Nature Biography

How can you truly belong to a place? What does being at home mean in a society that has always celebrated the search for greener pastures? And can a newcomer ever acquire the deep understanding of the land that comes from being part of a culture that has lived there for centuries? When Daniel Coleman came to Hamilton to take a position at McMaster University, he began to ask himself these kinds of questions, and Yardwork: A Biography of an Urban Place is his answer.

Catherine Munro transforms her life when she moves to Shetland to study the hardy ponies who call this archipelago home. Over the course of her first year, she is welcomed into the rhythms and routines that characterise life at the edge of the world. When faced with personal loss, Catherine finds comfort and connection in the shared lives of the people, animals and wild landscapes of Shetland.

Sloths spend most of their lives in trees, and until recently, scientists didn’t know very much about them. But Dr. Rebecca Cliffe was determined to discover their secrets. To find out more, she fitted sloths with special backpacks containing a device to track their activity. She learned how to climb trees in the Costa Rican jungle so she could take sloth hair samples and test their DNA. And she’s helped create sloth crossings and plant trees to ensure the sloths aren’t trapped in shrinking territories. Along the way, she earned the nickname Dr. Sloth.

Tony Howard rose to fame in 1965 as a member of a group of young climbers from northern England who made the first British ascent of Norway's Troll Wall. Tony went on to design the modern sit harness, now used universally by every climber in the world. Tony has dedicated his life to travelling the world in search of never before climbed rock faces and remote trekking adventures. The scale of his travels is vast. Quest into the Unknown, the last word in adventure travel, is the jaw-dropping account of a life of adventure that is the very definition of true exploration.

Structured Chaos is Victor Saunders’ follow-up to Elusive Summits (winner of the Boardman Tasker Prize in 1990), No Place to Fall and Himalaya: The Tribulations of Vic & Mick. He reflects on his early childhood in Malaya and his first experiences of climbing as a student, and describes his progression from scaling canal-side walls in Camden to expeditions in the Himalaya and Karakoram.

Without a map, navigate by the stars. Susan Tweit began learning this lesson as a young woman diagnosed with an autoimmune disease that was predicted to take her life in two to five years. Offered no clear direction for getting well through conventional medicine, Tweit turned to the natural world that was both her solace and her field of study as a plant ecologist.

Kurtyka: The Art of Freedom won the Banff Mountain Book Competition and National Outdoor Book Awards in 2017. It's the first biography of Wojciech Kurtyka - a famous Himalayan mountaineer and laureate of the Piolet d'Or for the sum of his climbing accomplishments. His ascent of Gasherbrum IV's Shining Wall was considered one of the most important achievements of mountaineering in the 20th century. This book will appeal to both climbing aficionados and all of the listeners who are dreaming about mountain landscape and longing to touch the sky.

How can we begin to talk about what is happening to the world? We are facing a global emergency. Temperatures are rising. Mass species extinction has begun. The time for denial is over. It is time to act. Letters to the Earth is the beginning of a new story. It is an invitation to act and an opportunity to extend the invitation. These letters are the result of a callout from Culture Declares Emergency to the public to write a response to climate and ecological emergency.

En 1845, Henry David Thoreau part vivre dans une cabane construite de ses propres mains, au bord de l'étang de Walden, dans le Massachusetts. Là, au fond des bois, il mène pendant deux ans une vie frugale et autarcique, qui lui laisse tout le loisir de méditer sur le sens de l'existence, la société et le rapport des êtres humains à la Nature. Une réflexion sereine qui montre qu'il faut s'abstraire du monde et de ses désirs pour devenir réellement soi-même.

After escaping war-torn France, where 18 members of her family were murdered in the Holocaust, Gisèle Huff arrived in the US with her mother. It was 1947, and they had $400 to their name. Gisèle quickly found her footing in America, eventually earning a PhD at Columbia University, running for Congress, and launching a spectacular career in K–12 education.

Ocean Country is an adventure story, a call to action, and a poetic meditation on the state of the seas. But most importantly it is the story of finding true hope in the midst of one of the greatest crises to face humankind: the rapidly degrading state of our environment. After a near-drowning accident in which she was temporarily paralyzed, Liz Cunningham crisscrosses the globe in an effort to understand the threats to our dazzling but endangered oceans.

Leo Houlding started climbing at 10 years of age in the Lake District and was the youngest person (and first Briton) to free climb El Capitan in Yosemite National Park in the United States at 18 years, which cemented his reputation. He has since gone on to summit the world's toughest peaks and explore the most extreme places on our planet.

A deeply moving story of the beauty and brutality of life, and death, on the world's most unpredictable and perilous mountain. Sitting just lower than Everest at 8,611 meters above sea level on the China-Pakistan border, the Savage Mountain claims the lives of even the most experienced climbers. Alongside severe altitude, the weather is notoriously volatile and the climb relentlessly steep. A staggering one in four attempts result in death on the mountain.

Julene Bair has inherited part of a farming empire and fallen in love with a rancher from Kansas' beautiful Smoky Valley. She means to create a family, provide her son with the father he longs for, and preserve the Bair farm for the next generation, honoring her own father's wish and commandment, "Hang on to your land!" But part of her legacy is a share of the ecological harm the Bair farm has done: each growing season her family - like other irrigators - pumps over two hundred million gallons out of the Ogallala aquifer.

The Cairngorm mountains in Scotland are a magnet for climbers and walkers. John Allen spent more than thirty years in the Cairngorm Mountain Rescue Team saving the lost and injured. This special anniversary edition of his story includes new chapters discussing how mountain rescue has developed over the last decade.

Pocket Change Collective is a series of small books with big ideas from today's leading activists and artists. In this installment, Earth Guardians Youth Director and hip-hop artist Xiuhtezcatl Martinez shows us how his music feeds his environmental activism and vice versa. Martinez visualizes a future that allows us to direct our anger, fear, and passion toward creating change. Because, at the end of the day, we all have a part to play.

When Helen Lehndorf moves to the city after a childhood living off the land in rural Taranaki, she can't help but feel different from her peers and professors. She finds solace in long walks foraging weeds and plants along the river, but something inside her still longs for home. Chasing a feeling of ancestral belonging, she travels to England with her new husband. There they learn about nature as the commons, shared between all who encounter it - a source of delight, food, medicine.

Michael Branch “earned his whiskers” in the Great Basin Desert of northwestern Nevada, where he lives off the grid with his wife and two curious little girls. Shifting between pastoral passages on beauty found in the desert and humorous tales of being a father, Raising Wild offers an intimate portrait of a landscape where mountain lions and ground squirrels can threaten in equal measure. With Branch’s distinct lyricism and wit, this barren landscape becomes a place resonant with the rattle of snakes, the plod of pronghorn antelope, and the rustle of juniper trees.

For over a decade, Ben Garrod has studied chimpanzees to find ways to protect and conserve them. We join Ben on a journey that has taken him around the world, studying eastern chimps in the humid forests of Uganda and the critically endangered western chimps of Liberia. In his trademark infectious, lighthearted style, Ben describes encounters with chimpanzees that highlight the different threats they face.

A stirring look at nonviolent activism, from American suffragists to civil rights to the climate change movement. We Are Power brings to light the incredible individuals who have used nonviolent activism to change the world.