Call of the Reed Warbler - Revised Edition by Charles Massy

$39.99 AUD

Category: Natural History

Windfall: Unlocking a Fossil-Free Future by Ketan Joshi

$29.99 AUD

Category: Climate

We've had a decade of distraction and inaction on climate change, but what made things go so very wrong in Australia? And what can the rest of the world learn from our mistakes – and opportunities? In Windfall, renewable energy expert Ketan Joshi examines how wind power inspired the creation of a weird, fabricated disease, and why the speed with which emissions could have been reduced — like putting a price on carbon — was hampered by a flurry of policy disasters. He then plots a way forward to a future where communities champion equitable new clean tech projects, where Australia grows past a reliance on toxic fuels, and where the power of people is used to rattle fossil fuel advocates from their complacency. Renewable energy can become a key player in the effort to upgrade our species from one on a path to self-destruction to a path of sustainability and fairness. With the knowledge of how the last decade was lost, the next decade can work the way it's meant to. 'In Windfall: Unlocking a fossil-free future, renewable energy industry insider Ketan Joshi gives a teeth-gnashing account of Australia's interminable climate debates. ...Show more

The Language of Butterflies by Wendy Williams

$29.99 AUD

Category: Natural History

An enthralling look at one of the world's most beautiful and resilient animals, and the role they play in our ecosystem Butterflies are beloved across the globe, adorning gardens, parks and zoos. Their feats are staggering - monarchs migrate thousands of kilometres each year. They are smarter than we th ink - some species have learned to fool ants into taking care of them. Their beauty has led many to obsession - lepidopterists (butterfly-seekers) have died in search of particular species, frenzied and driven mad in the pursuit of colour. What draws us to these creatures so intensely? Why do they live so briefly? How do they get their colours? Science journalist Wendy Williams investigates butterflies across the globe, their habitats and those dedicated to studying them. She examines the ancient partnership between butterflies and humans, and the ways we depend on them today - from a bellwether on climate change to a source of life-saving medical technology. For lovers of Sy Montgomery's The Soul of an Octopusand Peter Wohlleben's The Hidden Life of Trees, this melodious book reveals the inner lives of these special creatures and shows why they continue to fascinate us. Touching, eye-opening and profound, it is a love letter to these vanishing species, and a celebration of the beauty and joy they bring to our world. ...Show more

Hope in Hell - Confronting the Climate Emergency by Jonathon Porritt

$32.99 AUD

Category: Climate

'Brave and unflinching in setting out the reality of the hell towards which we're headed, but even more urgent, passionate and compelling about the grounds for hope if we change course fast enough, Hope in Hell is a powerful call to arms from one of Britain's most eloquent and trusted campaign ers.' Caroline Lucas, MP Climate change is the defining issue of our time - we know, beyond reasonable doubt, what that science now tells us. Just as climate change is accelerating, so too must we - summoning up a greater sense of urgency, courage and shared endeavour than humankind has ever seen before.    The Age of Climate Change is an age of superlatives: most extreme this, biggest that, most costly ever. The impacts worsen every year, played out in people's backyards and communities, and more and more people around the world now realise this is going to be a massive challenge for the rest of their lives. In Hope in Hell, Porritt confronts that dilemma head on. He believes we have time to do what needs to be done, but only if we move now - and move together. In this ultimately optimistic book, he explores all these reasons to be hopeful: new technology; the power of innovation; the mobilisation of young people - and a sense of intergenerational solidarity as older generations come to understand their own obligation to secure a safer world for their children and grandchildren.    ...Show more

Body Count: How Climate Change is Killing Us by Paddy Manning

$32.99 AUD

Category: Climate

'Our house is on fire,' 16-year-old Swedish school strike activist Greta Thunberg told world leaders in 2019. Across an angry year of weather, Australians watched it in real-time: record heatwaves and worsening drought, unprecedented fish kills in the Murray-Darling Basin and devastating wildfires acros s Queensland and NSW - this is climate change, a terrifying portent for the most arid continent on earth. But most shocking of all is the untold human toll - escalating human deaths in Australia and beyond. The climate crisis is now a health emergency, with extreme weather events, disease, mental illness and infrastructure collapse killing what the WHO predicts will be millions around the world over the next decade. Shocking and undeniable, Manning reveals what climate change really looks like, telling the moving stories of victims, their families and doctors - putting names and faces to the people who have already paid the ultimate price for inaction on the biggest moral challenge of our century. ...Show more

English Pastoral by James Rebanks

$35.00 AUD

Category: Natural History

The author of the beloved No.1 bestseller The Shepherd's Life returns with a stirring history of family, loss and the land over three generations on a Lake District farm 'A beautifully-written story of a family, a home and a changing landscape.' - Nigel Slater 'Just about perfect.' - Wendell Berry Ja mes Rebanks was taught by his grandfather to work the land the old way. Their family farm in the Lake District hills was part of an ancient agricultural landscape: a patchwork of crops and meadows, of pastures grazed with livestock, and hedgerows teeming with wildlife. And yet, by the time James inherited the farm, that landscape had profoundly changed. The men and women had vanished from the fields; the old stone barns had crumbled; the skies had emptied of birds and their wind-blown song. English Pastoral is the story of an inheritance: one that affects us all. It tells of how rural landscapes around the world were brought close to collapse, and how the age-old rhythms of work, weather, community and wild things were lost. But this elegy from the northern fells is also a song of hope: of how, guided by the past, one farmer began to salvage a tiny corner of England that was now his, doing his best to restore the life that had vanished and to leave a legacy for the future. This is a book about what it means to have love and pride in a place, and how, against the odds, it may still be possible to build a new pastoral: not a utopia, but somewhere decent for us all.   ...Show more

Bird Way by Jennifer Ackerman

$35.00 AUD

Category: Natural History

From the New York Times bestselling author of The Genius of Birds, a radical investigation into the bird way of being, and the recent scientific research that is dramatically shifting our understanding of birds -- how they live and how they think. 'There is the mammal way and there is the bird way.' Thi s is one scientist's pithy distinction between mammal brains and bird brains: two ways to make a highly intelligent mind. But the bird way is much more than a unique pattern of brain wiring, and lately, scientists have taken a new look at bird behaviours they have, for years, dismissed as anomalies or mysteries. What they are finding is upending the traditional view of how birds conduct their lives, how they communicate, forage, court, breed, survive. They're also revealing the remarkable intelligence underlying these activities, abilities we once considered uniquely our own -- deception, manipulation, cheating, kidnapping, infanticide, but also, ingenious communication between species, cooperation, collaboration, altruism, culture, and play. Some of these extraordinary behaviours are biological conundrums that seem to push the edges of-well-birdness: A mother bird that kills her own infant sons, and another that selflessly tends to the young of other birds as if they were her own. Young birds that devote themselves to feeding their siblings and others so competitive they'll stab their nestmates to death. Birds that give gifts and birds that steal, birds that dance or drum, that paint their creations or paint themselves, birds that build walls of sound to keep out intruders and birds that summon playmates with a special call -- and may hold the secret to our own penchant for playfulness and the evolution of laughter. Drawing on personal observations, the latest science, and her bird-related travel around the world, from the tropical rainforests of eastern Australia and the remote woodlands of northern Japan, to the rolling hills of lower Austria and the islands of Alaska's Kachemak Bay, Ackerman shows there is clearly no single bird way of being. In every respect, in plumage, form, song, flight, lifestyle, niche, and behaviour, birds vary. It's what we love about them. As E.O Wilson once said, when you have seen one bird, you have not seen them all. ...Show more

Vesper Flights by Helen Macdonald

$35.00 AUD

Category: Natural History

Animals don't exist to teach us things, but that is what they have always done, and most of what they teach us is what we think we know about ourselves. From the internationally acclaimed author of H is for Hawk comes Vesper Flights, a transcendent collection of essays about the human relationship to th e natural world. In Vesper Flights Helen Macdonald brings together a collection of her best loved pieces, along with new essays on topics and stories ranging from nostalgia and science fiction to the true account of a refugee's flight to the UK. Her pieces ranges from accounts of swan upping on the Thames to watching tens of thousands of cranes in Hungary to seeking the last golden orioles in Suffolk's poplar forests. She writes about wild boar, swifts, mushroom hunting, migraines, the strangeness of birds' nests, what we do when we watch wildlife and why. This is a book about observation, fascination, time, memory, love and loss and how we make the world around us, by one of this century's most important and insightful nature writers. ...Show more

The Rare Metals War by Guillaume Pitron

$35.00 AUD

Category: Climate

The resources race is on. Powering our digital lives and green technologies are some of the Earth's most precious metals - but they are running out. And what will happen when they do? The green-tech revolution has been lauded as the silver bullet to a new world. One that is at last free of oil, polluti on, shortages, and cross-border tensions. Drawing on six years of research across a dozen countries, this book cuts across conventional green thinking to probe the hidden, dark side of green technology. By breaking free of fossil fuels, we are in fact setting ourselves up for a new dependence - on rare metals such as cobalt, gold, and palladium. They are essential to electric vehicles, wind turbines, solar panels, our smartphones, computers, tablets, and other everyday connected objects. China has captured the lion's share of the rare metals industry, but consumers know very little about how they are mined and traded, or their environmental, economic, and geopolitical costs. The Rare Metals War is a vital expose of the ticking time-bomb that lies beneath our new technological order. It uncovers the reality of our lavish and ambitious environmental quest that involves risks as formidable as those it seeks to resolve. ' T he journalist and filmmaker warns against the optimistic belief that technology is the solution ... At a time when many claim to be "citizens of the world" or retreat into naive or hypocritical protectionism, Pitron's book is an attempt to open people's eyes to the consequences of their societal choices and lifestyles.' -Green European Journal 'French Writer and analyst Guillaume Pitron warns about growing reliance on rare-earth metal - which are necessary to build high-tech products ... He shines a light on "the untold story" of the energy and digital transitions.' -European Scientist ...Show more

Human Nature by Geoff Blackwell, Ruth Hobday

$65.00 AUD

Category: Natural History

At a moment now being described as the age of Anthropocene, twelve of National Geographic's most influential photographers address the biggest questions on our time while sharing some of their greatest images.  

Horizon by Barry Lopez

$22.99 AUD

Category: Natural History

From the National Book Award-winning author of the classic Arctic Dreams, a vivid, poetic, capacious work that recollects the travels around the world and the encounters--human, animal, and natural--that have shaped an extraordinary life.   Taking us from pole to pole and across decades of lived experience, Barry Lopez--hailed by the Los Angeles Times Book Review as "one of our finest writers"--gives us his most far-ranging, yet personal, work to date. Horizon moves indelibly, immersively, through the author's travels to six regions of the world: from Western Oregon to the High Arctic; from the Gal pagos to the Kenyan desert; from Botany Bay in Australia to finally, unforgettably, the ice shelves of Antarctica.   As he takes us on these myriad travels, Lopez also probes the long history of humanity's quests and explorations, including the prehistoric peoples who trekked across Skraeling Island in northern Canada, the colonialists who plundered Central Africa, an enlightenment-era Englishman who sailed the Pacific, a Native American emissary who found his way into isolationist Japan, and today's ecotourists in the tropics. Throughout his journeys--to some of the hottest, coldest, and most desolate places on the globe--and via friendships he forges along the way with scientists, archaeologists, artists, and local residents, Lopez searches for meaning and purpose in a broken world.   Horizon is a revelatory, epic work that voices concern and frustration along with humanity and hope--a book that makes you see the world differently, and that is the crowning achievement by one of America's great thinkers and most humane voices. ...Show more

The Museum of Whales You Will Never See - Travels Among the Collectors of Iceland by Kendra Greene

$32.99 AUD

Category: Natural History

“Filled with charming illustrations, this delightful book about Iceland’s 265 museums is as quirky and mesmerizing as the country’s dreamscape itself.” —Forbes Mythic creatures, natural wonders, and the mysterious human impulse to collect are on beguiling display in this poetic tribute to the museums of an otherworldly island nation. Iceland is home to only 330,000 people (roughly the population of Lexington, Kentucky) but more than 265 museums and public collections–nearly one for every ten people. They range from the intensely physical, like the Icelandic Phallological Museum, which collects the penises of every mammal known to exist in Iceland, to the vaporously metaphysical, like the Museum of Icelandic Sorcery and Witchcraft, which poses a particularly Icelandic problem: How to display what can’t be seen? In The Museum of Whales You Will Never See, A. Kendra Greene is our wise and whimsical guide through this cabinet of curiosities, showing us, in dreamlike anecdotes and more than thirty charming illustrations, how a seemingly random assortment of objects–a stuffed whooper swan, a rubber boot, a shard of obsidian, a chastity belt for rams–can map a people’s past and future, their fears and obsessions. “The world is chockablock with untold wonders,” she writes, “there for the taking, ready to be uncovered at any moment, if only we keep our eyes open.”   ...Show more