"Dissatisfaction with nature flows throughout Western civilization, as deep as its blood, as abiding as its bones. Convinced to the marrow that something is deeply wrong with nature, . . . the Western world tries to remake it into something better."For Priscilla Stuckey, this is a fundamental and heartbreaking misconception: that nature can be fixed, exploited, or simply ignored. Modern societies try to bend nature to human will instead of engaging...

Explains how to start and organize a rock collection; provides detailed descriptions of hundreds of minerals with information on geographic distribution, physical properties, chemical composition, and crystalline structures; and includes 385 color photographs.

Over the snow, the world is hushed and white, but under the snow is a secret world of squirrels and snowshoe hares, bears and bullfrogs, and many others who live outside in the woods during the winter

When Ms. Frizzle, the strangest teacher in school, takes her class on a field trip to the waterworks, everyone ends up experiencing the water purification system from the inside.

An eye-opening and witty account of the global ecological transformations wrought by roads, from an award-winning author. Some 40 million miles of roadways encircle the earth, but we tend to regard them only as infrastructure for human convenience. In Crossings, Ben Goldfarb delves into the new science of road ecology to explore how roads have transformed our world. Millions of animals are killed by cars each day in the US alone, and roads fragment...

Mole is mad about magic until he takes his friend Mouse to a show that turns out to be all tricks, but then Mouse conjures up a special night program to show him the enchantment found in nature.

Journalist Weisman offers an original approach to questions of humanity's impact on the planet. Drawing on the expertise of engineers, atmospheric scientists, art conservators, zoologists, oil refiners, marine biologists, astrophysicists, religious leaders, and paleontologists, he illustrates what the planet might be like today if humans disappeared. He explains how our massive infrastructure would collapse and finally vanish without human presence;...

Never more since recent years have the news and scientists given us proofs of the changes happening on our earth; tsunamis, heat waves, ice melting, storms and flooding, quickly disappearing species. Facing the reoccurences of these phenomena, governments tried to act. There was the Earth Summit in Rio in 1992 and, in 2005, the Kyoto protocol started to be implemented by the countries who signed it. Unfortunately the attempts remain largely insufficient....

"Living at the border between life and non-life, fungi use diverse cocktails of potent enzymes and acids to disassemble some of the most stubborn substances on the planet, turning rock into soil and wood into compost, allowing plants to grow. Fungi not only help create soil, they send out networks of tubes that enmesh roots and link plants together in the "Wood Wide Web." Fungi also drive many long-standing human fascinations: from yeasts that cause...

Although less well known than the Mayans, the Anasazi, who flourished in the region now known as New Mexico, also vanished without a trace. Now, eight centuries after their thriving, 2,000-year-old civilization disappeared as though it had never existed, naturalist and adventurer Childs undertakes to find out where the Anasazi went and why. But discovering the fate of an entire race of people, 800 years after the fact, is not like tracking down a...