Over the last century mankind has irrevocably damaged the environment through the unscrupulous greed of big business and our own willful ignorance. Here are the strikingly poignant accounts of disasters whose names live in infamy: Chernobyl, Bhopal, Exxon Valdez, Three Mile Island, Love Canal, Minamata and others. And with these, the extraordinary and inspirational stories of the countless men and women who fought bravely to protect the communities and environments at risk.

Back in 2007, two gently unemployed people with no previous restaurant experience drove 90 minutes to Chicago to eat a raw food dinner. 90 minutes. They said, I wish there was somewhere closer And they were stupid enough to decide the best solution to the problem was to open their own raw vegan restaurant. Not normal people. Not even close. This is their story. KATHY: Did you remember to put in the recipes? DANNY: Yes. The string around my finger totally worked.

A moving tribute to the physical and spiritual properties of nature's richestelement by one of the world's leading soil conservationists.

Back in 2007, two gently unemployed people with no previous restaurant experience drove 90 minutes to Chicago to eat a raw food dinner. 90 minutes. They said”, “I wish there was somewhere closer…” And they were stupid enough to decide the best solution to the problem was to open their own raw vegan restaurant. Not normal people. Not even close. This is their story. KATHY: “Did you remember to put in the recipes?” DANNY: “Yes. The string around my finger totally worked.”

A series of laws passed in the 1970s promised the nation unprecedented transparency in government, a veritable “sunshine era.” Though citizens enjoyed a new arsenal of secrecy-busting tools, officials developed a handy set of workarounds, from over classification to concealment, shredding, and burning. It is this dark side of the sunshine era that Jason Ross Arnold explores in the first comprehensive, comparative history of presidential resistance to the new legal regime, from Reagan-Bush to the first term of Obama-Biden. After examining what makes a necessary and unnecessary secret, Arnold considers the causes of excessive secrecy, and why we observe variation across administrations. While some administrations deserve the scorn of critics for exceptional secrecy, the book shows excessive secrecy was a persistent problem well before 9/11, during Democratic and Republican administrations alike. Regardless of party, administrations have consistently worked to weaken the system’s legal foundations. The book reveals episode after episode of evasive maneuvers, rule bending, clever rhetorical gambits, and downright defiance; an army of secrecy workers in a dizzying array of institutions labels all manner of documents “top secret,” while other government workers and agencies manage to suppress information with a “sensitive but unclassified” designation. For example, the health effects of Agent Orange, and antibiotic-resistant bacteria leaking out of Midwestern hog farms are considered too “sensitive” for public consumption. These examples and many more document how vast the secrecy system has grown during the sunshine era. Rife with stories of vital scientific evidence withheld, justice eluded, legalities circumvented, and the public interest flouted, Secrecy in the Sunshine Era reveals how our information society has been kept in the dark in too many ways and for too long.

Thousands of travelers become stuck after ISIS attacks the United States, leaving the nation's physical, electrical, and technological infrastructure in tatters. Jim Powell and his co-workers are stranded in a hotel in Richmond, Virginia, about five hundred miles from home. He and several others embark on a journey to try to get back home, by any means possible, in a world with scarce law enforcement where the rules of civilized society no longer apply.

At the turn of the nineteenth century, geology—and its claims that the earth had a long and colorful prehuman history—was widely dismissedasdangerous nonsense. But just fifty years later, it was the most celebrated of Victorian sciences. Ralph O’Connor tracks the astonishing growth of geology’s prestige in Britain, exploring how a new geohistory far more alluring than the standard six days of Creation was assembled and sold to the wider Bible-reading public. Shrewd science-writers, O’Connor shows, marketed spectacular visions of past worlds, piquing the public imagination with glimpses of man-eating mammoths, talking dinosaurs, and sea-dragons spawned by Satan himself. These authors—including men of science, women, clergymen, biblical literalists, hack writers, blackmailers, and prophets—borrowed freely from the Bible, modern poetry, and the urban entertainment industry, creating new forms of literature in order to transport their readers into a vanished and alien past. In exploring the use of poetry and spectacle in the promotion of popular science, O’Connor proves that geology’s success owed much to the literary techniques of its authors. An innovative blend of the history of science, literary criticism, book history, and visual culture, The Earth on Show rethinks the relationship between science and literature in the nineteenth century.