San Antonio College Library

Paddy Woodworth has spent years traveling the globe and talking with people--scientists, politicians, and ordinary citizens--who are working on the front lines of the battle against environmental degradation. At sites ranging from Mexico to New Zealand and Chicago to Cape Town, Woodworth shows us the striking successes (and a few humbling failures) of groups that are attempting to use cutting-edge science to restore blighted, polluted, and otherwise...

Biodiversity describes the incredible variety of life found on our planet. This program explores Earth’s biodiversity, the fundamental processes and characteristics of the Earth’s biological history, the extinction of existing species, and the appearance of new ones, such as Homo sapiens. What are the long-term consequences of human population growth? Are we heading towards a great extinction? Is the Earth’s biological diversity diminishing...

Written on Water focuses on the Ogallala Aquifer and examines the conflicts, politics, economics and groundwater depletion in the High Plains region. Farmers and communities survive on the precious waters of the aquifer, yet it is being depleted at alarming rates. Since the 1960s, advances in irrigation technology have allowed farmers to transform the "Great American Desert" into their own fertile agricultural oasis. The Ogallala supports over one-fifth...

Bluebird Man tells the story of 93-year-old Alfred Larson, a self-taught conservationist who has committed the last 35 years of his life to saving Idaho's bluebirds. In the late 1970s, Al was inspired to join a growing movement of citizen scientists who over the past three decades have helped reverse bluebird declines by setting up networks of nestboxes specifically designed to provide nesting habitat for this emblematic bird.

New Zealand was one of the last land masses to be found and settled by people. Lush and fertile, almost everything brought here flourishes, often with surprising consequences. Told through the experiences of its native species--in particular, a charismatic and peculiar giant, flightless parrot-- this is the moving story of the changing fortunes of New Zealand's wildlife since humans first arrived.

The polar regions are being affected by global warming much more intensely than any other part of the world. The global mean temperature has risen around 1.1 degree Celsius since 1990, but in the Arctic it has risen more than twice that number. Global warming threatens to change that whole fragile ecosystem even faster than in the rest of the world. The situation is becoming more and more dramatic each year and we are approaching a point of no return....

Young Australian filmmaker Heidi Lee Douglas goes to Tasmania to make a documentary about the destruction of the island's ancient forests. As anti-logging protests escalate, logging giant Gunns Ltd. reacts to public pressure by suing Heidi and 19 others for $6.4 million for allegedly conspiring to destroy the company's business. When Heidi discovers Gunns wants to use her footage as evidence to support its claims, she faces a crisis of conscience....

More than a century ago, ornithologist Frank Chapman redirected a Christmas-time tradition of revelers shooting birds to a new holiday recreation: counting birds instead. Now join the annual bird count, the longest-running wildlife census in the world.

With a million species at risk of extinction, Sir David Attenborough explores how this crisis of biodiversity has consequences for us all, threatening food and water security, undermining our ability to control our climate and even putting us at greater risk of pandemic diseases.