She points out that even when researchers are working toward benevolent goals, conducting environmental science and activism is often premised on a colonial worldview and access to land. Focusing on plastic pollution, Liboiron models an anticolonial scientific practice aligned with Indigenous, and particularly Métis, concepts of land, ethics, and relations. She draws on her work in the Civic Laboratory for Environmental Action Research (CLEAR)—an anticolonial science laboratory in Newfoundland, Canada—to illuminate how pollution is not a symptom of capitalism, but a violent enactment of colonial land relations that claim access to Indigenous land. Her creative, lively, and passionate text refuses theories of pollution that make Indigenous land available for settler and colonial goals. In this way, her methodology demonstrates that anticolonial science is not only possible, it is currently being practiced in ways that enact more ethical modes of being in the world.

    To reach this unique audience, Whitlock and Schluter motivate learning with interesting biological and medical examples; they emphasize intuitive understanding; and they focus on real data. The book covers basic topics in introductory statistics, including graphs, confidence intervals, hypothesis testing, comparison of means, regression, and designing experiments. It also introduces the principles behind such modern topics as likelihood, linear models, meta-analysis and computer-intensive methods. Instructors and students consistently praise the book's clear and engaging writing, strong visualization techniques, and its variety of fascinating and relevant biological examples.

    Extreme weather is breeding banditry, humanitarian crisis, and state failure. In Tropic of Chaos, investigative journalist Christian Parenti travels along the front lines of this gathering catastrophe--the belt of economically and politically battered postcolonial nations and war zones girding the planet's midlatitudes. Here he finds failed states amid climatic disasters. But he also reveals the unsettling presence of Western military forces and explains how they see an opportunity in the crisis to prepare for open-ended global counterinsurgency.Parenti argues that this incipient "climate fascism"--a political hardening of wealthy states-- is bound to fail. The struggling states of the developing world cannot be allowed to collapse, as they will take other nations down as well. Instead, we must work to meet the challenge of climate-driven violence with a very different set of sustainable economic and development policies.

    It is high time for humanity to grow up and to transcend itself by embracing transhumanism.Transhumanism offers the most inclusive ideology for all ethnicities and races, the religious and the atheists, conservatives and liberals, the young and the old regardless of socioeconomic status, gender identity, or any other individual qualities. This book expounds on contemporary views and practical advice from more than 70 transhumanists.Astronaut Neil Armstrong said on the Apollo 11 moon landing in 1969, "One small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind." Transhumanism is the next logical step in the evolution of humankind, and it is the existential solution to the long-term survival of the human race.

    Bruce Franklin shows how menhaden have shaped America’s national—and natural—history, and why reckless overfishing now threatens their place in both. Since Native Americans began using menhaden as fertilizer, this amazing fish has greased the wheels of U.S. agriculture and industry. By the mid-1870s, menhaden had replaced whales as a principal source of industrial lubricant, with hundreds of ships and dozens of factories along the eastern seaboard working feverishly to produce fish oil. Since the Civil War, menhaden have provided the largest catch of any American fishery. Today, one company—Omega Protein—has a monopoly on the menhaden “reduction industry.” Every year it sweeps billions of fish from the sea, grinds them up, and turns them into animal feed, fertilizer, and oil used in everything from linoleum to health-food supplements. The massive harvest wouldn’t be such a problem if menhaden were only good for making lipstick and soap. But they are crucial to the diet of bigger fish and they filter the waters of the Atlantic and Gulf coasts, playing an essential dual role in marine ecology perhaps unmatched anywhere on the planet. As their numbers have plummeted, fish and birds dependent on them have been decimatedand toxic algae have begun to choke our bays and seas. In Franklin’s vibrant prose, the decline of a once ubiquitous fish becomes an adventure story, an exploration of the U.S. political economy, a groundbreaking history of America’s emerging ecological consciousness, and an inspiring vision of a growing alliance between environmentalists and recreational anglers.

    In the face of environmental degradation and global climate change, scientific knowledge alone does not tell us what we ought to do. The missing premise of the argument and much-needed center piece in the debate to date has been the need for ethical values, moral guidance, and principled reasons for doing the right thing for our planet, its animals, its plants, and its people.Contributors from throughout the world (including North America, Africa, Australia, Asia, and Europe) bring forth a rich variety of heritages and perspectives. Their contributions take many forms, illustrating the rich variety of ways we express our moral beliefs in letters, poems, economic analyses, proclamations, essays, and stories. In the end, their voices affirm why we must move beyond a scientific study and response to embrace an ongoing model of repair and sustainability. These writings demonstrate that scientific analysis and moral conviction can work successfully side-by-side.This is a book that can speak to anyone, regardless of his or her worldview, and that also includes a section devoted to “what next” thinking that helps the reader put the words and ideas into action in their personal lives. Thanks to generous support from numerous landmark organizations, such as the Kendeda Fund and Germeshausen Foundation, the book is just the starting point for a national, and international, discussion that will be carried out in a variety of ways, from online debate to “town hall” meetings, from essay competitions for youth to sermons from pulpits in all denominations. The “Moral Ground movement” will result in a newly discovered, or rediscovered, commitment on a personal and community level to consensus about our ethical obligation to the future.

    But the historic landfall of October 1492 was only a secondary event of the year. The preceding January, they had accepted the surrender of Muslim Granada, ending centuries of Islamic rule in their peninsula. And later that year, they had ordered the expulsion or forced baptism of Spain's Jewish minority, a cruel crusade undertaken in an excess of zeal for their Catholic faith. Europe, in the century of Ferdinand and Isabella, was also awakening to the glories of a new age, the Renaissance, and the Spain of the "Catholic Kings" - as Ferdinand and Isabella came to be known - was not untouched by this brilliant revival of learning. Here, from the noted historian Malveena McKendrick, is their remarkable story.

    Filled with facts, theories and tips on how we can do our bit for the planet, this is your one-stop guide to making every aspect of your life earth-friendly.

    VollmannIn his nonfiction, William T. Vollmann has won acclaim as a singular voice tackling some of the most important issues of our age, from poverty to violence to the dark soul of American imperialism as it has played out on the U.S./Mexico border. Now, Vollmann turns to a topic that will define the generations to come--the factors and human actions that have led to global warming. Vollmann begins No Immediate Danger, the first volume of Carbon Ideologies, by examining and quantifying the many causes of climate change, from industrial manufacturing and agricultural practices to fossil fuel extraction, economic demand for electric power, and the justifiable yearning of people all over the world to live in comfort. Turning to nuclear power first, Vollmann then recounts multiple visits that he made at significant personal risk over the course of seven years to the contaminated no-go zones and sad ghost towns of Fukushima, Japan, beginning shortly after the tsunami and reactor meltdowns of 2011. Equipped first only with a dosimeter and then with a scintillation counter, he measured radiation and interviewed tsunami victims, nuclear evacuees, anti-nuclear organizers and pro-nuclear utility workers.Featuring Vollmann's signature wide learning, sardonic wit, and encyclopedic research, No Immediate Danger, whose title co-opts the reassuring mantra of official Japanese energy experts, builds up a powerful, sobering picture of the ongoing nightmare of Fukushima.

    Since then, deformed frogs have been turning up in lakes around the world. Written by the only journalist granted access to secret hot spots where these deformed frogs are tested, and brainstorming sessions among the researchers, this compelling, fast-paced narrative is the first to offer a complete picture of what is quite possibly a global catastrophe in the making.

    This hilarious and informative book is designed for anyone who is sci-curious and wants to know more about the world around them, especially the elements of everyday science that other books ignore.

    How else to explain our imaginative failure in the face of global warming? In his first major book of nonfiction since In an Antique Land, Ghosh examines our inability—at the level of literature, history, and politics—to grasp the scale and violence of climate change.The extreme nature of today’s climate events, Ghosh asserts, make them peculiarly resistant to contemporary modes of thinking and imagining. This is particularly true of serious literary fiction: hundred-year storms and freakish tornadoes simply feel too improbable for the novel; they are automatically consigned to other genres. In the writing of history, too, the climate crisis has sometimes led to gross simplifications; Ghosh shows that the history of the carbon economy is a tangled global story with many contradictory and counterintuitive elements.Ghosh ends by suggesting that politics, much like literature, has become a matter of personal moral reckoning rather than an arena of collective action. But to limit fiction and politics to individual moral adventure comes at a great cost. The climate crisis asks us to imagine other forms of human existence—a task to which fiction, Ghosh argues, is the best suited of all cultural forms. His book serves as a great writer’s summons to confront the most urgent task of our time.

    Everyone knows that this is happening, and yet the only politics that is emerging to tackle it are coming from the increasingly nativist far-right. How should the left respond?In Beyond Barbarism, two rising stars of the British left lay down a set of proposals for a fundamental re-shaping of the global economy and offer a roadmap for tackling climate breakdown. Building on the debates surrounding the Green New Deal, debates that both authors have been central to, Lawrence and Laybourn argue that it is not enough merely to spend our way out of the crisis. Instead we need to rapidly reshape the shape and purpose of the economy, away from the emphasis on endless growth and towards creating a healthy and flourishing environment for everyone. This must be based on the principles of internationalism and the democratic ownership of the economy. Beyond Barbarism is a radical and achievable manifesto for a new politics and a new economics capable of tackling climate breakdown.

    Once the epicenter of the voting rights struggle, today it's Ground Zero for a new movement that is Flowers's life's work. It's a fight to ensure human dignity through a right most Americans take for granted: basic sanitation. Too many people, especially the rural poor, lack an affordable means of disposing cleanly of the waste from their toilets, and, as a consequence, live amid filth.Flowers calls this America's dirty secret. In this powerful book she tells the story of systemic class, racial, and geographic prejudice that foster Third World conditions, not just in Alabama, but across America, in Appalachia, Central California, coastal Florida, Alaska, the urban Midwest, and on Native American reservations in the West.Flowers's book is the inspiring story of the evolution of an activist, from country girl to student civil rights organizer to environmental justice champion at Bryan Stevenson's Equal Justice Initiative. It shows how sanitation is becoming too big a problem to ignore as climate change brings sewage to more backyards, and not only those of poor minorities.

    Thanks largely to YouTube clips posted by the sloth orphanage in Costa Rica, sloths have attracted a vast audience of admirers. Instead of seeing them as ridiculous anachronisms of which we know little, they have turned into creatures considered by many to be the most endearing on earth.Over much the same period, scientific investigations have also changed our view of sloths. No longer are they seen as total misfits in the modern world but, in the words of one specialist sloth investigator, they are 'masters of an alternative lifestyle'.In this wonderfully entertaining celebration of this most unique of creatures, William Hartston reveals the fascinating history of the sloth, from the prehistoric ground sloth to modern pygmy sloths in Panama, explores the current state of the science of sloths and reveals the truth behind sloth behaviour.