Rat Island: Predators in Paradise and the World’s Greatest Wildlife Rescueby William StolzenburgBloomsbury (2011), $26
For city dwellers, rats are a nuisance and a health hazard. But for isolated island species, rats are a death sentence, as William Stolzenburg demonstrates in his new book, Rat Island.
When you walk the walk like John Francis, you don’t necessarily need to talk the talk. Planetwalker: 17 Years of Silence, 22 Years of Walking is the true story of a native Philadelphian who, after witnessing a devastating 1971 California oil spill, chose to abstain from all motorized transportation. Instead, Francis walked. When his walking
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How can you get back to the land when you don’t have any land to get back to? In his new book, The City Homesteader: Self-Sufficiency on Any Square Footage, Scott Meyer shows acre-less urban- and suburbanites how to grow and preserve their own food, raise small livestock and become ever more self-sufficient—from composting to
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Wendell Berry understands technology’s lure to farmers. In 1950, when he was 16, his father bought a tractor, and suddenly he found he was impatient with his mules. But what does a tireless machine do to a farmer’s relationship to the land? Land becomes something to overcome—a perspective shared by a traveler on an interstate
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Food Politics: How the Food Industry Influences Nutrition and Healthby Marion NestleUC Press, 2003; $16.95When you bite into an apple, you’re probably not considering the laws and regulations, complex legal relationships and huge amounts of money that go into promoting food products. On your behalf, though, Marion Nestle is.
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The Ecology of Commerce: A Declaration of Sustainabilityby Paul HawkenHarper Collins, 1993, $19.96Paul Hawken, author, entrepreneur and activist, debunks the tired notion that business and the environment are somehow at odds. “Common wisdom holds that ecologists worry about nature while economists are concerned with human beings,” Hawken explains. “But economists are in fact taking care
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