We're creeping closer to a milestone: the highest concentration of atmospheric CO₂ in human history. The U.S.’s greenhouse gas emissions are down to 1990s levels—due largely to the recession, the natural gas boom displacing much dirtier coal, and increased fuel efficiency in vehicles—all good news for the Obama administration, which promised to cut emissions by 17 percent from 2005 levels by 2020. But the amount of carbon in the global atmosphere is creeping higher and higher. 

Remote lands populated by cannibalistic natives and poisonous snakes set the stage for biologist Tim Flannery’s latest book, Among the Islands. The renowned author delves into his 1980s and ’90s expeditions to catalog unique, elusive species, like a red-gray tree-climbing mouse and a monkey-faced bat. He bounces from the Solomon Islands to Fiji to Bismarck’s Isles, falling into a sinkhole while trying to set a mist net and trudging through thigh-deep guano to get a closer look at an insect-eating bat. 

Check out some of the stories we posted this week on Audubon...

As floodwaters poured into New York City’s tunnels and subways, rodents that make their homes in the holes and crevices underground found themselves inundated, a result of Hurricane Sandy that may have more effectively eliminated the pests than years of poisoning.

Now that the days are getting shorter, our lights burn brightly later into the morning and earlier in the evening. There may be no better visual reminder of where humans live on the planet than a photograph of the earth at night. Cities shine, suburbs twinkle, and the few remaining locales that don’t glow with electricity look both desolate and peaceful. Despite our love of light, so-called light pollution can have detrimental effects to wildlife and humans. That’s why the National Park Service and the International Dark-Sky Association, a nonprofit focused on preserving the night, protecting wildlife, and conserving electricity, have begun to identify dark sky reserves across the world.

When explaining why I don’t eat beef, pork, or chicken, despite the tempting aroma of a barbequed burger or bacon sizzling on the stove, I say that it’s better for the environment to abstain. But what, exactly, does that mean?

Power plants that burn one of our most polluting fuel sources, coal, are shutting down because of natural gas prices, market conditions, and decrease in demand— and more of them may be closed in the next decade than originally predicted.

Faces open to the sun, young sunflowers follow the golden orb across the sky catching as much light as possible. Now researchers have found out how to make solar panels do the same without using GPS devices or equipment to manually rotate them, making them more efficient and potentially driving down their cost.

Seals, eels, and jellyfish star in David Hall's video, Beneath Cold Seas: The Underwater Wilderness of the Pacific Northwest, a complement to his photography book of the same name. 

Printed, it looks like tracks made from a bird. Uttered, it was sung aloud. The comparisons between Nushu, an ancient Chinese script for women, and birds are easy to draw. And in her book When Women Were Birds, Terry Tempest Williams uses the text to help describe how women used this secret language to express themselves.