Showing results by publisher "Brilliance Audio" in Environment

Burned-out after years of doing development work around the world, William Powers spent a season in a 12-foot-by-12-foot cabin off the grid in North Carolina, as recounted in his award-winning memoir Twelve by Twelve. Could he live a similarly minimalist life in the heart of New York City? To find out, Powers and his wife jettisoned 80 percent of their stuff, left their 2,000-square-foot Queens townhouse, and moved into a 350-square-foot "micro-apartment" in Greenwich Village.

In this highly original work of lyrical reportage, Elizabeth Rush guides listeners through some of the places where this change has been most dramatic, from the Gulf Coast to Miami, and from New York City to the Bay Area. For many of the plants, animals, and humans in these places, the options are stark: retreat or perish in place. Weaving firsthand accounts from those facing this choice with profiles of wildlife biologists and other members of the communities both currently at risk and already displaced, Rising privileges the voices of those usually kept at the margins.

What does it mean to be a millennial in this chaotic world? Beyond Snapchat and Tinder, the consumerist culture we’ve inherited, and quarter-life crises, can a millennial aspire to more? Alison Lea Sher argues, yes, we can! Packing herself up in an RV, Sher embarks on a road trip, interviewing 150 of her millennial peers as they begin their adult lives. From kids heading straight to Wall Street after college, to those sleeping on it, Sher asks: “Who are you; what should you do; and how can you step into your destiny as a stakeholder in society?”

It is elemental, mysterious, precious, destructive. It is the subject of countless poems and paintings; the top of the weather report; the source of all the world's water. Yet this is the first audiobook to tell the story of rain.

The Fracking King follows Winston Crwth - a boarding-school kid, loner, and Scrabble prodigy - who becomes an unlikely hero in the fight to stop fracking in Pennsylvania. Truth is a rare commodity in politics, and the idea of "winning" a debate as cleanly and simply as you'd win a Scrabble game can seem impossible. But with the truth on his side, a jar of toxic "frackwater", and the belief that he can win a Scrabble tournament whose first prize is a meeting with Governor Linda King LaRue, Winston creates a moment of devastating truth.

In The Synthetic Age, Christopher Preston argues that what is most startling about this coming epoch is not only how much impact humans have had but, more important, how much deliberate shaping they will start to do. Emerging technologies promise to give us the power to take over some of Nature's most basic operations. It is not just that we are exiting the Holocene and entering the Anthropocene; it is that we are leaving behind the time in which planetary change is just the unintended consequence of unbridled industrialism.

Like 75% of American women, Ronnie Citron-Fink dyed her hair, visiting the salon every few weeks to hide gray roots in her signature dark brown mane. She wanted to look attractive, professional, and most of all, young. Yet as a journalist covering health and the environment, she knew something wasn’t right. All those unpronounceable chemical names on the back of the hair dye box were far from natural. Were her recurring headaches and allergies telltale signs that the dye offered the illusion of health, all the while undermining it? Ronnie took a leap and decided to ditch the dye.

We should thank a pollinator at every meal. These diminutive creatures fertilize a third of the crops we eat. Yet half of the 2,000 species of pollinators are threatened. Birds, bats, insects, and many other pollinators are disappearing, putting our entire food supply in jeopardy. In North America and Europe, bee populations have already plummeted by more than a third and the population of butterflies has declined 31 percent. Protecting Pollinators explores why the statistics have become so dire and how they can be reversed.

Weathercaster “Nor’Easter" Nick Pittman tells his heartfelt story of learning to embrace the unpredictable and turn rainy days into opportunities.