You'll do it 20,000 times a day. You assume all this air is clean; it's the very breath of life. But in Delhi, the toxic smog is as bad for you as smoking 50 cigarettes a day. Even a few days in Paris, London or Rome is equivalent to two or three cigarettes. Air pollution is implicated in six of the top ten causes of death worldwide, including lung cancer, heart disease, stroke, and dementia. 'Breathless' gives us clear facts about air pollution in...

The world's climate is changing, and it's affecting the planet. The destruction of natural habitats and the rise in pollution are just some of the issues we're all facing today. If you're someone who cares for nature and is worried about the environment, you might be wondering what you can do to help. Filled with useful information, inspiring articles, and sustainable ideas and projects, this Eco handbook gives you a wide range of ways to make a positive...

What does the foghorn sound like? It sounds huge. It rattles. It rattles you. It is a booming, lonely sound echoing into the vastness of the sea. When Jennifer Lucy Allan hears the foghorn's colossal bellow for the first time, it marks the beginning of an obsession and a journey deep into the history of a sound that has carved out the identity and the landscape of coastlines around the world, from Scotland to San Francisco. Within its sound is a maritime...

Holding her first grandchild in her arms in 2003, Mary Robinson was struck by the uncertainty of the world he had been born into. Before his 50th birthday, he would share the planet with more than nine billion people - people battling for food, water, and shelter in an increasingly volatile climate. The faceless, shadowy menace of climate change had become, in an instant, deeply personal. Mary Robinson's mission would lead her all over the world,...

A day in the life of Carla Valentine - curator, pathology technician and 'death professional' - is not your average day. She spent ten years training and working as an Anatomical Pathology Technologist: where the mortuary slab was her desk, and that day's corpses her task list. 'Past Mortems' tells Carla's stories of those years, as well as investigating the body alongside our attitudes towards death - shedding light on what the living can learn from...

From relics of Georgian empire-building and slave-trading, through Victorian London's barged-out refuse to 1980s fly-tipping and the pervasiveness of present-day plastics, 'Rag and Bone' traces the story of our rubbish, and, through it, our history of consumption. In a series of beachcombing and mudlarking walks - beginning in the Thames in central London, then out to the Kentish estuary and eventually the sea around Cornwall - Lisa Woollett also...

Darkness has shaped the lives of humans for millennia, and in 'Dark Skies', author Tiffany Francis travels around Britain and Europe to learn more about nocturnal landscapes and humanity's connection to the night sky. Over the course of a year, Tiffany travels through different nightscapes across the UK and beyond. She experiences 24-hour daylight while swimming in the Gulf of Finland and visits Norway to witness the Northern Lights and speak to people...

Climate change is real but it's not the end of the world. It is not even our most serious environmental problem. Michael Shellenberger has been fighting for a greener planet for decades. He helped save the world's last unprotected redwoods. He co-created the predecessor to today's Green New Deal. And he led a successful effort by climate scientists and activists to keep nuclear plants operating, preventing a spike of emissions. But in 2019, as some...

This is the story of a family led to confront a crisis they had never foreseen. Aged eleven, their eldest daughter has stopped eating and speaking. Alongside diagnoses of autism and selective mutism, her parents slowly become aware of another source for her distress: her imperilled future on a rapidly heating planet. Steered by her determination to understand the truth, the family begins to see the deep connections between their own and the planet's...

533 days in the life of a great European writer. Though a tireless explorer of distant cultures, for more than forty years Cees Nooteboom has also been returning to the island of Menorca, 'the island of the wind', and it is in his house there, with a study full of books and a garden taken over with native plants and fauna, that the 533 days of writing take place. The product is not a diary, nor a set of movements of the soul organised by dates, but...