Brower's voice is passionate, perfectly cadenced, humorous, and very wise. And original: while most writers point to where we are, this one draws the map.?Edward O. Wilson, author, "The Diversity of Life and Naturalist"Credited with galvanizing an entire generation of environmentalists in the 60's, David Brower, the highly respected "archdruid" of the modern environmental movement, recalls with wit and wisdom his 50 years of controversial activism and offers an inspired strategy for the next generation of "those who would save the Earth."In this intelligent and engaging chronicle of his years as an agitatator for the planet, Brower points out the irony that since the first Earth Day 25 years ago, we've lost one-seventh of the world's productive land to pollution, clearcutting, and pavement-and our population has doubled! From the politics of preserving the environment and how to use New York-style PR to save tigers and dolphins, to reengineering cities, the future of hypercars, and his vision for the Earth Corps, Brower takes us on a sweeping journey of what has been and what could be if we apply CPR (Conservation, Preservation, Restoration) to our wounded world. Printed on entirely tree-free kenaf paper, "Let the Mountains Talk, Let the Rivers Run" follows its own prescription for saving the world's forests.TABLE OF CONTENTSCPR for the Earth: An InvitationPART I: OPPORTUNITIES1. Seeing and Remembering2. Climbing Mountains3. The Bristlecone Pine4. Visions of a Wild CenturyPART II: SOLUTIONS5. Havens6. Cities with Boundaries7. Eco-Preserves8. Forest Revolution9. More Monks10. HypercarsPART III: RESTORATION11. A World Restored12. Making a Difference13. The CPR Service14. What will it Cost?15. The Cure for What Ails UsPART IV: WILDNESS16. Where the Wilderness Is17. Listening to Mountains18. Rachel Carson's Pelicans19. Neat TricksPART V: SAVING THE EARTH20. The Third Planet: Operating Instructions21. Unwise Misuse22. Rule Number 6 Revisited23. Let Heaven and Nature Sing24. For Those Who Would Save the Earth

    Come with me--see what I have seen--and try to understand what global warming really means for us and for our children. Leave Washington and travel to the places I have visited..."--From the PrefaceA glacier disappears high in the Peruvian Andes. Floodwaters surge across the English countryside. Ten thousand Pacific Islanders begin to evacuate their homeland. A dust storm turns day into night across the Inner Mongolian plains. These events may seem unrelated, but they are not. Even as scientists and other experts debate the specifics, climate crisis is already affecting the lives of millions.In this ground-breaking book, Mark Lynas reveals the first evidence--collected during an epic three-year journey across five continents--about how global warming is hitting people's lives all around the world. From American hurricane chasers to Mongolian herders, from Alaskan Eskimos to South Sea islanders, Lynas's encounters and discoveries give us a stark warning about the even worse dangers that lie ahead if nothing is done.High Tide's message is urgent and its revelations are at once shocking and inspiring--shocking as so few of us yet realize the magnitude of what's happening, and inspiring as there is still time to avert much greater catastrophe. No one who reads this book will be able to look their children in the eyes and say "I didn't know."As global temperatures soar to record levels, Lynas bears witness to:- CRIPPLING DROUGHT: China's Yellow River no longer reaches the sea for half the year, and villages across the north of the country are disappearing under advancing sand dunes- BAKED ALASKA: Permafrost is melting, leaving houses, roads and whole forests sucked into the thawing ground. Winter is in retreat, leaving animals confused and Native Alaskan people without a livelihood- DISAPPEARING GLACIERS: Every glaciated mountain range on Earth is experiencing massive ice losses. Montana's Glacier National Park has lost 100 glaciers in the last century; only 50 remain. Water supplies to hundreds of millions of people--from Peru to Pakistan--are threatened- HIGH TIDES: Islanders on the tiny South Pacific nation of Tuvalu are already leaving their homeland as rising sea levels engulf their atolls. Today 70 percent of the world's sandy shorelines are retreating; up to 90 percent of the beaches on the Eastern U.S. seaboard are eroding fast- CATASTROPHIC FLOODS: English villagers now talk about a "wet season" rather than a winter. Heavier rainfall is now falling across the global mid-latitudes, from the continental U.S. to Russia, sparking devastating floods on an ever more frequent basis.

    What it will be like to live in a world where growth is over? Economist and resource analyst Jeff Rubin is certain that the world's governments are getting it wrong. Instead of moving us toward economic recovery, measures being taken around the globe right now are digging us into a deeper hole. Both politicians and economists are missing the fact that the real engine of economic growth has always been cheap, abundant fuel and resources. But that era is over. The end of cheap oil, Rubin argues, signals the end of growth--and the end of easy answers to renewing prosperity. Rubin's own equation is clear: with China and India sucking up the lion's share of the world's ever more limited resources, the rest of us will have to make do with less. But is this all bad? Can less actually be more? Rubin points out that there is no research to show that people living in countries with hard-charging economies are happier, and plenty of research to show that some of the most contented people on the planet live in places with no-growth or slow-growth GDPs. But it doesn't matter whether it's bad or good, it's the new reality: our world is not only about to get smaller, our day-to-day lives are about to be a whole lot different.

    An insect the size of a rice kernel eventually killed more than 30 billion pine and spruce trees from Alaska to New Mexico.The pine beetle didn't act alone. Misguided science, out-of-control logging, bad public policy, and a hundred years of fire suppression released the world's oldest forest manager from all natural constraints. The beetles exploded wildly in North America and then crashed, leaving in their wake grieving landowners, humbled scientists, hungry animals, and altered watersheds. Although climate change triggered this complex event, human arrogance assuredly played a role. And despite the billions of public dollars spent on control efforts, the beetles burn away like a fire that can't be put out.Author Andrew Nikiforuk draws on first-hand accounts from entomologists, botanists, foresters, and rural residents to investigate this unprecedented pine beetle plague, its startling implications, and the lessons it holds. Written in an accessible way, Empire of the Beetle is the only book on the pine beetle epidemic that is devastating the North American West.Published in partnership with the David Suzuki Foundation.

    He has a name for this moment-when both Mother Nature and Father Greed have hit the wall at once-'The Great Disruption.' -Thomas Friedman in the New York TimesIt's time to stop just worrying about climate change, says Paul Gilding. We need instead to brace for impact because global crisis is no longer avoidable. This Great Disruption started in 2008, with spiking food and oil prices and dramatic ecological changes, such as the melting ice caps. It is not simply about fossil fuels and carbon footprints. We have come to the end of Economic Growth, Version 1.0, a world economy based on consumption and waste, where we lived beyond the means of our planet's ecosystems and resources.The Great Disruption offers a stark and unflinching look at the challenge humanity faces-yet also a deeply optimistic message. The coming decades will see loss, suffering, and conflict as our planetary overdraft is paid; however, they will also bring out the best humanity can offer: compassion, innovation, resilience, and adaptability. Gilding tells us how to fight-and win-what he calls The One Degree War to prevent catastrophic warming of the earth, and how to start today.The crisis represents a rare chance to replace our addiction to growth with an ethic of sustainability, and it's already happening. It's also an unmatched business opportunity: Old industries will collapse while new companies will literally reshape our economy. In the aftermath of the Great Disruption, we will measure growth in a new way. It will mean not quantity of stuff but quality and happiness of life. Yes, there is life after shopping.

    Dickson Despommier's visionary book provides a blueprint for securing the world's food supply and at the same time solving one of the gravest environmental crises facing us today."--StingImagine a world where every town has their own local food source, grown in the safest way possible, where no drop of water or particle of light is wasted, and where a simple elevator ride can transport you to nature's grocery store - imagine the world of the vertical farm.When Columbia professor Dickson Despommier set out to solve America's food, water, and energy crises, he didn't just think big - he thought up. Despommier's stroke of genius, the vertical farm, has excited scientists, architects, and politicians around the globe. Now, in this groundbreaking book, Despommier explains how the vertical farm will have an incredible impact on changing the face of this planet for future generations.Despommier takes readers on an incredible journey inside the vertical farm, buildings filled with fruits and vegetables that will provide local food sources for entire cities.Vertical farms will allow us to:- Grow food 24 hours a day, 365 days a year- Protect crops from unpredictable and harmful weather- Re-use water collected from the indoor environment- Provide jobs for residents- Eliminate use of pesticides, fertilizers, or herbicides- Drastically reduce dependence on fossil fuels- Prevent crop loss due to shipping or storage- Stop agricultural runoffVertical farms can be built in abandoned buildings and on deserted lots, transforming our cities into urban landscapes which will provide fresh food grown and harvested just around the corner. Possibly the most important aspect of vertical farms is that they can built by nations with little or no arable land, transforming nations which are currently unable to farm into top food producers. In the tradition of the bestselling The World Without Us, The Vertical Farm is a completely original landmark work destined to become an instant classic

    Now he broadens the warning: the entire human game, he suggests, has begun to play itself out.Bill McKibben’s groundbreaking book The End of Nature -- issued in dozens of languages and long regarded as a classic -- was the first book to alert us to global warming. But the danger is broader than that: even as climate change shrinks the space where our civilization can exist, new technologies like artificial intelligence and robotics threaten to bleach away the variety of human experience.Falter tells the story of these converging trends and of the ideological fervor that keeps us from bringing them under control. And then, drawing on McKibben’s experience in building 350.org, the first truly global citizens movement to combat climate change, it offers some possible ways out of the trap. We’re at a bleak moment in human history -- and we’ll either confront that bleakness or watch the civilization our forebears built slip away.Falter is a powerful and sobering call to arms, to save not only our planet but also our humanity.

    This is the history of how England's elite came to own our land, and an inspiring manifesto for how to open up our countryside once more. This book has been a long time coming. Since 1086, in fact. For centuries, England's elite have covered up how they got their hands on millions of acres of our land, by constructing walls, burying surveys and more recently, sheltering behind offshore shell companies. But with the dawn of digital mapping and the Freedom of Information Act, it's becoming increasingly difficult for them to hide.Trespassing through tightly-guarded country estates, ecologically ravaged grouse moors and empty Mayfair mansions, writer and activist Guy Shrubsole has used these 21st century tools to uncover a wealth of never-before-seen information about the people who own our land, to create the most comprehensive map of land ownership in England that has ever been made public.From secret military islands to tunnels deep beneath London, Shrubsole unearths truths concealed since the Domesday Book about who is really in charge of this country - at a time when Brexit is meant to be returning sovereignty to the people. Melding history, politics and polemic, he vividly demonstrates how taking control of land ownership is key to tackling everything from the housing crisis to climate change - and even halting the erosion of our very democracy.It's time to expose the truth about who owns England - and finally take back our green and pleasant land.

    In 2001 a panel representing virtually all the world's governments and climate scientists announced that they had reached a consensus: the world was warming at a rate without precedent during at least the last ten millennia, and that warming was caused by the buildup of greenhouse gases from human activity. The consensus itself was at least a century in the making. The story of how scientists reached their conclusion--by way of unexpected twists and turns and in the face of formidable intellectual, financial, and political obstacles--is told for the first time in The Discovery of Global Warming, Spencer R. Weart lucidly explains the emerging science, introduces us to the major players, and shows us how the Earth's irreducibly complicated climate system was mirrored by the global scientific community that studied it. Unlike familiar tales of Science Triumphant, this book portrays scientists working on bits and pieces of a topic so complex that they could never achieve full certainty--yet so important to human survival that provisional answers were essential. Weart unsparingly depicts the conflicts and mistakes, and how they sometimes led to fruitful results. His book reminds us that scientists do not work in isolation, but interact in crucial ways with the political system and with the general public. The book not only reveals the history of global warming, but also analyzes the nature of modern scientific work as it confronts the most difficult questions about the Earth's future.

    Utilizing the most up-to-the-minute data available, Tim Flannery offers a guided tour of the environmental challenges we face and their potential solutions in both the big picture and in specific detail. He explores everything from techniques for storing the carbon that dead plants release into the earth to the fragile balancing act between energy demands and food supply in India and China, from carbon-trading schemes in South America to a recent collaboration between a Danish wind-energy company and an automobile manufacturer that may produce a viable electric car and end the reign of big oil. Now or Never is a powerful, thought-provoking, and essential book about the most urgent issue of our time. It burns with Flannery’s characteristic mix of passion, scientific precision, and “offhand interdisciplinary brilliance” (Entertainment Weekly).

    Once-lush grasslands, the source of precious food and water, are growing dry and bare. Rivers that used to flow year-round now run dry after the rains. Grazing animals want for food. What is causing this “desertification” of the earth, and how can we stop it? In The Grazing Revolution, biologist Allan Savory presents a solution that’s as radical as it is simple: huge herds of livestock, managed to mimic the behavior of the natural herds that once roamed grasslands centuries ago. Tracing his own story of discovery, Savory debunks common misconceptions and provides a vivid chronicle of the process by which he has seen scrubby wasteland revert to robust ecosystems. Our age-old agricultural practices are contributing greatly to the global climate change underway; Savory argues that by re-imagining these practices, we can reverse desertification and save the planet.

    Today he knows that mountain land as intimately as anyone can know his home. Petersen conflates a quarter century into the adventures of four high-country seasons, tracking the rigors of survival from the snowmelt that announces the arrival of spring to the decline and death of autumn and winter that will establish the fertile ground needed for next year's rebirth. In the past we listened to Henry David Thoreau or Aldo Leopold; today it is Petersen's turn. His observations are lyrical, scientific, and from the heart. He reinforces Thoreau's dictum: "in wildness is the preservation of the earth." In prose rich with mystery and soul, his words are a plea for the survival of the remnant wilderness."Many of us would like to live a life of greater intention and simplicity, but few can and even fewer do. David Petersen is one of those rare human beings among us who lives a wild life with a cultured mind . . . [He] has created a map all of us can follow."—Terry Tempest Williams, author of The Open Space of Democracy

    It soon becomes a journey of exploration. For Grady, whose forebears were slaves who came to Canada in the 1880s, this is a journey through fear, racism, and violence into his own family roots. For Simonds, who grew up a lonely Canadian in the American School of Campinas, Brazil, it is a journey into the heart of the ex-pat promised land, the nation of the American Dream. As Grady and Simonds travel back through American history, they encounter the splendours of the Mojave Desert, the Grand Canyon, the Mississippi River, and the bayous of Louisiana and the Outer Banks, and they experience the impact of geography on culture and of culture on the landscape. Although they are observing America from the outside, they also strangely feel at home. The Americans they meet illuminate a country dissolving in the grip of the Bush administration's final years and inspire them to reassess their-and our-assumptions about that powerful and complex country. Also available in paperback.

    From the closure of Arctic research stations as oil drilling begins in the High Arctic to slashed research budgets in agriculture, dramatic changes to the nation's fisheries policy, and the muzzling of government scientists, Harper's government has effectively dismantled Canada's long-standing scientific tradition.Drawing on interviews with scientists whose work has been halted by budget cuts and their colleagues in an NGO community increasingly treated as an enemy of the state, The War on Science paints a vivid and damning portrait of a government that has abandoned environmental stewardship and severed a national commitment to the objective truth of basic science as old as Canada itself.

    This is the first book to look at fracking from both economic and environmental perspectives."