For thirty years David G. Campbell has explored the Amazon, an enchanting terrain of forest and river that is home to the greatest diversity of plants and animals to have ever existed, anywhere at any time, during the four-billion-year history of life on Earth.
With great artistic flair, Campbell describes a journey up the Rio Moa, a remote tributary of the Amazon River, 2,800 miles from its mouth. Here he joins three old friends: Arito, a caiman hunter turned paleontologist; Tarzan, a street urchin brought up in a bordello; and Pimentel, a master canoe pilot. They travel together deep into the rainforest and set up camp in order to survey every woody plant on a two-hectare plot of land with about as many tree species as in all of North America.
Campbell introduces us to two remarkable women, Dona Cabocla, a widow who raised six children on that lonely frontier, and Dona Ausira, a Nokini Native American who is the last speaker of her tribe's ages-old language. These pioneers live in a land whose original inhabitants were wiped out by centuries of disease, slavery, and genocide, taking their traditions and languages with them. He explores the intimate relationship between the extinction of native language and the extirpation of biological diversity. "It's hard for a people to love a place that is not defined in words and thus cannot be understood. And it's easy to give away something for which there are no words, something you never knew existed."
In elegant prose that enchants and entrances, Campbell has written an elegy for the Amazon forest and its peoples-for what has become a land of ghosts.
Colliding environmental and development interests have shaped national policy reforms supporting both oil development and environmental protection in Alaska. Oil and Wilderness in Alaska examines three significant national policy reform efforts that came out of these conflicts: the development of the Trans-Alaska pipeline, the establishment of a vast system of protected natural areas through the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act, and the reform of the environmental management of the marine oil trade in Alaska to reduce the risk of oil pollution after the Exxon Valdez disaster.
Illuminating the delicate balance and give-and-take between environmental and commercial interests, as well as larger issues shaping policy reforms, Busenberg applies a theoretical framework to examine the processes and consequences of these reforms at the state, national, and international levels. The author examines the enduring institutional legacies and policy consequences of each reform period, their consequences for environmental protection, and the national and international repercussions of reform efforts. The author concludes by describing the continuing policy conflicts concerning oil development and nature conservation in Alaska left unresolved by these reforms. Rich case descriptions illustrate the author’s points and make this book an essential resource for professors and students interested in policies concerning Alaska, the Arctic, oil development, nature conservation, marine oil spills, the policy process, and policy theory.
In 1972, Eric Dinerstein was in film school at Northwestern University, with few thoughts of nature, let alone tiger-filled jungles at the base of the Himalayas or the antelope-studded Serengeti plain. Yet thanks to some inspiring teachers and the squawk of a little green heron that awakened him to nature's fundamental wonders, Dinerstein would ultimately become a leading conservation biologist, traveling to these and other remote corners of the world to protect creatures ranging from the striking snow leopard to the homely wrinkle-faced bat.
Tigerland and Other Unintended Destinations takes readers on Dinerstein's unlikely journey to conservation's frontiers, from early research in Nepal to recent expeditions as head of Conservation Science at the World Wildlife Fund. We are there as the author renews his resolve after being swept downstream on an elephant's back, tracks snow leopards in the mountains of Kashmir with a remarkable housewife turned zoologist, and finds unexpected grit in a Manhattanite donor he guides into the wildest reaches of the Orinoco River. At every turn, we meet professed and unprofessed ecologists who share
Dinerstein's mission, a cast of free-spirited characters uncommonly committed to-and remarkably successful at-preserving slices of the world's natural heritage.
A simple sense of responsibility, one feels, shines through all of Dinerstein's experiences: not just to marvel at what we see, but to join in efforts sustain the planet's exquisite design. Tigerland's message is clear: individuals make all the difference; if we combine science, advocacy, and passion, ambitious visions for conservation can become reality-even against overwhelming odds.
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