Tag Archives: Nature

In My Hands Today…

Posted on by
Reply

Waste Wars: The Wild Afterlife of Your Trash – Alexander Clapp

Dumps and landfills around the world are overflowing. Disputes about what to do with the millions of tons of garbage generated every day have given rise to waste wars waged almost everywhere you look. Some are border skirmishes. Others hustle trash across thousands of miles and multiple oceans. But no matter the scale, one thing is true about almost all of few people have any idea they’re happening.

Journalist Alexander Clapp spent two years roaming five continents to report deep inside the world of Javanese recycling gangsters, cruise ship dismantlers in the Aegean, Tanzanian plastic pickers, whistle-blowing environmentalists throughout the jungles of Guatemala, and a community of Ghanaian boys who burn Western cellphones and televisions for cents an hour, to tell listeners what he has figured out: While some trash gets tossed onto roadsides or buried underground, much of it actually lives a secret hot potato second life, getting shipped, sold, re-sold, or smuggled from one country to another, often with devastating consequences for the poorest nations of the world.

Waste Wars is a jaw-dropping exposé of how and why, for the last forty years, our garbage—the stuff we deem so worthless we think nothing of throwing it away—has spawned a massive, globe-spanning, multi-billion-dollar economy, one that offloads our consumption footprints onto distant continents, pristine landscapes, and unsuspecting populations. If the handling of our trash reveals deeper truths about our Western society, what does the globalized business of garbage say about our world today? And what does it say about us?

In My Hands Today…

Posted on by
Reply

Leave Only Footprints: My Acadia-to-Zion Journey Through Every National Park – Conor Knighton

When Conor Knighton decided to spend a year wandering through “America’s Best Idea,” he was worried the whole thing might end up being his worst idea. But, after a broken engagement and a broken heart, he desperately needed a change of scenery. The ambitious plan he cooked up went a bit overboard in that department; Knighton set out to visit every single one of America’s National Parks, from Acadia to Zion.

Leave Only Footprints is the memoir of his year spent traveling across the United States, a journey that yielded his “On the Trail” series, which quickly became one of CBS Sunday Morning’s most beloved segments. In this smart, informative, and often hilarious book, he’ll share how his journey through these natural wonders, unchanged by man, ended up changing his worldview on everything from God to politics to love and technology. Whether it’s waking up early for a naked scrub in an Arkansas bathhouse or staying up late to stargaze along our loneliest highway, Knighton goes behind the scenery to provide an unfiltered look at America. In the tradition of books like A Walk in the Woods or Turn Right at Machu Picchu, this is an irresistible mix of personal narrative and travelogue-some well-placed pop culture references, too-and a must-read for any of the 331 million yearly National Parks visitors.

In My Hands Today…

Posted on by
Reply

Crossings: How Road Ecology Is Shaping the Future of Our Planet – Ben Goldfarb

An eye-opening account of the global ecological transformations wrought by roads, from the award-winning author of Eager.

Some 40 million miles of roadways encircle the earth, yet we tend to regard them only as infrastructure for human convenience. While roads are so ubiquitous they’re practically invisible to us, wild animals experience them as entirely alien forces of death and disruption.

In Crossings, environmental journalist Ben Goldfarb travels throughout the United States and around the world to investigate how roads have transformed our planet. A million animals are killed by cars each day in the U.S. alone, but as the new science of road ecology shows, the harms of highways extend far beyond roadkill.

Creatures from antelope to salmon are losing their ability to migrate in search of food and mates; invasive plants hitch rides in tire treads; road salt contaminates lakes and rivers; and the very noise of traffic chases songbirds from vast swaths of habitat. Yet road ecologists are also seeking to blunt the destruction through innovative solutions.

Goldfarb meets with conservationists building bridges for California’s mountain lions and tunnels for English toads, engineers deconstructing the labyrinth of logging roads that web national forests, animal rehabbers caring for Tasmania’s car-orphaned wallabies, and community organizers working to undo the havoc highways have wreaked upon American cities. Today, as our planet’s road network continues to grow exponentially, the science of road ecology has become increasingly vital. Written with passion and curiosity, Crossings is a sweeping, spirited, and timely investigation into how humans have altered the natural world―and how we can create a better future for all living beings.

In My Hands Today…

Posted on by
Reply

After the North Pole: A Story of Survival, Mythmaking, and Melting Ice – Erling Kagge

The North Pole looms large in our collective psyche—the ultimate Otherland in a world mapped and traversed. It is the center of our planet’s rotation, one of the places that is most vulnerable in an epoch of global climate change. Its sub-zero temperatures and strange year of one sunset and one sunrise make it an eerie, utterly disorienting place that challenges human endurance and understanding.

Erling Kagge and his friend Børge Ousland became the first people “to ever reach the pole without dogs, without depots and without motorized aids,” skiing for 58 days from a drop off point on the ice edge of Canada’s northernmost island.

In magisterial prose, Erling narrates his epic, record-making journey, probing the physical challenges and psychological motivations for embarking on such an epic expedition, the history of the territory’s exploration, its place in legend and art, and the thrilling adventures he experienced during the trek. It is another example of what bestselling author Robert MacFarlane has called “Kagge’s extraordinary life in wild places,”

Erling offers surprises on every page while observing the key role that this place holds in our current climate and geopolitical conversations. As majestic, mesmerizing, and monumental as the terrain it captures, The North Pole is for anyone who has gazed out at the horizon—and wondered what happens if you keep going.

In My Hands Today…

Posted on by
Reply

Deep Water: The World in the Ocean – James Bradley

The ocean has shaped and sustained life on Earth for billions of years. Its waters contain our past, from the deep history of evolutionary time to exploration and colonialism; our present, as a place of solace and pleasure, and as the highway that underpins the global economy; and – as waters heat and sea levels rise ever higher – our future.

Deep Water is both a hymn to the beauty, mystery and wonder of the ocean, and a reckoning with our complex relationship to the natural world. It is a book shaped by tidal movements and deep currents, and lit by the presence of other minds and other ways of being. Weaving together science, history and personal reflection it explores the way the ocean connects every living being on Earth, the origins of the environmental catastrophe that is overtaking us and the question of what lies ahead.

Immense in scope but also human and intimate, Deep Water offers new ways of understanding not just our relationship with the planet, but the past – and perhaps most importantly, the future.