A Passion For Nature

A definitive biography traces the life of John Muir from his boyhood in Scotland up to his death on the eve of World War I and offers important insights into the passionate nature of America's first great conservationist and founder of the Sierra Club.

David Suzuki's lifelong work as an environmentalist, naturalist, and scientist have influenced countless others in their fight to save the planet, 20 such devotees of them have contributed to this inspiring collection. These journalists, scientists, writers and environmentalists have taken their enthusiasm for Suzuki's philosophy and funneled it into their own personal recollections, manifestos, and essays: Rick Bass describes his love for the Yaak Valley in Montana; Richard Mabey takes readers to a moonlit May evening in Suffolk; David Helvarg tells us of a stirring seaside memory from his childhood. No matter what journey these writers take us on, the unifying theme of their work is always the same: a deep and abiding love of nature — inspired and shared by David Suzuki.

A Passion for Wildlife chronicles the history of the Canadian Wildlife Service and the evolution of Canadian wildlife policy over its first half century. It presents the exploits and accomplishments of a group of men and women whose dedication to the ideals of science, conservation, and a shared vision of Canada as a country that treasures its natural heritage has earned them the respect of their profession around the world.

Notwithstanding the importance of modern technology, fieldwork remains vital, not least through helping to inspire and educate the next generation. Fieldwork has the ingredients of intellectual curiosity, passion, rigour and engagement with the outdoor world - to name just a few. You may be simply noting what you see around you, making detailed records, or carrying out an experiment; all of this and much more amounts to fieldwork. Being curious, you think about the world around you, and through patient observation develop and test ideas. Forty contributors capture the excitement and importance of fieldwork through a wide variety of examples, from urban graffiti to the Great Barrier Reef. Outdoor learning is for life: people have the greatest respect and care for their world when they have first-hand experience of it. The Editors are donating all royalties due to them to the environmental charity, The Field Studies Council, to support student fieldwork at the Council's field centres.

Nineteenth-century Americans celebrated nature through many artistic forms, including natural-history writing, landscape painting, landscape design theory, and transcendental philosophy. Although we tend to associate these movements with the nation’s dawning environmental consciousness, Passions for Nature demonstrates that they instead alienated Americans from the physical environment even as they seemed to draw people to it. Rather than see these expressions of passion for nature as initiating environmental awareness, this study reveals how they contributed to a culture that remains startlingly ignorant of the details of the material world. Using as a touchstone the writings of nineteenth-century philanthropist Susan Fenimore Cooper (the daughter of famed author James Fenimore Cooper), Passions for Nature reveals that while a generalized passion for nature was intense and widespread in her era, cultural attention to the "real" physical world was quite limited. Popular artistic forms represented the natural world through specific metaphors for the American experience, cultivating a national tradition of valuing nature in terms of humanity. Johnson crosses disciplinary boundaries to demonstrate that anthropocentric understandings of the natural world result not only from the growing gulf between science and imagination that C. P. Snow located in the early twentieth century but also--and surprisingly--from cultural productions traditionally viewed as positive engagements with the environment. By uncovering the roots of a cultural alienation from nature, Passions for Nature explains how the United States came to be a nation that simultaneously reveres the natural world and yet remains dangerously distant from it.

This “fact-filled and amusing trek through nature’s dark side” (Kirkus Reviews) reveals the fascinating, weird, and often perverted ways that Mother Nature fends only for herself. It may be a wonderful world, but as Dan Riskin (host of the Animal Planet’s TV show Monsters Inside Me) explains, it’s also a dangerous, disturbing, and disgusting one. At every turn, it seems, living things are trying to eat us, poison us, use our bodies as their homes, or have us spread their eggs. In Mother Nature Is Trying to Kill You, Riskin is our tour guide through the natural world at its most gloriously ruthless. Using the seven deadly sins as a road map, Riskin offers dozens of jaw-dropping examples that illuminate how brutal nature can truly be. From slothful worms that hide in your body for up to thirty years to wrathful snails with poisonous harpoons that can kill you in less than five minutes to lustful ducks that have orgasms faster than you can blink, these fascinating accounts reveal the candid truth about “gentle” Mother Nature’s true colors. Riskin’s passion for the strange and his enthusiastic expertise bring Earth’s most fascinating fauna and flora into vivid focus. Through his adventures—which include sliding on his back through a thick soup of bat guano just to get face-to-face with a vampire bat, befriending a parasitic maggot that has taken root in his head, and coming to grips with having offspring of his own—Riskin makes unexpected discoveries not just about the world all around us but also about the ways this brutal world has shaped us as humans and what our responsibilities are to this terrible, wonderful planet we call home.

The Passion of Trees is a collection of photographs taken in Iran and Azerbaijan’s stunning nature. However, this is a collection of nature photographs with a difference. Over the years, Ali has witnessed the beauty of the forests that he has loved since his childhood severely decline. As the number of roads and dams have increased, and more and more of the forests have been destroyed, the situation has become increasingly desperate. “To me, each tree, like a human being, has a tale to tell. When a tree dies, a whole story is interrupted, a destiny is altered for the worse. I feel as if the trees, bundled in the back of trucks, are cursing us with their broken hands, wounded faces and severed roots.” The Passion of Trees is Ali’s stark reminder that the natural world deserves our care. Through his photography, Ali encourages viewers to consider the world around them and to look upon nature with a different perspective, to consider the very real possibility that without swift action, the devastating effects of climate change and the decline of countless animals and plants.

Rediscover—or discover for the first time—the things that make you passionate in life Vital Signs is about what inspires passion and what defeats it. How we lose it and how we get it back. And ultimately it’s about the endless yet endlessly fruitful tug-of-war between freedom and domestication, the wild in us and the tame, our natural selves and our conditioned selves. Each chapter in Vital Signs will contain a core sample, an intimate biography of one of the strategies we employ to gain or regain our passion. The book also affirms the importance of courageous inquiry into dispassion—where we’re numb, depressed, stuck, bored—so the reader can recognize and change these tendencies in themselves.