The central concept guiding the management of parks and wilderness over the past century has been “naturalness”—to a large extent the explicit purpose in establishing these special areas was to keep them in their “natural” state. But what does that mean, particularly as the effects of stressors such as habitat fragmentation, altered disturbance regimes, pollution, invasive species, and climate change become both more pronounced and more pervasive?
 
Beyond Naturalness brings together leading scientists and policymakers to explore the concept of naturalness, its varied meanings, and the extent to which it provides adequate guidance regarding where, when, and how managers should intervene in ecosystem processes to protect park and wilderness values. The main conclusion is the idea that naturalness will continue to provide an important touchstone for protected area conservation, but that more specific goals and objectives are needed to guide stewardship.
 
The issues considered in Beyond Naturalness are central not just to conservation of parks, but to many areas of ecological thinking—including the fields of conservation biology and ecological restoration—and represent the cutting edge of discussions of both values and practice in the twenty-first century. This bookoffers excellent writing and focus, along with remarkable clarity of thought on some of the difficult questions being raised in light of new and changing stressors such as global environmental climate change.

Climate change demands a change in how we envision, prioritize, and implement conservation and management of natural resources. Addressing threats posed by climate change cannot be simply an afterthought or an addendum, but must be integrated into the very framework of how we conceive of and conduct conservation and management.
 
In Climate Savvy, climate change experts Lara Hansen and Jennifer Hoffman offer 18 chapters that consider the implications of climate change for key resource management issues of our time—invasive species, corridors and connectivity, ecological restoration, pollution, and many others. How will strategies need to change to facilitate adaptation to a new climate regime? What steps can we take to promote resilience?
 
Based on collaboration with a wide range of scientists, conservation leaders, and practitioners, the authors present general ideas as well as practical steps and strategies that can help cope with this new reality.
 
While climate change poses real threats, it also provides a chance for creative new thinking. Climate Savvy offers a wide-ranging exploration of how scientists, managers, and policymakers can use the challenge of climate change as an opportunity to build a more holistic and effective philosophy that embraces the inherent uncertainty and variability of the natural world to work toward a more robust future.

Past archaeological literature on cooperation theory has emphasized competition's role in cultural evolution. As a result, bottom-up possibilities for group cooperation have been under theorized in favor of models stressing top-down leadership, while evidence from a range of disciplines has demonstrated humans to effectively sustain cooperative undertakings through a number of social norms and institutions. Cooperation and Collective Action is the first volume to focus on the use of archaeological evidence to understand cooperation and collective action.

Disentangling the motivations and institutions that foster group cooperation among competitive individuals remains one of the few great conundrums within evolutionary theory. The breadth and material focus of archaeology provide a much needed complement to existing research on cooperation and collective action, which thus far has relied largely on game-theoretic modeling, surveys of college students from affluent countries, brief ethnographic experiments, and limited historic cases. In Cooperation and Collective Action, diverse case studies address the evolution of the emergence of norms, institutions, and symbols of complex societies through the last 10,000 years. This book is an important contribution to the literature on cooperation in human societies that will appeal to archaeologists and other scholars interested in cooperation research.

George Washington Carver (1864-1943) is best known for developing new uses for agricultural crops and teaching methods of soil improvement to southern farmers. This annotated selection of his letters and other writings from the collections at the Tuskegee Institute and the George Washington Carver National Monument in Diamond, Missouri, reveals the forces that shaped his creative genius—including the influence of persistent racism. His letters also show us Carver’s deep love for his fellow man, whether manifested in his efforts to treat polio victims in the 1930s or in his emotionally charged friendships that lasted a lifetime.
 
With a new chapter on the oral history interviews Dr. Kremer conducted (several years after publication of the first edition) with people who knew Carver personally, and the addition of newly uncovered documents and a bank of impressive photographs of Carver and some of his friends, this second edition of our classic title commemorates the 75th anniversary of Carver’s death on January 5, 2018.
 

At a community fire day in a northern California town several years ago, author Faith Kearns gave a talk on building fire-safe houses able to withstand increasingly common wildfires. Much to her surprise, Kearns was confronted by an audience member whose house had recently burned. What she thought was straightforward, helpful scientific information had instead retraumatized audience members, forcing Kearns to reevaluate her approach. Like Kearns, scientists today working on controversial issues from climate change to drought to COVID-19 are finding themselves more often in the middle of deeply traumatizing or polarized conflicts. It is no longer enough for scientists to communicate a scientific topic clearly. They must not only be experts in their fields of study, but also experts in navigating the thoughts, feelings, and opinions of members of the public they engage with, and with each other. And the conversations are growing more fraught.
 
In Getting to the Heart of Science Communication, Faith Kearns has penned a succinct guide for navigating the human relationships critical to the success of practice-based science. Using interviews and personal anecdotes, as well as her own insights as a field scientist, Kearns walks readers through the evolution of science communication and how emotional and high-stakes issues have shaped communication. The meat of the book lies in the middle chapters, where Kearns offers key tools for communicators: listening, working with conflict, and understanding trauma, loss, and healing. She concludes the book with a substantive discussion on diversity, equity, and inclusion in science communication, and advice to readers for handling their own emotional needs in an unpredictable career landscape.
 
This meticulously researched volume takes science communication to the next level, helping scientists see the value of listening as well as talking, understanding power dynamics in relationships, and addressing the roles of trauma, loss, grief, and healing. This book will particularly resonate with early to mid-career scientists, graduate students, and researchers, especially those in applied sciences who work closely with the public.
 

Tsunamis are infrequent but terrifying hazards for coastal communities. Difficult to predict, they materialize with little warning, claiming thousands of lives and causing billions of dollars in damage. Recent mega-tsunamis in Japan and Indonesia claimed close to 250,000 lives, triggering wide-scale economic and social disruption.  Developing countries cannot afford costly underwater cable systems, and governments and relief organizations have been forced to rely on flawed warning systems such as deep-sea buoys. Now, a groundbreaking new approach to tsunami detection and warning, which relies on low-cost underwater sensors and networks of smartphone communication, has changed the equation. Developed by an international, interdisciplinary team of researchers, this approach allows at-risk coastal communities to have an economically viable, scientifically sound means to protect themselves.

Coeditors Louise K. Comfort and Harkunti P. Rahayu, accomplished experts in disaster preparedness, contend that it will give communities precious additional minutes to communicate warnings about imminent tsunamis to residents, potentially saving many lives. Chapters authored by a close group of collaborators present the science behind this new approach, describing conceptual design, computational models, and real-time testing of a prototype system in the warm equatorial waters of Indonesia’s Mentawai Sea. Introductory chapters explain the sociotechnical approach—how undersea sensors can transmit data to a network of electronic devices on land to alert residents to impending tsunami threats in near-real time. Subsequent chapters explore what this might look like: assessing communities at risk; designing interactive information systems for communication during an emergency; designing wireless networks for smartphone communication that can guide residents to safety; and designing community-based shelters. The book concludes with a thoughtful analysis of how these sociotechnical advances might be used for all coastal cities at risk of tsunamis, sea-level rise, storm surges, and other hazards.

Hazardous Seas is an invaluable guide for policy makers and international NGOs looking to save lives from tsunamis and mitigate crippling damage to communities, and provides a comprehensive overview of tsunami detection and warning for students of engineering, computer science, planning, policy, and economic and environmental analysis. 
 

Making Nature Whole is a seminal volume that presents an in-depth history of the field of ecological restoration as it has developed in the United States over the last three decades. The authors draw from both published and unpublished sources, including archival materials and oral histories from early practitioners, to explore the development of the field and its importance to environmental management as well as to the larger environmental movement and our understanding of the world.

Considering antecedents as varied as monastic gardens, the Scientific Revolution, and the emerging nature-awareness of nineteenth-century Romantics and Transcendentalists, Jordan and Lubick offer unique insight into the field's philosophical and theoretical underpinnings. They examine specifically the more recent history, including the story of those who first attempted to recreate natural ecosystems early in the 20th century, as well as those who over the past few decades have realized the value of this approach not only as a critical element in conservation but also as a context for negotiating the ever-changing relationship between humans and the natural environment.

Making Nature Whole is a landmark contribution, providing context and history regarding a distinctive form of land management and giving readers a fascinating overview of the development of the field. It is essential reading for anyone interested in understanding where ecological restoration came from or where it might be going.

This book, the culmination of forty years of theorizing about the moral status of animals, explicates and justifies society’s moral obligation to animals in terms of the commonsense metaphysics and ethics ofAristotle’s concept of telos. Rollin uses this concept to assert that humans have a responsibility to treat animals ethically. Aristotle used the concept, from the Greek word for "end" or "purpose," as the core explanatory concept for the world we live in. We understand what an animal is by what it does. This is the nature of an animal, and helps us understand our obligations to animals.
 

• an outline of a science-based, ecologically sound approach to restoration
• discussion of the conceptual framework and rigorous principles that underlie the approach
• case studies of two types of restoration projects (restoring mined landscapes and restoring damaged rangelands) that illustrate how the approach, framework, and four key principles for restoring landscapes have been implemented
• a variety of scenarios that represent typical restoration problems and how those problems can be handled
• indicators for monitoring and how landscape function can be tracked and analyzed as part of a comprehensive monitoring program.

• frames the development of integrative river science and its application to river rehabilitation programs
• develops a coherent set of guiding principles with which to approach integrative river science
• considers the application of cross-disciplinary thinking in river rehabilitation experiences from around the world
• examines the crossover between science and management, outlining issues that must be addressed to promote healthier river futures

Case studies explore practical applications in different parts of the world, highlighting approaches to the use of integrative river science, measures of success, and steps that could be taken to improve performance in future efforts.

Will you please just listen to me? If you are a scientist, or a fan of science, have you ever wondered why your fact-based explanation of ground-breaking scientific research falls flat with family, friends, and the general public?  Do you want your research to matter to society and not simply be confined to arcane discussion in academic circles? Social science communicator Anne Helen Toomey argues that science today faces a public-relations crisis due to its historic emphasis on “trickle-down research,” and she calls for a whole-scale change in how scientists engage with the world. This book is a guide for the scientific community and its allies to build public trust in science—and scientists—again.

In this accessible volume, Toomey unpacks why “facts” mean different things to different people and how science-based attitudes and behaviors spread. Using humor, stories, and down-to-earth examples from her own science journey, she explains why seemingly straightforward evidence can sometimes feel irrelevant, or even threatening, to a skeptical public. This practical, how-to guide will help scientists think more carefully about the choices they make even before collecting data. It explores how researchers and others who work with science can address public distrust, communicate about uncertainty, and engage with policymakers for real-world impact.

Science with Impact argues that science can—and should—make a meaningful difference in society. It offers hope and guidance to those of us who wish to take the steps to make it so.