検索キーワード： "ライフ" 自然・生態学

This volume, aimed at the general audience, presents life and times of the amazing animals that inhabited Earth more than 500 million years ago. The Cambrian Period was a critical time in Earth's history. During this immense span of time nearly every modern group of animals appeared. Although life had been around for more than 2 million millennia, Cambrian rocks preserve the record of the first appearance of complex animals with eyes, protective skeletons, antennae, and complex ecologies.

There are few stories more remarkable than the evolution of life on earth. Where did humans come from? Where did life come from? New fields of study, such as molecular biology and astrobiology, are shedding remarkable new light on the origin of life and the origin of sex. In this Very Short...

Fungi can appear anywhere, from desert dunes to frozen tundra. They can invade our bodies and live between our toes or our floorboards. They are unwelcome intruders or vastly expensive treats, and symbols of both death and eternal life. But despite their familiar presence, there’s still much to learn about the eruption, growth, and decay of their secret interconnected world. From fields, feasts, and fairy rings to death caps, puffballs, and ambrosia beetles, this is an intoxicating journey into the life of an extraordinary organism, one that we have barely begun to understand. 

An ambitious account of the evolution and biology of insects. Insects are the most successful group of animals ever to have lived. They comprise a million species and perhaps 10 quintillion individuals: one in every four animals on the planet is a beetle; one in every ten is a butterfly or moth...

On 11 March 2011, a massive earthquake sent a 120-foot-high tsunami smashing into the coast of Northeast Japan. By the time the sea retreated, more than 18,000 people had been crushed, burned to death, or drowned. It was Japan's greatest single loss of life since the atomic bombing of Nagasaki. It set off a national crisis and the meltdown of a nuclear power plant. And even after the immediate emergency had abated, the trauma of the disaster continued to express itself in bizarre and mysterious ways.

環境への罪悪感を手放し、無理のないサステナビリティとエコな暮らしを叶えるための、前向きで心地よいライフスタイル・ガイド。通勤中の満員電車や、リラックスした休日の家事の合間に耳を傾けるだけで、日々の小...

This one-volume edition of Living the Good Life and Continuing the Good Life brings these classics on rural homesteading together. This couple abandoned the city for a rural life with minimal cash and the knowledge of self-reliance and good health.

What is life? Many scientists believe life can be reduced to ‘mechanistic’ factors, such as genes and information codes. Yet there is a growing army of scientists, philosophers and artists who reject this view. The gene metaphor is not only too simplistic but deeply misleading. If there is a way to reduce life to a single principle, that principle must acknowledge the creativity of life, turning genetic determinism on its head.

In this New York Times best seller, a naturalist probes the forest to comprehend the secret lives of owls. Leigh Calvez takes listeners on an adventure into the world of owls: owl-watching, avian science, and the deep forest - often in the dead of night. These birds are a bit mysterious, and that's part of what makes them so fascinating.

Thoreau's classic account of the solitary life, describing his attempts to simplify his life and sort out his priorities by living alone in a cabin beside Walden Pond for nearly two years, is one of the most influential books ever written. The bible of the environmental movement, Walden vividly portrays Thoreau's reverence for nature, and his understanding of the idea that nature is made up of crucially interrelated parts.

Rivers, on a long view, are alive. They are born; they change; they shift their channels; they forge new routes to the sea; they move both gradually and violently; they can teem (usually) with life; they may die a quasi-natural death; they are frequently maimed and even murdered. It is the annual flood pulse—the brief time when the river occupies the floodplain—that gives a river its vitality, but it is human engineering that kills it, suppressing the flood pulse with dams, irrigation, siltation, dikes, and levees.

The water coming out of your tap is four billion years old and might have been slurped by a Tyrannosaurus Rex. We will always have exactly as much water on Earth as we have ever had. Water cannot be destroyed, and it can always be made clean enough for drinking again. In fact, water can be made so clean that it actually becomes toxic. As Charles Fishman brings vibrantly to life in this delightful narrative excursion, water runs our world in a host of awe-inspiring ways, which is both the promise and the peril of our unexplored connections to it.

When we think of animals that provide the greatest insights into animal cognition and behavior, primates and honeybees come to mind, or perhaps whales or octopus. What about the raccoons that plunder our rubbish at night, or the coyotes that threaten pets and livestock, or the gulls that divebomb for snacks at the beach? Outsider Animals challenges everything you thought you knew about the overlooked animals that live in proximity to humans, sharing the stories that each has to tell about adaptation and cohabitation on our increasingly crowded planet.

Being a game warden in Maine is not just a job, it’s a way of life. This honest and entertaining book by a twenty-two-year veteran of the service tells the story of America’s oldest game warden service. The stories told cover the risks wardens face dealing with poachers, rogue wildlife, and...

The problem of agriculture is as old as civilization. Throughout history, great societies that abused their land withered into poverty or disappeared entirely. Now we risk repeating this ancient story on a global scale due to ongoing soil degradation, a changing climate, and a rising population. But there is reason for hope. David R. Montgomery introduces us to farmers around the world at the heart of a brewing soil health revolution that could bring humanity's ailing soil back to life remarkably fast.

What remains when the screens go dark, the noise fades, and the illusions of time and status crumble? In a world obsessed with material goods and digital distractions, we have forgotten the most vital question: Who are we without our inventions?

Noted transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau spent two years, two months, and two days chronicling his near-isolation in the small cabin he built in the woods near Walden Pond on land owned by his mentor, the father of Transcendentalism, Ralph Waldo Emerson. Immersing himself in nature and solitude, Thoreau sought to develop a greater understanding of society amidst a life of self-reliance and simplicity. Originally published in 1854, Walden remains one of the most celebrated works in American literature.

Called "one of the greatest men alive" by the Times of London, E. O. Wilson proposes an historic partnership between scientists and religious leaders to preserve Earth's rapidly vanishing biodiversity. 

How does life work? How does nature produce the right numbers of zebras and lions on the African savanna, or fish in the ocean? How do our bodies produce the right numbers of cells in our organs and bloodstream? In The Serengeti Rules, award-winning biologist and author Sean B. Carroll tells the stories of the pioneering scientists who sought the answers to such simple yet profoundly important questions.

Stany Nyandwi’s gift for communicating with chimpanzees is so special that world-renowned primatologist Dr. Jane Goodall has called him a “chimpanzee whisperer.” His skills and devotion to these creatures—our closest living relatives, with whom we share 98.7 percent of our DNA—have earned him international awards and sent him on travels within Africa and around the world. But he began life in poverty, born and raised in a dirt-floor, straw-roofed hut in rural Burundi. The Chimpanzee Whisperer is the story of his astonishing life journey.