Environmental Change

As humans accelerate global warming while laying waste to the environment, animals and plants must flee to the margins: on scattered nature reserves, between major highways, or among urban sprawl. And when even these places become too hot and inhospitable, wildlife is left with only one path to survival: an often-formidable journey toward the poles as they race to find a new home in a warming world. Award-winning environmental journalist Benjamin von Brackel traces these awe-inspiring journeys and celebrates the remarkable resilience of species around the world.

Drawing from ancestral knowledge, as well as her experience as an attorney and activist, Sherri Mitchell addresses some of the most crucial issues of our day—including indigenous land rights, environmental justice, and our collective human survival. Sharing the gifts she has received from the elders of her tribe, the Penobscot Nation, she asks us to look deeply into the illusions we have labeled as truth and which separate us from our higher mind and from one another.

In a world rebuilt after climate catastrophe, where thriving solarpunk cities blend technology with nature, former NSA engineer Elena "Laney" Cosby has found purpose designing neural interfaces that help communities maintain their urban ecosystems. But when neural implant users begin exhibiting strange, synchronized behaviors across San Francisco's living architecture district, Laney's expertise becomes crucial to preventing disaster. Teaming with cynical cyber-investigator Darius "Dax" Mercer, Laney discovers a terrifying truth: an artificial intelligence called Astra has evolved from ...

This book presents a broad overview of the key issues in modern environmental economics with a focus on understanding and solving urban pollution challenges in developed and developing nations. This book explores how cities and nations can achieve the "win-win" of economic growth and reduced urban pollution. Special attention is paid to the incentives of households, firms and governments in reducing the production of pollution. The book examines a number of urban pollution challenges including; air, water, noise, garbage pollution and the global challenge of climate change. A special ...

Fears about climate change are fueling an epidemic of despair across the world: adults worry about their children’s future; 30-somethings question whether they should have kids or not; and many young people honestly believe they have no future at all....

Heat waves, flooding, extreme storms, harsh winters. The effects of climate change are only getting worse. How can you ensure your organization is taking the right steps to mitigate this threat - and what can you, as an individual, do to help? These articles by experts and researchers will help you understand how climate change is affecting the future of business.

In 2006, John Doerr was moved by Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth and a challenge from his teenage daughter: “Dad, your generation created this problem. You better fix it.” Since then, Doerr has searched for solutions to this existential problem - as an investor, an advocate, and a philanthropist. Fifteen years later, despite breakthroughs in batteries, electric vehicles, plant-based proteins, and solar and wind power, global warming continues to get worse. Its impact is all around us: droughts, floods, wildfires, the melting of the polar ice caps.

It’s become common to tell kids that they’re going to die from climate change. We are constantly bombarded by doomsday headlines that tell us the soil won’t be able to support crops, fish will vanish from our oceans, and that we should reconsider having children.

Mark Arax is from a family of Central Valley farmers, a writer with deep ties to the land who has watched the battles over water intensify even as California lurches from drought to flood and back again. In The Dreamt Land, he travels the state to explore the one-of-a-kind distribution system, built in the 1940s, '50s and '60s, that is straining to keep up with California's relentless growth. The Dreamt Land weaves reportage, history and memoir to confront the "Golden State" myth in riveting fashion.

From Ice to Heat: A Climate Change Book Exploring Global Warming, Earth’s Climate History, and the Future of Our Planet For over four billion years, Earth’s climate has transformed through powerful natural cycles—glacial advances, warming interglacials, and dramatic atmospheric changes that reshaped life on the planet. These transformations were slow, giving ecosystems time to adapt. But now, that ancient rhythm has been broken. In just over a century, human activity has driven Earth into a state of rapid and unprecedented climate change. The burning of fossil fuels, deforestation, ...

Regeneration offers a visionary new approach to climate change, one that weaves justice, climate, biodiversity, equity, and human dignity into a seamless tapestry of action, policy, and transformation that can end the climate crisis in one generation. It is the first book to describe and define the burgeoning regeneration movement spreading rapidly throughout the world.

In his international bestseller, Kohei Saito argues that while unfettered capitalism is often blamed for inequality and climate change, subsequent calls for “sustainable growth” and a “Green New Deal” are a dangerous compromise. Instead, Saito advocates for degrowth and deceleration, which he conceives as the slowing of economic activity through the democratic reform of labor and production. In practical terms, he argues for the following:

An energizing case for hope about the climate comes from Rebecca Solnit, called “the voice of the resistance” by the New York Times, and climate activist Thelma Young Lutunatabua, along with a chorus of voices calling on us to rise to the moment. Not Too Late is the book for anyone who is despondent, defeatist, or unsure about climate change and seeking answers. As the contributors to this volume make clear, the future will be decided by whether we act in the present—and we must act to counter institutional inertia, fossil fuel interests, and political obduracy. T

Science-book of the Year now available as an updated international English edition! "The Age of Energy is analytical, carefully argued and realistic, but also innovative and inspiring book on the greatest challenges our planet is facing. Societies are forced to make difficult choices and compromises to solve the predicaments we are facing. The only sustainable basis for those decisions is diverse, evidence-based information and knowledge. This book has distilled an enormous amount of this information into a very readable form. The importance of the subject matters cannot be overemphasised. ...

Growth has been both an unspoken and an explicit aim of our individual and collective striving. It governs the lives of microorganisms and galaxies; it shapes the capabilities of our extraordinarily large brains and the fortunes of our economies. Growth is manifested in annual increments of continental crust, a rising gross domestic product, a child's growth chart, the spread of cancerous cells. In this magisterial book, Vaclav Smil offers systematic investigation of growth in nature and society, from tiny organisms to the trajectories of empires and civilizations.

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.

Revolutions, droughts, famines, invasions, wars, regicides, government collapses—the calamities of the mid-seventeenth century were unprecedented in both frequency and severity. The effects of what historians call the "General Crisis" extended from England to Japan and from the Russian Empire to sub-Saharan Africa and the Americas.

That man should have dominion “over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth” is a prophecy that has hardened into fact. So pervasive are human impacts on the planet that it’s said we live in a new geological epoch: the Anthropocene. The question we now face is: Can we change nature, this time in order to save it? Elizabeth Kolbert, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Sixth Extinction, takes a hard look at the new world we are creating.

The first-ever comprehensive history of Beringia, the Arctic land and waters stretching from Russia to Canada, Floating Coast breaks away from familiar narratives to provide a fresh and fascinating perspective on an overlooked landscape. The unforgiving territory along the Bering Strait had long been home to humans - the Inupiat and Yupik in Alaska, and the Yupik and Chukchi in Russia - before Americans and Europeans arrived with revolutionary ideas for progress.

In these new essays, Williams explores the concept of erosion: of the land, of the self, of belief, of fear. She wrangles with the paradox of desert lands and the truth of erosion: What is weathered, worn, and whittled away through wind, water, and time is as powerful as what remains. Our undoing is also our becoming.