Features portraits of female ranchers and cowgirls who live in the American West, and anecdotes about their daily lives and thoughts about the disappearance of their lifestyle.

"Read it, please. Straight through to the end. Whatever else you were planning to do next, nothing could be more important." —Barbara Kingsolver Twenty years ago, with The End of Nature, Bill McKibben offered one of the earliest warnings about global warming. Those warnings went mostly unheeded; now, he insists, we need to acknowledge that we've waited too long, and that massive change is not only unavoidable but already under way. Our old familiar globe is suddenly melting, drying, acidifying, flooding, and burning in ways that no human has ever seen. We've created, in very short order, a new planet, still recognizable but fundamentally different. We may as well call it Eaarth. That new planet is filled with new binds and traps. A changing world costs large sums to defend—think of the money that went to repair New Orleans, or the trillions it will take to transform our energy systems. But the endless economic growth that could underwrite such largesse depends on the stable planet we've managed to damage and degrade. We can't rely on old habits any longer. Our hope depends, McKibben argues, on scaling back—on building the kind of societies and economies that can hunker down, concentrate on essentials, and create the type of community (in the neighborhood, but also on the Internet) that will allow us to weather trouble on an unprecedented scale. Change—fundamental change—is our best hope on a planet suddenly and violently out of balance.

When natural disaster strikes, survivors and onlookers alike face questions about whether God is in control or how he could allow such tragedy to occur. Respected Bible teacher Erwin Lutzer offers answers about God's purposes, his goodness, and his ultimate plan. Without pretending to know the mind of God, Lutzer's answers assure the reader that God is still sovereign, and his plan is still best.

This reading has been written with a lot of fantasy, but it is not far from reality. Sometimes our mind allows us to develop inexplicable predictions to unsuspected limits.