Conservation History

Wild City is a paean to New York City and its complex, and often surprising, relationship to its non-human residents, large and small. Like the wide range of humans who populate it’s five boroughs, a many animals, including whales, coyotes, deer, bed bugs, geese, mosquitos, and hawks all call the Big Apple’s streets, parks, and shores home as well.

America's Nuclear Wastelands presents an expert, yet straightforward overview of this complex topic, including nuclear weapons history and contamination issues. The author, a government consultant with a long career in Pacific Northwest nuclear waste issues, also explores the current institutional and political environment, demonstrating the critical role of public participation for past and future generations.

Roy was instrumental in returning the osprey, red kite and golden eagle to the British Isles, but the road to reintroduction isn’t an easy one. In what will surely be the seminal book on British reintroductions, Roy details the painstaking process of returning the Goldeneye to Scotland, one duckling at a time, the die-hard determination needed to make a dazzling success of the red kite reintroduction and the leap of faith we will all need to make to accept sharing our forests and skies with large carnivores again.

Over the past 100 years, gulls have been brought ashore by modernity. They now live not only on the coasts, but in our slipstream following trawlers, barges, and garbage trucks. They are more our contemporaries than most birds, living their wild lives among us in towns and cities. In many ways, they live as we do, walking the built-up world and grabbing a bite where they can. Yet this disturbs us. We’ve started fearing gulls for getting good at being among us. We see them as scavengers, not entrepreneurs; oceangoing aliens, not refugees.

Inspired by Nathaniel Rich’s Losing Earth: A Recent History, the acclaimed book that grew out of an August 2018 issue of the New York Times Magazine solely dedicated to it, Saving Earth tells the human story of the climate-change conversation from the recent past into the present day. It wrestles with the long shadow of our failures, what might be ahead for today’s generation, and crucial questions of how we understand the world we live in—and how we can work together to change the outlook for the better.

Before skyscrapers and smokestacks rose across the eastern U.S., elk, bison, wolves, and cougars roamed. Typically imagined as icons of the West, these large mammals are in fact native to what was once a kind of Eden—towering forests in the Northeast, rolling prairies in the Midwest, and cypress swamps in the Deep South. But, in mere decades, industrialization and unregulated hunting brought these emblems of the East to the precipice of extinction; by the 1950s, squirrels were one of the few wild mammals an easterner was likely to encounter.

We all need to understand the issues surrounding the controversial topic of GMOs for the sake of our health, our families, and the security of the food chain of our planet. Our very future may depend on it. This first volume in a five book series is the introduction you've been looking for.

We are in a race between political and natural tipping points. Can we close coal-fired power plants fast enough to save the Greenland ice sheet and avoid catastrophic sea level rise? Can we raise water productivity fast enough to halt the depletion of aquifers and avoid water-driven food shortages? Can we cope with peak water and peak oil at the same time? These are some of the issues Lester R. Brown skillfully distills in World on the Edge.

Wild Isles is a celebration of the wildlife found on a relatively modest collection of islands positioned at a latitude so northerly to be unattractive to many animals and plants. Despite these unpromising foundations, the islands of Britain and Ireland, together with more than 6,000 lesser islets that make up our archipelago, contain some of the most diverse, beautiful and wildlife-rich landscapes and seas on our planet. This audiobook will explore the fascinating relationships within and between species who make their home on our beautiful isles.

Our modern-day cities might seem to represent our separation from the natural world. In fact, as Ben Wilson reveals in this captivating re-examination of urban landscapes around the world, nature has always been at the heart of the city. Wilson explores the wild side of cities, past, present and future: the middens, abandoned sites and strips of land alongside railway lines.

Deep in the heart of the Amazon, an entire region has lived under the control of one notorious land baron: JosElio de Barros. JosElio cut a grisly path to success: having arrived in the jungle with a shady past, he quickly made a name for himself as an invincible thug who grabbed massive tracts of public land, burned down the jungle and executed or enslaved anyone trying to stop him. Enter Dezinho, the leader of a small but robust farm workers' union fighting against land grabs, ecological destruction, and blatant human rights abuses.

Nature on the brink? Maybe not. With so much bad news in the world, we forget how much environmental progress has been made. In a narrative that reaches from Native American tribal practices to public health and commercial hunting, Wild at Heart shows how western attitudes towards nature have changed dramatically in the last five hundred years. Humans can learn from the past, and our choices today will determine whether nature survives.

In a Polish forest a young woman befriends a boar. An Englishman sets up home with two beavers in Saskatchewan. A zoologist watches a fish make a conscious decision. Darwin finds the evidence for evolution in the backyards of pigeon fanciers. The entire population of Croatia anxiously awaits the arrival of a single stork.

Insects are essential for life as we know it. As they become more scarce, our world will slowly grind to a halt; we simply cannot function without them. Drawing on the latest groundbreaking research and a lifetime's study, Dave Goulson reveals the shocking decline of insect populations that has taken place in recent decades, with potentially catastrophic consequences. He passionately argues that we must all learn to love, respect and care for our six-legged friends.

Most people only consider the Mississippi River when they cross it or when it inconveniently abandons its banks. But every year, millions of tons of cargo are transported by towboats on the river. In Peep Light, Captain Lee Hendrix provides unique insight on people who work and live on and near the Mississippi River. Hendrix, formerly a pilot for the Delta Queen Steamboat Co., has worked on the Mississippi for fifty years. In 2014, Hendrix became captain of the towboat Mississippi with the US Army Corps of Engineers, then he later retired to return to passenger vessels.

From the Model T to the SUV, Autophobia reveals that our vexed relationship with the automobile is nothing new. In fact, debates over whether cars are forces of good or evil in our world have raged for over a century now, ever since the automobile was invented. According to Brian Ladd, this love and hate relationship we share with our cars is the defining quality of the automotive age.

In Wild, Amy Jeffs journeys—on foot and through medieval texts—from landscapes of desolation to hope, offering the listener an insight into a world at once distant and profoundly close to home. The seven chapters, entitled Earth, Ocean, Forest, Beast, Fen, Catastrophe, Paradise, open with fiction and close with reflection. They blend reflections of travels through fen, forest and cave, with retelling of medieval texts that offer rich depictions of the natural world.

Mals, Italy, has long been known as the breadbasket of the Tyrol. But recently the tiny town became known for something else entirely. A Precautionary Tale tells us why, introducing readers to an unlikely group of activists and a forward-thinking mayor who came together to ban pesticides in Mals by a referendum vote, making it the first place on Earth to accomplish such a feat, and a model for other towns and regions to follow. For hundreds of years, the people of Mals had cherished their traditional foodways and kept their local agriculture organic. Their town had become a mecca for tourists drawn by the alpine landscape, the rural and historic character of the villages, and the fine breads, wines, cheeses, herbs, vegetables, and the other traditional foods they produced.

Deepwater Horizon was supposed to be the cutting edge of energy exploration: drilling 5,000 feet below the surface of the Gulf of Mexico, the $560 million rig would be indispensable in helping to solve the ongoing energy crisis. Then, on April 20, 2010, BP’s dismal safety record came home to roost.

The Pasagoula River is the largest unobstructed river in the continuous United States. Because of this lack of restraint, the river has been left to rise and fall naturally with the seasons, overflowing annually into the adjoining bottomland surrounded by some of the most ecologically diverse woodlands, in North America. Herman Murrah lived his entire life on the banks and in the swamp surrounding this river in southeast Mississippi. In this book, Herman's son Davy details the adventures that continue to inspire young conservationists in the fight to protect our remaining natural ecosystems.