Environment & Nature audiobooks

What Stands in a Storm

By: Kim Cross

Narrated by: Tracy Brunjes

Length: 9 hours 46 minutes

Abridged: No

April 27, 2011 marked the climax of a superstorm that saw a record 358 tornadoes rip through twenty-one states in three days, seven hours, and eighteen minutes. It was the deadliest day of the biggest tornado outbreak in recorded history, which saw 348 people killed, entire neighborhoods erased, and $11 billion in damage. But from the terrible... Read more

War Dogs

By: Rebecca Frankel

Narrated by: Tanya Eby

Length: 8 hours 6 minutes

Abridged: No

In War Dogs, Rebecca Frankel offers a riveting mix of on-the-ground reporting, her own hands-on experiences in the military working dog world, and a look at the science of dogs' special abilities—from their amazing noses and powerful jaws to their enormous sensitivity to the emotions of their human companions. The history of dogs in the U.S.... Read more

The Soul of All Living Creatures

By: Vint Virga, DVM

Narrated by: Vint Virga, DVM

Length: 6 hours 17 minutes

Abridged: No

As an emergency room clinician four years out of veterinary school, Dr. Vint Virga had a life-changing experience: he witnessed the power of simple human contact and compassion to affect the recovery of a dog struggling to survive after being hit by a car. Observing firsthand the remarkably strong connection between humans and animals inspired... Read more

Never Turn Your Back on an Angus Cow

By: Dr. Jan Pol & David Fisher

Narrated by: Tom Perkins

Length: 8 hours 40 minutes

Abridged: No

Dr. Jan Pol is not your typical veterinarian. Born and raised on a dairy farm in the Netherlands, he is the star of Nat Geo Wild's hit show The Incredible Dr. Pol and has been treating animals in rural Michigan since the 1970s. Dr. Pol's 20,000-plus patients have ranged from white mice to 2,600-pound horses and everything in between.




From the... Read more

Mother Nature Is Trying to Kill You

By: Dan Riskin, PhD

Narrated by: Dan Riskin

Length: 5 hours 52 minutes

Abridged: No

It may be a wonderful world, but as Dan Riskin explains, it's also a dangerous, disturbing, and disgusting one. At every turn, it seems, living things are trying to eat us, poison us, use our bodies as their homes, or have us spread their eggs. In Mother Nature Is Trying to Kill You, Riskin is our guide through the natural world at its most... Read more

The Forest Unseen

By: David George Haskell

Narrated by: Michael Healy

Length: 9 hours 27 minutes

Abridged: No

In this wholly original book, biologist David Haskell uses a one-square-meter patch of old-growth Tennessee forest as a window into the entire natural world. Visiting it almost daily for one year to trace nature's path through the seasons, he brings the forest and its inhabitants to vivid life.



Each of this book's short chapters begins with a... Read more

The Gathering Wind

By: Gregory A. Freeman

Narrated by: David Drummond

Length: 10 hours 18 minutes

Abridged: No

In October 2012, a replica of the famous HMS Bounty, an eighteenth-century tall sailing ship, was on a collision course with a storm that would become the largest hurricane ever recorded in the Atlantic—a clash that would prove dramatic, tragic, perplexing, and ultimately one of the most unforgettable stories of Superstorm Sandy.



Crewed by an... Read more

The Elephant Whisperer

By: Lawrence Anthony & Graham Spence

Narrated by: Simon Vance

Length: 10 hours 54 minutes

Abridged: No

When South African conservationist Lawrence Anthony was asked to accept a herd of "rogue" wild elephants on his Thula Thula game reserve in Zululand, his common sense told him to refuse. But he was the herd's last chance of survival: they would be killed if he wouldn't take them.
 
In order to save their lives, Anthony took them in. In the years... Read more

Gifts of the Crow

By: Tony Angell & John Marzluff

Narrated by: Danny Campbell

Length: 8 hours 15 minutes

Abridged: No

New research indicates that crows are among the brightest animals in the world. And professor of Wildlife Science at the University of Washington John Marzluff has done some of the most extraordinary research on crows, which has been featured in The New York Times, National Geographic, and the Chicago Tribune, as well as on NPR and PBS. Now he... Read more

Cat Daddy

By: Joel Derfner & Jackson Galaxy

Narrated by: Jackson Galaxy

Length: 6 hours 24 minutes

Abridged: No

Cat behaviorist and star of Animal Planet's hit television show My Cat from Hell, Jackson Galaxy, a.k.a. "Cat Daddy," isn't what you might expect for a cat expert (as the New York Times noted, with his goatee and tattoos he "looks like a Hell's Angel"). Yet Galaxy's ability to connect with even the most troubled felines—not to mention the... Read more

The Monkey Wrench Gang

By: Edward Abbey

Narrated by: Michael Kramer

Length: 16 hours 41 minutes

Abridged: No

Ex-Green Beret George Hayduke has returned from war to find his beloved southwestern desert threatened by industrial development. Joining with Bronx exile and feminist saboteur Bonnie Abzug, wilderness guide and outcast Mormon Seldom Seen Smith, and libertarian billboard torcher Doc Sarvis, M.D., Hayduke is ready to fight the power—taking on the... Read more

Plastic Ocean

By: Capt. Charles Moore & Cassandra Phillips

Narrated by: Mel Foster

Length: 12 hours 30 minutes

Abridged: No

In the summer of 1997, Charles Moore set sail from Honolulu with the sole intention of returning home after competing in a trans-Pacific race. To get to California, he and his crew took a shortcut through the seldom-traversed North Pacific Subtropical Gyre, a vast "oceanic desert" where winds are slack and sailing ships languish. There, Moore... Read more

How the Dog Became the Dog

By: Mark Derr

Narrated by: David Colacci

Length: 8 hours 22 minutes

Abridged: No

That the dog evolved from the wolf is an accepted fact of evolution and history, but the question of how wolf became dog has remained a mystery, obscured by myth and legend. How the Dog Became the Dog posits that dog was an evolutionary inevitability in the nature of the wolf and its human soul mate.



The natural temperament and social structure... Read more

Oceana

By: Ted Danson & Michael D'Orso

Narrated by: Michael Kramer

Length: 6 hours 2 minutes

Abridged: No

Most people know Ted Danson as the affable bartender Sam Malone in the long-running television series Cheers. But fewer realize that over the course of the past two and a half decades, Danson has tirelessly devoted himself to the cause of heading off a looming global catastrophe—the massive destruction of our planet's oceanic biosystems and the... Read more

Elixir

By: Brian M. Fagan

Narrated by: James Langton

Length: 13 hours 16 minutes

Abridged: No

Elixir spans five thousand years, from the beginnings of civilization to the parched American Sun Belt of today. It is a story of human endeavor: our present-day interaction with this most essential resource has deep roots in the remote past, and every human culture has been shaped by its relationship to water.



For the earliest hunter-gatherers,... Read more

30 Days to a Well-Mannered Dog

By: Tamar Geller & Jonathan Grotenstein

Narrated by: Renée Raudman

Length: 9 hours 37 minutes

Abridged: No

Widely regarded as the anti-Cesar Millan by dog owners and experts, Tamar Geller's nonaggressive approach to dog training is based on love, play, and mutual respect between dog and owner—much like how a wolf plays with its young. Using a combination of child psychology and animal behavior science, Geller revolutionized the way Americans train... Read more

Zoo Story

By: Thomas French

Narrated by: John Allen Nelson

Length: 8 hours 41 minutes

Abridged: No

Welcome to the savage and surprising world of Zoo Story, an unprecedented account of the secret life of a zoo and its inhabitants, both animal and human. Based on six years of research, the book follows a handful of unforgettable characters at Tampa's Lowry Park Zoo: an alpha chimp with a weakness for blondes, a ferocious tiger who revels in... Read more

Into the Storm

By: Andrew Tilin & Reed Timmer

Narrated by: Joshua Swanson

Length: 9 hours 17 minutes

Abridged: No

Reed Timmer is one of the most successful and most extreme storm chasers in the world. His is a job that requires science and bravado, knowledge and instinct just to survive, never mind excel. It's a job some people would kill for. But most prefer to let Timmer take the risks while they watch from the safety of their homes. Reed Timmer is a star... Read more

Pandora's Seed

By: Spencer Wells

Narrated by: Spencer Wells

Length: 6 hours 40 minutes

Abridged: No

This new book by Spencer Wells, the internationally known geneticist, anthropologist, author, and director of the Genographic Project, focuses on the seminal event in human history: mankind's decision to become farmers rather than hunter-gatherers.



What do terrorism, pandemic disease, and global warming have in common? To find the answer we need... Read more

My River Chronicles

By: Jessica DuLong

Narrated by: Jessica Dulong

Length: 10 hours 5 minutes

Abridged: No

In 2001, journalist Jessica DuLong ditched her dot-com desk job for the diesel engines of a rusty antique fireboat, the John J. Harvey, and the storied waters of the Hudson. My River Chronicles: Rediscovering America on the Hudson tells the story of this mechanic's daughter and Stanford graduate who had left her blue-collar upbringing behind... Read more

Green Metropolis

By: David Owen

Narrated by: Patrick Lawlor

Length: 9 hours 49 minutes

Abridged: No

Most Americans think of crowded cities as ecological nightmares—as wastelands of concrete and garbage and diesel fumes and traffic jams. Yet residents of compact urban centers, David Owen shows, individually consume less oil, electricity, and water than other Americans. They live in smaller spaces, discard less trash, and, most important of all,... Read more

How to Build a Dinosaur

By: James Gorman & Jack Horner

Narrated by: Patrick Lawlor

Length: 6 hours 36 minutes

Abridged: No

In movies, in novels, in comic strips, and on television, we've all seen dinosaurs—or at least somebody's educated guess of what they would look like. But what if it were possible to build, or grow, a real dinosaur without finding ancient DNA? Jack Horner, the scientist who advised Steven Spielberg on the blockbuster film Jurassic Park and a... Read more

The Human, the Orchid, and the Octopus

By: Jacques Cousteau & Susan Schiefelbein

Narrated by: Stephen Hoye

Length: 12 hours 58 minutes

Abridged: No

Part adventure story, part manifesto, this is legendary ocean explorer Jacques Cousteau's passionate plea for sustaining life on earth.



Explorer, diving pioneer, filmmaker, inventor, and activist, Jacques Cousteau was blessed from his childhood with boundless curiosity about the natural world. As the leader of fascinating, often dangerous... Read more

Storm World

By: Chris Mooney

Narrated by: Lloyd James

Length: 10 hours 37 minutes

Abridged: No

Chris Mooney, author of The Republican War on Science and one of the leading young environmental journalists and bloggers working today, immerses readers in the world of those who study hurricanes. What was once an arcane branch of meteorology (itself an arcane science) has become embroiled in one of the most politicized and hotly contested... Read more