Showing results by publisher "Brilliance Audio" in Nature & Ecology

Dr. Carl Sagan takes us on a great adventure, offering his vivid and startling insight into the brain of man and beast, the origin of human intelligence, the function of our most haunting legends - and their amazing links to recent discoveries.

Scratch beneath the surface of a coffee bean, a red pepper flake, a poppy seed, a mold spore, a foxglove leaf, a magic-mushroom cap, a marijuana bud, or an apple seed, and we find a bevy of strange chemicals. We use these to greet our days (caffeine), titillate our tongues (capsaicin), recover from surgery (opioids), cure infections (penicillin), mend our hearts (digoxin), bend our minds (psilocybin), calm our nerves (CBD), and even kill our enemies (cyanide). But why do plants and fungi produce such chemicals? And how did we come to use and abuse some of them?

In Your Dog Is Your Mirror, dog trainer Kevin Behan proposes a radical new model for understanding canine behavior: a dog’s behavior and emotion, indeed its very cognition, are driven by our emotion. The dog doesn’t respond to its owner based on what the owner thinks, says, or does; it responds to what the owner feels. And in this way, dogs can actually put people back in touch with their own emotions.

The world's largest land mammal could help us end cancer. The fastest bird is showing us how to solve a century-old engineering mystery. The oldest tree is giving us insights into climate change. The loudest whale is offering clues about the impact of solar storms. For a long time, scientists ignored superlative life forms as outliers. Increasingly, though, researchers are coming to see great value in studying plants and animals that exist on the outermost edges of the bell curve.

A fantastic book! Timothy Egan describes his journeys in the Pacific Northwest through visits to salmon fisheries, redwood forests and the manicured English gardens of Vancouver. Here is a blend of history, anthropology and politics.

Carl Sagan, writer and scientist, returns from the frontier to tell us about how the world works. In his delightfully down-to-earth style, he explores and explains a mind-boggling future of intelligent robots, extraterrestrial life and its consequences, and other provocative, fascinating quandaries of the future that we want to see today.

From beloved, award-winning poet Aimee Nezhukumatathil comes a debut work of nonfiction - a collection of essays about the natural world, and the way its inhabitants can teach, support, and inspire us.

Ivory's Ghosts is the first comprehensive, contemporary look at the world's most treasured organic material, ivory. Using a wide range of historical and firsthand reportage, John Frederick Walker tells the astonishing and sometimes savage story of ivory's enormous impact on both human history and that of its most important source: the majestic African elephant.

Growing up in Alabama, Renkl was a devoted reader, an explorer of riverbeds and red-dirt roads, and a fiercely loved daughter. Here, in brief essays, she traces a tender and honest portrait of her complicated parents - her exuberant, creative mother; her steady, supportive father - and of the bittersweet moments that accompany a child’s transition to caregiver.

Author Mark Plotkin, chief ethnobotanist for Conservation International, has spent much of the past 15 years tracking the shamans of the northeast Amazon. Their knowledge of healing plants may hold the cure to some of today's most devastating diseases. This book is a critically acclaimed account of his apprenticeship to these powerful wise men, a gripping journey into a wild and wonderful world seldom glimpsed by outsiders.

Weathercaster “Nor’Easter" Nick Pittman tells his heartfelt story of learning to embrace the unpredictable and turn rainy days into opportunities.

Could humans unknowingly be a part of a larger superorganism—one with its own motivations and goals, one that is alive, and conscious, and has the power to shape the future of our species? This is the fascinating theory from author and futurist Byron Reese, who calls this human superorganism “Agora.” In We Are Agora, Reese starts by asking the question, “What is life and how did it form?” From there, he looks at how multicellular life came about, how consciousness emerged, and how other superorganisms in nature have formed.

For the past four years, Margaret Renkl’s columns have offered readers of The New York Times a weekly dose of natural beauty, human decency, and persistent hope from her home in Nashville. Now more than sixty of those pieces have been brought together in this sparkling new collection.

Atop a hill in the rainforest of Belize, next to the ruins of a fallen civilization, a butterfly farm raises the brilliant blue morpho. What starts out as the worst vacation ever turns into a quest to learn more about the first-of-its-kind farm when journalist Diana Marcum inadvertently discovers this wildlife sanctuary, which is supported by an international live-butterfly trade.

After a chance meeting in the pub, Roger Morgan-Grenville and his friend Duncan decide to take up beekeeping. Their enthusiasm matched only by their ignorance, they are pitched into an arcane world of unexpected challenges. Coping with many setbacks along the way, they manage to create a colony of beehives, finishing two years later with more honey than anyone knows what to do with. By standing back from their normal lives and working with the cycle of the seasons, they emerge with a new-found understanding of nature and a respect for the honeybee and the threats it faces.

Since its inception, however, America’s public land system has been embroiled in controversy - caught in the push and pull between the desire to develop the valuable resources the land holds or conserve them. Alarmed by rising tensions over the use of these lands, hunter, angler, and outdoor enthusiast Mark Kenyon set out to explore the spaces involved in this heated debate, and learn firsthand how they came to be and what their future might hold.

Many fantasize about dramatically changing their lives - living in accordance with their ideals rather than the exigencies of job, bills, and possessions. William Powers actually does it. Here, his family, with baby in tow, searches for balance, community, and happiness in a small town in Bolivia. They build an adobe house, plant a prolific orchard and organic garden, and weave their life into a community of permaculturists, bio-builders, artists, and creative businesspeople. Can this Transition Town succeed in the face of encroaching North American capitalism?

We should thank a pollinator at every meal. These diminutive creatures fertilize a third of the crops we eat. Yet half of the 2,000 species of pollinators are threatened. Birds, bats, insects, and many other pollinators are disappearing, putting our entire food supply in jeopardy. In North America and Europe, bee populations have already plummeted by more than a third and the population of butterflies has declined 31 percent. Protecting Pollinators explores why the statistics have become so dire and how they can be reversed.

Nature on the brink? Maybe not. With so much bad news in the world, we forget how much environmental progress has been made. In a narrative that reaches from Native American tribal practices to public health and commercial hunting, Wild at Heart shows how western attitudes towards nature have changed dramatically in the last five hundred years. Humans can learn from the past, and our choices today will determine whether nature survives.

Burned-out after years of doing development work around the world, William Powers spent a season in a 12-foot-by-12-foot cabin off the grid in North Carolina, as recounted in his award-winning memoir Twelve by Twelve. Could he live a similarly minimalist life in the heart of New York City? To find out, Powers and his wife jettisoned 80 percent of their stuff, left their 2,000-square-foot Queens townhouse, and moved into a 350-square-foot "micro-apartment" in Greenwich Village.