Showing results for "life" in Environmentalists & Naturalists

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.

After Lachlan McIver's father suffers a sudden, fatal heart attack it sends him into a spiral of grief and outrage. This tragedy inspires him to become a doctor and he eventually finds his calling – providing care for communities in some of the most remote and neglected parts of the world. In this no-holds-barred memoir, Lachlan recounts his experiences treating patients and tackling health problems across dozens of countries.

If there is one thing that most of us aspire to, it is, simply, to be happy. And yet attaining happiness has become, it appears, anything but simple. Having stuff - the latest, the newest, the best yet - is all too often peddled as the surefire route to happiness. So why then, in our consumer-driven society, is depression, stress and anxiety ever more common, affecting every strata of society and every age, even, worryingly, the very young?

Very few individuals can truthfully say that their work impacts every person on Earth. Forrest Galante is one of them. As a wildlife biologist and conservationist, Galante devotes his life to studying, rediscovering, and protecting our planet’s amazing life-forms. Part memoir, part biological adventure, Still Alive celebrates the beauty and determined resiliency of our world, as well as the brave conservationists fighting to save it.

At 83 years old, Valerie Taylor has lived a big, bold, adventurous life. Born in Australia, Valerie spent a great deal of her childhood in New Zealand. A talented artist, she dropped out of school when she contracted polio and was saved by Sister Elizabeth Kenny's treatment plan; it was two years before she could walk unaided. When Valerie was 15, she found work as an animator and moved back to Australia with her family. All the while she thrived on being close to the ocean, and was a keen spearfisher.

Canadian botanist, biochemist, and visionary Diana Beresford-Kroeger's startling insights into the hidden life of trees have already sparked a quiet revolution in how we understand our relationship to forests. Now, in a captivating account of how her life led her to these illuminating and crucial ideas, she shows us how forests can not only heal us but save the planet.

An enthralling account of a modern voyage of discovery as we meet the clever, social birds of prey called caracaras, which puzzled Darwin, fascinate modern-day falconers, and carry secrets of our planet's deep past in their family history.

Annie Worsley is a Professor of Environmental Change. A few years ago, she took the plunge and moved to the remote North West Highlands of Scotland. It is a land of unquenchable spirit and severe wildness. In the Highlands, life is ruled by the great elemental forces – light, wind and water hold sway over how land forms, where the sea sits, and what grows. It also dictates how its people live. Annie returns to prehistory to tell the epic story of the Scotland Highlands.

Each year, more than 1,000 rhinoceroses are killed - in South Africa alone. There are fewer than 18,000 white rhinos and only 5,000 black rhinos left alive in the wild. The situation with regard to this corrupt, illegal war on wildlife is clearly critical. And what are rhinos killed for? Their horns - sold in shavings as a snake-oil 'cure' for colds or impotence. The going price is $16,000 a kilogram, but a rhino's horn is simply keratin, the same material as our fingernails, with no magical, medicinal properties.

Mary Moody’s best-selling memoirs about her adventures in France, Au Revoir and Last Tango in Toulouse, inspired thousands of women. The Accidental Tour Guide completes the circle by sharing another major turning point in her life. When Mary loses her beloved husband, her world is turned upside down. Part of her journey to reignite her passion for living is to boldly go where she has never been before - in her travels and in her everyday life. A powerful, moving, and inspiring true story about how to rebuild your life without the people who matter most.

Beatrix Potter's Gardening Life is the first work to explore the origins of Beatrix Potter's love of gardening and plants and show how this passion came to be reflected in her work.

In 1987, Robert Harris happened upon an unusual job advert in The Kerryman - a new warden service was being set up on Skellig Michael, and the deadline was imminent. Just weeks later, he was on his way to set up camp in one of Ireland’s most remote locations, unaware that he would be making that same journey every May for the next 30 years. Here he transports us to the otherworldly island, a place that is teeming with natural life, including curious puffins that like to visit his hut.

Laurie Zaleski never aspired to run an animal rescue; that was her mother Annie’s dream. But from girlhood, Laurie was determined to make the dream come true. Thirty years later as a successful businesswoman, she did it, buying a 15-acre farm deep in the Pinelands of South Jersey. She was planning to relocate Annie and her caravan of ragtag rescues - horses and goats, dogs and cats, chickens and pigs - when Annie died, just two weeks before moving day. In her heartbreak, Laurie resolved to make her mother’s dream her own.

In 2007, after 20 years of living in London, Kate Humble and her husband Ludo decided it was time to leave city life behind them. Three years later, now the owner of a Welsh smallholding, Kate hears that a nearby farm is to be broken up and sold off. Another farm lost; another opportunity for a young farmless farmer gone. Desperate to stop the sale, Kate contacts the council with an alternative plan - to keep the farm working and to run a rural skills and animal husbandry school alongside it. Against all odds, she succeeds.

Victor Emanuel is widely considered one of America's leading birders. In One More Warbler, Emanuel recalls a lifetime of birding adventures - from his childhood sighting of a male Cardinal that ignited his passion for birds to a once-in-a-lifetime journey to Asia to observe all eight species of cranes of that continent. He tells fascinating stories of meeting his mentors who taught him about birds, nature, and conservation, and later, his close circle of friends who he frequently birded and traveled with around the world.

Penelope Lively has always been a keen gardener. This audiobook is partly a memoir of her own life in gardens: the large garden at home in Cairo where she spent most of her childhood, her grandmother's garden in a sloping Somerset field, then two successive Oxfordshire gardens of her own and the smaller urban garden in the North London home she lives in today. It's also a wise, engaging exploration of gardens in literature, from Paradise Lost to Alice in Wonderland.

In Raven's Witness, Lentfer tells Nelson's story - from his midwestern childhood to his first experiences with Native culture in Alaska through his own lifelong passion for the land where he so belonged. Nelson was the author of the best-selling The Island Within and Heart and Blood. The recipient of multiple honorary degrees and numerous literary awards, he regularly packed auditoriums when he spoke. His depth of experience allowed him to become an intermediary between worlds. This is his story.

In Origin Story, medical historian Howard Markel recounts the two-year period (1858 to 1860) of Darwin's writing of On the Origin of Species through its spectacular success and controversy. Simultaneously, Markel delves into the mysterious health symptoms Darwin developed, combing the literature to emerge with a cogent diagnosis of a case that has long fascinated medical historians.

Roger Deakin, author of the immortal Waterlog and Wildwood, was a man of unusually many parts. A born writer who nonetheless took decades to write his first book, Roger was also variously—and sometimes simultaneously—maverick ad-man, seller of stripped pine furniture on the Portobello Road, cider-maker, teacher, environmentalist, music promoter, and filmmaker. But above all he was the restorer of ancient Walnut Tree Farm in Suffolk.

From 2000 to 2010, River Selby was a wildland firefighter whose given name was Anastasia. This is a memoir of that time in their life—of Ana, the struggles she encountered, and the contours of what it meant to be female-bodied in a male-dominated profession. Hotshot is a work of intimacy and authority, nimbly merging a personal journey of reinvention and self-acceptance with expert insight into the textured history of ecological systems and Indigenous land tending.