For most of Elizabeth Sawin’s career, she was not a multisolver. Instead, she worked on a single, albeit immensely important problem: climate change. Despite tremendous effort—long hours of teaching, attending conferences, publicizing analysis—at the end of the day, she felt like she was chasing her tail. Unless people began to recognize the multitude of unexpected benefits from ratcheting down emissions, climate change would remain a losing political issue.

That experience, along with the guidance of leaders in systems thinking and racial justice, convinced her that the world’s thorniest problems may be easier to tackle together than one by one. That’s multisolving: using a single investment of time or money to solve many problems at the same time. (Reduced fossil fuel use = improvements in climate, health, equity, economics, and more.) While the idea of killing two birds with one stone (or “filling two needs with one deed”) is age-old, and the notion of co-benefits in policy-making has been around for years, Multisolving addresses the current mismatch between complex, deeply intertwined societal issues and our siloed approach to them.

This unique resource is for local school boards that need revenue for their students but don’t want to overtax low-income seniors. It is for nonprofits working to reduce food waste and combat the root causes of hunger while increasing racial justice. It is for seaside communities that can protect themselves from flooding while also improving biodiversity with a living coastline. It may also be for you: doing the work you know is imperative but that is sometimes overwhelming, a tiny drop in a swirling ocean.
Multisolving can’t promise a list of “fifty simple things to make everything OK.” What it does offer are strategies to build solidarity between diverse groups, overcome powerful interests, and create lasting change that benefits us all.
 

Resilience Thinking introduces a bold and necessary shift in how we understand and manage systems—whether ecological, economic, or social—in a world marked by rapid change and uncertainty. Rather than offering short-term fixes or efficiency-driven solutions that often lead to brittle outcomes, this book presents a powerful framework for building systems that can adapt, transform, and thrive over time.

Written by scientist Brian Walker and science communicator David Salt, Resilience Thinking explains how human and natural systems operate as dynamic networks shaped by cycles of disturbance, renewal, and evolution. The book explores what qualities make a system resilient—such as diversity, modularity, and the ability to learn—and how these qualities can be nurtured to ensure long-term sustainability.

Clear, concise, and engaging, the book offers more than just theory. Through five real-world case studies, readers see how resilience thinking can be applied across landscapes, communities, and industries to navigate risk, foster innovation, and expand future options. Whether managing a watershed, planning urban growth, or designing policy, this approach equips decision-makers with tools for thinking beyond linear models and toward systems that can absorb shocks and keep functioning.

Resilience Thinking is essential reading for environmental professionals, business leaders, and anyone seeking smarter ways to steward resources in a complex, interconnected world.

Did you know that you are more closely related to a mushroom than to a daisy? That crocodiles are closer to birds than to lizards? That dinosaurs are still among us? That the terms "fish," "reptiles," and "invertebrates" do not indicate scientific groupings? All this is the result of major changes in classification, whose methods have been totally revisited over the last thirty years.

Modern classification, based on phylogeny, no longer places humans at the center of nature. Groups of organisms are no longer defined by their general appearance, but by their different individual characteristics. Phylogeny, therefore, by showing common ancestry, outlines a tree of evolutionary relationships from which one can retrace the history of life.

This book diagrams the tree of life according to the most recent methods of classification. By showing how life forms arose and developed and how they are related, The Tree of Life presents a key to the living world in all its dazzling variety.,