We’ve been lied to. That’s what Eugene Linden tells us in his formidably researched Winds of Change: Climate, Weather, and the Destruction of Civilizations, a cautionary document that challenges public complacency about global warming. Scientists have, for years, agreed that human activity has seriously altered Earth’s atmosphere to the point where we may be facing severe climate change. But that’s not the story that gets out from our elected officials and from the national media. Linden’s book spends a lot of time in the past, documenting the sudden and mysterious collapse of several advanced civilizations. Why did the Norse Greenland colonies fail? Why did the Mayans abandon their cities? Linden says the answer to these long-pondered mysteries lies in sudden climate change. His emphasis on history puts a face on climate change which can throttle a culture through drought, starvation and disease.

The same could happen to us. Evidence of climate change flickers bursts of extreme climate instability transitional to permanent change are already upon us, Linden suggests. This evidence comes from multiple fronts these days, not just from the ice core blanketing Greenland, but also from oceanic water and sediment samples. Who dropped the ball and forgot to tell the public at large? The majority of scientists who publish in peer-reviewed journals believe human activity could provoke severe climate change in the foreseeable future. But reporters give equal weight to the minority opinion of less credentialed scientists and to scientific experts specifically hired by major industry to downplay the threat of global warming. It’s true that scientists have reached no consensus about the type of climate change we’re looking at or what impacts it will have, but, as Linden notes, ignoring the threat of climate change until every question is settled is a bit like refusing to run from an oncoming tsunami. Lynn Hamilton writes from Tybee Island, Georgia.

Walden Pond is a sacred place in American literature, a symbol of one man’s effort to savor and preserve the natural world. Now, on the 150th anniversary of the publication of Henry David Thoreau’s Walden comes a fitting tribute to the man, the book and the location that inspired this seminal experiment in simple living.

In Walden Pond: A History, author W. Barksdale Maynard not only offers a wonderfully detailed portrait of the place itself but also explains the cultural context for Thoreau’s decision to build a home in the woods. A professor of architecture at Johns Hopkins University and a consultant for the Walden Woods Project, Maynard weaves together a history of the land, the Transcendental movement and the all-important relationship between Thoreau and his mentor, Ralph Waldo Emerson.

It was Emerson, the father of Transcendentalism, who owned the land on the shores of Walden Pond where Thoreau and a group of his friends raised a 10- by 15-foot house in 1845. Emerson supported Thoreau’s endeavor but wasn’t interested in year-round rustic living himself, preferring "a comfortable study in town." Using old photographs, maps and illustrations, Maynard creates a vivid picture of the house and its environs that will enrich any reader’s appreciation of Walden. Also included is a comprehensive look at Thoreau’s influence on figures from Yeats to Kerouac and a description of recent efforts to save Walden Pond from environmental threats that would undoubtedly trouble the man who made it famous.

Cows grieve and weep, chickens cuddle lovingly with horses, and pigs croon happily to the moon in the magical world explored by best-selling writer Jeffrey Masson in his newest animal oeuvre, The Pig Who Sang to the Moon: The Emotional World of Farm Animals. Masson, an ardent animal advocate who has already investigated the emotional lives and mysterious ways of cats, dogs and elephants (The Nine Emotional Lives of Cats; Dogs Never Lie About Love; When Elephants Weep), now focuses compassionate attention on the animal citizens of barnyard and pasture: pigs and chickens, goats, sheep, cows and ducks.

His book provides an endearing, sometimes painful, peek into the emotional landscapes of “farmed” animals (animals raised solely for human consumption and use), and explores their capacity for happiness and suffering in a confined breeding environment. Masson asserts that farm animals have individual personalities and take pleasure in the same things humans do: Chickens love to sunbathe, lambs and goats are happiest at play, and pigs are fond of moonlight, music and song! (There is photographic evidence of porcine warbling in the book’s preface.) Is it right, then, the author asks, to raise animals for food especially using often inhumane farming methods? Masson’s answer is an emphatic “no,” and after reading his impassioned arguments, even the staunchest meat-eater might agree. Though this book is an enlightening weave of animal anecdote and scientific reference, it is also a radical plea for vegetarianism. The author regrettably offers no balancing discussion of the science of nutrition, or of the mechanics of the natural food chain, for example. But he does raise important questions concerning the sanctity of all sentient life on our planet. Masson’s dream is of an egalitarian world where animal life is equal in value to human life, and in The Pig Who Sang to the Moon he presents poignant evidence to support his cause.

The many years he has spent as our pre-eminent literary naturalist have not diminished Peter Matthiessen’s enthusiasm for his work. He is still awed by “icebergs, whales, the sea and ships, circumpolar currents, geologic time, the origins and evolutionary histories of life forms, the quirks of birds, birders and explorers, antifreeze in fish blood, the blue in ice, human folly, the ozone hole and the earthly balances upset by global warming in short, the mysteries of the natural world in their endless variations, the myriad petals of creation that open up and fall away in every moment.” The rare sensibility he brings to his observation, research and writing can be fully appreciated in his magnificent new book, End of the Earth: Voyages to Antarctica, an account of two journeys around the islands near Antarctica.

Matthiessen’s astute observations of nature are informed by a vast fund of scientific information as well as the histories of early Antarctic pioneers. A passionate conservationist, he also takes time to reflect on the likelihood of exploitation of the continent’s natural resources and the long-term effect of global warming.

Matthiessen was deeply affected by the expansive, unpolluted landscape of the South Pole, which is one and a half times the size of Europe and has an average elevation nearly twice as high as Asia’s. Antarctica, as he points out, is “the last clean place on Earth.” He has something of a problem explaining exactly why he was so attracted by the South Pole only three years after his first trip to Antarctica, he eagerly agreed to go on a second one. As he quotes what others have written on the subject, he finds himself in agreement with an explorer who speaks of a “giant force.” Yes, that is part of it. He quotes an unknown person who has stated that “the ancient and indifferent ice gives up its secrets slowly.” Matthiessen concludes, “thus we struggled to find words for such a wordless feeling: what draws me eludes me to the same degree, and seeking to understand it may just be the problem.” Our foremost naturalist prose poet has taken us on a memorable trip.

Roger Bishop is a Nashville bookseller and a contributing editor of BookPage.

Heralded as the worst conflagration to assail a city in peacetime, the 1906 San Francisco fire was responsible for the deaths of 3,000 people and the destruction of 522 city blocks, according to firefighter turned writer Dennis Smith in his new moment-by-moment chronicle of the fire, San Francisco Is Burning: The Untold Story of the 1906 Earthquake and Fires.

Smith’s book argues that bureaucratic bungling allowed the fire to spread much further and wreak more havoc than it had to. Even in an age when emergency water arrived by way of horse and wagon, the fire could have been contained, Smith believes, but for gross errors in municipal leadership. Dynamite, for instance, could have been used to create fire breaks. Instead, untrained personnel blew up burning buildings, disseminating embers that started new fires nearby. Smith blames the entire destruction of Chinatown on this practice. Perhaps the most unfortunate domino in the chain of destruction was the demise of Fire Chief Dennis Sullivan, who was fatally injured in the initial earthquake. For years, Sullivan had warned his superiors in government that the availability of water for firefighting was not up to par. With water pressure low and fire wagons traveling by hoof, his department’s hoses weren’t even capable of watering the top floors of the emerging skyscrapers. Smith challenges the popular mythology of a runaway fire unstoppable by merely human forces. In fact, the fire spread relatively slowly, he thinks, and could have been minimized in the presence of competent leadership. Unfortunately, with the death of Sullivan, such knowledge was absent.

Envy comes easy when reading Diane Ackerman’s description of her extensive flower garden in upstate New York. Her new book Cultivating Delight a florid and wide-ranging narrative that captures backyard surprises and nature’s biodiversity covers one full season in the life of her garden, from spring’s sensual eruption to winter’s hibernation.

Ackerman’s rich prose is a bridge to a world of discovery. I plan my garden as I wish I could plan my life, with islands of surprise, color, and scent, she writes. Like a trumpet vine, her widespread and insatiable interests climb in every direction. With her garden as a departure point, she uses mythology, natural history, current science, poetry and even some good old-fashioned folklore to build a narrative that is a tribute to nature. Among the subjects covered are bird migration, squirrel habits, a brief social history of bread baking, the number of new insect species discovered each year (5,000) and how to calculate the outdoor temperature by listening to crickets.

The author of more than a dozen books, including the bestseller A Natural History of the Senses, Ackerman has a passion for roses that borders on obsession. (No wonder she cannot stop at 120 rose bushes.) Deep in winter, when the snow often falls like gunshot, she tries to remember the smell of a favorite rose, Abraham Darby. What was it exactly? Candied lemon peel, apple, cinnamon, and chocolates. This delicious olfactory memory is just one of many tender moments in which the author taps the reader in the heart.

Ackerman may focus her efforts on planting, watering, caring for and even deadheading penstamon, campanula, asters, daylilies and hundreds of other types of flowers (detailed in a useful addendum that includes light conditions for each species), but she knows gardens are also important doors to our dimming wild natures. Our gardens bring an untamed world to our thresholds with the arrival of songbirds, small mammals, deer, snakes, frogs and insects. What will become of the wild that lives in us, our own private wilderness? Ackerman asks, even as she acknowledges that humans are better at transforming nature than at understanding it. The answer, she concludes, is in the commonality we all share with the fauna and flora that lie just beyond that arbitrary border between house and garden. As Ackerman proves convincingly in Cultivating Delight, we just have to pay attention.

Stephen J. Lyons writes from Monticello, Illinois.

Rooted in the remote Queen Charlotte Islands of British Columbia, a golden spruce stood for more than 300 years, capturing the hearts, imaginations and scientific curiosity of local tribes, explorers and naturalists. The result of a genetic mutation, the golden spruce stood out like a miracle in a sea of its ordinary green fellows. The Haida tribe of British Columbia cherished that miracle and wove it into their mythology and very sense of self. Commanded to flee his perishing village without looking back, says Haida mythology, a Haida boy has regrets and turns around for one last look. At that moment, he takes root and changes into the magnificent spruce that is both a miracle and a warning.

We are horrified when a crocodile snatches and devours a baby or a dog. Determined to teach the beast a lesson for violating our sense of decency, we hunt for it with the intent of imposing the ultimate penalty. Such scenarios might someday cease thanks to what naturalists view as an equally alarming prospect: the very extinction of some of Earth’s most fearsome, carnivorous animals. In Monster of God: The Man-Eating Predator in the Jungles of History and the Mind, author David Quammen predicts the next 150 years will be critical in determining if some subspecies of flesh-eating animals are confined to zoos or other supervised habitats en route to their eventual disappearance.

“Dangerous predators, of whatever species, are more easily admired from afar,” Quammen advises. Then, disregarding his own observation, he takes the reader on trips that make most of the travel industry’s ambitious safari packages look like a Sunday picnic. His treks lead to such human-meat consumers as India’s Asiatic lions, Australia’s saltwater crocodiles and Russia’s Siberian tigers. In his previously published and widely praised The Song of the Dodo, Quammen asserts that animal preserves involve isolation and confinement, and thus render the creatures vulnerable to biological or climatic catastrophes that might lead to their annihilation. In Monster of God, he extends that reasoning and tells why he thinks humanity needs menacing, man-eating creatures and would be forever diminished by their disappearance. If you have a habit of skimming, make sure you don’t flip through the section entitled “Shadow of the Nine-Toed Bear” or you’ll miss one of the most interesting parts of the book. It deals with Romania’s brown bears, and the odds are that when you learn about the history of the grizzlies in that country and of the privileged hunting tactics of Nicolae Ceausescu, the deranged dictator executed in 1989, you’ll end up rooting for the beasts. Alan Prince lectures at the University of Miami School of Communication.

omething amazing started in the late 1970s and continues to this day. Whales, the largest mammals on earth and killers in self-defense of many men, began to show a willingness, indeed an eagerness, to be friends with humankind to a degree never before recorded. From gently nudging boats to begging to be petted, the behavioral turnaround among these behemoth creatures has captivated the imaginations and affections of thousands of whalewatchers.

Eye of the Whale offers a persuasive and very readable study of the current state of whale-human affairs. Those who are sympathetic (like me) to the whales’ cause will find equal grounds in the book for alarm and hope. From Baja California, the birthing and nursing waters of the Eastern Pacific gray whale, to Siberia, where the Western Pacific population is on the verge of oblivion, environmental writer and activist (he was instrumental in saving the Atlantic striped bass) Dick Russell follows the migration pattern of the gentle giant. He seems to examine almost everyone and everything along the way that might have an effect on the creatures’ progress from geography and economics to the human heart itself.

Giving thrust to the story is the ongoing environmental fight against Mitsubishi, one of the largest corporations in the world, which sought to commercialize the Baja beaches resulting in the inevitable destruction of gray whale habitat. Another constant presence is that of Charles Melville Scammon, a 19th century whaler and sea captain whose written descriptions and drawings of whales and other sea creatures, landscapes and natural phenomena are included in the book and reveal a 21st century sensitivity.

“That intense, that immense and impeccable, eye” of the whale seems to cast a mythic spell over all those, even enemies, who have gazed into it up close. The number of the spellbound is increasing. Bruce Mate, an Illinois marine biologist interviewed by Russell, sees whales as avatars of a whole new world not all that far in the future. “I think, probably, in our children’s generation, we’re going to see remarkable changes in our relationships with certain forms of wildlife,” he says.

If so, Eye of the Whale will have played, in its enthralling way, a small but important role in the transformation.

Maude McDaniel writes from Cumberland, Maryland.

dward Abbey, the staunch defender of the natural world, can quit turning over in his grave now. His torch has been retrieved and lifted high by Kathleen Meyer, an environmental writer with as much wit and stylistic color as the man himself. Meyer’s Barefoot-Hearted is, in part, the story of her romance with Patrick McCarron, an old-fashioned blacksmith of Irish descent with whom she shares a rodent-infested, fly-ridden barn in Montana’s Bitterroot Valley. Meyer proves once again that the material for great writing is almost always close at hand. You might think of flies, mice and bats as vermin, but through close observations of these intruders and much scientific and anecdotal research, Meyer turns her life with these critters into a complex treatise on man’s often unconscious inhumanity to wildlife. “Who is the real intruder here?” Meyer frequently asks. She is one of those rare writers who can pile on the zoological detail and make it as compelling as an Agatha Christie chiller. The book’s centerpiece is a chapter on bear cubs orphaned by hunters and high-speed drivers, and the animal advocates who undertake heroic measures to save them from animal control gas chambers. It’s a fascinating and sympathetic portrait of the American Black Bear, a creature, it seems, much more sinned against (by encroaching development, hunting and reckless huckleberry harvesting) than sinner. When she’s not regaling her readers with the sex life of the skunks who live under her barn, Meyer entertains with scenes from her relationship with McCarron, whose immunity to suburban conditioning makes her own environmentalism pale to light green by comparison. We’re talking here about a man who refuses to use pesticides, indoor plumbing or gasoline-powered vehicles. At one point in their adventure together, Meyer points to a pesky fly on her beloved’s shoulder. Patrick looks at the fly, looks back at Kathleen and says, “Pretend it’s a parrot.” The only reservation I have in recommending this memoir is that you may become so addicted to Meyer’s prose, you’ll want to read all her other books immediately. Unfortunately, there’s only one: the international bestseller How to Shit in the Woods. Kathleen, don’t make us wait 10 years for the next one! Lynn Hamilton writes from Tybee Island, Georgia.

On the morning of Aug. 27, 1883, the volcano Krakatoa, situated in a group of small islands between Java and Sumatra, erupted with such force that it sent tremors both physical and otherwise around the world. Calculated to have been the fifth most powerful volcanic blast in history, it killed, according to the official count, 36,417 people, most by the gigantic ocean waves it set in motion. It was the first world-altering eruption to occur after the invention and spread of the telegraph and, thus, the first to be studied and profiled with scientific exactitude from all points of the globe. How the volcano came into being and what its explosion has meant to humanity is the story Simon Winchester tells in his new book Krakatoa. Whether he is tracing the evolution of the Oxford English Dictionary, as he did in The Professor and the Madman, or detailing how England’s geological foundations were first charted, as in The Map That Changed the World, Winchester’s specialty is putting important historical events into a wider context. His context here may seem a bit too wide, however, taking into its leisurely embrace such diverse arcana as plate tectonics, ancient and modern shipping routes and Javanese social organization under Dutch colonization. It takes the author more than 200 pages to get to the actual eruption. But for readers who savor data and anecdotes as Winchester so clearly does, the wait will be worthwhile. Winchester is just as far-ranging when tracing the effects of the eruption. He credits it with everything from influencing the style of certain landscape painters to being a factor in the rise of Islamic fundamentalism in Indonesia. (And he makes persuasive arguments for both.) “Here was the event,” he writes, “that presaged all the debates that continue to this day: about global warming, greenhouse gases, acid rain, ecological interdependence. Few in Victorian times had begun to think truly globally even though exploration was proceeding apace, the previously unknown interior of continents were being opened for inspection, and the developing telegraph system, allowing people to communicate globally, was having its effects. Krakatoa, however, began to change all that.” The 1883 explosion was so massive that the volcano cone destroyed itself and slipped beneath the surface of the sea. In 1930, though, it began to re-emerge and has since grown into a respectably-sized island now rich in plant and animal life. Winchester concludes his book with a first-hand description of the place that once wrought such havoc and which may someday do so again.

Today, as on all other days in Louisiana’s bayou country, 50 acres of land will become water. In 10 months, a land area the size of Manhattan will be a part of the Gulf of Mexico. The main reason: Levees built to control Mississippi River flooding have deprived the wetlands of fresh sediments. In Bayou Farewell: The Rich Life and Tragic Death of Louisiana’s Cajun Coast, author Mike Tidwell says nutrient starvation threatens the source of a third of America’s seafood and endangers an entire subculture of America.

Tidwell immerses himself in the Cajun world, with its zesty cooking, toe-tapping music, and ingrained passion for and reliance on hunting, trapping and fishing. Amid new friends who have never flown, owned a credit card or read a book, he finds the soul of bayou life in a shrimper’s observation: “A bayou Cajun man, he loves two t’ings de most in de whole world: bein’ on de water and bein’ wit his family.” Let’s peek as Tidwell visits a tiny, tin-roofed house on stilts: Visitors pass through, each chiming in that the Leeville Bridge is going to be repainted. Everybody asks about the boy born to Tim’s second cousin Nikia across the street. Tim’s nephew comes by to make sure everything’s OK with the new outboard because he’ll be running Tim’s crab traps. Yes, there’s a TV set and it’s on, but it doesn’t stand a chance. Who could possibly follow the banter of a TV quiz show with so many kinfolk coming and going? Tidwell’s writing style makes it easy for readers to feel his new Cajun friends are their friends, too, and to wonder if their way of life must vanish because the rest of the nation doesn’t care enough. An active environmentalist, author of five books and four-time winner of the Lowell Thomas Award, the highest prize in American travel journalism, Tidwell outlines expensive solutions but says the main question is whether sufficient willpower can be mustered to tackle the problem.

Alan Prince is the former travel editor of the Miami Herald.