検索キーワード： 自然・生態学

Anna Blix takes the listener on a personal, investigative, and deeply fascinating journey through each of the 40 weeks in a human pregnancy. Parallelly, for each week, we meet other creatures who have just delivered their next generation into the world. The bacteria E. coli has multiplied by two within 20 minutes. An Eastern grey kangaroo is pregnant for just 5 weeks before giving birth to a baby the size of a bean, which then crawls into its pouch to grow.

Carbon dioxide. This seemingly simple and ubiquitous substance is fundamental to how our planet works. All life is made from CO2 and its behavior on this planet has kept it bizarrely habitable for hundreds of millions of years. In its workings lie both the splendor of our world—and the potential for life’s destruction. In short, it is the most important substance in Earth’s history.

Riley Black brings listeners back in time to prehistoric seas, swamps, forests, and savannas where critical moments in plant evolution unfolded. Each chapter stars plants and animals alike, underscoring how the interactions between species have helped shape the world we call home. As the chapters move upwards in time, Black guides listeners along the burgeoning trunk of the Tree of Life, stopping to appreciate branches of an evolutionary story that links the world we know with one we can only just perceive now through the silent stone, from ancient roots to the present.

The North Pole looms large in our collective psyche as the ultimate Otherland in a world otherwise fully mapped and traversed. Erling Kagge and his friend Børge Ousland became the first people “to ever reach the pole without dogs, without depots and without motorized aids,” skiing for 58 days from a drop off point on the ice edge of Canada’s northernmost island. With magnificent prose, Erling takes us along for his historical journey, examining the psychological motivations for going on this epic expedition.

Ever since the Greek and Roman historians speculated on the seemingly ever-growing violence and greed of the world, metal has been to blame. We have gone from a “golden age” of peace and shared plenty, to an “iron age of bloodshed and conquest”—and beyond. Today, according to geologist Shefa Siegel, we are threatened not by metal, but by its absence. Metal that once lay close enough to the surface of the earth so that primitive miners could more or less chip off what they needed is now so scarce that entire landscapes are pulverized to extract a fine dust of precious, powdered ore.

Wit’s End isn’t just a state of mind. It’s an address, for a run-down off-the-grid cabin, 120 shabby square feet of fixer-upper Patrick Hutchison purchased on a whim in the mossy woods of the Cascade Mountains in Washington state. To say Hutchison didn’t know what he was getting into is no more an exaggeration than to say he’s a man with nearly zero carpentry skills. Well, used to be. You can learn a lot over 7 years of renovations.

The eldest son of a master woodworker, Callum Robinson spent his childhood surrounded by wood and trees, absorbing craft lessons in his father’s workshop. In time he became his father’s apprentice, helping to create exquisite bespoke objects. But eventually the need to find his own path led him to establish his own workshop and chase ever bigger and more commercial projects, until the devastating loss of one major job threatened to bring it all crashing down.

As Indigenous scientist and author of Braiding Sweetgrass Robin Wall Kimmerer harvests serviceberries alongside the birds, she considers the ethic of reciprocity that lies at the heart of the gift economy. How, she asks, can we learn from Indigenous wisdom and the plant world to reimagine what we value most? Our economy is rooted in scarcity, competition, and the hoarding of resources, and we have surrendered our values to a system that actively harms what we love. Meanwhile, the serviceberry’s relationship with the natural world is an embodiment of reciprocity.

In Power Metal, journalist and author Vince Beiser explores the Achilles’ heel of green power and digital technology: that the manufacturing of our computers, cell phones, electric cars, solar panels, and wind turbines requires enormous amounts of increasingly rare materials—lithium, cobalt, copper, and others—the demand for which is skyrocketing. Around the world, businesses and governments are scrambling for new places and new ways to get those metals, at enormous cost to people and the planet.

In Hungry Beautiful Animals, philosopher Matthew C. Halteman shows us how—despite all the forces arrayed against going vegan—we can create an abundant life for everyone without using animals for food. It might seem that moral rectitude or environmental judgement should do the trick, but they can’t. Going vegan must be about flourishing, for all life. Shame and blame don’t lead to flourishing. We must do it with joy instead.

Consider the seahorse: couples mate for life and meet each morning for a dance, pirouetting and changing colors before going their separate ways, to dance again the next day. The American wood frog survives winter by allowing itself to freeze solid, its heartbeat slowing until it stops altogether. Come spring, the heart kick-starts itself spontaneously back to life. As for the lemur, it lives in matriarchal troops led by an alpha female (it’s not unusual for female ring-tailed lemurs to slap males across the face when they become aggressive).

The Lost World of the Dinosaurs has descriptive copy which is not yet available from the Publisher.

In this short, delightful book, Sy takes us inside the flock and reveals all the things that make chickens such remarkable creatures: only hours after leaving the egg, they are able to walk, run, and peck; relationships are important to them and the average chicken can recognize more than one hundred other chickens; they remember the past and anticipate the future; and they communicate specific information through at least twenty-four distinct calls.

Betsky shows us contemporary imaginative reuse throughout the world: the Mexican housing authority transforming concrete slums into well-serviced apartments; the MassMOCA museum, built out of old textile mills; the squatted city of Christiana in Copenhagen, fashioned from an old army base; Project Heidelberg in Detroit. All point towards a new circular economy of reuse, built from the ashes of the capitalist economy of consumption.

In 2019, Tony Putman was working as a gardener in Edenbridge, Kent, when he noticed a bold robin sitting on a branch of an old plum tree. The robin glanced in his direction as he approached, but he didn't move, so Tony grabbed his camera and took a photo. This would be the first of hundreds of photos that Tony would take of Bob the robin - and the start of an extraordinary friendship that would last for years.

Award-winning environmentalist, author, and journalist Bill McKibben selects twenty science and nature essays that represent the best examples of the form published in the previous year.

From a much-loved expert and popular science writer comes this straight-from-the-trenches report on how and why folks from all walks of life are using magic mushrooms to enhance their lives.

One afternoon many years ago, James Rebanks met an old woman on a remote Norwegian island. She lived and worked alone on a tiny rocky outcrop, caring for wild Eider ducks and gathering their down. Hers was a centuries-old trade that had once made men and women rich, but had long been in decline. Still, somehow, she seemed to be hanging on. Back at home, Rebanks couldn’t stop thinking about the woman on the rocks. She was fierce and otherworldly – and yet strangely familiar. Years passed. Then, one day, he wrote her a letter, asking if he could return.

Forty years ago, author and photographer Jon Waterman took his first paddling journey into the Noatak headwaters in the Alaskan Arctic. In this fully illustrated book, he ventures once again, this time “into the thaw,” documenting the changes – both environmental and cultural – wrought by climate change. Sharing this eye-opening adventure with his son, Waterman documents the effects on altered land, wildlife and the Inuit-Inupiat life.

In Insect Epiphany, author Barrett Klein shares his expert insights into the outsize influence that insects have had on civilization. Our world would look very different without insects, not just because they are part of the food chain, but because they have inspired so many aspects of our cultural output.