Environmental Engineering

Recent years have seen out-of-control wildfires rage across remote Brazilian rainforests, densely populated California coastlines, and major cities in Australia. What connects these separate events is more than immediate devastation and human loss of life. In Global Burning, Eve Darian-Smith contends that using fire as a symbolic and literal thread connecting different places around the world allows us to better understand the parallel, and related, trends of the growth of authoritarian politics and climate crises and their interconnected global consequences.

In 2020, COVID-19, the Australia bushfires, and other global threats served as vivid reminders that human and nonhuman fates are increasingly linked. Human use of nonhuman animals contributes to pandemics, climate change, and other global threats which, in turn, contribute to biodiversity loss, ecosystem collapse, and nonhuman suffering.

Within every company, there lies a sleeping giant. Companies have long been viewed as either the primary cause of environmental destruction, or as a deep-pocketed funding source for people trying to confront it. But with their access to innovation, new technology, and intellectual firepower, most companies are built to tackle the challenges our planet faces in a way smaller organizations and foundations can’t. What would happen if executives stopped looking at sustainability as a side project for the PR team and saw it instead as a way to benefit the planet and their profits?

Journalist Jelmer Mommers knows most people prefer not to talk or even think about climate change, and that is exactly why he wrote this book. Denial and despair are not the only possible responses to the current crisis. Drawing on the latest science, Mommers describes how we got here, what possible future awaits us, and how you can help make a difference.

Four-and-a-half billion years ago, Planet Earth was formed from a vast spinning nebula of cosmic dust, the detritus left over from the birth of the sun. Within the next 100 years, human life on swathes of the Earth's surface will end in a haze of heat, drought, and, again, dust. Dust is a legacy of 20th-century progress and a profound threat to life in the 21st century. And yet dust is something we hardly ever consider--it is so small and so mundane as to be beyond the threshold of thought. Jay Owen's Dust sparks curiosity and corrects that oversight.

As fossil fuel prices rise, oil insecurity deepens, and concerns about climate change cast a shadow over the future of coal, a new energy economy is emerging. Wind, solar, and geothermal energy are replacing oil, coal, and natural gas, at a pace and on a scale we could not have imagined even a year ago. For the first time since the Industrial Revolution, we have begun investing in energy sources that can last forever. Plan B 4.0 explores both the nature of this transition to a new energy economy and how it will affect our daily lives.

Nature on the brink? Maybe not. With so much bad news in the world, we forget how much environmental progress has been made. In a narrative that reaches from Native American tribal practices to public health and commercial hunting, Wild at Heart shows how western attitudes towards nature have changed dramatically in the last five hundred years. Humans can learn from the past, and our choices today will determine whether nature survives.

Lost in a sea of information about climate change and global warming? Let's dive in and explore the significance of this massive issue. You can't get away from it on the news, the flood of climate change information is like a barrage. How are you supposed to make sense of it all? You know about the conferences on global warming, and you are still concerned about the political actions needed to impact global warming, but struggling to understand what that change actually looks like?

Mal angenommen es war nicht früher alles besser – sondern wird es erst in der Zukunft: Wie würde die ideale Welt 2040 in Bezug auf fossile Brennstoffe, Mobilität und Ernährung aussehen? Und wäre sie auch praktisch umsetzbar? Jan Hegenberg zeigt in seinem Buch faktenbasiert, aber trotzdem mit einer ordentlichen Prise Humor, wie wir die Energiewende angehen können und wie Städte ohne Autos aussehen und funktionieren würden. Dabei seziert er genussvoll und unterhaltsam die Fehlinformationen, denen wir zu dem Thema Klimawende aufgesessen sind, und zeigt, wie gut wir 2040 klimaneutral leben können.

From the Pulitzer Prize winner and number one international best-selling author of The World Is Flat, an essential and entertaining field guide to thriving in the 21st century. We all sense it - something big is going on. You feel it in your workplace. You feel it when you talk to your children. You can't miss it when you read the newspapers or watch the news. Our lives are speeding up - and it is dizzying.

Sometimes solving climate change seems impossibly complex. This book offers hope. Drawing on the latest research, Mark Jaccard shows us how to recognize the absolutely essential actions (decarbonizing electricity and transport) and policies (regulations that phase out coal plants and gasoline vehicles, carbon tariffs). Rather than feeling paralyzed and pursuing ineffective efforts, we can all make a few key changes in our lifestyles to reduce emissions, to contribute to the urgently needed affordable energy transition in developed and developing countries.

In a world where hunger persists amid abundance and climate change threatens our very existence, Shannon Dobbs presents a groundbreaking solution to our broken food system. This isn't just another book about the problem—it's a comprehensive guide to fixing it. Dobbs, an Army veteran turned food system innovator, unveils the revolutionary Nexus and Nodes model. This scalable approach bridges the gap between food waste and food insecurity, turning challenges into opportunities for community empowerment and environmental healing.

"Our Choice gathers in one place all of the most effective solutions that are available now and that, together, will solve this crisis. It is meant to depoliticize the issue as much as possible and inspire readers to take action - not only on an individual basis but as participants in the political processes by which every country, and the world as a whole, makes the choice that now confronts us." (Al Gore, from the Introduction)

In Getting to Green, Frederic C. Rich argues that meaningful progress on urgent environmental issues can be made only on a bipartisan basis. Rich reminds us of American conservation's conservative roots and of the bipartisan political consensus that had Republican congressmen voting for, and Richard Nixon signing, the most important environmental legislation of the 1970s.

A leading ecologist argues that if humankind is to survive on a fragile planet, we must understand and obey its iron laws. Over the past century, our species has made unprecedented technological innovations with which we have sought to control nature. From river levees to enormous one-crop fields, we continue to try to reshape nature for our purposes - so much so it seems we may be in danger of destroying it.

This book is the first of its kind to examine the role of great powers in the international politics of climate change. It develops a novel analytical framework for studying environmental power in international relations, what counts as a great power in the environmental field, and what their special environmental responsibilities are. In doing so, the book connects International Relations (IR) debates on power inequality, great powers and great power management, with global environmental politics (GEP) scholarship.

Black Snake is the story of four leaders - LaDonna Allard, Jasilyn Charger, Lisa DeVille, and Kandi White - and their fight against the pipeline. It is the story of a new generation of environmental activists, galvanized at Standing Rock, becoming the protectors of America's natural resources.

The environment and its decline in health is the most important issue facing mankind today and is a subject everyone should have an understanding of, from business CEOs to the average person in society. By exploring topics such as biodiversity, ecosystem services, sustainability, and ecology, the listener will be equipped with the necessary foundational knowledge that is required before effective management strategies can be considered and implemented, either in business or at the home.

As global rates of plant and animal extinctions mount, anxieties about the future of the earth's ecosystems are fueling ever more ambitious efforts at conservation, which draw on Western scientific principles to manage species and biodiversity. In Revenant Ecologies, Audra Mitchell argues that these responses not only ignore but also magnify powerful forms of structural violence like colonialism, racism, genocide, extractivism, ableism, and heteronormativity, ultimately contributing to the destruction of unique life forms and ecosystems.

Eminent ecologist Jeremy B. C. Jackson and award-winning journalist Steve Chapple traveled the length of the Mississippi River interviewing farmers, fishermen, scientists, and policymakers to better understand the mounting environmental problems ravaging the United States. Along their journey, which quickly expanded to California, Florida, and New York, the pair uncovered surprising and profound connections between ecological systems and environmental crises across the country.