Sustainability Initiative

A New York Times bestseller

With more than 2 million copies sold worldwide, this beautifully-written book journeys deep into the forest to uncover the fascinating--and surprisingly moving--hidden life of trees.

"At once romantic and scientific, [Wohlleben's] view of the forest calls on us all to reevaluate our relationships with the plant world."--Daniel Chamovitz, PhD, author of What a Plant Knows

Are trees social beings? In The Hidden Life of Trees forester and author Peter Wohlleben convincingly makes the case that, yes, the forest is a social network. He draws on groundbreaking scientific discoveries to describe how trees are like human families: tree parents live together with their children, communicate with them, support them as they grow, share nutrients with those who are sick or struggling, and even warn each other of impending dangers. Wohlleben also shares his deep love of woods and forests, explaining the amazing processes of life, death, and regeneration he has observed in his woodland.

After learning about the complex life of trees, a walk in the woods will never be the same again.

Includes a Note From a Forest Scientist, by Dr.Suzanne Simard

Published in Partnership with the David Suzuki Institute

“If you’ve ever been perplexed by the byzantine rules of recycling, you’re not alone…you’ll want to read Can I Recycle This?... An extensive look at what you can and cannot chuck into your blue bin.” —The Washington Post

The first illustrated guidebook that answers the age-old question: Can I Recycle This?

Since the dawn of the recycling system, men and women the world over have stood by their bins, holding an everyday object, wondering, "can I recycle this?" This simple question reaches into our concern for the environment, the care we take to keep our homes and our communities clean, and how we interact with our local government. Recycling rules seem to differ in every municipality, with exceptions and caveats at every turn, leaving the average American scratching her head at the simple act of throwing something away. Taking readers on a quick but informative tour of how recycling actually works (setting aside the propaganda we were all taught as kids), Can I Recycle This gives straightforward answers to whether dozens of common household objects can or cannot be recycled, as well as the information you need to make that decision for anything else you encounter. 

Jennie Romer has been working for years to help cities and states across America better deal with the waste we produce, helping draft meaningful legislation to help communities better process their waste and produce less of it in the first place. She has distilled her years of experience into this non-judgmental, easy-to-use guide that will change the way you think about what you throw away and how you do it.

"Hummingbirds are a glittering, sparkling collective of over three hundred wildly variable, colorful species. For centuries they have captured our imaginations - revered by indigenous Americans, coveted by European collectors, and to this day admired worldwide for their unsurpassed metallic, jewel-like plumage, acrobatic flight, and immense character. Yet they exist on a knife-edge -- theirs is a precarious life, dependent upon finding sufficient nectar to provide the high energy their bodies demand daily. They live fast and die young. And they do this in habitats that range from boreal woodlands to deserts, from dripping cloud-forests to montane paramo, and on islands both tropical and sub-polar. They are, perhaps, the ultimate embodiment of evolution's power to carve a niche for a seemingly delicate creature in even the harshest of places. The Glitter in the Green tells the colorful story of these fabulous birds -- their history, their compelling life cycles, and their perilous position in a changing landscape -- and the stories of the people, past and present, whose lives have been shaped by the zealous passion hummingbirds inspire. Enthusiastic amateur birdwatchers, conservation workers, scientists, smugglers, witches, and celebrities -- all have been consumed in one way or another with passion for the most remarkable family of all the birds. Travelling the full length of their worldwide range, from the very edge of the Arctic Circle to the sub-Antarctic islands off the tip of South America, acclaimed nature writer Jon Dunn embarks on a search for the most remarkable examples of their kind, exploring their rich cultural heritage, and encountering a host of human characters as colorful as the birds themselves"--

From bestselling author James Raffan comes an enlightening and original story about a polar bear’s precarious existence in the changing Arctic, reminiscent of John Vaillant’s The Golden Spruce.

Nanurjuk, “the bear-spirited one,” is hunting for seals on Hudson Bay, where ice never lasts more than one season. For her and her young, everything is in flux.

From the top of the world, Hudson Bay looks like an enormous paw print on the torso of the continent, and through a vast network of lakes and rivers, this bay connects to oceans across the globe. Here, at the heart of everything, walks Nanurjuk, or Nanu, one polar bear among the six thousand that traverse the 1.23 million square kilometers of ice and snow covering the bay.

For millennia, Nanu’s ancestors have roamed this great expanse, living, evolving, and surviving alongside human beings in one of the most challenging and unforgiving habitats on earth. But that world is changing. In the Arctic’s lands and waters, oil has been extracted—and spilled. As global temperatures have risen, the sea ice that Nanu and her young need to hunt seal and fish has melted, forcing them to wait on land where the delicate balance between them and their two-legged neighbors has now shifted.

This is the icescape that author and geographer James Raffan invites us to inhabit in Ice Walker. In precise and provocative prose, he brings readers inside Nanu’s world as she treks uncertainly around the heart of Hudson Bay, searching for nourishment for the children that grow inside her. She stops at nothing to protect her cubs from the dangers she can see—other bears, wolves, whales, human beings—and those she cannot.

By focusing his lens on this bear family, Raffan closes the gap between humans and bears, showing us how, like the water of the Hudson Bay, our existence—and our future—is tied to Nanu’s. He asks us to consider what might be done about this fragile world before it is gone for good. Masterful, vivid, and haunting, Ice Walker is an utterly unique piece of creative nonfiction and a deeply affecting call to action.

NATIONAL BESTSELLER * The Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Sixth Extinction returns to humanity's transformative impact on the environment, now asking: After doing so much damage, can we change nature, this time to save it?

RECOMMENDED BY PRESIDENT OBAMA AND BILL GATES * SHORTLISTED FOR THE WAINWRIGHT PRIZE FOR WRITING * ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The Washington Post * ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: Time, Esquire, Smithsonian Magazine, Vulture, Publishers Weekly, Kirkus Reviews, Library Journal * "Beautifully and insistently, Kolbert shows us that it is time to think radically about the ways we manage the environment."--Helen Macdonald, The New York Times

That man should have dominion "over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth" is a prophecy that has hardened into fact. So pervasive are human impacts on the planet that it's said we live in a new geological epoch: the Anthropocene.

In Under a White Sky, Elizabeth Kolbert takes a hard look at the new world we are creating. Along the way, she meets biologists who are trying to preserve the world's rarest fish, which lives in a single tiny pool in the middle of the Mojave; engineers who are turning carbon emissions to stone in Iceland; Australian researchers who are trying to develop a "super coral" that can survive on a hotter globe; and physicists who are contemplating shooting tiny diamonds into the stratosphere to cool the earth.

One way to look at human civilization, says Kolbert, is as a ten-thousand-year exercise in defying nature. In The Sixth Extinction, she explored the ways in which our capacity for destruction has reshaped the natural world. Now she examines how the very sorts of interventions that have imperiled our planet are increasingly seen as the only hope for its salvation. By turns inspiring, terrifying, and darkly comic, Under a White Sky is an utterly original examination of the challenges we face.

In this New York Times bestseller, Ijeoma Oluo offers a hard-hitting but user-friendly examination of race in America
Widespread reporting on aspects of white supremacy--from police brutality to the mass incarceration of Black Americans--has put a media spotlight on racism in our society. Still, it is a difficult subject to talk about. How do you tell your roommate her jokes are racist? Why did your sister-in-law take umbrage when you asked to touch her hair--and how do you make it right? How do you explain white privilege to your white, privileged friend?
In So You Want to Talk About Race, Ijeoma Oluo guides readers of all races through subjects ranging from intersectionality and affirmative action to "model minorities" in an attempt to make the seemingly impossible possible: honest conversations about race and racism, and how they infect almost every aspect of American life.
"Oluo gives us--both white people and people of color--that language to engage in clear, constructive, and confident dialogue with each other about how to deal with racial prejudices and biases."--National Book Review
"Generous and empathetic, yet usefully blunt . . . it's for anyone who wants to be smarter and more empathetic about matters of race and engage in more productive anti-racist action."--Salon (Required Reading)

Named one of the most important nonfiction books of the 21st century by Entertainment Weekly' Slate' Chronicle of Higher Education' Literary Hub, Book Riot' and Zora

A tenth-anniversary edition of the iconic bestseller--one of the most influential books of the past 20 years, according to the Chronicle of Higher Education--with a new preface by the author

It is in no small part thanks to Alexander's account that civil rights organizations such as Black Lives Matter have focused so much of their energy on the criminal justice system.
--Adam Shatz, London Review of Books

Seldom does a book have the impact of Michelle Alexander's The New Jim Crow. Since it was first published in 2010, it has been cited in judicial decisions and has been adopted in campus-wide and community-wide reads; it helped inspire the creation of the Marshall Project and the new $100 million Art for Justice Fund; it has been the winner of numerous prizes, including the prestigious NAACP Image Award; and it has spent nearly 250 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list.

Most important of all, it has spawned a whole generation of criminal justice reform activists and organizations motivated by Michelle Alexander's unforgettable argument that we have not ended racial caste in America; we have merely redesigned it. As the Birmingham News proclaimed, it is undoubtedly the most important book published in this century about the U.S.

Now, ten years after it was first published, The New Press is proud to issue a tenth-anniversary edition with a new preface by Michelle Alexander that discusses the impact the book has had and the state of the criminal justice reform movement today.

"From one of our most intrepid and eloquent adventurers of the natural world: an account of her search for home--experiences traveling in Greenland, the North Pole, the Channel Islands of California, Japan; of herding animals in Wyoming and Montana, and her embrace of the balance between the ordinary and celestial. In The Solace of Open Spaces, Gretel Ehrlich announced her aspiration as a writer to assign the physical qualities of the earth--weather, light and wind--to our contemporary age. In Unsolaced, thirty-five years later, Ehrlich shows us how these forces have shaped her experience and her understanding as she recalls the split-end strands of friendships spliced to new loves, houses built and lived in, conversations that shifted outlooks, as she tries to catch a glimpse of herself and the places she has sought as an anchor for her spirit. Ehrlich's quest is not for the comfort of permanence, but for transience, the need to be unsettled--to find stillness in the disquiet of engagement, to find in the landscapes of earth, ice, climate, genetic mayhem, and shifting canvas of memory--the possibility of longing. Ehrlich's voice is a unique amalgam of poetry and science, her attention held fast by the vegetation and animals she cares for, the lyric exaltation of insight that gives both her and her readers an intimation of a greater whole"--