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"In an era of cell phone addiction and ever-expanding cities, many of us fear we've lost our connection to nature--but Peter Wohlleben is convinced that age-old ties linking humans to the forest remain alive and intact. Whether we observe it or not, our blood pressure stabilizes near trees, the color green calms us, and the forest sharpens our senses. Drawing on new scientific discoveries, The Heartbeat of Trees reveals the profound interactions humans...
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Have you ever wondered why we stop to watch the orange glow that arrives before sunset, or why we flock to see cherry blossoms bloom in spring? Is there a reason that people -- regardless of gender, age, culture, or ethnicity -- are mesmerized by baby animals, and can't help but smile when they see a burst of confetti or a cluster of colorful balloons? We are often made to feel that the physical world has little or no impact on our inner joy. Increasingly,...
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"In an alternate past--or possible future--a mighty tree stands on the banks of a winding river, bearing silent witness to the flow of time and change. A family farms the fertile valley. Soon, a village sprouts, and not long after, a town. Residents learn to harness the water, the wind, and the animals in order to survive and thrive. The growing population becomes ever more industrious and clever, bending nature itself to their will and their ambition:...
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"An historically unprecedented disconnect between humanity and the heavens has opened. Jo Marchant's book can begin to heal it. For at least 20,000 years, we have led not just an earthly existence but a cosmic one. Celestial cycles drove every aspect of our daily lives. Our innate relationship with the stars shaped who we are--our art, religious beliefs, social status, scientific advances, and even our biology. But over the last few centuries we have...
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"H Is for Hawk meets Joan Didion in the Pyrocene in this arresting combination of memoir, natural history, and literary inquiry that chronicles one woman's experience of life in Northern California during the worst fire season on record. Told in luminous, perceptive prose, The Last Fire Season is a deeply incisive inquiry into what it really means-now-to live in relationship to the elements of the natural world. When Manjula Martin moved from the...
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" How we come to feel at home in our towns and cities is what Warnick sets out to discover in This Is Where You Belong. She dives into the body of research around place attachment--the deep sense of connection that binds some of us to our cities and increases our physical and emotional well-being--then travels to towns across America to see it in action. Inspired by a growing movement of placemaking, she examines what its practitioners are doing to...
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It was a catastrophe without precedent in recorded history: for months on end, starting in A.D. 535, a strange, dusky haze robbed much of the earth of normal sunlight. Crops failed in Asia and the Middle East as global weather patterns radically altered. Bubonic plague, exploding out of Africa, wiped out entire populations in Europe. Flood and drought brought ancient cultures to the brink of collapse. In a matter of decades, the old order died and...
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Biodiversity describes the incredible variety of life found on our planet. This program explores Earth’s biodiversity, the fundamental processes and characteristics of the Earth’s biological history, the extinction of existing species, and the appearance of new ones, such as Homo sapiens. What are the long-term consequences of human population growth? Are we heading towards a great extinction? Is the Earth’s biological diversity diminishing...
11) Fresh Water
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Fresh water defines the distribution of life on land. Follow the descent of rivers from their mountain sources to the sea. Watch spectacular waterfalls, fly inside the Grand Canyon and explore the wildlife in the world's deepest lake. Planet Earth captures unique and dramatic moments of animal behavior: a showdown between smooth-coated otters and mugger crocodiles, deep-diving long tailed macaques, massive flocks of snow geese on the wing and piranha...
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At the jungle animal hospital in Guatemala, the wards are full of exotic patients, many of them orphans rescued from the illegal pet trade. It is the job of a dedicated team of vets to nurse them back to health. We follow the team in their busiest year yet as they patch up animals in need, select a troop of spider monkeys for release and prepare a flock of very precious scarlet macaws for freedom.
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Global energy use increases by the day. Polluting the atmosphere with ever more carbon dioxide is not a viable solution for our future energy needs. Can new technologies such as carbon sequestration and ethanol production help provide the energy we need without pushing the concentrations of CO2 to dangerous levels?
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We all require food, air, and water to survive - which are contaminated to some extent by man-made pollutants. Two studies, one in a rural western mining town and another in a dense urban population, reveal how these exposures impact health, and what can be done to reduce the risks.
15) Oceans
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Ocean systems operate on a range of scales, from massive systems such as El Niño that affects weather across the globe, to tiny photosynthetic organisms near the ocean surface that take in large amounts of carbon dioxide. This program looks at how ocean systems regulate themselves and thus help maintain the planet's habitability.
17) Atmosphere
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The atmosphere is what makes the Earth habitable. Heat-trapping gases allow ecosystems to flourish. While the NOAA Global Monitoring Project documents the fluctuations in greenhouse gases worldwide, MIT's Prof. Kerry Emanuel looks at the role of hurricanes in regulating global climate.
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The early Earth was a much different planet than the one we know today. Ancient rocks provide evidence of the emergence of oxygen in the atmosphere and of a frozen Snowball Earth. Scientists Paul Hoffman and Andrew Knoll look at these clues to help explain the rise of complex animal life.
19) Water Resources
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While essential to the lives of humans and animals, fresh water only accounts for six percent of the world's water supply. Scientists in Florida's Everglades and the water challenged Southwest consider the optimum use of existing sources of fresh water for both humans and ecosystems.
20) Ecosystems
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Scientists from the Smithsonian Center for Tropical Research document the astounding abundance of diversity in tropical rainforests to discover why so many species coexist that are competing for the same resources. In North America, the Yellowstone Wolf Reintroduction project explores why removing just one species dramatically changed the distribution of plants and animals up and down the food web.