"Over the past several decades, globalization has homogenized what we eat, and done so ruthlessly. The numbers are stark: Of the roughly six thousand different plants once consumed by human beings, only nine remain major staples today. Just three of these-rice, wheat, and corn-now provide fifty percent of all our calories. Dig deeper and the trends are more worrisome still: The source of much of the world's food-seeds-is mostly in the control of just...

"Tells the story of the energy boom's impact on a small town at the edge of Appalachia--and one woman's transformation from a struggling single parent to an unlikely activist. Stacey Haney is a local nurse working hard to raise two kids and keep up her small farm when the fracking industry comes to her hometown of Amity, Pennsylvania. Intrigued by reports of lucrative natural gas leases in her neighbors' mailboxes, she strikes a deal with a Texas-based...

A timely documentary that raises urgent questions about how we travel and the unintended cultural and environmental consequences of tourism around the globe. Gringo Trails follows well-worn travelers' routes through Bolivia, Thailand, Mali, and Bhutan and reveals the complex relationships between colliding cultures, such as the host countries' need for financial security and the tourists who provide it in their quest for authentic experiences. Through...

The killer bargain referred to by this hard-hitting documentary's title is the availability of cheap consumer goods, imported by Western companies, whose prices don't reflect the actual human and environmental costs associated with their production in the developing world. Consumers remain largely unaware of the conditions under which the goods they buy are produced; this film makes those connections shockingly clear. While some retailers and manufacturers...

"An eye-opening and witty account of the global ecological transformations wrought by roads, from an award-winning author. Some 40 million miles of roadways encircle the earth, but we tend to regard them only as infrastructure for human convenience. In Crossings, Ben Goldfarb delves into the new science of road ecology to explore how roads have transformed our world. Millions of animals are killed by cars each day in the US alone, and roads fragment...

"This narrative middle-grade nonfiction from Rebecca Donnelly dives into the scientific and cultural history of the waste humans produce, examining why we make so much trash, why we're so bad at handling it, and how we can stop it (that is, us) from ruining the planet"--

The planet is being overwhelmed with clothes. Close to 56 million tonnes of clothes are sold every year. In Europe, the amount purchased has almost doubled since the year 2000. Thanks to fast disposable fashion, you can constantly renew your wardrobe. But producing clothes at such a low price has a very high environmental cost. Textiles are the second most polluting industry in the world, after oil. According to the brands, they no longer have time...

"From hunting and gathering to GMOs and ultraprocessed foods, this expansive tour of human history rewrites the story of our species--and points the way to a better future"-- How humankind first hunted and gathered explains our emergence as a new species and our earliest technology. Our first food systems, from fire to agriculture, tell where we settled and how civilizations expanded. The quest for food for growing populations drove exploration,...