Showing titles in Ecosystems & Habitats

Anyone who has ever stood on the shores of Monterey Bay, watching the rolling ocean waves and frolicking otters, knows it is a unique place. But even residents on this idyllic California coast may not realize its full history. Monterey began as a natural paradise, but became the poster child for industrial devastation in John Steinbeck's Cannery Row, and is now one of the most celebrated shorelines in the world. It is a remarkable story of life, death, and revival - told here for the first time in all its stunning color and bleak grays.

Eric Wade built a cabin in remote Alaska where he took his young family, venturing hundreds of miles by small boat. They chased away bears, marveled at giant eagles, stalked moose, and discovered a greater under-standing of family and nature. “A wonderful, addictive love song to the Alaskan wilderness.”—Charles Rangeley-Wilson, author of Silver Shoals and The Silt Road “A poet with an axe, a teacher on a river, forever learning and sharing.”—Kim Heacox, author of Jimmy Bluefeather and The Only Kayak “A tale of decades spent learning, enjoying and sharing a rare gift.”—...

How Civilization Learned to Wash Its Hands A Living History of Human Invention There are few objects more universal, more overlooked, and more revealing than the toilet. From the stone drains of Minoan palaces to NASA’s space-age thrones, this book traces how every great leap in human progress began not with monuments or machines, but with waste, water, and the will to stay clean. Archaeologists, engineers, reformers, and dreamers all appear here: Arthur Evans kneeling in Cretan dust to uncover a 4,000-year-old flush; Sextus Julius Frontinus defending Rome’s vast aqueducts before an ...

Zane Grey fished up to 300 days of the year. But, with all that time on the water, there was nothing more exciting or more compelling than the really big fish - the giants of the sea. In Zane Grey's day, blue fin tuna were pursued with harpoons and sometimes are even today. There is the story of a swordfish that was hooked at 10:30 in the morning and played until 11:30 that night - only to...! Tales of Swordfish and Tuna will dazzle and thrill any fishing heart.

Born into the Waorani tribe of Ecuador's Amazon rainforest, Nemonte Nenquimo was taught about plant medicines, foraging, oral storytelling, and shamanism by her elders. Age 14, she left the forest for the first time to study with an evangelical missionary group in the city. Eventually, her ancestors began appearing in her dreams, pleading with her to return and embrace her own culture. She listened. Two decades later, Nemonte has emerged as one of the most forceful voices in climate-change activism.

From bestselling author, long-time former National Geographic Explorer, and anthropologist Wade Davis comes the story of America's Nile: how it once flowed freely and how human intervention has left it near exhaustion, altering the water temperature, volume, local species, and shoreline of the river Theodore Roosevelt once urged us to "leave it as it is."

A page-turning memoir about a young woman's grueling, revelatory summers working alone in a remote lookout tower and her eyewitness account of the increasingly unpredictable nature of wildfire in the Canadian north. While growing up in Peace River, Alberta, Trina Moyles heard many stories of...

Lighthouses are striking totems of our relationship to the sea. For many, they encapsulate a romantic vision of solitary homes amongst the waves, but their original purpose is much more utilitarian than that. Still today we depend upon their guiding lights for the safe passage of ships. Nowhere is this truer than in the rock lighthouses of Great Britain and Ireland, a ring of 19 towers built between 1811-1905, so called because they were constructed on desolate rock formations in the middle of the sea, and made of granite to withstand the power of its waves.

In 2018, lumps of frozen soil, collected from the bottom of the world's first deep ice core and lost for decades, reappeared in Denmark. When geologist Paul Bierman and his team first melted a piece of this unique material, they were shocked to find perfectly preserved leaves, twigs, and moss. That observation led them to a startling discovery: Greenland's ice sheet had melted naturally before, about 400,000 years ago.

In a world filled with breathtaking beauty, we have often overlooked the elusive charm and magic of certain landscapes. A cloudy river flows into a verdant Arctic wetland where sandhill cranes and muskoxen dwell. Further south, cypress branches hang low over dismal swamps. Places like these - collectively known as swamplands or peatlands - often go unnoticed for their ecological splendor. They are as globally significant as rainforests, and function as critical carbon sinks for addressing our climate crisis.

Rivers, more than any road, technology, or political leader, have shaped the course of human civilization. They have opened frontiers, founded cities, settled borders, and fed billions. They promote life, forge peace, grant power, and can capriciously destroy everything in their path. Even today, rivers remain a powerful global force - one that is more critical than ever to our future. In Rivers of Power, geographer Laurence C. Smith explores the timeless yet underappreciated relationship between rivers and civilization as we know it.

Fungi can appear anywhere, from desert dunes to frozen tundra. They can invade our bodies and live between our toes or our floorboards. They are unwelcome intruders or vastly expensive treats, and symbols of both death and eternal life. But despite their familiar presence, there’s still much to learn about the eruption, growth, and decay of their secret interconnected world. From fields, feasts, and fairy rings to death caps, puffballs, and ambrosia beetles, this is an intoxicating journey into the life of an extraordinary organism, one that we have barely begun to understand.

As a graduate student exploring the rain forests of Australia, Meg Lowman realized that she couldn’t monitor her beloved leaves using any of the usual methods. So she put together a climbing kit: she sewed a harness from an old seat belt, gathered hundreds of feet of rope, and found a tool belt for her pencils and rulers. Up she went, into the trees. Forty years later, Lowman remains one of the world’s foremost arbornauts, known as the “real-life Lorax.”

Field notes from an age of extinction, tracking the ever-shifting meaning of America’s animals throughout history to understand the current moment Journalist Jon Mooallem has watched his little daughter’s world overflow with animals—butterfly pajamas, appliquéd owls—while the actual...

Sixty years ago in the snowy valleys of Japan, a young snow monkey discovered a hotel’s hot spring, and others in her troop soon joined her. Now, generations of families have built their routines around their own hot springs. In this episode, we follow a young snow monkey as her troop leaps from rock to rock toward their favorite activity in winter: a long steamy soak.

Perhaps the closest a human being comes to visiting another planet is to descend into the sea. In Soundings, Kennedy Warne connects his lifelong exploration of the underwater world with a global story of humanity’s relationship with the sea. Drawing on over 20 years of work for National Geographic, he shares experiences that range from diving with harp seals under the sea ice of the Gulf of St Lawrence to following the legendary ‘sardine run’ along South Africa’s Wild Coast; from watching turret-building ghost crabs in Arabia to witnessing the impact of dynamite fishing in the Philippines…

In this panoramic account, Nir Arielli explores the history of the Dead Sea from the first Neolithic settlements to the present day. Moving through the ages, Arielli reveals the religious, economic, military, and scientific importance of the lake, which has been both a source of great wealth and a site of war. The Dead Sea weaves together a tapestry of the lake's human stories—and amidst environmental degradation and renewed conflict, makes a powerful case for why it should be saved.

From bestselling author James Raffan comes an enlightening and original story about a polar bear’s precarious existence in the changing Arctic, reminiscent of John Vaillant’s The Golden Spruce. Nanurjuk, “the bear-spirited one,” is hunting for seals on Hudson Bay, where ice never lasts...

When John and Jean Silverwood, both experienced sailors, decided to give their four children a taste of life on the high seas, they hoped the trip would offer important learning experiences - not only about the natural world but about the beauty of human life stripped down to its essence, far from civilization. But the adventure that awaited them would surpass anything they could have imagined.

Beginning in his kayak in his home waters of eastern Long Island, Carl Safina's The View from Lazy Point takes us through the four seasons to the four points of the compass, from the high Arctic south to Antarctica, across the warm belly of the tropics from the Caribbean to the west Pacific, then home again.