Showing results for "free audiobooks" in Outdoors & Nature

No running water, no car, no electricity or any of the things it powers: the internet, phone, washing machine, radio, or light bulb. Just a wooden cabin, on a smallholding, by the edge of a stand of spruce. The Way Home is a modern-day Walden - an honest and lyrical account of a remarkable life lived in nature without modern technology. Mark Boyle, author of The Moneyless Man, explores the hard-won joys of building a home with his bare hands, learning to make fire, collecting water from the stream, foraging, and fishing.

In May of 1963, Seattle mountaineer Jim Whittaker stepped into world history by becoming the first American to summit Mount Everest. More than 50 years later, he is still regarded as a seminal figure in North American mountaineering, as well as an astute businessman who helped create the outdoor recreation industry. A Life on the Edge: Memoirs of Everest and Beyond is Jim's courageous, no-punches-pulled autobiography and a look at a peripatetic, sometimes difficult life.

A story of defiance and determination by a controversial scientist, this is Lee Berger's own take on finding Homo naledi, an all-new species on the human family tree and one of the greatest discoveries of the 21st century. In 2013, Lee Berger, a National Geographic explorer-in-residence, heard of a cache of bones in a hard-to-reach underground cave in South Africa. He put out a call around the world for petite collaborators - men and women small and adventurous enough to be able to squeeze through eight-inch tunnels to reach a sunless cave forty feet underground. It worked.

From the author of Apocalyptic Planet, an unsparing, vivid, revelatory travelogue through prehistory that traces the arrival of the First People in North America 20,000 years ago and the artifacts that enable us to imagine their lives and fates. This book upends our notions of where these people came from and who they were.

Are we deranged? The acclaimed Indian novelist Amitav Ghosh argues that future generations may well think so. How else to explain our imaginative failure in the face of global warming? In his first major book of nonfiction since In an Antique Land, Ghosh examines our inability - at the level of literature, history, and politics - to grasp the scale and violence of climate change.

Over 60 years after Virginia Woolf drowned in the River Ouse, Olivia Laing set out one midsummer morning to walk its banks, from source to sea. Along the way, she explores the roles that rivers play in human lives, tracing their intricate flow through literature, mythology, and folklore. Lyrical and stirring, To the River is a passionate investigation into how history resides in a landscape - and how ghosts never quite leave the places they love.

In Tides: The Science and Spirit of the Ocean, writer, sailor, and surfer Jonathan White takes listeners across the globe to discover the science and spirit of ocean tides. In the Arctic, White shimmies under the ice with an Inuit elder to hunt for mussels in the dark cavities left behind at low tide; in China, he races the Silver Dragon, a 25-foot tidal bore that crashes 80 miles up the Qiantang River; in France, he interviews the monks that live in the tide-wrapped monastery of Mont Saint-Michel; in Chile and Scotland, he investigates the growth of tidal power generation.

In this powerful essay, Joëlle Gergis, a leading climate scientist, depicts the likely future in vivid and credible detail. Working from the science, she discusses the world’s and Australia’s efforts to combat climate change. She outlines how far Australia is from keeping its promises to cut emissions. She takes aim at false solutions and the folly of “adaptation” rather than curbing fossil fuel use.

Never before has such an account of mountaineering triumph and tragedy been told from a woman's point of view. By proving that women had the skill, strength, and courage necessary to make this difficult and dangerous climb, the 1978 Women's Himalayan Expedition's accomplishment had a positive impact around the world, changing perceptions about women's abilities in sports and other arenas. And Annapurna: A Woman's Place has become an acknowledged classic in the annals of women's achievements - a story of challenge and commitment told with passion, humor, and unflinching honesty.

Elephants are the largest land animals in the world. They are also intensely social and have advanced long-term memories. In this episode, a parade of Asian elephants makes its way through the Sri Lankan forest to a lake for drinks and mud baths, stopping periodically for group naps. The female leading the parade uses infrasonic rumbles—inaudible to humans, but traveling as far as two miles along the surface of the Earth as seismic waves—to invite friends and family around the forest to join her at the reservoir.

Crows have long been the subject of folklore, likely because they’re strikingly similar to humans, leading lives rich in personality, intelligence, and relationships. In this episode, we fly the streets of Seattle with a crow as she grooms her mate, delivers what appears to be a gift, and finally commutes miles away from her territory to gather and chat with thousands of other crows before it’s time to roost for the night.

Humpback whales are among the most intelligent animals on Earth. Some scientists believe they might even surpass humans in self-awareness, empathy, and communication skills. In this episode, we swim with a whale as he teams up with other humpbacks to use bubbles to catch fish, rescues a sea lion, and puts his own spin on melodies sung by whales across the Pacific Ocean. This is the world in its natural state, defined by seasons, routines, and cycles. By the time this whale is ready to close one eye and go to sleep, you will be too.

A born naturalist and a fearless traveler, Vladimir Dinets wrote travel guides, conducted field research, and lived a couple of lives before he was accepted into the PhD program in zoology at the University of Miami. He thought crocodiles were a dead-end research topic - survivors from the age of the dinosaurs but not much else - until he witnessed groups of up to seventy alligators performing mating choruses that included infrasound vibrations - a form of communication extremely rare in nature.

Dung beetles might sound dirty, but the ancient Egyptians believed their god took the form of a dung beetle to roll the morning sun across the sky every day. In this episode, we roll with dung beetles around the world as they push their precious dung—often in balls many times larger than they are—over Florida pastures, Armenian highlands, and the vast South African savanna.

In the fall of 1978, Ray Ordorica packed everything he thought he would need into his Toyota LandCruiser and drove north to Alaska. He came to a land he had never seen, to find something he wasn't even sure existed: a wilderness cabin he could use for a year or more to live, think, relax, read, and write. Ordorica found his cabin, fixed it up, and, although it was just an un-insulated 12- by 16-foot one-room log structure, he spent three winters in it in relative comfort.

Dogs are a familiar and comforting part of many of our lives. In this episode, we take a walk with a pet xoloitzcuintli, or Mexican hairless dog, as he greets his blocks by smell. Along the way, we learn the backstory of squirrels in U.S. cities and observe the very smart and clean neighborhood raccoon.

By 1930, no place in the world was less well explored than Greenland. The native Inuit had occupied the relatively accessible west coast for centuries. The east coast, however, was another story. In August 1930, Henry George Watkins (nicknamed “Gino”), a twenty-three-year-old British explorer, led thirteen scientists and explorers on an ambitious expedition to the east coast of Greenland and into its vast and forbidding interior to set up a permanent meteorological base on the icecap, 8,200 feet above sea level.

Sloths are the slowest mammals on earth. They can hardly see. They live in rainforests among jaguars, pumas, and countless other predators. Yet they survive. And they do it by being so incredibly slow, and living a life covered in algae. In this episode, we hang with a sloth in the jungle of Costa Rica as he spends a month digesting one single leaf, and we see the symbiosis and collaboration that surrounds him.

For six years Jim and Jamie Dutcher lived intimately with a pack of wolves, gaining their trust as no one has before. In this book the Dutchers reflect on the virtues they observed in wolf society and behavior. Each chapter exemplifies a principle, such as kindness, teamwork, playfulness, respect, curiosity, and compassion. Their heartfelt stories combine into a thought-provoking meditation on the values shared between the human and the animal world.

Framed by the author’s personal experience with backyard hens, Chickens: Their Natural and Unnatural Histories explores the history of the chicken from its descent from the dinosaurs to the space-age present. En route, Lembke surveys chickens in ancient Greece, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, the 19th century, and modern times, including the role of chickens in Jewish and Muslim practices. She also investigates the birds’ contributions to science and their jaunty appearances in literature.