Showing titles in Ecosystems & Habitats

Growing up near the Sabine, journalist Wes Ferguson, like most East Texans, steered clear of its murky, debris-filled waters, where alligators lived in the backwater sloughs and an occasional body was pulled from some out-of-the-way crossing. The Sabine held a reputation as a haunt for a handful of hunters and loggers, more than a few water moccasins, swarms of mosquitoes, and the occasional black bear lumbering through swamp oak and cypress knees.

The Turning Tide is a hymn to a sea passage of world-historical importance. Combining social and cultural history, nature-writing, travelogue and politics, Jon Gower charts a sea which has carried both Vikings and saints, invasion forces and furtive gun-runners, writers, musicians and fishermen. The divided but interconnected waters of the Irish Sea—from the narrow North Channel through St George’s Channel to where the Celtic sea opens out into wide Atlantic—have a turbulent history to match the violence of its storms.

The Atlantic grey seal is globally rare—there are fewer grey seals in the world than African elephants—and Britain hosts 40 per cent of this world population. Over the course of a year in their lives, Susan Richardson comes to know a colony of seals, watching as it is hit by storms in the autumn pupping season, experiencing sociable winter haul-outs and sympathising as the colony scratch and fidget through their annual moult.

It’s summer, and John Connell finds himself—like so many others—confined to his local area, the opportunity to freely travel and socialise cut short. His attention turns to the Camlin river—an ever-present source of life for his hometown’s inhabitants and, for John, a site of boyhood adventure, first love, family history and local legend. He decides to canoe its course with a friend, a two-day trip requiring physical exertion and mental resilience. Despite the world growing still around them, the river teems with life—a symphony of buzzing mayfly and jumping trout.

Where nature writing meets humor—a raucous, hilarious look at life in the high desert of Nevada, from the author of Raising Wild and Rants from the Hill.

In this informed and lyrical collection of interwoven essays, Lisa Knopp explores the physical and cultural geography of the Mississippi, Missouri, and Platte rivers she has come to understand and cherish. At the same time, she contemplates how people experience landscape, identifying three primary roles of environmental perception: the insider, the outsider, and the outsider seeking to become an insider. Viewing the waterways through these approaches, she searches for knowledge and meaning.

Michael Branch “earned his whiskers” in the Great Basin Desert of northwestern Nevada, where he lives off the grid with his wife and two curious little girls. Shifting between pastoral passages on beauty found in the desert and humorous tales of being a father, Raising Wild offers an intimate portrait of a landscape where mountain lions and ground squirrels can threaten in equal measure. With Branch’s distinct lyricism and wit, this barren landscape becomes a place resonant with the rattle of snakes, the plod of pronghorn antelope, and the rustle of juniper trees.

In Tree Thieves, Lyndsie Bourgon takes us deep into the underbelly of the illegal timber market. As she traces three timber poaching cases, she introduces us to tree poachers, law enforcement, forensic wood specialists, the enigmatic residents of former logging communities, environmental activists, international timber cartels and Indigenous communities along the way.

In the late 2000s, when the three-decade-long Left Front rule in West Bengal was crumbling, Parimal Bhattacharya began to travel outside the well-trodden urban centres to different parts of the region - from the Sundarbans to tribal Jangalmahal, from the outskirts of Kolkata to villages on the Bangladesh border, from the floodplains of the Hooghly to the forests of Simlipal in neighbouring Odisha.

Science Be Dammed is an alarming reminder of the high stakes in the management - and perils in the mismanagement - of water in the Western United States. It seems deceptively simple: Even when clear evidence was available that the Colorado River could not sustain ambitious dreaming and planning by decision-makers throughout the 20th century, river planners and political operatives irresponsibly made the least sustainable and most dangerous long-term decisions.

Jake Fiennes is on a mission to change the face of the English countryside. Mass farming, crop science and industrial chemicals have destroyed the majority of our natural landscape and wildlife over the last century. Land Healer is the story of Fiennes' ambition to bring back our flora and fauna—by reclaiming our traditions and trialling new experiments which could restore our symbiosis with our land, and save our shared future.

Lasst uns den Menschen als Teil der Natur neu denken! Den Fluss Orinoco bereiste vor 200 Jahren Alexander von Humboldt auf seiner Südamerika-Expedition, und dieser Naturforscher ist einer der Leitsterne für das neue Hörbuch der Bestsellerautoren Harald Lesch und Klaus Kamphausen. Denn: Wir benötigen dringend ein neues Verständnis der natürlichen Welt und ein neues Verständnis von uns selbst, eines in dem auch das Fühlen und Wundern wieder mehr Platz erhalten. Eines, das uns ermöglicht, die Rolle des Menschen als Teil des Ökosystems Erde neu zu bestimmen und die Zerstörung unserer Lebensgrundlagen zu verhindern.

In Spring Tides, marine biologist Fiona Gell tells the story of a pioneering project to create the very first marine nature reserve on the Isle of Man. Growing up in a traditional fishing family on the island, Fiona spent her time on her grandfather's boat, listening to stories from the local fishermen and combing the beach for mermaid's purses and whelks' eggs.

Following numerous courses in scuba diving, Gary Knapp embarked on a 12-year filming adventure inspired by his promise to God to share with mankind the majestic life he created both under and above the world’s oceans. Through his vivid accounts, Gary takes you on an incredible journey beneath the depths of the seas, to exotic islands, and other countries by the oceans as he travels with marine biologists on trips around the globe.

Start a peaceful revolution by planting an edible ecosystem and sharing the experience with your neighbors. Humans have always thrived in rich, diverse, edible ecosystems. Yet most cities and suburbs are blanketed by lawns, ornamentals, and a lack of biodiversity, let alone anything edible. It is within these sterile landscapes that seeds of an edible ecosystem lie. The Edible Ecosystem Solution is a comprehensive, practical guidebook that looks at underutilized spaces to reveal the many opportunities for landscape transformation.

Oggi le montagne d'Italia e del mondo - le Dolomiti e il Monte Bianco, l'Everest e il K2, il Kilimanjaro e il Gran Sasso - sono soprattutto spazi di divertimento e avventura. Ma i sentieri, le pareti di roccia e di ghiaccio, le piste da sci e le vette sono solo una parte del quadro. Per millenni, in ogni angolo della terra, le montagne sono state territori di duro lavoro quotidiano, fonte di paura e luoghi eletti a culto, scenario di sfide che hanno messo alla prova le umane possibilità, oltre che teatro di guerra.

A magnificent and empowering memoir about a woman spearheading a global initiative to heal the world's rainforests and the communities who depend on them. When Kinari Webb first travelled to Indonesian Borneo at 21, she was both awestruck by the beauty of her surroundings and heartbroken by the rainforest destruction she witnessed. As she got to know the local communities, she realised that their need to pay for expensive healthcare led directly to rampant logging, which in turn imperilled their health and safety further.

The Birdsville Track runs through three deserts, from Marree in Northern South Australia, to Birdsville in outback Queensland. This legendary, dirt road has a rich folk history, intriguing culture and unique ecosystems. But it doesn’t give up its secrets easily - unless you have the Birdsville Track Audio Tour of course! The Birdsville Track Audio Tour has 45 tracks and 138 minutes of professional-quality audio. The tracks are designed to be played at set points along the Birdsville Track, as shown on the map.

“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately.” And so it began. Henry David Thoreau, at 27, built a tiny, one-room cabin in the woods — on land owned by his friend, Ralph Waldo Emerson — and began his two-year experiment in frugality on the shore of Walden Pond. He wasn’t seeking isolation so much as simplicity, to “live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms.”

"Für die mit der Sehnsucht nach dem Meer" ist eine Sammlung von Gedichten und Geschichten. In allen Geschichten und Gedichten steht das Meer im Mittelpunkt, und nicht zuletzt die Sehnsucht nach dem Meer. Der Autor nimmt dich an die Hand und begleitet dich auf eine persönliche Reise. Eine Geschichte, die Lust macht, am Meer spazieren zu gehen und dem Rauschen der Wellen zu lauschen.