Environmental Engineering

In Americans at Risk, Dr. Irwin Redlener draws on his broad experience as a pediatrician working with mobile emergency units both for children and adults, his time making recommendations to legislators about the vulnerabilities of children to biological and chemical agents and his regular meetings with Tom Ridge of the office of Homeland Security over a period of four years to write this urging a plan for a coordinated plan between government and the private sector.

Peak Everything addresses many of the cultural, psychological and practical changes we will have to make as nature rapidly dictates our new limits. This latest book from Richard Heinberg, author of three of the most important books on Peak Oil, touches on the most important aspects of the human condition at this unique moment in time.

A combination of wry commentary and sober forecasting on subjects as diverse as farming and industrial design, this book tells how we might make the transition from The Age of Excess to the Era of Modesty with grace and satisfaction....

Toxic Water, Toxic System exposes the consequences of a seemingly anonymous authoritarian state willing to maintain white supremacy at any cost—including poisoning an entire city and shutting off water to thousands of people. Weaving together narratives of frontline activists along with archival data, Michael Mascarenhas provides a powerful exploration of the political alliances and bureaucratic mechanisms that uphold inequality.

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.

Capitalism Is Past Its Sell-By Date explores capitalism’s accomplishments, its challenges, and the most profound effect of its success—overconsumption that is challenging the Earth’s ecosystems and inhabitants. Included is a comprehensive review of capitalism, an exploration of the implications of the exhaustion of the Earth’s resources, and an examination of growth. This book aims neither to praise nor to condemn capitalism, but to describe its current and future states of play to create a more proactive and productive conversation around our shared global future.

The environment, and the movement that grew up to protect it, is under attack, concerted and purposeful. Yet the need for solutions to pressing environmental problems grows more urgent each day. Teresa Heinz Kerry and Senator John Kerry traveled across the country in a national campaign to see at first hand how these issues unite people across party and ideological lines.

Revealing the deep and abiding interest that African American, Latino, and Native American communities - many of whom live in degraded and polluted parts of the country - have in our collective environment, Engage, Connect, Protect is part eye-opening critique of the cultural divide in environmentalism, part biography of a leading social entrepreneur, and part practical toolkit for engaging diverse youth.

Fulfilling a deathbed request, Nancy Nichols writes about the connection between the industrial pollution in their hometown and the rare cancer that was killing her sister, Sue.

To listen to most pundits and political writers, evolution, stem cells, and climate change are the only scientific issues worth mentioning and the only people who are anti-science are conservatives. Now for the first time, science writers Dr. Alex B. Berezow and Hank Campbell have drawn open the curtain on the left’s fear of science. As Science Left Behind reveals, vague inclinations about the wholesomeness of all things natural, the unhealthiness of the unnatural, and many other seductive fallacies have led to an epidemic of misinformation.

A straightforward and fact-based exploration of how weather happens, how it relates to climate, and how science answers major questions about Earth as a system.

Maverick environmental writers William J. Kelly and Chip Jacobs follow up their acclaimed Smogtown with a provocative examination of China’s ecological calamity already imperiling a warming planet. Toxic smog most people figured was obsolete needlessly kills as many there as the 9/11 attacks every day, while sometimes Grand Canyon-sized drifts of industrial particles aloft on the winds rain down ozone and waterway-poisoning mercury in America. Vivid, gonzo prose blends first-person reportage with exhaustive research and a sense of karma, describing the horror of "Cancer Villages", spellbinding "peasant revolts" against cancer-spreading plants, and much more....

From the National Business Book Award winner and GG finalist, a very different book about facing the climate crisis, and what awaits us on the other side.

Beyond images of emaciated polar bears and drought-cracked lakes, there remains a major part of climate change's impact that the media has neglected: how our health will suffer from higher temperatures and extreme weather. From spiraling rates of asthma and allergies and spikes in heatstroke-related deaths to swarms of invasive insects carrying diseases like dengue or West Nile and increases in heart and lung disease and cancer, the effect of rising temperatures on human health will be far-reaching, and is more imminent than we think.

In August 2018 a 15-year-old Swedish girl, Greta Thunberg, decided not to go to school one day. Her actions ended up sparking a global movement for action against the climate crisis, inspiring millions of pupils to go on strike for our planet, forcing governments to listen, and earning her a Nobel Peace Prize nomination.

How Business Can Fight Climate Change captures the perspectives, insights, and ideas of 35 of the world's greatest thought and action leaders, addressing the increasingly alarming global challenges of a world where carbon emissions are out of control. It provides an easy-to-understand guide for every business leader and company on how they can play a more proactive role in addressing this serious threat to the global system—the very system they depend on and thrive in. This is a call to action and a practical blueprint for how the world can get to zero greenhouse gas emissions

In Climaturity, Marc Cortez advocates for a transparent climate discussion where half-truths are completed, climate science limitations are put into context, and politicians are held accountable for spending taxpayer dollars. Climaturity offers a new perspective on the climate controversy through the pragmatic lens of a long-time renewable energy industry veteran. Part science, part satire, and part snark, he takes a stand against the climate panic movement.

In the past two centuries we have experienced wave after wave of overwhelming change. Entire continents have been resettled; there are billions more of us; the jobs done by countless people would be unrecognisable to their predecessors; scientific change has transformed us all in confusing, terrible and miraculous ways. Anatol Lieven's major new book provides the frame that has long been needed to understand how we should react to climate change. This is a vast challenge, but we have often in the past had to deal with such challenges.

The once denuded Northeastern United States is now a region of trees. Nature Next Door argues that the growth of cities, the construction of parks, the transformation of farming, the boom in tourism, and changes in the timber industry have together brought about a return of Northeastern forests. Although historians and historical actors alike have seen urban and rural areas as distinct, they are in fact intertwined, and the dichotomies of farm and forest, agriculture and industry, and nature and culture break down when the focus is on the history of Northeastern woods.

We are complacent. We bask in the idea that Canada holds 20% of the world’s fresh water - water crises face other countries, but not ours. We could not be more wrong. In Boiling Point, best-selling author and activist Maude Barlow lays bare the issues facing Canada’s water reserves, including long-outdated water laws, unmapped and unprotected groundwater reserves, agricultural pollution, industrial-waste dumping, boil-water advisories, and the effects of deforestation and climate change. This will be the defining issue of the coming decade, and most of us have no idea that it is on our very own doorstep.

Imagine living without clean air. For the people who lived on the doorstep of Monkton Coke Works, their daily reality was a horrendous nightmare of hazardous and acrid sulfur dioxide emissions, all-pervading soot, and clamorous tannoys. Over decades, the facility grew unflaggingly, converting ever-increasing quantities of coal into coke without concern for the residents’ well-being.