Human Ecology

This Very Short Introduction audiobook celebrates the centrality of ecology in our lives. Jaboury Ghazoul explores how ecology has evolved rapidly from natural history to become a predictive science that explains how the natural world works and which guides environmental policy and management decisions.

What if Bigfoot is not a zoological mystery, but an anthropological one? For more than a century, reports of large, upright, human-like figures have emerged from forests across the world. They appear briefly, avoid contact, leave little evidence, and vanish before certainty can form. Popular culture has treated these accounts as entertainment, folklore, or hoax. Science has largely dismissed them for lack of proof. The Anthropology of Bigfoot takes a different approach. Rather than asking whether Bigfoot can be proven, this book asks whether the question itself has been misunderstood.

This is the first book to trace the fascinating parallel history of law and science from antiquity to modern times, showing how the two disciplines have always influenced each other - until recently. In the past few years, the scientific paradigm has shifted dramatically, from seeing the natural world as a kind of cosmic machine to understanding it as a network of fluidly interacting communities. But law is stuck in a mechanistic, 17th-century view that the world is made up of discrete individual parts.

Authors Paul Warde, Libby Robin, and Sverker Sörlin trace the emergence of the concept of the environment following World War II, a period characterized by both hope for a new global order and fear of humans' capacity for almost limitless destruction. It was at this moment that a new idea and a new narrative about the planet-wide impact of people's behavior emerged, closely allied to anxieties for the future. With the rise of "the environment", the authors argue, came new expertise, making certain kinds of knowledge crucial to understanding the future of our planet.