Nature & Environment

Consuming less is our best strategy for saving the planet--but can we do it? In this thoughtful and surprisingly optimistic book, journalist J. B. MacKinnon investigates how we may achieve a world without shopping. We can't stop shopping. And yet we must. This is the consumer dilemma. The economy says we must always consume more: even the slightest drop in spending leads to widespread unemployment, bankruptcy, and home foreclosure. The planet says we consume too much: in America, we burn the ...

Matsutake is the most valuable mushroom in the world-and a weed that grows in human-disturbed forests across the Northern Hemisphere. Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing's account of these sought-after fungi offers insights into areas far beyond just mushrooms and addresses a crucial question: What manages to live in the ruins we have made? The Mushroom at the End of the World explores the unexpected corners of matsutake commerce, where we encounter Japanese gourmets, capitalist traders, Hmong jungle fight...

In The Quest, master storyteller, leading energy expert and Pulitzer prize-winner for The Prize, Daniel Yergin shows us how energy is the ultimate engine of global political and economic change, in a gripping story that spans the old energies on which our civilization has been built, the new energies that are competing to replace them, and the battle over climate change. Epic in scope and never more timely, The Quest vividly reveals the decisions, technologies, and individuals that are shapin...