San Antonio College Library

This film retrospectively asks us to reflect on the state of the world and ourselves, and to listen more closely to what is being asked of us at this time of unprecedented global transformation.

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...

Human health depends on the health of the planet. Earth's natural systems--the air, the water, the biodiversity, the climate--are our life support systems. Yet climate change, biodiversity loss, scarcity of land and freshwater, pollution and other threats are degrading these systems. The emerging field of planetary health aims to understand how these changes threaten our health and how to protect ourselves and the rest of the biosphere. Planetary...

In The Middle Path, noted geographer Eric Lambin provides a concise, readable summary of the present state of the environment and considers what must be done if environmental catastrophe is to be avoided. Finding merit in the arguments of both optimists and pessimists, Lambin argues that it is not too late to exploit the inherent tendency toward equilibrium of large-scale systems such as the earths̕ environment. By relying upon a combination of remedies...

Schneider traces our climatic history not only from the beginning and up to the twentieth century, but deep into the twenty-first as well. He depicts the next one hundred years as a potentially perilous period for climate and life - unless we citizens of Earth first recognize and then work to control the unintended global scale experiment we are foisting on ourselves and all other life on "Laboratory Earth." This "lab" is not built of glass, wires,...

Sponsored jointly by the National Geographic Society and the Smithsonian Institution, this book offers a sweeping vision of our Earth as we enter a new millennium. More than a dozen visionary scientists, scholars, and writers offer their thought-provoking perspectives on life on Earth in the 21st century and the revolutions in Western thought that have transformed our views of nature and the human place within it. Approaching the planet as a dynamic...

Crossing the far corners of the globe, Tales of an Ecotourist showcases travel, from the hot and humid Amazon jungle to the frozen but dry Antarctic, as a simple yet spellbinding lens to better understand the complex issue of climate change. At its core, climate change is an issue few truly understand, in large part due to its dizzying array of scientific, economic, cultural, social, and political variables. Using both keen humor and memorable anecdotes,...

This book explores the confluence of human and environmental change on ten of the great rivers of the world.

"A firsthand chronicle of the catastrophic reality of our planet's changing ecosystems and the necessity of relishing this vulnerable, fragile Earth while we still can"-- "After nearly a decade overseas as a war reporter, the acclaimed journalist Dahr Jamail returned to America to renew his passion for mountaineering, only to find that the slopes he had once climbed have been irrevocably changed by climate disruption. In response, Jamail embarks...