Showing titles in Ecosystems & Habitats

Fanny Kelly (1845-1904) was a North American pioneer captured by the Sioux and held captive for five months. Her ill-fated party was attacked by chief Ottawa on the Oregon Trail. She escaped when Sihasapa people took her to Fort Sully.

Marine algae are the supreme eco-engineers of life: they oxygenate the waters, create habitat for countless other organisms, and form the base of a food chain that keeps our planet unique in the universe as we know it. In this audiobook Josie Iselin explores both the artistic and the biological presence of 16 seaweeds and kelps that live in the thin region where the Pacific Ocean converges with the North American continent - a place of incomparable richness.

In this timely and exciting contribution to a wider conversation about our relationship with the natural world, wildlife journalist Millie Kerr takes listeners on a global journey of discovery. She considers the practicalities and possibilities of ecological restoration around the world, while exploring first-hand some of the most ambitious undertakings occurring today, many of which involve species reintroductions in the Global South.

Professor Richard Fortey has been a devoted field mycologist all his life. He has rejoiced in the exuberant variety and profusion of mushrooms since reading as a boy of nuns driven mad by ergot (a fungus). Drawing on decades of experience doing science in the woods and fields, Fortey starts with the perfect ‘fungus day’ – eating ceps in Piedmont. He introduces brown rotters and the white, earthstars and death caps; fungal annuals and perennials, dung lovers and parasites, even fungi that move through the trees like mycelial monkeys.

As Carl Safina's compelling natural-history adventure makes clear, the fate of the leatherback turtle is in our hands. The distressing decline of these ancient sea turtles in Pacific waters and their surprising recovery in the Atlantic illuminate the results - both positive and negative - of our interventions and the lessons that can be applied, globally, to restore the oceans and their creatures. We accompany award-winning natural-history expert Safina and his colleagues as they track leatherbacks across the world's oceans and onto remote beaches of every continent.

The epic story of the world's last subsistence whalers. At a time when global change has eradicated thousands of unique cultures, The Last Whalers tells the stunning inside story of the Lamalerans, an ancient tribe of 1,500 hunter-gatherers who live on a volcanic island so remote it is known by other Indonesians as 'The Land Left Behind'. They have survived for centuries by taking whales with bamboo harpoons but now are being pushed toward collapse by the encroachment of the modern world.

Part odyssey, part pilgrimage, this epic personal narrative follows the author’s exploration of coasts, islands, reefs, and the sea’s abyssal depths. Scientist and fisherman Carl Safina takes readers on a global journey of discovery, probing for truth about the world’s changing seas, deftly weaving adventure, science, and political analysis.

For over a quarter century, biologist Mark J. Rauzon has worked in the field of island restoration, traveling throughout the American Insular Pacific to eradicate invasive plants and animals introduced by humans. The region spans from Hawai'i to Samoa to Guam, and their neighbors - small, obscure, tropical islands that are hundreds if not thousands of nautical miles from each other. These little-known US possessions and territories include various islands and atolls: Jarvis, Howland, Baker, the Northern Marianas, Wake, Palmyra, Johnston, and Rose Atoll, among others.

What if saving our home planet starts with giving other species space to roam? How can we re-shape our human-built landscapes to serve both people and wildlife? These are the questions that Hillary Rosner attempts to answer in Roam, an urgent quest to figure out how to stitch our fragmented planet back together. It’s about the people trying to reconstruct landscapes where animals can once again move freely, as they did for millennia.

On her 120-acre homestead high in the Colorado Rockies, beloved writer Pam Houston learns what it means to care for a piece of land and the creatures on it. Elk calves and bluebirds mark the changing seasons, winter temperatures drop to 35 below, and lightning sparks a 110,000-acre wildfire, threatening her century-old barn and all its inhabitants. Through her travels from the Gulf of Mexico to Alaska, she explores what ties her to the Earth, the ranch most of all.

There is a saying in Russian jails. Ne ver ne boysya ne prosi: don't trust, don't fear, don't beg. Don't trust because life here will always disappoint you. Don't fear because whatever you're scared of, you are powerless to prevent it. And don't beg because nobody ever begged their way out of a Russian prison cell. The plan was to attach a Greenpeace pod to Gazprom's platform and launch a peaceful protest against oil being pumped from the icy waters of the Arctic.

Naturalist Joe Hutto’s latest adventures in wildlife observation take him to Wyoming’s Wind River Mountains. Hutto is living in a tent at 12,000 feet, where blizzards occur in July and where human wants become irrelevant—and human needs can become a matter of life and death—to study the Rocky Mountain bighorn sheep.

Only those who love trees should cut them, writes forester Ethan Tapper. In How to Love a Forest, he asks what it means to live in a time in which ecosystems are in retreat and extinctions rattle the bones of the earth. How do we respond to the harmful legacies of the past? How do we use our species’ incredible power to heal rather than to harm? Tapper walks us through the fragile and resilient community that is a forest.

Liminal, transformative and increasingly elusive – far from a simple cloud of water droplets, fog is a state of mind. As mist drifted through a copse of trees, turning a familiar place strange and otherworldly, Laura Pashby snapped a photograph and an obsession began. Pashby hunts for fog, walks and swims in it, explores its often pivotal role in literature, mythology and history, as well as its environmental significance. There has been a 50 per cent drop in 'fog events' in the past fifty years, fog is drifting away without us noticing and the ecological impact could be calamitous.

Si hay un futuro que imaginar es ancestral, pues ya está presente en el aquí y ahora y en lo que existe a nuestro alrededor, en los ríos, las montañas y los árboles que son nuestros parientes. Krenak propone una mirada que desafía y enfrenta los supuestos que sostienen la mentalidad occidental.

In The Last Empty Places, bestselling author Peter Stark takes the listener to four of the most remote, wild, and unpopulated areas of the United States outside of Alaska, and mainly not part of protected wilderness: the rivers and forests of Northern Maine; the rugged, unpopulated region of Western Pennsylvania, that lies only a short distance from the East's big cities; the haunting canyons of Central New Mexico; and the vast, arid basins of Southeast Oregon.

With Mountain Madness, Clinton Crockett Peters chronicles his travels and personal transformation from a West Texas evangelical to mountain guide to humbled humanist after a near-fatal injury in Japan's Chichibu Mountains. From 2007 to 2010, Peters lived in Kosuge Village, nestled in central Japan's peaks, where he was the only foreigner in town. This essay collection profiles who he was before Japan, why he became obsessed with mountains, and his fallout from mountain obsession. Ultimately, the collection asks, how can landscape create and end identities?

This classic is an essential handbook for anyone who studies, surfs, protects, or is fascinated by the ocean, with a wealth of information based on theory and statistics, but also anecdotal observation and personal experience. It brought to the general public understanding of the awesome and complex power of the waves. This revision from Kim McCoy updates the book's relevance in the time of climate change. One of the most significant effects of global warming will be sea-level rise. What will this mean to waves and beaches, and what effects are we already seeing?

As more and more of our planet is urbanised, we humans still feel that primal pull to connect with our wilder roots. This gorgeously lyrical book invites us to celebrate the natural world, while also offering a clear-eyed glimpse into the challenges faced by urban plants and animals as cities grow and sprawl. Wild City proposes a compelling manifesto for city wildlife, suggesting how we might take action to protect the often-overlooked residents who live alongside us.

Seit Jahrzehnten steigende Temperaturen sind eine unabweisbare Tatsache: Der Klimawandel kommt nicht - wir sind bereits mittendrin. Bernhard Kegel geht in seinem Hörbuch der Frage nach, wie sich unsere Umwelt in den nächsten Jahren verändern wird. Welche Migration von Flora und Fauna wird es geben - und was bedeutet dies für unser Leben? Was passiert, wenn natürliche Zyklen kollabieren, wenn etwa Fische schlüpfen, weil die Wassertemperatur ansteigt, aber kein Futter vorhanden ist, weil sich Phytoplankton erst vermehrt, wenn die Tage länger werden?