Nature as climate refugee – The largest global migration of species since the ice age.
DIE NATUR AUF DER FLUCHT
(Nature on the Run)
by Benjamin von Brackel
Heyne/PRH Germany, April 2021
There is something afoot in the world of animals and plants, something which has so far caught too little attention. Wherever they can, animals and plants are moving towards the earth’s poles to flee from rising temperatures and drought in their natural habitats. Tropical zones lose their inhabitants, beavers are settling in Alaska, gigantic shoals of fish disappear just to reappear in front of foreign coastlines. Sea creatures move an average of 72 kilometres a year, land creatures an average of 17 kilometres. In this exciting and vivid book, Benjamin von Brackel describes a phenomenon which demonstrates nature’s impressive adaptability as well as the dramatic consequences of climate change – not the least for humankind, for the migration of species won’t leave us unaffected.
Benjamin von Brackel, born in 1982, graduated from the German School for Journalism in Munich and studied politics in Erlangen and Berlin. Today, he is one of the most renowned environmental journalists in Germany. He works as freelance journalist for the Süddeutsche Zeitung, Die Zeit and Natur focussing on climate change. He co-founded the online magazine klimareporter° and was awarded the German Environmental Media Prize in 2016.
In this compelling follow-up to the national bestseller The Rise of Wolf 8, Rick McIntyre profiles one of Yellowstone’s most revered alpha males, Wolf 21. Leader of the Druid Peak Pack, Wolf 21 was known for his unwavering bravery, his unusual benevolence (unlike other alphas, he never killed defeated rival males), and his fierce commitment to his mate, the formidable Wolf 42. Wolf 21 and Wolf 42 were attracted to each other the moment they met—but Wolf 42’s jealous sister interfered viciously in their relationship. After an explosive insurrection within the pack, the two wolves came together at last as leaders of the Druid Peak Pack, which dominated the park for more than 10 years. McIntyre recounts the pack’s fascinating saga with compassion and a keen eye for detail, drawing on his many years of experience observing Yellowstone wolves in the wild. His outstanding work of science writing offers unparalleled insight into wolf behavior and Yellowstone’s famed wolf reintroduction project. It also offers a love story for the ages.
A squirrel in the garden. A rat in the wall. A pigeon on the street. Humans have spent so much of our history drawing a hard line between human spaces and wild places. When animals pop up where we don’t expect or want them, we respond with fear, rage, or simple annoyance. It’s no longer an animal. It’s a pest.
A return trip to the South Pole is an impossible dream for many of us – but the medic Carmen Possnig did just that. On behalf of the European Space Agency, she spent a year in the heart of the Antarctica to find out what it’s like to live in extreme weather conditions, with a distinct lower level of oxygen and in complete isolation from the rest of the world. With twelve other scientists, she spent the winter at the Concordia research station in the eternal ice. There, she not only encountered the breathtaking beauty of the most extreme continent on Earth, but also her own limits: Sharing a tight space with other people for twelve months, in a world that remains dark for months on end and where the temperature drops to -80°C, requires a huge physical and mental effort. Carmen Possnig’s personal and witty travel report, and its wealth of photographs, opens up a window onto an alien world – making us marvel at our planet’s diversity, and at how adaptable human nature can be.
Six days after giving birth, a polar bear named Aurora got up and left her den at the Columbus Zoo, leaving her tiny, squealing cub to fend for herself. Hours later, Aurora still hadn’t returned. The cub was furless and blind, and with her temperature dropping dangerously, the zookeepers entrusted with her care felt they had no choice: They would have to raise one of the most dangerous predators in the world themselves, by hand. Over the next few weeks, a group of veterinarians and zookeepers would work around the clock to save the cub, whom they called Nora. Humans rarely get as close to a polar bear as Nora’s keepers got with their fuzzy charge. But the two species have long been intertwined. Three decades before Nora’s birth, her father, Nanuq, was orphaned when an Inupiat hunter killed his mother, leaving Nanuq to be sent to a zoo. That hunter, Gene Agnaboogok, now faces some of the same threats as the wild bears near his Alaskan village of Wales, on the westernmost tip of the North American continent. As sea ice diminishes and temperatures creep up year-after-year, Gene and the polar bears—and everyone and everything else living in the far north—are being forced to adapt. Not all of them will succeed. Sweeping and tender, THE LONELIEST POLAR BEAR explores the fraught relationship humans have with the natural world, the exploitative and sinister causes of the environmental mess we find ourselves in, and how the fate of polar bears is not theirs alone.