A history of epidemics, plagues, and famines chronicles the disastrous effects of these often cataclysmic events on the individual and on human history

Fourth Horseman: A Short History Of Epidemics Plagues Famine And Other Scourges

NIKIFORUK, Andrew

History

Penguin Canada

Our health and habitat are being threatened by biological invaders moving at unprecedented speed. Avian flu and its potential to cause a human pandemic is only one example of a worldwide menace unwittingly unleashed by the forces of globalization. The combination of unfettered free trade in living organisms, increased mobility, and urban crowding has created an increasingly volatile environment for the world’s 6.5 billion people. Nikiforuk argues that it shouldn’t take a pandemic to make us rethink the deadly pace of globalization and biological traffic. Authoritative and wide-ranging, Pandemonium is a clear-eyed guide to instability, unpredictability, and the hidden biological terrorist on our doorstep.

Pandemonium: Bird Flu Mad Cow And Other Biological Plagues Of The 21st Centryu

Health, Fitness & Dieting

Diseases & Physical Ailments

Pandemonium: Bird Flu, Mad Cow Disease and Other Biological Plagues of the 21st Century

Penguin Global

The fourth horseman: A short history of epidemics, plagues, famine, and other scourges

Viking Canada

A history of epidemics, plagues, and famines chronicles the disastrous effects of these often cataclysmic events on the individual and on human history

The Fourth Horseman: A Short History of Epidemics, Plagues, Famine and Other Scourges

World

M. Evans & Co.

Running on empty: Alberta after the boom

NeWest Press

School's Out: The Catastrophe in Public Education

MacFarlane, Walter & Ross

Winner of the 2002 Arthur Ellis Award for Best True Crime Winner of the W.O. Mitchell City of Calgary Book Prize Finalist for the 2002 Governor General's Literary Award for Nonfiction Finalist for the Wilfred Eggleston Award for Nonfiction At Trickle Creek in northern Alberta, Wiebo Ludwig thought he’d buffered his tiny religious community from civilization, but in 1990 civilization came calling. A Calgary oil company proposed to drill directly in view of the farm’s communal dining room. Ludwig hadn’t realized his land ownership didn’t include mineral rights. He wrote letters, petitioned, forced public hearings, and discovered the provincial regulator cared little about landowners. After the oil company accidentally vented raw sour gas, Ludwig’s wife miscarried. Nearby parcels of land were clear-cut. Ludwig’s northern boundary became a highway for semi-trailers loaded with drilling equipment. Seismic crews raced up and down his road. More sour gas wells popped up. People defending their property rights gradually turned into monkeywrenching terrorists. Hostilities began with nails on the roads, sabotaged well sites, and road blockades. They culminated in death threats, shootings, and bombings. The Mounties recruited a Ludwig acolyte as an informant, and in an attempt to establish the man’s credibility the RCMP itself blew up an equipment shack at a well site. Ludwig was eventually charged with 19 different counts of mischief, vandalism and possession of explosives and later convicted on five charges. While he was out on bail, joyriding teenagers went to Trickle Creek at four o'clock one morning. Someone fired at one of the pickups, killing 16-year-old Karman Willis. Despite a lengthy investigation, the RCMP has not laid charges. This is a taut, careful work of nonfiction that reads like a thriller and raises unsettling questions about individual rights, corporate power, police methods, and government accountability. The reader comes to question whether Wiebo Ludwig can be dismissed as a zealot. And to ask: What would I have done in his shoes? From the Hardcover edition.

Saboteurs: Wiebo Ludwig's War Against Big Oil

Americas

Winner of the 2009 Rachel Carson Environment Book Award , from the Society of Environmental Journalists
 Canada has one third of the world’s oil source; it comes from the bitumen in the oil sands of Alberta. Advancements in technology and frenzied development have created the world’s largest energy project in Fort McMurray where, rather than shooting up like a fountain in the deserts of Saudi Arabia, the sticky bitumen is extracted from the earth. Providing almost 20 percent of America’s fuel, much of this dirty oil is being processed in refineries in the Midwest. This out-of-control megaproject is polluting the air, poisoning the water, and destroying boreal forest at a rate almost too rapid to be imagined. In this hard-hitting book, journalist Andrew Nikiforuk exposes the disastrous environmental, social, and political costs of the tar sands and argues forcefully for change.

Tar Sands: Dirty Oil and the Future of a Continent

Business & Money

Economics

Greystone Books

Beginning in the late 1980s, a series of improbable bark beetle outbreaks unsettled iconic forests and communities across western North America. An insect the size of a rice kernel eventually killed more than 30 billion pine and spruce trees from Alaska to New Mexico. Often appearing in masses larger than schools of killer whales, the beetles engineered one of the world's greatest forest die-offs since the deforestation of Europe by peasants between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries. The beetle didn't act alone. Misguided science, out-of-control logging, bad public policy, and a hundred years of fire suppression created a volatile geography that released the world's oldest forest manager from all natural constraints. Like most human empires, the beetles exploded wildly and then crashed, leaving in their wake grieving landowners, humbled scientists, hungry animals, and altered watersheds. Although climate change triggered this complex event, human arrogance assuredly set the table. With little warning, an ancient insect pointedly exposed the frailty of seemingly stable manmade landscapes. And despite the billions of public dollars spent on control efforts, the beetles burn away like a fire that can't be put out. Drawing on first-hand accounts from entomologists, botanists, foresters, and rural residents, award-winning journalist Andrew Nikiforuk investigates this unprecedented beetle plague, its startling implications, and the lessons it holds.

Empire of the Beetle: How Human Folly and a Tiny Bug Are Killing North America's Great Forests (David Suzuki Institute)

Sports & Outdoors

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Books by NIKIFORUK, Andrew