Distractions

Winter has arrived. For many people, their daily schedule starts with driving to work before sunrise and returning home after dark. Workout schedules are altered to accommodate colder temperatures and limited visibility. While we adapt to the next four months of winter recreation, settling in your favorite chair with a book is a worthy way to spend time. This month’s collection delivers natural history, personal memoirs, and essays championing the environment.

Ice Rivers

A Story of Glaciers, Wilderness, and Humanity

Jemma Wadham

The ice sheets and glaciers that cover one-tenth of Earth’s land surface are in grave peril. High in the Alps, Andes, and Himalaya, once-indomitable glaciers are retreating, even dying. A riveting blend of cutting-edge research and tales of encounters with polar bears and survival under the midnight sun, Ice Rivers is an unforgettable portrait of our vanishing icy wildernesses.

The Heart of the Wild

Essays on Nature, Conservation, and the Human Future

Edited by Ben Minter and Jonathan Losos

Today’s leading scientists, humanists, and nature writers offer a thought-provoking meditation on the urgency of learning about and experiencing our wild places in an age of rapidly expanding human impacts. The contributors make impassioned defenses of naturalism, natural history, and nature education in helping us to rediscover a love for the wild at a time when our connections with it have frayed or been lost altogether.

Eco-Types

Five Ways of Caring about the Environment

Emily Huddart Kennedy

When we picture the ideal environmentalist, we likely have in mind someone who dedicates herself to reducing her own environmental footprint through individual choices about consumption—driving a fuel-efficient car, for example, or eating less meat, or refusing plastic straws. This is a benchmark that many aspire to—and many others reject. In Eco-Types, Emily Huddart Kennedy shows that there is more than one way to care about the environment, outlining a spectrum of eco-social relationships that range from engagement to indifference.

Meltdown

The Making and Breaking of a Field Scientist

Sarah Boon

In Meltdown, Sarah Boon tells us about field adventures in snow and ice, the tough decision of choosing an academic career over that of a writer, and the challenges she faces as a woman in science. Her story blends adventure and academia as she traverses John Evans Glacier on Ellesmere Island, builds weather stations in northern British Columbia, samples proglacial rivers, and scares away grizzlies with helicopters. Meltdown is an honest and reflective narrative about the process of finding your identity, the need for open conversations around mental health and science, and one woman’s pursuit of balance between her career and personal life.

A Place on the Water

Peter D. Nordgren

If you and your family moved to the shore of a small northern Wisconsin lake, what would you find there? That’s the question answered in “A Place on Water,” by Peter D. Nordgren. In fifty-two short essays, Nordgren takes readers around the lake, into the depths, along the shore, and up into the branches of the forest. What is found there brings the comfort of familiarity, the surprise of the unexpected, and the mystery of the unknown. Purchase the book online through www.northbranch.info.

Clamor

How Noise Took Over the World and How We Can Take it Back

Chris Berdik

An eye- (and ear-) opening investigation into how our ever-noisier world affects our health, our well-being, and our planet. Chris Berdik explains in Clamor, noise can have serious health effects, disrupting our sleep, ratcheting up our stress, and destroying our concentration. As he argues, it is one of the most pervasive, yet underacknowledged, pollutants in our daily lives—one that we neglect, both individually and systemically, at our peril. Drawing on extensive research and original reporting, Berdik shows how a too-limited understanding of noise, focused on loud sounds and decibel counts, has undermined a century of noise-control efforts and obscured the full toll noise exacts on us and the environment.