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Over the last three million years or so, our lineage has diverged sharply from those of our great ape relatives. Change has been rapid (in evolutionary terms) and pervasive. In The Evolved Apprentice, Kim Sterelny argues that the divergence stems from the fact humans gradually came to enrich the learning environment of the next generation. He develops a new theory of the evolution of human cognition and human social life that emphasizes the gradual evolution of information-sharing practices across generations and how these practices transformed human minds and social lives.

Strategically situated at the gateway to the Mississippi River yet standing atop a former swamp, New Orleans was from the first what geographer Peirce Lewis called an "impossible but inevitable city". How New Orleans came to be, taking shape between the mutual and often contradictory forces of nature and urban development, is the subject of An Unnatural Metropolis.

In Losing Eden award-winning historian Sara Dant debunks the myth of the American West as “Eden” and instead embraces a more realistic and complex understanding of a region that has been inhabited and altered by people for tens of thousands of years. In this lively narrative Dant discusses the key events and topics in the environmental history of the American West, from the Beringia migration, Columbian Exchange, and federal territorial acquisition to post–World War II expansion, resource exploitation, and current climate change issues.

Listeners will go deep into a Vermont sugar bush and its web of plastic tubes, mainline valves, and collection tanks. They will visit sugarhouses crammed with gas evaporators and reverse-osmosis machines. And they will witness encounters between sugar makers and the tourists eager to invest Vermont with mythological fantasies of rural simplicity.

In Stolen Harvest: The Hijacking of the Global Food Supply, Vandana Shiva explores the devastating effects of commercial agriculture and genetic engineering on the food we eat, the farmers who grow it, and the soil that sustains it. This prescient critique and call to action covers some of the most pressing topics of this ongoing dialogue, from the destruction of local food cultures and the privatization of plant life, to unsustainable industrial fish farming and safety concerns about corporately engineered foods.

A critical examination of how inequality and cultural inertia hinder meaningful climate action. The challenges of climate change, like so many issues today, are not evenly distributed across social and economic lines. In this sobering exploration of the interconnected crises of climate change and social inequality, William M. Epstein examines how entrenched cultural values and systemic inequities thwart meaningful climate action, driving humanity closer to catastrophic consequences.

Theodore J. Karamanski's sweeping maritime history demonstrates the far-ranging impact that the tools and infrastructure developed for navigating the Great Lakes had on the national economies, politics, and environment of continental North America. Synthesizing popular as well as original historical scholarship, Karamanski weaves a colorful narrative illustrating how disparate private and government interests transformed these vast and dangerous waters into the largest inland water transportation system in the world.

The consequences of twenty-first-century sea level rise on the United States and its nearly 90,000 miles of shoreline will be immense: Miami and New Orleans will disappear; many nuclear and other power plants, hundreds of wastewater plants and toxic waste sites, and oil production facilities will be at risk; port infrastructures will need to be raised; and over ten million Americans fleeing rising seas will become climate refugees.

Life in Space explores the many aspects and outcomes of NASAs research in life sciences, a little-understood endeavor that has often been overlooked in histories of the space agency. Maura Mackowski details NASAs work in this field from spectacular promises made during the Reagan era to the major new directions set by George W. Bush's Vision for Space Exploration.

After decades of debate about global warming, the fact of the climate crisis is finally widely accepted. People at all scales—from the household to the global market—are attempting to govern climate to deal with its causes and impacts. Although the stakes are different now, governing climate is centuries old. In this book, Zeke Baker develops a genealogy of climate science that traces the relationship between those who have created knowledge of the climate and those who have attempted to gain power and govern society, right up to the present, historic moment.

The Revolutionary War is often celebrated as marking the birth of American republicanism, liberty, and representative democracy. Yet for the tens of thousands of British and Hessian troops sent 3,000 miles across the Atlantic Ocean to wage war under alien skies, such a progressive picture, as Vaughn Scribner reveals, could not have been further from the truth. In Under Alien Skies, Scribner illustrates how foreign soldiers' negative perceptions of the American environment merged with harsh wartime realities to elicit considerable physical, mental, and emotional anguish.

In The Hundred Years' Trial, Alexander and Harold Gouzoules explore the century-long impacts of the historic 1925 Scopes "Monkey Trial," starting with the development of evolutionary theory and charting the resulting cultural and legal conflicts over evolution in the United States. Through a blend of legal history, scientific exploration, and cultural analysis, the authors reexamine how this landmark trial remains a pivotal moment in shaping modern debates on science, religion, and education.

Women working in the sciences face obstacles at virtually every step along their career paths. From subtle slights to blatant biases, deep systemic problems block women from advancing or push them out of science and technology entirely. Women in Science Now examines solutions to this persistent gender gap, offering new perspectives on how to make science more equitable and inclusive for all.

Evocatively chronicled, Erickson tells what it is like trying to stop the unstoppable. Bad Smoke, Good Smoke gives voice to the particular pains that ranchers must face in our era of climate change and ever more powerful natural disasters.

During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Americans depended upon ice to stay cool and to keep their perishable foods fresh. Jonathan Rees tells the fascinating story of how people got ice before mechanical refrigeration came to the household. Drawing on newspapers, trade journals, and household advice books, Before the Refrigerator explains how Americans built a complex system to harvest, store, and transport ice to everyone who wanted it, even the very poor.

Dickson D. Despommier proposes a visionary yet achievable plan for creating a new, self-sustaining urban landscape. He argues that we can find solutions through the concept of biomimicry: emulating successful strategies found in nature. A better city is possible if we heed the lessons that forests and trees teach about how to store carbon, grow food, collect rainwater, and convert sunlight into energy.

Plants are commonly considered immobile, in contrast to humans and other animals. But vegetal existence involves many place-based forms of change: stems growing upward, roots spreading outward, fronds unfurling in response to sunlight, seeds traveling across wide distances, and other intricate relationships with the surrounding world. How do plants as sessile, growing, decaying, and metamorphosing beings shape the places they inhabit, and how are they shaped by them?

After a near-fatal stroke and a separation, amidst a global pandemic, Rick Van Noy decided to go for a paddle. In Borne by the River, he charts the story of discovery, and healing that came from this solo canoe journey. Paddling two hundred miles on the Delaware River to his boyhood home just upriver from Trenton, New Jersey, Van Noy contemplates his fate and life, as well as the simple joy of sitting in a small boat floating down a large river with his dog, Sully.

Humans and fungi share nearly 50 percent of the same DNA. Because we're related, designing drugs to combat the varieties that attack us is a challenge. Meanwhile, in an ever hotter, wetter world, fungi may be finding new ways to thrive, queueing up global outbreak potentials for which no vaccine and woefully few medications exist; some fungi are already beginning to resist treatment. Among other lifeforms, bats, amphibians, and essential crops are also increasingly threatened by these pathogens.

Serendipity tells the story of James Estes’s life as a naturalist and the concepts that have driven his interest in researching the ecological role of top-level predators. Using the relationships between sea otters, kelp, and sea urchins as a touchstone, Estes retraces his investigations of numerous other species, ecosystems, and ecological processes in an attempt to discover why ecologists can learn so many details about the systems in which they work and yet understand so little about the broader processes that influence these systems.