Recommended Books

Rambunctious Garden: Saving Nature in a Post-Wild World 
by Emma Marris
Rambunctious Garden is an optimistic overview of the options we have in dealing with the altered ecology of our Earth.  She discusses the costs and benefits of the many strategies that are put forward and practiced around the globe, interviewing conservationists and ecologists with broadly divided opinions .  As Hamlet would say in 2012, "to preserve, restore, alter or experiment, that is the question." 

A Sand County Almanac
by Aldo Leopold
A must for anyone interested in conservation.  The collection of essays is considered to be a landmark book in the American conservation movement. The book has had over two million copies printed and has been translated into nine languages.[1] It has informed and changed the environmental movement and stimulated a widespread interest in ecology as a science.  -Wikipedia

A Short History of Nearly Everything
by Bill Bryson
Written with his typical humor and broad understanding, this is a book about life, the universe and everything, from the Big Bang to the ascendancy of Homo sapiens. "This is a book about how it happened," the author writes. "In particular how we went from there being nothing at all to there being something, and then how a little of that something turned into us, and also what happened in between and since."

Dr. Tatiana's Sex Advice to All Creation
by Olivia Judson
Dr Tatiana's Sex Advice to All Creation explores the science of sex, considering everything from why females of so many species are so promiscuous to why sex exists at all. It is a blend of wit and rigor, a fusion of science and natural history, that will entertain, amaze, and inform.   It is written in the form of an advice column. 
Olivia Judson writes a biology blog for the New York Times.
From the opening chapter:
Dear Dr. Tatiana:
My name's Twiggy and I'm a stick insect.  It is with great embarrassment that I write to you while copulating, but my mate and I have been copulating for ten weeks already.  I am bored out of my skull, yet he shows no signs of flagging.  He says it is because he is madly in love with me, but I think he is just plain mad.  How can I get him to quit?  

The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight
Thom Hartman
 goodreads.com-The_Last_Hours_of_Ancient_Sunlight
 Recommended by Mort Shurtz