Daily archives: June 27, 2017

Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring was first published in three serialized excerpts in the New Yorker in June of 1962. The book appeared in September of that year and the outcry that followed its publication forced the banning of DDT and spurred revolutionary changes in the laws affecting our air, land, and water.

Silent Spring

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From the author of Guns, Germs and Steel, Jared Diamond's Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Survive is a visionary study of the mysterious downfall of past civilizations. - What happened to the people who made the forlorn long-abandoned statues of Easter Island? - What happened to the architects of the crumbling Maya pyramids? - Will we go the same way, our skyscrapers one day standing derelict and overgrown like the temples at Angkor Wat?

Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed

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This groundbreaking book dismantles racially based theories of human history by revealing the environmental factors actually responsible for history's broadest patterns. Here is a world history that really is a history of all the world's peoples, a unified narrative of human life even more intriguing and important than accounts of dinosaurs and glaciers.

Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies

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Forget everything you think you know about global warming. It's not about carbon – it's about capitalism. The good news is that we can seize this crisis to transform our failed economic system and build something radically better. In her most provocative book yet, Naomi Klein, author of the global bestsellers The Shock Doctrine and No Logo, exposes the myths that are clouding climate debate. 

This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate

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One hundred thousand years ago, at least six human species inhabited the earth. Today there is just one. Us. Homo sapiens. How did our species succeed in the battle for dominance? Why did our foraging ancestors come together to create cities and kingdoms? How did we come to believe in gods, nations, and human rights; to trust money, books, and laws; and to be enslaved by bureaucracy, timetables, and consumerism? And what will our world be like in the millennia to come?

Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

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Leading political and environmental commentator on where we have gone wrong, and what to do about it "Without countervailing voices, naming and challenging power, political freedom withers and dies. Without countervailing voices, a better world can never materialise. Without countervailing voices, wells will still be dug and bridges will still be built, but only for the few. Food will still be grown, but it will not reach the mouths of the poor. New medicines will be developed, but they will be inaccessible to many of those in need."

How Did We Get Into This Mess?

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Global warming - many of us believe that it is somebody else's problem, that it will affect other people and that other people will come up with the solution. This is not true. This book follows psychologist Geoffrey Beattie's mission to find out why we aren't saving the planet.

Why Aren’t We Saving the Planet?

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In Storms of My Grandchildren, Dr. James Hansen—the nation’s leading scientist on climate issues—speaks out for the first time with the full truth about global warming: The planet is hurtling even more rapidly than previously acknowledged to a climatic point of no return.

Storms of my grandchildren

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Over the last half-billion years, there have been five mass extinctions, when the diversity of life on earth suddenly and dramatically contracted. Scientists around the world are currently monitoring the sixth extinction, predicted to be the most devastating extinction event since the asteroid impact that wiped out the dinosaurs. This time around, the cataclysm is us. 

The Sixth Extinction

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