At Home on an Unruly Planet: Finding Refuge on a Changed Earth

One of Kirkus Reviews' 100 Best Nonfiction Books of 2022
A gold Nautilus Book Award winner, Ecology & Environment

From rural Alaska to coastal Florida, a vivid account of Americans working to protect the places they call home in an era of climate crisis

How do we find a sense of home and rootedness in a time of unprecedented upheaval? What happens when the seasons and rhythms in which we have built our lives go off-kilter?

Once a distant forecast, climate change is now reaching into the familiar, threatening our basic safety and forcing us to reexamine who we are and how we live. In At Home on an Unruly Planet, science journalist Madeline Ostrander reflects on this crisis not as an abstract scientific or political problem but as a palpable force that is now affecting all of us at home. She offers vivid accounts of people fighting to protect places they love from increasingly dangerous circumstances. A firefighter works to rebuild her town after catastrophic western wildfires. A Florida preservationist strives to protect one of North America's most historic cities from rising seas. An urban farmer struggles to transform a California city plagued by fossil fuel disasters. An Alaskan community heads for higher ground as its land erodes.

Ostrander pairs deeply reported stories of hard-won optimism with lyrical essays on the strengths we need in an era of crisis. The book is required reading for anyone who wants to make a home in the twenty-first century.

ISBN-13: 9781250871411

Media Type: Paperback

Publisher: Holt - Henry & Company - Inc.

Publication Date: 08-08-2023

Pages: 352

Product Dimensions: 5.60(w) x 8.90(h) x 1.00(d)

Madeline Ostrander is a science journalist and writer whose work has appeared in the NewYorker.com, The Nation, Sierra magazine, PBS's NOVA Next, Slate, and numerous other outlets. Her reporting on climate change and environmental justice has taken her to locations such as the Alaskan Arctic and the Australian outback. She's received grants, fellowships, and residencies from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, Artist Trust, the USC Annenberg Center for Health Journalism, the Fund for Investigative Journalism, the Jack Straw Cultural Center, the Mesa Refuge, Hedgebrook, and Edith Cowan University in Australia. She is the former senior editor of YES! magazine and holds a master's degree in environmental science from the University of Wisconsin–Madison. She lives in Seattle with her husband.

Table of Contents

Prologue

PART 1
1. The Fire
2. Homesick
3. The Flood
4. The First Home
5. The Thaw
6. The Explosion

PART 2
7. The Home Fires Burning
8. Finding Home Ground
9. Living with Water
10. A Safe Space
11. To Move Home
12. To Clean House Epilogue

Notes
Acknowledgments
Index

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