A revolutionary new understanding of the precarious modern human-nature relationship and a path to a healthier, more sustainable world. Amidst all the wondrous luxuries of the modern world—smartphones, fast intercontinental travel, Internet movies, fully stocked refrigerators—lies an unnerving fact that may be even more disturbing than all the environmental and social costs of our lifestyles. The fragmentations of our modern lives, our disconnections from nature and from the consequences of our actions, make it difficult to follow our own values and ethics, so we can no longer be truly ethical beings. When we buy a computer or a hamburger, our impacts ripple across the globe, and, dissociated from them, we can’t quite respond. Our personal and professional choices result in damages ranging from radioactive landscapes to disappearing rainforests, but we can’t quite see how. Environmental scholar Kenneth Worthy traces the broken pathways between consumers and clean-room worker illnesses, superfund sites in Silicon Valley, and massively contaminated landscapes in rural Asian villages. His groundbreaking, psychologically based explanation confirms that our disconnections make us more destructive and that we must bear witness to nature and our consequences. Invisible Nature shows the way forward: how we can create more involvement in our own food production, more education about how goods are produced and waste is disposed, more direct and deliberative democracy, and greater contact with the nature that sustains us.

"Sure to become a game-changing guide to the future of good food and healthy landscapes." —Dan Barber, chef and author of The Third Plate Prepare to set aside what you think you know about yourself and microbes. The Hidden Half of Nature reveals why good health—for people and for plants—depends on Earth’s smallest creatures. Restoring life to their barren yard and recovering from a health crisis, David R. Montgomery and Anne Biklé discover astounding parallels between the botanical world and our own bodies. From garden to gut, they show why cultivating beneficial microbiomes holds the key to transforming agriculture and medicine.

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"Wild Ones is a tour through our environmental moment and the eccentric cultural history of people and wild animals in America that inflects it. With propulsive curiosity and searing wit, and without that easy moralizing and nature worship of environmental journalism's older guard, [Jon] Mooallem merges reportage, science, and history into a humane and endearing meditation on what it means to live in, and bring life into, a broken world."--Back cover.

The nanosciences and their companion nanotechnologies are a hot topic all around the world. For some, they promise developments ranging from nanobots to revolutionary new materials. For others, they raise the specter of Big Brother and of atomically modified organisms (AMOs). This book is a counterbalance to spin and paranoia alike, asking us to consider what the nanosciences really are. Nanosciences are not just a branch of materials sciences, a common misrepresentation fostered in the funding wars. Nor should nanotechnology be confused with miniaturization, a convergence of microelectronics, biotechnology and lab-on-chip techniques. These misconceptions arise from a well-orchestrated US policy dating from the mid-1990s, in which the instrument that lies at the heart of the true nanoscience revolution ? the scanning tunneling microscope (STM) ? plays just a minor part. These issues are covered here for the first time in a book by a scientist who holds two Feynman prizes in nanotechnology and who has played a significant role in the birth of the nanosciences. Writing from the cutting edge and with an understanding of the real nature of nanoscience, the author provides a scientific and historical perspective on the subject, a response to the misplaced ethical concerns of objectors and to the scaremongering of the popular press.