelation for families struggling to get kids to GO OUTSIDE, or to just stop...

McKibben's earliest warnings about global warming went largely unheeded. In this book, he argues that we can meet the challenges of a new "Eaarth"--still recognizable but suddenly and violently out of balance--by building the kind of societies and economies that can hunker down, concentrate on essentials, and create the type of community that will allow us to weather trouble on an unprecedented scale.

Traces the ongoing challenges to endangered turtle populations, evaluating the global trade practices, limited supply, and increasing demand in high-population world regions that have compromised conservation efforts.

Science professor Curt Stager declares, "There's nothing like a lake to reflect and reveal the world." He does the same in this philosophical meditation on lakes, their inhabitants, and the human threats they face. He begins his literary tour with Thoreau's Walden Pond, which provides a jumping-off point for discussions of diatoms, algae, Thoreau, debates about the starting date of the Anthropocene, the different approaches of environmentalists and...

In this landmark book, Ackerman confronts the unprecedented reality that one prodigiously intelligent and meddlesome creature, Homo sapiens, is now the dominant force shaping the future of planet Earth and takes her readers on an exhilarating journey through this new reality, introducing many of the people and ideas now creating -- perhaps saving -- our future and that of our fellow creatures.

Jane Goodall and Douglas Abrams explore through intimate and thought-provoking dialogue one of the most sought after and least understood elements of human nature: hope. Drawing on decades of work that has helped expand our understanding of what it means to be human and what we all need to do to help build a better world, the book touches on vital questions, including: How do we stay hopeful when everything seems hopeless? How do we cultivate hope...