Showing titles in Ecosystems & Habitats

An exploration of marine life and the ocean environment, this audiobook makes marine biology and oceanography accessible and enjoyable. Oceanology offers up riches from every corner of the ocean, from coral reefs and mangrove swamps to icy fjords and deep-ocean trenches, and from great whales to the microscopic beauty of plankton. Along the way, it explains how the ocean itself works, including tides, currents, hurricanes, tsunamis, and the global processes of oceanography and climate.

"Woodcraft" is a quite poetic guide to the wild by Nessmuk. Canoeing had been popularized by Scottish lawyer John MacGregor in the 1860s, but the typical canoe trip of the day employed expert guides and heavy canoes. Nessmuk, who was 1.60 m tall and 47 kg, had a 2.7 m long, 4.8 kg solo canoe. He named it the Sairy Gamp (the name of a Dickens character) and in it he completed a 428 km journey through the central Adirondacks. He was 62 years old and in frail health (tuberculosis and asthma) at the time.

If fresh water is to be treasured, the Great Lakes are the mother lode. No bodies of water can compare to them. One of them, Superior, is the largest lake on earth, and the five lakes together contain a fifth of the world's supply of standing fresh water. Their surface area of 95,000 square miles is greater than New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Vermont, New Hampshire, and Rhode Island combined. They are so vast that they dominate much of the geography, climate, and history of North America. In one way or another, they affect the lives of tens of millions.

Five oceans—the Atlantic, the Pacific, the Indian, the Arctic, and the Southern—cover approximately 70 percent of the earth. Yet we know little about what lies beneath them. By the early 2020s, less than twenty-five percent of the ocean’s floor has been charted, most close to shorelines, and over three quarters of the ocean lies in in what is called the Deep Sea, depths below a thousand meters.

I am floating in the middle of the night, and nobody in the world even knows I am missing. Nobody is looking for me. You can't get more alone than that. You can't be more lost. I've got too many people who love me. There's no way I'm dying like this. In the dead of night on July 24, 2013, John Aldridge was thrown off the back of the Anna Mary while his fishing partner, Anthony Sosinski, slept below. As desperate hours ticked by, Sosinski, the families, the local fishing community, and the US Coast Guard in three states mobilized in an unprecedented search effort.

National Geographic Ocean unveils the power and significance of our planet's watery essence: the fundamental importance of the ocean in shaping Earth's climate and chemistry, as well as its vital role in supporting a multitude of life-forms, including our own human race. World-renowned oceanographer Sylvia Earle guides listeners with her lyrical style and inspiring wisdom, describing the evolution, beauty, and impact of our ocean; the challenges it faces, such as climate change, plastic, and overfishing; and the myriad ways we can help protect it.

Some of the only truly feral cattle in the world wander a long-abandoned island off the northernmost tip of Scotland. A variety of wildlife not seen in many lifetimes has rebounded on the irradiated grounds of Chernobyl. A lush forest supports thousands of species that are extinct or endangered everywhere else on earth in the Korean peninsula's narrow DMZ.

In this abridgement of River-Horse, the pre-eminent chronicler of American back roads - who has given us the classics Blue Highways and Prairyerth - recounts his singular voyage through American waters from sea to sea. Along the route, he offers a lyrical and ceaselessly fascinating shipboard perspective on the country and its rivers, lakes, canals, and landscapes.

In The Big Melt, Rolling Stone contributing editor and leading environmental journalist Jeff Goodell takes the listener up close and personal to one of the world’s most remote locations—Western Antarctica—and to the foot of the staggeringly important Thwaites Glacier.

To catch a Florida Man, you have to become one, and that’s what Officer Jeff Babauta did. As his ponytailed, whiskey-soaked alter ego, he established Sunshine Alligator Farm. His goal? Infiltrate the shady world of illegal poachers in the Florida Everglades in order to protect the natural world. A head-spinning adventure soon unfolds.

A sweeping, interdisciplinary history of the world's third-largest river, a potent symbol across South Asia and the Hindu diaspora. Weaving together geography, environmental politics, and religious history, Sen offers a remarkable portrait of one of the world's largest and most densely populated river basins.

Few books have captured the haunting world of music and rivers and of the sport they provide as well as A River Never Sleeps. Roderick L. Haig-Brown writes of fishing not just as a sport, but also as an art. He knows moving water and the life within it - its subtlest mysteries and perpetual delights. He is a man who knows fish lore as few people ever will, and the legends and history of a great sport. Month by month, he takes you from river to river, down at last to the saltwater and the sea.

In The Three Ages of Water, Peter Gleick guides us through the long, fraught history of our relationship to this precious resource. Water has shaped civilizations and empires, and driven centuries of advances in science and technology—from agriculture to aqueducts, steam power to space exploration—and progress in health and medicine.

A quixotic journey through London's past, Mudlark plumbs the banks of the Thames to reveal the stories hidden behind the archaeological remnants of an ancient city. Long heralded as a city treasure herself, expert "mudlarker" Lara Maiklem is uniquely trained in the art of seeking. Tirelessly trekking across miles of the Thames' muddy shores, where others only see the detritus of city life, Maiklem unearths evidence of England's captivating, if sometimes murky, history - with some objects dating back to 43 AD, when London was but an outpost of the Roman Empire.

The Bears Ears National Monument in southeastern Utah, created by President Obama in 2016 and eviscerated by the Trump administration in 2017, contains more archaeological sites than any other region in the United States. In The Bears Ears, acclaimed adventure writer David Roberts takes listeners on a tour of his favorite place on Earth, as he unfolds the rich and contradictory human history of the 1.35 million acres of the Bears Ears domain. Weaving personal memoir with archival research, Roberts sings the praises of the outback he's explored for the last 25 years.

Ranging from prehistory to the 21st century, The Great Sea is above all the history of human interaction across a region that has brought together many of the great civilizations of antiquity as well as the rival empires of medieval and modern times.

A stunningly lyrical firsthand account of a life spent hunting, studying, and living alongside caribou, A Thousand Trails Home encompasses the historical past and present day, revealing the fragile intertwined lives of people and animals surviving on an uncertain landscape of cultural and climatic change sweeping the Alaskan Arctic. Author Seth Kantner vividly illuminates this critical story about the interconnectedness of the Iñupiat of Northwest Alaska, the Western Arctic caribou herd, and the larger Arctic region.

Fifty Years on the Trail is the true story of John Young Nelson (1826-1903), an early frontiersman, military scout, interpreter, guide, and saloon owner. Nelson ran away from home as a young teenager to adventure in the west. He worked on farms, served as a cabin boy on a Mississippi steamer, and became an apprentice with a group of traders traveling west from Missouri. After meeting a band of Sioux, he got himself adopted into the tribe, learned how to live off the land and became a Sioux warrior.

The stories we usually tell ourselves about climate change tend to focus on the damage inflicted on human societies by big storms, severe droughts, and rising sea levels. But the most powerful impacts are being and will be felt by the natural world and its myriad species, which are already in the midst of the sixth great extinction. Rising temperatures are fracturing ecosystems that took millions of years to evolve, disrupting the life forms they sustain--and in many cases driving them towards extinction. The natural Eden that humanity inherited is quickly slipping away.

At 28,251 feet, K2 might be almost 800 feet shorter than Everest, but it’s a far harder climb. It will kill you on the way up and the way down. Mick Conefrey guides us through the early story of the legendary mountain and the extraordinary attempts that led up to its first ascent in 1954 - these are tales of riveting drama and unimaginable tragedy.