Environment Food

Farming is the world's greatest cause of environmental destruction - and the one we are least prepared to talk about. We criticize urban sprawl, but farming sprawls across 30 times as much land. We have ploughed, fenced and grazed great tracts of the planet, felling forests, killing wildlife, and poisoning rivers and oceans to feed ourselves. Yet millions still go hungry.

We have never had so much information at our fingertips, and yet most of us simply don't understand how our world really works. Professor Vaclav Smil is not a pessimist or an optimist, he is a scientist, and this book is a much-needed reality check on topics ranging from food production and nutrition, through energy and the environment, to globalisation and the future. For example, the carbon footprint of meat is well known, but did you know that the equivalent of five tablespoons of diesel fuel goes into the production of each greenhouse-grown, medium-size, supermarket-bought tomato?

When a shattered kayak and camping gear are found on an uninhabited island, they reignite a mystery surrounding a shocking act of protest. Five months earlier, logger-turned-activist Grant Hadwin had plunged naked into a river in British Columbia's Queen Charlotte Islands, towing a chainsaw. When his night's work was done, a unique Sitka spruce, 165 feet tall and covered with luminous golden needles, teetered on its stump. Two days later it fell.

“What’s for dinner"? seemed like a simple question - until journalist and supermarket detective Michael Pollan delved behind the scenes. From fast food and big organic to small farms and old-fashioned hunting and gathering, this young listeners’ adaptation of Pollan’s famous food-chain exploration encourages kids to consider the personal and global health implications of their food choices. The Omnivore’s Dilemma serves up a bold message to the generation that needs it most: It’s time to take charge of our national eating habits - and it starts with you.

When Bob Quinn was a kid, a stranger at a county fair gave him a few kernels of an unusual grain. Little did he know, that grain would change his life. Years later, after finishing a PhD in plant biochemistry and returning to his family's farm in Montana, Bob started experimenting with organic wheat. In the beginning, his concern wasn't health or the environment; he just wanted to make a decent living and some chance encounters led him to organics.

Nutrition scientist and gastronome Dr. P. K. Newby provides a sweeping overview of the many interrelationships between humans, land, and food. Newby examines topics including key nutrition concepts behind good eating; the technology, biology, and psychology of food choices; how diet affects our health and environment; and evidence-based tips for creating lasting behavior change. At the same time, Newby debunks popular myths and food folklore, challenging listeners to "learn, unlearn, and relearn" the fundamentals of nutrition at the heart of a health-giving diet.

In Food from the Radical Center, Gary Nabhan tells the stories of diverse communities who are getting their hands dirty and bringing back North America's unique fare: bison, sturgeon, camas lilies, ancient grains, turkeys, and more. These efforts have united people from the left and right, rural and urban, faith-based and science-based, in game-changing collaborations. Their successes are extraordinary by any measure, whether economic, ecological, or social.

Through fascinating and accessible interviews with celebrity chefs, ranchers, farmers, and top scientists, this remarkable book, soon to be a full-length documentary film narrated by Woody Harrelson, will teach you how to become an agent in humanity's single most important and time sensitive mission. Reverse climate change and effectively save the world - all through the choices you make in how and what to eat.

PROBLEM: Six in ten adults now live with at least one chronic disease, and poor diet can accelerate your biological age by up to seven years. Genes matter— but what you do with them matters even more. AGITATION: Cutting-edge studies (2023-2025) show that everyday choices switch on or silence more than 20 000 genes linked to longevity, immunity and metabolism. When the wrong nutrients disrupt your methylation cycle, harmful homocysteine rises, health declines and aging speeds up. SOLUTION: In Epigenetic Nutrition, clinical nutritionist Curro Clavero reveals science-backed protocols to ...

When we use chemical fertilizers, we injure the microbial life that sustains plants and then become increasingly dependent on an arsenal of toxic substances. Teaming with Microbes offers an alternative to this vicious circle and details how to garden in a way that strengthens, rather than destroys, the soil food web. You’ll discover that healthy soil is teeming with life - not just earthworms and insects, but a staggering multitude of bacteria, fungi, and other microorganisms.

According to the UN Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD), each year, an estimated 24 billion tons of fertile soil are lost due to erosion. That’s a whopping 3.4 tons lost every year for each person on the planet.

Grassland ecosystems can be found on nearly every continent. Countless animals and plants live in them. So what difference could the loss of one animal species make? Follow the chain reaction, and discover how important honey bees are.

For decades, it has been nearly universal dogma among environmentalists and health advocates that cattle and beef are public enemy number one. But is the matter really so clear? Hardly, argues environmental lawyer turned rancher Nicolette Hahn Niman in her new book, Defending Beef. The public has long been led to believe that livestock, especially cattle, erode soils, pollute air and water, damage riparian areas, and decimate wildlife populations. In Defending Beef, Hahn Niman argues that cattle are not inherently bad for either the Earth or our own nutritional health.

In Stolen Harvest: The Hijacking of the Global Food Supply, Vandana Shiva explores the devastating effects of commercial agriculture and genetic engineering on the food we eat, the farmers who grow it, and the soil that sustains it. This prescient critique and call to action covers some of the most pressing topics of this ongoing dialogue, from the destruction of local food cultures and the privatization of plant life, to unsustainable industrial fish farming and safety concerns about corporately engineered foods.

In We Are the Weather, Jonathan Safran Foer explores the central global dilemma of our time in a surprising, deeply personal, and urgent new way. Some people reject the fact, overwhelmingly supported by scientists, that our planet is warming because of human activity. But do those of us who accept the reality of human-caused climate change truly believe it? If we did, surely we would be roused to act on what we know.

For most of history, humans did without refined sugar. Granulated sugar was first produced in India around the sixth century BC, yet for almost 2,500 years afterward sugar remained marginal in the diets of most people. Then, suddenly, it was everywhere. How did sugar find its way into almost all the food we eat, fostering illness and ecological crisis along the way? The World of Sugar begins with the earliest evidence of sugar production.

We’ve been told that a vegetarian diet can feed the hungry, honor the animals, and save the planet. Lierre Keith believed in that plant-based diet and spent twenty years as a vegan. But in The Vegetarian Myth, she argues that we’ve been led astray - not by our longings for a just and sustainable world, but by our ignorance. e truth is that agriculture is a relentless assault against the planet, and more of the same won’t save us. In service to annual grains, humans have devastated prairies and forests, driven countless species extinct, altered the climate, and destroyed the topsoil - the basis of life itself....

For listeners who enjoyed Finding the Mother Tree and The Hidden Life of Trees comes the first-ever book about a movement to restore biodiversity in our cities and towns by transforming empty lots, backyards, and degraded land into mini-forests. Author Hannah Lewis is the forest maker turning asphalt into ecosystems to save the planet, and she wants everyone to know they can do it too.

Ecologist Mark Easter offers a detailed picture of the impact the foods you love have on the earth. Organized by the ingredients of a typical dinner party, including seafood, salad, bread, chicken, steak, potatoes, and fruit pie with ice cream, each chapter examines the food through the lens of the climate crisis. Gathered like guests around the table, here are the stories of these foods: the soil that grew the lettuce, the farmers and ranchers and orchardists who steward the land, the dairy and farm workers and grocers who labor to bring it to the table.

Sustainability of the environment contains both wishful thinking and ignorance – ignorance of the reality that natural systems are complex and unfathomable by scientists, and that repetition of their outputs depend on repetition of initial and all subsequent conditions. Scientific insights provide knowledge, but it is partial in most cases, and when applied is often subject to conflicting objectives, which in turn produce conditions that affect outcomes ‑ thus our best efforts to predict natural outcomes are usually flawed. We further display our ignorance in seeking social ...