In order to rescue ourselves from climate catastrophe, we need to radically alter how humans live on Earth. We have to go from spending carbon to banking it. We have to put back the trees, wetlands, and corals. We have to regrow the soil and turn back the desert. We have to save whales, wombats, and wolves. We have to reverse the flow of greenhouse gases and send them in exactly the opposite direction: down, not up. We have to flip the carbon cycle and run it backwards. For such a revolutionary transformation we’ll need civilization 2.0. A secret unlocked by the ancients of the Amazon for its ability to transform impoverished tropical soils into terra preta—fertile black earths—points the way. The indigenous custom of converting organic materials into long lasting carbon has enjoyed a reawakening in recent decades as the quest for more sustainable farming methods has grown. Yet the benefits of this carbonized material, now called biochar, extend far beyond the soil. Pyrolyzing carbon has the power to restore a natural balance by unmining the coal and undrilling the oil and gas. Employed to its full potential, it can run the carbon cycle in reverse and remake Earth as a garden planet. Burn looks beyond renewable biomass or carbon capture energy systems to offer a bigger and bolder vision for the next phase of human progress, moving carbon from wasted sources: • into soils and agricultural systems to rebalance the carbon, nitrogen, and related cycles; enhance nutrient density in food; rebuild topsoil; and condition urban and agricultural lands to withstand flooding and drought • to cleanse water by carbon filtration and trophic cascades within the world’s rivers, oceans, and wetlands • to shift urban infrastructures such as buildings, roads, bridges, and ports, incorporating drawdown materials and components, replacing steel, concrete, polymers, and composites with biological carbon • to drive economic reorganization by incentivizing carbon drawdown Fully developed, this approach costs nothing—to the contrary, it can save companies money or provide new revenue streams. It contains the seeds of a new, circular economy in which energy, natural resources, and human ingenuity enter a virtuous cycle of improvement. Burn offers bold new solutions to climate change that can begin right now.
Right? Wrong. In this paradigm-shifting book, Herman Pontzer reveals for the first time how human metabolism really works so that we can finally manage our weight and improve our health.
When the world's most devastating artificial virus, GenoVax, is created in 2015, the entire human race faces painful destruction after the virus, which makes people feel as if they are burning to death, is released. Reprint.
Get your pink on with this totally “fetch” hardcover journal inspired by the 2004 hit Mean Girls.
"An FBI agent teams up with the first police robot to hunt a shadowy terrorist in this gripping technothriller-and fact-based tour of tomorrow-from the authors of Ghost Fleet"--
Barbara Ravage has fashioned an enlightening, invaluable book.” —Stewart O'Nan, author of The Circus Fire: A True Story of an American TragedyThough each of us is just a spark away from being a burn victim, the public knows little and ...
Inside the Dome, Partridge, having taken his father's place as leader of the Pures, realizes that things are not as clear as he thought while outside, Pressia and Bradwell continue their efforts to heal the Wretches, unsure if they can ...
Walden's only hope may lie with a third option: a very unlikely alien intervention. In Burn, James Patrick Kelly (Think Like a Dinosaur) delivers an innovative, entertaining, and morally-complex vision of the perils of idealism.
Synopsis: It’s 2008, at the height of the second Gulf War, and Don’t Ask Don’t Tell still bans LGBTQ service members from revealing their truth.
On a cold Sunday evening in early 1957, Sarah Dewhurst waited with her father in the parking lot of the Chevron gas station for the dragon he’d hired to help on the farm… Sarah Dewhurst and her father, outcasts in their little town of ...
Three teenaged girls living on Jar Island band together to enact revenge on the people that have hurt them.