It includes a list of important people and important terms, and overall book summary, a chapter by chapter book summary as well as a supplemental essay.

    In prehistoric caves, drummers used natural acoustics to recreate natural sound. In classical Europe, orators turned the human voice into a lyrical instrument. In Buddhist temples, the icons' ears were exaggerated to represent their spiritual power. And in modern metropolises we are battered by the roar of sound that surrounds us. In the first narrative history of the subject which puts humans at its centre, and coinciding with the author's major Radio 4 series on the same subject, acclaimed historian David Hendy describes the history of noise - which is also the history of listening. As he puts it himself: 'By thinking about sound and listening, I want to get closer to what it felt like to live in the past or be caught up in the major events of history. The book is a chance for readers to discover more of the personal and social background to those stories featured in the radio series.' This unusual book reveals fascinating changes in how we have understood our fellow human humans and the world around us. For although we might see ourselves inhabiting a visual world, our lives are shaped by our need to hear and be heard.

    But do you always recognize what you see and hear? With this book, you'll get started. Birding for the Curious is a beginner course in birding for every nature and animal lover out there. With it, you'll learn what birding is all about, what birders do and how you can become one. You'll also learn how to:- Find more birds- Identify the birds you see- Attract more birds to your yard and feedersBirding for the Curious is the perfect gift for the nature-lover in your life, or an excellent introduction to birding for you. It won't be long before you can easily recognize and name the common birds in your area. With this book, you will enjoy nature at a whole new level.

    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

    Outer Hebrides, 600 acres . . . Puffins and seals. Apply . . . ”.In this radiant and powerful book, Adam describes, and relives, his love affair with this enchantingly beautiful property, which he inherited when he was twenty-one. As the islands grew to become the most important thing in his life, they began to offer him more than escape, giving him “sea room”—a sailing term Nicolson uses to mean “the sense of enlargement that island life can give you.”The Shiants—the name means holy or enchanted islands—lie east of the Isle of Lewis in a treacherous sea once known as the “stream of blue men,” after the legendary water spirits who menaced sailors there. Crowned with five-hundred-foot cliffs of black basalt and surrounded by tidal rips, teeming in the summer with thousands of sea birds, they are wild, dangerous, and dramatic—with a long, haunting past. For millennia the Shiants were a haven for those seeking solitude—an eighth-century hermit, the twentieth-century novelist Compton Mackenzie—but their rich, sometimes violent history of human habitation includes much more. Since the Stone Age, families have dwelled on the islands and sailors have perished on their shores. The landscape is soaked in centuries-old tales of restless ghosts and ancient treasure, cradling the heritage of a once productive world of farmers and fishermen.In passionate, keenly precise prose, Nicolson evokes the paradoxes of island life: cut off from the mainland yet intricately bound to it, austere yet fertile, unforgiving yet bewitchingly beautiful.Sea Room does more than celebrate and praise this extraordinary place. It shares with us the greatest gift an island can bestow: a deep, revelatory engagement with the natural world.

    But scientists have long cautioned against such anthropomorphizing, arguing that it limits our ability to truly comprehend the lives of other creatures. Recently, however, things have begun to shift in the other direction, and anthropologist Barbara J. King is at the forefront of that movement, arguing strenuously that we can—and should—attend to animal emotions. With How Animals Grieve, she draws our attention to the specific case of grief, and relates story after story—from fieldsites, farms, homes, and more—of animals mourning lost companions, mates, or friends. King tells of elephants surrounding their matriarch as she weakens and dies, and, in the following days, attending to her corpse as if holding a vigil. A housecat loses her sister, from whom she's never before been parted, and spends weeks pacing the apartment, wailing plaintively. A baboon loses her daughter to a predator and sinks into grief. In each case, King uses her anthropological training to interpret and try to explain what we see—to help us understand this animal grief properly, as something neither the same as nor wholly different from the human experience of loss. The resulting book is both daring and down-to-earth, strikingly ambitious even as it’s careful to acknowledge the limits of our understanding. Through the moving stories she chronicles and analyzes so beautifully, King brings us closer to the animals with whom we share a planet, and helps us see our own experiences, attachments, and emotions as part of a larger web of life, death, love, and loss.

    His paper led to a revolution in thinking—to a new worldview. Eco-Economy discusses the need today for a similar shift in our worldview. The issue now is whether the environment is part of the economy or the economy is part of the environment. Lester R. Brown argues the latter, pointing out that treating the environment as part of the economy has produced an economy that is destroying its natural support systems. Brown notes that if China were to have a car in every garage, American style, it would need 80 million barrels of oil a day—more than the world currently produces. If paper consumption per person in China were to reach the U.S. level, China would need more paper than the world produces. There go the world's forests. If the fossil fuel-based, automobile-centered, throwaway economic model will not work for China, it will not work for the other 3 billion people in the developing world—and it will not work for the rest of the world. But Brown is optimistic as he describes how to restructure the global economy to make it compatible with the Earth's ecosystem so that economic progress can continue. In the new economy, wind farms replace coal mines, hydrogen-powered fuel cells replace internal combustion engines, and cities are designed for people, not cars. Glimpses of the new economy can be seen in the wind farms of Denmark, the solar rooftops of Japan, and the bicycle network of the Netherlands. Eco-Economy is a road map of how to get from here to there.

    Features the local customs in Uganda, mores and bureaucracy governing those from love to superstition.

    The series called "Zoo Quest" was the start of his long career.

    She wanted a garden. When she and her husband finished graduate school, they headed west to Santa Cruz, California. With little money in their pockets, they found a modest seaside cottage with a small backyard. It wasn’t much—a twelve-hundred-square-foot patch of land with a couple of fruit trees and a lot of dirt—but it was a good place to start.From the Ground Up is Stewart's chronicle of the seedlings and weeds, cats and compost, worms and watering that transform a tiny plot of earth into a glorious garden. From planting the seeds her great-grandmother sends to battling snails, gophers, and aphids, Stewart takes us on a tour of her coastal garden and shares the lessons she's learned the hard way. In the process, she brings her California beach town to life—complete with harbor seals, monarch butterfly migrations, and an old-fashioned, seaside amusement park just down the street.Delighting in triumphs and confessing to a multitude of gardening sins, Stewart dishes the dirt for both the novice and experienced gardener. With helpful tips in each chapter, From the Ground Up tells the story of a young woman’s determination to create a garden in which the plants struggle to live up to the gardener’s vision

    The culprit--so necessary and yet the source of such upheaval--is the X chromosome, and this is its story. An enlightening and entertaining tour of the cultural and natural history of this intriguing member of the genome, "The X in Sex" traces the journey toward our current understanding of the nature of X. From its chance discovery in the nineteenth century to the promise and implications of ongoing research, David Bainbridge shows how the X evolved and where it and its counterpart Y are going, how it helps assign developing human babies their sex--and maybe even their sexuality--and how it affects our lives in infinitely complex and subtle ways. X offers cures for disease, challenges our cultural, ethical, and scientific assumptions about maleness and femaleness, and has even reshaped our views of human evolution and human nature.

    What is the biology in humans of this deep-in-the-bones pull toward a particular place, and how is it related to animal homing?Heinrich explores the fascinating science chipping away at the mysteries of animal migration: how geese imprint true visual landscape memory; how scent trails are used by many creatures, from fish to insects to amphibians, to pinpoint their home if they are displaced from it; and how the tiniest of songbirds are equipped for solar and magnetic orienteering over vast distances. Most movingly, Heinrich chronicles the spring return of a pair of sandhill cranes to their home pond in the Alaska tundra. With his trademark “marvelous, mind-altering” prose (Los Angeles Times), he portrays the unmistakable signs of deep psychological emotion in the newly arrived birds—and reminds us that to discount our own emotions toward home is to ignore biology itself.

    It contains, however, a number of deeper messages related to some of the most basic and important principles of modern biology. The bees are merely the actors that take us into the realm of physiology, genetics, reproduction, biophysics and learning, and that introduce us to the principles of natural selection underlying the evolution of simple to complex life forms. The book destroys the cute notion of bees as anthropomorphic icons of busy self-sacrificing individuals and presents us with the reality of the colony as an integrated and independent being—a superorganism with its own, almost eerie, emergent group intelligence. We are surprised to learn that no single bee, from queen through drone to sterile worker, has the oversight or control over the colony. Instead, through a network of integrated control systems and feedbacks, and communication between individuals, the colony arrives at consensus decisions from the bottom up through a type of swarm intelligence. Indeed, there are remarkable parallels between the functional organization of a swarming honeybee colony and vertebrate brains.

    Emoto, “magnificent…genius…His research in spiritual consciousness is positively masterful.” This book will transform your world view. Dr. Masaru Emoto’s first book, The Hidden Message in Water, told about his discovery that crystals formed in frozen water revealed changes when specific, concentrated thoughts were directed toward them. He also found that water from clear springs and water that has been exposed to loving words showed brilliant, complex and colourful snowflake patters. In contrast, polluted water, or water exposed to negative though formed incomplete, asymmetrical patterns with dull colors. The implications of this research creates a new awareness of how we can positively impact the Earth and our own personal world. This book takes you further and deeper into how you can affect your own personal healing by reading it.