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Designing Wildlife Habitats
John Beardsley
Harvard University Press, 2013

The vision of a garden shared peacefully by humans and animals is a familiar, but elusive, landscape trope. Whether threatened by habitat destruction or climate change, displaced by urbanization or invasive species, poisoned by industrial toxins, or hunted to extinction, many wild animals have failed to thrive in the company of people. There is growing scientific consensus that we are in the midst of the sixth great extinction in earth history—and the first caused by human activities.

What agency can landscape architects and garden designers have in conserving or restoring wildlife diversity? Designing Wildlife Habitats gathers essays by designers, scientists, and historians to explore how they might better collaborate to promote zoological biodiversity and how scientific ambitions might be expressed in culturally significant and historically informed design. Established conservation practices within ecology have begun to shape landscape architecture, and current initiatives in ecosystem services, restoration ecology, and designer-generated ecological experiments provide an enlarged role for landscape architects in the creation of productive habitats. Design has become increasingly instrumental to both the appearance and the ecological function of landscapes.

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front cover of Thirteen Ways to Steal a Bicycle
Thirteen Ways to Steal a Bicycle
Theft Law in the Information Age
Stuart P. Green
Harvard University Press, 2012

Theft claims more victims and causes greater economic injury than any other criminal offense. Yet theft law is enigmatic, and fundamental questions about what should count as stealing remain unresolved—especially misappropriations of intellectual property, information, ideas, identities, and virtual property.

In Thirteen Ways to Steal a Bicycle, Stuart Green assesses our current legal framework at a time when our economy increasingly commodifies intangibles and when the means of committing theft and fraud grow ever more sophisticated. Was it theft for the editor of a technology blog to buy a prototype iPhone he allegedly knew had been lost by an Apple engineer in a Silicon Valley bar? Was it theft for doctors to use a patient’s tissue without permission in order to harvest a valuable cell line? For an Internet activist to publish tens of thousands of State Department documents on his Web site?

In this full-scale critique, Green reveals that the last major reforms in Anglophone theft law, which took place almost fifty years ago, flattened moral distinctions, so that the same punishments are now assigned to vastly different offenses. Unreflective of community attitudes toward theft, which favor gradations in blameworthiness according to what is stolen and under what circumstances, and uninfluenced by advancements in criminal law theory, theft law cries out for another reformation—and soon.

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