We all live on nature's doorstep, but we often overlook it. From backyards to local parks, the natural places we see the most may well be the ones we know the least.

In Close to Home, biologist Thor Hanson shows how retraining our eyes reveals hidden wonders just waiting to be discovered. In Kansas City, migrating monarch butterflies flock to the local zoo. In the Pacific Northwest, fierce yellowjackets placidly sip honeydew, unseen in the treetops. In New England, a lawn gone slightly wild hosts a naturalist's life's work. And in the soil beneath our feet, remedies for everything from breast cancer to the stench of skunks lie waiting for someone's searching shovel.

Close to Home is a hands-on natural history for any local patch of Earth. It shows that we each can contribute to science and improve the health of our planet. And even more, it proves that the wonders of nature don't lie in some far-off land: they await us, close to home.

WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE
ONE OF THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW'S 10 BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR
A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
A NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD FINALIST

The 10th-anniversary edition of the instant classic, The Sixth Extinction, now with a new epilogue. Kolbert blends intellectual and natural history and field reporting into a powerful account of the mass extinction unfolding before our eyes.

Over the last half a 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.

In The Sixth Extinction, two-time winner of the National Magazine Award and New Yorker writer Elizabeth Kolbert draws on the work of scores of researchers in half a dozen disciplines, accompanying many of them into the field: geologists who study deep ocean cores, botanists who follow the tree line as it climbs up the Andes, marine biologists who dive off the Great Barrier Reef. She introduces us to a dozen species, some already gone, others facing extinction, including the Panamian golden frog, staghorn coral, the great auk, and the Sumatran rhino. Through these stories, Kolbert provides a moving account of the disappearances occurring all around us and traces the evolution of extinction as concept, from its first articulation by Georges Cuvier in revolutionary Paris up through the present day. In the ten years since the book was originally published, evidence of the Sixth Extinction has continued to mount, making its message more urgent than ever.

The Sixth Extinction is likely to be mankind's most lasting legacy; as Kolbert observes, it compels us to rethink the fundamental question of what it means to be human.

Some 40 million miles of roadways encircle the earth, yet we tend to regard them only as infrastructure for human convenience. While roads are so ubiquitous they're practically invisible to us, wild animals experience them as entirely alien forces of death and disruption. In Crossings, environmental journalist Ben Goldfarb travels throughout the United States and around the world to investigate how roads have transformed our planet. A million animals are killed by cars each day in the U.S. alone, but as the new science of road ecology shows, the harms of highways extend far beyond roadkill. Creatures from antelope to salmon are losing their ability to migrate in search of food and mates; invasive plants hitch rides in tire treads; road salt contaminates lakes and rivers; and the very noise of traffic chases songbirds from vast swaths of habitat.

Yet road ecologists are also seeking to blunt the destruction through innovative solutions. Goldfarb meets with conservationists building bridges for California's mountain lions and tunnels for English toads, engineers deconstructing the labyrinth of logging roads that web national forests, animal rehabbers caring for Tasmania's car-orphaned wallabies, and community organizers working to undo the havoc highways have wreaked upon American cities.

Today, as our planet's road network continues to grow exponentially, the science of road ecology has become increasingly vital. Written with passion and curiosity, Crossings is a sweeping, spirited, and timely investigation into how humans have altered the natural world--and how we can create a better future for all living beings.

MÁS DE 200 SEMANAS CONSECUTIVAS EN EL LISTADO DEL NEW YORK TIMES

Uno de los libros más importantes de nuestros tiempos, que nos invita a descubrir un nuevo lenguaje para comunicarnos con la naturaleza y recibir sus enseñanzas.

Como mujer indígena, Robin Wall Kimmerer es heredera de un valioso legado que considera a los animales y las plantas nuestros mejores maestros. Como botánica, se ha valido del rigor científico para estudiar mejor la naturaleza. Y como madre, profesora y escritora, ha dedicado su vida a conjugar ambas perspectivas para abogar por un despertar de la consciencia ecológica que reconozca y celebre nuestra profunda conexión con otras formas de vida.

En Una trenza de hierba sagrada, la autora entreteje experiencias y saberes en una serie de relatos iluminadores y emotivos que nos inspiran a fortalecer nuestra relación sagrada con la Madre Tierra. Cada capítulo es una magnífica lección de gratitud y reciprocidad, que nos recuerda que, si ofrecemos nuestros dones al mundo y lo ayudamos a sanar, este nos retribuirá con la armonía y el bienestar que tanto anhelamos.

Bestseller del New York Times

Bestseller del Washington Post

Bestseller del Los Angeles Times

Mejor Colección de Ensayos de la Década según Literary Hub

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A masterpiece of our times, inviting us to discover a new language for communicating with nature and receiving its lessons.

As a Native American woman, Robin Wall Kimmerer is the heir to a valuable legacy that views animals and plants as our greatest and oldest teachers. As a botanist, she leverages scientific knowledge to better understand nature. And as a mother, teacher, and writer, she has dedicated her life to blending these perspectives and advocate for an awakening of ecological consciousness that acknowledges and celebrates our deep connection with other forms of life.

In Braiding Sweetgrass, the author weaves together experiences and knowledge in a series of illuminating and emotional stories that inspire us to reinvigorate our sacred relationship with Mother Earth. Each chapter offers a magnificent lesson in gratitude and reciprocity, reminding us that if we contribute our gifts to the world and help it heal, it will reward us with the harmony and wellness we are yearning for.

A New York Times Bestseller

A Washington Post Bestseller

A Los Angeles Times Bestseller

Named a Best Essay Collection of the Decade by Literary Hub

When Paula Whyman first climbs a peak in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains in search of a home in the country, she has no idea how quickly her tidy backyard ecology project will become a massive endeavor. Just as quickly, she discovers how little she knows about hands-on conservation work. In Bad Naturalist, readers meander with her through orchards and meadows, forests and frog ponds, as she is beset by an influx of invasive species, rattlesnake encounters, conflicting advice from experts, and delayed plans--but none of it dampens her irrepressible passion for protecting this place. With delightful, lyrically deft storytelling, she shares her attempts to coax this beautiful piece of land back into shape. It turns out that amid the seeming chaos of nature, the mountaintop is teeming with life and hope.

The essential guide to Texas's state parks and historic sites.

Updated with a new park, Palo Pinto Mountains State Park west of Forth Worth; new historic sites; and scores of beautiful new photographs, the Official Guide to Texas State Parks has all the essential information organized by geographical regions to help you plan your great Texas adventure. The only complete resource of its kind on Texas, Laurence Parent's Official Guide to Texas State Parks is the trusted source, with more than sixty-five thousand copies sold over the past thirty years.

Praise for Previous Editions

Texas state-park fans should be thrilled. . . . Official Guide to Texas State Parks is the ultimate book detailing Texas's state parks.--Dallas Morning News

This book will make you want to hit the road to visit the natural splendor of Texas.--Houston Chronicle

It's good enough for a coffee table or a campfire. The Official Guide to Texas State Parks gives you sleek photography, maps, narratives, and loads of information.--Southern Living

The newly updated Official Guide to Texas State Parks and Historic Sites . . . has beautiful color photographs and insights on camping, fishing, horseback riding, and other recreational opportunities around the state.--Texas Journey

Much has been written on the scientific and technological aspects of climate change.... But Armstrong's book is both more personal and more profound. Its urgent message is that hearts and minds need to change if we are to once more learn to revere our beautiful and fragile planet. --The Guardian

Since the beginning of time, humankind has looked upon nature and seen the divine. In the writings of the great thinkers across religions, the natural world inspires everything from fear, to awe, to tranquil contemplation; God, or however one defined the sublime, was present in everything. Yet today, even as we admire a tree or take in a striking landscape, we rarely see nature as sacred.

In this short but deeply powerful book, the best-selling historian of religion Karen Armstrong re-sacralizes nature for modern times. Drawing on her vast knowledge of the world's religious traditions, she vividly describes nature's central place in spirituality across the centuries. In bringing this age-old wisdom to life, Armstrong shows modern readers how to rediscover nature's potency and form a connection to something greater than ourselves.

Nature has long been the source of human curiosity and wonderment, and the inspiration for some of our deepest creative impulses. But we are now witnessing its rapid impoverishment, even destruction, in much of our world.

In this beautifully illustrated book, Jeremy Mynott traces the story of nature--past, present, and future. From the dramatic depictions of animals by the prehistoric cave-painters, through the romantic discovery of landscape in the eighteenth century, to the climate emergency of the present day, Mynott looks at the different ways in which humankind has understood the world around it. Charting how our ideas about nature emerged and changed over time, he reveals how the impulse to control nature has deep historical roots.

As we reach an environmental crisis point, this vital study shows how human imagination and wonder can play a restorative role--and reveal what nature ultimately means to us.

An antidote to the loneliness of our species.--ROBIN WALL KIMMERER

A master class in how to love the world.--MARGARET RENKL

A thrilling book about the abounding queerness of the natural world that challenges our expectations of what is normal, beautiful, and possible.

Growing up, Patricia Ononiwu Kaishian felt most at home in the swamps and culverts near her house in the Hudson Valley. A child who frequently felt out of place, too much of one thing or not enough of another, she found acceptance in these settings, among other amphibious beings. In snakes, snails, and, above all, fungi, she saw her own developing identities as a queer, neurodivergent person reflected back at her--and in them, too, she found a personal path to a life of science.

In Forest Euphoria, Kaishian shows us this making of a scientist and introduces readers to the queerness of all the life around us. Fungi, we learn, commonly have more than two biological sexes--and some as many as twenty-three thousand. Some intersex slugs mutually fire calcium carbonate love darts at each other during courtship. Glass eels are sexually undetermined until their last year of life, a mystery that stumped scientists once dubbed the eel question. Nature, Kaishian shows us, is filled with the unusual, the overlooked, and the marginalized--and they have lessons for us all.

Wide-ranging, richly observant, and full of surprise, Forest Euphoria will open your eyes and change how you look at the world around you.

Some 40 million miles of roadways encircle the earth, yet we tend to regard them only as infrastructure for human convenience. While roads are so ubiquitous they're practically invisible to us, wild animals experience them as entirely alien forces of death and disruption. In Crossings, environmental journalist Ben Goldfarb travels throughout the United States and around the world to investigate how roads have transformed our planet. A million animals are killed by cars each day in the U.S. alone, but as the new science of road ecology shows, the harms of highways extend far beyond roadkill. Creatures from antelope to salmon are losing their ability to migrate in search of food and mates; invasive plants hitch rides in tire treads; road salt contaminates lakes and rivers; and the very noise of traffic chases songbirds from vast swaths of habitat.

Yet road ecologists are also seeking to blunt the destruction through innovative solutions. Goldfarb meets with conservationists building bridges for California's mountain lions and tunnels for English toads, engineers deconstructing the labyrinth of logging roads that web national forests, animal rehabbers caring for Tasmania's car-orphaned wallabies, and community organizers working to undo the havoc highways have wreaked upon American cities.

Today, as our planet's road network continues to grow exponentially, the science of road ecology has become increasingly vital. Written with passion and curiosity, Crossings is a sweeping, spirited, and timely investigation into how humans have altered the natural world--and how we can create a better future for all living beings.

Mary Austin's love of the desert is everywhere evident in The Land of Little Rain, a collection of fourteen vignettes about the land and people of the region that today includes Death Valley National Park and the Mojave National Preserve. Part nature essay, personal essay, folk legend, and local history of the California Sierras, this enduring American classic resists classification. Her lyrical observations are infused with a deep understanding of the flora and fauna of the area and an appreciation of the people she encountered and befriended there-Shoshones and Paiutes, Mexican and Chinese immigrants, shepherds, stagecoach drivers, and miners among them. Austin's writings have been compared to the work of Ralph Waldo Emerson, John Muir, and Aldo Leopold, but her poetic sensibility is purely original, winsome, and entirely her own. This Warbler Classics paperback includes the illustrations that appeared in the original edition and a detailed biographical note.

David Abram's first book, The Spell of the Sensuous has become a classic of environmental literature. Now he returns with a startling exploration of our human entanglement with the rest of nature.

As the climate veers toward catastrophe, the innumerable losses cascading through the biosphere make vividly evident the need for a metamorphosis in our relation to the living land. For too long we've ignored the wild intelligence of our bodies, taking our primary truths from technologies that hold the living world at a distance. Abram's writing subverts this distance, drawing readers ever closer to their animal senses in order to explore, from within, the elemental kinship between the human body and the breathing Earth. The shape-shifting of ravens, the erotic nature of gravity, the eloquence of thunder, the pleasures of being edible: all have their place in this book.

For years Charlie Burrell and his wife, Isabella Tree, farmed Knepp Castle Estate and struggled to turn a profit. By 2000, with the farm facing bankruptcy, they decided to try something radical. They would restore Knepp's 3,500 acres to the wild. Using herds of free-roaming animals to mimic the actions of the megafauna of the past, they hoped to bring nature back to their depleted land. But what would the neighbors say, in the manicured countryside of modern England where a blade of grass out of place is considered an affront?

In the face of considerable opposition the couple persisted with their experiment and soon witnessed an extraordinary change. New life flooded into Knepp, now a breeding hotspot for rare and threatened species like turtle doves, peregrine falcons, and purple emperor butterflies.

The fabled English nightingale sings again.

At a time of looming environmental disaster, Wilding is an inspiring story of a farm, a couple, and a community transformed. Isabella Tree's wonderful book brings together science, natural history, a fair bit of drama, and--ultimately--hope.

This eye-opening book offers a clear and captivating (Dr. Kris Verburgh​)scientific deep dive into how plants and animals have already unlocked the secrets to immortality-and the lessons they hold for us all.

Recent advances in medicine and technology have expanded our understanding of aging across the animal kingdom, and our own timeless quest for the fountain of youth. Yet, despite modern humans living longer today than ever before, the public's understanding of what is possible is limited to our species--until now. In this spunky, effervescent debut, the key to immortality is revealed to be a superpower within reach. With mind-bending stories from the natural world and our own, Jellyfish Age Backwards reveals lifespans we cannot imagine and physiological gifts that feel closer to magic than reality:

• There is a Greenland shark that was 286 years old when the Titanic sank, and is currently 390, making it older than the United States. Scientists predict it will live for another 100 years.
• Trees and lobsters don't age in the way we know it. They simply get bigger and bigger.
• There are forms of radiation that have been known to actually increase the lifespans of certain species, from tortoises to naked mole-rats.
• There's a species of jellyfish, the size of a fingernail, that can age forwards, then, when threatened, age backwards and begin the process all over again.

Mixing cutting-edge research and stories from habitats all around the world, molecular biologist Nicklas Brendborg explores extended life cycles in all its varieties. Along the way, we meet a man who fasted for over a year; a woman who edited her own DNA; redwoods that survive thousands of years; and in the soil of Easter Island, the key to eternal youth. Jellyfish Age Backwards is a love letter to the immense power of nature, and what the immortal lives of many of earth's animals and plants can teach us about the secrets to longevity.

Shortlisted for the Royal Society Science Book Prize

A New York Times Editor's Choice Pick

A Sunday Times (UK) Best Book of the Year

Despite efforts to sustain civilization, humanity faces existential threats from overpopulation, globalized trade and travel, urbanization, and global climate change. In A Darwinian Survival Guide, Daniel Brooks and Salvatore Agosta offer a novel--and hopeful--perspective on how to meet these tremendous challenges by changing the discourse from sustainability to survival. Darwinian evolution, the world's only theory of survival, is the means by which the biosphere has persisted and renewed itself following past environmental perturbations, and it has never failed, they explain. Even in the aftermath of mass extinctions, enough survivors remain with the potential to produce a new diversified biosphere.

Drawing on their expertise as field biologists, Brooks and Agosta trace the evolutionary path from the early days of humans through the Late Pleistocene and the beginning of the Anthropocene all the way to the Great Acceleration of technological humanity around 1950, demonstrating how our creative capacities have allowed humanity to survive. However, constant conflict without resolution has made the Anthropocene not only unsustainable, but unsurvivable. Guided by the four laws of biotics, the authors explain how humanity should interact with the rest of the biosphere and with each other in accordance with Darwinian principles. They reveal a middle ground between apocalypse and utopia, with two options: alter our behavior now at great expense and extend civilization or fail to act and rebuild in accordance with those same principles. If we take the latter, then our immediate goal ought to focus on preserving as many of humanity's positive achievements--from high technology to high art--as possible to shorten the time needed to rebuild.

A lyrical, sensuous and thoroughly engrossing memoir of one critical year in the life of an organic peach farmer, Epitaph for a Peach is a delightful narrative . . . with poetic flair and a sense of humor (Library Journal). Line drawings.

In this phytobiography--a collection of stories written in partnership with a plant--research scientist Monica Gagliano shares genuine first-hand accounts from her research into plant communication and cognition.

By transcending the view of plants as the objects of scientific materialism, Gagliano encourages us to rethink plants as people--beings with subjectivity, consciousness, and volition, and hence having the capacity for their own perspectives and voices. The book draws on up-close-and-personal encounters with the plants themselves, as well as plant shamans, indigenous elders, and mystics from around the world and integrates these experiences with an incredible research journey and the groundbreaking scientific discoveries that emerged from it.

Gagliano has published numerous peer-reviewed scientific papers on how plants have a Pavlov-like response to stimuli and can learn, remember, and communicate to neighboring plants. She has pioneered the brand-new research field of plant bioacoustics, for the first time experimentally demonstrating that plants emit their own 'voices' and, moreover, detect and respond to the sounds of their environments. By demonstrating experimentally that learning is not the exclusive province of animals, Gagliano has re-ignited the discourse on plant subjectivity and ethical and legal standing. This is the story of how she made those discoveries and how the plants helped her along the way.

Step Out of Your Car and Right into Nature!

New England's Roadside Ecology guides you through 30 spectacular natural sites, all within an easy walk from the road. The sites include the forests, wetlands, alpines, dunes, and geologic ecosystems that make up New England.

Author Tom Wessels is the perfect guide. Each entry starts with the brief description of the hike's level of difficulty--all are gentle to moderate and cover no more than two miles. Entries also include turn-by-turn directions and clear descriptions of the flora, fauna, and fungi you are likely to encounter along the way. New England's Roadside Ecology is a must-have guide for outdoor enthusiasts, hikers, and tourists in Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Vermont.