Farmed animal advocacy has advanced substantially since the two giants alluded to in the book's title first raised the issue. Ruth Harrison drew attention to the welfare of farmed animals in her influential 1964 book, Animal Machines. The book, which includes a foreword by Rachel...
For most of the last four centuries, the beaver's relationship with North America was transactional. Europeans wanted its fur to make hats. Farmers wanted the dams gone from their fields. Homeowners wanted its flooding to stop. In each case, the animal was assessed by what...
This open-access book, published by Springer in 2026 and edited by Nicoletta Batini, is Volume 63 of the series Natural Resource Management and Policy. It includes twenty-one chapters covering themes from human economic symbiosis with other animals to human predatory (consumptive) uses of animals, including...
Professor Alan Kazdin is an Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Child Psychiatry at Yale University and a former President of the American Psychological Association (2008). He is also a careful scientist who promotes evidence-based treatments for mental health. In his words:- "Our recent research shows worldwide...
Published by Penguin Random House Plastics Inc.: The Secret History and Shocking Future of Big Oil's Biggest Bet is a compelling new book by American journalist Beth Gardiner that explores Big Oil's role in continuing to extract fossil fuels, which serve as the feedstock for ongoing...
In his new book, Shelter from the Storm: How Climate Change Is Creating a New Era of Migration (The New Press, 2026), Julian Hattem explores how climate and environmental changes are reshaping patterns of human mobility. He convincingly demonstrates that the scale of these migrations...
In the early years of this century, I met Jason Matheny, an early advocate for cultured meat and the founder of the cultured meat company, New Harvest, in 2004. Matheny asserted that meat cultivated from the cells of cattle, pigs, chickens, and other farmed animals...
These two books deal with the same topic, animal research and testing, in quite different ways. Both describe very personal explorations of the topic, grounded in the two authors' interactions with laboratory animals. Melanie Kaplan, author of Lab Dog and a journalist, adopted a beagle, Hammy,...
The true story, A Street Cat Named Bob, is an international best-seller about twin redemption: that of a homeless tabby street cat and a homeless Englishman who adopt each other and help one another heal, leading to celebrity status for both cat and human. The author,...
In the Pixar movie, WALL-E, set a few hundred years in the future, humans have no direct contact with one another, are relatively helpless, and spend all day interacting only via television. As did many of my friends, I felt that the film got the...
