Environment

The world is currently closer to superpower conflict than at any time since the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. World War III is a real possibility, and with 12,000 warheads in the arsenals of more than half a dozen countries, we are standing on a nuclear knife edge. Despite receiving very little attention, nuclear war is a far greater threat to humanity's immediate survival than climate change. While climate heating threatens humanity over many decades, nuclear war could destroy civilisation in just a few hours.

What can nature teach us about living together? Investigating eight symbiotic relationships trying to survive the climate and biodiversity crises, Sophie Pavelle explains why it has never been more vital for us to understand symbiosis. Symbiotic relationships regulate ecosystems, strengthen resilience and bind pivotal connections. Species living together in symbiosis is no accident – these dynamics evolved.

A revolution is taking place. Around the world, ordinary people are turning to courts seeking justice for environmental damage. At the forefront of this movement, pioneering barrister Monica Feria-Tinta advocates not only for the people fighting for their homes and livelihoods, but also for those who have no voice: for rivers, forests and endangered species.

In Nature's Genius David Farrier takes us on a profound journey into this ever-changing natural world. What we discover could change us. The ways animals adjust to the urban landscape can help us design sustainable cities. Examining other intelligences can help us remake our economies. Learning from bacterial evolution may help solve our waste problem. Synthetic biology could rescue animals from the brink of extinction. Thinking in timescales of the natural world could help us choose a better future.

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.

The 2015 Paris Agreement on climate change was one of the most difficult and hopeful achievements of the twenty-first century: 195 nations finally agreed, after twenty years of trying, to establish an ambitious, operational regime to address one of the greatest civilizational challenges of our time. In Landing the Paris Climate Agreement, Todd Stern provides an engaging account from inside the rooms where it happened: the full, charged, seven-year story of how the Paris Agreement came to be, following an arc from Copenhagen, to Durban, to the secret US-China climate deal in 2014, to Paris.

The story of Chicago is often likened to that of a phoenix rising out of the ashes of the Great Fire. Yet that infamous event was only part of the destruction that has shaped Chicago's identity. This unique history explores the calamities that have befallen the Windy City, such as the 1954 killer water surge that swept in on a calm summer day; the 1967 tornado that ripped through rush hour traffic; the 1886 Haymarket Square riot that put Chicago on the anarchist map; and many other acts of nature and human folly.

In Eating the Ocean Elspeth Probyn investigates the profound importance of the ocean and the future of fish and human entanglement. On her ethnographic journey around the world's oceans and fisheries, she finds that the ocean is being simplified in a food politics that is overwhelmingly land based and preoccupied with buzzwords like "local" and "sustainable."

Observer l’histoire de l’humanité à partir des forêts, c’est la perspective enthousiasmante que propose le journaliste, conférencier et essayiste Laurent Testot, qui s’inscrit dans le courant assez récent et novateur de l’histoire environnementale. L’auteur retrace l’histoire de l’humanité depuis la constitution des premiers empires de l’antiquité romaine, chinoise et indienne, en passant par les sociétés médiévales et modernes et étudie le rapport que ces sociétés passées ont entretenu avec leur environnement et en particulier leurs forêts.

Drei Jahre nach Erscheinen des Platz-1-Spiegel-Bestsellers legen Sven Plöger und Andreas Schlumberger eine komplett überarbeitete und erweiterte Neuausgabe vor, mit Extrakapiteln zu den Themen Wasserstoff, Kernfusion sowie der Entfernung, Speicherung und Nutzung von Kohlenstoff aus der Atmosphäre.