"Lynn Margulis is one of the most successful synthetic thinkers in modern biology. This collection of her work, enhanced by essays co-authored with Dorion Sagan, is a welcome introduction to the full breadth of her many contributions." EDWARD O. WILSON, AUTHOR OF THE DIVERSITY OF LIFE "An important contribution to the history of the 20th century. Read it and you will taste the flavor of real science." JAMES LOVELOCK, AUTHOR OF GAIA: A NEW LOOK AT LIFE ON EARTH "Truly inspirational and of fundamental importance. This thoughtful series of essays on some of the largest questions concerning the nature of life on earth deserves careful study."PETER RAVEN, MISSOURI BOTANICAL GARDEN

This book presents a biographical history of the field of systems thinking, by examining the life and work of thirty of its major thinkers. It discusses each thinker’s key contributions, the way this contribution was expressed in practice and the relationship between their life and ideas. This discussion is supported by an extract from the thinker’s own writing, to give a flavour of their work and to give readers a sense of which thinkers are most relevant to their own interests.

Based on over eighty hours of interviews with Lovelock and unprecedented access to his personal papers and scientific archive, Jonathan Watts has written a definitive and revelatory biography of a fascinating, sometimes contradictory man. James Lovelock is best known as the father of Gaia Theory, the idea that life on Earth is a self-sustaining system in which organisms interact with their environments to maintain a habitable ecosystem. Lovelock’s life was a chronicle of twentieth-century science, and somehow he seemed to have a hand in much of it. During the Second World War he worked at the National Medical Research Institute, where his life-long interest in chemical tracing began. In the 1960s he worked at NASA. He worked for MI5 and MI6 during the Cold War. He was a science advisor to the oil giant Shell, who he warned as early as 1966 that fossil fuels were causing serious harm to the environment. He invented the technology that found the hole in the Ozone layer. And all of this shaped Gaia Theory – a theory that could not have been developed without the collaboration of two important women in his life. Drawing together the many influences which shaped his life and thinking, The Many Lives of James Lovelock is a unique biography of one of the most fascinating scientists of the modern age.

With a style unmatched in the religious fiction genre, Mr. Elliott shows a talent rarely seen in a new author. Faith Journeys of the Heart skilfully applies the natural ingredient of short-story building. The authors memorable characters emotionally involve the reader and tease with expectation. His highly-driven and profound technique, leads the reader through a maze of revelations. Elliotts skill in this highly popular genre deserves to be recognized. Mr Elliott has been writing from an early age. He soon found his natural ability and talented prose an enjoyment he wished to share. Over the years, he has developed a unique writing style, allowing the character and plot to evolve around him when he begins his work. This ingredient captures the imagination of the reader and takes us on paths rarely visited. Using places and people he has known as a platform to build the expressive and vibrant characters who populate his work, Mr Elliott shows the talent of the born storyteller.

Doing Environmental Ethics explains how we may transform our fossil-fuel-burning economy, which continues to intensify our ecological crisis, into a circular and ecological economy. The text resists political corruption and personal greed by gleaning ethical insights from our philosophical and religious cultures and by embracing the scientific Gaia hypothesis for the Earth. Its reasoning ascribes intrinsic worth to uplifting duties and rights as well as inspiring virtues and relationships, and tests applying these values by predicting the likely consequences of acting on them. It affirms all life has value for itself, and that human life also values reasoning and feelings and being ethical. The third edition examines US and international environmental policies through 2018. It analyzes the Trump administration’s repudiation of the environmental policies of the Obama administration and its new rules slashing the social costs of climate change. The text reviews a draft UN treaty that would impose human rights and environmental constraints on transnational corporations, but it also highlights outstanding examples of corporate upcycling and low-carbon innovation. Finally, the third edition explains why food security requires protecting the food sovereignty of farming communities and cooperatives, as well as public policies ensuring fair profits for farmers practicing agro-ecology.

Inspired by the Rhetoric Culture Project, this volume focuses on the use of imagery, narrative, and cultural schemes to deal with predicaments that arise during the course of life. The contributors explore how people muster their resources to understand and deal with emergencies such as illness, displacement, or genocide. In dealing with such circumstances, people can develop new rhetorical forms and, in the process, establish new cultural resources for succeeding generations. Several of the contributions show how rhetorical cultural forms can themselves create emergencies. The contributors bring expertise from a variety of disciplines, including anthropology and communications studies, underlining the volume's wider relevance as a reflection on the human condition.

Refuting allegations of "pseudoscience" that have long dogged Reich's research, the author argues that Reich's lab experiments in the mid-1930s represented the cutting edge of light microscopy and time-lapse micro-cinematography and deserve to be taken seriously as legitimate scientific contributions.--Publisher's description.

Madison designed his Constitution to promote consensus. This book explains why it also rewards polarization, and how to fix it.