To me there is a connection to something larger than myself, an overriding sense of spirit that I only seem to encounter in the outdoors, beneath the canopy of old-growth forest, or within the gaze of ancient snow-capped peaks. Since arriving in Alaska over 30 years ago it is something I have continually sought among this state’s striking landscape and in many of my own adventures here. It's an attitude, a sensibility I also seek in the stories I read, an authenticity tied to place, but also an inclination toward hope and optimism, even a tenuous one, that we can all relate to; a sentiment I have always tried to incorporate into my own writing.
Though this book is 17 years old, it is still a compelling memoir about a young man’s journey to find his “place” in Alaska, and the exploits he has along the way. Heacox describes in elegant detail his paddling adventures, encounters with wildlife, his work as a ranger, and his struggle with humanity and how we are all, including himself, tampering with the natural world we love. A wonderful personal adventure interspersed with rich characters, history, and internal conflict.
In this coming-of-middle-age memoir, Kim Heacox, writing in the tradition of Abbey, McPhee, and Thoreau, discovers an Alaska reborn from beneath a massive glacier, where flowers emerge from boulders, moose swim fjords, and bears cross crevasses with Homeric resolve. In such a place Heacox finds that people are reborn too, and their lives begin anew with incredible journeys, epiphanies, and successes. All in an America free of crass commercialism and overdevelopment.
Braided through the larger story are tales of gold prospectors and the cabin they built sixty years ago; John Muir and his intrepid terrier, Stickeen; and a dynamic geology…
I’m a science fiction writer who loves my chosen genre for the promises it makes for the worlds that we can have—and the warnings that it offers for the worlds that might be ours if we don’t take care. I’ve picked books for people who like their thinking to be challenged, and who also long for the world to be a much better place. These are the kinds of books I love to read—and the kinds of books I try to write.
Earth has suffered devastating environmental collapse and is now a world of jungles and monsters. The last remnants of humanity are split between those clinging to the surface, and those who have removed themselves to the upper atmosphere. We follow Pearl, living in an isolated forest region, suddenly taken to the stars. A vivid and luscious reimagining of Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea.
"A richly imagined eco-gothic tale." - The Guardian
"Exquisitely realised." - The Times
After the ravages of the Green Winter, Earth is a place of deep jungles and monstrous animals. The last of the human race is divided into surface dwellers and the people who live in the Upper Settlement, a ring perched at the edge of the Earth s atmosphere.
Bearing witness to this divided planet is Pearl, a young techie with a thread of shuvani blood, who lives in the isolated forests of Gobari, navigating her mad mother and the strange blue light in the sky. But Pearl…
I am the daughter of a health food fanatic whose admonitions about what to eat manifested in my early attraction to all food junky. Later in life, I became a bit of a food snob, shopping regularly at the farmers’ market for the freshest and most delicious fruits and vegetables I’ve ever tasted. My love of both good food and sharp analysis came to shape my career as an academic. Food became the object of my analyses, but always with an eye toward contradiction. I’ve written several books and articles exploring how capitalism constrains needed food system transformations, bringing me to my latest fascination with the tech sector.
In my next pick, Romero draws on previously unexplored archives to tell stories of pesticides never told before, most notably how industrial waste was utilized to make chemicals that could kill all that got in agriculture’s way.
I love how he renders ironic the closed-looped systems so championed by environmentalists—or the use of warfare chemicals on fields that grow our foods. It is indeed strange that we use chemicals designed to kill the food that we eat to live.
The toxicity of pesticides to the environment and humans is often framed as an unfortunate effect of their benefits to agricultural production. In Economic Poisoning, Adam M. Romero upends this narrative and provides a fascinating new history of pesticides in American industrial agriculture prior to World War II. Through impeccable archival research, Romero reveals the ways in which late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American agriculture, especially in California, functioned less as a market for novel pest-killing chemical products and more as a sink for the accumulating toxic wastes of mining, oil production, and chemical manufacturing. Connecting farming ecosystems to technology…
When I first started reading about wilderness, I accepted it as an obvious thing—a place without people. That lasted a short time before I realized the enormous historical complexity of such places. Rather than places without people, without history, without politics, “wilderness” became a laboratory of American society. I tried to capture that vibrancy in my book An Open Pit Visible from the Moon where I showed all the claims various people made on one wilderness area in the North Cascades. I'm a writer, historian, and former college professor who now calls the Skagit Valley of Washington home. As much as I enjoy studying wilderness, I prefer walking through it and noticing what it teaches.
Rarely has a collection of essays inspired and perplexed me as much as this one. One chapter argues one thing; the next argues its near-opposite. And both are persuasive!After Preservation is designed to raise fundamental questions about nature, wilderness, and the Anthropocene without providing definitive answers. I didn’t close the book with answers, but I did close it knowing more, thinking harder, and questioning what I believed. If we are meant to save nature—or if we are merely meant to understand why that’s a fraught concept—we’ll need to grapple with ideas and practicalities like these authors do.
From John Muir to the Endangered Species Act, environmentalism in America has always had close to its core a preservationist ideal. Generations have been inspired by its ethos-to protect nature from the march of human development. But we have to face the facts. Accelerating climate change, rapid urbanization, agricultural and industrial devastation, metastasizing fire regimes, and other quickening anthropogenic forces all attest to the same truth: the earth is now spinning through the age of humans. After Preservation takes stock of the ways we have tried to both preserve and exploit nature to ask a direct but profound question: what…
Did I truly want to read a 400-page
book about a raging wildfire that caused $10-billion in damage and burned 2,579
homes to ash? Within a few pages, my answer was “Hell, yes!”
Centered on a record-setting
disaster in Fort McMurray, Alberta, Fire Weather is as gripping as a
Hollywood blockbuster and as magnetic as a Martin Luther King Jr. speech.
John
Vaillant captures the shock and heartbreak of destruction—but also the
cognitive dissonance that allows our species to burn enough fossil fuels to
threaten our very existence. Cities like Fort McMurray wouldn’t exist without
the oil industry. But nor would today’s terrifying “fire tornadoes.”
In this
time of reckoning, what should people like me do next?
***AN INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER*** *Longlisted for the BAILLIE GIFFORD PRIZE FOR NON-FICTION*
'Astounding on every page. John Vaillant is one of the great poetic chroniclers of the natural world' David Wallace-Wells
'No book feels timelier than John Vaillant's Fire Weather . . . an adrenaline-soaked nightmare that is impossible to put down' Cal Flyn, The Times
A gripping account of this century's most intense urban fire, and a panoramic exploration of the rapidly changing relationship between humanity and fire's fierce energy.
In May 2016, Fort McMurray, Alberta, the hub of Canada's oil industry, was overrun by wildfire. The multi-billion-dollar disaster turned…
I grew up in Chicago and at a very young age worked in retail. While my mom was building her own brand, lumbar support called the “back machine”, I watched the process and got to shadow her to understand what the customers’ needs were. I went to the University of Wisconsin in Madison and triple majored in Design, Retail, and Business. I then moved to NYC and launched my brand BOY MEET GIRL® in 2001. When I couldn’t find a book on a woman building a brand who was also a mother I knew I had to write my book to show others how you can do it.
I have been in the fashion industry for over two + decades and have been fortunate to work with Alyssa Hardy the author of this book. She has featured me in several articles she writes for and has been a model in one of my anti-bullying campaigns.
Why I would recommend her book is not only because I think she is a rock star but because how important her book is to our society. It gives a real insider look at the rise of “fast fashion” and the abuse and neglect of garment workers.
An insider's look at how the rise of "fast fashion" obstructs ethical shopping and fuels the abuse and neglect of garment workers
"With years of expertise in the fashion industry, Alyssa's reporting is consistently deep and thoughtful, and her work on sustainability and ethics has changed how I view the clothes I wear." -Brittney McNamara, features director at Teen Vogue
Ours is the era of fast fashion: a time of cheap and constantly changing styles for consumers of every stripe, with new clothing hitting the racks every season as social media-fueled tastes shift.
Squat toilets, profuse sweating, jumbo centipedes, ear nibbling—these are just some of the delights I’ve encountered in my global travels, which inspired my YA comedic adventure novels, Never Sorry Ever Jolly and Carpe Diem, which was published in the U.S., Germany, the Netherlands, and China. Carpe Diem was also nominated for numerous YA awards, chosen as a Book Sense/Indie Bound Pick, received a starred review from the School Library Journal, and according to The Washington Post: “This is self-confessed travel junkie Autumn Cornwell's first novel—and she's hit one out of the park.”
Basically, I live my life as an adventure then write about it!
If Emily Hahn’s real-life adventures were in a novel, you’d say they were completely implausible. I discovered this unorthodox travel journalist when I was in my twenties, longing for my own travel experiences. Born in 1905 when women’s options were limited, Emily simply saw life as an adventure and didn’t let her gender or youth stop her from traveling the world solo. She voyaged to Africa on a steamer; worked for the Red Cross in the Belgian Congo; became a concubine and got hooked on opium in Shanghai; moved to Hong Kong where she helped with underground relief work — all the while writing books and articles for publications like The New Yorker. She inspired me to live life as an adventure and then write about it. (But obviously, without all the affairs and opium!)
Known as Mickey to her friends, Emily Hahn was a feminist trailblazer before the word existed. She ran away to the Belgian Congo as a Red Cross Worker during the Great Depression, was the concubine of a Chinese poet in Shanghai in the 1930s, had a child with the head of the British Secret Service in Hong Kong before WWII ...
I have been interested in the environment my entire life. I studied international environmental politics in college at the University of Michigan and in graduate school at MIT. I research and taught international environmental politics at the University of Massachusetts for 33 years. I have published extensively on global environmental governance, focusing on the role played by science, international organizations, transnational actors, and governments. I have consulted for the United Nations, and the governments of the USA, France, and Portugal.
Robert Falkner’s Environmentalism and Global International Society provides a historical overview of the rise of global environmental governance.
He shows how the issue moved from the periphery of the world’s attention, and how environmental protection and an ecological worldview have become core principles of how global governance is performed.
Environmentalism and Global International Society reveals how environmental values and ideas have transformed the normative structure of international relations. Falkner argues that environmental stewardship has become a universally accepted fundamental norm, or primary institution, of global international society. He traces the history of environmentalism's rise from a loose set of ideas originating in the nineteenth century to a globally applicable norm in the twentieth century, which has come to redefine international legitimacy and states' global responsibilities. He shows how this deep norm change came about as a result of the interplay between non-state and state actors, and how the new…
I was fortunate to grow up in a typical 1960s neighborhood where the good life was an option. This was the storyline in The Wonder Years, and it was not just saccharine reminiscence.The physical environment defined sustainability: suburbs marked the distinction between country and city, obesity was not an epidemic, Nature-Deficit Disorder was unknown, most children walked to school, and vehicle miles traveled were 50 percent lower. If home sizes were smaller, face-to-face interaction was more prevalent and despair less common. I’ve worked to extend this privilege of place on sustainable lines because it is essential to solving the existential crises of our time—structural racism and climate change.
“Our cities and towns have been on a high carbon diet—and our metropolitan regions have become obese,” Peter Calthorpe states. Plying a generation of path-breaking work, he reveals how shifting to urbanism, “compact and walkable development,” can mitigate climate change and secure health and happiness. The metrics he presents are essential reading. Three types of neighborhoods—urban, compact, and sprawl—are assessed for their impact on land consumption, energy use, infrastructure, and utility cost, vehicle miles traveled, and greenhouse gas emissions. The information delivers a clear message: technology will not save us, but a lifestyle change will. It is “not radical,” Calthorpe writes, “but simply a shift from large lot single family homes” to the “streetcar suburbs” that once flourished in American cities. This seemingly simple solution is a vast undertaking, but the blueprint is fresh, and the next step requires, as Olmsted averred, “the best application of the arts of…
From the beginning of his career, Peter Calthorpe has been a leading innovator in sustainable building projects, sustainable development, and walkable communities. A leader in the New Urbanism Movement, he is an important resource for solutions to current problems of urban sprawl, suburban isolation, and the related problems of outsized energy consumption and an outsized share of world emissions. According to 'Ecological Urbanism', relentless and thoughtless development have created a way of living that brings us to a point of reckoning regarding energy, climate change and the way we shape our communities. The answer to these crises is 'Sustainable Development',…
My passion for mining history was sparked when I lived in Fort Resolution, Northwest Territories. One of my students wanted to write a short essay on the Pine Point Mine, which he claimed had cheated the community by making so much money, providing few jobs, and leaving a big mess after closing. I offered to drive the student out to tour the abandoned mine and was blown away by the dozens of open pits and abandoned haul roads that had been carved out of the northern forest. From that day on, I was hooked on mining history, hungry to learn as much as possible about these abandoned places.
Asbestos was once thought of as a life-saving fire retardant used to construct walls and ceilings, but now we know it is (in its dust form) the cause of deadly lung diseases. I loved this book because it focuses on the struggles of people on the front lines of exposure: asbestos miners and millworkers.
I was inspired by the bravery of asbestos miners when they went on strike in 1949, partly for safer working conditions, only to meet the batons and paddy wagons of the Quebec provincial police. I was also shocked by the fact the owner of the mine, Johns-Manville, secretly harvested the lungs of dead miners for analysis at a lab in Saranac, New York, all the while suppressing the evidence of harm to the workers’ bodies.
For decades, manufacturers from around the world relied on asbestos to produce a multitude of fire-retardant products. As use of the mineral became more widespread, medical professionals discovered it had harmful effects on human health. Mining and manufacturing companies downplayed the risks to workers and the general public, but eventually, as the devastating nature of asbestos-related deaths became common knowledge, the industry suffered terminal decline. A Town Called Asbestos looks at how the people of Asbestos, Quebec, worked and lived alongside the largest chrysotile asbestos mine in the world. Dependent on this deadly industry for their community's survival, they developed…
