Showing results by publisher "Audible Studios" in Nature & Ecology

What's the connection between a platter of jumbo shrimp at your local restaurant and murdered fishermen in Honduras, impoverished women in Ecuador, and disastrous hurricanes along America's Gulf coast? Mangroves. Many people have never heard of these salt-water forests, but for those who depend on their riches, mangroves are indispensable. In Let Them Eat Shrimp, Kennedy Warne takes listeners into the muddy battle zone that is the mangrove forest.

With his distinctively witty, anecdotal, and disarming voice, John Yow now journeys to the shore and shares his encounters with some of the most familiar and beloved coastal birds. Out of his travels—from North Carolina's Outer Banks, down the Atlantic coast, and westward along the Gulf of Mexico—come colorful accounts of twenty-eight species, from ubiquitous beach birds like sanderlings and laughing gulls to wonders of nature like roseate spoonbills and the American avocets.

The Digital Age was expected to usher in an era of clean production, an alternative to smokestack industries and their pollutants. But as environmental journalist Elizabeth Grossman reveals in this penetrating analysis of high tech manufacture and disposal, digital may be sleek, but it's anything but clean. Deep within every electronic device lie toxic materials that make up the bits and bytes, a complex thicket of lead, mercury, cadmium, plastics, and a host of other often harmful ingredients.

Doctor, angler, and raconteur Donald Thomas takes fishermen on a rollicking road trip through Alaska, Costa Rica, Australia, the Galapagos, and more. Fishing in oceans along the way, he enjoys the kind of adventures most people can only dream of. Each chapter includes a sidebar that gives Thomas an opportunity to riff entertainingly on a particular game fish, as well as an “At a Glance” section with both the current IGFA All-Tackle and Fly-Rod world records for that species.

We share our lives, for better or worse, with a multitude of animals: white-tailed deer and white-tailed eagles, hens and wrens, frogs and guppies, and, last but hardly least, bugs and bacteria. For the most part, we drift along separately, with neither man nor animal affecting the other's way of life. Sometimes, however, we fall in love - as in the case of the cat in the title - or otherwise encounter our animal neighbors in ways that change both of us.

A New York Times Notable Book of 1994! Highly respected author, philosopher, and animal trainer Vicki Hearne offers a treasure trove of animal anecdotes, all written in her unique and poetic style. Through entertaining stories about cats, horses, an ornamental carp, a scorpion, and tortoises, Hearne focuses on how each of these various creatures experiences happiness in its own special way. She takes issue with Ludwig Wittgenstein on lions and language, discusses the naming of pets, and considers the process of mourning a loved dog’s death.

Mark Seth Lender’s home is on the edge of a salt marsh. From his front porch and back yard he is witness to an astonishing array of wildlife, but nothing he sees is more beautiful and inspiring than the birds that fill the air, perch on trees and wade in shallow water. His reports on the sighting of birds like great horned owls, little blue herons and snowy egrets are featured in the segment "Salt Marsh Diary" heard on NPR’s Living on Earth. For the first time, he has chronicled the marsh’s life in a book penned from his perch.

The Agile City engages the fundamental question: what to do about it? Journalist and urban analyst James S. Russell argues that we'll more quickly slow global warming - and blunt its effects - by retrofitting cities, suburbs, and towns. The Agile City shows that change undertaken at the building and community level can reach carbon-reduction goals rapidly. Adapting buildings (39 percent of greenhouse-gas emission) and communities (slashing the 33 percent of transportation related emissions) offers numerous other benefits that tax gimmicks and massive alternative-energy investments can't match.

Animal migration is a magnificent sight: a mile-long blanket of cranes rising from a Nebraska river and filling the sky; hundreds of thousands of wildebeests marching across the Serengeti; a blaze of orange as millions of monarch butterflies spread their wings to take flight. Nature’s great migrations have captivated countless spectators, none more so than premier ecologist David S. Wilcove. In No Way Home, his awe is palpable - as are the growing threats to migratory animals.

Climate change is a major topic of concern today and will be so for the foreseeable future, as predicted changes in global temperatures, rainfall, and sea level continue to take place. But as Jan Zalasiewicz and Mark Williams reveal in The Goldilocks Planet, the climatic changes we are experiencing today hardly compare to the changes the Earth has seen over the last 4.5 billion years.

Air sustains the living. Every creature breathes to live, exchanging and changing the atmosphere. Water and dust spin and rise, make clouds and fall again, fertilizing the dirt. Twenty thousand fungal spores and half a million bacteria travel in a square foot of summer air. The chemical sense of aphids, the ultraviolet sight of swifts, a newborn’s awareness of its mother’s breast - all take place in the medium of air.

In the 2012 edition of its flagship report, Worldwatch celebrates the twentieth anniversary of the 1992 Earth Summit with a far-reaching analysis of progress toward building sustainable economies. Written and read in clear language, State of the World 2012 offers a new perspective on what changes and policies will be necessary to make sustainability a permanent feature of the world's economies.

Picking up where she left off in Where the Blind Horse Sings, Kathy Stevens regales us with more tales of the rescued animals at Catskill Animal Sanctuary (CAS), some touching, some hilarious, all provocative. We meet Barbie, the broiler hen found hiding under a blue Honda in Brooklyn who falls for the animal ambassador Rambo, a ram with an uncanny sense of what others need. Then there’s Norma Rae, the turkey rescued from a "turkey bowl" just before Thanksgiving.

The world's preeminent environmental organization began with a layer of soot on the windowsill of a Greenwich Village apartment. Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) founder John H. Adams, a pioneer of environmental action, was working as a lawyer for the U.S. Attorney's office when he and fellow lawyers teamed up to form a grassroots environmental advocacy group.

Cooler Smarter is based on an in-depth, two-year study by the experts at The Union of Concerned Scientists. While other green guides suggest an array of tips, Cooler Smarter offers proven strategies to cut carbon, with chapters on transportation, home energy use, diet, and personal consumption, as well as how best to influence your workplace, your community, and elected officials. The book explains how to make the biggest impact and when not to sweat the small stuff.

As a young boy, the author took part in collecting specimens for his father. Fifty years later, he was asked to join a team from the same institution studying the state of sea life in the Bahamian waters where he grew up, as measured against his father’s benchmark. The first of the sea changes presented in this eloquent book stems from climate change and is the drastic transformation of ocean life due to global warming - but there are more.

A nature audiobook unlike any other, Jordan Fisher Smith's startling account of fourteen years as a park ranger thoroughly dispels our idealized visions of life in the great outdoors. Instead of scout troops and placid birdwatchers, Smith's beat - a stretch of land that has been officially condemned to be flooded - brings him into contact with drug users tweaked out to the point of violence, obsessed miners, and other dangerous creatures. In unflinchingly honest prose, he reveals the unexpectedly dark underbelly of patrolling and protecting public lands.

Carl Safina has been hailed as one of the top 100 conservationists of the 20th century (Audubon Magazine) and A Sea in Flames is his blistering account of the months-long manmade disaster that tormented a region and mesmerized the nation. Traveling across the Gulf to make sense of an ever-changing story and its often-nonsensical twists, Safina expertly deconstructs the series of calamitous misjudgments that caused the Deepwater Horizon blowout, zeroes in on BP’s misstatements, evasions, and denials, reassesses his own reaction to the government’s crisis handling, and reviews the consequences of the leak.

Few books have captured the haunting world of music and rivers and of the sport they provide as well as A River Never Sleeps. Roderick L. Haig-Brown writes of fishing not just as a sport, but also as an art. He knows moving water and the life within it - its subtlest mysteries and perpetual delights. He is a man who knows fish lore as few people ever will, and the legends and history of a great sport. Month by month, he takes you from river to river, down at last to the saltwater and the sea.

For almost 40 years, Chet Raymo walked a one-mile path from his house to the college where he taught, chronicling the universe by observing every detail of his route with a scientists curiosity, a historians respect for the past, and a childs capacity for wonder. With each step, the landscape he traversed became richer, suggesting ever deeper aspects of astronomy, history, biology, and literature, and making the path universal in scope.