Archives de catégorie : Environment

HOW TO SAVE THE PLANET WITHOUT REALLY TRYING de Jessica Eise

Dr. Jessica Eise, a behavior and climate researcher, reveals a radical shift: people do want to help. The problem isn’t willpower—it’s that we’ve ignored how our brains and bodies are wired for action.

HOW TO SAVE THE PLANET WITHOUT REALLY TRYING
by Jessica Eise
Urano US, Fall 2027
(via Sterling Lord Literistic)

For over 40 years, climate change has dominated the headlines—and yet, meaningful action remains out of reach. We’re told it’s the system’s fault, that our choices don’t matter, and in the same breath, that none of us are doing enough. No wonder so many—especially the young—feel paralyzed and hopeless. What’s missing isn’t passion: it’s an understanding of how people actually work. In How to Save the Planet Without Really Trying, Dr. Jessica Eise, a behavior and climate researcher, reveals a radical shift: people do want to help. The problem isn’t willpower—it’s that we’ve ignored how our brains and bodies are wired for action.

It turns out human psychology and physiology are tailor-made for this fight. When we tap into our natural instincts, we can guide ourselves to want less meat, consume less, and live more closely in line with our values. The result? Freer, lighter, happier lives—and real progress on the climate crisis. This isn’t wishful thinking. It’s science.

In four powerful sections—Body, Space, People, Tools—Eise lays out an intuitive science of transformation and a practical playbook: simple, repeatable, or “plugand-play” tools scaled by impact and effort. The result is maximum climate impact with maximum pleasure. The future of sustainability has never looked so easy!

Blending the habit building clarity of Atomic Habit with the simplifying joy of Marie Kondo, How to Save the Planet will speak to the same audience as David Wallace-Wells’s The Uninhabitable Earth, Greta Thunberg, and Christina Figueres’s The Future We Choose. It only takes 3.5% of the population to bring about great change.

Dr. Jessica Eise is a social scientist and professor at Indiana University, recognized globally for her pioneering work on how cultural, political, and psychological forces shape responses to climate change. Author of How to Feed the World (Island Press), she is widely cited in and writes for popular media, in addition to her scholarly work. She received her PhD from Purdue and, unusually for an academic, has an MA in journalism from NYU.

THE LOVE OF BEAVERS de Matthew Perry

The author’s extensive, long-term tracking of wild beaver colonies documents intimate family relationships and complex colony hierarchies highlighting how beavers serve as primary forces against drought and climate shifting by engineering vital, biodiverse wetlands.

THE LOVE OF BEAVERS
by Matthew Perry
Atria Books, March 2028
(via Writers House)

When conservationist and naturalist Matthew Perry arrived at Spring Farm CARES Nature Sanctuary in central New York, he believed he had been hired to restore a damaged landscape by hand—replanting forests, repairing streams, rebuilding bird habitat after two centuries of agricultural depletion. Instead, on his very first day, he met the true agents of restoration: a young pair of beavers newly released onto the land. Within months, they accomplished what no human-designed plan could, transforming a narrow farm stream into a living wetland system.

What began as a practical collaboration became a twenty-six-year relationship spanning three generations of beavers—and a profound shift in how to understand wildlife, restoration, and intelligence beyond the human realm. THE LOVE OF BEAVERS chronicles the lives of a single, multi-generational beaver colony with rare intimacy, following individuals, family lines, and learned traditions across decades of floods, droughts, loss, recovery, and renewal.

The world is just becoming hip to the importance and appeal of beavers. Perry’s posts of ongoing field observations, images, and short-form narrative videos regularly draw hundreds of thousands to millions of views, including a single beaver-fo­cused post that has reached more than 10 million viewers.

As the beavers go about their lives, the land responds. The book documents this transformation from the inside, revealing rewilding not as a technical intervention but as a relationship—one rooted in patience, trust, and shared time.

Matthew Perry has served for over twenty-five years as Conservation Director and Resident Naturalist at Spring Farm CARES Nature Sanctuary, overseeing a 260-acre rewilding project shaped largely by beaver-engineered wetlands. He is President of Beavers: Wetlands & Wildlife, a national nonprofit dedicated to coexistence-based conservation, and President of the Utica Peregrine Falcon Project. The Spring Farm beavers will be featured in an upcoming PBS documentary, and the BBC has ex­pressed interest in filming the colony in 2026.

THE PERSISTENCE OF WILD THINGS d’Emily Sohn

Discover a new wilderness, where animals survive—and thrive—in damaged, developed, and disturbed environments.

THE PERSISTENCE OF WILD THINGS:
How Life Endures in the Most Unexpected Places
by Emily Sohn
Sourcebooks, July 2027
(via DeFiore and Company)

Along highways in the United States, monarch butterflies lay their eggs on milkweed during long-distance migrations, even as vehicles fly past at 70 mph. In a swirling mass of waste in the ocean called the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, fantastic and otherworldly creatures float alongside and on top of milk jugs. On the border of Israel and Syria, wolves find safety in minefields in the Golan Heights, where fragile explosives keep people away. And on a small Swedish island, the quiet presence of bird-watching tourists protects a lively seabird population from predators.

In THE PERSISTENCE OF WILD THINGS, award-winning journalist Emily Sohn takes readers on an investigative journey around the world to explore pockets of wildlife thriving in unexpected places. She speaks with researchers and scientists, digging into deeply complex questions surrounding modern relationships between people and wild animals. Through conversations and visits to unusual field sites, she reveals how our best efforts to help the environment may sometimes cause harm. Along the way, we begin to see the potential for a new approach to conservation, one that acknowledges the reality of today’s ecosystems and sees humans as a part of nature, not apart from it.

Although coverage of environmental issues often induces despair, THE PERSISTENCE OF WILD THINGS leads with optimism. The natural world is filled with stories of resilience, and wilderness is everywhere. If we learn to notice the bright spots and silver linings, we can cultivate a new kind of hope for the future.

Emily Sohn is an award-winning health and science journalist whose work has appeared in The New York Times, National Geographic, Outside, Nature, Scientific American, Audubon, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, Discovery, Science News, and many other publications. Her stories have accumulated awards from the National Association of Science Writers, the American Society of Journalists and Authors, the Society of Environmental Journalists, and more. She has appeared on podcasts, radio programs, and TV shows, including NPR’s All Things Considered, the BBC World News, and All Sides with Ann Fisher.

A NATURAL HISTORY OF THE SPIRITS de Jori Lewis

From the winner of James Beard, Harriet Tubman, and Whiting Awards, a shimmering and unexpected vision of the world we inhabit together.

A NATURAL HISTORY OF THE SPIRITS:
On Ecology, Belonging, and the Sublime
by Jori Lewis
The New Press, November 2026
(via The Gernert Company)

From the celebrated journalist whose work has been hailed by Tiya Miles as “broad, complex, and unexpected,” and by Publishers Weekly as “informative and compassionate,” award-winning author Jori Lewis’s stunning new book blends scientific research, myth, folklore, and cultural analysis in a lyrical literary work that observes the natural world as an entry point into understanding the traumas of our history and the unexplored dimensions of our spiritual lives.

A NATURAL HISTORY OF THE SPIRITS offers profound meditations on the history of colonialism, racism, and social and ecological change, exploring such wide-ranging subjects as the reproduction crisis of the long-lived African baobab tree in the face of climate change; the evolutionary history of the watermelon and how racist stereotypes related to it developed and persist in the United States; the disquieted spirits of the Senegalese island Sangomar in the wake of new oil and gas exploration in the area; and how, by observing the habits of plants and animals, we may more deeply understand how we create home.

For readers of Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass and Barry Lopez’s Arctic Dreams, A NATURAL HISTORY OF THE SPIRITS grapples with how we have made, and continue to make, meaning of the world by reading the land, the animals, the water, and the skies.

Jori Lewis is an award-winning journalist whose reports have appeared on PRI’s The World and in Discover Magazine, Pacific Standard, and the Virginia Quarterly Review. She is also a contributing editor of Adi, a literary magazine about global politics. The author of Slaves for Peanuts (winner of a Whiting Award, a James Beard Award, and the Harriet Tubman Prize), Lewis splits her time between Chicago, Illinois, and Senegal.

DIE NATUR IST KEIN PARTEIMITGLIED de Harald Lesch & Axel Kleidon

Policy-makers must act now, but first, they need to understand how nature actually works. The physicists Harald Lesch and Axel Kleidon express frustration over the widespread unwillingness among broad political circles to understand how nature functions—an essay intended as a wake-up call.

DIE NATUR IST KEIN PARTEIMITGLIED
[Nature Belongs to No Party]
by Harald Lesch & Axel Kleidon
C. Bertelsmann/PRH Germany, March 2026

Again and again, political and economic leaders act as if we can simply ignore the laws of nature, and like to think that technology can perform magic tricks à la Harry Potter. In « Nature Belongs to No Party », two physicists speak truth to power: they explain in clear terms that nature does not negotiate, is not a party member and won’t cede to our demands. What exactly do energy-efficiency and climate protection entail? Why does energy depreciate? And what policies would a government that understands how nature works adopt?

DIE NATUR IST KEIN PARTEIMITGLIED is useful ammunition for anyone who’s as frustrated and angry as the authors about the seeming inability of politicians to tackle climate change head on.

Harald Lesch is a professor of theoretical astrophysics at the Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics at the Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich, and one of Germany’s most famous scientists. He has presented several accessible and popular science programmes, and written and co-written many popular and bestselling books.

Axel Kleidon studied physics and meteorology at the universities of Hamburg and Purdue. After graduating with a PhD in meteorology, he did a postdoc at Stanford and joined the faculty of the University of Maryland. Since 2006, he has led a research group at the Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry in Jena. In his research, he uses thermodynamics to quantify natural energy conversions within the earth system, and applies this approach to understanding atmosphere-biosphere interactions, our planet’s response to global change, and the natural limits of renewable energy.