Many people will remember that Rachel Carson predicted a silent spring, but she also warned of a fruitless fall, a time with no pollination and no fruit. The fruitless fall nearly became a reality when, in 2007, beekeepers watched thirty billion bees mysteriously die. And they continue to disappear. The remaining pollinators, essential to the cultivation of a third of American crops, are now trucked across the country and flown around the world, pushing them ever closer to collapse. Fruitless Fall does more than just highlight this growing agricultural catastrophe. It emphasizes the miracle of flowering plants and their pollination partners, and urges readers not to take the abundance of our Earth for granted. A new afterword by the author tracks the most recent developments in this ongoing crisis.

"Terroir" is French for taste of place. In this book, a James Beard Award-winning author explores many of the North American foods that depend on place for their unique flavor, including salmon from Alaska's Yukon River and honey from the tupelo-lined banks of the Apalachicola River.

An investigation into the mysterious case of the vanishing honeybee.

A playful guide to identifying, serving, and enjoying one of America's most delicious foods describes the various types of oysters available in terms of appearance, origin, availability, and flavor and provides a host of tempting recipes, a color guide, lists of top oyster restaurants and festivals, tips on pairing wine and oysters, and more.

Presents a recipe-complemented celebration of America's apple renaissance that explores 120 of the fruit's considerable varieties, including the Black Oxford, the Knobbed Russet, and the D'Arcy Spice.

Biological diversity, or biodiversity, refers to the universal attribute of all living organisms that each individual being is unique - that is, no two organisms are identical. The biology of biodiversity must include all the aspects of evolutionary and ecological sciences analyzing the origin, changes, and maintenance of the di versity of living organisms. Today biodiversity, which benefits human life in vari ous ways, is threatened by the expansion of human activities. Biological research in biodiversity contributes not only to understanding biodiversity itself but also to its conservation and utilization. The Biology of Biodiversity was the specialty area of the 1998 International Prize for Biology. The International Prize for Biology was established in 1985 in commemoration of the sixty-year reign of the Emperor Showa and his longtime devotion to biological research. The 1998 Prize was awarded to Professor Otto Thomas Solbrig, Harvard University, one of the authors of this book. In conjunction with the awarding of the International Prize for Biology, the 14th International Symposium with the theme of The Biology of Biodiversity was held in Hayama on the 9th and 10th of December 1998, with financial support by an international symposium grant from the Ministry of Education, Science, Sports and Culture of Japan. The invited speakers were chosen so as to cover four basic aspects of biodiversity: species diversity and phylogeny, ecological biodiversity, development and evolution, and genetic diversity of living organisms including human beings.