by Caroline Van Hemert (2019)
Faced with disillusionment in her ornithology career, Caroline Van Hemert and her husband embark on an astonishing 4,000-mile journey from Bellingham, Washington, to the Arctic Ocean entirely by human power: rowboat, ski, foot, and raft across roadless glaciers and mountains.
Michael Finkel
In 1986, twenty-year-old Christopher Knight walked into the woods of Maine and did not speak to another human being for twenty-seven years. He lived in a hidden tent encampment through brutal winters, surviving exclusively by burglarizing nearby summer cabins for food and batteries.
Mark Hertsgaard
Like many of us, Mark Hertsgaard has long worried about the declining health of our environment. But in 1991, he decided to act on his concern and investigate the escalating crisis for himself. Traveling on his own dime, he embarked on an odyssey lasting most of the decade and spanning nineteen countries. Now, in Earth Odyssey, he reports on our environmental predicament through the eyes of the people who live it.From the gilded boardrooms of Paris to the traffic-clogged streets of Bangkok, we travel from the deep human past to our still unfolding future. Much of the story revolves around people like Zhenbing, Hertsgaard's charismatic interpreter in China, whose desire to escape poverty leaves him indifferent to his country's horrific air and water pollution. We also meet Garang, a proud Dinka tribesman whose response to Sudan's famine shows the difficulty of building an environmentally sustainable future without bridging the gap between rich and poor. Drawing on interviews with Vaclav Havel, Al Gore, Jacques Cousteau, and numerous other prominent figures, Hertsgaard offers fresh insight into such complex issues as humanity's growing addiction to the automobile, the insidious spread of nuclear technology, and the inevitable tension between unfettered capitalism and the health of the biosphere.Earth Odyssey is a vivid, passionate narrative about one man's journey around the world in search of the answer to the most important question of our time: Is the future of the human species at risk? Combining first-rate reportage with irresistible storytelling, Mark Hertsgaard has written an essential--and ultimately hopeful--book about the uncertain fate of humankind.From the Hardcover edition.
John Muir
"When John Muir died in 1914, the pre-eminent American naturalist, explorer, and conservationist had not yet written the second volume of his autobiography, in which he had planned to cover his Yosemite years, 1863 to 1875. Working with a variety of sources - Muir's letters, journals, articles, and unpublished manuscripts, as well as selections drawn from biographical pieces written about Muir by people who met him in Yosemite in the early 1870s - editors Engberg and Wesling have assembled what they term a "composite autobiography." They provide brief interpretive and transitional passages throughout the book and a short biographical/critical piece on Muir."--BOOK JACKET.
Oliver Rackham
From its earliest origins to the present day, Oliver Rackham describes the endlessly changing character of Britain's countryside.