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Thomas Paine's reputation as a political thinker rests chiefly on the two books that influenced the American and French revolutions: "Common Sense" and "Rights of Man". But political scientist Jack Fruchtman draws on all of Paine's writings to establish that the key to his political thinking is his religious understanding of nature. For Paine, the study of nature gave humans access to the mind of God - revealing the right social, political and economic relations necessary to a stable nation. In this book, Fruchtman explains how Paine constructed a rationale for political revolution based on his theory of nature. Paine believed that human beings had a natural ability to reflect God's inventive creativity. Although they could never achieve God's perfection, people could continually enhance human life by improving their inventions. They could make better candles and build stronger bridges; they could create sound economies and establish democratic constitutions. When Paine proposed that political revolution was just such an invention, he advanced a powerful justification for eliminating the evil kings and corrupt aristocrats who seemed to threaten the people's very humanity. By re-examining Paine's language, imagery and underlying beliefs, Fruchtman offers a portrait of a revolutionary writer who relied on nature and nature's God in everything he said and did.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

'Jefferson and Nature' is the first comprehensive study to take Jefferson completely at his word--his favorite word. 'Nature'--the term and the many ideas associated with it--pervades Jefferson's life and writings.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

Barbara Hurd's Listening to the Savage weaves rich explorations of science, history, mythology, literature, and music. The listening of the book delineates and champions a kind of attentiveness to what is not easily heard and is written in language that is as precise as it is poetic, providing original ways of engagement in the natural world. As in Hurd's other books, the previously unknown or the barely known becomeless mysterious but still retain the quality of mystery. The book presumes that nature is a mix of the chaotic and the wondrous. It addresses worry and advocacy-worry about our c.

Barbara Hurd's Listening to the Savage weaves rich explorations of science, history, mythology, literature, and music. The listening of the book delineates and champions a kind of attentiveness to what is not easily heard and is written in language that is as precise as it is poetic, providing original ways of engagement in the natural world. As in Hurd's other books, the previously unknown or the barely known become less mysterious but still retain the quality of mystery. The book presumes that nature is a mix of the chaotic and the wondrous. It addresses worry and advocacy-worry about our carelessness that can destroy the balance of that mix and a cry for us to pay more attention to humanity's relationship to natural history. Listen, be alert, it says without hectoring. Rivers, ferns, streams, birds all have a life that is delicate and worth preserving. Barbara Hurd is one of our finest environmental writers, and this book will please the choir and persuade those on the ambivalent edge.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

A cutting-edge science book in the style of FERMAT'S LAST THEOREM and CHAOS from an exciting and accessible new voice in popular science writing. Bio-inspiration is the new engineering. Instead of - in its crudest terms - welding large piece of hard 'dry' right-angled metal together scientists, architects and engineers are looking at imitating (or mimicking) nature by manufacturing 'wet' materials such as spider silk or the surface of the gecko's foot. The amazing power of the gecko's foot has long been known - it can climb a vertical glass wall and even walk upside down on the ceiling - but nothing could be done with it because its mechanism was beyond the power of optical microscopes. Recently though the secret of the gecko's foot has been solved by a team of scientists in Portland, Oregon who have established that the mechanism really is dry, and that is does not involve suction, capillary action or anything else the lay person might imagine. Each foot has iGBP million bristles and each bristle ramifies into hundreds of finer spatula-shaped projections. The fine scale of the gecko's foot is beyond the capacity of conventional microengineering but a team of nanotechnologists have already made a good initial approximation. The gecko's foot is just one of many examples of this new 'smart' science. In Peter Forbes' accessible and engaging book we also discover, amongst other things, how George de Mestral's brush with the spiny fruits of the cocklebur inspired him to invent Velcro; how the shape of leaves opening from a bud has inspired the design of solar-powered satellites; how scientists are trying to mimic the self-cleaning leaves of the Scared Lotus plant to create the first self-cleaning pane of glass; and the parallels between cantilever bridges and the spines of large mammals such as the bison. The new 'smart' science of Bio-inspiration is going to produce a plethora of products over the next decades that will transform our lives, and force us to look at the world in a completely new way. It is science we will be reading about in our papers very soon; it is the science of tomorrow's world.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

• The origin of metaphor - the animal connection
• animals and identity formation
• the animal - an idea waiting to be thought
• notes for a diatribe on masks
• the arboreal eye
• aggression and the hunt
• a theory of the value of hunting
• meditations on hunting
• the significance of bears
• digging for our roots
• the nature of tourism
• whatever happened to human ecology?
• the conflict of ideology and ecology
• sociobiology and value systems
• itinerant thoughts on place
• place and the child.
• (source: Nielsen Book Data)

Throughout his life, Paul Shepard drew on a range of disciplines, including biology, ecology, ethology and anthropology, to piece together a logical and meaningful shape to the natural world. These essays, selected by his wife, offer his legacy to students of the natural world.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

• My islands.--Tropical education.--On the wings of the wind.--A desert fruit.--Pretty Poll.--High life.--Eight-legged friends.--Mud.--The greenwood tree.--Fish as fathers.--An English shire.--The bronze axe.--The Isle of Ruim.--A hill-top stronghold.--A persistent nationality.--Casters and Chesters.