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The Mountains Of California John Muir An Unabridged, Digitally Enlarged Edition With Original Illustrations, To Include: The Sierra Nevada - The Glaciers - The Snow - A Near View Of The High Sierra - The Passes - The Glacier Lakes - The Glacier Meadows - The Forests - The Douglas Squirrel - A Wind-Storm In The Forests - The River Floods - Sierra Thunder-Storms - The Water-Ouzel - The Wild Sheep - In The Sierra Foot-Hills - The Bee-Pastures |
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Garbology: Our Dirty Love Affair with Trash Edward Humes A Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist takes readers on a surprising tour of the world of garbage.
Take a journey inside the secret world of our biggest export, our most prodigious product, and our greatest legacy: our trash. It’s the biggest thing we make: The average American is on track to produce a whopping 102 tons of garbage across a lifetime, $50 billion in squandered riches rolled to the curb each year, more than that produced by any other people in the world. But that trash doesn’t just magically disappear; our bins are merely the starting point for a strange, impressive, mysterious, and costly journey that may also represent the greatest untapped opportunity of the century.
In Garbology, Pulitzer Prize–winning author Edward Humes investigates the trail of that 102 tons of trash—what’s in it; how much we pay for it; how we manage to create so much of it; and how some families, communities, and even nations are finding a way back from waste to discover a new kind of prosperity. Along the way , he introduces a collection of garbage denizens unlike anyone you’ve ever met: the trash-tracking detectives of MIT, the bulldozer-driving sanitation workers building Los Angeles’ immense Garbage Mountain landfill, the artists in residence at San Francisco’s dump, and the family whose annual trash output fills not a dumpster or a trash can, but a single mason jar.
Garbology digs through our epic piles of trash to reveal not just what we throw away, but who we are and where our society is headed. Are we destined to remain the country whose number-one export is scrap—America as China’s trash compactor—or will the country that invented the disposable economy pioneer a new and less wasteful path? The real secret at the heart of Garbology may well be the potential for a happy ending buried in our landfill. Waste, Humes writes, is the one environmental and economic harm that ordinary working Americans have the power to change—and prosper in the process. |
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My First Summer in the Sierra John Muir This book is a facsimile reprint and may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. |
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The Tiger: A True Story of Vengeance and Survival (Vintage Departures) John Vaillant A gripping story of man pitted against nature’s most fearsome and efficient predator.
Outside a remote village in Russia’s Far East a man-eating tiger is on the prowl. The tiger isn’t just killing people, it’s murdering them, almost as if it has a vendetta. A team of trackers is dispatched to hunt down the tiger before it strikes again. They know the creature is cunning, injured, and starving, making it even more dangerous. As John Vaillant re-creates these extraordinary events, he gives us an unforgettable and masterful work of narrative nonfiction that combines a riveting portrait of a stark and mysterious region of the world and its people, with the natural history of nature’s most deadly predator. |
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Cape Cod Henry David Thoreau 1908. A minor work by Thoreau, Cape Cod illustrates the qualities that define his greatest works: his clarity and ease of style, and his concreteness as a naturalist and observer of nature and society. Compiled from magazine articles published in the 1850s after his death, these chapters detail several short trips he made to Cape Cod between 1849 and 1855. Contents: The Shipwreck; Stagecoach Views; The Plains of Nauset; The Beach; The Wellfleet Oysterman; The Beach Again; Across the Cape; The Highland Light; The Sea and the Desert; and Provincetown. See other titles by this author available from Kessinger Publishing. |
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Moby-Duck: The True Story of 28,800 Bath Toys Lost at Sea and of the Beachcombers, Oceanographers, Environmentalists, and Fools, Including the Author,Who Went in Search of Them Donovan Hohn A compulsively readable narrative of whimsy and curiosity- "adventurous, inquisitive, and brightly illuminating" (Janet Maslin, The New York Times).
When the writer Donovan Hohn heard of the mysterious loss of thousands of bath toys at sea, he figured he would interview a few oceanographers, talk to a few beachcombers, and read up on Arctic science and geography. But questions can be like ocean currents: wade in too far, and they carry you away. Hohn's accidental odyssey pulls him into the secretive arena of shipping conglomerates, the daring work of Arctic researchers, the lunatic risks of maverick sailors, and the shadowy world of Chinese toy factories. Moby-Duck is a journey into the heart of the sea and an adventure through science, myth, the global economy, and some of the worst weather imaginable.
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The Travels of a T-Shirt in the Global Economy: An Economist Examines the Markets, Power, and Politics of World Trade Pietra Rivoli The Travels of a T-Shirt in the Global Economy has been lauded by the New York Times, Financial Times, and reviewers worldwide. Translated in fourteen languages, Travels has received numerous awards for its frank and nuanced discussion of global economic realities. Now updated and revised--including a discussions of environmental issue--this fascinating book illustrates crucial lessons in the debate on globalization. The major themes and conclusions from the first edition are intact, but in response to questions from readers and students around the world, the second edition now includes: - Updates on the people, businesses, and politics involved in the production of the T-shirt.
- Discussions of environmental issues related to both international trade and the T-shirt's life story.
- A look at the maturing of the anti-globalization movement, and the recent shift in public opinion against internationalism.
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Visit Sunny Chernobyl: And Other Adventures in the World's Most Polluted Places Andrew Blackwell For most of us, traveling means visiting the most beautiful places on Earth—Paris, the Taj Mahal, the Grand Canyon. It’s rare to book a plane ticket to visit the lifeless moonscape of Canada’s oil sand strip mines, or to seek out the Chinese city of Linfen, legendary as the most polluted in the world. But in Visit Sunny Chernobyl, Andrew Blackwell embraces a different kind of travel, taking a jaunt through the most gruesomely polluted places on Earth. From the hidden bars and convenience stores of a radioactive wilderness to the sacred but reeking waters of India, Visit Sunny Chernobyl fuses immersive first-person reporting with satire and analysis, making the case that it’s time to start appreciating our planet as it is—not as we wish it would be. Irreverent and reflective, the book is a love letter to our biosphere’s most tainted, most degraded ecosystems, and a measured consideration of what they mean for us. Equal parts travelogue, expose, environmental memoir, and faux guidebook, Blackwell careens through a rogue’s gallery of environmental disaster areas in search of the worst the world has to offer—and approaches a deeper understanding of what’s really happening to our planet in the process. |
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Natural Disasters Patrick Leon Abbott This book focuses on natural disasters: how the normal processes of the Earth concentrate their energies and deal heavy blows to humans and their structures. "Natural Disasters" is concerned with how the natural world operates and, in so doing, kills and maims humans and destroys their works. Throughout the book, certain themes are maintained: * energy sources underlying disasters * plate tectonics and climate change * Earth processes operating in rock, water, and atmosphere * significance of geologic time * complexities of multiple variables operating simultaneously * detailed and readable case histories. The text aims to explain important principles about the Earth and then develop further understanding through numerous case histories. The book includes recent happenings such as the Western United States wildfires during the summer 2000 and the Los Alamos prescribed burn, also occurring in 2000. |
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Diversity Amid Globalization: World Regions, Environment, Development (3rd Edition) Lester Rowntree, Martin Lewis, Marie Price, William Wyckoff For undergraduate World Regional Geography courses, or for a courses on globalization or cultural diversity. Diversity Amid Globalization explicitly acknowledges the geographic changes in today's world by emphasizing both the homogenizing and diversifying forces inherent to the globalization process. This approach allows the authors to emphasize the interconnections that bind people and places together. The globalization approach challenges students to make critical comparisons between the regions of the world in order to understand them more fully. Examples of the sorts of topics used to accomplish these goals include: *The rise of Islamic fundamentalism in SW Asia. *Aboriginal groups using high-technology tools to forge common political survival strategies. *The economic and political integration of the European Union, contrasted with micronationalism and the factionalism in Europe. *Ethnic diversification in the face of strong participation in the global assembly line in SE Asia. *The globalization and localization of beer consumption and production in the United States and Canada. |