Nature

The resources race is on. Powering our digital lives and green technologies are some of the Earth’s most precious metals—but they are running out. And what will happen when they do?

The green-tech revolution has been lauded as the silver bullet to a new world. One that is at last free of oil, pollution, shortages, and cross-border tensions. Now updated after several years of research across a dozen countries, this book cuts across conventional green thinking to probe the hidden, dark side of green technology.

By breaking free of fossil fuels, we are in fact setting ourselves up for a new dependence—on rare metals such as cobalt, gold, and palladium. They are essential to electric vehicles, wind turbines, solar panels, our smartphones, computers, tablets, and other everyday connected objects. China has captured the lion’s share of the rare metals industry, but consumers know very little about how they are mined and traded, or their environmental, economic, and geopolitical costs.

The Rare Metals War is a vital exposé of the ticking time-bomb that lies beneath our new technological order. It uncovers the reality of our lavish and ambitious environmental quest that involves risks as formidable as those it seeks to resolve.

A fresh appreciation of the magic of birds and how watching them fulfils a human need to connect with nature.

Enchantment by birds is commonplace. Birdwatchers merely go a step further than others and actively seek to be enchanted. This book tells why they take that extra step. It takes the reader on a series of excursions into birdwatching’s past, venturing forward to the present. With an intriguing cast of characters, avian as well as human, its lively narratives explore the emotional and aesthetic impulses behind the pastime as well as its scientific and conservationist components.

Its stories of 22 Australian birds range widely: from wordy squabbles over bird names to the artistic finessing of field guides; from the Paradise Parrot’s tragic fall into extinction to the everyday enjoyment of a Magpie’s carol; from the evolution of citizen science to the boom in birding tourism. Interlacing them all is the insight that birdwatching is a means by which modern, urban people reach out to touch the wild. A primal desire to connect with nature lies at the heart of the pastime.

Enchantment by Birds not only offers a compelling exposition of what makes birders tick; it also tells us, imaginatively and informatively, why birds have a special place in our hearts.

For readers of Entangled Life and The Hidden Life of Trees, a fascinating journey into the world of plants and animals, and the ways they communicate with each other.

In forests, fields, and even gardens, there is a constant exchange of information going on. Animals and plants must communicate with one another to survive, but they also tell lies, set traps, talk to themselves, and speak to each other in a variety of unexpected ways.

Here, behavioral biologist Madlen Ziege reveals the fascinating world of nonhuman communication. In charming, humorous, and accessible prose, she reveals the hidden world of nature’s language, and how it can help us to understand our own place in the natural world.

Long a fire continent, Australia now finds itself at the leading edge of a fire epoch.

Australia is one of the world’s fire powers. It not only has regular bushfires, but in no other country has fire made such an impact on the national culture.

Over the past two decades, bushfires have reasserted themselves as an environmental, social, and political presence.

The Still-Burning Bush traces the ecological and social significance of the use of fire to shape the environment through Australian history, beginning with Aboriginal usage, and the subsequent passing of the firestick to rural colonists and then to foresters, to ecologists, and back to Indigenes.

Each transfer kindled public debate not only over suitable fire practices but also about how Australians should live on the land. In Australia, the 2019–2020 season have heightened the sense of urgency behind this discussion, as the megafires of recent decades and the serial conflagrations in California have for Americans.

The Still-Burning Bush examines the global changes that are affecting Australia (and the world). Especially pertinent is the concept of a Pyrocene—the idea that humanity’s cumulative fire practices are fashioning the fire equivalent of an ice age.

A remarkable memoir detailing a heroic and unswerving commitment to renew the severely degraded land on Wooleen, a massive pastoral property in Western Australia’s southern rangelands.

The outback conjures many images that the Australian psyche is built upon. Its grand vistas of sweeping dusty plains and its evocation of a tough pioneering spirit form the foundation of our prosperous culture. But these romantic visions often hide the stark environmental, economic, and social problems that have inadvertently been left in the wake of our collective past.

Through retelling the struggle of his family amid droughts, financial ruin, depression, and death, David Pollock exposes the modern-day realities of managing a remote outback station. Forced by a sense of moral responsibility, he set out on an uncharted course to restore the 153,000 hectares of degraded leasehold land that he felt he was obliged to manage on behalf of the Australian people. Then, just at the point when that course seemed certain to fail, the project was saved by the generosity and faith of everyday Australians.

This is an urgent story of political irresponsibility, bureaucratic obstinacy, industrial monopolization, and, above all, ecological illiteracy in a vast segment of the Australian continent. It is a familiar story of overexploitation. Yet it is also a story of the extraordinary ability of the natural environment to repair itself, given the chance.

After over a decade of his hard-won insights, Pollock outlines in The Wooleen Way a specific and comprehensive plan to reverse the ecological damage done to the pastoral resource since European colonization. He also emphasizes the economic and social necessity of carrying it out, and of curbing the conquering human spirit so that it aligns with the subtle power of the natural landscape.

Is the shift to renewable energy and digital devices going to free us from severe pollution, material shortages, and military tensions?

Rare metals are essential to electric vehicles, fighter jets, wind turbines, and solar panels, and also to our smartphones, computers, tablets, and other everyday connected objects. But consumers know very little about how they are mined and traded, or the environmental, economic, and geopolitical costs of this dependence.

This book reveals the dark side of the world that awaits us. It is an undercover tale of a technological odyssey that has promised much, and a look behind the scenes. Behind it all lurks China, which has captured the lion’s share of the ownership and processing of rare metals we now can’t do without. Drawing on six years of research across a dozen countries, this book shows that by breaking free of fossil fuels, we are in fact setting ourselves up for a new dependence—on rare metals that have become vital to our new ecological and digital society.

With the original introduction by C.J. Dennis and a new foreword by Sean Dooley.

Ninety years on, A.H. Chisholm’s classic Mateship with Birds is still as fresh and inspirational as an early-morning walk in the bush, the air resounding with birdsong. His account of the secret lives of birds — their seasonal doings and their complex relationships — reflects his patient and detailed observations, and his deep enjoyment of the Australian bush and all its inhabitants.

This is not just a book for bird-lovers. Chisholm’s charming and often humorous prose reveals a man who loves words as well as birds. His style of writing and the historical photographs accompanying his text provide a gentle record of a period that already feels like ‘the old days’.

But Chisholm wrote with an urgent message to the future. He could clearly see the threat that ‘the moving finger of Civilisation’ posed to birdlife, and his account of the tragic demise of the Paradise Parrot ends with this passionate exhortation: ‘What are the bird-lovers of Australia going to do about this matter of vanishing Parrots? Surely it is a subject worthy of the closest attention of all good Australians.’

With the reissuing of this book, we honour these words, and offer his delight in ‘the loveliest and the best of Nature’s children’ to a new generation.