Coral Whisperers

Coral Whisperers PDF Author: Irus Braverman
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520970837
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 385

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Book Description
In recent years, a catastrophic global bleaching event devastated many of the world’s precious coral reefs. Working on the front lines of ruin, today’s coral scientists are struggling to save these important coral reef ecosystems from the imminent threats of rapidly warming, acidifying, and polluted oceans. Coral Whisperers captures a critical moment in the history of coral reef science. Gleaning insights from over one hundred interviews with leading scientists and conservation managers, Irus Braverman documents a community caught in an existential crisis and alternating between despair and hope. In this important new book, corals emerge not only as signs and measures of environmental catastrophe, but also as catalysts for action.

Coral Whisperers

Coral Whisperers PDF Author: Irus Braverman
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520970837
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 385

Get Book Here

Book Description
In recent years, a catastrophic global bleaching event devastated many of the world’s precious coral reefs. Working on the front lines of ruin, today’s coral scientists are struggling to save these important coral reef ecosystems from the imminent threats of rapidly warming, acidifying, and polluted oceans. Coral Whisperers captures a critical moment in the history of coral reef science. Gleaning insights from over one hundred interviews with leading scientists and conservation managers, Irus Braverman documents a community caught in an existential crisis and alternating between despair and hope. In this important new book, corals emerge not only as signs and measures of environmental catastrophe, but also as catalysts for action.

At Every Depth

At Every Depth PDF Author: Tessa Hill
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231553250
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 432

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Book Description
The world’s oceans are changing at a drastic pace. Beneath the waves and along the coasts, climate change and environmental degradation have spurred the most radical transformations in human history. In response, the people who know the ocean most intimately are taking action for the sake of our shared future. Community scientists track species in California tidepools. Researchers dive into the waters around Sydney to replant kelp forests. Scientists and First Nations communities collaborate to restore clam gardens in the Pacific Northwest. In At Every Depth, the oceanographer Tessa Hill and the science journalist Eric Simons profile these and other efforts to understand and protect marine environments, taking readers to habitats from shallow tidepools to the deep sea. They delve into the many human connections to the ocean—how people live with and make their living from the waters—journeying to places as far-flung as coral reefs, the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, and the Arctic and Antarctic poles. At Every Depth shares the stories of people from all walks of life, including scientists, coastal community members, Indigenous people, shellfish farmers, and fisheries workers. It brings together varied viewpoints, showing how scientists’ research and local and Indigenous knowledge can complement each other to inform a more sustainable future. Poignantly written and grounded in science, this book offers a narrative perspective on the changing oceans, letting us see how our relationships to the oceans are changing too.

The California Deserts

The California Deserts PDF Author: Bruce M Pavlik
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 9780520940789
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 386

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Book Description
This highly readable, spectacularly illustrated compendium is an ecological journey into a wondrous land of extremes. The California Deserts explores the remarkable diversity of life in this harsh yet fragile quarter of the Golden State. In a rich narrative, it illuminates how that diversity, created by drought and heat, has evolved with climate change since the Ice Ages. Along the way, we find there is much to learn from each desert species-- whether it is a cactus, pupfish, tortoise, or bighorn sheep--about adaptation to a warming, arid world. The book tells of human adaptation as well, and is underscored by a deep appreciation for the intimate knowledge acquired by native people during their 12,000-year desert experience. In this sense, the book is a journey of rediscovery, as it reflects on the ways that knowledge has been reclaimed and amplified by new discoveries. The book also takes the measure of the ecological condition of these deserts today, presenting issues of conservation, management, and restoration. With its many sidebars, photographs, and featured topics, The California Deserts provides a unique introduction to places of remarkable and often unexpected beauty.

Life on the Rocks

Life on the Rocks PDF Author: Juli Berwald
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0593087313
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 353

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Book Description
FINALIST FOR THE L.A. TIMES BOOK PRIZE NAMED A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR BY THE NEW YORKER AND BOOKLIST The story of the urgent fight to save coral reefs, and why it matters to us all Coral reefs are a microcosm of our planet: extraordinarily diverse, deeply interconnected, and full of wonders. When they’re thriving, these fairy gardens hidden beneath the ocean’s surface burst with color and life. They sustain bountiful ecosystems and protect vulnerable coasts. Corals themselves are evolutionary marvels that build elaborate limestone formations from their collective skeletons, broker symbiotic relationships with algae, and manufacture their own fluorescent sunblock. But corals across the planet are in the middle of an unprecedented die-off, beset by warming oceans, pollution, damage by humans, and a devastating pandemic. Juli Berwald fell in love with coral reefs as a marine biology student, entranced by their beauty and complexity. Alarmed by their peril, she traveled the world to discover how to prevent their loss. She met scientists and activists operating in emergency mode, doing everything they can think of to prevent coral reefs from disappearing forever. She was so amazed by the ingenuity of these last-ditch efforts that she joined in rescue missions, unexpected partnerships, and risky experiments, and helped rebuild reefs with rebar and zip ties. Life on the Rocks is an inspiring, lucid, meditative ode to the reefs and the undaunted scientists working to save them against almost impossible odds. As she also attempts to help her daughter in her struggle with mental illness, Berwald explores what it means to keep fighting a battle whose outcome is uncertain. She contemplates the inevitable grief of climate change and the beauty of small victories.

The Ambassador's Wife

The Ambassador's Wife PDF Author: Jennifer Steil
Publisher: Anchor
ISBN: 0385539037
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 413

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Book Description
From a real-life ambassador's wife and the acclaimed author of Exile Music comes a harrowing novel about the kidnapping of an American woman in the Middle East and the heartbreaking choices she and her husband each must make in the hope of being reunited. When bohemian artist Miranda meets British ambassador Finn in the ancient stone streets of an Islamic city, the course of her life alters in extraordinary ways. Their marriage gives her the luxury to paint whenever she wants, a staff to wait on her, and a young daughter she adores, but she loses the freedom to wander where she likes and to meet the Muslim women she is secretly teaching to paint. Her husband also makes Miranda a target: One sunny afternoon while hiking in the mountains, she is brutally kidnapped. As Finn struggles to save his family and his career, and Miranda grows close to a stranger’s child in captivity, the secrets he and Miranda have each sought to hide place them and those who trust them in peril. Not even freedom could restore the happiness that once was theirs.

Curious Species

Curious Species PDF Author: Whitney Barlow Robles
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300266189
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 324

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Book Description
A compelling and innovative exploration of how animals shaped the field of natural history and its ecological afterlives Can corals build worlds? Do rattlesnakes enchant? What is a raccoon, and what might it know? Animals and the questions they raised thwarted human efforts to master nature during the so-called Enlightenment--a historical moment when rigid classification pervaded the study of natural history, people traded in people, and imperial avarice wrapped its tentacles around the globe. Whitney Barlow Robles makes animals the unruly protagonists of eighteenth-century science through journeys to four spaces and ecological zones: the ocean, the underground, the curiosity cabinet, and the field. Her forays reveal a forgotten lineage of empirical inquiry, one that forced researchers to embrace uncertainty. This tumultuous era in the history of human-animal encounters still haunts modern biologists and ecologists as they struggle to fathom animals today. In an eclectic fusion of history and nature writing, Robles alternates between careful historical investigations and probing personal narratives. These excavations of the past and present of distinct nonhuman creatures reveal the animal foundations of human knowledge and show why tackling our current environmental crisis first requires looking back in time.

The Nature of Data

The Nature of Data PDF Author: Jenny Goldstein
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 1496217152
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 342

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Book Description
By synthesizing scholarly work at the intersection of political ecology, digital geography, and science and technology studies, The Nature of Data analyzes how new digital technologies affect environments and their control.

Soul Whispers II

Soul Whispers II PDF Author: Sophia Fairchild
Publisher: Soul Wings Press
ISBN: 0984593039
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 195

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Book Description
What are the elements whispering to you? Since ancient times the four elements ~ air, water, fire and earth ~ have been associated with balance, healing and wholeness. Journey through the secret alchemy of the elements with professional Soul Coaches from all over the world to deepen your authentic connection to the true path of your soul. New techniques are unveiled, allowing you and your clients to experience the profound transformative power of the elements - to rejuvenate, inspire and heal your life! Learn how to ~Activate your Chakras ~Restore your Passion ~Overcome Addictions ~Work with your Dreams ~Create Sacred Ceremony ~Enhance your Creativity ~Rediscover your Abundance ~Make a Home for your Soul. Contributing Authors ~ Patti Allen, Roberta Ashkawa Binder, Ulrike Behre-Brandes, Kelly Chamchuk, Michelle Chant, Maria Clark, Sophia Fairchild, Misasha, Petra Nella, Coral Mujaes Pola, Christine Schreibstein, Helen Mumford Sole, Linda J. Stewart, Deb Swingholm, Jenn de Valk, Judy Ward, and Ilona Warda. Gold Medal Award ~ Spirit BOOK OF THE YEAR 2011 Living Now Book Awards

Islands

Islands PDF Author: Steven Roger Fischer
Publisher: Reaktion Books
ISBN: 1780230532
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 338

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Book Description
When Lost’s Oceanic Airlines Flight 815 crashed, the survivors found themselves on a seemingly deserted island. In Defoe’s novel, Robinson Crusoe spends twenty-eight years on a remote tropical island near Trinidad, while in the movie Castaway Tom Hanks survives over four years on a South Pacific island. And Jurassic Park kept its dinosaur population confined to an island off the coast of Central America. Islands often find themselves at the center of imagined worlds, secluded and sometimes mystical locales filled with strange creatures and savage populations. The cannibals, raptors, and smoke monsters that exist on the islands of popular culture aside, the more than one million islands and islets on the planet are indeed small , geological, biological, and cultural laboratories. From Britain to Japan, from the Galapagos to Manhattan, this book roams the planet to provide the first global introduction to these waterlocked landforms. Longtime island dweller Steven Roger Fischer shows that, since time began, islands have been one of the primary birthplaces for plants, animals, and proto-humans. These eyots of stone and sand—whether in ocean, lake, or river—fostered the human race, and Fischer recounts how humanity then exploited these remarkable habitats as stepping stones to global dominion. He explores island economics, warfare, and politics, and he examines the role they have played in literature, art and psychology. At the same time, he sparks our imagination with visions of islands—from Atlantis to Tahiti, Treasure Island to Hawaii. Ultimately, he reveals, these isolated mini-worlds are a measure of humankind itself. An engaging account of the islets that have enriched, lured, terrified, and inspired us, Islands shines new light on these cradles of earth—and human—history.

Continent in Dust

Continent in Dust PDF Author: Jerry C. Zee
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520384105
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 332

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Book Description
In China, the weather has changed. Decades of reform have been shadowed by a changing meteorological normal: seasonal dust storms and spectacular episodes of air pollution have reworked physical and political relations between land and air in China and downwind. Continent in Dust offers an anthropology of strange weather, focusing on intersections among statecraft, landscape, atmosphere, and society. Traveling from state engineering programs that attempt to choreograph the movement of mobile dunes in the interior, to newly reconfigured bodies and airspaces in Beijing, and beyond, this book explores contemporary China as a weather system in the making: what would it mean to understand “the rise of China” literally, as the country itself rises into the air?