science, urbanism, and climate justice

The Hidden Life of Trees

What They Feel, How They Communicate

By: Peter Wohlleben
Narrated by: Mike Grady
Length: 7 hours 32 minutes

“Wow! This book enlightened and truly moved me. I can’t look at a tree without thinking about how amazing they are. It saddens me when they aren’t treated appropriately. This book inspired me to want to learn even more about these incredible beings! Read more

Zen and the Art of Saving the Planet

By: Thich Nhat Hanh
Narrated by: Edoardo Ballerini & True Dedication
Length: 9 hours 19 minutes

“When you wake up and you see that the Earth is not just the environment, the Earth is us, you touch the nature of interbeing. And at that moment you can have real communication with the Earth… We have to wake up together. And if we wake up together, then we have a chance. Our way of living our life and planning our future has led us into this... Read more

Black Earth Wisdom

Soulful Conversations with Black Environmentalists

By: Leah Penniman
Narrated by: Karen Chilton, Janina Edwards, Bill Andrew Quinn & Landon Woodson
Length: 11 hours 53 minutes

A soulful collection of illuminating essays and interviews that explore Black people’s spiritual and scientific connection to the land, waters, and climate, curated by the acclaimed author of Farming While BlackAuthor of Farming While Black and co-founder of Soul Fire Farm, Leah Penniman reminds us that ecological humility is an intrinsic part... Read more

The Story of More

How We Got to Climate Change and Where to Go from Here

By: Hope Jahren
Narrated by: Hope Jahren
Length: 6 hours 42 minutes

The essential pocket primer on climate change that will leave an indelible impact on everyone who reads it. • “Jahren asks the central question of our time: how can we learn to live on a finite planet?" —Elizabeth Kolbert, New York Times bestselling author of The Sixth Extinction

"The voice that science has been waiting for.” —Nature

Hope Jahren... Read more

Entangled Life

How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds & Shape Our Futures

By: Merlin Sheldrake
Narrated by: Merlin Sheldrake
Length: 9 hours 32 minutes

“Do you keep hearing about all the breakthroughs happening with mushrooms and fungi, and wonder what all the fuss is about? Entangled Life is a wonderful overview of the impact mushrooms and fungi are having on a variety of urgent human endeavors. It's not just our understanding of forest ecology and mycelial networks (the "wood wide web") that... Read more

Under the Sky We Make

How to Be Human in a Warming World

By: Kimberly Nicholas PhD
Narrated by: Kimberly Nicholas PhD
Length: 8 hours 50 minutes

** Los Angeles Times bestseller **

It's warming. It's us. We're sure. It's bad. But we can fix it.

After speaking to the international public for close to fifteen years about sustainability, climate scientist Dr. Nicholas realized that concerned people were getting the wrong message about the climate crisis. Yes, companies and governments are... Read more

Water

A Biography

By: Giulio Boccaletti
Narrated by: Giulio Boccaletti
Length: 14 hours 16 minutes

Spanning millennia and continents, here is a stunningly revealing history of how the distribution of water has shaped human civilization. Boccaletti, of The Nature Conservancy, “tackles the most important story of our time: our relationship with water in a world of looming scarcity” (Kelly McEvers, NPR Host).
 
Writing with authority and brio,... Read more

As Long as Grass Grows

The Indigenous Fight for Environmental Justice, from Colonization to Standing Rock

By: Dina Gilio-Whitaker
Narrated by: Kyla Garcia
Length: 7 hours 8 minutes

The story of Native peoples’ resistance to environmental injustice and land incursions, and a call for environmentalists to learn from the Indigenous community’s rich history of activism

Through the unique lens of “Indigenized environmental justice,” Indigenous researcher and activist Dina Gilio-Whitaker explores the fraught history of treaty... Read more

The Dawn of Everything

A New History of Humanity

By: David Graeber & David Wengrow
Narrated by: Mark Williams
Length: 24 hours 19 minutes

“This book packs the foundations of modern political philosophy with dynamite and lights the fuse! Through recent advances in archaeology and anthropology, Davids Graeber and Wengrow show us a dizzying range of sophisticated models of human social organization among indigenous peoples, around the world, over tens of thousands of years,... Read more

The World Without Us

By: Alan Weisman
Narrated by: Adam Grupper
Length: 12 hours 3 minutes

Discover the impact of the human footprint in The World Without Us. Take us off the Earth and what traces of us would linger? And which would disappear? Alan Weisman writes about which objects from today would vanish without us; how our pipes, wires, and cables would be pulverized into an unusual (but mere) line of red rock; why some museums and... Read more

Under a White Sky

The Nature of the Future

By: Elizabeth Kolbert
Narrated by: Rebecca Lowman
Length: 6 hours 21 minutes

AudioFile Magazine’s Best Audiobooks of 2021

The New York Times bestselling author of The Sixth Extinction and Field Notes from a Catastrophe returns to humanity’s transformative impact on the environment in Under a White Sky.

That man should have dominion “over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth” is a... Read more

Crow Planet

Essential Wisdom from the Urban Wilderness

By: Lyanda Lynn Haupt
Narrated by: Christine Williams
Length: 5 hours 31 minutes

There are more crows now than ever. Their abundance is both an indicator of ecological imbalance and a generous opportunity to connect with the animal world. Crow Planet reminds us that we do not need to head to faraway places to encounter "nature." Rather, even in the suburbs and cities where we live we are surrounded by wild life such as... Read more

The Disordered Cosmos

A Journey into Dark Matter, Spacetime, and Dreams Deferred

By: Chanda Prescod-Weinstein
Narrated by: Joniece Abbott-Pratt
Length: 10 hours 55 minutes

“If this was the science I learned growing up, I would have been way more invested. This is an intersectional look at physics, detailing the dazzling wonder and the stifling social conditions of physics. Read more

Rooted

Life at the Crossroads of Science, Nature, and Spirit

By: Lyanda Lynn Haupt
Narrated by: Christine Williams
Length: 5 hours 38 minutes

This inspiring meditation on the intersection of science, nature, and spirit shows readers how to deepen their connection to the natural world.

In Rooted, cutting-edge science supports a truth that poets, artists, mystics, and earth-based cultures across the world have proclaimed over millennia: life on this planet is radically interconnected.... Read more

Hurricane Lizards and Plastic Squid

The Fraught and Fascinating Biology of Climate Change

By: Thor Hanson
Narrated by: Stacy Carolan
Length: 6 hours 28 minutes

A beloved natural historian explores how climate change is driving evolution  

In Hurricane Lizards and Plastic Squid, biologist Thor Hanson tells the remarkable story of how plants and animals are responding to climate change: adjusting, evolving, and sometimes dying out. Anole lizards have grown larger toe pads, to grip more tightly... Read more

Eager

The Surprising, Secret Life of Beavers and Why They Matter

By: Ben Goldfarb
Narrated by: Will Damron
Length: 11 hours 24 minutes

In Eager, environmental journalist Ben Goldfarb reveals that our modern idea of what a healthy landscape looks like and how it functions is wrong, distorted by the fur trade that once trapped out millions of beavers from North America’s lakes and rivers. The consequences of losing beavers were profound: streams eroded, wetlands dried up, and... Read more

Bitch

On the Female of the Species

By: Lucy Cooke
Narrated by: Lucy Cooke
Length: 11 hours 54 minutes

“This book blew my mind wide open. Everything I’ve ever read about evolutionary biology and the polarity of male versus female has been through the same ultra-Victorian pinhole in which the 'God' of evolutionary science Charles Darwin presented it 200 years ago; males are aggressive and interesting, while females are boring passive babymakers,... Read more

The Intersectional Environmentalist

How to Dismantle Systems of Oppression to Protect People + Planet

By: Leah Thomas
Narrated by: Leah Thomas, Hayden Bishop & Erin Walker
Length: 4 hours 1 minute

“Acclaimed environmental activist Leah Thomas has put together an expert and necessary introduction into the ways climate change has most aggressively impacted marginalized communities while simultaneously pinpointing the ways those same voices have historically been ignored within environmentalism movements. The Intersectional Environmentalist... Read more

The Three Ages of Water

Prehistoric Past, Imperiled Present, and a Hope for the Future

By: Peter Gleick
Narrated by: Jonathan Beville
Length: 11 hours 25 minutes

A revelatory account of how water has shaped the course of human life and history, and a positive vision of what the future can hold—if we act now
 
From the very creation of the planet billions of years ago to the present day, water has always been central to existence on Earth. And since long before the legendary Great Flood, it has been a... Read more

Timefulness

How Thinking Like a Geologist Can Help Save the World

By: Marcia Bjornerud
Narrated by: Tanya Eby
Length: 5 hours 44 minutes

Few of us have any conception of the enormous timescales in our planet's long history, and this narrow perspective underlies many of the environmental problems we are creating for ourselves. The passage of nine days, which is how long a drop of water typically stays in Earth's atmosphere, is something we can easily grasp. But spans of hundreds... Read more