In Ghost Bears, R. Edward Grumbine looks at the implications of the widespread loss of biological diversity, and explains why our species-centered approach to environmental protection will ultimately fail. Using the fate of the endangered grizzly bear -- the "ghost bear" -- to explore the causes and effects of species loss and habitat destruction, Grumbine presents a clear and inviting introduction to the biodiversity crisis and to the new science of conservation biology.
Gifford Pinchot and the Making of Modern Environmentalism, the first new biography in more than three decades, offers a fresh interpretation of the life and work of the famed conservationist and Progressive politician. In addition to considering Gifford Pinchot's role in the environmental movement, historian Char Miller sets forth an engaging description and analysis of the man -- his character, passions, and personality -- and the larger world through which he moved.
Char Miller begins by describing Pinchot's early years and the often overlooked influence of his family and their aspirations for him. He examines Gifford Pinchot's post-graduate education in France and his ensuing efforts in promoting the profession of forestry in the United States and in establishing and running the Forest Service. While Pinchot's twelve years as chief forester (1898-1910) are the ones most historians and biographers focus on, Char Miller also offers an extensive examination of Pinchot's post-federal career as head of The National Conservation Association and as two-term governor of Pennsylvania. In addition, he looks at Pinchot's marriage to feminist Cornelia Bryce and discusses her role in Pinchot's political radicalization throughout the 1920s and 1930s. An epilogue explores Gifford Pinchot's final years and writings.
Char Miller offers a provocative reconsideration of key events in Pinchot's life, including his relationship with friend and mentor John Muir and their famous disagreement over damming Hetch Hetchy Valley. The author brings together insights from cultural and social history and recently discovered primary sources to support a new interpretation of Pinchot -- whose activism not only helped define environmental politics in early twentieth century America but remains strikingly relevant today.
While a number of gases are implicated in global warming, carbon dioxide is the most important contributor, and in one sense the entire phenomena can be seen as a human-induced perturbation of the carbon cycle. The Global Carbon Cycle offers a scientific assessment of the state of current knowledge of the carbon cycle by the world's leading scientists sponsored by SCOPE and the Global Carbon Project, and other international partners. It gives an introductory over-view of the carbon cycle, with multidisciplinary contributions covering biological, physical, and social science aspects. Included are 29 chapters covering topics including: an assessment of carbon-climate-human interactions; a portfolio of carbon management options; spatial and temporal distribution of sources and sinks of carbon dioxide; socio-economic driving forces of emissions scenarios.
Throughout, contributors emphasize that all parts of the carbon cycle are interrelated, and only by developing a framework that considers the full set of feedbacks will we be able to achieve a thorough understanding and develop effective management strategies.
The Global Carbon Cycle edited by Christopher B. Field and Michael R. Raupach is part of the Rapid Assessment Publication series produced by the Scientific Committee on Problems of the Environment (SCOPE), in an effort to quickly disseminate the collective knowledge of the world's leading experts on topics of pressing environmental concern.
"This is a book about the making of cities and the buildings that compose them. It is about the conditions under which an architect engaged in those activities now works, how those conditions evolved and why they are changing. It is about the qualities of life that are threatened by the ways cities are built at the beginning of the 21st century and intelligent response to those threats. It is about why the city planning ideas and the cultural cuisinart that came in the box with modern architecture are a lingering menace." -- from Global City Blues.
Much of the architecture and town planning of the past fifty years has been based on an unsubstantiated optimism about the promise of modernity. In our rush to embrace the future, we invented new ways of building that rejected the past and sent people headlong into a placeless limbo where they are insulated from each other and cut off from such basic experiences of location as the weather and the time of day. Despite calamitous results, many architects and planners remain enamored of the modernist ideals that underlie these changes.
In Global City Blues, renowned architect Daniel Solomon presents a perceptive overview and an insightful assessment of how the power and seductiveness of modernist ideals led us astray. Through a series of independent but linked essays, he takes the reader on a personal picaresque, introducing us to people, places, and ideas that have shaped thinking about planning and building and that laid the foundation for his beliefs about the world we live in and the kind of world we should be making.
As an alternative, Daniel Solomon discusses the ideas and precepts of New Urbanism, a reform movement he helped found that has risen to prominence in the past decade. New Urbanism offers a vital counterbalance to the forces of sprawl, urban disintegration, and placelessness that have so transformed the contemporary landscape.
Global City Blues is a fresh and original look at what the history of urban form can teach us about creating built environments that work for people.
Vast areas of valuable resources unfettered by legal rights have, for centuries, been the central target of human exploitation and appropriation. The global commons -- Antarctica, the high seas and deep seabed minerals, the atmosphere, and space -- have remained exceptions only because access has been difficult or impossible, and the technology for successful extraction has been lacking. Now, technology has caught up with desire, and management regimes are needed to guide human use of these important resource domains.
In The Global Commons, Susan Buck considers the history of human interactions with each of the global commons areas and provides a concise yet thorough account of the evolution of management regimes for each area. She explains historical underpinnings of international law, examines the stakeholders involved, and discusses current policy and problems associated with it.
Buck applies key analytical concepts drawn from institutional analysis and regime theory to examine how legal and political concerns have affected the evolution of management regimes for the global commons. She presents in-depth case studies of each of the four regimes, outlining the historical evolution of the commons -- development of interest in exploiting the resource domain; conflicts among nations over the use of the commons; and efforts to design institutions to control access to the domains and to regulate their use -- and concluding with a description of the management regime that eventually emerged from the informal and formal negotiations.
The Global Commons provides a clear, useful introduction to the subject that will be of interest to general readers as well as to students in international relations and international environmental law, and in environmental law and policy generally.
Global Marine Biological Diversity presents the most up-to-date information and view on the challenge of conserving the living sea and how that challenge can be met.
“Insightful tour de force… Farrell’s writing is as informative as it is intoxicating” -- Publishers Weekly
Shanna Farrell loves a good drink. As a bartender, she not only poured spirits, but learned their stories—who made them and how. Living in San Francisco, surrounded by farm-to-table restaurants and high-end bars, she wondered why the eco-consciousness devoted to food didn’t extend to drinks.
The short answer is that we don’t think of spirits as food. But whether it's rum, brandy, whiskey, or tequila, drinks are distilled from the same crops that end up on our tables. Most are grown with chemicals that cause pesticide resistance and pollute waterways, and distilling itself requires huge volumes of water. Even bars are notorious for generating mountains of trash. The good news is that while the good drink movement is far behind the good food movement, it is emerging.
In A Good Drink, Farrell goes in search of the bars, distillers, and farmers who are driving a transformation to sustainable spirits. She meets mezcaleros in Guadalajara who are working to preserve traditional ways of producing mezcal, for the health of the local land, the wallets of the local farmers, and the culture of the community. She visits distillers in South Carolina who are bringing a rare variety of corn back from near extinction to make one of the most sought-after bourbons in the world. She meets a London bar owner who has eliminated individual bottles and ice, acculturating drinkers to a new definition of luxury.
These individuals are part of a growing trend to recognize spirits for what they are—part of our food system. For readers who have ever wondered who grew the pears that went into their brandy or why their cocktail is an unnatural shade of red, A Good Drink will be an eye-opening tour of the spirits industry. For anyone who cares about the future of the planet, it offers a hopeful vision of change, one pour at a time.
Scientists, theologians, and the spiritually inclined, as well as all those concerned with humanity's increasingly widespread environmental impact, are beginning to recognize that our ongoing abuse of the earth diminishes our moral as well as our material condition. Many people are coming to believe that strengthening the bonds among spirituality, science, and the natural world offers an important key to addressing the pervasive environmental problems we face.
The Good in Nature and Humanity brings together 20 leading thinkers and writers -- including Ursula Goodenough, Lynn Margulis, Dorion Sagan, Carl Safina, David Petersen, Wendell Berry, Terry Tempest Williams, and Barry Lopez -- to examine the divide between faith and reason, and to seek a means for developing an environmental ethic that will help us confront two of our most imperiling crises: global environmental destruction and an impoverished spirituality. The book explores the ways in which science, spirit, and religion can guide the experience and understanding of our ongoing relationship with the natural world and examines how the integration of science and spirituality can equip us to make wiser choices in using and managing the natural environment. The book also provides compelling stories that offer a narrative understanding of the relations among science, spirit, and nature.
Grounded in the premise that neither science nor religion can by itself resolve the prevailing malaise of environmental and moral decline, contributors seek viable approaches to averting environmental catastrophe and, more positively, to achieving a more harmonious relationship with the natural world. By bridging the gap between the rational and the religious through the concern of each for understanding the human relation to creation, The Good in Nature and Humanity offers an important means for pursuing the quest for a more secure and meaningful world.
Grass Productivity is a prodigiously documented textbook of scientific information concerning every aspect of management "where the cow and grass meet." Andre Voisin's "rational grazing" method maximizes productivity in both grass and cattle operations.
Established by the USDA Forest Service in 1993, the Great Basin Ecosystem Management Project for Restoring and Maintaining Sustainable Riparian Ecosystems is a large-scale research study that uses an interdisciplinary approach to examine the effects of climate change and human disturbance on riparian areas. Structured as a collaborative effort between management and research, the project focuses on understanding the geomorphic, hydrologic, and biotic processes that underlie riparian structure and function and the interrelated responses of those processes to disturbances, both natural and anthropogenic.
Great Basin Riparian Ecosystems, edited by Jeanne C. Chambers and Jerry R. Miller, presents the approach used by the researchers to study and understand riparian areas in the Great Basin region. It summarizes the current state of knowledge about those areas and provides insights into the use of the information generated by the project for the restor-ation and management of riparian ecosystems. Because semi-arid ecosystems like the Great Basin are highly sensitive to climate change, the study considered how key processes are affected by past and present climate. Great Basin Riparian Ecosystems also examines the processes over a continuum of temporal and spatial scales.
Great Basin Riparian Ecosystems addresses restoration over a variety of scales and integrates work from multiple disciplines, including riparian ecology, paleoecology, geomorphology, and hydrology. While the focus is on the Great Basin, the general approach is widely applicable, as it describes a promising new strategy for developing restoration and management plans, one based on sound principles derived from attention to natural systems.
For hundreds of years, the New England cod fishery was one of the most productive in the world, with higher average annual landings than any comparable ocean area. But in the late 1980s, fish catches dropped precipitously, as the cod, flounder, and other species that had long dominated the region seemed to lose their ability to recover from the massive annual harvests. Even today, with fishing sharply restricted, populations have not recovered.
Largely overlooked in this disaster is the intriguing human and scientific puzzle that lies at its heart: an anguished, seemingly inexplicable conflict between government scientists and fishermen over how fish populations are assessed, which has led to bitter disputes and has crippled efforts to agree on catch restrictions. In The Great Gulf, author David Dobbs offers a fascinating and compelling look at both sides of the conflict.
With great immediacy, he describes the history of the fisheries science in this most studied of oceans, and takes the reader on a series of forays over the Gulf of Maine and Georges Bank on both fishing boats and research vessels. He introduces us to the challenges facing John Galbraith, Linda Despres, and Jay Burnett, passionate and dedicated scientists with the National Marine Fisheries Service who spend countless hours working to determine how many fish there really are, and to the dilemma of Dave Goethel, a whipsmart, conscientious fisherman with 20 years's experience who struggles to understand the complex world he works in while maintaining his livelihood in an age of increasing regulation.
Dobbs paints the New England fishery problem in its full human and natural complexity, vividly portraying the vitality of an uncontrollable, ultimately unknowable sea and its strange, frightening, and beautiful creatures on the one hand, and on the other, the smart, irrepressible, unpredictable people who work there with great joy and humor, refusing to surrender to the many reasons for despair or cynicism. For anyone who read Cod or The Perfect Storm, this book offers the next chapter of the story -- how today's fishers and fisheries scientists are grappling with the collapse of this fishery and trying to chart, amid uncertain waters, a course towards its restoration.
Green at Work, published by Island Press in 1992, was the first source of information to help nontechnical but environmentally concerned job seekers learn about career opportunities with environmental companies or within the newly emerging "green" corporate culture. Now entirely revised and expanded, this indispensable volume again offers invaluable tools and strategies for launching a green career.
Susan Cohn has expanded her scope beyond the business world to examine environmentally focused, nontechnical careers in a wide variety of fields, including communications, banking and finance, consulting, public policy, the non-profit sector, and more. This completely updated edition includes:
As the need to confront unplanned growth increases, planners, policymakers, and citizens are scrambling for practical tools and examples of successful and workable approaches. Growth management initiatives are underway in the U.S. at all levels, but many American "success stories" provide only one piece of the puzzle. To find examples of a holistic approach to dealing with sprawl, one must turn to models outside of the United States.
In Green Urbanism, Timothy Beatley explains what planners and local officials in the United States can learn from the sustainable city movement in Europe. The book draws from the extensive European experience, examining the progress and policies of twenty-five of the most innovative cities in eleven European countries, which Beatley researched and observed in depth during a year-long stay in the Netherlands. Chapters examine:
Throughout, Beatley focuses on the key lessons from these cities -- including Vienna, Helsinki, Copenhagen, Stockholm, Zurich, Amsterdam, London, and Berlin -- and what their experience can teach us about effectively and creatively promoting sustainable development in the United States. Green Urbanism is the first full-length book to describe urban sustainability in European cities, and provides concrete examples and detailed discussions of innovative and practical sustainable planning ideas. It will be a useful reference and source of ideas for urban and regional planners, state and local officials, policymakers, students of planning and geography, and anyone concerned with how cities can become more livable.
While the state of California remains one of the most striking and varied landscapes in the world, it has experienced monumental changes since European settlers first set foot there. The past two centuries have witnessed an ongoing struggle between environment and economy, nature and humanity that has left an indelible mark on the region.
Green Versus Gold provides a compelling look at California's environmental history from its Native American past to conflicts and movements of recent decades. Acclaimed environmental historian Carolyn Merchant has brought together a vast storehouse of primary sources and interpretive essays to create a comprehensive picture of the history of ecological and human interactions in one of the nation's most diverse and resource-rich states.
For each chapter, Merchant has selected original documents that give readers an eyewitness account of specific environments and periods, along with essays from leading historians, geographers, scientists, and other experts that provide context and analysis for the documents. In addition, she presents a list of further readings of both primary and secondary sources. Among other topics, chapters examine:
California's natural environment and Native American lands the Spanish and Russian frontiers environmental impacts of the gold rush the transformation of forests and rangelands agriculture and irrigation cities and urban issues the rise of environmental science and contemporary environmental movement.
Merchant's informed and well-chosen selections present a unique view of decades of environmental change and controversy. Historians, educators, environmentalists, writers, students, scientists, policy makers, and others will find the book an enlightening and important contribution to the debate over our nation's environmental history.
Greening the College Curriculum provides the tools college and university faculty need to meet personal and institutional goals for integrating environmental issues into the curriculum. Leading educators from a wide range of fields, including anthropology, biology, economics, geography, history, literature, journalism, philosophy, political science, and religion, describe their experience introducing environmental issues into their teaching.
The book provides:
Growing Greener is an illustrated workbook that presents a new look at designing subdivisions while preserving green space and creating open space networks. Randall Arendt explains how to design residential developments that maximize land conservation without reducing overall building density, thus avoiding the political and legal problems often associated with "down-zoning."
The author offers a three-pronged strategy for shaping growth around a community's special natural and cultural features, demonstrating ways of establishing or modifying the municipal comprehensive plan, zoning ordinance, and subdivision ordinance to include a strong conservation focus. Open space protection becomes the central organizing principle for new residential development, and the open space that is protected is laid out to form an interconnected system of protected lands running across a community.
The book offers:
In addition, Growing Greener includes eleven case studies of actual conservation developments in nine states, and two exercises suitable for group participation. Case studies include: Ringfield, Chadds Ford Township, Pennsylvania; The Fields of St. Croix, City of Lake Elmo, Minnesota; Prairie Crossing, Grayslake, Illinois; The Meadows at Dolly Gordon Brook, York, Maine; Farmcolony, Standsville, Virginia; The Ranch at Roaring Fork, Carbondale, Colorado; and others.
Growing Greener builds upon and expands the basic ideas presented in Arendt's earlier work Conservation Design for Subdivisions, broadening the scope to include more detailed sections on the comprehensive planning process and information on how zoning ordinances can be updated to incorporate the concept of conservation design. It is the first practical publication to explain in detail how resource-conserving development techniques can be put into practice by municipal officials, residential developers, and site designers, and it offers a simple and straightforward approach to balancing opportunities for developers and conservationists.
Dryland degradation and desertification now affect almost a billion people around the world. Tragically, the biological resources and productivity of millions of acres of land are lost to desertification each year because people remain unaware of strategies and techniques that could improve yields, reduce risk, and begin healing the world's deserts. A Guide for Desert and Dryland Restoration is the first book to offer practical, field-tested solutions to this critical problem.
Author David Bainbridge has spent more than 25 years actively involved in restoring lands across the American Southwest. A Guide for Desert and Dryland Restoration presents the results of his years of fieldwork, as well as research and experience from scientists and practitioners around the globe.
The book discusses the ecology of desert plants, explores the causes of desertification and land abuse, and outlines the processes and procedures needed to evaluate, plan, implement, and monitor desert restoration projects. It sets forth economical and practical field-tested solutions for understanding site characteristics, selecting and growing plants, and ensuring that they survive with a minimal amount of water and care. Each chapter represents a guide to a critical topic for environmental restoration; extensive photographs, diagrams and drawings give detailed information for immediate application, and additional resources are included in appendixes.
A Guide for Desert and Dryland Restoration is the first comprehensive book focused on restoring arid regions, and clearly demonstrates that arid lands can be successfully rehabilitated. In addition to restorationists, the book will be an invaluable resource for anyone working in arid lands, including farmers, ranchers, gardeners, landscapers, outdoor recreation professionals, and activists.
Community development -- the economic, physical, and social revitalization of a community, led by the people who live in that community -- offers a wide range of exciting and rewarding employment options. But until now, there has been no "road map" for professionals, volunteers, students, or anyone wishing to become involved in the field.
A Guide to Careers in Community Development describes the many different kinds of community development jobs available, ranging from community organizing, to financing housing and new businesses, to redeveloping brownfields. It offers advice on how to break into the field along with guidance for career advancement and lateral movement.
Following an introductory chapter that offers an overview and definition of community development and its history, the authors describe:
A Guide to Careers in Community Development is an essential reference for anyone interested in working in the community development field, including graduate and undergraduate students, volunteers, and mid-career professionals seeking a more fulfilling line of work.
The Guide to Graduate Environmental Programs provides over 160 profiles of graduate programs across the country that offer curricula related to the environment. Because it was impossible to include every program in the book, and because these programs are constantly changing, Island Press welcomes suggested changes and additions to the profiles.
While Island Press is not the official "author" of the book, we are eager to receive new or updated information to be included in the next edition. Drawing from this information, Island Press has created an online listing of programs that were not profiled in the book. To submit your contribution, either fill out the postcard included in the book itself, or e-mail the name, address, phone number, and e-mail address of the "contact person" for that program; someone will contact that person for further information as the second edition is developed. If you would like to correct an error or to provide specific "update" information, please e-mail that information or return the card included in the book.
Following is a description of how the book was researched and the profiles compiled:
The research process began with a list, drawn up by career center staff at University of California at Santa Barbara, of 412 environmental programs, departments, and schools within universities across the country. The list was based on a literature search, queries over the Internet, and contact with environmental professionals and associations. Certificate-only programs were not included. Selection preference was given to programs mentioned repeatedly by environmental professionals, and to those drawing a more diverse student body.
Postcards requesting information and course catalogues were sent to all 412 programs.
A survey was mailed to faculty representing each program. Of the 412 graduate programs queried, 156 programs completed and returned their surveys. Each completed survey was reworked into a profile. Schools that did not respond to the mailing were contacted twice by phone to remind them to return the survey.
To supplement this information, and to ensure that the most noteworthy programs were included in the guide, additional profiles were compiled for a select number of key programs that failed to return their surveys. These latter profiles were based on literature review and personal interviews.
In all, each program was contacted three times – once by mail and twice by phone – to encourage them to submit their surveys, and to verify and update information.
The absence of a particular profile, or segment of a profile, reflects no editorial judgement on the part of the authors. Rather, if a specific program was not profiled, the most likely explanation is that the program in question did not return its survey. If you have information on other graduate environmental programs, please pass that information on to us, so that we can include them in future editions of the guide.
Most of the information provided was accurate as of November 1994 – the date by which the surveys were completed – and some follow-up verification was conducted during the summer of 1996, before the book went into production. There are an ever-expanding number of programs in the environmental field, and existing programs are constantly evolving. Readers should therefore expect to continue to encounter ongoing changes in names, titles, and phone numbers.
Superstorm Sandy sent a strong message that a new generation of urban development and infrastructure is desperately needed, and it must be designed with resilience in mind. As cities continue to face climate change impacts while growing in population, they find themselves at the center of resilience and green city solutions, yet political and budgetary obstacles threaten even the best-planned initiatives. In The Guide to Greening Cities, seasoned green city leaders Sadhu Johnston, Steven Nicholas, and Julia Parzen use success stories from across North America to show how to turn a green city agenda into reality.
The Guide to Greening Cities is the first book written from the perspective of municipal leaders with successful, on-the-ground experience working to advance green city goals. Through personal reflections and interviews with leading municipal staff in cities from San Antonio to Minneapolis, the authors share lessons for cities to lead by example in their operations, create programs, implement high-priority initiatives, develop partnerships, measure progress, secure funding, and engage the community. Case studies and chapters highlight strategies for overcoming common challenges such as changes of leadership and fiscal austerity. The book is augmented by a companion website, launching with the publication of the book, which offers video interviews of municipal leaders, additional case studies, and other resources.
Rich in tools, insights, and tricks of the trade, The Guide to Greening Cities helps professionals, policymakers, community leaders, and students understand which approaches have worked and why and demonstrates multidisciplinary solutions for creating healthy, just, and green communities.
Impact fees are one-time charges that are applied to new residential developments by local governments that are seeking funds to pay for the construction or expansion of public facilities, such as water and sewer systems, schools, libraries, and parks and recreation facilities. In the face of taxpayer revolts against increases in property taxes, impact fees are used increasingly by local governments throughout the U.S. to finance construction or improvement of their infrastructure. Recent estimates suggest that 60 percent of all American cities with over 25,000 residents use some form of impact fees. In California, it is estimated that 90 percent of such cities impose impact fees.
For more than thirty years, impact fees have been calculated based on proportionate share of the cost of the infrastructure improvements that are to be funded by the fees. However, neither laws nor courts have ensured that fees charged to new homes are themselves proportionate. For example, the impact fee may be the same for every home in a new development, even when homes vary widely in size and selling price. Data show, however, that smaller and less costly homes have fewer people living in them and thus less impact on facilities than larger homes. This use of a flat impact fee for all residential units disproportionately affects lower-income residents.
The purpose of this guidebook is to help practitioners design impact fees that are equitable. It demonstrates exactly how a fair impact fee program can be designed and implemented. In addition, it includes information on the history of impact fees, discusses alternatives to impact fees, and summarizes state legislation that can infl uence the design of local fee programs. Case studies provide useful illustrations of successful programs.
This book should be the first place that planning professionals, public officials, land use lawyers, developers, homebuilders, and citizen activists turn for help in crafting (or recrafting) proportionate-share impact fee programs.
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