Showing titles in Ecosystems & Habitats

In May 2016, Fort McMurray, Alberta, the hub of Canada's oil industry, was overrun by wildfire. The multi-billion-dollar disaster turned entire neighbourhoods into firebombs and drove 90,000 people from their homes in a single afternoon. Through the story of this apocalyptic conflagration, John Vaillant explores the past and the future of our ever-hotter, more flammable world.

Eye of the Albatross takes us soaring to locales where whales, sea turtles, penguins, and shearwaters flourish in their own quotidian rhythms. Carl Safina’s guide and inspiration is an albatross he calls Amelia, whose life and far-flung flights he describes in fascinating detail. Interwoven with recollections of whalers and famous explorers, Eye of the Albatross probes the unmistakable environmental impact of the encounters between man and marine life.

For over 200 years, the Catskill Mountains have been repeatedly and dramatically transformed by New York City. In Making Mountains, David Stradling shows the transformation of the Catskills landscape as a collaborative process, one in which local and urban hands, capital, and ideas have come together to reshape the mountains and the communities therein. This collaboration has had environmental, economic, and cultural consequences.

Through a series of personal journeys, Dan Richards explores the appeal of far-flung outposts in mountains, tundra, forests, oceans and deserts. Following a route from the Cairngorms of Scotland to the fire-watch lookouts of Washington State; from Iceland's 'Houses of Joy' to the Utah desert; frozen ghost towns in Svalbard to shrines in Japan; Roald Dahl's writing hut to a lighthouse in the North Atlantic, Richards explores landscapes which have inspired writers, artists and musicians....

Deep in the forest, in places you would never think to look, are some of the most remarkable creatures. Overlooked and unsung, this is the forgotten forest: a world of glow-in-the-dark mushrooms and giant mosses, where slime moulds travel the forest in search of prey and ancient lichens live for thousands of years. Join bestselling author Robert Vennell on a walk through this fantastical forest, wandering through tales from history, science, and spirituality in search of these weird and wonderful species.

Fly fishing, historian Mark Kurlansky has found, is a battle of wits, fly fisher vs. fish - and the fly fisher does not always (or often) win. The targets - salmon, trout and char; and for some, bass, tarpon, tuna, bonefish and even marlin - are highly intelligent, wily, strong and athletic animals. The allure, Kurlansky learns, is that fly fishing makes catching a fish as difficult as possible. There is an art, too, in the crafting of flies.

Charlotte Runcie has always felt pulled to the sea, lured by its soothing, calming qualities but also enlivened and inspired by its salty wildness. When she loses her beloved grandmother and becomes pregnant with her first child, she feels its pull even more intensely. In Salt on Your Tongue Charlotte explores what the sea means to us and particularly what it has meant to women through the ages.

When Kinari Webb first traveled to Indonesian Borneo at 21 to study orangutans, she was both awestruck by the beauty of her surroundings and heartbroken by the rain forest destruction she witnessed. As she got to know the local communities, she realized that their need to pay for expensive health care led directly to the rampant logging, which in turn imperiled their health and safety even further. Webb realized her true calling was at the intersection of medicine and conservation.

Did you know that a whale shark’s spots are as unique as a fingerprint? Or that sharks can go into a trance when flipped upside down? Or that the Megallodon’s mouth was 6 feet across? With The Shark Handbook, jump into brand new facts about these fierce sea creatures! Learn about over 400 profiles of every shark in existence, from the first sharks living about 445 million years ago to the ones lurking in the ocean deep today.

Last summer, Katherine May was approaching 40, feeling overwhelmed by motherhood and lacking connection with others, lost in a world of inundation and expectation. She had always felt different, but this feeling was new. She wanted to get out, get free and find herself again - and so set about walking the rugged 450-mile South West Coast Path. However, this journey uncovered more than she had ever imagined.

Rescue of the Bounty is the harrowing story of the sinking and rescue of Bounty - the tall ship used in the classic 1962 film Mutiny on the Bounty - which was caught in the path of Hurricane Sandy with 16 aboard.

Remote desert locations, including the Chihuahuan Desert of northern Mexico, southern Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona, draw adventurers of all kinds, from the highly skilled and well prepared to urban cowboys who couldn't lead themselves (much less a horse!) to water. David Alloway's goal in this book is to help all of them survive when circumstances beyond their control strand them in the desert environment.

Throughout history, trees have determined the tools we use, the boats we build, the stories we tell about the world and ourselves, the songs we sing, and some of our most important rituals. As such, our lives are intertwined with those of the trees and woodlands around us. In this journey deep into the woods, Wyl Menmuir travels the length and breadth of Britain and Ireland to meet the people who plant trees, the ecologists who study them, those who shape beautiful objects and tools from wood, and those who use them to help others.

North Georgia has more than forty lakes, and not one is natural. The state's controversial decision to dam the region's rivers for power and water supply changed the landscape forever.

From the author of The Secret Knowledge of Water and Atlas of a Lost World comes a deeply felt essay collection focusing upon a vivid series of desert icons - a sheet of virga over Monument Valley, white seashells in dry desert sand, boulders impossibly balanced. Craig Childs delves into the primacy of the land and the profound nature of the more-than-human.

Throughout history, rivers have been our foremost source of fresh water both for agriculture and for individual consumption, but now economists say that by 2025 water scarcity will cut global food production by more than the current U.S. grain harvest. In this groundbreaking book, veteran science correspondent Fred Pearce focuses on the dire state of the world's rivers to provide our most complete portrait yet of the growing world water crisis and its ramifications for us all.

Dylan Tomine takes us to the far reaches of the planet in search of fish and adventure, with keen insight, a strong stomach, and plenty of laughs along the way. Closer to home, he wades deeper into his beloved steelhead rivers of the Pacific Northwest and the politics of saving them. Tomine celebrates the joy - and pain - of exploration, fatherhood, and the comforts of home waters from a vantage point well off the beaten path. Headwaters traces the evolution of a lifelong angler’s priorities from fishing to the survival of the fish themselves.

Part odyssey, part pilgrimage, this epic personal narrative follows the author’s exploration of coasts, islands, reefs, and the sea’s abyssal depths. Scientist and fisherman Carl Safina takes readers on a global journey of discovery, probing for truth about the world’s changing seas, deftly weaving adventure, science, and political analysis.

They are trees of life and trees of knowledge. They are wish-fulfillers, rain forest royalty, more precious than gold. They are the fig trees, and they have affected humanity in profound but little-known ways. Gods, Wasps and Stranglers tells their amazing story. Fig trees fed our prehuman ancestors, influenced diverse cultures, and played key roles in the dawn of civilization.

Reeling from the pain of devastating miscarriages and suffering from PTSD after military adventures in Afghanistan, Merlin and his wife Lizzie decide to leave the bustle of London and return to Merlin’s childhood home, a Cornish hill farm called Cabilla in the heart of Bodmin Moor. There, they are met by unexpected challenges: a farm slipping ever further into debt, the discovery that the overgrazed and damaged woods running throughout the valley are in fact one of the UK’s last remaining fragments of Atlantic temperate rainforest, and the sudden and near catastrophic strickening by Covid.