Conservation Science

The Upcycle is the eagerly awaited follow-up to Cradle to Cradle, the most consequential ecological manifesto of our time. Now, drawing on the lessons gained from 10 years of putting the cradle-to-cradle concept into practice with businesses, governments, and ordinary people, William McDonough and Michael Braungart envision the next step in the solution to our ecological crisis: We don't just reuse resources with greater effectiveness, we actually improve them as we use them.

A follow-up to Ohlson’s previous book, The Soil Will Save Us (Rodale 2014), Sweet in Tooth and Claw extends the concept of cooperation in nature to the life-affirming connections among microbes, plants, fungi, insects, birds, and animals—including humans—in ecosystems around the globe.

A riveting history of America's most beautiful natural resources, The Quiet World documents the heroic fight waged by the U.S. federal government from 1879 to 1960 to save wild Alaska - ;Mount McKinley, the Tongass and Chugach national forests, Gates of the Arctic, Glacier Bay, Lake Clark, and the Coastal Plain of the Beaufort Sea, among other treasured landscapes - from the extraction industries.

Poacher Wars is an intense, well-written account about a true wildlife warrior and his fight against the criminals who plunder our natural resources. As a Pennsylvania Game Warden, Wasserman patrolled four hundred square miles of rugged mountain terrain where he investigated thousands of game law violations and arrested many violent career poachers.

Susan Knilans and Jacqueline Freeman are in love with bees. So in love that they observe their bees - their work, communication, seasonal activity, and more - for hours each day. And with observation came realization: When bees are allowed to live as they would in nature (with smaller hives, no chemicals, freedom to swarm, and little-to-no human interference), they will thrive. Accordingly, Knilans and Freeman have spent decades perfecting the revolutionary practice of preservation beekeeping, guided by the simple question, "What do the bees want?"

The organic grower's guide to planting, propagation, culture, and ecology. Trees are our allies in healing the world. Partnering with trees allows us to build soil, enhance biodiversity, increase wildlife populations, grow food and medicine, and pull carbon out of the atmosphere, sequestering it in the soil. Author Akiva Silver is an enthusiastic tree grower with years of experience running his own commercial nursery. In this audiobook, he clearly explains the most important concepts necessary for success with perennial woody plants.

Bjorn Lomborg argues that many of the elaborate and expensive actions now being considered to stop global warming will cost hundreds of billions of dollars, are often based on emotional rather than strictly scientific assumptions, and may very well have little impact on the world’s temperature for hundreds of years. Rather than starting with the most radical procedures, Lomborg argues that we should first focus our resources on more immediate concerns, such as fighting malaria and HIV/AIDS and assuring and maintaining a safe, fresh water supply....

A deft blend of science reporting and travel writing, The Journeys of Trees explores the evolving movements of forests by focusing on five trees: giant sequoia, ash, black spruce, Florida torreya, and Monterey pine.

Prize-winning poet and journalist Eliza Griswold’s Amity and Prosperity is an expose on how fracking shattered a rural Pennsylvania town, and how one lifelong resident brought the story into the national spotlight. This is an incredible true account of investigative journalism and a devastating indictment of energy politics in America.

The Ogallala aquifer has nourished life on the American Great Plains for millennia. But less than a century of unsustainable irrigation farming has taxed much of the aquifer beyond repair. The imminent depletion of the Ogallala and other aquifers around the world is a defining planetary crisis of our times. Running Out offers a uniquely personal account of aquifer depletion and the deeper layers through which it gains meaning and force.

Humans have been farming for thousands of years, and yet agriculture has undergone more fundamental changes in the past 80 years than in the previous several centuries. In 1900, 30 million American farmers tilled the soil or tended livestock; today there are fewer than 4.5 million farmers who feed a population four times larger than it was at the beginning of the century.

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.

In the early 70s, some of us were shot like stars from our parents' homes. This was an act of nature, bigger than ourselves. In the austere beauty and natural reality of Hell's Canyon of Eastern Oregon, 100 miles from pavement, Pam, unable to identify with her parent's world and looking for deeper pathways has a chance encounter with returning Vietnam warrior Skip Royes. Skip, looking for a bridge from survival back to connection, introduces Pam to the vanishing culture of the wandering shepherd and together they embark on a four-year sojourn into the wilderness.

Fred Rogers was an international celebrity, a pioneer in children's television, an advocate for families, and a multimedia artist and performer. He wrote the television scripts and music, performed puppetry, sang, hosted, and directed Mister Rogers' Neighborhood for more than thirty years. The Green Mister Rogers centers on the show's environmentalism. Ultimately, Rogers cultivates a practical wisdom that provides a way for children to confront the environmental crisis through action and hope and, in doing so, develop into adults with greater care for the environment.

Earth is embroiled in its sixth major extinction event—this time caused not by asteroids or volcanos, but by us. At bottom, preventing this sixth extinction is a spiritual and philosophical problem, for it is the assumptions defining us and our relation to earth that are driving the devastation. Those assumptions insist on a fundamental separation of human and earth that devalues earth and enables our exploitative relation to it.

Individuals can’t save the world alone. But if millions of us work together to save our own patch of earth—then we really have a shot. How do we do it? With Acts of Restorative Kindness (ARK). An ARK is a restored native ecosystem. It’s a thriving patch of native plants and creatures that have been allowed and supported to re-establish in the earth's intelligent, successional process of natural restoration. Over time, this becomes a pantry and a habitat for our pollinators and wild creatures who are in desperate need of support.

The news about wildlife is dire—more than 900 species have been wiped off the planet since industrialization. Against this bleak backdrop, however, there are also glimmers of hope and crucial lessons to be learned from animals that have defied global trends toward extinction: bears in Italy, bison in North America, whales in the Atlantic. These populations are back from the brink, some of them in numbers unimaginable in a century. How has this happened? In crisp, transporting prose, Christopher Preston reveals the mysteries and challenges at the heart of these resurgences.

In a prizewinning five-year investigation, authors Simen Sætre and Kjetil Østli took an in-depth look at Norway’s role in the global salmon industry and, for the first time, produced a comprehensive evaluation of the detrimental effects of salmon farming. From lice to escapees, from concentrating the waste of sea pens in the fjords through which wild salmon swim to their natal streams to the fact that salmon farming causes a net reduction of protein reaped from the ocean, the results don’t look good.

Carlos Magdalena is not your average horticulturist. He's a man on a mission to save the world's most endangered plants. First captivated by the flora of his native Spain, he has traveled to the remotest parts of the globe in search of exotic species. Renowned for his pioneering work, he has committed his life to protecting plants from man-made ecological destruction and thieves hunting for wealthy collectors.

In Storms of My Grandchildren, James Hansen - the nation's leading scientist on climate issues - speaks out for the first time with the full truth about global warming: the planet is hurtling even more rapidly than previously acknowledged to a climatic point of no return. Although Hansen was Al Gore's science adviser for the 2006 documentary An Inconvenient Truth, his recent data shows that our situation is even more dire today.