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Are plants intelligent? Can they solve problems, communicate, and navigate their surroundings? Or are they passive, incapable of independent action or social behavior? Philosophers and scientists have pondered these questions since ancient Greece, most often concluding that plants are unthinking and inert: they are too silent, too sedentary - just too different from us. Yet discoveries over the past 50 years have challenged these ideas, shedding new light on the extraordinary capabilities and complex interior lives of plants.

In Slime we'll meet the algae innovators working toward a sustainable future: from seaweed farmers in South Korea, to scientists using it to clean the dead zones in our waterways, to the entrepreneurs fighting to bring algae fuel and plastics to market. Ruth Kassinger takes listeners on an around-the-world, behind-the-scenes, and into-the-kitchen tour. Whether you thought algae was just the gunk in your fish tank or you eat seaweed with your oatmeal, Slime will delight and amaze with its stories of the good, the bad, and the up-and-coming.

An enchanting biography of the most resonant - and most necessary - chemical element on Earth. Carbon. It's in the fibers in your hair, the timbers in your walls, the food that you eat, and the air that you breathe. It's worth billions as a luxury and half a trillion as a necessity, but there are still mysteries yet to be solved about the element that can be both diamond and coal. Where does it come from, what does it do, and why, above all, does life need it?

After 1991, international organizations from the Red Cross to Greenpeace sought to help the victims, yet found themselves stymied by post-Soviet political circumstances they did not understand. International diplomats and scientists allied to the nuclear industry evaded or denied the fact of a wide-scale public health disaster caused by radiation exposure. Efforts to spin the story about Chernobyl were largely successful; the official death toll ranges between 31 and 54 people. In reality, radiation exposure from the disaster caused between 35,000 and 150,000 deaths in Ukraine alone.

In these 24 lectures, The Great Courses teams up with the Smithsonian’s National Zoo and Conservation Biology Institute, to take you behind the scenes of the animal world. Dr. Moore has crafted a wonderful introduction to zoology that brings you up close and personal with a breathtaking variety of animal species through the eyes of a trained zoologist.

More than a practical guide, Start Your Farm is a hopeful call to action for anyone who aspires to grow wholesome, environmentally sustainable food for a living. Take it from Forrest Pritchard and Ellen Polishuk: Making this dream a reality is not for the faint of heart, but it's well within reach - and there's no greater satisfaction under the sun.

In this Very Short Introduction audiobook, Jan Zalasiewicz gives a brief introduction to the fascinating field of geology. Describing how the science developed from its early beginnings, he looks at some of the key discoveries that have transformed it before delving into its various subfields, such as sedimentology, tectonics, and stratigraphy.

Increasingly, cracks are appearing in the capacity of communities, ecosystems, and landscapes to provide the goods and services that sustain our planet's well-being. The response from most quarters has been for "more of the same" that created the situation in the first place: more control, more intensification, and greater efficiency. "Resilience thinking" offers a different way of understanding the world and a new approach to managing resources. It embraces human and natural systems as complex entities continually adapting through cycles of change.

In A World of Three Zeros, Yunus describes the new civilization emerging from the economic experiments his work has helped to inspire. He explains how global companies like McCain, Renault, Essilor, and Danone got involved with this new economic model through their own social action groups, describes the ingenious new financial tools now funding social businesses, and sketches the legal and regulatory changes needed to jumpstart the next wave of socially driven innovations.

The burning of fossil fuels releases carbon dioxide (CO2), and these CO2 emissions are a major driver of climate change. Carbon capture offers a path to climate change mitigation that has received relatively little attention. In this volume in the MIT Press Essential Knowledge series, Howard Herzog offers a concise guide to carbon capture, covering basic information as well as the larger context of climate technology and policy.

Chocolate is the center of a massive global industry worth billions of dollars annually, yet its future in our modern world is currently under threat. In Chocolate Crisis, Dale Walters discusses the problems posed by plant diseases, pests, and climate change, looking at what these mean for the survival of the cacao tree. Walters takes listeners to the origins of the cacao tree in the Amazon basin of South America, describing how ancient cultures used the beans produced by the plant, and follows the rise of chocolate as an international commodity over many centuries.

John Muir was an early proponent of a view we still hold today—that much of California was pristine, untouched wilderness before the arrival of Europeans. But as this book demonstrates, what Muir was really seeing when he admired the grand vistas of Yosemite and the gold and purple flowers carpeting the Central Valley were the fertile gardens of the Sierra Miwok and Valley Yokuts Indians, modified and made productive by centuries of harvesting, tilling, sowing, pruning, and burning.

An energizing case for hope about the climate comes from Rebecca Solnit, called “the voice of the resistance” by the New York Times, and climate activist Thelma Young Lutunatabua, along with a chorus of voices calling on us to rise to the moment. Not Too Late is the book for anyone who is despondent, defeatist, or unsure about climate change and seeking answers. As the contributors to this volume make clear, the future will be decided by whether we act in the present—and we must act to counter institutional inertia, fossil fuel interests, and political obduracy. T

In a world of mass consumption and busy schedules, taking the time to understand our own trash habits can be daunting. In Trash Talk, the ever-curious and talented Iris Gottlieb pulls back the curtain on the intricacies of the global trash production system and its contribution to climate change. From the history of the mafia’s rule of the New York sanitation system to orbital debris (space trash) to the myth of recycling, Gottlieb will help listeners see trash in a whole new way.

As climate change has escalated into a crisis, the reuse of existing structures is the only way to even begin to preserve our wood, sand, silicon, and iron, let alone stop belching carbon monoxide into the air. Our housing crisis means that we need usable buildings now more than ever, but architect and critic Aaron Betsky shows that new construction—often seeking to maximize profits rather than resources, often soulless in its feel—is not the answer.

The Sustainable Development Goals, adopted by the United Nations in 2015, comprise an ambitious and sweeping agenda that unites economic, social, and environmental aims. What resources do the world's religious and secular traditions offer in support of these objectives? Which principles do these traditions hold in common? This book presents an in-depth and deeply engaged conversation among interfaith religious leaders and interdisciplinary scholars and practitioners in pursuit of an ethical consensus that could ground sustainable development efforts.

For more than fifty years, we have been waging, but not winning, the war on cancer. The astonishing news is that up to two-thirds of all cancer cases are linked to preventable environmental causes. If we can stop cancer before it begins, why don't we? That was the question that motivated Kristina Marusic's revelatory inquiry into cancer prevention. They recognize that we will never reduce cancer rates without ridding our lives of the chemicals that increasingly trigger this deadly disease.

Discover wisdom and guidance to face the climate emergency from the most influential environmental and spiritual leaders of our time, including the Dalai Lama, Greta Thunberg, Joanna Macy, Vandana Shiva, Paul Hawken, Katharine Hayhoe, and Matthieu Ricard. A Future We Can Love inspires each of us to rise to the occasion to ensure a brighter future for generations to come.

In May 2016, Fort McMurray, Alberta, the hub of Canada's oil industry, was overrun by wildfire. The multi-billion-dollar disaster turned entire neighbourhoods into firebombs and drove 90,000 people from their homes in a single afternoon. Through the story of this apocalyptic conflagration, John Vaillant explores the past and the future of our ever-hotter, more flammable world.

In Wasteland, journalist Oliver Franklin-Wallis takes us on a shocking journey inside the waste industry—the secretive multi-billion dollar world that underpins the modern economy, quietly profiting from what we leave behind.