In search of affordable housing, young couple Anja and Louis move into a community on an artificial mountain, The Berg—yet another "eco-friendly" initiative run by a corporation called Finster. They're offered a home rent-free in exchange for keeping quiet about the seriously malfunctioning infrastructure of the experimental house. But when Louis returns home from his mother's funeral in America, Anja is convinced he has changed. He seems to be in denial of his grief and newly idealistic, consumed by a secret project at the NGO where he works as an artist-consultant. Anja is horrified when she discovers what Louis has invented: a pill called Oval that temporarily rewires the user's brain to be more generous. Louis is convinced that if he can introduce the drug into the Berlin club scene, he can finally remedy the income disparity that has made Berlin so unlivable. Oval is a fascinating portrait of the unbalanced relationships that shape our world, as well as a prescient warning of what the future may hold.

    Then the mines closed, and the town wore away like a bar of soap. Now Bakerton has been granted a surprise third act: it sits squarely atop the Marcellus Shale, a massive deposit of natural gas.To drill or not to drill? Prison guard Rich Devlin leases his mineral rights to finance his dream of farming. He doesn’t count on the truck traffic and nonstop noise, his brother’s skepticism or the paranoia of his wife, Shelby, who insists the water smells strange and is poisoning their frail daughter. Meanwhile his neighbors, organic dairy farmers Mack and Rena, hold out against the drilling—until a passionate environmental activist disrupts their lives.Told through a cast of characters whose lives are increasingly bound by the opposing interests that underpin the national debate, Heat & Light depicts a community blessed and cursed by its natural resources. Soaring, ambitious, it zooms from drill rig to shareholders’ meeting to the Three Mile Island nuclear reactor to the ruined landscape of the “strippins,” haunting reminders of Pennsylvania’s past energy booms. This is a dispatch from a forgotten America—a work of searing moral clarity from one of the finest writers of her generation, a courageous and necessary book.

    In The Long Thaw, David Archer, one of the world's leading climatologists, predicts that if we continue to emit carbon dioxide we may eventually cancel the next ice age and raise the oceans by 50 meters. The great ice sheets in Antarctica and Greenland may take more than a century to melt, and the overall change in sea level will be one hundred times what is forecast for 2100. By comparing the global warming projection for the next century to natural climate changes of the distant past, and then looking into the future far beyond the usual scientific and political horizon of the year 2100, Archer reveals the hard truths of the long-term climate forecast.Archer shows how just a few centuries of fossil-fuel use will cause not only a climate storm that will last a few hundred years, but dramatic climate changes that will last thousands. Carbon dioxide emitted today will be a problem for millennia. For the first time, humans have become major players in shaping the long-term climate. In fact, a planetwide thaw driven by humans has already begun. But despite the seriousness of the situation, Archer argues that it is still not too late to avert dangerous climate change--if humans can find a way to cooperate as never before.Revealing why carbon dioxide may be an even worse gamble in the long run than in the short, this compelling and critically important book brings the best long-term climate science to a general audience for the first time.

    Since then, the New Yorker has devoted enormous attention to climate change, describing the causes of the crisis, the political and ecological conditions we now find ourselves in, and the scenarios and solutions we face. The Fragile Earth tells the story of climate change—its past, present, and future—taking readers from Greenland to the Great Plains, and into both laboratories and rain forests. It features some of the best writing on global warming from the last three decades, including Bill McKibben’s seminal essay “The End of Nature,” the first piece to popularize both the science and politics of climate change for a general audience, and the Pulitzer Prize–winning work of Elizabeth Kolbert, as well as Kathryn Schulz, Dexter Filkins, Jonathan Franzen, Ian Frazier, Eric Klinenberg, and others. The result, in its range, depth, and passion, promises to bring light, and sometimes heat, to the great emergency of our age.

    From the roots to the crown and back to the seeds, Richard Powers’s twelfth novel unfolds in concentric rings of interlocking fables that range from antebellum New York to the late twentieth-century Timber Wars of the Pacific Northwest and beyond. There is a world alongside ours—vast, slow, interconnected, resourceful, magnificently inventive, and almost invisible to us. This is the story of a handful of people who learn how to see that world and who are drawn up into its unfolding catastrophe.A New York Times Bestseller.

    Most “Mojavs,” prevented by armed vigilantes from freely crossing borders to lusher regions, have allowed themselves to be evacuated to encampments in the east. Holdouts like Ray and Luz subsist on rationed cola and water, and whatever they can loot, scavenge, and improvise.For the moment, the couple’s fragile love, which somehow blooms in this arid place, seems enough. But when they cross paths with a mysterious child, the thirst for a better future begins. Immensely moving, profoundly disquieting, and mind-blowingly original, Watkins’s novel explores the myths we believe about others and tell about ourselves, the double-edged power of our most cherished relationships, and the shape of hope in a precarious future that may be our own.

    By moving our jobs out to the suburbs where we live and shop, we have created Edge Cities. Garreau has spent three years visiting Edge Cities and presents a groundbreaking book about who we are, how we got that way, where we are headed and what we value.

    The invitation was open to all – to think beyond the human narrative and bear witness to the scale of the crisis. Letters of love, loss, hope and action were written by over 1000 people.Now published as a collection, Letters to the Earth brings together the voices of children and the public with authors, scientists and playwrights in the first creative project of its kind.Alongside letters from the public, Letters to the Earth received submissions from artist and peace activist Yoko Ono, actor Mark Rylance, writer and illustrator of The Lost Words Jackie Morris, novelist Anna Hope, environmental writer Jay Griffiths and Green Party MP Caroline Lucas . Together they are an invitation to consider how this existential threat affects the way we live our lives and the action we take.Lots of books consider the climate and ecological crisis from a political or scientific perspective, but Letters to the Earth is the first book to chronicle how humankind is collectively processing planetary crisis.

    Recent, massive blooms of billions of jellyfish have clogged power plants, decimated fisheries, and caused millions of dollars of damage. Driven by questions about how overfishing, coastal development, and climate change were contributing to a jellyfish population explosion, Juli embarked on a scientific odyssey. She traveled the globe to meet the biologists who devote their careers to jellies, hitched rides on Japanese fishing boats to see giant jellyfish in the wild, raised jellyfish in her dining room, and throughout it all marveled at the complexity of these alluring and ominous biological wonders.

    What we can—and must—do to succeed. This book will change the way we understand the future of our planet. It is both alarming and hopeful. James Gustave Speth, renowned as a visionary environmentalist leader, warns that in spite of all the international negotiations and agreements of the past two decades, efforts to protect Earth’s environment are not succeeding. Still, he says, the challenges are not insurmountable. He offers comprehensive, viable new strategies for dealing with environmental threats around the world.The author explains why current approaches to critical global environmental problems—climate change, biodiversity loss, deterioration of marine environments, deforestation, water shortages, and others—don’t work. He offers intriguing insights into why we have been able to address domestic environmental threats with some success while largely failing at the international level. Setting forth eight specific steps to a sustainable future, Speth convincingly argues that dramatically different government and citizen action are now urgent. If ever a book could be described as “essential,” this is it.

    The discussion moves systematically through ideas, theories, research and practice of urban design from a wide range of sources. It gradually builds the concepts one upon the other towards a total view of the subject.

    For seven years, Maeda and his students—several of whom are already internationally celebrated—have created some of the most digitally sophisticated and exciting pieces of design to emerge anywhere. Little of this research has been seen outside the laboratory.This book presents the most fascinating work produced by the group, arranged into themes that apply to today's design issues: information visualization, digital typography, abstraction, interaction design, and education. Each section also features brief essays by leading names in the field of interaction and digital design—Casey Reas, David Small, Yogo Nakamura, Joshua Davis, and Gillian Crampton-Smith.Deftly bridging the chasm between art and science, John Maeda, a true pioneer in the digital realm, leads the way to a greater understanding and richness of experience.

    Here you’ll find the facts, the processes, the physics of our complex and changing climate, but delivered with eloquence and urgency. Lawrence Krauss writes with a clarity that transcends mere politics. Prose and poetry were never better bedfellows.” —Ian McEwan, Booker Prize-winning author of Solar and Machines Like Me “Lawrence Krauss has written the ideal book for anyone interested in understanding the science of global warming. It is at once elegant, rigorous, and timely.”—Elizabeth Kolbert, staff writer, The New Yorker, and Pulitzer prize-winning author of The Sixth Extinction “A brief, brilliant, and charming summary of what physicists know about climate change and how they learned it.” —Sheldon Glashow, Nobel Laureate in Physics, Metcalf Distinguished Professor Emeritus, Boston University “The distinguished scientist Lawrence Krauss turns his penetrating gaze on the most pressing existential threat facing our world: climate change. It is brimming with information lucidly analysed. Such hope as there is lies in science, and a physicist of Dr. Krauss’s imaginative versatility is unusually qualified to offer it.” —Richard Dawkins, author of The Blind Watchmaker and Science in the Soul “Lucid and gripping, this study of the most severe challenge humans have ever faced leads the reader from the basic physics of climate change to recognition of the damage that humans have already caused and on to the prospects that lie ahead if we do not change course soon.” —Noam Chomsky, Laureate Professor, University of Arizona, author of Internationalism or Extinction? “Lawrence Krauss tells the story of climate change with erudition, urgency, and passion. It is our great good luck that one of our most brilliant scientists is also such a gifted writer. This book will change the way we think about the future.” —Jennifer Finney Boylan, author of Good Boy and She’s Not There “Everything on climate change that I’ve seen is either dumbed down and bossy or written for other climate scientists. I’ve been looking for a book that can let me, a layperson, understand the science. This book does just what I was looking for. It is important.” —Penn Jillette, Magician, author of Presto! and God, No! “The renowned physicist Lawrence Krauss makes the science behind one of the most important issues of our time accessible to all.” —Richard C. J. Somerville, Distinguished Professor Emeritus, Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California, San Diego “Lawrence Krauss is a fine physicist, a talented writer, and a scientist deeply engaged with public affairs. His book deserves wide readership. The book’s eloquent exposition of the science and the threats should enlighten all readers and motivate them to an urgent concern about our planet’s future.” —Lord Martin Rees, Astronomer Royal, former president of the Royal Society, author of On the Future: Prospects for Humanity

    Buried beneath these parallel conflicts--one for the soul of baseball, the other for the soul of the city--was the subtext of race. Deftly intertwined by journalist Jonathan Mahler, these braided Big Apple narratives reverberate to reveal a year that also saw the opening of Studio 54, the acquisition of the New York Post by Rupert Murdoch, a murderer dubbed the "Son of Sam," the infamous blackout, and the evolution of punk rock. As Koch defeated Cuomo, and as Reggie Jackson rescued a team racked with dissension, 1977 became a year of survival--and also of hope.

    The waters rose, submerging New York City. But the residents adapted and it remained the bustling, vibrant metropolis it had always been. Though changed forever.Every street became a canal. Every skyscraper an island.Through the eyes of the varied inhabitants of one building, Kim Stanley Robinson shows us how one of our great cities will change with the rising tides.And how we too will change.