Earth Environment

Twenty years ago, with The End of Nature, Bill McKibben offered one of the earliest warnings about global warming. Those warnings went mostly unheeded; now, he insists, we need to acknowledge that we've waited too long, and that massive change is not only unavoidable but already under way. Our old familiar globe is suddenly melting, drying, acidifying, flooding, and burning in ways that no human has ever seen.

A journey around the United States in search of the truth about the threat of earthquakes leads to spine-tingling discoveries, unnerving experts, and ultimately the kind of preparations that will actually help guide us through disasters. It's a road trip full of surprises.

"The climate crisis may at times appear to be happening slowly, but in fact it is happening very quickly - and has become a true planetary emergency....[I]nconvenient truths do not go away just because they are not seen. Indeed, when they are not responded to, their significance doesn't diminish; it grows." -Al Gore

This is the book for anyone who feels overwhelmed by the current state of our environment. Hopeful and prophetic, The Future Earth invites us to imagine how we can reverse the effects of climate change in our own lifetime and encourages us to enter a deeper relationship with the earth as conscientious stewards and to re-affirm our commitment to one another in our shared humanity.

From conservation to protecting endangered species to sustainable living, A Christian's Guide to Planet Earth offers a faith-based framework for viewing our responsibility to the natural world as well as practical, biblical ways we can care for the magnificent creation around us. Drawing on science and Scripture, this hope-filled and listener-friendly guide helps us navigate questions about caring for and respecting God's world.

A thrilling scientific investigation and the portrait of an extraordinary genius, The Seashell on the Mountaintop gives us new insight into our planet, revealing how we learned to read the story told to us by the Earth itself, written in rock and stone.

Big History, the field that studies the entire known past of our universe to give context to human existence, has so far been the domain of historians. Geologist Walter Alvarez - best known for his Impact Theory explaining dinosaur extinction - makes a compelling case for a new, science-first approach to Big History.

Ben Mezrich takes us on an exhilarating true adventure story from the icy terrain of Siberia to the cutting-edge genetic labs of Harvard University. A group of young scientists, under the guidance of Dr. George Church, the most brilliant geneticist of our time, works to make fantasy reality by sequencing the DNA of a frozen woolly mammoth harvested from above the Arctic Circle and splicing elements of that sequence into the DNA of a modern elephant.

In Cows Save the Planet, journalist Judith D. Schwartz looks at soil as a crucible for our many overlapping environmental, economic, and social crises. Schwartz reveals that for many of these problems - climate change, desertification, biodiversity loss, droughts, floods, wildfires, rural poverty, malnutrition, and obesity - there are positive, alternative scenarios to the degradation and devastation we face. In each case, our ability to turn these crises into opportunities depends on how we treat the soil. Drawing on the work of thinkers and doers, renegade scientists and institutional whistleblowers from around the world, Schwartz challenges much of the conventional thinking about global warming and other problems. For example, land can suffer from undergrazing as well as overgrazing, since certain landscapes, such as grasslands, require the disturbance from livestock to thrive.

How can people lead good lives without ultimately hastening global collapse? The answer lies in fairness. We can’t fight the climate and nature crises without addressing the ever-widening gaps between the rich and poor, the powerful and the weak. Drawing upon more than 40 years of experience in research, practical work, campaigning and advocacy, combined with interviews with globally renowned experts, in Just Earth Tony Juniper reveals the system shifts needed to achieve real, lasting change.

The history of the Great Warming of a half millennium ago suggests that we may yet be underestimating the power of climate change to disrupt our lives todayand our vulnerability to drought, writes Fagan, is the silent elephant in the room.

Chris Mooney, author of The Republican War on Science and one of the leading young environmental journalists and bloggers working today, immerses listeners in the world of those who study hurricanes. What was once an arcane branch of meteorology (itself an arcane science) has become embroiled in one of the most politicized and hotly contested debates in American science: whether or not the recent hurricane disasters, culminating in Katrina, are connected to global warming.

When the writer Donovan Hohn heard of the mysterious loss of thousands of bath toys at sea, he figured he would interview a few oceanographers, talk to a few beachcombers, and read up on Arctic science and geography. But questions can be like ocean currents: wade in too far, and they carry you away. Hohn's accidental odyssey pulls him into the secretive world of shipping conglomerates, the daring work of Arctic researchers, the lunatic risks of maverick sailors, and the shadowy world of Chinese toy factories.

Laki is Iceland's largest volcano - and its most fearsome. Its eruption in 1783 is one of history's great untold natural disasters. Spewing out sun-blocking ash and then a poisonous fog for eight long months, the effects of the eruption lingered across the world for years. It caused the deaths of people as far away as the Nile and created catastrophic conditions throughout Europe.

Wagner and Martin Weitzman explore in lively, clear terms the likely repercussions of a hotter planet, drawing on and expanding from work previously unavailable to general audiences. They show that the longer we wait to act, the more likely an extreme event will happen. A city might go underwater.

In an easy conversational style, The Restless Northwest provides a brief overview of the remarkable geological processes that have shaped the Pacific Northwest. The narrative is also sprinkled with firsthand accounts of the people involved in recent exciting, scientific discoveries. Williams enlivens this story of long-ago geologic events, with a variety of fascinating asides, on everything from enormous undersea tubeworms, to the Willamette meteorite.

Scientists' understanding of life is progressing more rapidly than at any point in human history, from the extraordinary decoding of DNA to the controversial emergence of biotechnology. Featuring pioneering biologists, geneticists, physicists, and science writers, Life explains just how far we've come - and takes a brilliantly educated guess at where we're heading.

A moving, inspiring, personal look at the vastly changing world of wildlife on planet earth as a result of human incursion, and the crucial work of animal and bird preservation across the globe being done by scientists, field biologists, zoologists, environmentalists, and conservationists.

The roots of today's environmental catastrophe run deep into humanity's past. Through this unprecedented reading of Homer's Iliad, the award-winning classicist Edith Hall examines how this foundational text both documents the environmental practices of the ancient Greeks and betrays an awareness of the dangers posed by the destruction of the natural landscape. Underlying Homer's account of brutal military operations, alliances, and cataclysmic struggle is a palpable understanding that the direction in which humanity was headed could create a world that was uninhabitable.

How would you like to wake up one day to discover that you could no longer travel when and where you wished? How about learning tomorrow that the industry in which you work has been outlawed and you no longer have a job? Worse, what if your property was rezoned to prohibit single-family residences, requiring you to move to an apartment complex? Outrageous? Of course, but there is a program being proposed and implemented that leads to all of the above and more. It is called Agenda 21/2030. And, every member country of the United Nations has agreed to implement it under international controls...