Archives de catégorie : Nature

THE GOD FLOWER de Casey Taylor

Part history, part real-time reporting, and part ethnography, THE GOD FLOWER is a provocative and radical history of cannabis and Western imperialism.

THE GOD FLOWER:
A People’s History of Cannabis and Anti-Colonial Resistance
by Casey Taylor
St. Martin’s Press, April 2027

For nearly as long as there have been people, there has been cannabis. From humanity’s origins in the Horn of Africa to the rural highlands of ancient Japan, the plant has featured in religious sacraments that have been the foundation for whole cultures.

The history and ethnobotany of cannabis reveals a hidden truth: where the plant has thrived, so have radical and anti-imperialist politics. Where cannabis grows, colonialism weakens. In a revolutionary narrative that breaks from the Western propagandized version of world events, Casey Taylor blends together original reporting from Ethiopia to the Caribbean, the latest ethnobotanical research, studies of historical and religious documents, and recently declassified American intelligence materials. The result is an unforgettable people’s history that begins in ancient cultures and carries through to modern times, decentering Western colonial power along the way.

Gripping first-person reporting collides with groundbreaking scholarship in THE GOD FLOWER, producing both an unflinching critique of imperialism—which has always viewed cannabis with at best suspicion and more frequently open hostility—and an ode to a plant that has shaped our lives in more ways than we realize.

Casey Taylor is a writer based in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He has written longform features about the history of cannabis and Kissinger’s Jamaican policies, western tattooing, the United States Postal Service, and many other subjects for publications like Defector Media, New York Magazine, The New Republic, WIRED, Vox, and Vice. A graduate of Carnegie Mellon University, Taylor has settled in Pittsburgh after growing up on the other side of the state near Philadelphia.

BÖSE TIERE de Markus Bennemann

Adultery, blackmail, murder – the animal kingdom is bursting with transgressive energy…

BÖSE TIERE
[Nasty Beasts]
by Markus Bennemann
Goldmann/PRH Germany, November 2026

Markus Bennemann loves our fellow creatures. But he also knows they can be anything but loveable.

Following his bestselling « Böse Bäume » (‘Nasty trees’), the nature and science writer sheds light on the nastiest criminals in the animal kingdom, from five-limbed burglars and safe-crackers with jug ears to scaly sharpshooters, feathered serial killers and sexually motivated killer women lurking in the grass.

Blackmailers and adulterers, mass murderers and accomplices – animals are no strangers to true crime. And they’re more sneaky, inventive and bonkers than any crime writer could come up with.

Markus Bennemann couldn’t decide whether to major in literature or biology. In the end, he chose literature, and now writes books about… well, biology. His most recent book is the bestselling Böse Bäume (‘Bad trees’).

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.

THE ART OF BIODIVERSITY d’Eric Himmel

Strikingly original and abundantly illustrated, The Art of Biodiversity surveys the golden age of natural history art, exploring the alliance between scientists and artists that first revealed the astonishing diversity of life on Earth.

THE ART OF BIODIVERSITY:
Artists & Naturalists, 1700–1900
by Eric Himmel
Abrams, April 2026

With more than 330 color illustrations of surpassing beauty, this book reveals a story about art that’s not in the art history books, and a story about science that’s missing from histories of science. Here, such giants as Linnaeus, Buffon, Cuvier, Humboldt, and Darwin cross paths with superb artists, including Merian, Redouté, Audubon, and Haeckel, among many others.

An essential visual companion to popular narratives like Andrea Wulf’s The Invention of Nature and Jason Roberts’s Every Living Thing, this volume provides a definitive archival record of the era that defined modern biology.

Between 1700 and 1900, an art movement unveiled nature’s great secret: the global diversity of life-forms. Centuries before the word “biodiversity” existed, naturalists began to glimpse the reality that lay behind Charles Darwin’s lyrical evocation of nature’s “endless forms most beautiful.”

The naturalists recruited artists to create a family album of Earth, with every picture a precise drawing of a species of plant or animal, and so science and art, for the first and last time, went exploring together.

This art first appeared in vividly illustrated books that, in a world without photography or film, offered readers a vastly expanded vision of nature. The Art of Biodiversity introduces the reader to the extraordinary men and women who created these books. They focused exquisite artistic skills on nature, traded in exotic seashells and butterflies, collected bird and monkey specimens in tropical rainforests, dredged strange invertebrates from the depths of the ocean, peered through magnifying lenses at insects, and dug prehistoric bones out of the earth.

After sinking out of sight in the twentieth century, biodiversity art resurfaced in the twenty-first in myriad forms that reach millions of people on the Internet, as the natural history books in the world’s great libraries were digitized and made available to all.

Chronicling the only art movement that successfully aligned the goals of art and science, for the transcendent purpose of documenting and understanding the natural world, The Art of Biodiversity is a must-have for historians of science, collectors of botanical and zoological art, and anyone captivated by the enduring beauty of the living world.

“Dazzling . . . A natural history page-turner.”―KIRKUS

“The art and design of natural science is brought to the forefront in Eric Himmel’s elegantly written, illustrated, and designed The Art of Biodiversity.”―PRINT

“To turn each page is to be transported. Eric Himmel does something strange and wonderful, alchemizing image and insight into a supremely vivid guided tour of the art of nature, and the nature of art. A book as beautiful as it is fascinating.”―JASON ROBERTS, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Every Living Thing and A Sense of the World

Over a 40-year publishing career at Abrams, Eric Himmel acquired and edited hundreds of books in the arts and sciences. He was a coauthor of The Beautiful Brain: The Drawings of Santiago Ramón y Cajal (2017). The son of photographers Lillian Bassman and Paul Himmel, Eric is an author and sculptor living in New York City.