Showing titles in Environmentalists & Naturalists

After years of prosecuting hard-core criminals, rising legal star Alan Bell took a private sector job in South Florida's newest skyscraper. Suddenly, he suffered such bizarre medical symptoms, doctors suspected he'd been poisoned by the Mafia. Bell's rapidly declining health forced him to flee his glamorous Miami life to a sterile "bubble" in the remote Arizona desert.

This book tells the story of one exceptional great tit that Len called Star. With patience, consistency and sensitivity, Len succeeds in teaching this little bird to count using taps. Star's character and intelligence is revealed in this intimate bird biography, unlike any told before. In opening her home to wild birds, Len gains their trust enough to make astonishing discoveries about their capabilities.

Across the planet, the futures of young people hang in the balance as they face the harsh realities of the environmental crisis. This urgent book chronicles the lives of the diverse young people on the frontlines of the environmental crisis around the world, amplifying the stories of those living at the heart of the crisis. Advocating for the protection of both people and the planet, Bella restores the beating heart to global environmental issues, from air pollution, to deforestation and overconsumption by telling the stories of those most directly affected.

Through the Pacific Northwest forests and along the rugged coastal shores of California, Dawn Again: Tracking the Wisdom of the Wild is a memoir of exploration and survival from a stunning new voice.

Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, home to only a handful of people, is a harsh and lonely place. So when James Campbell's cousin Heimo Korth asked him to spend a summer building a cabin in the rugged Interior, Campbell hesitated about inviting his 15-year-old daughter, Aidan, to join him. Would she be able to withstand clouds of mosquitoes, the threat of grizzlies, bathing in an ice-cold river, and hours of grueling labor peeling and hauling logs? But once there, Aidan embraced the wild.

Native woodland is one of the most valuable resources for biodiversity in Ireland’s wet climate. Yet Ireland has the lowest forest cover of any part of Europe, with the surviving native woodland covering a tiny area of the country. Ireland lost the majority of its ancient forest centuries ago, but now is when we need it most to help solve the climate crisis. This audiobook is a celebration of Ireland’s native woodlands blended with a personal account of learning to manage a single small wood over a typical year.

In 1987, Robert Harris happened upon an unusual job advert in The Kerryman - a new warden service was being set up on Skellig Michael, and the deadline was imminent. Just weeks later, he was on his way to set up camp in one of Ireland’s most remote locations, unaware that he would be making that same journey every May for the next 30 years. Here he transports us to the otherworldly island, a place that is teeming with natural life, including curious puffins that like to visit his hut.

On her 120-acre homestead high in the Colorado Rockies, beloved writer Pam Houston learns what it means to care for a piece of land and the creatures on it. Elk calves and bluebirds mark the changing seasons, winter temperatures drop to 35 below, and lightning sparks a 110,000-acre wildfire, threatening her century-old barn and all its inhabitants. Through her travels from the Gulf of Mexico to Alaska, she explores what ties her to the Earth, the ranch most of all.

James Bond: author, ornithologist, marksman, and...identity-theft victim? When James Bond published his landmark book, Birds of the West Indies, he had no idea it would set in motion events that would link him to the most iconic spy in the Western world and turn his life upside down. Born into a wealthy family but cut off in his early 20s, James Bond took off to the West Indies in search of adventure.

Teralyn Pilgrim had no idea the environmental and economic impact of food waste, or that she could save $100 a month by being waste free. But when a story of hungry children fills her with unbearable guilt, she decided to make a change to the way her family approached mealtime. Despite finicky kids and a skeptical husband, Pilgrim turned her feelings of guilt into action and created a zero-food waste kitchen.

In The Sea Inside, Philip Hoare sets out to rediscover the sea, its islands, birds and beasts. He begins on the south coast where he grew up, a place of almost monastic escape. From there he travels to the other side of the world - the Azores, Sri Lanka, New Zealand - in search of encounters with animals and people. Navigating between human and natural history, he asks what these stories mean for us now.

These letters between the pioneering environmentalist and her beloved friend reveal "a vibrant, caring woman behind the scientist" (Los Angeles Times). This very special collection of letters from Rachel Carson to her Maine summer neighbor Dorothy Freeman offers an intimate, spellbinding look at Carson's private life and thoughts.

In 2015, an American hunter named Walter Palmer shot and killed a lion named Cecil. The lion was one of dozens slain each year in Zimbabwe, which legally licenses the hunting of big cats. But Cecil’s death sparked unprecedented global outrage, igniting thousands of media reports about the peculiar circumstances surrounding this hunt. At the center of the controversy was Dr. Andrew Loveridge, the zoologist who had studied Cecil for eight years. In Lion Hearted, Loveridge pieces together, for the first time, the fascinating life and murky details of this beloved lion’s slaying.

John Muir is regarded as the "father of America's national parks" and is a towering figure in the history of that country's involvement with ecology. This wonderful memoir pays tribute to a giant of ecology and is essential listening for lovers of natural history.

In a collection of gripping stories of adventure, Doug Peacock, loner, iconoclast, environmentalist, and contemporary of Edward Abbey, reflects on a life lived in the wild, asking the question many ask in their twilight years: “Was It Worth It?”

In this important and timely audiobook, scientists from a broad range of disciplines detail their personal responses to climate change and the ecological crises that led them to form Scientists for XR and work tirelessly within it. Whether their inspiration comes from education or activism, family ties or the work environment, the scientists writing here record what drives them, what non-violent direct action looks like to them, what led them to become interested in the environmental crisis that threatens us all and what they see as the future of life on Earth.

Known as the original "Snakemaster" from his various television shows, Austin Stevens is one of the most famous herpetologists in the world. From his show Austin Stevens: Snakemaster on Animal Planet to his many appearances in the media, Stevens is known as an incredibly smart, yet incredibly insane animal lover.

Pollution is the single largest cause of death in the developing world. One in seven people in low- and middle-income countries die as a result of it. Simply put, pollution is now the world's most prevalent health risk. And yet, while most everyone has heard about "going green"; few are aware of the more dire and sinister brown pollution - places where man-made toxic pollutants have taken root and spread. Brown sites poison millions of people every year, causing needless suffering and death. After witnessing several brown sites firsthand and meeting families trapped by poverty in these toxic hot spots, environmentalist Richard Fuller founded the Blacksmith Institute, now renamed Pure Earth, a global nonprofit that initiates large-scale cleanups of some of the most polluted places on earth.

Dating back to slavery, Edgefield County, South Carolina - a place "easy to pass by on the way somewhere else" - has been home to generations of Lanhams. In The Home Place, listeners meet these extraordinary people, including Drew himself, who over the course of the 1970s falls in love with the natural world around him. As his passion takes flight, however, he begins to ask what it means to be "the rare bird, the oddity".

In Origin Story, medical historian Howard Markel recounts the two-year period (1858 to 1860) of Darwin's writing of On the Origin of Species through its spectacular success and controversy. Simultaneously, Markel delves into the mysterious health symptoms Darwin developed, combing the literature to emerge with a cogent diagnosis of a case that has long fascinated medical historians.