Showing titles in Nature & Ecology

A groundbreaking study that radically alters our understanding of the Americas before the arrival of the Europeans in 1492. Traditionally, Americans learned in school that the ancestors of the people who inhabited the Western Hemisphere at the time of Columbus’s landing had crossed the Bering...

The experience of being in nature alone is here set within the context of a series of walks that Neil Ansell takes into the most remote parts of Britain, the rough bounds in the Scottish Highlands. He illustrates the impact of being alone as part of nature rather than outside it. As a counterpoint, Neil Ansell also writes of the changes in the landscape and how his hearing loss affects his relationship with nature as the calls of the birds he knows so well become silent to him.

Brought to you by Penguin. Shortlisted for the Best Nonfiction Audiobook at the New York Festival Radio Awards 2020. A SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER WINNER OF THE WAINWRIGHT PRIZE 2019 WINNER OF THE STANFORD DOLMAN TRAVEL BOOK OF THE YEAR AWARD 2020 'You'd be crazy not to read this book' The Sunday...

A thoughtful, illuminating rumination on the life lessons we can take from those who work the land and the millennia of wisdom they draw upon when they go about their day, 'making a living by turning light and time into money'. As with his previous bestsellers, John Connell skilfully synthesises...

An awe-inspiring exploration of how symbiosis can change the way we understand our world, ourselves and our future From evolution to capitalism, ‘survival of the fittest’ has shaped our view of the world. But we got it wrong – and our mistake has brought us to the brink. For the history of...

At the southernmost tip of South Africa, where fresh and salt water collide, a tiny seahorse appears to levitate. Seahorses are the ocean’s slowest swimmers, but they have one of the world’s fastest muscle contractions, using it to suction up their prey. In this episode, we meander through eelgrass with a male Knysna seahorse as he twines tails with his partner, changes color to match the sand, and even gives birth to a brood of tiny seahorses.

After years of unexplained health problems, Polly Atkin's perception of her body was rendered fluid and disjointed. When she was finally diagnosed with two chronic conditions in her thirties, she began to piece together what had been happening to her - all the misdiagnoses, the fractures, the dislocations, the bone-crushing exhaustion, the not being believed. Some of Us Just Fall combines memoir, pathography and nature writing to trace a fascinating journey through illness, a journey which led Polly to her current home in the Lake District.

August 1897: the Belgica set sail, eager to become the first scientific expedition to reach the white wilderness of the South Pole. But the ship soon became stuck fast in the ice of the Bellinghausen sea, condemning the ship's crew to overwintering in Antarctica and months of endless polar night. In the darkness, plagued by a mysterious illness, their minds ravaged by the sound of dozens of rats teeming in the hold, they descended into madness.

Visiting Iceland as an anthropologist and film-maker in 2008, Sarah Thomas is spellbound by its otherworldly landscape. An immediate love for this country and for Bjarni, a man she meets there, turns a week-long stay into a transformative half-decade, one which radically alters Sarah's understanding of herself and of the living world. She embarks on a relationship not only with Bjarni, but with the light, the language and the old wooden house they make their home.

Read by the author, Brian Blessed Recorded with all of Brian’s ebullience, The Panther in My Kitchen is a laugh-out-loud, life-affirming audiobook about the joy animals bring and why we should care for them. Brian Blessed has a lifelong love of animals and over the years has rescued cats and...

Our most powerful tool to reverse the global epidemic of chronic disease, heal the environment, reform politics, and revive economies is food. What we eat has tremendous implications not just for our waistlines, but also for the planet, society, and the global economy. What we do to our bodies...

The secretive Mysteries conducted at Eleusis in Greece for nearly two millennia have long puzzled scholars with strange accounts of initiates experiencing otherworldly journeys. In this groundbreaking work, three experts - a mycologist, a chemist, and a historian - argue persuasively that the sacred potion given to participants in the course of the ritual contained a psychoactive entheogen. The authors then expand the discussion to show that natural psychedelic agents have been used in spiritual rituals across history and cultures.

Most historians study the smallest slivers of time, emphasizing specific dates, individuals, and documents. But what would it look like to study the whole of history, from the big bang through the present day - and even into the remote future? How would looking at the full span of time change the way we perceive the universe, the earth, and our very existence? These were the questions David Christian set out to answer when he created the field of "Big History", the most exciting new approach to understanding where we have been, where we are, and where we are going.

The richness of the Irish language is closely tied to the natural landscape and offers a more magical way of seeing the world. Most people associate Britain and Ireland with the English language, a vast, sprawling linguistic tree with roots in Latin, French, and German. But the inhabitants of these islands originally spoke another tongue. Look closely enough and English contains traces of the Celtic soil from which it sprung, found in words like bog, loch, cairn, and crag. Today, this heritage can be found nowhere more powerfully than in modern-day Gaelic.

In this indispensable follow up to his acclaimed The End of the Line: How Overfishing Is Changing the World, Charles Clover chronicles how determined individuals are proving that the crisis in our oceans can be reversed, with benefits for both local communities and entire ecosystems. Rewilding the Sea celebrates what happens when we step aside and let nature repair the damage: whether it is the overfishing of bluefin tuna across the Atlantic, the destruction of coral gardens by dredgers in Lyme Bay or the restoration of oysters on the East Coast of America.

Brought to you by Penguin. Animals don't exist to teach us things, but that is what they have always done, and most of what they teach us is what we think we know about ourselves. From the internationally acclaimed author of H is for Hawk comes Vesper Flights, a transcendent collection of essays...

Nick Bullock is a climber who lives in a small, green van, flitting between Llanberis, Wales, and Chamonix in the French Alps. Tides, Nick’s second work, is the much-anticipated follow-up to his critically acclaimed debut, Echoes. Tides is a gripping memoir that captures the very essence of what it means to dedicate one’s life to climbing.

SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2022 SPORTS BOOK AWARDS Veteran climber Mark Synnott never planned on climbing Mount Everest, but a hundred-year mystery lured him into an expedition--and an awesome history of passionate adventure, chilling tragedy, and human aspiration unfolded. On June 8, 1924, George...

Kids love the ocean - it’s mysterious and unknown, home to monsters of the imagination and some of the most fascinating life forms on the planet. But while many grown-ups might love being by or on the sea, how much do we actually know about the world beneath the waves? In this follow-up to A Grown-Up Guide to Dinosaurs, evolutionary biologist, Professor Ben Garrod, takes the listener on an oceanic journey from the beginning of life on Earth to the present day, discovering what the ocean actually is and why it’s so important in the evolutionary history of life.

Collected together for the very first time, this is the complete Series 1 and 2 of Life Stories, written and presented by Sir David Attenborough. One of the nation's most popular presenters, Sir David examines 40 marvels of the natural world from his extraordinary and pioneering experiences...