Showing titles in Ecology

Eye of the Albatross takes us soaring to locales where whales, sea turtles, penguins, and shearwaters flourish in their own quotidian rhythms. Carl Safina’s guide and inspiration is an albatross he calls Amelia, whose life and far-flung flights he describes in fascinating detail. Interwoven with recollections of whalers and famous explorers, Eye of the Albatross probes the unmistakable environmental impact of the encounters between man and marine life.

Serendipity tells the story of James Estes’s life as a naturalist and the concepts that have driven his interest in researching the ecological role of top-level predators. Using the relationships between sea otters, kelp, and sea urchins as a touchstone, Estes retraces his investigations of numerous other species, ecosystems, and ecological processes in an attempt to discover why ecologists can learn so many details about the systems in which they work and yet understand so little about the broader processes that influence these systems.

Un diptyque essentiel pour comprendre le monde d'aujourd'hui et de demain. "Dans Où atterrir ?" Comment s'orienter en politique, l'hypothèse est qu'on ne comprend rien aux positions politiques si l'on ne donne pas une place centrale à la question du climat et à sa dénégation. Tout se passe comme si une partie importante des classes dirigeantes était arrivée à la conclusion qu'il n'y aurait plus assez de place sur terre pour elles et pour le reste de ses habitants.

What will it take for us to preserve what remains of life on the planet? Is humanity itself at risk? These are the overarching questions Said Dawlabani asks in this book’s comprehensive development model.

Nature is rife with cheating. Possums play possum, feigning death to cheat predators. Crows cry wolf to scare off rivals. Amphibians and reptiles are inveterate impostors. Even genes and cells cheat. The Liars of Nature and the Nature of Liars explores the evolution of cheating in the natural world, revealing how dishonesty has given rise to wondrous diversity.

A collection of probing essays and weekly meditations, this book addresses how to prepare emotionally and spiritually for the impending collapse of industrial civilization. Author Carolyn Baker offers wisdom, inspiration, and a sense of spiritual purpose for anyone who is concerned about the...

John Muir was an early proponent of a view we still hold today—that much of California was pristine, untouched wilderness before the arrival of Europeans. But as this book demonstrates, what Muir was really seeing when he admired the grand vistas of Yosemite and the gold and purple flowers carpeting the Central Valley were the fertile gardens of the Sierra Miwok and Valley Yokuts Indians, modified and made productive by centuries of harvesting, tilling, sowing, pruning, and burning.

Aussi incroyable que cela paraisse, les plantes sont capables d'éprouver toute la gamme des émotions. Et comme on l'a récemment démontré, elles savent aussi, par les moyens les plus extraordinaires comme les plus simples, transmettre ce qu'elles ressentent. La nature ne cesse de nous parler, preuves à l'appui. À nous d'arrêter d'être sourds. Elles se défendent, elles attaquent, elles nouent des alliances, elles chassent, elles rusent, elles draguent, elles communiquent à distance leurs peurs, leurs souffrances et leur joie.

Increasingly, cracks are appearing in the capacity of communities, ecosystems, and landscapes to provide the goods and services that sustain our planet's well-being. The response from most quarters has been for "more of the same" that created the situation in the first place: more control, more intensification, and greater efficiency. "Resilience thinking" offers a different way of understanding the world and a new approach to managing resources. It embraces human and natural systems as complex entities continually adapting through cycles of change.

Nos últimos anos a ciência tem comprovado que as árvores e o homem têm muito mais em comum do que poderíamos imaginar. Assim como nós, elas se comunicam, mantêm relacionamentos, formam famílias, cuidam dos doentes e dos filhos, têm memória, defendem-se de agressores e competem ferozmente com outras espécies. Em A vida secreta das árvores, o engenheiro florestal alemão Peter Wohlleben alia seus 20 anos de experiência às últimas descobertas científicas para examinar o dia a dia desses seres fantásticos.

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.

On the Alaska Peninsula, where exceptional landscapes are commonplace, a small river attracts attention far beyond its scale. Each year, from summer to early fall, brown bears and salmon gather at Brooks River to create one of North America's greatest wildlife spectacles. As the salmon leap from the cascade, dozens of bears are there to catch them, and thousands of people come to watch in person or on the National Park Service's popular Brooks Falls Bearcam. The Bears of Brooks Falls tells the story of this region and the bears that made it famous.

Read by the author, Tom Lathan. In Lost Wonders author and journalist Tom Lathan tells the powerful stories of ten species that have lived, died out and been declared extinct since the turn of the twenty-first century. Many scientists believe that we are currently living through the Earth’s...

We are in the midst of an extinction event: the sixth mass extinction on Earth and one entirely caused by mankind. All species become extinct sooner or later, but we have accelerated that natural process several hundredfold, and now, it is happening right in front of our eyes. Extinction has a terrifying finality to it. And many species have already been lost to us forever; there is little we can do about that. What we can do, however, is reflect, remember, and ultimately acknowledge the unvarnished truth.

Naturalist Joe Hutto’s latest adventures in wildlife observation take him to Wyoming’s Wind River Mountains. Hutto is living in a tent at 12,000 feet, where blizzards occur in July and where human wants become irrelevant—and human needs can become a matter of life and death—to study the Rocky Mountain bighorn sheep.

One bright day in December 2001, sixty-two-year-old Germaine Greer found herself confronted by an irresistible challenge in the shape of sixty hectares of dairy farm, one of many in southeast Queensland, Australia, which, after a century of logging, clearing, and downright devastation, had been abandoned to their fate. She didn’t think for a minute that by restoring the land she was saving the world. She was in search of heart’s ease.

Despite efforts to sustain civilization, humanity faces existential threats from overpopulation, globalized trade and travel, urbanization, and global climate change. In A Darwinian Survival Guide, Daniel Brooks and Salvatore Agosta offer a novel—and hopeful—perspective on how to meet these tremendous challenges by changing the discourse from sustainability to survival. Darwinian evolution, the world’s only theory of survival, is the means by which the biosphere has persisted and renewed itself following past environmental perturbations, and it has never failed, they explain.

Many people will remember that Rachel Carson predicted a silent spring, but she also warned of a fruitless fall, a time with no pollination and no fruit. The fruitless fall nearly became a reality when, in 2007, beekeepers watched 30 billion bees mysteriously die. And they continue to disappear. The remaining pollinators, essential to the cultivation of a third of American crops, are now trucked across the country and flown around the world, pushing them ever closer to collapse.

Reveals how we can each reconnect to collective intelligence and return our world to wholeness, balance, and sanity Explains how collective intelligence manifests in flocks of birds, instantaneous knowing in indigenous peoples, and the power of sacred places Offers ways for us to...

There are more crows now than ever. Their abundance is both an indicator of ecological imbalance and a generous opportunity to connect with the animal world. Crow Planet reminds us that we do not need to head to faraway places to encounter "nature." Rather, even in the suburbs and cities where...