Títulos en Medioambiente

The Meaty Truth is an eye-opening look at the massive problems caused by the American population's food supply. Water, meat, and milk and other dairy products are filled with toxins, antibiotics, untested growth hormones, ammonia, and animal pus and manure. The current conditions of the food production industry must drastically improve, and until they do, it is absolutely vital to monitor what you eat.

Like many people, Beth Terry didn't think an individual could have much impact on the environment. But while laid up after surgery, she read an article about the staggering amount of plastic polluting the oceans and decided then and there to kick her plastic habit. Now she wants to teach you how you can too.

Naturalist Joe Hutto’s latest adventures in wildlife observation take him to Wyoming’s Wind River Mountains. Hutto is living in a tent at 12,000 feet, where blizzards occur in July and where human wants become irrelevant—and human needs can become a matter of life and death—to study the Rocky Mountain bighorn sheep.

With real-world considerations in mind, disaster preparedness consultant David Black shows us how to stay alive when tragedy strikes. His step-by-step actions can help us make it safely through a variety of crises, from catastrophic weather to terrorism to civil unrest. Black presents tailor-made plans for individuals, businesses, organizations, small groups, and communities to follow, in all regions of the country and broken down by type of emergency and environment.

A search for the contemporary Nikola Tesla - considered a mad scientist by his society for predicting global warming more than 100 years ago - fuels this analysis of climate issues, which introduces thinkers and inventors who are working to find possible ways out of the energy crisis. From Louis Michaud, a retired refinery engineer who claims we can harness the energy of man-made tornadoes, to a professor and a businessman who are running a company that genetically modifies algae so it can secrete ethanol naturally, these individuals and their unorthodox methods are profiled.

A poet at heart, Amy Minato rejects her life of consumption in Chicago to go back to nature - specifically, to a commune in Oregon, where she rediscovers herself. She also cops occasionally to the pretentiousness of her mission, and laughs along with the listener at her attempts to be both environmentally friendly and sane, considering the fact that she’s moved in with a bunch of strangers in a remote locale. 

A North Country Life is the story of author Sydney Lea’s powerful connection to his family, friends, and the northern outdoors. Loosely organized by the changing of seasons, different sections feature essays on such topics as childhood family fishing trips in the wilds of Maine, trophy fly-fishing the northern reaches of the Connecticut River, the opening day of turkey hunting season in Vermont, and getting lost in the deep woods while deer hunting. The essays are introspective and dramatic.

Well-known nature and conservation writer Ted Williams is an avid fisherman who has devoted many years to writing about the sport and advocating the preservation of bodies of water and species of fish. Here, he brings together his love of angling with his profound sense of responsibility for the environment.

An icon of the environmental movement outlines a provocative approach for reclaiming our planet. According to Stewart Brand, a lifelong environmentalist who sees everything in terms of solvable design problems, three profound transformations are under way on Earth right now. Climate change is real and is pushing us toward managing the planet as a whole. Urbanization - half the world's population now lives in cities, and 80 percent will by midcentury - is altering humanity's land impact and wealth.

Thanks to an ongoing revolution in the science of meteorology, we can now understand how extreme weather conditions arise, produce far more accurate forecasts, and know how to protect ourselves when dangerous conditions develop. The Science of Extreme Weather is your field guide to the worst that Earth’s atmosphere can inflict. In 24 exciting, informative, and potentially life-saving half-hour lectures aimed at weather novices and amateur forecasters alike, you gain a surprisingly powerful tool in the face of such overwhelming forces: knowledge.

Beavers, those icons of industriousness, have been gnawing down trees, building dams, shaping the land, and creating critical habitat in North America for at least a million years. Once one of the continent's most ubiquitous mammals, they ranged from the Atlantic to the Pacific, and from the Rio Grande to the edge of the northern tundra. Wherever there was wood and water, there were beavers - 60 million (or more) - and wherever there were beavers, there were intricate natural communities that depended on their activities.

Numerous times in American history, reformers have sought to help the poor by putting them amidst nature, in the belief being that physical beauty can make beautiful people. It seems like an odd idea. But Thomas Jefferson believed it fervently. And it's also the reason Central Park exists in New York City and the town of Greenbelt exists in Maryland. This program, from seasoned producer Richard Paul, looks at a time in our past when nature was used to uplift the poor.

Dinosaurs continue to be one of the greatest mysteries of the world. Paleontologists have been working for years to find out everything possible about these creatures that roamed the earth millions of years ago. While they have discovered quite a lot by studying dinosaur bones, there are still so many unanswered questions. Were they warm-blooded or cold-blooded? Were they more like birds, or more like reptiles? Why and how did they become extinct?

The 1960s saw the Brazilian Amazon rainforest go from wretched jungle to the future of the country. Government policy encouraged widespread de-forestation, gold mining using industrial methods. The government proposed the first hydro-electrical plant based at the Tucurui Dam in the North Eastern State of Pará, Brazil. Producer Cecilia Vaisman traveled to the south western state of Acra, where she speaks with Ilzamar Mendes, widow of Chico Mendes.

The most outspoken proponents of saving the rainforest in Brazil were initially the region’s indigenous tribes, particularly the Kayapo tribe. Producer Cecilia Vaisman visits the town of Gorotire, where chiefs discuss their fight against ranchers, and how they are making accommodations, including mining and logging concessions. Some were looking at the immediate benefits, such as electricity, solid homes, and even airplanes.

“Plastics,” said the character in the movie The Graduate. “There’s a great future in plastics.” Today we understand how plastics degrade the environment. However, in 1988, research was just beginning to show the damage plastics could bring, from plastics bags and six-pack rings in the ocean to bottles clogging drainage areas and sea animals ingesting bits of plastic.

The apple may have originated not in Mesopotamia, but in Alma Ata, Kazakstan. The majority of apples around the world share a genetic heritage with apples grown in the area. There, Frank Browning discovers that one of the world's oldest apple breeding programs is still on-going. He tells us about efforts to hybridize better apples, and the place the program has in the global picture.

During the International Geophysical Year (IGY), in the late 1950's, teams of scientists poured in Antarctica, mining for data: about the weather, the climate and most especially, about the ice. Producer Barbara Bogaev talks to some of the men who were there.

Until satellites came along, weather forecasting was either very local (it's raining) or very general (it's going to be warmer tomorrow). When satellites started sending pictures of the Earth and its atmosphere, a remarkable meteorologist named Harry Wexler, saw the opportunity for long range, global forecasting. In the late 1950's, as head of the U.S. Weather Bureau and chief U.S. scientist for the International Geophysical Year (IGY), Wexler not only had the vision, but the means to carry it out.

Bjorn Lomborg argues that many of the elaborate and expensive actions now being considered to stop global warming will cost hundreds of billions of dollars, are often based on emotional rather than strictly scientific assumptions, and may very well have little impact on the world’s temperature for hundreds of years. Rather than starting with the most radical procedures, Lomborg argues that we should first focus our resources on more immediate concerns, such as fighting malaria and HIV/AIDS and assuring and maintaining a safe, fresh water supply....