As a botanist and professor of plant ecology, Robin Wall Kimmerer has spent a career learning how to ask questions of nature using the tools of science. As a Potawatomi woman, she learned from elders, family, and history that the Potawatomi, as well as a majority of other cultures indigenous to this land, consider plants and animals to be our oldest teachers. In Braiding Sweetgrass, Kimmerer brings these two lenses of knowing together to reveal what...

A chronicle of how the Kalahari Bushmen's history was intertwined with that of the drought in Africa examines their widely publicized battle with the Botswana government and offers a cautionary lesson about water issues facing the twenty-first century.

A Traditional Eskimo Whaling Crew Races for shore near Barrow, Alaska, while their comrades drift out to sea: ice that should be solidly anchored at this time of year is giving way. Elsewhere, a team of scientists with frosty beards traverses the breadth of Alaska, measuring the thinning snow every ten kilometers in an effort to understand albedo, the heat-deflecting property that helps regulate the planet's temperature. Climate change isn't an abstraction...