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Over the last half billion years, there have been five major mass extinctions, when the diversity of life on Earth suddenly and dramatically contracted. Scientists are currently monitoring the sixth extinction, predicted to be the most devastating since the asteroid impact that wiped out the dinosaurs. This time around the cataclysm is us. In this book the author tells us why and how human beings have altered life on the planet in a way no species...
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"The Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Sixth Extinction returns to humanity's transformative impact on the environment, now asking: After doing so much damage, can we change nature, this time to save it? That man should have dominion 'over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth' is a prophecy that has hardened into fact. So pervasive are human impacts on the planet that it's said we live in a new geological epoch:...
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Extend the human story backward for the five thousand years of recorded history and it covers no more than a millionth of a lifetime of the Earth. Yet how do we humans take stock of the history of our planet, and our own place within it? Big History interweaves different disciplines of knowledge to offer an all-encompassing account of history on Earth. Since its publication, Cynthia Brown's work has been translated into nine languages and has helped...
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Dedham's National Native American Heritage Month List
Dedham's Summer Reading Weeks Three & Four
Medfield Eco-Centric Book Club Picks
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Dedham's Summer Reading Weeks Three & Four
Medfield Eco-Centric Book Club Picks
More Lists...
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"As a botanist, Robin Wall Kimmerer has been trained to ask questions of nature with the tools of science. As a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, she embraces the notion that plants and animals are our oldest teachers. In Braiding Sweetgrass, Kimmerer brings these two lenses of knowledge together to take us on "a journey that is every bit as mythic as it is scientific, as sacred as it is historical, as clever as it is wise.""--
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In this book, world-renowned marine ecologist Enric Sala illuminates the many reasons why preserving Earth's biodiversity makes logical, emotional, and economic sense. Using key moments from his own scientific awakening, Sala reveals that our survival depends on all species. The natural world, he explains, is a perfect circular economy, where every species, in life and in death, sustains everything else. Sala also builds a cogent argument for the...
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Thirty years ago Bill McKibben offered one of the earliest warnings about climate change. Now he broadens the warning: the entire human game, he suggests, has begun to play itself out. Bill McKibben's groundbreaking book The End of Nature -- issued in dozens of languages and long regarded as a classic -- was the first book to alert us to global warming. But the danger is broader than that: even as climate change shrinks the space where our civilization...
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"Douglas W. Tallamy's first book, Bringing Nature Home, awakened thousands of readers to an urgent situation: wildlife populations are in decline because the native plants they depend on are fast disappearing. His solution? Plant more natives. In this new book, Tallamy takes the next step and outlines his vision for a grassroots approach to conservation. Nature's Best Hope shows how homeowners everywhere can turn their yards into conservation corridors...
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"...a daring call to action that details how the future of human civilization is under threat--and offers concrete advice for making your voice heard in the fight to solve the climate crisis at a moment when the solutions we need are emerging around the world."--Page 4 of cover.
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"Artist, technologist, and philosopher James Bridle's Ways of Being is a brilliant, searching exploration of different kinds of intelligence--plant, animal, human, artificial--and how they transform our understanding of humans' place in the cosmos"--
What does it mean to be intelligent? Is it something unique to humans, or shared with other beings--beings of flesh, wood, stone, and silicon? The last few years have seen rapid advances in "artificial"...
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W. W. Norton & Company
Pub. Date
2021.
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English
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"An unprecedented portrait of the hidden patterns in human society-visualized through the world of data. Award-winning geographer-designer team James Cheshire and Oliver Uberti transform enormous datasets into rich maps and cutting-edge visualizations. In this triumph of visual storytelling, they uncover truths about our past, reveal who we are today, and highlight what we face in the years ahead. With their joyfully inquisitive approach, Cheshire...
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2021.
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"Vaclav Smil's mission is to make facts matter. An environmental scientist, policy analyst, and a hugely prolific author, he is Bill Gates' go-to guy for making sense of our world. In Numbers Don't Lie, Smil answers questions such as: What's worse for the environment--your car or your phone? How much do the world's cows weigh (and what does it matter)? And what makes people happy?"--
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Why did Eurasians conquer, displace, or decimate Native Americans, Australians, and Africans, instead of the reverse? In this groundbreaking book, evolutionary biologist Jared Diamond stunningly dismantles racially based theories of human history by revealing the environmental factors actually responsible for history's broadest patterns. Here, at last, is a world history that really is a history of all the world's peoples, a unified narrative of human...
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"An award-winning astronomer and physicist's spellbinding and urgent call for a new Enlightenment and the recognition of the preciousness of life using reason and curiosity--the foundations of science--to study, nurture, and ultimately preserve humanity as we face the existential crisis of climate change"--
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This profound and accessible book details how science is studying nature's best ideas to solve our toughest 21st-century problems.
If chaos theory transformed our view of the universe, biomimicry is transforming our life on Earth. Biomimicry is innovation inspired by nature - taking advantage of evolution's 3.8 billion years of R&D since the first bacteria. Biomimics study nature's best ideas: photosynthesis, brain power, and shells - and adapt...
18) Ishmael
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Series
Ishmael trilogy volume 1
Language
English
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One of the most beloved and bestselling novels of spiritual adventure ever published, Ishmael has earned a passionate following. This special twenty-fifth anniversary edition features a new foreword and afterword by the author.
“A thoughtful, fearlessly low-key novel about the role of our species on the planet . . . laid out for us with an originality and a clarity that few would deny.”—The New...
“A thoughtful, fearlessly low-key novel about the role of our species on the planet . . . laid out for us with an originality and a clarity that few would deny.”—The New...
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In this brave and provocative work, former US Vice President, Al Gore asserts that only a radical rethinking of our relationship with nature will save the earth's ecology for future generations. Gore's analysis of where we've gone wrong ranges across politics, history, science, economics, psychology, and religion. He argues that only a worldwide mobilization can save us from disaster and presents a brilliant and comprehensive plan for action that...
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