"A fascinating and daresay essential meditation on childhood, parenthood, and the importance of wild spaces for those wild creatures known as kids."—Dave Eggers How fully can the world be explored when you are focused on trying not to die? This is the question that lies at the heart of Amy Fusselman’s Savage Park. America is the land of safety, of protecting children to make sure that nothing can possibly hurt them. But while on a trip to...

"A seed slips beyond a garden wall. A tree is planted on a precarious border. A shrub is stolen from its culture and its land. What happens when these plants leave their original homes and put down roots elsewhere? In fourteen essays, Dispersals explores the entanglements of the plant and human worlds: from species considered invasive, like giant hogweed; to those vilified but intimate, like soy; and those like kelp, on which our futures depend. Each...

An eye-opening examination of how treating land as a source of profit has a massive impact on racial inequality and the housing, gentrification, and environmental crises. Climate change, gentrification, racial inequity, and corporate greed are some of the most urgent problems facing our society. They are traditionally treated as unrelated issues, but they all share a common root: the commodification of land. Environmental journalist Audrea Lim began...

Explores how environmental factors have influenced human history and civilizations from ancient times through the present day.

People of European descent form the bulk of the population in most of the temperate zones of the world - North America, Australia and New Zealand. The military successes of European imperialism are easy to explain; in many cases they were a matter of firearms against spears. But as Alfred W. Crosby maintains in this highly original and fascinating book, the Europeans' displacement and replacement of the native peoples in the temperate zones was more...

The author surveys the traces we will leave for peoples in the very distant future. He shows that modern civilization has created objects and landscapes with the potential to endure through deep time, including the plastic polluting the oceans, the nuclear waste entombed within the earth, and the thirty million miles of paved roads spanning the planet. This is his medition on climate change and the Anthropocene, and an urgent search for fossils--industrial,...

This book is a socio-spatial history of the Middle East, and uses that case to reflect more broadly on the making of the modern world. Pivoting around Bilād al-Shām (Greater Syria) - alternatingly zooming in on cities and nation-states and zooming out to neighboring countries, imperial and transnational links, and overseas diasporas - it asks: Why, how, and in which stages did well-rooted cities and regions mold a dynamic modern world economy...

"In the 60,000 years since people began colonizing the continents, a continuous feature of human civilization has been mobility. History is replete with seismic global events-pandemics and plagues, wars and genocides. Each time, after a great catastrophe, our innate impulse toward physical security compels us to move. The map of humanity isn't settled--not now, not ever. The filled-with-crises 21st century promises to contain the most dangerous and...