Roger Deakin’s journey through trees takes him through the woods of Britain and Europe, to Kazakhstan and Australia, finding fellowship with a good many trees and the critters that live among them, as well as many lovely and interesting people.
Amidst the noisy and nonsensical discourse about recognizing the intelligence of machines, Zoë Schlanger asks us to open our eyes to the intelligence that already surrounds us and upon which we wholly depend: that of plants.
Like another book with the same name, James C. Scott’s Against the Grain argues that the “just so” story of humans’ progression from barbarians to civilized agriculturalists is not the success story we might have thought.
Amid a drive for more “artificial” intelligence, James Bridle here asks what counts as intelligence, and then reframes fears about a future AI takeover into more productive—and present—ends.
Each essay in this collection is a a full-throated declaration of a democracy of species—with humans as the minority voice.
Kolbert’s essays span Kyoto, Bush-era climate denialism, ocean acidification, Canadian tar sands, and melting glaciers.
MacKinnon calls for a “rewilding,” bringing the wild back into our lives rather than carving out a separate place for it. A compelling and beautiful read.
From frogs to bats to megafauna and the Great Barrier Reef, Kolbert’s tale is a terrifying and fascinating travelogue.
Bill McKibben indicts the current economic system for it’s single-minded pursuit of “more” without regard for whether or not it is (or can be) “better.”
A revisionist history that argues that we traded away much of our humanity in exchange for the little bit of security that agriculture promised.
Meeker argues that the destructive aspects of western civilization are founded on the tragic mode, while the comic mode offers a path for redemption.