Yuma Public Library

This profound and accessible book details how science is studying nature's best ideas to solve our toughest 21st-century problems. If chaos theory transformed our view of the universe, biomimicry is transforming our life on Earth. Biomimicry is innovation inspired by nature - taking advantage of evolution's 3.8 billion years of R&D since the first bacteria. Biomimics study nature's best ideas: photosynthesis, brain power, and shells - and adapt...

Examines what would happen to the natural world if humans were gone, describing how nature would reclaim the planet and why taking care of the Earth now is so important.

"In the 1990s, scientists lived inside Biosphere 2 (Biosphere 1 is the Earth itself) for two years, trying to figure out if colonizing Mars would ever be possible. Now scientists don't live there but instead conduct all sorts of studies and experiments aimed to help us better understand our environment and especially understand what sort of things are happening to it due to climate change and other man-made problems. It's a unique take on the Scientists...

In this potent collage of stories, essays, and testimony, Williams makes a stirring case for the preservation of America’s Redrock Wilderness in the canyon country of southern Utah.
As passionate as she is persuasive, Williams, the beloved author of Refuge,  is one of the country’s most eloquent and imaginative writers. The desert is her blood. Here she writes lyrically about the desert’s power...

As a botanist, Robin Wall Kimmerer has been trained to ask questions of nature with the tools of science. As a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, she embraces the notion that plants and animals are our oldest teachers. In Braiding Sweetgrass, Kimmerer brings these two lenses of knowledge together to take us on "a journey that is every bit as mythic as it is scientific, as sacred as it is historical, as clever as it is wise" (Elizabeth...

Explains how civilization must heal itself in order to save the environment. Presents a comprehensive plan for action addressing population trends, technology, and environmental education.

Over the last half billion years, there have been five major mass extinctions, when the diversity of life on Earth suddenly and dramatically contracted. Scientists are currently monitoring the sixth extinction, predicted to be the most devastating since the asteroid impact that wiped out the dinosaurs. This time around the cataclysm is us. In this book the author tells us why and how human beings have altered life on the planet in a way no species...