EVS247: Environmental Chemistry: Find Books

A golden era of deep-sea discovery is underway. In the process, the abyss is being revealed as perhaps the most amazing part of our planet, with a topography even more varied and extreme than its Earthbound counterpart. Teeming with unsuspected life, an extraordinary interconnected ecosystem deep below the waves has a huge effect on our daily lives, influencing climate and weather systems worldwide. Currently the fantastic creatures that live in the deep-many of them incandescent in a world without light-and its formations trap vast quantities of carbon that would otherwise poison our atmosphere; and novel bacteria as yet undiscovered hold the promise of potent new medicines. Yet the deep also contains huge mineral riches lusted after by many nations and corporations; mining them could ultimately devastate the planet, compounding the deepening impacts of ubiquitous pollutants and rampant overfishing.

Inter- and transdisciplinary examination into the 2015 Gold King Mine spill in Silverton, Colorado, when three million gallons of subterranean mine water, carrying 880,000 pounds of heavy metals, spilled into a tributary of the Animas River. Illuminates the ongoing ecological, economic, political, social, and cultural significance of a regional event.

A compelling history of seashells and the animals that make them, revealing what they have to tell us about nature, our changing oceans, and ourselves. She begins with their childhood wonder, unwinds surprising histories like the origin of Shell Oil as a family business importing exotic shells, and charts what shells and the soft animals that build them are telling scientists about our warming, acidifying seas.

Much of what you've heard about plastic pollution may be wrong. Instead of a great island of trash, the infamous Great Pacific Garbage Patch is made up of manmade debris spread over hundreds of miles of sea--more like a soup than a floating garbage dump. Recycling is more complicated than we were taught: less than nine percent of the plastic we create is reused, and the majority ends up in the ocean. And plastic pollution isn't confined to the open ocean: it's in much of the air we breathe and the food we eat.

Particulate Plastics in Terrestrial and Aquatic Environments provides a fundamental understanding of the sources of these plastics and the threats they pose to the environment. It demonstrates the ecotoxicity of particulate plastics using case studies and offers management practices to mitigate environmental contamination

A firsthand chronicle of the catastrophic reality of our planet's changing ecosystems and the necessity of relishing this vulnerable, fragile Earth while we still can

Recounts the story of Flint's poisoned water through the people who caused it, suffered from it, and exposed it. It is a chronicle of one town, but could also be about any American city, all made precarious by the neglect of infrastructure and the erosion of democratic decision making.

"The Great Lakes--Erie, Huron, Michigan, Ontario and Superior--hold 20 percent of the world's supply of surface fresh water and provide sustenance, work and recreation for tens of millions of Americans. But they are under threat as never before, and their problems are spreading across the continent.

In this accessible and timely book, hydrology expert William M. Alley and science writer Rosemarie Alley sound the call to protect groundwater. Drawing on examples from around the world, including case studies in the United States, Canada, Australia, India, and Sub-Saharan Africa, the authors examine groundwater from key scientific and socioeconomic perspectives.

Seamus McGraw takes us on a trip along America's culturally fractured back roads and listens to farmers and ranchers and fishermen, many of them people who are not ideologically, politically, or in some cases even religiously inclined to believe in man-made global climate change. He shows us how they are already being affected and the risks they are already taking on a personal level to deal with extreme weather and its very real consequences for their livelihoods.

Turn on the faucet, and water pours out. Pull out the drain plug, and the dirty water disappears. Most of us give little thought to the hidden systems that bring us water and take it away when we' done with it. But these underappreciated marvels of engineering face an array of challenges that cannot be solved without a fundamental change to our relationship with water, David Sedlak explains in this enlightening book.

When Pabich received a monthly water bill for 30,000 gallons (for a household of two people and one dog), she was chagrined. After all, she is an expert on sustainable water use. So she set out to make a change.

Less than 1 percent of the world's water is fresh and potable--and no more will ever be available. Thanks to pollution, global warming, and population growth, water access is poised to become today's most explosive global issue. This book, based on the film by the same title, offers insights into the coming water crisis from visionary scientists, policymakers, activists, and environmentalists.

Americans see water as abundant and cheap: we turn on the faucet and out it gushes, for less than a penny a gallon. We use more water than any other culture in the world, much to quench what's now our largest crop--the lawn. Yet most Americans cannot name the river or aquifer that flows to our taps, irrigates our food, and produces our electricity. And most don't realize these freshwater sources are in deep trouble.

Prud'homme introduces readers to an array of colorful, obsessive, brilliant--and sometimes shadowy--characters through whom these issues come alive. He takes readers into the heart of the daily dramas that will determine the future of this essential resource--from the alleged murder of a water scientist in a New Jersey purification plant, to the epic confrontation between salmon fishermen and copper miners in Alaska, to the poisoning of Wisconsin wells, to the epidemic of intersex fish in the Chesapeake Bay, to the wars over fracking for natural gas. Michael Pollan has changed the way we think about the food we eat; Alex Prud'homme will change the way we think about the water we drink.

Bottled and Sold shows how water went from being a free natural resource to one of the most successful commercial products of the last one hundred years-and why we are poorer for it. It's a big story and water is big business. Every second of every day in the United States, a thousand people buy a plastic bottle of water, and every second of every day a thousand more throw one of those bottles away. That adds up to more than thirty billion bottles a year and tens of billions of dollars of sales. Are there legitimate reasons to buy all those bottles? With a scientist's eye and a natural storyteller's wit, Gleick investigates whether industry claims about the relative safety, convenience, and taste of bottled versus tap hold water.

Pioneering oceanographer Curtis Ebbesmeyer seized the world's imagination when he and his worldwide network of beachcomber volunteers traced ocean currents using thousands of sneakers and plastic bath toys spilled from storm-tossed freighters.

In the middle of the Mojave Desert, Las Vegas casinos use billions of gallons of water for fountains, pirate lagoons, wave machines, and indoor canals. Meanwhile, the town of Orme, Tennessee, must truck in water from Alabama because it has literally run out. Robert Glennon captures the irony-and tragedy-of America's water crisis in a book that is both frightening and wickedly comical.

Maude Barlow has for decades been a leading voice arguing that access to safe drinking water should be a basic human right. Called the "Al Gore of water," Barlow is the very best kind of advocate--deeply informed, articulate, and persuasive. Essential reading for anyone interested in the emerging international movement for water justice, Blue Covenant is one of the most important books of our time.

Chad Pregracke was a high school student when he first glimpsed the trash that littered the bottom of the Mississippi, a shocking sight that launched him on a quest to clean up the river. After four discouraging years seeking government help without success, he decided to take his fund-raising private & a corporate sponsor decided to take a chance on this naive but unshakably determined young man. Ten years later Chad's one-man project has grown into a $500,000 operation with more than 60 sponsors (including National Geographic).

Recounts the building of the O'Shaughnessy Dam and Hetch Hetchy Reservoir in the middle of Yosemite National Park-despite the availability of less expensive, less technically challenging, and less politically complicated possibilities-that set off a defining controversy in American environmentalism. From the early 1900s to 1913 Americans argued about proposals to dam the Tuolumne River and transform the extraordinary Hetch Hetchy Valley into a giant source of water and hydroelectric power for the San Francisco Bay Area. It is a story of intrigue replete with political scandals and suspect tactics played out in the corridors of Congress, in San Francisco's City Hall and its corporate boardrooms, and in the national media.

When the residents of Leadville, Colorado awoke the morning of February 23, 1983, it was to the Arkansas River gushing blood red with toxic mine waste headed straight to a pump station supplying public water. The event sparked a Superfund cleanup that drew national attention at the same time the mining industry abandoned the people it had supported with employment for more than a century. That volatile formula catapulted the town into a modern-day Western standoff with a group of EPA officials and state representatives, determined to clean up the 100-year-old hazardous mess the town has been built upon.

The definitive firsthand account of California's Camp Fire-the nation's deadliest wildfire in a century-and a riveting examination of what went wrong and how to avert future tragedies as the climate crisis unfolds. On November 8, 2018, the people of Paradise, California, awoke to a mottled gray sky and gusty winds. Soon the Camp Fire was upon them, gobbling an acre a second. Less than two hours after the fire ignited, the town was engulfed in flames, the residents trapped in their homes and cars. By the next morning, eighty-five people were dead. San Francisco Chronicle reporter Lizzie Johnson was there as the town of Paradise burned.

A dramatic, revelatory account of the female inmate firefighters who battle California's wildfires. Speaking to captains, family and friends, correctional officers, and camp commanders, she provides an illuminating look at how the fire camps actually operate. In doing so, she encompasses California's underlying catastrophes of climate change, economic disparity, historical injustice, and the emotional and physical intensity of firefighting.

In the past few years, it has become impossible (for most) to deny the effects of climate change and that the planet is warming, and to acknowledge that we must act. But a new kind of denialism is taking root in the halls of power, shaped by a quarter-century of neoliberal policies, that threatens to doom us before we've grasped the full extent of the crisis. As Kate Aronoff argues, since the 1980s and 1990s, economists, pro-business Democrats and Republicans in the US, and global organizations like the UN and the World Economic Forum have all made concessions to the oil and gas industry that they have no intention of reversing. What's more, they believe that climate change can be solved through the market, capitalism can be a force for good, and all of us, corporations included, are fighting the good fight together. These assumptions, Aronoff makes abundantly clear, will not save the planet.

A round-the-globe journey through the periodic table explains how the air people breathe reflects the world's history, tracing the origins and ingredients of the atmosphere to explain air's role in reshaping continents, steering human progress, and powering revolutions.

The most important book yet from the author of the international bestseller The Shock Doctrine, a brilliant explanation of why the climate crisis challenges us to abandon the core "free market" ideology of our time, restructure the global economy, and remake our political systems. In short, either we embrace radical change ourselves or radical changes will be visited upon our physical world. The status quo is no longer an option.

We don’t have an energy crisis. We have a consumption crisis. And this book, which takes aim at cherished assumptions regarding energy, offers refreshingly straight talk about what’s wrong with the way we think and talk about the problem.

The ongoing assault on climate science in the United States has never been more aggressive, more blatant, or more widely publicized than in the case of the Hockey Stick graph -- a clear and compelling visual presentation of scientific data, put together by Mann and his colleagues, demonstrating that global temperatures have risen in conjunction with the increase in industrialization and the use of fossil fuels.

In this epic tale of an American civil war, Pooley takes us behind the scenes and into the hearts and minds of the most important players in the struggle to cap global warming pollution--a fight in which trillions of dollars and the fate of the planet are at stake.

Right now, a group of scientists is working on ways to minimize the catastrophic impact of global warming.But they're not designing hybrids or fuel cells or wind turbines. They're trying to lower the temperature of the entire planet. And they're doing it with huge contraptions that suck CO2 from the air, machines that brighten clouds and deflect sunlight away from the earth, even artificial volcanoes that spray heat-reflecting particles into the atmosphere.This is the radical and controversial world of geoengineering.

Piecing together events like a detective story, Schneider reveals that as expert consensus grew, well-informed activists warned of dangerous changes no one knew how to predict precisely, and special interests seized on that very uncertainty to block any effective response. He persuasively outlines a plan to avert the building threat and develop a positive, practical policy that will bring climate change back under our control, help the economy with a new generation of green energy jobs and productivity, and reduce the dependence on unreliable exporters of oil, and thus ensure a future for ourselves and our planet that's as rich with promise as our past.

Possibly the most graphic treatment of global warming that has yet been published, Six Degrees is what readers of Al Gore's best-selling An Inconvenient Truth or Ross Gelbspan's Boiling Point will turn to next. Written by the acclaimed author of High Tide, this highly relevant and compelling book uses accessible journalistic prose to distill what environmental scientists portend about the consequences of human pollution for the next hundred years. In 2001, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released a landmark report projecting average global surface temperatures to rise between 1.4 degrees and 5.8 degrees Celsius (roughly 2 to 10 degrees Fahrenheit) by the end of this century. Based on this forecast, author Mark Lynas outlines what to expect from a warming world.

A study of Earth's atmosphere traces a journey of scientific discovery, from the Renaissance scientist who realized that we live at the bottom of a dense ocean of air, to a well-meaning inventor who nearly destroys the ozone layer.

A groundbreaking book that transforms the debate about global warming by offering a fresh perspective based on human needs as well as environmental concerns. Bjorn Lomborg argues that many of the elaborate and expensive actions now being considered to stop global warming will cost hundreds of billions of dollars, are often based on emotional rather than strictly scientific assumptions, and may very well have little impact on the world's temperature for hundreds of years.

Friel's book is the first to respond directly to Lomborg's controversial research as published in The Skeptical Environmentalist (2001) and Cool It: The Skeptical Environmentalist's Guide to Global Warming (2007). His close reading of Lomborg's textual claims and supporting documentation reveals a lengthy list of findings that will rock climate skeptics and their allies in the government and news media, demonstrating that the published peer-reviewed climate science, as assessed mainly by the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, has had it mostly right--even if somewhat conservatively right--all along.

Gorman analyzes the notion of sustainability from a fresh perspective--the integration of human activities with the biogeochemical cycling of nitrogen--and provides a supportive alternative to studying sustainability through the lens of climate change and the cycling of carbon. It is the first book to examine the social processes by which industrial societies learned to bypass a fundamental ecological limit and, later, began addressing the resulting concerns by establishing limits of their own.

From the New York Times best-selling journalist, the staggering, hidden story of an unlikely band of mothers who discovered the deadly secret of Love Canal, and exposed one of America's most devastating environmental disasters. Keith O'Brien uncovers how Lois, Luella, Barbara and other local mothers uncovered the poisonous secret of Love Canal: that they were living on the site where industrial employer Hooker Chemical had been dumping toxic waste for years, and covering it up.

In the 1940s, DDT helped the Allies win the Second World War by wiping out the insects that caused malaria, with seemingly no ill effects on humans. After the war, it was sprayed willy-nilly across fields, in dairy barns, and even in people's homes, leaving environmental and human devastation in its wake across the globe, particularly in communities of color. Thirty years later the U.S. would ban the use of DDT--only to reverse the ban in the 1990s when calls arose to bring it back to fight West Nile and malaria. What happened? How to Sell a Poison traces the surprising history of DDT in parallel to the story of a predominantly Black town poisoned by a neighboring DDT plant.

"Sometimes called "black gold," Iowa's deep, rich soils are a treasure that formed over thousands of years under the very best of the world's grasslands, the tall-grass prairie, which produced the finest soils in the world. They are diverse and complex, and hold within them a record not only of Iowa's prehistoric past, but also of the changes that took place after settlers came from the east and utterly transformed the land, and of the changes taking place today in response to global warming.

The Silent Spring of our time From an MIT scientist, mounting evidence that the active ingredient in the world's most commonly used weedkiller is responsible for debilitating chronic diseases, including cancer, liver disease, and more Glyphosate is the active ingredient in Roundup, the most commonly used weedkiller in the world. Nearly 300 million pounds of glyphosate-based herbicide are sprayed on farms-and food-every year. Agrichemical companies claim that glyphosate is safe for humans, animals, and the environment. But emerging scientific research on glyphosate's deadly disruption of the gut microbiome, its crippling effect on protein synthesis, and its impact on the body's ability to use and transport sulfur-not to mention several landmark legal cases- tells a very different story.

In Cows Save the Planet, journalist Judith D. Schwartz looks at soil as a crucible for our many overlapping environmental, economic, and social crises. Schwartz reveals that for many of these problems--climate change, desertification, biodiversity loss, droughts, floods, wildfires, rural poverty, malnutrition, and obesity--there are positive, alternative scenarios to the degradation and devastation we face.

This book presents a multifaceted and interwoven tale of what colonial exploitation of indigenous peoples and resources left in its wake. It is a socio-ecological history that explores the toxic interrelationships between mercury and silver production, urban environments, and the people who lived and worked in them.

A groundbreaking analysis of agricultural development and transitions toward more sustainable management in one region. An invaluable resource for researchers, policymakers, and students alike, it examines new approaches to make agricultural landscapes healthier for both the environment and people. The Yaqui Valley is the birthplace of the Green Revolution and one of the most intensive agricultural regions of the world, using irrigation, fertilizers, and other technologies to produce some of the highest yields of wheat anywhere.

Yellow Dirt offers readers a window into a dark chapter of modern history that still reverberates today. From the 1940s into the early twenty-first century, the United States knowingly used and discarded an entire tribe for the sake of atomic bombs. Secretly, during the days of the Manhattan Project and then in a frenzy during the Cold War, the government bought up all the uranium that could be mined from the hundreds of rich deposits entombed under the sagebrush plains and sandstone cliffs. Despite warnings from physicians and scientists that long-term exposure could be harmful, even fatal, thousands of miners would work there unprotected.

Gold has been exploited intensively in the Brazilian Amazon with garimpo methods, which uses the elemental mercury in amalgamating the gold, the final stage of the ore dressing process. The authors report results from analyzing samples of water, bottom sediments, suspended solids, and fish that were collected at the Madeira River basin in Brazil, to document how the mercury from the gold mining is contaminating the aquatic environment.

David Carle offers a fascinating exploration of one more primary element of the natural world--the land beneath our feet. From earthworms and earthquakes to Earth Day, this concise, engaging guide is a multifaceted primer on the literal foundation of California's environment.

Dirt, soil, call it what you want--it's everywhere we go. It is the root of our existence, supporting our feet, our farms, our cities. This fascinating yet disquieting book finds, however, that we are running out of dirt, and it's no laughing matter. An engaging natural and cultural history of soil that sweeps from ancient civilizations to modern times,Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizationsexplores the compelling idea that we are--and have long been--using up Earth's soil. Once bare of protective vegetation and exposed to wind and rain, cultivated soils erode bit by bit, slowly enough to be ignored in a single lifetime but fast enough over centuries to limit the lifespan of civilizations. A rich mix of history, archaeology and geology,Dirttraces the role of soil use and abuse in the history of Mesopotamia, Ancient Greece, the Roman Empire, China, European colonialism, Central America, and the American push westward.

Mortimer invites readers on an eye-opening journey into the secret world of bees--and the singular world of his fellow bee-keepers. In connecting with a club of disparate but kindred spirits, he discovers the centuries-old history of the trade; the practicality of maintaining it; what bees see, think, and feel; how they talk to each other and socialize; and what can be done to combat their biggest threats, both human and mite.

An eye-opening investigation into forest migration past and present-and the people fighting to save its uncertain future. Forests are restless. Any time a tree dies or a new one sprouts, the forest that includes it has shifted. Today, however, an array of obstacles-humans felling trees by the billions, invasive pests transported through global trade-threaten to overwhelm these vital movements. Worst of all, the climate is changing faster than ever before, and forests are struggling to keep up. A deft blend of science reporting and travel writing, The Journeys of Trees examines the evolving movements of forests by focusing on five types of tree: giant sequoia, ash, black spruce, Florida torreya, and Monterey pine.

Are trees social beings? Forester and author Peter Wohlleben makes the case that, yes, the forest is a social network. He draws on groundbreaking scientific discoveries to describe how trees are like human families: tree parents live together with their children, communicate with them, support them as they grow, share nutrients with those who are sick or struggling, and even warn each other of impending dangers.

A leading medical ethnobotanist tells us the story of her quest to develop new ways to fight illness and disease through the healing powers of plants in this uplifting and adventure-filled memoir. Plants are the basis for an array of lifesaving and health-improving medicines we all now take for granted. Ever taken an aspirin? Thank a willow tree for that. What about life-saving medicines for malaria? Some of those are derived from cinchona and wormwood. In today's world of synthetic pharmaceuticals, scientists and laypeople alike have lost this connection to the natural world. But by ignoring the potential of medicinal plants, we are losing out on the opportunity to discover new life-saving medicines needed in the fight against the greatest medical challenge of this century: the rise of the post-antibiotic era.

An Indigenous environmental scientist breaks down why Western conservationism isn't working--and offers Indigenous models informed by case studies, historical overviews, and stories that center the voices of Latin American women and land protectors. Despite the fact that Indigenous communities are among the most affected by climate devastation, Indigenous science is nowhere to be found in mainstream environmental policy or discourse. And while holistic land, water, and forest management practices born from millennia of Indigenous knowledge systems have much to teach all of us, Indigenous science has long been ignored, otherized, or perceived as "soft" -- the product of a systematic, centuries-long campaign of racism, colonialism, and extractive capitalism. Jessica Hernandez--a Maya Ch'orti' and Zapotec environmental scientist and founder of environmental agency Piña Soul--introduces and contextualizes Indigenous environmental knowledge and proposes a vision of land stewardship that heals rather than displaces, that generates rather than destroys.

Say "algae" and most people think of pond scum. What they don't know is that without algae, none of us would exist. There are as many algae on Earth as stars in the universe, and they have been essential to life on our planet for eons. Algae created the Earth we know today, with its oxygen-rich atmosphere, abundant oceans, and coral reefs. Crude oil is made of dead algae, and algae are the ancestors of all plants. Today, seaweed production is a multi-billion dollar industry, with algae hard at work to make your sushi, chocolate milk, beer, paint, toothpaste, shampoo and so much more. In Slime we'll meet the algae innovators working toward a sustainable future: from seaweed farmers in South Korea, to scientists using it to clean the dead zones in our waterways, to the entrepreneurs fighting to bring algae fuel and plastics to market.

We always hear the same old green advice: fly less, turn the thermostat down, drive a hybrid car. But what about all the other things we buy and do? Part green-lifestyle guide, part popular science book, this books provides the facts we need to make carbon-savvy purchases and lifestyle decisions.

In the world today, we face considerable challenges, and while new ones pile on, the old standbys of fossil fuel overuse, greenhouse gas emissions, resource scarcity, food security, and weather and water extremes like droughts and floods remain. Fortunately, scientists are studying myriad ways human waste can help. Science journalist Lina Zeldovich argues in The Other Dark Matter that human excrement is a resource, cheap and widely available, that can be converted into a sustainable energy source, act as an organic fertilizer, provide effective medicinal therapy for resistant bacterial infection, and much more.

Draws on up-to-date science to outline specific steps that must be taken individually and collectively to mitigate, prevent and reverse catastrophic environmental damage.If climate change is the biggest threat humanity has ever faced, then why are we doing so little about it? And where do we go from here? Mommers describes how we got here, what possible futures await us, and how you can help make a difference. This updated translation includes responses to the COVID-19 pandemic.

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? 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 this book the author tells us why and how human beings have altered life on the planet in a way no species has before. She provides a moving account of the disappearances of various species occurring all around us and traces the evolution of extinction as concept, from its first articulation by Georges Cuvier in revolutionary Paris up to Lyell and Darwin, and through the present day. The sixth extinction is likely to be mankind's most lasting legacy, compelling us to rethink the fundamental question of what it means to be human.

Sometimes solving climate change seems impossibly complex, and it is hard to know what changes we all can and should make to help. This book offers hope. Drawing on the latest research, Mark Jaccard shows us how to recognize the absolutely essential actions (decarbonizing electricity and transport) and policies (regulations that phase out coal plants and gasoline vehicles, carbon tariffs). Rather than feeling paralyzed and pursuing ineffective efforts, we can all make a few key changes in our lifestyles to reduce emissions, to contribute to the urgently needed affordable energy transition in developed and developing countries.

From St. Louis to New Orleans, from Baltimore to Oklahoma City, there are poor and minority neighborhoods so beset by pollution that just living in them can be hazardous to your health. Due to entrenched segregation, zoning ordinances that privilege wealthier communities, or because businesses have found the 'paths of least resistance, ' there are many hazardous waste and toxic facilities in these communities, leading residents to experience health and wellness problems on top of the race and class discrimination most already experience.

The chemical pollution that irrevocably damages today's environment is, although many would like us to believe otherwise, the legacy of conscious choices made long ago. The Polluters reveals at last the crucial decisions that allowed environmental issues to be trumped by political agendas. It spotlights the leaders of the chemical industry and describes how they applied their economic and political power to prevent the creation of an effective system of environmental regulation.

From injuries caused by lead poisoning to the devastating effects of atmospheric pollution, infectious disease, and industrial waste, Americans of color are harmed by environmental hazards in staggeringly disproportionate numbers. This systemic onslaught of toxic exposure and institutional negligence causes irreparable physical harm to millions of people across the country--cutting lives tragically short and needlessly burdening our health care system. But these deadly environments create another insidious and often overlooked consequence: robbing communities of color, and America as a whole, of intellectual power.

As we become a more digital society, the gains that have been made for the environment by moving toward a paperless world with more and more efficient devices will soon be or already have been offset by the number of devices in our lives that are always using energy. But many don't think about the impact on the environment of the "Internet of things." Whether it's a microwave connected to the internet, use of Netflix, or online shopping, these technological advances have created new impacts that the people who are most well-versed in these issues haven't considered.

Buying Time applies lessons learned the hard way from the global economic crisis of the past decade, to offer an overview of the state of the environment and our energy future. Grounded in subtle thinking about complex systems, including the economy, energy, and the environment, this book underscores the connections linking them all. Kaz Makabe is a veteran financial systems expert who lived through the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster. He nevertheless concludes that nuclear energy is the bridge than can help us cross over the abyss we face

Erik Loomis-a historian of both the labor and environmental movements-follows the thread that runs from the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire in New York in 1911 to the collapse of the Rana Plaza factory building outside of Dhaka, Bangladesh, in 2013. The truth is that our systems of industrial production today are just as dirty and abusive as they were during the depths of the industrial revolution and the Gilded Age, but the ugly side of manufacturing is now hidden in faraway places where workers are most vulnerable.

From the front lines of the fracking debate, a "field philosopher" explores one of our most divisive technologies. When philosophy professor Adam Briggle moved to Denton, Texas, he had never heard of fracking. Less than three years later he would successfully lead a citizens' initiative to ban hydraulic fracturing in Denton--the first Texas town to challenge the oil and gas industry.

Wisconsin's rich tradition of sustainability rightfully includes its First Americans, who along with Aldo Leopold, John Muir, and Gaylord Nelson shaped its landscape and informed its "earth ethics" This collection of Native biographies, one from each of the twelve Indian nations of Wisconsin, introduces the reader to some of the most important figures in Native sustainability.

In How to Talk to a Science Denier, Lee McIntyre tells the story of his own adventures in talking face to face with science deniers and their victims--including a Flat Earth convention in Denver, coal miners in rural Pennsylvania, and fishermen in the Maldives--and what he learned from the experience

The World According to Monsanto charts award-winning journalist and documentary filmmaker Marie-Monique Robin’s three-year journey across four continents to uncover the disturbing practices of multinational agribusiness corporation Monsanto.

Investigative journalist Elizabeth Grossman opens the door on a new world of chemistry-green chemistry - and the scientists who are unearthing the field's potential to transform manufacturing with unprecedented benefits to the corporate bottom line and our health. She finds that a revolution is brewing, and its rallying call is "benign by design." These scientists are creating new, non-toxic materials that work with natural systems instead of disrupting them. Traveling the world to see this cutting-edge science at work, Grossman gives us a first look at the next "big idea" in industrial technology.

An expose of some of the more controversial agendas behind global warming argues that poor-quality science and dishonest politics are contributing to the intentionally disproportionate and self-serving levels of fear.

In this brilliant companion volume to Guns, Germs, and Steel, Diamond probes the other side of the equation: What caused some of the great civilizations of the past to collapse into ruin, and what can we learn from their fates? He weaves an all-encompassing global thesis through a series of fascinating historical-cultural narratives. Moving from the Polynesian cultures on Easter Island to the flourishing American civilizations of the Anasazi and the Maya and finally to the doomed Viking colony on Greenland, Diamond traces the fundamental pattern of catastrophe. Environmental damage, climate change, rapid population growth, and unwise political choices were all factors in the demise of these societies, but other societies found solutions and persisted.