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 has before. She provides a moving account of the disappearances of various species occurring all around us and traces the evolution of extinction as concept, from its first articulation by Georges Cuvier in revolutionary Paris up to Lyell and Darwin, and through the present day. The sixth extinction is likely to be mankind's most lasting legacy, compelling us to rethink the fundamental question of what it means to be human. -- Publisher description.

For the first time in Earth's history, our planet is experiencing a confluence of rapidly accelerating changes prompted by one species: humans. Climate change is only the most visible of the modifications we've made--up until this point, inadvertently--to the planet. And our current behavior threatens not only our own future but that of countless other creatures. By comparing Earth's story to those of other planets, astrobiologist David Grinspoon shows what a strange and novel development it is for a species to evolve to build machines, and ultimately, global societies with world-shaping influence. Without minimizing the challenges of the next century, Grinspoon suggests that our present moment is not only one of peril, but also great potential, especially when viewed from a 10,000-year perspective. Our species has surmounted the threat of extinction before, thanks to our innate ingenuity and ability to adapt, and there's every reason to believe we can do so again. Our challenge now is to awaken to our role as a force of planetary change, and to grow into this task. We must become graceful planetary engineers, conscious shapers of our environment and caretakers of Earth's biosphere. This is a perspective that begs us to ask not just what future do we want to avoid, but what do we seek to build? What kind of world do we want? Are humans the worst thing or the best thing to ever happen to our planet? Today we stand at a pivotal juncture, and the answer will depend on the choices we make.

A vibrant cultural history investigating pandemics and vaccines, by bestselling author and historian Simon Schama Cities and countries engulfed by panic and death, desperate for vaccines but fearful of what inoculation may bring. This is what the world has just gone through with Covid-19. But as Simon Schama shows in his epic history of vulnerable humanity caught between the terror of contagion and the ingenuity of science, it has happened before. Characteristically, Schama's message is delivered through gripping, page-turning stories set in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: smallpox strikes London; cholera hits Paris; plague comes to India. Threading through the scenes of terror, suffering and hope - in hospitals and prisons, palaces, and slums - are an unforgettable cast of characters: a philosopher-playwright burning up with smallpox in a country chateau; a vaccinating doctor paying house calls in Halifax; a woman doctor in south India driving her inoculator-carriage through the stricken streets as dead monkeys drop from the trees. But we are also in the labs when great, life-saving breakthroughs happen, in Paris, Hong Kong, and Mumbai. At the heart of it all is an unsung hero: Waldemar Haffkine, a gun-toting Jewish student in Odesa turned microbiologist at the Pasteur Institute, hailed in England as "the saviour of mankind" for vaccinating millions against cholera and bubonic plague in British India while being cold-shouldered by the medical establishment of the Raj. Creator of the world's first mass production line of vaccines in Mumbai, he is tragically brought down in an act of shocking injustice. Foreign Bodies crosses borders between east and west, Asia and Europe, the worlds of rich and poor, politics and science. Its thrilling story carries with it the credo of its author on the interconnectedness of humanity and nature; of the powerful and the people. Ultimately, Schama says, as we face the challenges of our times together, "there are no foreigners, only familiars."

An extraordinary book that explores how the earth itself has shaped the Western imagination and how, as a result, our interaction with the environment is far richer and more complex than today's doomsayers would have us believe.

Griffin examines the nature of women and women's roles in Western culture, and shows how the ways that we subordinate the role of women in society are deliberately similar to the ways that we attempt to exclude and subordinate nature. Featuring the brilliant original title essay that is nothing less than an intellectual and emotional exploration of the nature of Western society itself, as well as Susan Griffin's best previously published essays over the past decade, The Eros of Everyday Life combines the beautiful lyricism and sensibility of a poet with the intellectual rigor of one of the finest and most original minds writing today.

Periods of great social change reveal a tension between the need for continuity and the need for innovation. To comprehend these changes as history and as guideposts to the future, Peter F. Drucker has, over a lifetime, pursued a discipline that he terms social ecology. The writings brought together in The Ecological Vision define the discipline as a sustained inquiry into the man-made environment and an active effort at maintaining equilibrium between change and conservation.

An analysis of our earth today and during the next century.

"The Song of Songs is among the most accessible of all biblical books. It is also the most deeply ecological text of the canon, yet few people are aware of the Song's ecological message. The intention of Toward a Holy Ecology: Reading the Song of Songs in the Age of Climate Crisis is to illuminate that message. Today there is such urgency around our many earth crises-so much brokenness-that we need a vision of wholeness and an ecological language that can help inspire, soothe and reinvigorate us, and bring us together regardless of our various affiliations and ideologies. The Song offers both ecological language and a vision. It sets the natural world before us with intensity and beauty, bidding us to savor it with all of our senses so that we may return to the world with the renewed clarity, love and energy necessary to work toward a healthy future for the earth and all her inhabitants. The Song is a particularly powerful book since it never utters the name of the divine, yet is a deeply spiritual work that may reach people who are interested in matters of the sacred, but prefer to steer clear of God language and conventional religious ideas. In both the Jewish and Christian worlds, where many people are disengaging from religion altogether, the Song-with its universal themes of love, justice and the integrity of nature-may help open the door to the possibilities which religion has to offer. Toward a Holy Ecology: Reading the Song of Songs in an Age of Climate Crisis seeks to engage a wide readership including all people who love the earth and its inhabitants, outdoor enthusiasts, spiritual seekers, poets, feminists, and students of the humanities, religion and ecology"--

The Sixth Extinction is a haunting account of the age in which we live. Ecologists are calling it the Sixth Great Extinction, and the world isn't losing just its ecological legacy; also vanishing is a vast human legacy of languages and our ways of living, seeing, and knowing. Terry Glavin confirms that we are in the midst of a nearly unprecedented, catastrophic vanishing of animals, plants, and human cultures. He argues that the language of environmentalism is inadequate in describing the unraveling of the vast system in which all these extinctions are actually related. And he writes that we're no longer gaining knowledge with every generation. We're losing it. In the face of what he describes as a dark and gathering sameness upon the Earth, Glavin embarks on a global journey to meet the very things we're losing (a distinct species every ten minutes, a unique vegetable variety every six hours, an entire language every two weeks) and on the way encounters some of the world's wonderful, rare things: a human-sized salmon in Russia; a mysterious Sino-Tibetan song-language; a Malayan tiger, the last of its kind; and a strange tomato that tastes just like black cherry ice cream. And he finds hope in the most unlikely places---a macaw roost in Costa Rica; a small village in Ireland; a relic community of Norse whalers in the North Atlantic; the vault beneath the Royal Botanical Garden at Kew; and the throne room of the Angh of Longwa in the eastern Himalayas. A fresh narrative take on the usual doom and gloom environmentalism, The Sixth Extinction draws upon zoology, biology, ecology, anthropology, and mythology to share the joys hidden within the long human struggle to conserve the world's living things. Here, we find hope in what's left: the absolute and stunning beauty in the Earth's last cultures and creatures.

Provocateurs Will Self and Ralph Steadman join forces in this post-millennial meditation on the vexed relationship between psyche and place in a globalised world, bringing together for the first time the very best of their 'Psychogeography' columns for the Independent . Ranging from the Scottish Highlands to Istanbul and from Morocco to Ohio, Will Self's engaging and disturbing vision is perfectly counter-pointed by Ralph Steadman's edgy and beautiful artwork.

Book by Glavin, Terry

In a unique effort, this book brings together, for the first time, scholarly analyses by eminent researchers of the historical, social, legal, and cultural influences on the young newcomers' lives as well as reports by practitioners in major aid organizations about the concrete work that their organizations have been carrying out.

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This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the "public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.

2018 Reprint of 1962 Edition. Full facsimile of the original edition, not reproduced with Optical Recognition software. Bookchin wrote Our Synthetic Environment under the pseudonym Lewis Herber. This was one of the first books of the modern period in which an author espoused an ecological and environmentalist worldview. It predates Silent Spring (1962) by Rachel Carson, a more widely known book on the same topic widely credited as starting the environmental movement. "At the time of its publication, Our Synthetic Environment was the most comprehensive and enlightened book on the environmental crisis. Many other books on this topic have been published since, but none, I believe, as comprehensive." --René Dubos

The Negev , first published over a decade ago, told the story of some twenty years of study of southern Israel's desert. It synthesized the findings of botanists, geologists, soil scientists, agronomists, archaeologists, historians, and engineers and told how the applications of their work produced an agricultural surplus in this forbiddingly dry, hot region. , Now Michael Evenari has amplified the book with data from another decade of work. He describes the efforts at a new farm at Wadi Mashash, extends the weather data another ten years, presents further work on the adaptations of plants and animals to desert conditions, and takes a much deeper look at the historical precedents for the method of runoff agriculture, which has made the desert bloom.

Book by Singer, S. Fred

The Symposium on the Global Effects of Environmental Pollution has performed an important task; it has helped to determine the world-wide impact of certain types of local pollution and has uncovered certain unsuspected effects that might hold dan gerous implications for the future. This Symposium should help to make the world aware of a crisis that is becoming more ominous and that involves the developing as well as the developed countries - the crisis of the human environment. The causes of this crisis are not difficult to discern. There has been an unprecedented increase in the world's population, an ever-increasing rate of urbanization, and in many countries, a continuous process of industrialization. Essentially, advancing technology has made it possible for a minority of mankind to achieve affluence and holds out hope for improving the well-being of the great majority. But, because it has not been integrated into the natural environment, this very technology - in industry, in agriculture or in transport - is having many undesir able and potentially catastrophic consequences. Our air, our water and our soil are in grave danger. Many species of animal and plant life have become extinct or are facing extinction. The loss to mankind is grave and even the future oflife on earth may be in danger. The challenge is to find ways of repairing the harm already done and to prevent further harm.