Books and Magazines

Bringing Up Bébé meets Last Child in the Woods in this lively, insightful memoir about a mother who sets out to discover if the nature-centric parenting philosophy of her native Scandinavia holds the key to healthier, happier lives for her American children.

When Swedish-born Linda McGurk moved to small-town Indiana with her American husband to start a family, she quickly realized that her outdoorsy ways were not the norm. In Sweden children play outside all year round, regardless of the weather, and letting young babies nap outside in freezing temperatures is not only common - it is a practice recommended by physicians. In the US, on the other hand, she found that the playgrounds, which she had expected to find teeming with children, were mostly deserted. In preschool, children were getting drilled to learn academic skills while their Scandinavian counterparts were climbing trees, catching frogs, and learning how to compost. Worse, she realized that giving her daughters the same freedom to play outside that she had enjoyed as a child in Sweden could quickly lead to a visit by Child Protective Services.

The brewing culture clash finally came to a head when McGurk was fined for letting her children play in a local creek, setting off an online firestorm when she expressed her anger and confusion on her blog. The rules and parenting philosophies of her native country and her adopted homeland were worlds apart.

Struggling to fit in and to decide what was best for her children, McGurk turned to her own childhood for answers. Could the Scandinavian philosophy of "there is no such thing as bad weather, only bad clothes" be the key to better lives for her American children? And how would her children's relationships with nature change by introducing them to Scandinavian concepts like friluftsliv ("open-air living") and hygge (the coziness and the simple pleasures of home)? McGurk embarked on a six-month-long journey to Sweden to find out.

There's No Such Thing as Bad Weather is a fascinating personal narrative that highlights the importance of spending time outdoors and illustrates how the Scandinavian culture could hold the key to raising healthier, resilient, and confident children in America.

This is an invaluable textbook for any introductory survey course on the science and policy of climate change, for both non-science majors and introductory science students. The second edition has been thoroughly updated to reflect the most recent science from the latest IPCC reports, and many illustrations include new data. The new edition also reflects advances in the political debate over climate change. Unique amongst textbooks on climate change, it combines an introduction to the science with an introduction to economic and policy issues, and is tightly focused on anthropogenic climate change. It contains the necessary quantitative depth for students to properly understand the science of climate change. It supports students in using algebra to understand simple equations and to solve end of chapter problems. Supplementary online resources include: a complete set of PowerPoint figures for instructors, solutions to exercises, videos of the author's lectures, and additional computer exercises.

Explore global warming with graphics, illustrations, and charts that separate climate change fact from fiction, presenting the truth about global warming in a way that's both accurate and easy to understand. Respected climate scientists Michael E. Mann and Lee R. Kump address important questions about global warming and climate change, diving into the information documented by the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) and breaking it down into clear graphics that explain complex climate questions in simple illustrations that present the truth of the global warming problem clearly.

These experts take scientific findings about climate change and global warming and use analogies, striking images, and understandable graphics to make the global warming question clear to both skeptics and scientists. Dire Predictions shows the evidence and the causes that respected scientists have documented in IPCC findings and climate change studies — this powerful, illustrated book is updated with the latest IPCC information and is a must-read for anyone interested in understanding global warming and climate change and in joining the debate over the best way to combat global warming.

In the face of widespread fear and apathy, an international coalition of researchers, professionals, and scientists have come together to offer a set of realistic and bold solutions to climate change. One hundred techniques and practices are described here—some are well known; some you may have never heard of. They range from clean energy to educating girls in lower-income countries to land use practices that pull carbon out of the air. The solutions exist, are economically viable, and communities throughout the world are currently enacting them with skill and determination. If deployed collectively on a global scale over the next thirty years, they represent a credible path forward, not just to slow the earth’s warming but to reach drawdown, that point in time when greenhouse gases in the atmosphere peak and begin to decline. These measures promise cascading benefits to human health, security, prosperity, and well-being—giving us every reason to see this planetary crisis as an opportunity to create a just and livable world.

*Starred Review* It didn’t take long for Homo sapiens to begin “reassembling the biosphere,” observes Kolbert, a Heinz Award–winning New Yorker staff writer and author of Field Notes from a Catastrophe: Man, Nature, and Climate Change (2006). By burning fossil fuels, we are rapidly changing the atmosphere, the oceans, and the climate, forcing potentially millions of species into extinction. Five watershed events in the deep past decimated life on earth, hence the designation “Sixth Extinction” for today’s ­human-propelled crisis. To lay the groundwork for understanding this massive die-off, Kolbert crisply tells the stories of such earlier losses as the American mastodon and the great auk and provides an orienting overview of evolutionary and ecological science. She then chronicles her adventures in the field with biologists, botanists, and geologists investigating the threats against amphibians, bats, coral, and rhinos. Intrepid and astute, Kolbert combines vivid, informed, and awestruck descriptions of natural wonders, from rain forests to the Great Barrier Reef, and wryly amusing tales about such dicey situations as nearly grabbing onto a tree branch harboring a fist-sized tarantula, swimming among poisonous jellyfish, and venturing into a bat cave; each dispatch is laced with running explanations of urgent scientific inquiries and disquieting findings. Rendered with rare, resolute, and resounding clarity, Kolbert’s compelling and enlightening report forthrightly addresses the most significant topic of our lives. --Donna Seaman

This workbook will change your world. It will teach you how to use data collected by sensors, satellites and drones within smart cities in combination with the secrets of behavior-change, gamification, narrative design and social movement-building so you can make serious social and environmental change happen. Don’t think you experiences you have had, this process will take you on a journey that will unleash your most epic ideas yet.

“How to Save the World” is a workbook that helps you to have a new world through social and environmental changes professionals learn how to implement powerful techniques, drawn from behavioral psychology, measurement, design, data, storytelling, visualization, and game design that are proven to have impact.

Sound plan in this workbook will take you through a journey of exercises, questions, and case studies that will teach you the art of changing the world — and it’s often not what you think it is.
 

Junglenomics is all about protecting and restoring the natural environment and its biodiversity by introducing a form of economics that imitates the workings of natural ecosystems.

    The book begins by tracing the origins and growth of our environmental problems from the birth of farming to the development of modern money-based economies. It argues firstly that, just like species in ecosystems, we humans are genetically programmed to seek out new resources; and secondly that we inhabit a worldwide “economic ecosystem” in which people act out roles that are the exact equivalent to species in natural ecosystems. The only real difference is that ours is a “virtual” ecosystem, where rather than needing to evolve physically to occupy a new role, we are “avatars” who can step in and out of roles as the opportunity arises. In the economic world, technology is the equivalent to evolution, and the roles of money, innovation and markets have combined to evolve a whole array of niches where none previously existed, for example in electronics, energy and financial services.

    This has brought a unique and often devastating set of problems. There has been a huge proliferation of economic niches exploiting the world’s resources so fast and furious that it has left the rest of the “economic ecosystem” behind. This is mostly because there has not been time for enough clean-up “species”, which we find everywhere in Nature, to evolve alongside them. Natural ecosystems have no waste because evolutionary change is very slow, and that slowness allows the discarded waste that comes from the activities of one species to become a vital resource for another. The consequence of high-speed economic evolution is that we have a large supply of ‘dirty’ big beasts colonising and dominating the economic ecosystem, with the supply of “detrivores” to clean up after them lagging far behind. Junglenomics’ conclusion is thus that the chief cause of our environmental problems is much too much ‘dirty’ economic evolution, much too fast.
     
So how can we now establish the kind of balance that natural ecosystems enjoy and stop ourselves from damaging the natural world ever further? The answer, Junglenomics argues, is that balance between economics and ecology can yet be found by using highly successful natural ecosystems as a blueprint. Only in this way can the world achieve benign economic growth while conserving valuable ecosystems and their biodiversity. This involves, among many other things, nurturing and fast-tracking “good” technology and environmentally benign markets to control or eliminate “bad” ones; by establishing economic “symbiosis” to clear up behind polluters; by enlisting powerful economic actors in pursuit of ‘green’ profit to conserve and restore vulnerable wilderness; and by re-valuing environments and biodiversity to make them more valuable intact and alive than destroyed and dead. 

      In subsequent chapters, the Junglenomics paradigm is applied variously to pollution, land degradation, marine ecosystems, wildlife markets, wilderness destruction (including rainforests), and to the overall decline of biomass and biodiversity. *

    Junglenomics concludes that a World Environment Organisation is needed to disseminate ideas efficiently, share new technology and co-ordinate policy. It argues that we cannot cure new problems with old, failed policies; that a fresh mindset is needed to tackle the enormous environmental challenges facing the world; and that the Junglenomics paradigm - Nature’s paradigm - is the only way to achieve this for the long term.

*a longer synopsis covering these chapters is available on request.