Climate change wasn't on the public's radar in 1995, when Mary Taylor Young and her husband bought their piece of the wild in the Colorado Rockies. They built a cabin, set up a trail of bluebird nest boxes, and began a nature journal of observations. Her twenty-five year journal, she realized, was a record of climate change, happening not on an Antarctic ice sheet but in their own natural neighborhood and echoed in everyone's backyard.

"In May 2016, the city of Fort McMurray in Alberta, Canada, burned to the ground, forcing 88,000 people to flee their homes. It was the largest evacuation ever of a city in the face of a forest fire, raising the curtain on a new age of increasingly destructive wildfires. This book is a suspenseful account of one of North America's most devastating forest fires-and a stark exploration of our dawning era of climate catastrophes"--

From the 10th to the 15th centuries the earth experienced a rise in surface temperature that changed climate worldwide--a preview of today's global warming. In some areas, including Western Europe, longer summers brought bountiful harvests and population growth that led to cultural flowering. In the Arctic, Inuit and Norse sailors made cultural connections across thousands of miles as they traded precious iron goods. Polynesian sailors, riding new...