En 2015, Joe Sacco s'est rendu par deux fois dans les territoires du Nord-Ouest du Canada, au dessous de l'Arctique. Il est allé à la rencontre des Denes, un peuple autochtone. L'auteur nous raconte l'histoire de ce peuple, ses traditions, restées intactes pour certaines, les premières rencontres avec les anglais.
Pendant longtemps les peuples indigènes du Grand Nord, vivant sur des terres non propices à la colonisation agricole, restèrent livrés à eux-mêmes, jusqu'à ce que la découverte de pétrole et d'or incite le gouvernement à officialiser son autorité sur eux, comme sur leurs terres. À cette période, les autorités s'appropriaient les territoires, non plus par les massacres, mais cliniquement, méthodiquement, et de façon administrative - grâce à des traités.
En lisant ceux-ci, on n'échappe pas à l'impression que les « Indiens » ont donné la terre où ils vivaient en échange de la promesse d'une annuité de quelques dollars, de quelques outils et de médailles pour ceux qui se disaient leurs chefs. Aujourd'hui, la fracturation hydraulique ajoute la pollution à la spoliation initiale.
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Most people can name the influential leaders and major battles of the past. Few can name the most destructive storms, the worst winters, the most devastating droughts.

In The Earth Transformed , ground-breaking historian Peter Frankopan reconnects us with our ancestors who, like us, worshipped, exploited and conserved the natural environment - and draws salutary conclusions about what the future may bring.

In this revelatory book, Frankopan shows that engagement with the natural world and with climatic change and their effects on us are not new: exploring, for instance, how the development of religion and language and their relationships with the environment; tracing how growing demands for harvests resulted in the increased shipment of enslaved peoples; scrutinising how the desire to centralise agricultural surplus formed the origins of the bureaucratic state; and seeing how efforts to understand and manipulate the weather have a long and deep history. Understanding how past shifts in natural patterns have shaped history, and how our own species has shaped terrestrial, marine and atmospheric conditions is not just important but essential at a time of growing awareness of the severity of the climate crisis.

Taking us from the beginning of recorded history to the present day, The Earth Transformed forces us to reckon with humankind''s continuing efforts to make sense of the natural world.> Lire la suite Fermer

Rachel Carson's Silent Spring alerted a large audience to the environmental and human dangers of indiscriminate use of pesticides, spurring revolutionary changes in the laws affecting our air, land, and water. This Penguin Modern Classics edition includes an introduction by Lord Shackleton, a preface by World Wildlife Fund founder Julian Huxley, and an afterword by Carson's biographer Linda Lear. Now recognized as one of the most influential books of the twentieth century, Silent Spring exposed the destruction of wildlife through the widespread use of pesticides. Despite condemnation in the press and heavy-handed attempts by the chemical industry to ban the book, Rachel Carson succeeded in creating a new public awareness of the environment which led to changes in government and inspired the ecological movement. It is thanks to this book, and the help of many environmentalists, that harmful pesticides such as DDT were banned from use in the US and countries around the world. Rachel Carson (1907-64) wanted to be a writer for as long as she could remember. Her first book, Under the Sea Wind , appeared in 1941. Silent Spring , which alerted the world to the dangers of the misuse of pesticides, was published in 1962. Carson's articles on natural history appeared in the Atlantic Monthly , the New Yorker , Reader's Digest and Holiday . An ardent ecologist and preservationist, Carson warned against the dumping of atomic waste at sea and predicted global warming. If you enjoyed Silent Spring, you might like John Christopher's The Death of Grass , also available in Penguin Modern Classics. 'Carson's books brought ecology into popular consciousness' Daily Telegraph 'Very few books change the course of history. Those that do include Silent Spring ' Linda Lear, author of Rachel Carson: Witness for Nature
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Greta Thunberg was born in 2003. In August 2018, she started a school strike for the climate outside the Swedish Parliament that has since spread all over the world. She is an activist in Fridays for Future and has spoken at climate

The climate change is coming. To prepare for it, we need to admit that we can''t prevent it. ''Today, the scientific evidence verges on irrefutable. If you''re younger than sixty, you have a good chance of witnessing the radical destabilization of life on earth-massive crop failures, apocalyptic fires, imploding economies, epic flooding, hundreds of millions of refugees fleeing regions made uninhabitable by extreme heat or permanent drought. If you''re under thirty, you''re all but guaranteed to witness it. If you care about the planet, and about the people and animals who live on it, there are two ways to think about this. You can keep on hoping that catastrophe is preventable, and feel ever more frustrated or enraged by the world''s inaction. Or you can accept that disaster is coming, and begin to rethink what it means to have hope.'' This is Jonathan Franzen''s controversial New Yorker essay, published as a single volume that discusses a planet on the cusp of and what and how individuals can respond to that.
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As a botanist, Robin Wall Kimmerer has been trained to ask questions of nature with the tools of science. As a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, she embraces the notion that plants and animals are our oldest teachers. In Braiding Sweetgrass , Kimmerer brings these two lenses of knowledge together to take us on "a journey that is every bit as mythic as it is scientific, as sacred as it is historical, as clever as it is wise" (Elizabeth Gilbert). Drawing on her life as an indigenous scientist, a mother, and a woman, Kimmerer shows how other living beings-asters and goldenrod, strawberries and squash, salamanders, algae, and sweetgrass-offer us gifts and lessons, even if we've forgotten how to hear their voices. In a rich braid of reflections that range from the creation of Turtle Island to the forces that threaten its flourishing today, she circles toward a central argument: that the awakening of a wider ecological consciousness requires the acknowledgment and celebration of our reciprocal relationship with the rest of the living world. For only when we can hear the languages of other beings will we be capable of understanding the generosity of the earth, and learn to give our own gifts in return.
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Here, with the precision of a scientist and the simplicity of a fable, Rachel Carson reveals how man-made pesticides have destroyed wildlife, creating a world of polluted streams and silent songbirds.

An urgent investigation of the most underreported, seismic consequence of climate change: how it will force us to change where - and how - we livebr>br>We are facing a species emergency. With every degree of temperature rise, a billion people will be displaced from the zone in which humans have lived for thousands of years. While we must do everything we can to mitigate the impact of climate change, the brutal truth is that huge swathes of the world are becoming uninhabitable. From Bangladesh to Sudan to the western United States, and in cities from Cardiff to New Orleans to Shanghai, the quadruple threat of drought, heat, wildfires and flooding will utterly reshape Earth''s human geography in the coming decades. br>br> In this rousing call to arms, Royal Society Science Prize-winning author Gaia Vince demonstrates how we can plan for and manage this unavoidable climate migration. The vital message of this book is that migration is not the problem-it''s the solution. Rich countries in the north are facing demographic crises and labour shortages. Drawing on a wealth of eye-opening data and original reporting, Vince shows how migration brings benefits not only to migrants themselves, but to host countries, who benefit economically as well as culturally. A borderless world is not something to fear: in fact, studies suggest that it would double global GDP. As Vince describes, we will need to move northwards as a species, into the habitable fringes of Europe and Asia, into Canada and the greening Arctic circle. Nowhere will be spared the devastating impacts of climate disruption, but some places, Vince identifies, will also see some benefits from rising temperatures and growing populations.br>br> While the climate catastrophe is finally getting the attention it deserves, the inevitability of mass migration has been largely ignored. In Nomad Century, Vince provides, for the first time, an examination of the most pressing question facing humanity.> Lire la suite Fermer

Taking its title from a chilling warning made by the United Nations that the world''s soils could be lost within a lifetime, Sixty Harvests Left uncovers how the food industry is threatening the planet. Put simply, without soils there will be no food: game over. And time is running out.

From the United Kingdom to Italy, from Brazil to Gambia to the USA, Philip Lymbery, the internationally acclaimed author of Farmageddon , goes behind the scenes of industrial farming and confronts ''Big Agriculture'', where mega-farms, chemicals and animal cages are sweeping the countryside and jeopardising the air we breathe, the water we drink, the food we eat and the nature that we treasure.

In his investigations, however, he also finds hope in the pioneers who are battling to bring landscapes back to life, who are rethinking farming methods, rediscovering traditional techniques and developing technologies to feed an ever-expanding global population.

Impassioned, balanced and persuasive, Sixty Harvests Left not only demonstrates why future harvests matter more than ever, but reveals how we can restore our planet for a nature-friendly future.> Lire la suite Fermer

REBECCA SOLNIT is the author of more than twenty books, including Orwell's Roses; Hope in the Dark; Men Explain Things to Me; A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in