Most of us watch with mild concern the fast disappearing wild spaces or the recurrence of pollution - related crises such as oil spills, toxic blooms in fertilizer-enriched rivers, and the increasing violence in our own country. Joy Williams does much more than watch. With guts and passion, she sounds the alarm over the general disconnection from the natural world that our consumer culture has created. The culling of elephants, electron-probed chimpanzees, and the vanishing wetlands are just some of her subjects. Razor-sharp, controversial, scathingly opinionated, and refreshingly unafraid of conflict, Williams refuses to compromise as she lashes out at the greed of Americans and decries our own turpitude. It is not enough to mourn the passing of the natural world, Ill Nature shouts. Get out of our homes and our cars and our cubicles and do something...now.

Williams tackles a host of controversial subjects in this collection of nineteen impassioned essays dealing mostly with humanity's abuses of the natural world.

Human health depends on the health of the planet. Earth’s natural systems—the air, the water, the biodiversity, the climate—are our life support systems. Yet climate change, biodiversity loss, scarcity of land and freshwater, pollution and other threats are degrading these systems. The emerging field of planetary health aims to understand how these changes threaten our health and how to protect ourselves and the rest of the biosphere. Planetary Health: Protecting Nature to Protect Ourselves provides a readable introduction to this new paradigm. With an interdisciplinary approach, the book addresses a wide range of health impacts felt in the Anthropocene, including food and nutrition, infectious disease, non-communicable disease, dislocation and conflict, and mental health. It also presents strategies to combat environmental changes and its ill-effects, such as controlling toxic exposures, investing in clean energy, improving urban design, and more. Chapters are authored by widely recognized experts. The result is a comprehensive and optimistic overview of a growing field that is being adopted by researchers and universities around the world. Students of public health will gain a solid grounding in the new challenges their profession must confront, while those in the environmental sciences, agriculture, the design professions, and other fields will become familiar with the human consequences of planetary changes. Understanding how our changing environment affects our health is increasingly critical to a variety of disciplines and professions. Planetary Health is the definitive guide to this vital field.

Someone's finally doing something about the weather...in the first in this series by the New York Times bestselling author of Ink and Bone and the Morganville Vampires series. It's "A FUN READ" (Jim Butcher) from "A FIRST-CLASS STORYTELLER" (Charlaine Harris)... The Wardens Association has been around pretty much forever. Some Wardens control Fire, others control Earth or Water or Wind—and the most powerful can control more than one. Without wardens, Mother Nature would wipe humanity off the face of the earth... Joanne Baldwin is a Weather Warden. Usually, all it takes is a wave of her hand to tame the most violent weather. But now, Joanne is trying to outrun another kind of storm: accusations of corruption and murder. So, she’s resorting to the very human tactic of running for her life… Her only hope is Lewis, the most powerful warden known. Unfortunately, he’s also on the run from the Council. It seems he’s stolen not one but three bottles of Djinn—making him the most wanted man on earth. And without Lewis, Joanne’s chances of surviving are as good as a snowball in—well, a place she may be headed. So, she and her classic Mustang are racing hard to find him—because there’s some bad weather closing in fast... “[Ill Wind’s] forecast calls for murder, mayhem, magic, meteorology—and a fun read. You’ll never watch the Weather Channel the same way again.”—Jim Butcher, bestselling author of The Dresden Files Rachel Caine is the author of several bestselling series, including the Revivalist and Outcast Season novels. Among her many popular novels are Daylighters, The Dead Girls' Dance, Terminated, and Black Dawn.

The eighteenth century saw the rise of new and more sympathetic understanding of animals as philosophy, literature, and art argued that animals could feel and therefore possess inalienable rights. This idea gave birth to a diverse movement that affects how we understand our relationship to the natural world. The Cry of Nature details a crucial period in the history of this movement, revealing the significant role art played in the growth of animal rights. Stephen F. Eisenman shows how artists from William Hogarth to Pablo Picasso and Sue Coe have represented the suffering, chastisement, and execution of animals. These artists, he demonstrates, illustrate the lessons of Montaigne, Rousseau, Darwin, Freud, and others—that humans and animals share an evolutionary heritage of sentience, intelligence, and empathy, and thus animals deserve equal access to the domain of moral right. Eisenman also traces the roots of speciesism to the classical world and describes the social role of animals in the demand for emancipation. Instructive, challenging, and always engaging, The Cry of Nature is a book for anyone interested in animal rights, art history, and the history of ideas.

Do you wonder if humans are the only beings who wonder if they are alone in the universe? Our sun is a star. In the night sky are all kinds of stars, and orbiting those stars are planets like the ones in our own solar system. Could those planets have life like we do on Earth? Planet Earth is not too big, not too small, not too hot, and not too cold. It’s just right. Our very own Goldilocks planet . . . . Follow a young girl as she explores these questions in this gorgeous book about the wondrous search for another Goldilocks planet.

In this breathtaking suspense novel by Nevada Barr, park ranger Anna Pigeon is faced with a sinister mystery that threatens the visitors of Mesa Verde. As a strange and deadly disease spreads through the park, Anna must unravel the source and put an end to the evil wind that carries it. With gripping twists and turns, Ill Wind transports readers to the atmospheric landscape of Mesa Verde, immersing them in the heart-pounding action as Anna races against time to uncover the truth. Fans of Nevada Barr's thrilling storytelling and gripping mysteries won't be able to put this book down.