Can anthropology contribute to understanding today's world? How can knowledge about our origins as upright apes help our species solve its current challenges? Are there grounds for hope for ourselves and Planet Earth? As Homo sapiens, we have the cognitive and emotional capacity to understand our limitations and strengths. Can we tap into our strengths to find pathways ahead for our beleaguered species? A better question: Will we do so? In Our Beleaguered Species: Beyond Tribalism, Dr. Zelman explores how we became tribalistic when our ancestors were defenseless social primates living in small scattered groups, and how our very different interconnected world of today calls for using our other gifts from evolution. These include adaptability, creativity, symbolic language, and concern for the well-being and fair treatment of those outside our particular circles. To build a viable future for ourselves and other living things, we must nurture and treasure this portion of our evolutionary legacy. As members of a social species with the ability to deceive and harm as well as love our neighbors, we have the means to create havoc or harmony. Over the years, using our culture-language complex, we have done both. Tribalism in its several guises (racism, religious sectarianism, sexism, and more) is a major obstacle to furthering human well-being and reducing destruction of lives and resources that comprise the web of life on our shared planet. Today, having transformed the world of our ancestors, the challenges we face require using our diversity to build a balanced, global approach. We must move beyond tribalism. The author outlines prescriptions for such an endeavor, using a broad anthropological perspective and drawing from studies of the brain and behavior, environment, economic and political institutions, institutionalized inequalities, and the humanities. In her final chapter, she describes some ways we might regain a sense of our place in nature, not above it, and construct a sense of meaning from this understanding.

On this joyous journey around the wild edges of Britain, celebrated author Christopher Hart takes us through the life, ecology and history of the humble countryside hedge and how it is inextricably woven into our language, landscape and culture. Hedges – or hedgerows – have long been an integral part of the British landscape. An ancient, human-made boundary, hedgerows have become a critically important haven for wildlife and are now being recognised as one of the greatest ‘edge’ habitats on Earth. Britain boasts 400,000 kilometres of hedgerows, but has lost 50 per cent of them since the Second World War and their slow deterioration today is becoming a huge threat to the ecosystem. In Hedgelands, Christopher Hart shares the history of the hedge, highlighting the hawthorn and hazel of ancient hedgerows, and reveals its abundance of wildlife, from the elusive dunnock to the iconic nightingale, the industrious hedgehog to the miniscule harvest mouse. He demonstrates how this true environmental hero and powerful climate ally can help rebuild species-rich, resilient havens for birds, mammals and insects. Hedges play a vital role in mature woodland, grassland and even wetland, all of which can offer us much-needed ecological diversity and carbon sequestration. Through rewilding a patch of land in southwest England, Christopher shows us how easy, joyful and rewarding it is to restore even the smallest stretch of hedge. Whether you live in the country or the city, Hedgelands shares how simple actions can make a huge difference to the future of our precious hedges – and environment. “What’s good for us is good for nature, and what’s good for nature is good for us. And nowhere is this more true than in the bustling, flourishing, flowering, fruiting and altogether glorious native British hedge.”—Christopher Hart

Imagine a world structured around ecological and cultural diversity, rather than national and political parameters. In response to present and impending ecological and economic crises, Kirkpatrick Sale offers a definitive introduction to the unique concept of bioregionalism, an alternative way of organizing society to create smaller scale, more ecologically sound, individually responsive communities with renewable economies and cultures. He emphasizes, among many other factors, the concept of regionalism through natural population division, settlement near and stewardship of watershed areas, and the importance of communal ownership of and responsibility for the land. Dwellers in the Land focuses on the realistic development of these bioregionally focused communities and the places where they are established to create a society that is both ecologically sustainable and satisfying to its inhabitants.

“Reynolds gives us a much-needed reason for hope. The gardener, the conservationist, the city planner, and the nature lover will all be inspired for this wonderful book shows how thousands of even small wildlife friendly gardens can provide habitat for embattled wildlife around the world.” —Jane Goodall, Phd, DBE, Founder of the Jane Goodall Institute & UN Messenger of Peace Individuals can’t save the world alone. But if millions of us work together to save our own patch of earth—then we really have a shot. How do we do it? With Acts of Restorative Kindness (ARK). An ARK is a restored, native ecosystem. It’s a thriving patch of native plants and creatures that have been allowed and supported to re-establish in the earth's intelligent, successional process of natural restoration. Over time, this becomes a pantry and a habitat for our pollinators and wild creatures who are in desperate need of support. These ARKs will become the seeding grounds for our planet’s new story. They will be sanctuaries for our shared kin—the rooted and unrooted—and safe havens for the magic and abundance of the natural world. Most importantly, the ARK-building actions are within our control and laid out here in We Are the ARK. In these inspiring pages, discover how one person’s actions can effect big change in this world. Even the tiniest postage stamp patch of land matters! Together we are building a patchwork quilt of life that will wrap its way around this planet.

Originally published in Great Britain in 2013 by Jonathan Cape.

Does neuroscience have anything to say about religious belief or the existence of God? Some have tried to answer this question, but, in doing so, most have strayed from the scientific method. In The Phantom God, computational biologist and neuroscientist John C. Wathey, Ph.D., tackles this problem head-on, exploring religious feelings not as the direct perception by the brain of some supernatural realm, nor as the pathological misfiring of neurons, but as a natural consequence of how our brains are wired. Unlike other neurobiological studies of religion and spirituality, The Phantom God treats mysticism not as something uniquely human and possibly supernatural in origin, but as a completely natural phenomenon that has behavioral and evolutionary roots that can be traced far back into our vertebrate ancestry. Grounded in evolutionary and behavioral biology, this highly original and compelling book takes the reader on a journey through the neural circuitry of crying, innate knowledge, reinforcement learning, emotional bonding, embodiment, interpersonal perception, and the ineffable feeling of certainty that characterizes faith. Wathey argues that the feeling of God’s presence is spawned by innate neural circuitry, similar to the mechanism that compels an infant to cry out for its mother. In an adult, this circuitry can be activated under conditions that mimic the extreme desperation and helplessness of infancy, generating the compelling illusion of the presence of a loving, powerful, and all-knowing savior. When seen from this perspective, the illusion also appears remarkably like one that has long been familiar to neurologists: the phantom limb of the amputee, spawned by the expectation of the patient’s brain that the missing limb should still be there. Including a primer on the basic concepts and terminology of neuroscience, The Phantom God details the neural mechanisms behind the illusions and emotions of spiritual experience. ,

"Lianyungang, a booming port city, has China's most extreme gender ratio for children under four: 163 boys for every 100 girls. These numbers don't seem terribly grim, but in ten years, the skewed sex ratio will pose a colossal challenge. By the time those children reach adulthood, their generation will have twenty-four million more men than women. The prognosis for China's neighbors is no less bleak: Asia now has 163 million females "missing" from its population. Gender imbalance reaches far beyond Asia, affecting Georgia, Eastern Europe, and cities in the U.S. where there are significant immigrant populations. The world, therefore, is becoming increasingly male, and this mismatch is likely to create profound social upheaval. Historically, eras in which there have been an excess of men have produced periods of violent conflict and instability. Mara Hvistendahl has written a stunning, impeccably-researched book that does not flinch from examining not only the consequences of the misbegotten policies of sex selection but Western complicity with them"--