{"product_id":"life-on-a-littleknown-planet-isbn-9798217086061","title":"Life on a Little-Known Planet","description":"\u003cb\u003eA landmark collection of Pulitzer Prize winner Elizabeth Kolbert's most important pieces about climate change and the natural world\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eA \u003ci\u003eNEW YORKER\u003c\/i\u003e BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"To be a well-informed citizen of Planet Earth,\" \u003ci\u003eRolling Stone\u003c\/i\u003e has advised, \"you need to read Elizabeth Kolbert.\" From her National Magazine Award-winning series \u003ci\u003eThe Climate of Man\u003c\/i\u003e to her Pulitzer Prize-winning book \u003ci\u003eThe Sixth Extinction\u003c\/i\u003e, Kolbert’s work has shaped the way we think about the environment in the twenty-first century. Collected in \u003ci\u003eLife on a Little-Known Planet\u003c\/i\u003e are her most influential and thought-provoking essays.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAn intrepid reporter and a skillful translator of scientific idees, Kolbert expertly captures the wonders of nature and paints vivid portraits of the researchers and concerned citizens working to preserve them. She takes readers all around the globe, from an island in Denmark that’s succeeded in going carbon neutral, to a community in Florida that voted to give rights to waterways, to the Greenland ice sheet, which is melting in a way that has implications for everyone. We meet a biologist who believes we can talk to whales, an entomologist racing to find rare caterpillars before they disappear, and a climatologist who’s considered the \"father of global warming,\" amongst other scientists at the forefront of environmental protection.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe threats to our planet that Kolbert has devoted so much of her career to exposing have only grown more serious. Now is the time to deepen our understanding of the world we are in danger of losing.\u003cb\u003ePraise for \u003ci\u003eLife on a Little-Known Planet\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Kolbert’s writing is serious but adroit [with] just enough wry humour. The necessity of fitting huge subjects into 20 clear pages suits her style. Each essay is pacy, with energising turns. . . . Kolbert [is] a necessary voice on the environment.”\u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003e—The Observer\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Kolbert gracefully balances a realistic awareness of losses brought about by human activity—particularly by the use of fossil fuels—with a sense of wonder at just how much there is still to learn about this ‘little-known planet’ and admiration for those who quixotically explore and attempt to heal it. . . . [D]espair and hope dance together [in these] thought-provoking speculations about a world on the edge of violent change.”\u003cb\u003e—\u003ci\u003eKirkus Review,\u003c\/i\u003e starred review\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“[\u003ci\u003eLife on a Little-Known Planet\u003c\/i\u003e] reads like a world tour of what’s disappearing and what’s being brought back to life. . . . Kolbert’s writing is clear and well sourced. [She] reminds us that even in a time of crisis, regeneration is possible.”\u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003e—Imagine5\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“There is a great deal that humanity doesn’t know about how the world works, and expanding that knowledge may turn out to be crucial. [\u003ci\u003eLife on a Little-Known Planet\u003c\/i\u003e is] a worthwhile and convenient collection from one of the best-known writers on climate change and the environment.”\u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003e—Library Journal\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“With a topic as broad, technical—and let’s be honest, doomsy—as climate change is, \u003ci\u003eLife on a Little-Known Planet\u003c\/i\u003e is a master class in how to write about our changing world.”\u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003e—Mother Jones\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Kolbert brings every creature, place, person, fact, and issue to scintillating life in these deft, engaging, lucid, and thought-provoking dispatches covering 20 years of her world travels during epic planetary changes. . . . Kolbert resolutely and brilliantly alerts us to how little we know about our precious planet, how much harm we do, and how we must and can do better.”\u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003e—Booklist\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Kolbert is one of our most important and lucid voices on climate change, and she’s been ringing the bell for longer than most. This book . . . will be essential.”\u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003e—\u003c\/i\u003eEmily Temple, \u003ci\u003eLiterary Hub\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Kolbert has radically informed the way modern audiences understand climate change, and her newest collection is no exception, zooming into stories of hope, activism, and innovation across the globe.”\u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003e—The Millions\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cb\u003eElizabeth Kolbert\u003c\/b\u003e is the bestselling author of \u003ci\u003eField Notes from a Catastrophe\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eThe Sixth Extinction\u003c\/i\u003e, for which she won the Pulitzer Prize, and \u003ci\u003eUnder a White Sky, \u003c\/i\u003ewhich was named a top ten book of the year by\u003ci\u003e The Washington Post\u003c\/i\u003e. For her work at \u003ci\u003eTh\u003c\/i\u003ee \u003ci\u003eNew Yorker\u003c\/i\u003e, where she's a staff writer, she has received two National Magazine Awards and the Blake-Dodd Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She lives in Williamstown, Massachusetts, with her husband and children.\u003cb\u003eTalk to Me\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003eCan Artificial Intelligence Allow Us to Speak to Other Species?\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eDavid Gruber began his almost impossibly varied career studying bluestriped grunt fish off the coast of Belize. He was an undergraduate, and his job was to track the fish at night. He navigated by the stars and slept in a tent on the beach. “It was a dream,” he recalled. “I didn’t know what I was doing, but I was performing what I thought a marine biologist would do.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eGruber went on to work in Guyana, mapping forest plots, and in Florida, calculating how much water it would take to restore the Everglades. He wrote a PhD thesis on carbon cycling in the oceans and became a professor of biology at the City University of New York. Along the way, he got interested in green fluorescent proteins, which are naturally synthesized by jellyfish but, with a little gene editing, can be produced by almost any living thing, including humans. While working in the Solomon Islands, northeast of Australia, Gruber discovered dozens of species of fluorescent fish, including a fluorescent shark, which opened up new questions. What would a fluorescent shark look like to another fluorescent shark? Gruber enlisted researchers in optics to help him construct a special “shark’s eye” camera. (Sharks see only in blue and green; fluorescence, it turns out, shows up to them as greater contrast.) Meanwhile, he was also studying creatures known as comb jellies at the Mystic Aquarium, in Connecticut, trying to determine how, exactly, they manufacture the molecules that make them glow. This led him to wonder about the way that jellyfish experience the world. Gruber enlisted another set of collaborators to develop robots that could handle jellyfish with jellyfish-like delicacy.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“I wanted to know: Is there a way where robots and people can be brought together that builds empathy?” he told me.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIn 2017, Gruber received a fellowship to spend a year at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. While there, he came across a book by a free diver who had taken a plunge with some sperm whales. This piqued Gruber’s curiosity, so he started reading up on the animals.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe world’s largest predators, sperm whales spend most of their lives hunting. To find their prey—generally squid—in the darkness of the depths, they rely on echolocation. By means of a specialized organ in their heads, they generate streams of clicks that bounce off any solid (or semisolid) object. Sperm whales also produce quick bursts of clicks, known as codas, which they exchange with one another. The exchanges seem to have the structure of conversation.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eOne day, Gruber was sitting in his office at the Radcliffe Institute, listening to a tape of sperm whales chatting, when another fellow at the institute, Shafi Goldwasser, happened by. Goldwasser, a Turing Award–winning computer scientist, was intrigued. At the time, she was organizing a seminar on machine learning, which was advancing in ways that would eventually lead to ChatGPT. Perhaps, Goldwasser mused, machine learning could be used to discover the meaning of the whales’ exchanges.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“It was not exactly a joke, but almost like a pipe dream,” Goldwasser recollected. “But David really got into it.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eGruber and Goldwasser took the idea of decoding the codas to a third Radcliffe fellow, Michael Bronstein. Bronstein, also a computer scientist, is now the DeepMind Professor of AI at Oxford.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“This sounded like probably the most crazy project that I had ever heard about,” Bronstein told me. “But David has this kind of power, this ability to convince and drag people along. I thought that it would be nice to try.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eGruber kept pushing the idea. Among the experts who found it loopy and, at the same time, irresistible were Robert Wood, a roboticist at Harvard, and Daniela Rus, who runs MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. Thus was born the Cetacean Translation Initiative—Project CETI for short. (The acronym is pronounced “setty,” and purposefully recalls SETI, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence.) CETI represents the most ambitious, the most technologically sophisticated, and the most well-funded effort ever made to communicate with another species.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“I think it’s something that people get really excited about: Can we go from science fiction to science?” Rus told me. “I mean, can we talk to whales?” \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eSperm whales are nomads. It is estimated that, in the course of a year, an individual whale swims at least twenty thousand miles. But scattered around the tropics, for reasons that are probably squid-related, there are a few places the whales tend to favor. One of these is a stretch of water off Dominica, a volcanic island in the Lesser Antilles.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eCETI has its unofficial headquarters in a rental house above Roseau, the island’s capital. The group’s plan is to turn Dominica’s west coast into a giant whale-recording studio. This involves installing a network of underwater microphones to capture the codas of passing whales. It also involves planting recording devices on the whales themselves—cetacean bugs, as it were. The data thus collected can then be used to “train” machine-learning algorithms. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIn July, I went down to Dominica to watch the CETI team go sperm whale bugging. My first morning on the island, I met up with Gruber just outside Roseau, on a dive-shop dock. Gruber, who is fifty, is a slight man with dark curly hair and a cheerfully anxious manner. He was carrying a waterproof case and wearing a CETI T-shirt. Soon, several more members of the team showed up, also carrying waterproof cases and wearing CETI T-shirts. We climbed aboard an oversized Zodiac called CETI 2 and set off.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe night before, a tropical storm had raked the region with gusty winds and heavy rain, and Dominica’s volcanic peaks were still wreathed in clouds. The sea was a series of white-fringed swells. CETI 2 sped along, thumping up and down, up and down. Occasionally, flying fish zipped by; these remained aloft for such a long time that I was convinced for a while they were birds.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAbout two miles offshore, the captain, Kevin George, killed the engines. A graduate student named Yaly Mevorach put on a set of headphones and lowered an underwater mike—a hydrophone—into the waves. She listened for a bit and then, smiling, handed the headphones to me.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe most famous whale calls are the long, melancholy “songs” issued by humpbacks. Sperm whale codas are neither mournful nor musical. Some people compare them to the sound of bacon frying, others to popcorn popping. That morning, as I listened through the headphones, I thought of horses clomping over cobbled streets. Then I changed my mind. The clatter was more mechanical, as if somewhere deep beneath the waves someone was pecking out a memo on a manual typewriter.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eMevorach unplugged the headphones from the mike, then plugged them into a contraption that looked like a car speaker riding a broom handle. The contraption, which I later learned had been jury-rigged out of, among other elements, a metal salad bowl, was designed to locate clicking whales. After twisting it around in the water for a while, Mevorach decided that the clicks were coming from the southwest. We thumped in that direction, and soon George called out, “Blow!”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eA few hundred yards in front of us was a gray ridge that looked like a misshapen log. (When whales are resting at the surface, only a fraction of their enormous bulk is visible.) The whale blew again, and a geyser-like spray erupted from the ridge’s left side.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAs we were closing in, the whale blew yet again; then it raised its elegantly curved flukes into the air and dove. It was unlikely to resurface, I was told, for nearly an hour.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWe thumped off in search of its kin. The farther south we traveled, the higher the swells. At one point, I felt my stomach lurch and went to the side of the boat to heave. “I like to just throw up and get back to work,” Mevorach told me.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eTrying to attach a recording device to a sperm whale is a bit like trying to joust while racing on a Jet Ski. The exercise entails using a thirty-foot pole to stick the device onto the animal’s back, which in turn entails getting within thirty feet of a creature the size of a school bus. That day, several more whales were spotted. But, for all of our thumping around, CETI 2 never got close enough to one to unhitch the tagging pole.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe next day, the sea was calmer. Once again, we spotted whales, and several times the boat’s designated pole handler, Odel Harve, attempted to tag one. All his efforts went for naught. Either the whale dove at the last minute or the recording device slipped off the whale’s back and had to be fished out of the water. (The device, which was about a foot long and shaped like a surfboard, was supposed to adhere via suction cups.) With each new sighting, the mood on CETI 2 lifted; with each new failure, it sank.Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Sixth Extinction","brand":"Crown","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":48233332965605,"sku":"NP9798217086061","price":32.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9798217086061.jpg?v=1767731438","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/products\/life-on-a-littleknown-planet-isbn-9798217086061","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}