Archives de catégorie : Nature

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.

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.

INSECT SAFARI de Margie Patlak

Join a veteran science writer on a fascinating adventure as she explores the ever-more-astounding world of insects – all in her own backyard.

INSECT SAFARI:
Exploring the Wondrous World of Everyday Bugs
by Margie Patlak
Workman Publishing, June 2026
(via The Martell Agency)

When science writer Margie Patlak was inspirited to take a quick close-up snapshot of a bee in her backyard, it was the start of a years-long obsession with cataloging and understanding the tiny creatures that were all around her.

The essays in her book showcase the superpowers, alien anatomies, and striking untold behaviors and thinking abilities of bugs hidden in plain sight in backyards, parks, gardens, and even in the flowerpots that dot city courtyards and balconies. Each essay focuses on a specific bug and explores the big ideas these little bugs raise, such as whether the maternal instinct is truly instinctual, the value of a short life, whether to blend in or alter your environment, and whether you can have altruism without tribal atrocities.

But what perhaps makes INSECT SAFARI the most intriguing is its reporting on the plethora of recent scientific findings revealing there’s more to the inner lives and behaviors of insects than people ever thought possible.  Who knew wasps use tools and recognize faces, bees play with balls and do math, ants invented farming way before we did, and even fruit flies mull over their mating choices?

These findings reinforce the notion that we aren’t the only intelligent beings on Earth and tap into people’s curiosity about the alien life right here on their own planet. 

Margie Patlak is a science writer, memoirist, and photographer. Her book More Than Meets the Eye: Exploring Nature and Loss on the Coast of Maine was given an “Outstanding Book” award by the American Society of Journalists and Authors in 2022.  Her photo book Wild and Wondrous: Nature’s Artistry on the Coast of Maine was published in 2023, and her photographs have been featured in several solo and group exhibits.  She has also written articles for a number of newspapers and magazines, including Discover, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, and The Philadelphia Inquirer, and her essays have been published in a number of literary journals. Patlak divides her time between Down East Maine and Philadelphia.

THE LAST WHALE HUNTER de Justin Vibbert

A gripping work of narrative nonfiction that transports readers to the remote island of Bequia and into a battle for the soul of the Caribbean.

THE LAST WHALE HUNTER
by Justin Vibbert
Diversion Books, March 2027
(via Kaplan/DeFiore Rights)

Bequia—a volcanic speck in the Lesser Antilles—finds itself in crisis. Chinese-backed infrastructure now stretches from Jamaica to Trinidad; meanwhile, U.S. developers are scrambling to counter Beijing’s influence with luxury resorts. The result: local workers, displaced by foreign labor and priced out of their homes, are migrating south down the chain of islands in search of jobs. For former fishermen and port workers Nico, Junior, Baby, and Eustace, whaling isn’t about preserving tradition: it’s about staying afloat.

The man they sail with, and the heart of this book, is Bruce Ollivierre, whose family has hunted whales for generations. In THE LAST WHALE HUNTER, we journey alongside Ollivierre and his crew of economic migrants as they battle millionaire environmentalists, crumbling ocean ecosystems, and an ancient foe five hundred times their size.

Diving deep into Bequia’s resilient past, Vibbert details the epic story of Ollivierre’s enslaved ancestors, who built a whaling industry from scratch after British landowners abandoned the island and its failing sugar plantations. Now, as new empires carve up the Caribbean, Ollivierre has just days left in the season to land a whale and bring in enough money to keep schools open and his people housed and fed. All eyes turn to the 2025 Easter Regatta, where a final, high-risk hunt unfolds in full view of locals, yachting tourists—and Louise Mitchell, the island’s most powerful anti-whaling crusader, bent on shutting Ollivierre down for good. Failure could mean death for him and his men—and the end of whaling on Bequia altogether.

Justin Vibbert is a journalist and English Instructor at the City University of New York. His embedded reporting on underworld figures inspired the Off-Broadway play Royal Oak, now in development as a limited TV series. Justin has extensive magazine connections and has already been approached by The Explorers Club to give a presentation upon publication. This project has drawn early interest from Robert Downey Jr. and Gregg Bello, as well as documentary filmmaker Sasha Kneller (National Geographic, Discovery Channel). In addition to his writing, Justin is a model who has appeared in major brand campaigns for Ralph Lauren, American Express, and Google.