Science Ecology

Noted transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau spent two years, two months, and two days chronicling his near-isolation in the small cabin he built in the woods near Walden Pond on land owned by his mentor, the father of Transcendentalism, Ralph Waldo Emerson. Immersing himself in nature and solitude, Thoreau sought to develop a greater understanding of society amidst a life of self-reliance and simplicity. Originally published in 1854, Walden remains one of the most celebrated works in American literature.

In this paradigm-shattering book, biologist Mark W. Moffett draws on findings in psychology, sociology, and anthropology to explain the social adaptations that bind societies. He explores how the tension between identity and anonymity defines how societies develop, function, and fail. Surpassing Guns, Germs, and Steel and Sapiens, The Human Swarm reveals how mankind created sprawling civilizations of unrivaled complexity - and what it will take to sustain them.

One of the inspirations for the major motion picture Everest, starring Jake Gyllenhaal and Keira Knightley. This is the true story of a 24-hour period on Everest when members of three separate expeditions were caught in a storm and faced a battle against hurricane-force winds, exposure, and the effects of altitude, which ended the worst single-season death toll in the peak's history.

When Emory University neuroscientist Gregory Berns and his wife decided to venture into sustainable farming in rural Georgia, they knew that cows were a key part of a successful operation. But that was where his knowledge of cattle ended. As Berns and his small herd of three miniature zebus acclimated to each other and Berns received a crash course in being a cattleman, he turned his powers of scientific observation and innovation on his new charges. Cowpuppy offers a deeper understanding of these complex creatures and what we humans can learn from them.

David Christian is renowned for pioneering the emerging discipline of Big History, which surveys the whole of the past. With Future Stories, he casts his sharp analytical eye forward, offering an introduction to the strange world of the future, and a guide to what we think we know about it at all scales, from the individual to the cosmological. Christian consults theologians, philosophers, scientists, statisticians, and scholars as he explores how we prepare for uncertain futures, including the future of human evolution, artificial intelligence, interstellar travel, and more.

Most of us give little thought to the hidden systems that bring us water and take it away when we’re done. But these underappreciated marvels of engineering face an array of challenges that cannot be solved without a fundamental change to our relationship with water.

Born in Boston, Stephen Bodio wandered into Magdalena, New Mexico, in the 1970s while on his way to Montana and never left. He was accompanied by Betsy Huntington, who was twenty years his senior; the couple had been inseparable from the day they met. After stumbling upon a vintage home along the highway, they settled into a country life; it was the perfect way for the two of them to make their lives together in an out-of-the-way place.

Approximately 200,000 years ago, as modern humans began to radiate out from their evolutionary birthplace in Africa, Neanderthals were already thriving in Europe - descendants of a much earlier migration of the African genus Homo. But when modern humans eventually made their way to Europe 45,000 years ago, Neanderthals suddenly vanished.

Modern science has brought us produce in perpetual abundance - once-rare fruits are seemingly never out of season, and we breed and clone the hardiest, best-tasting varieties of the crops we rely on most. As a result, a smaller proportion of people on earth go hungry today than at any other moment in the last thousand years, and the streamlining of our food supply guarantees that the food we buy, from bananas to coffee to wheat, tastes the same every single time.

Emily Dickinson and Charles Darwin were born at a time when the science of studying the natural world was known as natural philosophy, a pastime for poets, priests, and schoolgirls. The world began to change in the 1830s, while Darwin was exploring the Pacific aboard the Beagle and Dickinson was a student in Amherst, Massachusetts. Poetry and science started to grow apart, and modern thinkers challenged the old orthodoxies, offering thrilling new perspectives that suddenly felt radical—and too dangerous for women.

In 2005, the United States imported 12 billion dollars' worth of seafood, nearly double what we had imported 10 years earlier. During that same period, our seafood exports rose by a third. In American Catch, our foremost fish expert Paul Greenberg looks to New York oysters, gulf shrimp, and Alaskan salmon to reveal how it came to be that 91 percent of the seafood Americans eat is foreign.

If you live on a rapidly changing planet, you'd be wise to learn how it works. The giant old forests on a skinny stretch of land on the far west coast of North America have a lot to say about living in a twitchy world.

Where does hunting fit in the modern world? To many, it can seem outdated or even cruel, but as On Hunting affirms, hunting is holistic, honest, and continually relevant. Authors Grossman, Miller, and Cunningham dive deep into the ancient past of hunting and examine its position today, demonstrating that we cannot understand humanity without first understanding hunting.

One of the great science and health revelations of our time is the danger posed by meat-eating. Every day, it seems, we are warned about the harm producing and consuming meat can do to the environment and our bodies. Many of us have tried to limit how much meat we consume, and many of us have tried to give it up altogether. But it is not easy to resist the smoky, cured, barbecued, and fried delights that tempt us.

Red is a brilliantly told, captivating history of red hair throughout the ages. An audiobook that breaks new ground, dispels myths, and reinforces the special nature of being a redhead, with a look at multiple disciplines, including science, religion, politics, feminism and sexuality, literature, and art. With an obsessive fascination that is as contagious as it is compelling, author Jacky Colliss Harvey (herself a redhead) begins her exploration of red hair in prehistory and traces the redhead gene as it made its way out of Africa with the early human diaspora.

This book looks at the weird and wonderful world of parasites, the most abundant form of life on Earth. Parasites come in all forms and sizes and inhabit every free-living organism. Parasitism is now, and always has been, a way to survive under changing environmental conditions. From arctic oceans to tropical forests, Scott Gardner, Judy Diamond, and Gabor Racz investigate how parasites survive and evolve, and how they influence and provide stability to ecosystems.

New York Times best-selling author Seth Siegel tells how contaminants got in our drinking water, what they’re doing to us, and what we must do to make our water safe.

Britain is defined by the dynamic, mysterious and fragile coastline that surrounds it. In this moving and beautiful account, Roger Morgan-Grenville tells the story of his marathon journey around that coast, explains some of the key challenges and opportunities he found and celebrates the people who are trying to protect and enhance it.

On June 28, 2013, a single bolt of lightning sparked an inferno that devoured more than 8,000 acres in Northern Arizona. Twenty elite firefighters - the Granite Mountain Hotshots - walked together into the blaze, tools in their hands and fire shelters on their hips. Only one of them walked out.

“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately.” And so it began. Henry David Thoreau, at 27, built a tiny, one-room cabin in the woods — on land owned by his friend, Ralph Waldo Emerson — and began his two-year experiment in frugality on the shore of Walden Pond. He wasn’t seeking isolation so much as simplicity, to “live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms.”