Download or read book Under a White Sky written by Elizabeth Kolbert and published by Crown. This book was released on 2021-02-09 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NATIONAL BESTSELLER • The Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Sixth Extinction returns to humanity’s transformative impact on the environment, now asking: After doing so much damage, can we change nature, this time to save it? RECOMMENDED BY PRESIDENT OBAMA AND BILL GATES • SHORTLISTED FOR THE WAINWRIGHT PRIZE FOR WRITING • ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The Washington Post • ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: Time, Esquire, Smithsonian Magazine, Vulture, Publishers Weekly, Kirkus Reviews, Library Journal • “Beautifully and insistently, Kolbert shows us that it is time to think radically about the ways we manage the environment.”—Helen Macdonald, The New York Times That man should have dominion “over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth” is a prophecy that has hardened into fact. So pervasive are human impacts on the planet that it’s said we live in a new geological epoch: the Anthropocene. In Under a White Sky, Elizabeth Kolbert takes a hard look at the new world we are creating. Along the way, she meets biologists who are trying to preserve the world’s rarest fish, which lives in a single tiny pool in the middle of the Mojave; engineers who are turning carbon emissions to stone in Iceland; Australian researchers who are trying to develop a “super coral” that can survive on a hotter globe; and physicists who are contemplating shooting tiny diamonds into the stratosphere to cool the earth. One way to look at human civilization, says Kolbert, is as a ten-thousand-year exercise in defying nature. In The Sixth Extinction, she explored the ways in which our capacity for destruction has reshaped the natural world. Now she examines how the very sorts of interventions that have imperiled our planet are increasingly seen as the only hope for its salvation. By turns inspiring, terrifying, and darkly comic, Under a White Sky is an utterly original examination of the challenges we face.
Download or read book Under a White Sky written by Elizabeth Kolbert and published by Random House. This book was released on 2021-03-04 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The author of the international bestseller The Sixth Extinction returns to humanity's transformative impact on the environment, now asking: after doing so much damage, can we change nature, this time to save it? CHOSEN BY BILL GATES AND BARACK OBAMA AS A SUMMER READ Meet the biologists trying to save the world's rarest fish; the engineers who are turning carbon emissions to stone; the researchers trying to develop a 'super coral'; and the physicists contemplating shooting tiny diamonds into the stratosphere to cool the earth. Elizabeth Kolbert is one of the most important writers on the environment. Here she investigates the immense challenges humanity faces as we scramble to reverse, in a matter of decades, the effects we've had on the natural world and asks - can we save the natural world in time?
Download or read book The Sixth Extinction written by Elizabeth Kolbert and published by Henry Holt and Company. This book was released on 2014-02-11 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: ONE OF THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW'S 10 BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR A major book about the future of the world, blending intellectual and natural history and field reporting into a powerful account of the mass extinction unfolding before our eyes Over the last half a billion years, there have been five mass extinctions, when the diversity of life on earth suddenly and dramatically contracted. Scientists around the world are currently monitoring the sixth extinction, predicted to be the most devastating extinction event since the asteroid impact that wiped out the dinosaurs. This time around, the cataclysm is us. In The Sixth Extinction, two-time winner of the National Magazine Award and New Yorker writer Elizabeth Kolbert draws on the work of scores of researchers in half a dozen disciplines, accompanying many of them into the field: geologists who study deep ocean cores, botanists who follow the tree line as it climbs up the Andes, marine biologists who dive off the Great Barrier Reef. She introduces us to a dozen species, some already gone, others facing extinction, including the Panamian golden frog, staghorn coral, the great auk, and the Sumatran rhino. Through these stories, Kolbert provides a moving account of the disappearances occurring all around us and traces the evolution of extinction as concept, from its first articulation by Georges Cuvier in revolutionary Paris up through the present day. The sixth extinction is likely to be mankind's most lasting legacy; as Kolbert observes, it compels us to rethink the fundamental question of what it means to be human.
Download or read book The Reindeer Chronicles written by Judith D. Schwartz and published by Chelsea Green Publishing. This book was released on 2020-08-19 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In a time of uncertainty about our environmental future—an eye-opening global tour of some of the most wounded places on earth, and stories of how a passionate group of eco-restorers is leading the way to their revitalization. Award-winning science journalist Judith D. Schwartz takes us first to China’s Loess Plateau, where a landmark project has successfully restored a blighted region the size of Belgium, lifting millions of people out of poverty. She journeys on to Norway, where a young indigenous reindeer herder challenges the most powerful orthodoxies of conservation—and his own government. And in the Middle East, she follows the visionary work of an ambitious young American as he attempts to re-engineer the desert ecosystem, using plants as his most sophisticated technology. Schwartz explores regenerative solutions across a range of landscapes: deserts, grasslands, tropics, tundra, Mediterranean. She also highlights various human landscapes, the legacy of colonialism and industrial agriculture, and the endurance of indigenous knowledge. The Reindeer Chronicles demonstrates how solutions to seemingly intractable problems can come from the unlikeliest of places, and how the restoration of local water, carbon, nutrient, and energy cycles can play a dramatic role in stabilizing the global climate. Ultimately, it reveals how much is in our hands if we can find a way to work together and follow nature’s lead.
Download or read book Field Notes from a Catastrophe written by Elizabeth Kolbert and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2015-02-03 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A new edition of the book that launched Elizabeth Kolbert's career as an environmental writer--updated with three new chapters, making it, yet again, "irreplaceable" (Boston Globe). Elizabeth Kolbert's environmental classic Field Notes from a Catastrophe first developed out of a groundbreaking, National Magazine Award-winning three-part series in The New Yorker. She expanded it into a still-concise yet richly researched and damning book about climate change: a primer on the greatest challenge facing the world today. But in the years since, the story has continued to develop; the situation has become more dire, even as our understanding grows. Now, Kolbert returns to the defining book of her career. She has added a chapter bringing things up-to-date on the existing text, plus three new chapters--on ocean acidification, the tar sands, and a Danish town that's gone carbon neutral--making it, again, a must-read for our moment.
Download or read book Under the Sky We Make written by Kimberly Nicholas PhD and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2021-03-23 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: ** Los Angeles Times bestseller ** It's warming. It's us. We're sure. It's bad. But we can fix it. After speaking to the international public for close to fifteen years about sustainability, climate scientist Dr. Nicholas realized that concerned people were getting the wrong message about the climate crisis. Yes, companies and governments are hugely responsible for the mess we're in. But individuals CAN effect real, significant, and lasting change to solve this problem. Nicholas explores finding purpose in a warming world, combining her scientific expertise and her lived, personal experience in a way that seems fresh and deeply urgent: Agonizing over the climate costs of visiting loved ones overseas, how to find low-carbon love on Tinder, and even exploring her complicated family legacy involving supermarket turkeys. In her astonishing, bestselling book Under the Sky We Make, Nicholas does for climate science what Michael Pollan did more than a decade ago for the food on our plate: offering a hopeful, clear-eyed, and somehow also hilarious guide to effecting real change, starting in our own lives. Saving ourselves from climate apocalypse will require radical shifts within each of us, to effect real change in our society and culture. But it can be done. It requires, Dr. Nicholas argues, belief in our own agency and value, alongside a deep understanding that no one will ever hand us power--we're going to have to seize it for ourselves.
Download or read book Under a War Torn Sky written by L.M. Elliot and published by Usborne Publishing Ltd. This book was released on 2015-04-01 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Shot down on a mission, 19-year-old bomber pilot Henry is alone in a treacherous land. Desperate to get back to his family and the girl he loves, he is forced to rely on the kindness of strangers and the cunning of the French Resistance. But in his battle to survive the deadly journey across Nazi-occupied Europe, he must face a terrible choice: can he take someone's life to save his own?
Download or read book The Great Displacement written by Jake Bittle and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2023-02-21 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The untold story of climate migration--the personal stories of those experiencing displacement, the portraits of communities being torn apart by disaster, and the implications for all of us as we confront a changing future. When the subject of migration that will be caused by global climate change comes up in the media or in conversation, we often think of international refugees--those from foreign countries who will emigrate to the United States to escape disasters like rising shorelines and famine. What many people don't realize though, is that climate migration is happening now--and within the borders of the United States. A human-centered narrative with national scope, The Great Displacement is the first book to report on climate migration in the US. From half-drowned Louisiana to fire-scorched California, from the dried-up cotton fields of Arizona to the soaked watersheds of inland North Carolina, people are moving. In the last decade alone, the federal government has sponsored the relocation of tens of thousands of families away from flood zones, and tens of thousands more have moved of their own accord in the aftermath of natural disasters. Insurance and mortgage markets are already shifting to reflect mounting climate risk, pushing more people away from their homes. Rising seas have already begun to sink eastern coastal cities, while extreme heat, unprecedented drought, and unstoppable wildfires plague the west. Over the next fifty years, millions of Americans will be caught up in this churn of displacement created by climate change, forced inland and northward in what will be the largest national migration we've yet to experience. The Great Displacement compassionately tells the stories of those who are already experiencing life on the move, while detailing just how radically climate change will transform our lives--forcing us out of the country's hardest-hit areas, uprooting countless communities, and prompting a massive migration that will fundamentally reshape the United States.
Download or read book Under a Painted Sky written by Stacey Heather Lee and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2015 with total page 386 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "In 1845, Sammy, a Chinese American girl, and Annamae, an African American slave girl, disguise themselves as boys and travel on the Oregon Trail to California from Missouri"--
Download or read book White Sky Black Ice written by Stan Jones and published by Soho Press. This book was released on 2003-07-01 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the small Alaskan village of Chukchi, what are the odds of two suicides occurring in a matter of a few days? State trooper Nathan Active discovers that his suspicions concerning the deaths are well-founded; the two men were murdered. But what was the motive and who killed them?
Download or read book White Dog Fell from the Sky written by Eleanor Morse and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2013-01-03 with total page 370 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An extraordinary novel of love, friendship, and betrayal for admirers of Abraham Verghese and Edwidge Danticat Eleanor Morse’s rich and intimate portrait of Botswana, and of three people whose intertwined lives are at once tragic and remarkable, is an absorbing and deeply moving story. In apartheid South Africa in 1977, medical student Isaac Muthethe is forced to flee his country after witnessing a friend murdered by white members of the South African Defense Force. He is smuggled into Botswana, where he is hired as a gardener by a young American woman, Alice Mendelssohn, who has abandoned her Ph.D. studies to follow her husband to Africa. When Isaac goes missing and Alice goes searching for him, what she finds will change her life and inextricably bind her to this sunburned, beautiful land. Like the African terrain that Alice loves, Morse’s novel is alternately austere and lush, spare and lyrical. She is a writer of great and wide-ranging gifts.
Download or read book A Red Family written by Mickey Friedman and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2009-01-29 with total page 218 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The searing memoir of an American communist family
Download or read book Our Biggest Experiment written by Alice Bell and published by Catapult. This book was released on 2021-09-21 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Traversing science, politics, and technology, Our Biggest Experiment shines a spotlight on the little-known scientists who sounded the alarm to reveal the history behind the defining story of our age: the climate crisis. Our understanding of the Earth's fluctuating environment is an extraordinary story of human perception and scientific endeavor. It also began much earlier than we might think. In Our Biggest Experiment, Alice Bell takes us back to climate change science's earliest steps in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, through the point when concern started to rise in the 1950s and right up to today, where the “debate” is over and the world is finally starting to face up to the reality that things are going to get a lot hotter, a lot drier (in some places), and a lot wetter (in others), with catastrophic consequences for most of Earth's biomes. Our Biggest Experiment recounts how the world became addicted to fossil fuels, how we discovered that electricity could be a savior, and how renewable energy is far from a twentieth-century discovery. Bell cuts through complicated jargon and jumbles of numbers to show how we're getting to grips with what is now the defining issue of our time. The message she relays is ultimately hopeful; harnessing the ingenuity and intelligence that has driven the history of climate change research can result in a more sustainable and bearable future for humanity.
Download or read book Against a White Sky written by Laurie Stapleton and published by Artemispress. This book was released on 2004 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Against a White Sky, Laurie Stapleton reveals her experiences as a gay high school teacher in an All-American city with honesty and humor. Having spent most of her young adult life in Santa Cruz, California-a beach town accepting of its large lesbian community-Laurie relocates to the more conservative San Joaquin Valley to enroll in an accelerated teacher credentialing program. There, Laurie discovers she is the only woman who regularly wears slacks. She decides she'd better change the way she dresses, walks and talks to feel socially comfortable-and maybe even safe. Laurie becomes certified to teach public high school within a year. Mindful of recent bouts with poverty and low self-esteem, she accepts the first teaching offer she receives-a public high school deeper in the heart of the valley, in a city voted All-American. Despite her struggle to sway students' and teachers' attention from her sexual identity, they seem to know anyway, as evidenced by homophobic slurs she hears in the school halls, and snickers from the student-athletes she coaches. Eventually she asks herself the hard questions: why she choose to live and teach in a town in which she is at best ignored, and at worse harassed, because of her sexual orientation? What is the meaning behind the irony that, as she helps her students discover their voices, she is silencing her own? Through honest self-reflection, Laurie discovers that her experiences ten years earlier as both a high school dropout and an emancipated minor presented some difficult obstacles-and helped her to see into the hearts of her own students. Through her challenging teaching experiences and personal reflections, Laurie begins to cultivate asense of home within while simultaneously discovering new directions educators might take towards fostering more inclusive values and respectful attitudes.
Download or read book Under a Storm Swept Sky written by Beth Anne Miller and published by Entangled: Embrace. This book was released on 2018-04-16 with total page 373 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Beautifully evocative and romantic." - NYT bestselling author, Monica McCarty An eighty-mile trek across the rugged, stunning beauty of Scotland’s Isle of Skye isn't something I imagined myself doing. Ever. This isn’t a trail for beginners. And I’m not a hiker. But I have to finish it, even if it kills me. I have no choice. With the ever-changing weather and relentless terrain, I’m in over my head. Rory Sutherland, my guide on this adventure, knows I don’t belong here. We clash with every mile, but we recognize a shared pain. Not only is the journey a struggle, but the tension between us is taut with unsaid words. And hope. He’s broken. I’m damaged. Together, we’re about to make the perfect storm.
Download or read book They Knew written by James Gustave Speth and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2021-08-24 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A devastating, play-by-play account of the federal government's leading role in bringing about today's climate crisis. In 2015, a group of twenty-one young people sued the federal government for violating their constitutional rights by promoting the climate catastrophe, depriving them of life, liberty, and property without due process of law. They Knew offers evidence for their claims, presenting a devastating, play-by-play account of the federal government's role in bringing about today's climate crisis. James Speth, tapped by the plaintiffs as an expert on climate, documents how administrations from Carter to Trump--despite having information about climate change and the connection to fossil fuels--continued aggressive support of a fossil fuel based energy system. What did the federal government know and when did it know it? Speth asks, echoing another famous cover up. What did the federal government do and what did it not do? They Knew (an updated version of the Expert Report Speth prepared for the lawsuit) presents the most compelling indictment yet of the government's role in the climate crisis, showing a forty-year failure to take action. Since Juliana v. United States was filed, the federal government has repeatedly delayed the case. Yet even in legal limbo, it has helped inspire a generation of youthful climate activists. An Our Children’s Trust Book
Download or read book Under the Broken Sky written by Mariko Nagai and published by Macmillan + ORM. This book was released on 2019-10-15 with total page 309 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Necessary for all of humankind, Under the Broken Sky is a breathtaking work of literature."—Booklist, starred review A beautifully told middle-grade novel-in-verse about a Japanese orphan’s experience in occupied rural Manchuria during World War II. Twelve-year-old Natsu and her family live a quiet farm life in Manchuria, near the border of the Soviet Union. But the life they’ve known begins to unravel when her father is recruited to the Japanese army, and Natsu and her little sister, Cricket, are left orphaned and destitute. In a desperate move to keep her sister alive, Natsu sells Cricket to a Russian family following the 1945 Soviet occupation. The journey to redemption for Natsu's broken family is rife with struggles, but Natsu is tenacious and will stop at nothing to get her little sister back. Literary and historically insightful, this is one of the great untold stories of WWII. Much like the Newbery Honor book Inside Out and Back Again by Thanhha Lai, Mariko Nagai's Under the Broken Sky is powerful, poignant, and ultimately hopeful. Christy Ottaviano Books
