Since the dawn of human history, birds have stirred our imagination, inspiring and challenging our ideas about science, faith, art, and philosophy. We have worshipped birds as gods, hunted them for sustenance, adorned ourselves with their feathers, studied their wings to engineer flight, and, more recently, attempted to protect them. In Birds and Us, award-winning writer and ornithologist Tim Birkhead takes us on a dazzling epic journey through our...

"A squirrel in the garden. A rat in the wall. A pigeon on the street. Humans have spent so much of our history drawing a hard line between human spaces and wild places. When animals pop up where we don't expect or want them, we respond with fear, rage, or simple annoyance. It's no longer an animal. It's a pest. At the intersection of science, history, and narrative journalism, Pests is not a simple call to look closer at our urban ecosystem. It's...

"Roads and highways connect small towns, major cities, and even entire countries to each other. In early history, roads used to be paths made by animals and then were adapted to suit human needs. Today, our roads and highways are paved with asphalt and concrete, among other building materials such as gravel and sand. Creating roads and highways requires swaths of land to be cleared and leveled, and may even require sections of mountains to be taken...

Honeybees have been mysteriously disappearing across the planet, literally vanishing from their hives. Filmed across the U.S., in Europe, Australia, and Asia, examine the alarming disappearance of honeybees and the greater meaning it holds about the relationship between mankind and Mother Earth. As scientists puzzle over the cause, organic beekeepers indicate alternative reasons for this tragic loss.

A newly-emerged peppered moth blends in with other speckled-winged moths on lichen-covered branches, but over time the moths with black wings increase as trees are blackened by soot from man-made machines.

The author surveys the traces we will leave for peoples in the very distant future. He shows that modern civilization has created objects and landscapes with the potential to endure through deep time, including the plastic polluting the oceans, the nuclear waste entombed within the earth, and the thirty million miles of paved roads spanning the planet. This is his medition on climate change and the Anthropocene, and an urgent search for fossils--industrial,...

"...[offers] a hopeful, clear-eyed, and somehow also hilarious guide to effecting real change, starting in our own lives. Saving ourselves from climate apocalypse will require radical shifts within each of us, to effect real change in our society and culture."--

McKibben's earliest warnings about global warming went largely unheeded. In this book, he argues that we can meet the challenges of a new "Eaarth"--still recognizable but suddenly and violently out of balance--by building the kind of societies and economies that can hunker down, concentrate on essentials, and create the type of community that will allow us to weather trouble on an unprecedented scale.

The hydrosphere encompasses all water on Earth from glaciers and ice to rivers and oceans. People use water every day. This title asks the question, how much do you use? Readers will learn how humans use water, how humans positively and negatively affect water, and how to protect the water supply.

Guide to living a truly responsible life on earth. Human waste, once considered a gift to the soil, has become toxic material that has broken the essential cycle of decay and regeneration. Here, writer Derrick Jensen and activist Aric McBay weave historical analysis and beautiful prose to remind us that life--human and nonhuman--will not go on unless we do everything we can to facilitate the most basic process on earth, the root of sustainability:...