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Nature and Science August 2026 |
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The Art of Biodiversity: Artists & Naturalists, 1700-1900
by Eric Himmel
Strikingly original and abundantly illustrated, The Art of Biodiversity surveys the golden age of natural history art, exploring the alliance between scientists and artists that first revealed the astonishing diversity of life on Earth.With more than 330 color illustrations of surpassing beauty, this book reveals a story about art that's not in the art history books, and a story about science that's missing from histories of science. Here, such giants as Linnaeus, Buffon, Cuvier, Humboldt, and Darwin cross paths with superb artists, including Merian, Redout , Audubon, and Haeckel, among many others.An essential visual companion to popular narratives like Andrea Wulf's The Invention of Nature and Jason Roberts's Every Living Thing, this volume provides a definitive archival record of the era that defined modern biology.Between 1700 and 1900, an art movement unveiled nature's great secret: the global diversity of life-forms. Centuries before the word biodiversity existed, naturalists began to glimpse the reality that lay behind Charles Darwin's lyrical evocation of nature's endless forms most beautiful.The naturalists recruited artists to create a family album of Earth, with every picture a precise drawing of a species of plant or animal, and so science and art, for the first and last time, went exploring together.This art first appeared in vividly illustrated books that, in a world without photography or film, offered readers a vastly expanded vision of nature. The Art of Biodiversity introduces the reader to the extraordinary men and women who created these books. They focused exquisite artistic skills on nature, traded in exotic seashells and butterflies, collected bird and monkey specimens in tropical rainforests, dredged strange invertebrates from the depths of the ocean, peered through magnifying lenses at insects, and dug prehistoric bones out of the earth.After sinking out of sight in the twentieth century, biodiversity art resurfaced in the twenty-first in myriad forms that reach millions of people on the Internet, as the natural history books in the world's great libraries were digitized and made available to all.Chronicling the only art movement that successfully aligned the goals of art and science, for the transcendent purpose of documenting and understanding the natural world, The Art of Biodiversity is a must-have for historians of science, collectors of botanical and zoological art, and anyone captivated by the enduring beauty of the living world.
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When the Forest Breathes: Renewal and Resilience in the Natural World
by Suzanne Simard
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER - The author of Finding the Mother Tree offers a powerful vision for saving our forests based on nature's deep-rooted cycles of renewal. A masterclass on the inner workings of forests. . . . This is science as an act of love for the world. --Zo Schlanger, author of The Light Eaters Early one spring morning, I went back to the forest. I wanted to learn what the mother trees could teach me about survival and adaptability, about living and dying. Raised in a family of loggers committed to sensible forest stewardship, trailblazing ecologist Suzanne Simard has watched as timber companies leave forests at higher risk for wildfires, water crises, and plant and animal extinction. But her research has the potential to chart a new course. The forest, she reveals, is a symphony of finely honed cycles of regeneration--from mushrooms breaking down logs to dying elder trees passing their genetic knowledge to younger ones--that hold the key to protecting our forests. Working closely with local Indigenous communities, whose models of responsible forestry have been largely dismissed, Simard examines how human interventions--particularly destruction of the overstory's mother trees--endanger new growth and longevity. If we can honor the tools that trees have honed for sharing intergenerational wisdom, she argues, we can protect these sacred places for many years to come. As she considers how older living things facilitate the conditions for new growth to flourish, Simard faces parallel rhythms of loss and regeneration in her own life, watching her two daughters grow into adults and savoring her final days with her ailing mother. Animated by wonder for our forests and the intricate practices of caretaking that have long sustained them, When the Forest Breathes is a vital reminder of all the natural world has to teach us about adaptability, resilience, and community.
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On Natural Capital: The Value of the World Around Us
by Partha Dasgupta
From the man that the New York Times calls the most important person you've never heard of, renowned Cambridge University economist Sir Partha Dasgupta, comes a paradigm shifting treatise, asking a simple yet profound question--what if we put a value on nature, just as we put a value on everything else? For just about everything of value in life, there is an economic model. If it matters to us, we have found a way to put a dollar amount on it--to quantify its importance in our lives and society. These models and metrics tell us that our economies are healthy because they are growing. And yet for as long as they have existed, our economic models have served us an incomplete picture; they fail to account for the fact that our growth is driven by a resource that we take for free and treat as infinite: nature. Indeed, for centuries we have been using nature as if it were limitless, but more than ever, we are recognizing that our demands on the natural world are unsustainable. In On Natural Capital, award-winning Cambridge University economist Sir Partha Dasgupta lays out a seminal new approach to economics that asks, what if we were to put a value on nature just as we value everything else? Rooted in mankind's struggle against climate change, Dasgupta's approach examines the existential need to rethink our relationship to nature and see its preservation as an economic imperative. Challenging much of economic thought that has come before, Dasgupta presents an urgent call to transform the focus and structures of global economics with a profound new model--one so radical that only an economist of his stature could make the world take it seriously. On Natural Capital is a bold and groundbreaking book that could, truly, change everything.
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Ecocivilization: Making a World That Works for All
by Jeremy Lent
One of the greatest thinkers of our age (The Guardian) presents a new way of living--one modeled on nature's design instead of capitalism's--for fans of Guns, Germs, and Steel and Doughnut Economics It has often been said that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism--and yet that is what the historical moment urgently calls for. As climate chaos, inequality, and social fragmentation intensify, humanity faces an imminent choice: continue with a system built on extraction and endless growth, or reimagine civilization itself. Incremental policy improvements are no longer enough--we need a deep transformation of our current civilization to continue to survive. In Ecocivilization, leading thinker Jeremy Lent offers that reimagination, grounded in proven design principles of ecosystems and in humankind's evolved inclination toward justice, mutuality, and dignity. What unfolds is a robust framework incorporating Lent's own expertise, and the lived experiences of those on the ground already putting ecological civilization's core tenets into practice--justice, mutuality, diversity, and symbiosis. From the global economy to universal housing and income, from infrastructure to agriculture, every major aspect of our society could be redesigned to work together as a coherent whole, setting the conditions for all people to flourish. Ecocivilization shows how this future on a regenerated Earth is not only desirable, but entirely feasible.
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The Edge of Space-Time: Particles, Poetry, and the Cosmic Dream Boogie
by Chanda Prescod-Weinstein
Physicist Chanda Prescod-Weinstein leverages her Black, Jewish, and queer identity to bring an adventurous cultural context to hard science. Through accessible explanations of theoretical physics concepts like relativity, dark matter, and quantum mechanics, and drawing parallels with ideas drawn from literature, Hebrew spirituality, and Indigenous folklore, Prescod-Weinstein rescues physics from its white, male, heteronormative enclave while stressing inclusion, wonder, and joy. For fans of: Astrophysics for People in a Hurry by Neil deGrasse Tyson.
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Hidden Creatures: Luscious Leeches, Bashful Botflies, and the Wondrous, History-Shaping World of Parasites
by Dino Martins
Welcome to the hidden, squirming world of parasites--some of the most misunderstood creatures with whom we share the Earth (and our bodies). Astonishing, eye-opening, and inspiring. --Chloe Dalton, author of Raising Hare A fascinating compendium of all the critters, some big, some small, some harmless and some lethal, that lie in wait for unsuspecting warm-blooded creatures. . . . The most persistent feeling, and one that Martins conveys beautifully, is one of awe at the sheer diversity and inventiveness of the living world. --The Guardian There is the tapeworm, which can grow 120 feet in length within the gut of a whale; the tsetse fly, a notorious vector of disease that can pierce the skin even of crocodiles with its needle-like mouth; and the most universal symbol of parasitic behavior: the leech. Long villainized as, well, parasitic, these creatures are actually a vital part of every ecosystem--and Dr. Dino Martins, an award-winning entomologist and biologist from Kenya, has made it his life's mission to demystify these beguiling beings. Hidden Creatures is a journey across the world ten times over--from Martins's home in the wilds of East Africa to the rainforests of Borneo to cities and backyards across the globe. Along the way we encounter brilliant and eccentric experts who join Martins on his adventures to investigate not only parasites but their hosts, from hyraxes and hippos to, of course, humans. Immersive, driven by an utterly infectious curiosity, and sure to transform every reader's understanding of these organisms, Hidden Creatures has the magnetic force of a David Attenborough documentary and introduces a monumental, charming new voice in science writing.
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