Ecology

As a botanist and professor of plant ecology, Robin Wall Kimmerer has spent a career learning how to ask questions of nature using the tools of science....

Award-winning Atlantic staff writer Zoë Schlanger delivers a groundbreaking work of popular science that probes the hidden world of the plant kingdom....

A groundbreaking study that radically alters our understanding of the Americas before the arrival of the Europeans in 1492....

When we think of fungi, we likely think of mushrooms. But mushrooms are only fruiting bodies, analogous to apples on a tree. Most fungi live out of sight, yet make up a massively diverse kingdom of organisms that supports and sustains nearly all living systems....

When we talk about human history, we often focus on great leaders, population forces, and decisive wars. But how has the earth itself determined our destiny? Our planet wobbles, driving changes in climate that forced the transition from nomadism to farming....

From number one New York Times best-selling author Michael Pollan, a radical challenge to how we think about drugs, and an exploration into the powerful human attraction to psychoactive plants - and the equally powerful taboos....

When we use chemical fertilizers, we injure the microbial life that sustains plants and then become increasingly dependent on an arsenal of toxic substances. Teaming with Microbes offers an alternative to this vicious circle....

In this lyrical, radically expansive self-portrait, celebrated poet, author, and lecturer Sophie Strand explores—with searing insight and honesty—the intersecting spaces of her own chronic illness, the complex ecology of a changing world, and the very nature of the stories we tell ourselves.

Environmental journalist Ben Goldfarb travels throughout the United States and around the world to investigate how roads have transformed our planet....

From a New York Times bestselling nature writer comes a celebration of what goes on outside in the dark, from blooming moon gardens to nocturnal salamanders, from glowing foxfire and synchronous fireflies that blink in unison like an orchestra of light.

Teaming with Nutrients explains how nutrients move into plants and what both macro-nutrients and micro-nutrients do once inside. It shows organic gardeners how to provide these essentials....

In an age when dire problems like the Flint water crisis or the California drought bring ever more attention to the indispensability of safe, clean, easily available water, The Death and the Life of the Great Lakes is a powerful paean to what is arguably our most precious resource....

A new fully updated narrative edition of David Attenborough’s seminal biography of our world, Living Planet....

Recent advances in medicine and technology have expanded our understanding of aging across the animal kingdom, and our own timeless quest for the fountain of youth....

As recently as 11,000 years ago - "near time" to geologists - many other large mammals roamed North America....

Doug Tallamy, the New York Times bestselling author of Nature's Best Hope and Bringing Nature Home, reveals the ecological importance of the mighty oak tree....

The past is past, but it does leave clues, and Thomas Halliday has used cutting-edge science to decipher them more completely than ever before. In Otherlands, Halliday makes sixteen fossil sites burst to life....

Drawing on his decades of field research and up-to-the-minute understanding of the latest science, renowned geologist Andrew H. Knoll delivers a rigorous yet accessible biography of Earth, charting our home planet's epic 4.6 billion-year story....

An inspiring story about what happens when 3,500 acres of land, farmed for centuries, is left to return to the wild, and about the wilder, richer future a natural landscape can bring....

David Quammen's book, The Song of the Dodo, is a brilliant, stirring work, breathtaking in its scope, far-reaching in its message - a crucial book in precarious times, which radically alters the way in which we understand the natural world and our place in that world....

Animal scientists have long considered domestic livestock to be too dumb to know how to eat right, but the lifetime research of animal behaviorist Fred Provenza and his colleagues has debunked this myth....

Since the beginning of time, humankind has looked upon nature and seen the divine. In the writings of the great thinkers across religions, the natural world inspires everything from fear, to awe, to tranquil contemplation....

In what he says is the most important piece of environmental writing in his long and award-winning career, Mark Kurlansky employs his signature multi-century storytelling and compelling attention to detail to chronicle the harrowing yet awe-inspiring life cycle of salmon....

The Sixth Extinction draws on the work of scores of researchers in half a dozen disciplines to provide a moving account of the disappearances occurring all around us and traces the evolution of extinction as concept.

Carol Ruckdeschel is the wildest woman in America. She eats road kill, wrestles alligators, rides horses bareback, and lives in a ramshackle cabin that she built herself in an island wilderness....

In this groundbreaking book, Nature Evolutionary and Earth Elder Pam Montgomery draws on her decades of working with plants and Nature consciousness to demonstrate that we are intrinsically created to be in relationship with Nature. She examines the co-opting of time, language, and culture to shed light on the roots of our separation, weaving together contemporary research on human physiology with personal experience.

Despite efforts to sustain civilization, humanity faces existential threats from overpopulation, globalized trade and travel, urbanization, and global climate change. In A Darwinian Survival Guide, Daniel Brooks and Salvatore Agosta offer a novel—and hopeful—perspective on how to meet these tremendous challenges by changing the discourse from sustainability to survival. Darwinian evolution, the world’s only theory of survival, is the means by which the biosphere has persisted and renewed itself following past environmental perturbations, and it has never failed, they explain.

In Eavesdropping on Animals, George Bumann shares the fascinating stories and insights he has gained from studying wildlife around the world for more than forty years, the last twenty of which have been spent leading popular programs on animal language and intelligence in Yellowstone National Park.

Earth stands at a tipping point. As we fail to curtail emissions fast enough, our planet stares down a cascade of imminent, catastrophic, and irreversible disaster triggered by climate change. Yet a potent technology already exists to buy us more time: solar geoengineering. Through methods such as atmospheric aerosols, human-generated cirrus clouds, and solar sails, we humans can—at least in the short term—slow the Earth's warming. Should we?

A connection to nature is vital to our wellbeing. The sound of birds, the smell of tree oils, the effects of natural sunlight. Studies have shown that patients who can observe a natural scene through a hospital window recover faster, and lockdown proved that when most other aspects of life falls away, nature still feels like a necessity, not a luxury. But the majority of the world’s population lives in some form of urban environment, and by 2050, two thirds of humanity – nearly 7 billion people – are expected to live in towns and cities.