Conservation Science

An award-winning historian tells the story of hunting in America, showing how this sport has shaped our national identity. From Daniel Boone to Teddy Roosevelt, hunting is one of America's most sacred - but also most fraught - traditions. It was promoted in the 19th century as a way to reconnect "soft" urban Americans with nature and to the legacy of the country's pathfinding heroes. Fair chase, a hunting code of ethics emphasizing fairness, rugged independence, and restraint towards wildlife, emerged as a worldview and gave birth to the conservation movement.

Five Times Faster is an inside story from Simon Sharpe, who has spent ten years at the forefront of climate change policy and diplomacy. In our fight to avoid dangerous climate change, science is pulling its punches, diplomacy is picking the wrong battles, and economics has been fighting for the other side. This provocative and engaging book sets out how we should rethink our strategies and reorganize our efforts in the fields of science, economics, and diplomacy, so that we can act fast enough to stay safe.

What do you do when your world ends? At 28 years old, Krista Schlyer sold almost everything she owned and packed the rest of it in a station wagon bound for the American wild. Her two best friends joined her - one a grumpy, grieving introvert, the other a feisty dog - and together they sought out every national park, historic site, forest, and wilderness they could get to before their money ran out or their minds gave in.

When all the species of birds, trees, mammals, reptiles, amphibians, fishes, wildflowers, dragonflies, tiger beetles, and ants are tallied, Alabama harbors more species than ninety percent of the other states in the US. The state's 4,533 species, with more being inventoried and discovered each year, are supported by no less than sixty-four distinct ecological systems—each a unique blend of soil, water, sunlight, heat, and natural disturbance regimes. Although Alabama is teeming with life, the state's prominence as a refuge for plants and animals is poorly appreciated.

In a triumph of marketing, the Tasmanian salmon industry has for decades succeeded in presenting itself as world's best practice and its product as healthy and clean, grown in environmentally pristine conditions. But what are we eating when we eat Tasmanian salmon? Richard Flanagan's expose of the salmon farming industry in Tasmania is chilling. In the way that Rachel Carson took on the pesticide industry in her groundbreaking book Silent Spring, Flanagan tears open an industry that is as secretive as its practices are destructive and its product disturbing.

They Called Us River Rats: The Last Batture Settlement of New Orleans is the previously untold story of perhaps the oldest outsider settlement in America, an invisible community on the annually flooded shores of the Mississippi River. This community exists in the place between the normal high and low water line of the Mississippi River, a zone known in Louisiana as the batture. Until now, the stories of this way of life have existed only in the memories of those who have lived here.

As climate change and development pressures overwhelm the environment, our emotional relationships with Earth are also in crisis. Pessimism and distress are overwhelming people the world over. In this maelstrom of emotion, solastalgia, the homesickness you have when you are still at home, has become, writes Glenn A. Albrecht, one of the defining emotions of the 21st century.

In this book, Adams’ self-proclaimed favourite of his own works, the pair encounter animals in imminent peril: the giant Komodo dragon of Indonesia, the lovable kakapo of New Zealand, the blind river dolphins of China, the white rhinos of Zaire, the rare birds of Mauritius island in the Indian Ocean and the alien-like aye-aye of Madagascar. Inimitably witty and poignant, Last Chance to See is both a celebration of our most extraordinary creatures and a warning about what we have to lose if we do not act soon.

It seems like an impossible task: secure a safe future for life on Earth, at a scale and speed that the world has never seen, in the face of vast and powerful forces-not just oil tycoons and governments, but the changing climate system itself. The odds are against us, and we are running out of time. But it doesn't have to be this way. Around the world, geophysicists and mathematicians, oceanographers and meteorologists, engineers, economists, psychologists and philosophers have been using their expertise to develop a deep understanding of the crises we face.

A life in the wild! Jane Goodall, born in London, England, always loved animals and wanted to study them in their natural habitats. So at age 26, off she went to Africa! Goodall's up-close observations of chimpanzees changed what we know about them and paved the way for many female scientists who came after her. Now her story comes to life in this biography.

Before reality TV, GPS devices, and dashboard computers, there was a coming of age for the Maine Warden Service. It was a time when a compass, map, and one's wits were what mattered most in the field. Every day offered the potential for an exciting new adventure, many of which endangered the wardens' lives. Open Season includes 20 stories from two former colonels, two lieutenants, two sergeants, four district wardens, a warden pilot, and one currently active-duty corporal. Altogether, their cumulative experiences account for more than 300 years of North Woods law.

In an easy conversational style, The Restless Northwest provides a brief overview of the remarkable geological processes that have shaped the Pacific Northwest. The narrative is also sprinkled with firsthand accounts of the people involved in recent exciting, scientific discoveries. Williams enlivens this story of long-ago geologic events, with a variety of fascinating asides, on everything from enormous undersea tubeworms, to the Willamette meteorite.

When we talk about racism, we often mean personal prejudice or institutional biases. Climate change doesn’t work that way. It is structurally racist, disproportionately caused by majority white people in majority white countries, with the damage unleashed overwhelmingly on people of colour. The climate crisis reflects and reinforces racial injustices. Author and environmental activist Jeremy Williams takes us on a short, urgent journey across the globe - from Kenya to India, the USA to Australia - to understand how white privilege and climate change overlap.

Forced to accept that intensive farming on the heavy clay of their land at Knepp was economically unsustainable, Isabella Tree and her husband, Charlie Burrell, made a spectacular leap of faith: they decided to step back and let nature take over. Thanks to the introduction of free-roaming cattle, ponies, pigs and deer - proxies of the large animals that once roamed Britain - the 3,500 acre project has seen extraordinary increases in wildlife numbers and diversity in little over a decade.

On a winter night in 1997, a British Columbia timber scout named Grant Hadwin committed an act of shocking violence in the mythic Queen Charlotte Islands. His victim was legendary: a unique 300-year-old Sitka spruce tree, fifty metres tall and covered with luminous golden needles.

From an award-winning adventure and science journalist comes an eye-opening exploration of a burgeoning environmental phenomenon and the science coalescing around it. Leslie Anthony leads listeners on adventures physical and philosophical as he explores how and why invasive species are hijacking ecosystems around the globe.

Perfect for Ages 6-9: A Delightful Children's Educational Adventure Story Join Imani, Tommy, and Maya on a magical day of discovery and learning! In this charming installment of the beloved "What Shall We Do Today?" series, three curious friends embark on an exciting adventure that celebrates Great Poetry Reading Day, National Blueberry Pie Day, and Save the Frogs Day all at once! A Perfect Read for Elementary School Children Follow along as: Seven-year-old Imani, with her curious nature and bouncy curls, leads the way Gap-toothed eight-year-old Tommy asks his famous question: "What shall ...

Survival of the Beautiful is a revolutionary new examination of the interplay of beauty, art, and culture in evolution. Taking inspiration from Darwin's observation that animals have a natural aesthetic sense, philosopher and musician David Rothenberg probes why animals, humans included, have innate appreciation for beauty - and why nature is, indeed, beautiful.

The second volume of William T. Vollmann's epic book about the factors and human actions that have led to global warming begins in the coal fields of West Virginia and Eastern Kentucky. Over the course of four years, Vollmann finds hollowed out towns with coal-polluted streams and acidified drinking water; makes covert visits to mountaintop removal mines; and offers documented accounts of unpaid fines for federal health and safety violations and of miners who died because their bosses cut corners to make more money.

William Henry Hudson (1841-1922) was an author, naturalist, and ornithologist. Born in Argentina, he spent his youth studying the local fauna and flora and observing the natural and human dramas on what was then a lawless frontier. Far Away and Long Ago is a record of the years 1840-50 on the Pampas. The abundant wildlife was easily observed and the author became a naturalist with a great talent for description. Hudson observed the birds, beasts and plants: the cowbird - the red willow, the armadillo, and the opossum - where adventurous Gauchos herded cattle.