Crossroads Of The Natural World

In this richly illustrated love letter to the wild places and natural wonders of North Carolina, Tom Earnhardt, writer and host of UNC-TV's Exploring North Carolina and lifelong conservationist, seamlessly ties deep geological time and forgotten species from our distant past to the unparalleled biodiversity of today. With varied topography and a climate that is simultaneously subtropical, temperate, and subarctic, he shows that North Carolina is a meeting place for living things more commonly found far to the north and south. Highlighting the ways in which the state is a unique ecological crossroads, Earnhardt's research, insightful writing, and stunning photography will both teach and inspire. Crossroads of the Natural World invites readers to engage a variety of topics, including the impacts of invasive species, the importance of forested buffers along our rivers, the role of naturalists, and the challenges facing the state in a time of climate change and sea-level rise. By sharing his own journey of more than sixty years, Earnhardt entices North Carolinians of every age to explore the natural diversity of our state.

Minnesota’s Twin Cities have long been powerful engines of change. From their origins in the early nineteenth century, the Twin Cities helped drive the dispossession of the region’s Native American peoples, turned their riverfronts into bustling industrial and commercial centers, spread streets and homes outward to the horizon, and reached well beyond their urban confines, setting in motion the environmental transformation of distant hinterlands. As these processes unfolded, residents inscribed their culture into the landscape, complete with all its tensions, disagreements, contradictions, prejudices, and social inequalities. These stories lie at the heart of Nature’s Crossroads. The book features an interdisciplinary team of distinguished scholars who aim to open new conversations about the environmental history of the Twin Cities and Greater Minnesota.

Deepen your connection to the natural world with this inspiring meditation, "a path to the place where science and spirit meet" (Robin Wall Kimmerer). In Rooted, cutting-edge science supports a truth that poets, artists, mystics, and earth-based cultures across the world have proclaimed over millennia: life on this planet is radically interconnected. Our bodies, thoughts, minds, and spirits are affected by the whole of nature, and they affect this whole in return. In this time of crisis, how can we best live upon our imperiled, beloved earth? Award-winning writer Lyanda Lynn Haupt’s highly personal new book is a brilliant invitation to live with the earth in both simple and profound ways—from walking barefoot in the woods and reimagining our relationship with animals and trees, to examining the very language we use to describe and think about nature. She invokes rootedness as a way of being in concert with the wilderness—and wildness—that sustains humans and all of life. In the tradition of Rachel Carson, Elizabeth Kolbert, and Mary Oliver, Haupt writes with urgency and grace, reminding us that at the crossroads of science, nature, and spirit we find true hope. Each chapter provides tools for bringing our unique gifts to the fore and transforming our sense of belonging within the magic and wonder of the natural world.

The environmental movement today is at a critical crossroads. Crossroads: Environmental Priorities for the Future is an in-depth assessment of the movement's successes and failures, and also offers prescriptions for the future. It includes contributions from some of the country's top environmental leaders and activists, including Barry Commoner, Stewart Udall, William K. Reilly, Gus Speth, Jay Hair, Lois Gibbs, Michael Frome, Chuck Little, and William Futrell.

Presents an account of human development from a depth-psychological, transpersonal perspective.

Tucked away in the northeastern corner of Alaska is one of the most contested landscapes in all of North America: the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Considered sacred by Indigenous peoples in Alaska and Canada and treasured by environmentalists, the refuge provides life-sustaining habitat for caribou, polar bears, migratory birds, and other species. For decades, though, the fossil fuel industry and powerful politicians have sought to turn this unique ecosystem into an oil field. Defending the Arctic Refuge tells the improbable story of how the people fought back. At the center of the story is the unlikely figure of Lenny Kohm (1939–2014), a former jazz drummer and aspiring photographer who passionately committed himself to Arctic Refuge activism. With the aid of a trusty slide show, Kohm and representatives of the Gwich'in Nation traveled across the United States to mobilize grassroots opposition to oil drilling. From Indigenous villages north of the Arctic Circle to Capitol Hill and many places in between, this book shows how Kohm and Gwich'in leaders and environmental activists helped build a political movement that transformed the debate into a struggle for environmental justice. In its final weeks, the Trump administration fulfilled a long-sought dream of drilling proponents: leasing much of the Arctic Refuge coastal plain for fossil fuel development. Yet the fight to protect this place is certainly not over. Defending the Arctic Refuge traces the history of a movement that is alive today—and that will continue to galvanize diverse groups to safeguard this threatened land.

"In "Atomic Environments," Neil S. Oatsvall examines how top policymakers in the Truman and Eisenhower administrations used environmental science in their work developing nuclear strategy at the beginning of the Cold War. While many people were involved in research and analysis during the period in question, it was at highest levels of executive decision-making where environmental science and nuclear science most clearly combined to shape the nation's policies. Because making and testing weapons, dealing with fallout and nuclear waste, and finding uses for radioactive byproducts required advanced understanding of how nuclear systems interacted with the world, policymakers utilized existing networks of environmental scientists-particularly meteorologists, geologists, and ecologists-to understand and control the United States' use of nuclear technology. Instead of profiling individuals, Oatsvall focuses on executive institutions, especially the leadership of the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) and high level officials in the Truman and Eisenhower White Houses, including the presidents, themselves. By scrutinizing institutional policymaking practices and agendas at the birth of the nuclear age, a constant set of values becomes clear: "Atomic Environments" reveals an emerging technocratic class that consistently valued knowledge about the environment to help create and maintain a nuclear arsenal, despite its existential threat to life on earth and the negative effects many nuclear technologies directly had on ecosystems and the American people, alike. "Atomic Environments" is divided into five chapters, each of which probes a different facet of the entanglement between environment, nuclear technologies, and policymaking. The first three chapters form a rough narrative arc about nuclear weapons. Chapter One situates bombs in their "natural habitat" by considering why nuclear tests occurred where they did and what testers thought they revealed about the natural environment and how they influenced it. Focusing on nuclear fallout, Chapter Two argues that nuclear tests actually functioned as a massive, uncontrolled experiment in world environments and human bodies that intermingled medicine, nuclear science, and environmental science. Chapter Three shows how the environmental knowledge gained in the first two chapters led to nuclear test ban treaty talks during the Eisenhower era, when the advancement of environmental knowledge and the natural world itself became crucial grounds of contention in the creation of nuclear test detection and evasion systems. The last two chapters step away from weapons to question how other nuclear technologies and facets of the U.S. nuclear program interacted with the natural world. Chapter Four examines agriculture's place in the U.S. nuclear program, from breakthrough advances in agricultural science including the use of radioisotopes and the direct application of radiation to food, to "atomic agriculture's" public relations value as a peaceful proxy, which shifted the moral calculus and further leveraged the U.S. government's atomic power. Chapter Five shows how knowledge of the natural world and the functioning of its systems proved important to uncovering the most effective ways to dispose of nuclear waste. Running throughout, Oatsvall consistently demonstrates how the natural world and the scientific disciplines that study it became integral parts of nuclear science, rather than adversarial fields of knowledge. But while nuclear technologies heavily depended on environmental science to develop, those same technologies frequently caused great harm to the natural world. Moreover, while some individuals expressed real anxieties about the damage wrought by nuclear technologies, policymakers as a class consistently made choices that privileged nuclear boosterism and secrecy, prioritizing institutional values over the lives and living systems that agencies like the AEC were ostensibly charged to protect. In the end, Oatsvall argues that although policymakers took their charge to protect and advance the welfare of the United States and its people seriously, they often failed to do so because their allegiance to the U.S. nuclear hierarchy blinded them to the real risks and dangers of the nuclear age"--

An objective, comprehensive, and accessible examination of today's most crucial problem: preserving the environment in the face of society's insatiable demand for energy. In Energy at the Crossroads, Vaclav Smil considers the twenty-first century's crucial question: how to reconcile the modern world's unceasing demand for energy with the absolute necessity to preserve the integrity of the biosphere. With this book he offers a comprehensive, accessible guide to today's complex energy issues—how to think clearly and logically about what is possible and what is desirable in our energy future. After a century of unprecedented production growth, technical innovation, and expanded consumption, the world faces a number of critical energy challenges arising from unequal resource distribution, changing demand patterns, and environmental limitations. The fundamental message of Energy at the Crossroads is that our dependence on fossil fuels must be reduced not because of any imminent resource shortages but because the widespread burning of oil, coal, and natural gas damages the biosphere and presents increasing economic and security problems as the world relies on more expensive supplies and Middle Eastern crude oil. Smil begins with an overview of the twentieth century's long-term trends and achievements in energy production. He then discusses energy prices, the real cost of energy, and "energy linkages"—the effect energy issues have on the economy, on quality of life, on the environment, and in wartime. He discusses the pitfalls of forecasting, giving many examples of failed predictions and showing that unexpected events can disprove complex models. And he examines the pros and cons not only of fossil fuels but also of alternative fuels such as hydroenergy, biomass energy, wind power, and solar power. Finally, he considers the future, focusing on what really matters, what works, what is realistic, and which outcomes are most desirable.