A fascinating excursion into the history behind the place we call home. Bill Bryson and his family live in a Victorian parsonage in a part of England where nothing of any great significance has happened since the Romans decamped. Yet one day, he began to consider how very little he knew about the ordinary things of life as he found it in that comfortable home. To remedy this, he formed the idea of journeying about his house from room to room to “write...

Discusses fashion trends and inexpensive clothing retailers and how they lead consumers to be wasteful.

The challenges we face can be difficult even to think about. Climate change, the depletion of oil, economic upheaval, and mass extinction together create a planetary emergency of overwhelming proportions. Active Hope shows us how to strengthen our capacity to face this crisis so that we can respond with unexpected resilience and creative power. Drawing on decades of teaching an empowerment approach known as the Work That Reconnects, the authors guide...

Reveals how the voyages of Columbus reintroduced plants and animals that had been separated millions of years earlier, documenting how the ensuing exchange of flora and fauna between Eurasia and the Americas fostered a European rise, devastated imperial China, convulsed Africa, and made Mexico City the center of the world. [From publisher's description]

"The story of the invention and use of electricity has often been told before, but never from an enviromnental point of view. The assumption of safety, and the conviction that electricity has nothing to do with life, are by now so entrenched in the human psyche that new research, and testimony by those who are being injured, are not enough to change the course that society has set. Two increasingly isolated worlds--that inhabited by the majority,...

I'm concerned about cutting UK emissions of twaddle – twaddle about sustainable energy. Everyone says getting off fossil fuels is important, and we are all encouraged to make a difference, but many of the things that allegedly make a difference add up.

Twaddle emissions are high at the moment because people get emotional (for example about wind farms or nuclear power) and no one talks about numbers. Or if they do mention numbers, they

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Drawing on previously obscure reports and government documents, renowned security expert Klare shows that the U.S. military sees the climate threat as imperiling the country on several fronts at once.

"Bill Gates shares what he's learned in more than a decade of studying climate change and investing in innovations to address the problems, and sets out a vision for how the world can build the tools it needs to get to zero greenhouse gas emissions. BillGates explains why he cares so deeply about climate change and what makes him optimistic that the world can avoid the most dire effects of the climate crisis. Gates says, "We can work on a local, national,...

"In May 2016, the city of Fort McMurray in Alberta, Canada, burned to the ground, forcing 88,000 people to flee their homes. It was the largest evacuation ever of a city in the face of a forest fire, raising the curtain on a new age of increasingly destructive wildfires. This book is a suspenseful account of one of North America's most devastating forest fires--and a stark exploration of our dawning era of climate catastrophes"--

"Repeopling Vermont: The Paradox of Development in the Twentieth Century, by historian Paul Searls, traces two distinct but interrelated stories to illuminate the fundamental contradictions and ironies that defined Vermont in the twentieth century. One is the story of a group of Swedish immigrants who settled in and around Landgrove in the 1890s and their descendants. The other is the story of Samuel R. Ogden, who beginning in 1929 purchased most...