Archives de catégorie : Environment

BETWEEN THE DEVIL AND THE DEEP BLUE SEA de Joseph Ogilvy

A cautionary tale of human exploitation and the consequences for our oceans.

BETWEEN THE DEVIL AND THE DEEP BLUE SEA
by Joseph Ogilvy
Bloomsbury, Spring 2026
(via Sterling Lord Literistic)

Look west from San Francisco, or Monterey, or Long Beach, past the pleasure boats and the surfers and the cargo ships. This is the California Current, the ocean system that made the Golden State; 1900 miles of the most productive waters on earth, flowing all the way from the Salish Sea to the furthest tip of the Baja Peninsula. For more than ten millennia generation after generation of Native Californians built their lives on the Current—delicately managed and exceptionally productive—home to innumerable sardines, tuna, and abalone galore.

But it was not to last. As modernity beckoned we could not resist the urge to plunder. As each stock collapsed we moved to seek another, reconstituting our economies around each new creature we found in plenty, until all were gutted in turn. Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea is the untold ocean story that brought California violently into the modern world, helped build its major cities, and brought thousands to its shores. At the heart of tremendous growth lay a remarkable boom-bust cycle, not just of the ocean, but of the human cultures that wrought it unwittingly on themselves, from Russian fur hunters tearing through territory in search of fresh otterskin, to the Chinese refugees seeking advantage in the ecological turmoil the Russians left behind, to the canning aristocracy born and destroyed by the sardine trade.

The world has vanishingly few untouched waters left to move into. At some point, we might want to start learning from our mistakes. BETWEEN THE DEVIL AND THE DEEP BLUE SEA is a history of how we got here and a warning for what we may not wish to repeat.

Joseph Ogilvy is a writer and chef from London, based in Austin, TX. After graduating from Oxford University he spent several years working in London restaurants including Bocca di Lupo, while writing on his days off. His experience in kitchens led him to investigate both the tangled human and ecological history of food. He will do for the oceans what John Vaillant did for fire and has all the makings of the next Barry Lopez while appealing to the same readership as Mark Arax’s The Dreamt Land and Earl Swift’s Chesapeake Requiem.

A BRIEF HISTORY OF CLIMATE FOLLY de Tim & Emma Flannery

This book reveals an outrageous history of dreamers and schemers who wanted to bend the climate to their will.

A BRIEF HISTORY OF CLIMATE FOLLY
by Tim and Emma Flannery
Text Publishing Australia, August 2026

In this entertaining and at times terrifying book, Tim and Emma Flannery tell the story of how human beings have tried to change the weather. It’s a long story that goes back to priests and shamans who prayed to weather gods and sang and danced to make it rain. It’s a story of shysters and charlatans and snake-oil salesmen. And it’s a story of shocking schemes to reshape nature.

Climate shapes species and plays a key role in evolution. But we are the only species that has ever dreamed of making the weather suit ourselves. And now that we are in danger of triggering catastrophic global warming, the history of human climate folly is more alarming than ever. Hitler, for instance, wanted to drain the Mediterranean. In the 1950s Soviet and US governments contemplated nuking the Arctic ice cap in order to create a warmer climate.

These schemes seem ludicrous to us, but are they any stranger than the idea that we can arrest runaway climate change by burying our carbon emissions deep in the earth or by seeding clouds with sulphur to block out the sun?

Tim Flannery is a paleontologist, an explorer, a conservationist and a leading writer on climate change. His books include the award-winning international bestseller The Weather Makers, and Here on Earth, Atmosphere of Hope and Europe: The First 100 Million Years, as well as his previous collaboration with his daughter, Emma Flannery, Big Meg.

Emma Flannery is a scientist and writer. She has explored caves, forests and oceans across most of the globe’s continents in search of elusive fossils, animals and plants. Her research and writing on geology, chemistry and palaeontology has been published in scientific journals, children’s books and a number of museum-based adult education tours.

KLIMAZIRKUS de David Nelles

Fighting populist arguments with wit and wisdom – and solutions that actually work.

KLIMAZIRKUS
by David Nelles
Penguin Germany, May 2025

« Why should I stop eating burgers? » – How populism slows down efforts to counteract climate change, and how to effect real change.

Eco-anarchists, selfish SUV drivers, tree-hugging snowflakes, compulsory veggie days, net zero… hardly any other topic these days is as contentious as climate change, and what to do about it. Again and again, we get ourselves entangled in populist pseudo-debates instead of finding workable solutions. No wonder that many people switch off whenever the subject comes up.

Bestselling author David Nelles thinks it’s high time we started a new kind of discussion about climate change and its consequences. In his entertaining new book « The Climate Circus », he uses the sort of statements made by politicians, journalists and various people on social media as a starting point to debunk the disinformation, incitement, binary thinking and misguided arguments we encounter daily. Armed with eye-opening graphics and a wealth of facts, he confronts us with our misconceptions, demonstrates how best to argue the case, and explains how we might go about making real progress.

As so many other business studies students, David Nelles was annoyed by all those over-emotional debates around climate change. He and fellow student Christian Serrer looked around in vain for a book that could provide them with a science-based yet accessible short introduction to the subject, with lots of useful graphics – so they decided to write it themselves with the help of more than 100 experts on the subject. The result was Kleine Gase – Große Wirkung: Der Klimawandel (‘Climate change: little gases – big consequences’), which was an instant hit and became the country’s bestselling book about climate change. Since then, Nelles has given and led more than 200 talks and workshops for businesses and communities. He is also founder of Klimafabrik, a ‘climate factory’ that helps organisations and their staff become greener.

WHAT’S LEFT de Malcolm Harris

A vital guide for collective political action against the climate apocalypse, from bestselling leftist Malcolm Harris— “a brilliant thinker and writer capable of making the intricacies of economic conditions supremely readable” (Vulture)

WHAT’S LEFT:
Three Paths Through the Planetary Crisis
by Malcolm Harris
Little, Brown, April 15, 2025
(via The Gernert Company)

Climate change is the unifying crisis of our time. But the scale of the problem can be paralyzing, especially when corporations are actively staving off changes that could save the planet but which might threaten their bottom lines. To quote Greta Thunberg, despite very clear science and very real devastation, the adults at the table are still saying “blah blah blah.” Something has to change—but what, and how?

In What’s Left, acclaimed writer and public intellectual Malcolm Harris cuts through the noise and gets real about our remaining options for saving the world. Just as humans have caused climate change, we hold the power to avert a climate apocalypse, but that will only happen through collective political action. Harris outlines the three strategies—progressive, socialist, and revolutionary—that have any chance of succeeding, while also revealing that none of them can succeed on their own. What’s Left shows how we must combine them into a single pathway: a meta-strategy, one that will ensure we can move forward together rather than squabbling over potential solutions while the world burns.

Vital and transformative, What’s Left is the guidebook we need at the moment we need it most. It confirms Malcolm Harris as next-generation David Graeber or Mike Davis—a historian-activist who shows us where we stand and how we got here, while also blazing a path toward a brighter future.

Malcolm Harris is the author of the national bestseller Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World, a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize; Kids These Days: The Making of Millennials; and Shit is Fucked Up and Bullshit: History Since the End of History. He was born in Santa Cruz, CA and graduated from the University of Maryland.

HOW FLOWERS MADE OUR WORLD de David George Haskell

Flowers are beautiful revolutionaries. When they evolved, they remade the natural world. Almost all of nature now depends on them. We live on a floral planet, yet flowers don’t get the credit they deserve. We admire them for their beauty, not their world-changing power. In this revealing new book, internationally renowned nature writer David Haskell puts flowers back where they belong, at the center of the story about how our planet came to be and how it thrives today.

HOW FLOWERS MADE OUR WORLD:
Revolutions of Cooperation, Beauty, and Illusion
by David George Haskell
Viking, 2026
(via The Martell Agency)

Flowers are innovators. They used beauty to transform former enemies into cooperative partners. They reinvented plant growth, sex, and motherhood. Through genetic nimbleness, they turned past environmental upheavals into opportunities for renewal. This inventiveness allowed them to build and sustain rain forests, savannahs, prairies, and even ocean shores.

Flowers create opportunities for others. Butterflies and bees would not exist without them. Modern birds diversified in lockstep with flowers. Flowers shaped our species’ history, too. Grasses caused our ape ancestors to come down from the trees. Agriculture, with flowering plants at its heart, is the foundation of all modern civilizations.

Although flowers lack nerves, they created a language of beauty to converse with animals. We draw this conversation into human social networks, using cut blooms, floral aromas, and flower symbolism to mediate our signals to one another. Illusion is beauty’s companion. Flowers dupe many pollinators, and we use flowers to conceal, mask, or deflect. By breeding and growing flowers, we create both beauty and illusions: paradoxically, flowers produced by horticulture can be dangerous to pollinators.

The study of flowers revolutionized science and was a foundation of the horrors of colonialism. Today, we look to the resilience and genetic flexibility of flowering plants to help us face the crises of climate change and extinction. Flowers thrived in the face of past calamity and can do so again.

Flowers are the among most consequential creatures ever to have evolved, but no book to date centers and elevates this story, much of which has been discovered only in the last decade. Today, interest among the reading public in the wonders of plants is high, as is our need to learn from them. Now is a perfect time to celebrate the story of how flowers made our world.

David Haskell’s work integrates scientific, literary, and contemplative studies of the natural world. He is a professor of biology and environmental studies at the University of the South and a Guggenheim Fellow. His 2017 book The Songs of Trees won the John Burroughs Medal for Outstanding Nature Writing. His 2012 book The Forest Unseen and 2022 book Sounds Wild and Broken were both finalists for the Pulitzer Prize and were shortlisted for the PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award.