'Animal,' Episode 2: Puffins

What can our relationships with other animals teach us? That’s the question naturalist Sy Montgomery addresses in her memoir, How to Be a Good Creature. She explores the lessons about life and love she learned from various animals who touched her life, from a tiny pinktoe tarantula in French Guiana to a beloved 750-pound pet pig named Christopher.

In our guide, we’ll examine how the wisdom and companionship of animals helped Montgomery find her calling as a traveler and nature writer, appreciate animals and people in new ways, and cultivate love and community. These animals taught her how to be more curious, compassionate, friendly, loving, and much more—in other words, they taught her how to be a good creature. We’ll also discuss some of the science and history behind our relationships with other animals, along with ways you can apply the lessons Montgomery learned to your life.

Our Iceberg Is Melting is a fable about a colony of penguins who realize that their home might be destroyed soon, and that they need to move the entire colony to a new iceberg. The fable teaches the necessary steps in making major changes to your company or your personal life.

In this guide, we’ll explore these topics in greater detail and present alternative theories or points of view; we’ll provide the kind of in-depth study that a short story like Our Iceberg Is Melting has to forego in favor of simplicity and clarity in its lessons.

Our Iceberg Is Melting is a fable about a colony of penguins who realize that their home might be destroyed soon, and that they need to move the entire colony to a new iceberg. The fable teaches the necessary steps in making major changes to your company or your personal life.

In this guide, we’ll explore these topics in greater detail and present alternative theories or points of view; we’ll provide the kind of in-depth study that a short story like Our Iceberg Is Melting has to forego in favor of simplicity and clarity in its lessons.

A ship sets out from London in 1914 carrying 28 men hoping to reach Antarctica and make the first trek across the continent by foot. But they never make it to Antarctica. The unforgiving ice pack destroys their ship, and they must make their way back to civilization through ice and open seas on sleds and three lifeboats. The men owe their incredible survival in the world’s most inhospitable conditions to the expedition’s leader: Ernest Shackleton. This is the true story of the Endurance crew, written in 1959 by journalist Alfred Lansing, using primary sources such as the crew members’ diaries and interviews with survivors.

This guide recounts their journey home against impossible odds, adds context on the Antarctic environment and history, and provides further diary excerpts that help complete the picture of the journey as the men experienced it. We also examine Shackleton’s successes and failures and what modern-day leaders can learn from him.

In The Sixth Extinction, journalist Elizabeth Kolbert argues that by drastically changing the shape of the earth and the composition of the atmosphere, humans have set in motion a sixth mass extinction that may one day be our undoing. The book revisits five previous mass extinction events spanning five hundred million years and compares them to the rapid, widespread extinctions underway today of a range of species including frogs, corals, birds, and rhinos.

These extinctions are a consequence of human-created global warming and ocean acidification, the destruction and fragmentation of forests, and our spread of invasive species around the world. What’s more, these actions will determine the course of life on the planet long after our species is gone.

In the course of their long lives, which rival humans’ lifespan, whales capture carbon that would otherwise enter the atmosphere and contribute to climate change. Are the largest animals in the ocean an overlooked key to staving off the worst effects of a warming climate?

What do the food on your plate, the electricity that powers your home, and the plastic in everything from your clothes to your car have in common? They all require large amounts of fossil fuel.

In How the World Really Works, scientist Vaclav Smil argues that our current way of life relies so heavily on fossil fuels that the only way to reduce our dependence on them and slow down climate change is to do so gradually and at great expense. But we can’t engage in any intelligent discussion about how to solve the problem of climate change unless everyone has a shared understanding of how the world works.

In this guide, we’ll explore Smil’s ideas about the functioning of four critical aspects of our world: energy, food production, manufacturing, and the environment. Throughout the guide, we’ll compare Smil’s analyses to those of other experts and examine current research and potential solutions to the issue of climate change.