Showing titles in Environment

The Allure of Fungi presents fungi through multiple perspectives–those of mycologists and ecologists, foragers and forayers, naturalists and farmers, aesthetes and artists, philosophers and Traditional Owners. It explores how a history of entrenched fears and misconceptions about fungi has led to their near absence in Australian ecological consciousness and biodiversity conservation.

An accessible and compelling story of a scientist's discovery of plant communication and how it influenced her research and changed her life.

Heatwaves, wildfires, hurricanes and flooding caused by climate change are already impacting people and nature. Adaptation until now has been incremental with governments and institutions tinkering around the edges of current systems. This will not be enough. Sink or Swim explores the hard choices that lie ahead concerning how people earn a living, the way governments manage relationships between countries, and how communities accommodate the movement of people. Should people be encouraged to move away from the coast?

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.

According to the UN Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD), each year, an estimated 24 billion tons of fertile soil are lost due to erosion. That’s a whopping 3.4 tons lost every year for each person on the planet.

Speaking to experts in fields as diverse as oil production and ecology, and visiting the places that have escaped recent human activity to discover how they have adapted to life without us, Alan Weisman paints an intriguing picture of the future of Earth. Exploring key concerns of our time, this absorbing thought experiment reveals a powerful - and surprising - picture of our planet's future.

In this Very Short Introduction audiobook, Jan Zalasiewicz gives a brief introduction to the fascinating field of geology. Describing how the science developed from its early beginnings, he looks at some of the key discoveries that have transformed it before delving into its various subfields, such as sedimentology, tectonics, and stratigraphy.

On Fire gathers for the first time more than a decade of Naomi Klein's impassioned writing from the front line of climate change and pairs it with new material on the staggeringly high stakes of what we choose to do next. These essays, reports and lectures show Klein at her most prophetic and philosophical, investigating the climate crisis not only as a profound political challenge but also as a spiritual and imaginative one.

Ages before the dawn of modern medicine, wild animals were harnessing the power of nature's pharmacy to heal themselves. Doctors by Nature reveals what researchers are now learning about the medical wonders of the animal world. In this visionary book, Jaap de Roode argues that we have underestimated the healing potential of nature for too long and shows how the study of self-medicating animals could impact the practice of human medicine.

An energy expert shows why hydrogen can fight climate change and become the fuel of the future. That may sound too good to be true, but as energy expert Marco Alverà explains, if we're going to heal the climate, we need to start thinking big. This audiobook is the blueprint for how to get us there. This is a guidebook for how to save the world and whether you are a policy maker, a business person, an activist, or simply curious, the message is this: there is hope, for us and our planet. The best part about hydrogen is that when you burn it, the only by-product is water.

Using Australia as a springboard, this book explores the science in folk history. It looks at ancient tales and traditions that may in all probability be rooted in scientifically verifiable fact and can be explored via geological evidence, such as the biblical flood. Nowadays the majority of our historical knowledge comes from the written word, but in The Edge of Memory, Patrick Nunn explores the largely untapped resource of the collective human memory that is held in stories. This important book explores the wider implications for our knowledge of how human society has developed through the millennia.

The grid is an accident of history and of culture, in no way intrinsic to how we produce, deliver and consume electrical power. Yet this is the system the United States ended up with, a jerry-built structure now so rickety and near collapse that a strong wind or a hot day can bring it to a grinding halt. The grid is now under threat from a new source: renewable and variable energy, which puts stress on its logics as much as its components.

Coming home from the war in Iraq, US Army private Roy Scranton thought he'd left the world of strife behind. Then he watched as new calamities struck America, heralding a threat far more dangerous than ISIS or al-Qaeda: Hurricane Katrina, Superstorm Sandy, megadrought - the shock and awe of global warming. Our world is changing. Rising seas, spiking temperatures, and extreme weather imperil global infrastructure, crops, and water supplies. Conflict, famine, plagues, and riots menace from every quarter.

Welcome to 2030. I own nothing, have no privacy, and life has never been better. This is the vision of the Great Reset, according to globalist leaders. While proponents of the Great Reset push slogans like “Build Back Better”, “The Fourth Industrial Revolution”, and “A New Normal”, the Reset is nothing short of a rebranded Soviet system, threatening to strip away property rights, restrict freedom of movement and association, and radically reshape our diets and way of life.

A preeminent geneticist hunts the Neanderthal genome to answer the biggest question of them all: what does it mean to be human? What can we learn from the genes of our closest evolutionary relatives? Neanderthal Man tells the story of geneticist Svante Pbo’s mission to answer that question, beginning with the study of DNA in Egyptian mummies in the early 1980s and culminating in his sequencing of the Neanderthal genome in 2009.

Throughout history, when threatened by wildfires our only defense was to pray for rain and run—until aircraft changed the way we fight fires. Beginning with the Canadian "H-Boats" in 1924, aircraft have become indispensable in detecting and extinguishing wildfires. Fire Eaters tells the incredible stories of the Ontario Provincial Air Service, the first government aerial fire suppression organization in history; one of its pilots, Carl Crossley, who invented the water scoop-up and drop-off system; and the Canadair CL-215, the first purpose-built water bomber.

In Stolen Harvest: The Hijacking of the Global Food Supply, Vandana Shiva explores the devastating effects of commercial agriculture and genetic engineering on the food we eat, the farmers who grow it, and the soil that sustains it. This prescient critique and call to action covers some of the most pressing topics of this ongoing dialogue, from the destruction of local food cultures and the privatization of plant life, to unsustainable industrial fish farming and safety concerns about corporately engineered foods.

The Brilliant Abyss tells the story of our relationship with the deep sea – how we imagine, explore and exploit it. It captures the golden age of discovery we are currently in and looks back at the history of how we got here, while also looking forward to the unfolding new environmental disasters that are taking place miles beneath the waves, far beyond the public gaze.

In this groundbreaking book, Nature Evolutionary and Earth Elder Pam Montgomery draws on her decades of working with plants and Nature consciousness to demonstrate that we are intrinsically created to be in relationship with Nature. She examines the co-opting of time, language, and culture to shed light on the roots of our separation, weaving together contemporary research on human physiology with personal experience.

For most of human history nature was held to be sacred and our God or gods were believed to be present everywhere in nature. When people in the West began to separate God and nature in the 17th century, it was not just a profound breach with thousands of years of accumulated wisdom and experience: it was also the root of how we have come to plunder the natural world and to promote our individual selves in unhealthy and destructive ways. Karen Armstrong argues that if we want to avert the looming environmental catastrophe, it is not enough to change our behaviour.