Scorched Earth


Book Description

A global history of environmental warfare and the case for why it should be a crime The environmental infrastructure that sustains human societies has been a target and instrument of war for centuries, resulting in famine and disease, displaced populations, and the devastation of people’s livelihoods and ways of life. Scorched Earth traces the history of scorched earth, military inundations, and armies living off the land from the sixteenth to the twentieth century, arguing that the resulting deliberate destruction of the environment—"environcide"—constitutes total war and is a crime against humanity and nature. In this sweeping global history, Emmanuel Kreike shows how religious war in Europe transformed Holland into a desolate swamp where hunger and the black death ruled. He describes how Spanish conquistadores exploited the irrigation works and expansive agricultural terraces of the Aztecs and Incas, triggering a humanitarian crisis of catastrophic proportions. Kreike demonstrates how environmental warfare has continued unabated into the modern era. His panoramic narrative takes readers from the Thirty Years' War to the wars of France's Sun King, and from the Dutch colonial wars in North America and Indonesia to the early twentieth century colonial conquest of southwestern Africa. Shedding light on the premodern origins and the lasting consequences of total war, Scorched Earth explains why ecocide and genocide are not separate phenomena, and why international law must recognize environmental warfare as a violation of human rights.




Brogan's Promise


Book Description

Whisky made her forget. One man’s love will help her remember. He could have walked away when he learned of his bride’s secret — that she is a raging alcoholic. But Brogan Mackintosh is not the kind of man to turn a blind eye to someone in need. He battled his own demons and won the fight against drink years before. Facing the challenges head on, like the battle hardened warrior he is, he is determined to help his new bride overcome the demons that haunt her. And he might even learn the truth surrounding the murders of her husband and infant son. Mairghread Mactavish isn’t sure she can continue to breathe anymore without the aid of wine and whisky. Plunging herself into the dark abyss of drunkenness was the only place where she could catch glimpses, bits and pieces of her memory from the night her world was torn apart. When she learns the truth about the man she is to marry — a man who has murdered more than one wife and raped countless other women — she makes a desperate decision to marry Brogan Mackintosh instead. Brogan offers her more than a way out of marrying a murderer, however. He might be the only man who can give her back the life she once lived. This is a story about overcoming grief and alcoholism and finding true love in your darkest hours.




Tried and True


Book Description

A compilation of popular Tried and True columns originally published in Science Scope, this new book is filled with teachers best classroom activities time-tested, tweaked, and engaging. These ageless activities will fit easily into your middle school curriculum and serve as go-to resources when you need a tried-and-true lesson for tomorrow. --from publisher description.




Geosonics


Book Description

How do we listen to the earth? That is the central question posed in Geosonics: Listening Through Earth's Soundscapes. Working across sound studies, media theory, and environmental media studies, Joshua Dittrich explores the material and metaphorical geology of the sonic environment. In an epoch of climate crisis, environment is no longer a neutral background, site, or simple “surrounding”: environment is immanently implicated in the chains of mediation that make up the material and imaginative infrastructure of our lives. The analytical task of Geosonics is to tune into that infrastructure through sound. Drawing on influential work in sound studies around the concept of transduction, this book explores how listening does not take place in a pre-existing soundscape, but rather makes place by etching out a mediated, mutually constitutive set of relations between listeners, media, and environments.




Take Their Breath Away


Book Description

A powerful and inventive guide to creating irrationally loyal customers There are a mountain of books about customer service, but very few as provocative and innovative as Take Their Breath Away. This practical book shows how to create and implement cutting-edge, inspiring concepts that raise the bar for the customer experience and help make the customer the central focus of the organization. This ingenious, real-world guide explores a variety of exciting, creative customer experience ideas using examples from remarkable customer-centric organizations. The key to a successful enterprise is value-added service, but the secret to great customer service is surprising customers with a value-unique experience. Take Their Breath Away provides ideas and insights for all who want to create a stunning, mind-blowing customer experience. This is not about "wow;" it's about "whoa!" Chip R. Bell (Dallas, TX) is founder and Senior Partner of The Chip Bell Group, a consulting firm that assists organizations in creating sustainable long-term customer devotion. He has served as a consultant or trainer to such major brands as Ritz-Carlton, Microsoft, and GE. John R. Patterson (Atlanta, GA) is founder and President of Progressive Insights, a Chip Bell Group alliance partner. With over 20 years of leadership experience, his consulting practice focuses on helping organizations create and sustain incredible customer experiences.




The Last Girl on Earth


Book Description

Fans of The 5th Wave will devour this heart-pounding sci-fi novel about a girl with a secret: on a near-future Earth taken over by aliens, she is the only human left alive. “A celebration of what it means to be human.” —Katharine McGee, New York Times bestselling author of The Thousandth Floor RAISED AMONG THEM. Li has a father and a sister who love her. A best friend, Mirabae, to share things with. She goes to school and hangs out at the beach and carefully follows the rules. She has to. Everyone she knows--her family, her teachers, her friends--is an alien. And she is the only human left on Earth. A SECRET THAT COULD END HER LIFE. The Abdoloreans hijacked the planet sixteen years ago, destroying all human life. Li's human-sympathizer father took her in as a baby and has trained her to pass as one of them. The Abdoloreans appear human. But they don't think with human minds or feel with human hearts. And they have special abilities no human could ever have. FIT IN OR DIE. When Li meets Ryn, she's swept up in a relationship that could have disastrous consequences. How far will Li go to stay alive? Will she save herself--and in turn, the human race--or will she be the final witness to humanity's destruction?




Midnight, Water City


Book Description

Hawai‘i author Chris McKinney’s first entry in a brilliant new sci-fi noir trilogy explores the sordid past of a murdered scientist, deified in death, through the eyes of a man who once committed unspeakable crimes for her. Year 2142: Earth is forty years past a near-collision with the asteroid Sessho-seki. Akira Kimura, the scientist responsible for eliminating the threat, has reached heights of celebrity approaching deification. But now, Akira feels her safety is under threat, so after years without contact, she reaches out to her former head of security, who has since become a police detective. When he arrives at her deep-sea home and finds Akira methodically dismembered, this detective will risk everything—his career, his family, even his own life—and delve back into his shared past with Akira to find her killer. With a rich, cinematic voice and burning cynicism, Midnight, Water City is both a thrilling neo-noir procedural and a stunning exploration of research, class, climate change, the cult of personality, and the dark sacrifices we are willing to make in the name of progress.




Green Earth


Book Description

The landmark trilogy of cutting-edge science, international politics, and the real-life ramifications of climate change—updated and abridged into a single novel More than a decade ago, bestselling author Kim Stanley Robinson began a groundbreaking series of near-future eco-thrillers—Forty Signs of Rain, Fifty Degrees Below, and Sixty Days and Counting—that grew increasingly urgent and vital as global warming continued unchecked. Now, condensed into one volume and updated with the latest research, this sweeping trilogy gains new life as Green Earth, a chillingly realistic novel that plunges readers into great floods, a modern Ice Age, and the political fight for all our lives. The Arctic ice pack averaged thirty feet thick in midwinter when it was first measured in the 1950s. By the end of the century it was down to fifteen. One August the ice broke. The next year the breakup started in July. The third year it began in May. That was last year. It’s a muggy summer in Washington, D.C., as Senate environmental staffer Charlie Quibler and his scientist wife, Anna, work to call attention to the growing crisis of global warming. But as they fight to align the extraordinary march of modern technology with the awesome forces of nature, fate puts an unusual twist on their efforts—one that will pit science against politics in the heart of the coming storm. Praise for the Science in the Capital trilogy “Perhaps it’s no coincidence that one of our most visionary hard sci-fi writers is also a profoundly good nature writer—all the better to tell us what it is we have to lose.”—Los Angeles Times “An unforgettable demonstration of what can go wrong when an ecological balance is upset.”—The New York Times Book Review “Absorbing and convincing.”—Nature




Life's Ponderous Adventure


Book Description

The author hopes this book will bring to the reader’s attention and focus the value in reflecting on various, often differing perspectives of our world. It seems many people live out their lifetime, rather unthinkingly, without ever considering seriously, any purpose for their life beyond immediate personal pleasures and satisfactions. Then they die, so they seem to think. A little intuition and insight soon reveals there is much more to our world than what we can see and that each of us has a real purpose for our existence. A basic truth the author points to is that human purpose is unattainable in isolation. Our thoughts, no matter how lofty, are worthless unless they are communicated and shared with others, in love. And so, he says, he writes. This book brings forth numerous ideas and inventions, discoveries and talents revealed in literary, mathematical, and art forms, all manifestations of God’s handiworks revealed through our humanness. The book also points to the humble efforts, the drudgeries of routines, even the poverty of so many humans and how God values and honors every individual who sincerely lives to please our Creator, God, no matter their station in life. God’s creativity didn’t end the sixth creation day. Yes, God rested on the seventh day, and He instructed us to do the same. God’s creative time marches forward, never static, but rather dynamic, energetic, ever-changing, evolving with ever-emerging newness and promise. Amazingly, God endorses and promotes our own human creativity with an important caveat. It is difficult to find a place on our earth’s surface not rearranged to suit our human generational whims. In so many situations, we have failed to clean up our messes. God gave we humans dominion over the whole earth. What we’ve collectively failed to understand or live up to is that dominion involves responsibility, conservation, and ownership. Ever since the reformation and its associated human upheavals, technology has, with continuing acceleration, produced marvelous time-saving, creative accomplishments. That is, for the minority of we humans fortunate enough to access them. But what about the majority, the masses of forgotten humans worldwide, living in deep poverty, often homeless, their own resources confiscated by greedy entrepreneurs? And what about earth’s surface, so deeply wounded and scarred by human mining interests? Sad to say, if the tables were reversed, and the presently forsaken masses of humanity were somehow to become the privileged, it would be no different. We humans are all selfish sinners So who’s responsible? Don’t blame Satan and his demons. All they do is suggest to us mindful humans. Every evil ever manifested could be traced back to human sins. And is there any possible solution to the messes we’ve made? Of course there is, but few find it. The whole creation, life, and humanity, Satan and his demons, the beauties and the sufferings all come into focus in Jesus. It’s all about Jesus and his love for we humans. The author’s writing style is suggestive of an ascending vortex (cyclone) of information that first focuses on some primary aspects of us and our world, written for the early childhood reader. It then spirals upward to give the reader deeper perspectives on similar topics, now written in format readable by primary students. Continuing to spiral upward, it is now addressed to intermediate level students, utilizing still greater depth of reasoning and language used. Finally, the book looks deeper into advanced studies of some chosen topics. Bless us all, dear Lord, in our efforts to better know your creation and You.




A Chip Off the Old Block


Book Description

A plucky pebble shows true grit as he travels the country trying to find out if he fits in with any of his famous rock-formation relatives. Rocky comes from a long line of rock stars! Uncle Gibraltar, Aunt Etna, and Great-Grandma Half Dome are just some of the legendary rock formations he calls family. It's no wonder he wants to matter in a big way too--but it's not easy trying to get a foothold. Rocky gets tossed by The Wave and driven away at Devil's Tower--but he's determined not to allow these pitfalls to chip away at his confidence. Rather than feeling crushed, he keeps on rolling, hoping to become the rock-star he knows he's meant to be.