This history of Yosemite follows it as the seat of controversy affecting the evolution of national parks, from its path-breaking establishment in 1864 as a grant to California, 1890 expansion into a national park, boundary reductions and loss of the Hetch Hetchy Valley, evolution of wildlife science, management practices threatening Yosemite Valley, and erosion of wilderness to the present day. ...
Climate change is the most important crisis humanity has faced, but we still confront huge barriers to resolving it. So, what do we do, and is there hope for humanity? The problem itself is complex, and there’s no single solution. But by understanding the barriers to resolving global warming and by employing a wide range of solutions—from shifting to clean energy to planting trees to reforming agricultural practices—w ...
The biggest challenges facing human wellbeing today are widening income inequality, continuing global poverty, and environmental degradation. Luckily, these problems are simple to solve — in theory.In practice, however, they are much harder to solve, because we are required to come up with solutions that are acceptable to a political majority in the rich world. Most of the commonly proposed “solutions” are simply not ...
In The Great Soul of Siberia, renowned tiger researcher Sooyong Park tracks three generations of Siberian tigers living in remote southeastern Russia. Reminiscent of the way Timothy Treadwell (the so-called Grizzly Man) immersed himself in the lives of bears, Park sets up underground bunkers to observe the tigers, living thrillingly close to these beautiful but dangerous apex predators. At the same time, he draws from twenty years of experience ...
In 1972, The Limits to Growth introduced the idea that world resources are limited. Soon after, people became aware of the threats to the world’s rainforests, the biggest terrestrial repositories of biodiversity and essential regulators of global air and water cycles. Since that time, new research and technological advances have greatly increased our knowledge of how rainforests are being affected by changing patterns of resource use. ...
Where do camels belong? In the Arab world is the obvious answer. But they are relative newcomers there. They evolved and lived for tens of millions of years in North America, while today they retain their greatest diversity in South America and have their only wild populations in Australia. This is a classic example of the problems that underlie the issues of natural and invasive species, a hot issue right now, as the flip side of biodiversity. ...
We’ve all heard the risk factors for cardiovascular disease: high blood pressure, high cholesterol, obesity, smoking, stress, and a sedentary lifestyle. But what about our environment? Despite almost 500 recent studies that show the links between air and water quality, biodiversity, and heart health, a poor environment as a critical cardiovascular risk factor has largely been ignored. In Planet Heart, cardiologist François Ree ...
Bill Bryson meets John Vaillant in this life list quest to see the rarest species in North America.Crammed into a minivan with wife, toddler, infant, and dog, accompanied by mounds of toys, diapers, tent, sleeping bags, and other paraphernalia, Cameron MacDonald embarks on a road trip of a lifetime to observe North America's rarest species. In California, the family camps in the brutally hot Mojave, where he observes a desert tortoise&# ...
