front cover of Make Waves
Make Waves
Water in Contemporary Literature and Film
Paula Anca Farca
University of Nevada Press, 2019
Water is a symbol of life, wisdom, fertility, purity, and death. Water also sustains and nourishes, irrigates our crops, keeps us clean and healthy, and contributes to our energy needs. But a strain has been put on our water resources as increased energy demands combine with the effects of climate change to create a treacherous environment. Individuals and communities around the globe increasingly face droughts, floods, water pollution, water scarcity, and even water wars. We tend to address and solve these concerns through scientific and technological innovations, but social and cultural analyses and solutions are needed as well.

In this edited collection, contributors tackle current water issues in the era of climate change using a wide variety of recent literature and film. At its core, this collection demonstrates that water is an immense reservoir of artistic potential and an agent of historical and cultural exchange. Creating familiar and relatable contexts for water dilemmas, authors and directors of contemporary literary texts and films present compelling stories of our relationships to water, water health, ecosystems, and conservation. They also explore how global water problems affect local communities around the world and intersect with social and cultural aspects such as health, citizenship, class, gender, race, and ethnicity.

This transformative work highlights the cultural significance of water—the source of life and a powerful symbol in numerous cultures. It also raises awareness about global water debates and crises.

 
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Making a Green Machine
The Infrastructure of Beverage Container Recycling
Jørgensen, Finn Arne
Rutgers University Press, 2011
Consider an empty bottle or can, one of the hundreds of billions of beverage containers that are discarded worldwide every year. Empty containers have been at the center of intense political controversies, technological innovation processes, and the modern environmental movement. Making a Green Machine examines the development of the Scandinavian beverage container deposit-refund system, which has the highest return rates in the world, from 1970 to present. Finn Arne Jørgensen investigates the challenges the system faced when exported internationally and explores the critical role of technological infrastructures and consumer convenience in modern recycling. His comparative framework charts the complex network of business and political actors involved in the development of the reverse vending machine (RVM) and bottle deposit legislation to better understand the different historical trajectories empty beverage containers have taken across markets, including the U.S. The RVM has served as more than a hole in the wall--it began simply as a tool for grocers who had to handle empty refillable glass bottles, but has become a green machine to redeem the empty beverage container, helping both business and consumers participate in environmental actions.
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Making Collaboration Work
Lessons From Innovation In Natural Resource Managment
Julia M. Wondolleck and Steven L. Yaffee
Island Press, 2000

Across the United States, diverse groups are turning away from confrontation and toward collaboration in an attempt to tackle some of our nation's most intractable environmental problems. Government agencies, community groups, businesses, and private individuals have begun working together to solve common problems, resolve conflicts, and develop forward-thinking strategies for moving in a more sustainable direction.

Making Collaboration Work examines those promising efforts. With a decade of research behind them, the authors offer an invaluable set of lessons on the role of collaboration in natural resource management and how to make it work. The book:

  • explains why collaboration is an essential component of resource management
  • describes barriers that must be understood and overcome
  • presents eight themes that characterize successful efforts
  • details the specific ways that groups can use those themes to achieve success
  • provides advice on how to ensure accountability
Drawing on lessons from nearly two hundred cases from around the country, the authors describe the experience in practical terms and offer specific advice for agencies and individuals interested in pursuing a collaborative approach. The images of success offered can provide ideas to those mired in traditional management styles and empower those seeking new approaches. While many of the examples involve natural resource professionals, the lessons hold true in a variety of public policy settings including public health, social services, and environmental protection, among others.

Making Collaboration Work will be an invaluable source of ideas and inspiration for policy makers, managers and staff of government agencies and nongovernmental organizations, and community groups searching for more productive modes of interaction.

[more]

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Making Development Sustainable
Redefining Institutions Policy And Economics
Edited by Johan Holmberg
Island Press, 1992

Making Development Sustainable is an integrated series of essays on the policies for sustainable development from one of the leading policy research institutes for environmental and development issues.

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Making Parks Work
Strategies for Preserving Tropical Nature
Edited by John Terborgh, Carel van Schaik, Lisa Davenport, and Madhu Rao
Island Press, 2002

Most scientists and researchers working in tropical areas are convinced that parks and protected areas are the only real hope for saving land and biodiversity in those regions. Rather than giving up on parks that are foundering, ways must be found to strengthen them, and Making Parks Work offers a vital contribution to that effort. Focusing on the "good news" -- success stories from the front lines and what lessons can be taken from those stories -- the book gathers experiences and information from thirty leading conservationists into a guidebook of principles for effective management of protected areas. The book:

  • offers a general overview of the status of protected areas worldwide
  • presents case studies from Africa, Latin America, and Asia written by field researchers with long experience working in those areas
  • analyzes a variety of problems that parks face and suggests policies and practices for coping with those problems
  • explores the broad philosophical questions of conservation and how protected areas can -- and must -- resist the mounting pressures of an overcrowded world

Contributors include Mario Boza, Katrina Brandon, K. Ullas Karanth, Randall Kramer, Jeff Langholz, John F. Oates, Carlos A. Peres, Herman Rijksen, Nick Salafsky, Thomas T. Struhsaker, Patricia C. Wright, and others.


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Making Peace with Nature
Ecological Encounters along the Korean DMZ
Eleana J. Kim
Duke University Press, 2022
The Korean Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) has been off-limits to human habitation for nearly seventy years, and in that time, biodiverse forms of life have flourished in and around the DMZ as beneficiaries of an unresolved war. In Making Peace with Nature Eleana J. Kim shows how a closer examination of the DMZ in South Korea reveals that the area’s biodiversity is inseparable from scientific practices and geopolitical, capitalist, and ecological dynamics. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with ecologists, scientists, and local residents, Kim focuses on irrigation ponds, migratory bird flyways, and land mines in the South Korean DMZ area, demonstrating how human and nonhuman ecologies interact and transform in spaces defined by war and militarization. In so doing, Kim reframes peace away from a human-oriented political or economic peace and toward a more-than-human, biological peace. Such a peace recognizes the reality of war while pointing to potential forms of human and nonhuman relations.
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Making Sense of Intractable Environmental Conflicts
Concepts and Cases
Edited by Roy J. Lewicki, Barbara Gray, and Michael Elliott
Island Press, 2002

Despite a vast amount of effort and expertise devoted to them, many environmental conflicts have remained mired in controversy, stubbornly defying resolution. Why can some environmental problems be resolved in one locale but remain contentious in another, often carrying on for decades? What is it about certain issues or the people involved that make a conflict seemingly insoluble.

Making Sense of Intractable Environmental Conflicts addresses those and related questions, examining what researchers and experts in the field characterize as "intractable" disputes—intense disputes that persist over long periods of time and cannot be resolved through consensus-building efforts or by administrative, legal, or political means. The approach focuses on the "frames" parties use to define and enact the dispute&#8212the lenses through which they interpret and understand the conflict and critical conflict dynamics. Through analysis of interviews, news media coverage, meeting transcripts, and archival data, the contributors to the book:

  • examine the concepts of frames, framing, and reframing, and the role that framing plays in conflicts
  • outline the essential characteristics of intractability and its major causes
  • offer case studies of eight intractable environmental conflicts
  • present a rich body of original interview material from affected parties
  • set forth recommendations for intervention that can help resolve disputes
Within each case chapter, the authors describe the historical development and fundamental nature of the conflict and then analyze the case from the perspective of the key frames that are integral to understanding the dynamics of the dispute. They also offer cross-case analyses of related conflicts.

Conflicts examined include those over natural resource use, toxic pollutants, water quality, and growth. Specific conflicts examined are the Quincy Library Group in California; Voyageurs National Park in Minnesota; Edwards Aquifer in Texas; Doan Brook in Cleveland, Ohio; the Antidegradation Environmental Advisory Group in Ohio; Drake Chemical in Pennsylvania; Alton Park/Piney Woods in Tennessee; and three examples of growth-related conflicts along the Front Range of Colorado's Rocky Mountains.

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The Malthusian Moment
Global Population Growth and the Birth of American Environmentalism
Robertson, Thomas
Rutgers University Press, 2012
Although Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962) is often cited as the founding text of the U.S. environmental movement, in The Malthusian Moment Thomas Robertson locates the origins of modern American environmentalism in twentieth-century adaptations of Thomas Malthus’s concerns about population growth. For many environmentalists, managing population growth became the key to unlocking the most intractable problems facing Americans after World War II—everything from war and the spread of communism overseas to poverty, race riots, and suburban sprawl at home.

Weaving together the international and the domestic in creative new ways, The Malthusian Moment charts the explosion of Malthusian thinking in the United States from World War I to Earth Day 1970, then traces the just-as-surprising decline in concern beginning in the mid-1970s. In addition to offering an unconventional look at World War II and the Cold War through a balanced study of the environmental movement’s most contentious theory, the book sheds new light on some of the big stories of postwar American life: the rise of consumption, the growth of the federal government, urban and suburban problems, the civil rights and women’s movements, the role of scientists in a democracy, new attitudes about sex and sexuality, and the emergence of the “New Right.”

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front cover of Mammals Of Nevada
Mammals Of Nevada
E. Raymond Hall
University of Nevada Press, 1995

First published in 1946, Mammals of Nevada is a monumental work. Hall and a team of more than sixty scientists, graduate students, and staff members of the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology in Kansas spent innumerable hours trapping, preparing, studying, and documenting thousands of specimens found within the state. This long out-of-print reference contains extensive examinations of the topography, climate, life zones, and floral and faunal areas. Hundreds of illustrations enhance the work. This updated edition features a new foreword and updated taxonomy by Timothy Lawlor.

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Mammals of the Pacific Northwest
From the Coast to the High Cascades
Chis Maser
Oregon State University Press, 1998

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Man and Nature
Or, Physical Geography as Modified by Human Action
George Marsh
Harvard University Press, 1965
George Perkins Marsh's Man and Nature was the first book to attack the American myth of the superabundance and the inexhaustibility of the earth. It was, as Lewis Mumford said, "the fountainhead of the conservation movement," and few books since have had such an influence on the way men view and use land. "It is worth reading after a hundred years," Mr. Lowenthal points out, "not only because it taught important lessons in its day, but also because it still teaches them so well...Historical insight and contemporary passion make Man and Nature an enduring classic."
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The Man from Clear Lake
Earth Day Founder Senator Gaylord Nelson
Bill Christofferson
University of Wisconsin Press, 2009
On Earth Day 1970 twenty million Americans displayed their commitment to a clean environment. It was called the largest demonstration in human history, and it permanently changed the nation’s political agenda. More than 1 billion people now participate in annual Earth Day activities.
    The seemingly simple idea—a day set aside to focus on protecting our natural environment—was the brainchild of U.S. Senator Gaylord Nelson of Wisconsin. It accomplished, far beyond his expectations, his lifelong goal of putting the environment onto the nation’s and the world’s political agendas.
    The life of Nelson, a small-town boy who learned his values and progressive political principles at an early age, is woven through the political history of the twentieth century. Nelson’s story intersects at times with Fighting Bob La Follette, Joe McCarthy, and Bill Proxmire in Wisconsin, and with George McGovern, Lyndon Johnson, Hubert Humphrey, Russell Long, Walter Mondale, John F. Kennedy, and others on the national scene.
 
Winner, Elizabeth A. Steinberg Prize, University of Wisconsin Press
 
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Managing Growth in America's Communities
Douglas R. Porter
Island Press, 1997

Communities across the country are turning to the concept of "growth management" to help plan for the future, as they seek to control the location, impact, character and timing of development in order to balance environmental and economic needs and concerns. Managing Growth in America's Communities presents practical information about proven strategies, programs and techniques of growth management for urban and rural communities. Topics examined include:

  • public roles in community development
  • determining locations and character of future development
  • protecting environmental and natural resources
  • managing infrastructure development
  • preserving community character and quality
  • achieving economic and social goals
  • property rights concerns
The author describes regulatory and programmatic techniques that have been most useful, obstacles to be overcome, and specific strategies that have been instrumental in achieving successful growth management programs. He provides examples from dozens of communities across the country as well as state and regional approaches currently in use. Brief profiles present overviews of problems addressed, techniques implemented, outcomes, and contact information for conducting further research. Among the communities profiled are Arlington County, Virginia; Fort Collins, Colorado; Lexington-Fayette County, Kentucky; Lincoln, Nebraska; Sarasota, Florida; Raleigh, North Carolina; Scottsdale, Arizona; and numerous others. Also included in the volume are informational sidebars written by leading experts in growth management including Robert Yaro, John De Grove, David Brower, and others.

Managing Growth in America's Communities is essential reading for community development specialists including government officials, planners, environmentalists, designers, developers, business people, and concerned citizens seeking innovative and feasible ways to manage growth.

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Managing Growth in America's Communities
Second Edition
Douglas Porter
Island Press, 2007
In this thoroughly revised edition of Managing Growth in America's Communities, readers will learn the principles that guide intelligent planning for communities of any size, grasp the major issues in successfully managing growth, and discover what has actually worked in practice (and where and why). This clearly written book details how American communities have grappled with the challenges of planning for growth and the ways in which they are adapting new ideas about urban design, green building, and conservation. Itdescribes the policies and programs they have implemented, and includes examples from towns and cities throughout the U.S.
 
“Growth management” is essential today, as communities seek to control the location, impact, character and timing of development in order to balance environmental and economic needs and concerns. Managing Growth in America's Communities addresses all of the key considerations:
  • Establishing public roles in community development;
  • Determining locations and character of future development;
  • Protecting environmental and natural resources;
  • Managing infrastructure development;
  • Preserving community character and quality;
  • Achieving economic and social goals;
  • Respecting property rights concerns.
 
The author, who is one of the nation’s leading authorities on managing community growth, provides examples from dozens of communities across the country, as well as state and regional approaches. Brief profiles present overviews of specific problems addressed, techniques utilized, results achieved, and contact information for further research. Informative sidebars offer additional perspectives from experts in growth management, including Robert Lang, Arthur C. Nelson, Erik Meyers, and others.
 
This new edition has been completely updated by the author. In particular, he considers issues of population growth, eminent domain, and the importance of design, especially “green” design. He also reports on the latest ideas in sustainable development, “smart growth,” neighborhood design, transit-oriented development, and green infrastructure planning. Like its predecessor, the second edition of Managing Growth in America's Communities is essential reading for anyone who is interested in how communities can grow intelligently.

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Managing Tourism Growth
Issues And Applications
Fred P. Bosselman, Craig Peterson, and Claire McCarthy
Island Press, 1999

Tourism is by many measures the world's largest and fastest growing industry, and it provides myriad benefits to hosts and visitors alike. Yet if poorly managed, tourism can have serious negative impacts on tourist communities-their environment, physical appearance, economy, health, safety, and even their social values.

Managing Tourism Growth analyzes and evaluates methods by which communities can carefully control tourism in order to maximize the positive aspects while minimizing the detrimental effects. The authors offer vivid examples of the ways in which uncontrolled tourism can adversely affect a community, and explain how to create an effective strategy that can protect tourism resources for current and future generations.

Specific chapters provide detailed descriptions and evaluations of various approaches that communities around the world have successfully used. The authors examine alternative legal and regulatory measures, management techniques, and incentives that target tourism growth at all levels, from the quality of development, to its amount and rate of growth, to the locations in which it takes place. Approaches examined include: quality differentiation, performance standards, and trade-off strategies; preservation rules, growth limitations, and incremental growth strategies; expansion, dispersal, and concentration strategies, and identification of new tourism resources. The final chapter presents a concise and useful checklist of the elements of successful strategies that can help guide destination communities in the planning process.

An outstanding feature of the book is the numerous and varied case studies it offers, including Santa Fe, New Mexico; Milford Sound, New Zealand; Nusa Dua, Bali; Great Barrier Reef, Australia; Sanibel, Florida; Canterbury, England; Republic of Maldives; Bruges, Belgium; Times Square, New York; Papua New Guinea; Park City, Utah; Whistler, British Columbia; and many others.

The depth and accessibility of information provided, along with the wealth of global case studies, make the book must-reading for planning professionals, government officials, tourism industry executives, consultants, and faculty and students of geography, planning, or tourism.

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Mapping And Imagination In The Great Basin
A Cartographic History
Richard V. Francaviglia
University of Nevada Press, 2005
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Marine Conservation Biology
The Science of Maintaining the Sea's Biodiversity
Edited by Elliott A. Norse and Larry B. Crowder; Foreword by Michael E. Soule ; Marine Conservation Biology Institute
Island Press, 2005

Humans are terrestrial animals, and our capacity to see and understand the importance and vulnerability of life in the sea has trailed our growing ability to harm it. While conservation biologists are working to address environmental problems humans have created on land, loss of marine biodiversity, including extinctions and habitat degradation, has received much less attention. At the same time, marine sciences such as oceanography and fisheries biology have largely ignored issues of conservation.

Marine Conservation Biology brings together for the first time in a single volume, leading experts from around the world to apply the lessons and thinking of conservation biology to marine issues. Contributors including James M. Acheson, Louis W. Botsford, James T. Carlton, Kristina Gjerde, Selina S. Heppell, Ransom A. Myers, Julia K. Parrish, Stephen R. Palumbi, and Daniel Pauly offer penetrating insights on the nature of marine biodiversity, what threatens it, and what humans can and must do to recover the biological integrity of the world's estuaries, coastal seas, and oceans.

Sections examine: distinctive aspects of marine populations and ecosystems; threats to marine biological diversity, singly and in combination; place-based management of marine ecosystems; the often-neglected human dimensions of marine conservation.

Marine Conservation Biology breaks new ground by creating the conceptual framework for the new field of marine conservation biology -- the science of protecting, recovering, and sustainably using the living sea. It synthesizes the latest knowledge and ideas from leading thinkers in disciplines ranging from larval biology to sociology, making it a must-read for research and teaching faculty, postdoctoral fellows, and graduate and advanced undergraduate students (who share an interest in bringing conservation biology to marine issues). Likewise, its lucid scientific examinations illuminate key issues facing environmental managers, policymakers, advocates, and funders concerned with the health of our oceans.

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Marine Ecosystem-Based Management in Practice
Different Pathways, Common Lessons
Julia M. Wondolleck and Steven L. Yaffee
Island Press, 2017
Julia Wondolleck and Steven Yaffee are hopeful.  Rather than lamenting the persistent conflicts in global marine ecosystems, they instead sought out examples where managers were doing things differently and making progress against great odds. They interviewed planners, managers, community members, fishermen, and environmentalists throughout the world to find the best lessons for others hoping to advance marine conservation. Their surprising discovery? Successful marine management requires not only the right mix of science, law, financing, and organizational structure, but also an atmosphere of collaboration—a comfortable place for participants to learn about issues, craft solutions, and develop the interpersonal relationships, trust, and understanding needed to put plans into action.
 
Marine Ecosystem-Based Management in Practice is the first practical guide for the marine conservation realm. In a unique collection of case studies, the authors showcase successful collaborative approaches to ecosystem-based management. The authors introduce the basic concepts of ecosystem-based management and five different pathways for making progress from community to multinational levels. They spotlight the  characteristics that are evident in all successful cases —the governance structures and social motivations that make it work. Case analyses ranging from the Gulf of Maine to the Channel Islands in Southern California comprise the bulk of the book, augmented by text boxes showcasing examples of guiding documents important to the process. They devote several ending chapters to discussion of the interpersonal relationships critical to successful implementation of marine ecosystem-based management. The book concludes with a discussion of the implications for policy and on-the-ground practice.
 
This book offers a hopeful message to policy makers, managers, practitioners, and students who will find this an indispensable guide to field-tested, replicable marine conservation management practices that work.
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Marine Reserves
A Guide to Science, Design, and Use
Jack Sobel and Craig Dahlgren; Center for Marine Conservation
Island Press, 2003

Conventional fishery management practices have failed to prevent the collapse of numerous fish stocks around the world. Amid growing concern about our ability to protect marine biodiversity and ecosystem integrity, scientists and managers alike are seeking alternative management tools. One of the most promising of those is no-take marine reserves -- areas of the sea where all consumptive use of natural resources is prohibited.


Marine Reserves is the first guidebook on no-take marine reserves, providing a synthesis of information on the underlying science, as well as design and implementation issues. The book, by Jack Sobel and Craig Dahlgren, describes the need for marine reserves and their potential benefits, examines how reserves can be designed to achieve specific objectives, and considers gaps in our knowledge and the research needed to address those gaps. Chapters examine: marine biological and geophysical issues relevant to reserve design; potential economic and biological benefits of marine reserves, and the likelihood of achieving them; influence of social and economic factors on reserve design and implementation; lessons learned from past efforts to establish marine reserves.


Also included are three case studies from California, Belize, and the Bahamas, as well as a review of experiences globally across a broad range of geographical locations, socioeconomic conditions, and marine environments. Case studies provide background on the history of marine reserves in each location, the process by which reserves were created, and the effect of the reserves on marine populations and communities as well as on human communities.


Marine Reserves represents an invaluable guide for fishery managers and marine protected area managers in creating and implementing effective marine reserves, and an accessible reference for environmentalists and others concerned with the conservation of marine resources. It will also be useful in undergraduate and graduate courses in marine ecology, fisheries, marine policy, and related fields.

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Markets and the Environment, Second Edition
Nathaniel O. Keohane and Sheila M. Olmstead
Island Press, 2015
A clear grasp of economics is essential to understanding why environmental problems arise and how we can address them. So it is with good reason that Markets and the Environment has become a classic text in environmental studies since its first publication in 2007. Now thoroughly revised with updated information on current environmental policy and real-world examples of market-based instruments, the primer is more relevant than ever.
 
The authors provide a concise yet thorough introduction to the economic theory of environmental policy and natural resource management. They begin with an overview of environmental economics before exploring topics including cost-benefit analysis, market failures and successes, and economic growth and sustainability. Readers of the first edition will notice new analysis of cost estimation as well as specific market instruments, including municipal water pricing and waste disposal. Particular attention is paid to behavioral economics and cap-and-trade programs for carbon.
 
Throughout, Markets and the Environment is written in an accessible, student-friendly style. It includes study questions for each chapter, as well as clear figures and relatable text boxes. The authors have long understood the need for a book to bridge the gap between short articles on environmental economics and tomes filled with complex algebra. Markets and the Environment makes clear how economics influences policy, the world around us, and our own lives. 
[more]

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Mass Destruction
The Men and Giant Mines That Wired America and Scarred the Planet
Timothy J. LeCain
Rutgers University Press, 2009
The place: The steep mountains outside Salt Lake City. The time: The first decade of the twentieth century. The man: Daniel Jackling, a young metallurgical engineer. The goal: A bold new technology that could provide billions of pounds of cheap copper for a rapidly electrifying America. The result: Bingham's enormous "Glory Hole," the first large-scale open-pit copper mine, an enormous chasm in the earth and one of the largest humanmade artifacts on the planet. Mass Destruction is the compelling story of Jackling and the development of open-pit hard rock mining, its role in the wiring of an electrified America, as well its devastating environmental consequences.

Mass destruction mining soon spread around the nation and the globe, providing raw materials essential to the mass production and mass consumption that increasingly defined the emerging "American way of life." At the dawn of the last century, Jackling's open pit replaced immense but constricted underground mines that probed nearly a mile beneath the earth, to become the ultimate symbol of the modern faith that science and technology could overcome all natural limits. A new culture of mass destruction emerged that promised nearly infinite supplies not only of copper, but also of coal, timber, fish, and other natural resources.

But, what were the consequences? Timothy J. LeCain deftly analyzes how open-pit mining continues to affect the environment in its ongoing devastation of nature and commodification of the physical world. The nation's largest toxic Superfund site would be one effect, as well as other types of environmental dead zones around the globe. Yet today, as the world's population races toward American levels of resource consumption, truly viable alternatives to the technology of mass destruction have not yet emerged.

[more]

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Meander Scars
Reflections on Healing the Willamette River
Abby Phillips Metzger
Oregon State University Press, 2013
Abby Phillips Metzger’s book of personal stories recounts a forgotten Oregon river, the Willamette, as it was before white settlement. Once a rich network of channels and sloughs, the Willamette today bears the scars of development and degradation.

Yet, through canoe trips and intimate explorations of the river, Metzger discovers glints of resiliency: a beaver trolling through a slough, native fish in quiet backwaters, and strong currents that carry undertones of the wild Willamette. Together with tales from farmers and scientists alike, these experiences lead Metzger to ask whether something scarred can fully heal, and whether a disjointed river can be whole again.

A story of re-discovery as told by a learner, Meander Scars will appeal to readers of literary nonfiction, river advocates, naturalists, and outdoor enthusiasts interested in sustaining healthy river systems for themselves, their children, and beyond.
[more]

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Measures of Success
Designing, Managing, and Monitoring Conservation and Development Projects
Richard Margoluis and Nick Salafsky
Island Press, 1998

Measures of Success is a practical, hands-on guide to designing, managing, and measuring the impacts of community-oriented conservation and development projects. It presents a simple, clear, logical, and yet comprehensive approach to developing and implementing effective programs, and can help conservation and development practitioners use principles of adaptive management to test assumptions about their projects and learn from the results.

The book presents a systematic approach to improving the focus, effectiveness, and efficiency of projects, with specific guidelines and advice on:

  • designing a realistic conceptual framework based on local site conditions
  • developing clearly defined goals, objectives, and activities
  • creating a monitoring plan that can be used to assess whether goals and objectives are being met
  • integrating social and biological science techniques to collect the most relevant and useful data in the most cost-effective way
  • using the information obtained through the monitoring plan to modify the project and learn from the result

The text is developed in eight chapters that follow the structure of a planning process from conception to completion, with the chapters linked by four scenarios that serve as teaching case studies throughout the book. Examples from these scenarios illustrate the processes and tools discussed, and each scenario case study is presented in its entirety in an appendix to the volume. The approach has been developed and field tested by practitioners working in many different projects in Latin America, Africa, and Asia, and their experience and input ensure that the guide is both practical and useful.

Measures of Success is the only work of its kind currently available, and represents an invaluable resource for field-based practitioners, project managers, and local community leaders, as well as for international NGO staff, college and university teachers and students, researchers, and government officials.

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The Media Commons
Globalization and Environmental Discourses
Patrick D Murphy
University of Illinois Press, 2017
Today's global media sustains a potent new environmental consciousness. Paradoxically, it also serves as a far-reaching platform that promotes the unsustainable consumption ravaging our planet. Patrick Murphy musters theory, fieldwork, and empirical research to map how the media communicates today's many distinct, competing, and even antagonistic environmental discourses.

The media draws the cultural boundaries of our environmental imagination--and influences just who benefits. Murphy's analysis emphasizes social context, institutional alignments, and commercial media's ways of rendering discussion. He identifies and examines key terms, phrases, and metaphors as well as the ways consumers are presented with ideas like agency and the place of nature. What emerges is the link between pervasive messaging and an "environment" conjured by our media-saturated social imagination. As the author shows, today's complex, integrated media networks shape, frame, and deliver many of our underlying ideas about the environment. Increasingly--and ominously--individuals and communities experience these ideas not only in the developed world but in the increasingly consumption-oriented Global South.

[more]

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A Meeting at the Mighty Mac
Alia Kirsch
Michigan Publishing Services, 2023
This book was an assignment for the Winter 2022 course "Nature, Culture & Landscape" offered by Dr. Sara Adlerstein at the University of Michigan's School for Environment & Sustainability. The charge was to create a children's book related to the theme of the Great Lakes with the goal of inspiring children to care and make environmentally sound choices.
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Meetings with Remarkable Mushrooms
Forays with Fungi across Hemispheres
Alison Pouliot
University of Chicago Press, 2023

A whirlwind journey through fungus frontiers that underscores how appreciating fungi is key to understanding our planet’s power and fragility.

What can we learn from the lives of fungi? Splitting time between the northern and southern hemispheres, ecologist Alison Pouliot ensures that she experiences two autumns per year in the pursuit of fungi—from Australia’s deserts to Iceland’s glaciers to America’s Cascade Mountains. In Meetings with Remarkable Mushrooms, we journey alongside Pouliot, magnifiers in hand, as she travels the world.

With Pouliot as our guide, we smell fire-loving truffles that transform their scent after burning to lure mammals who eat them and, ultimately, spread their spores. We spot the eerie glow of the ghost fungus, a deceptive entity that looks like an edible oyster mushroom but will soon heave back out—along with everything else in your stomach—if you take a bite. And we crawl alongside vegetable caterpillars, which are neither vegetable nor caterpillar but a fungus that devours insects from the inside out.

Featuring stunning color photographs of these mycological miracles, Meetings with Remarkable Mushrooms shows that understanding fungi is fundamental for harmonizing with the natural world.

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Memorials Matter
Emotion, Environment, and Public Memory at American Historical Sites
Jennifer K. Ladino
University of Nevada Press, 2019
From the sculptured peaks of Mount Rushmore to the Coloradan prairie lands at Sand Creek to the idyllic islands of the Pacific, the West’s signature environments add a new dimension to the study of memorials. In such diverse and often dramatic landscapes, how do the natural and built environments shape our emotions?

In Memorials Matter, author Jennifer Ladino investigates the natural and physical environments of seven diverse National Park Service (NPS) sites in the American West and how they influence emotions about historical conflict and national identity. Chapters center around the region’s diverse inhabitants (Mexican, Chinese, Japanese, African, and Native Americans) and the variously traumatic histories these groups endured—histories of oppression, exploitation, incarceration, slavery, and genocide. Drawing on material ecocritical theory, Ladino emphasizes the ideological and political importance of memorials and how they evoke visceral responses that are not always explicitly “storied,” but nevertheless matter in powerful ways.

In this unique blend of narrative scholarship and critical theory, Ladino demonstrates how these memorial sites and their surrounding landscapes, combined with written texts, generate emotion and shape our collective memory of traumatic events. She urges us to consider our everyday environments and to become attuned to features and feelings we might have otherwise overlooked.
 
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Metapopulations and Wildlife Conservation
Edited by Dale R. McCullough
Island Press, 1996

Development of rural landscapes is converting once-vast expanses of open space into pockets of habitat where wildlife populations exist in isolation from other members of their species. The central concept of metapopulation dynamics -- that a constellation of partially isolated patches can yield overall stability to a system that is chaotic at the level of the individual patch -- offers an important new way of thinking about the conservation and management of populations dispersed among small habitat fragments. This approach is proving to be a rich resource for biologists hoping to arrest the current catastrophic loss of biodiversity.

An understanding of metapopulation theory and analysis is critical to the modern practice of wildlife conservation and management. This volume provides a comprehensive overview of the subject, addressing the needs of an applied professional audience for comprehensible information to integrate into their practices. Leading conservation biologists, ecologists, wildlife managers, and other experts consider the emergence and development of metapopulation theory and explore its applicability and usefulness to real-world conservation programs.

Introductory chapters provide background information on basic concepts such as models, genetics, landscape configuraton, and edges and corridors. Subsequent chapters present detailed methods of analyzing metapopulation structure. Case studies of an array of vertebrate species, including the Swedish pool frog, the northern spotted owl, Stephens' kangaroo rat, Florida scrub jay, Mediterranean monk seal, Steller sea lion, tule elk, and others, illustrate nuances of metapopulation theory analysis and its practical applications.

Contributors describe what metapopulation approaches bring to wildlife conservation and management, present models of how metapopulation thinking has been applied in specific situations, and suggest the analysis required in given cases. Metapopulations and Wildlife Conservation is essential reading for anyone working in the field of wildlife conservation and managment.

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Mice in the Freezer, Owls on the Porch
The Lives of Naturalists Frederick and Francis Hamerstrom
Helen M. Corneli
University of Wisconsin Press, 2006

    Mice in the Freezer, Owls on the Porch is in many ways a love story—about a quiet scientist and his flamboyant wife, but also about their passions for hunting, for wild lands, and for the grouse and raptor species that they were instrumental in saving from destruction.
    From the papers and letters of Frederick and Frances Hamerstrom, the reminiscences of contemporaries, and her own long friendship with this extraordinary couple who were her neighbors, Helen Corneli draws an intimate picture of Fran and "Hammy" from childhood through the genesis and maturation of a romantic, creative, and scientific relationship. Following the Hamerstroms as they give up a life of sophisticated convention and comfort for the more "civilized" (as Aldo Leopold would have it) pleasures of living and conducting on-the-spot research into diminishing species, Corneli captures the spirit of the Hamerstroms, their profession, and the natural and human environments in which they worked. A nuanced account of the labors, adventures, and achievements that distinguished the Hamerstroms over the years—and that inspired a generation of naturalists—this book also provides a dramatic account of conservation history over the course of the twentieth century, particularly in Wisconsin during the eventful years from the 1920s through the 1970s.

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The Michigan Eco-Traveler
A Guide to Sustainable Adventures in the Great Lakes State
Sally Barber
University of Michigan Press, 2014

Michigan offers some of the most wonderfully diverse recreation opportunities in the country. The Michigan Eco-Traveler is for a new and growing breed of leisure traveler and adventurer—the individual seeking to experience the pleasant peninsulas responsibly by minimizing his or her eco-footprint. The book introduces readers to the importance of eco-friendly travel and highlights some of the best eco-conscience venues across the state that offer activities from golfing to skiing to sailing and much more. The book also examines environmental pressures on the state’s recreational resources, revealing the critical need for joining together in conservation practices, and offers travelers helpful tips for evaluating the sustainability of their own favorite recreational spots.

Whether you’re a weekend traveler, extreme adventurer, or family on vacation, The Michigan Eco-Traveler lights the way to a greener getaway. Naturalists, conservationists, and hospitality experts will find the book equally helpful in responding to the ever rising demand for sustainable recreation.

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Mimicking Nature's Fire
Restoring Fire-Prone Forests In The West
Stephen F. Arno and Carl E. Fiedler
Island Press, 2005

The magnificent stands of old-growth trees that characterize the forests of western North America depend on periodic fires for their creation or survival. Deprived of that essential disturbance process eventually they die, leaving an overcrowded growth of smaller trees vulnerable to intense blazes and epidemics of insects and disease.

In Mimicking Nature's Fire, forest ecologists Stephen Arno and Carl Fiedler present practical solutions to the pervasive problem of deteriorating forest conditions in western North America. Advocating a new direction in forest management, they explore the promise of "restoration forestry" -- an ecologically based approach that seeks to establish forest structures in which fire can once again serve as a beneficial process rather than as a destructive aberration.

The book begins with an overview of fundamentals: why traditional forestry tried to exclude fire from forests, why that attempt failed, and why foresters and ecologists now recognize the need for management based on how natural ecosystems operate. Subsequent chapters consider: how fire's historic role provides a foundation for designing restoration strategies; why a hands-off approach will not return forests to their historical condition; how management goals influence the strategies used in restoration forestry.

The second part of the book presents case studies of restoration projects in the western United States and Canada, representing different forest types, different historic fire regimes, and contrasting management goals. For each project, the authors describe why and how the project is being conducted, profile forest conditions, and describe methods of treatment. They also report what has been accomplished, identify obstacles to restoration, and offer their candid but understanding evaluation. Mimicking Nature's Fire concludes by placing restoration forestry in the broad context of conserving forests worldwide and outlining factors critical for its success.

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Mitigation Banking
Theory And Practice
Edited by Lindell L. Marsh, David A. Salvesen, and Douglas R. Porter; Foreword by John De Grove
Island Press, 1996

Under the Clean Water Act, development that results in the permanent destruction of wetlands must, in most cases, be mitigated by the creation of a new wetland or the restoration of a degraded one. In recent years, the concept of "mitigation banking" has emerged. Rather than require developers to create and maintain wetlands on their own on a quid pro quo basis, mitigation banking allows them to pay for wetlands that have been created and maintained properly by others to compensate for their damage.

The contributors to this volume provide an overview of mitigation banking experience in the United States, examine the key issues and concerns -- from providing assurances to determining the value of credits -- and describe the practice of developing and operating a mitigation bank. Topics include:

  • history and current experience of mitigation banking
  • policies and concerns of local, state, and federal agencies
  • economics of mitigation banking
  • funding, management, and operation of banks
  • starting a mitigation bank
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Modeling the Environment, Second Edition
Andrew Ford
Island Press, 2010
Modeling the Environment was the first textbook in an emerging field—the modeling techniques that allow managers and researchers to see in advance the consequences of actions and policies in environmental management. This new edition brings the book thoroughly up to date and reaffirms its status as the leading introductory text on the subject.
 
System dynamics is one of the most widely known and widely used methods of modeling. The fundamental principles of this approach are demonstrated here with a wide range of examples, including geo-hydrology, population biology, epidemiology and economics. The applications demonstrate the transferability of the systems approach across disciplines, across spatial scales, and across time scales. All of the models are implemented with stock and flow software programs such as Stella and Vensim. These programs are easy and fun to learn, and they allow students to develop realistic models within the first few weeks of a college course.
 
System dynamics has emerged as the most common approach in collaborative projects to address environmental problems. The stock and flow structures and the emphasis on feedback control provide a common language that is understood by scientists from many disciplines. Although the interdisciplinary approach described here is widely used in practice, there are few books to aid instruction. Modeling the Environment meets the urgent need for instructional materials in interdisciplinary modeling of environmental systems.
 
Visit
http://www.wsu.edu/~forda/AA2nd.html for valuable classroom materials.
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The Mojave Desert
Ecosystem Processes and Sustainability
Robert Webb
University of Nevada Press, 2009

In The Mojave Desert, thirty-eight scientists who are all specialists in desert ecology address the threats to the Mojave, as well as the potential for natural recovery and active restoration. The contributing authors discuss the desert from several perspectives: regional threats such as expanding human populations, climate change, atmospheric nitrogen deposition, and invasive plants; the impact of roads in a desert ecosystem; soils and plant communities; shrinking aquifers; and the monitoring and sustainability of this fragile ecosystem. Finally, they discuss the importance of long-term data and the ways scientists and resource managers can interact to enhance understanding of the processes of change in the Mojave Desert and to advance the preservation and restoration of its precious resources.The Mojave Desert offers the fruits of extensive research in a number of disciplines and a sound assessment of the current state and possible future of one of the world's major deserts. As human intrusion and climate change increasingly threaten the Mojave's ecosystem, studies like this are essential in helping scientists, land managers, and the general public understand what is at risk and what can be done to preserve this austere and hauntingly beautiful region.

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A Monastery for the Ibex
Conservation, State, and Conflict on the Gran Paradiso, 1919-1949
Wilko Graf von Hardenberg
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2020
Finalist, 2023 Turku Book Award
Gran Paradiso National Park is Italy’s oldest, and was instrumental in preventing the extinction of the Alpine ibex between World War I and just after World War II. Today, there are more than 30,000 ibex living in the Alps, all of which descended from that last colony protected in Gran Paradiso under Mussolini’s rule. Wilko Graf von Hardenberg merges the history of conservation with the area’s social history and Italy’s larger political history to produce a multifaceted narrative about the park as an institution, the conflicts it triggered, and practices adopted to manage the ibex despite hurdles placed by the fascist regime. The book’s central argument is that, in fascist Italy, preservation—propaganda notwithstanding—was a product of the regime’s continuities with the previous liberal system. Italy’s total fascist transformation, accomplished only more than a decade after Mussolini took power, virtually unmade the early successes of preservation set in place by the nascent “nature state” in the regime’s early years. Despite this conflict, conservationists succeeded in preserving the ibex. Hardenberg positions this success within the broader history of science, conservation, and tourism in fascist Italy and the Alpine region, creating a comprehensive historical background and comparative reference to ongoing debates about the role of nature conservation in general and in relation to the state and its agencies.
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Monitoring Ecosystems
Interdisciplinary Approaches for Evaluating Ecoregional Initiatives
Edited by David E. Busch and Joel C. Trexler; Foreword by Lance H. Gunderson
Island Press, 2003
Often a commitment to large ecosystem initiatives is linked both conceptually and legally with requirements for ecological monitoring as a means of evaluating the effectiveness of management actions. Programs to determine ecosystem status and trends can contribute significantly to the resolution of difficult and contentious management questions, and can play a key role both in sharpening the focus of research questions and in developing adaptive approaches to resource management.Monitoring Ecosystems brings together leading scientists and researchers to offer a groundbreaking synthesis of lessons learned about ecological monitoring in major ecoregional initiatives around the United States. Contributors—Donald L. DeAngelis, Lance H. Gunderson, Barry R. Noon, John C. Ogden, Craig J. Palmer, Keith M. Reynolds, Paul L. Ringold, John R. Sauer, Lawrence E. Stevens, and many others—present insights and experiences gained from their work in designing, developing, and implementing comprehensive ecosystem monitoring programs in the Pacific Northwest, the lower Colorado River Basin, and the Florida Everglades. The book:outlines the conceptual and scientific underpinnings for regional-scale ecosystem monitoringexamines the role and importance of data management, modeling, and integrative analysesconsiders techniques for and experience with monitoring habitats, populations, and communitiesChapters by the editors synthesize and expand on points made throughout the volume and present recommendations for establishing frameworks for monitoring across scales, from local to international.Monitoring Ecosystems presents a critical examination of the lessons learned from direct experience along with generalized conclusions that can be applied to monitoring programs in the United States and around the world. It is a vital contribution to science-based monitoring efforts that will allow those responsible for developing and implementing ecoregional initiatives to make use of knowledge gained in previous efforts, enabling them to focus their energies on system-specific questions and problems.
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Montana Ghost Dance
Essays on Land and Life
By John B. Wright
University of Texas Press, 1998

Montana has been the "last best place" for so many people. A century ago, Native Americans gathered here to perform the Ghost Dance—a last, doomed attempt to make white settlers vanish and bring back the old ways of life. Today, people are still pouring into Montana, looking for the pristine wilderness they saw in A River Runs through It.

The reality of Montana—indeed, of all the West—has never matched the myths, but this book eloquently explores how the search for a perfect place is driving growth, development, and resource exploitation in Big Sky country. In ten personal essays, John Wright looks at such things as Montana myths; old-timers; immigrants; elk; ways of seeing the landscape; land conservation and land trusts; the fate of the Blackfoot, Bitterroot, and Paradise valleys; and some means of preserving the last, best places.

These reflections offer a way of understanding Montana that goes far beyond the headlines about militia groups and celebrities' ranches. Montana never was or will be a pristine wilderness, but Wright believes that much can be saved if natives and newcomers alike see what stands to be lost. His book is a wake-up call, not a ghost dance.

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More City than Water
A Houston Flood Atlas
Edited by Lacy M. Johnson and Cheryl Beckett
University of Texas Press, 2022

2022 Art in Service to the Environment Award, Sierra Club Lone Star Chapter
Honorable Mention, 2022 Nonfiction Prize, Writers' League of Texas

Writers explore a city’s relationship with chronic catastrophic flooding.

Shortly after Hurricane Harvey dumped a record 61 inches of rain on Houston in 2017, celebrated writer and Bayou City resident Lacy M. Johnson began collecting flood stories. Although these stories attested to the infinite variety of experience in America’s most diverse city, they also pointed to a consistent question: What does catastrophic flooding reveal about this city, and what does it obscure?

More City than Water brings together essays, conversations, and personal narratives from climate scientists, marine ecologists, housing activists, urban planners, artists, poets, and historians as they reflect on the human geography of a region increasingly defined by flooding. Both a literary and a cartographic anthology, More City than Water features striking maps of Houston’s floodplains, waterways, drainage systems, reservoirs, and inundated neighborhoods. Designed by University of Houston seniors from the Graphic Design program, each map, imaginative and precise, shifts our understanding of the flooding, the public’s relationship to it, and the fraught reality of rebuilding. Evocative and unique, this is an atlas that uncovers the changing nature of living where the waters rise.

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The Mortal Sea
Fishing the Atlantic in the Age of Sail
W. Jeffrey Bolster
Harvard University Press, 2012

Since the Viking ascendancy in the Middle Ages, the Atlantic has shaped the lives of people who depend upon it for survival. And just as surely, people have shaped the Atlantic. In his innovative account of this interdependency, W. Jeffrey Bolster, a historian and professional seafarer, takes us through a millennium-long environmental history of our impact on one of the largest ecosystems in the world.

While overfishing is often thought of as a contemporary problem, Bolster reveals that humans were transforming the sea long before factory trawlers turned fishing from a handliner's art into an industrial enterprise. The western Atlantic's legendary fishing banks, stretching from Cape Cod to Newfoundland, have attracted fishermen for more than five hundred years. Bolster follows the effects of this siren's song from its medieval European origins to the advent of industrialized fishing in American waters at the beginning of the twentieth century.

Blending marine biology, ecological insight, and a remarkable cast of characters, from notable explorers to scientists to an army of unknown fishermen, Bolster tells a story that is both ecological and human: the prelude to an environmental disaster. Over generations, harvesters created a quiet catastrophe as the sea could no longer renew itself. Bolster writes in the hope that the intimate relationship humans have long had with the ocean, and the species that live within it, can be restored for future generations.

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The Mosquito Crusades
A History of the American Anti-Mosquito Movement from the Reed Commission to the First Earth Day
Patterson, Gordon
Rutgers University Press, 2009
Among the struggles of the twentieth century, the one between humans and mosquitoes may have been the most vexing, as demonstrated by the long battle to control these bloodsucking pests. As vectors of diseases such as malaria, yellow fever, encephalitis, and dengue fever, mosquitoes forced open a new chapter in the history of medical entomology. Based on extensive use of primary sources, The Mosquito Crusades traces this saga and the parallel efforts of civic groups in New Jersey's Meadowlands and along San Francisco Bay's east side to manage the dangerous mosquito population.

Providing readers with a fascinating exploration of the relationship between science, technology, and public policy, Gordon Patterson's narrative begins in New Jersey with John B. Smith's effort to develop a comprehensive plan and solution for mosquito control, one that would serve as a national model. From the Reed Commission's 1900 yellow fever experiment to the first Earth Day seventy years later, Patterson provides an eye-opening account of the crusade to curtail the deadly mosquito population.

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The Most Important Fish in the Sea
Menhaden and America
H. Bruce Franklin
Island Press, 2008
In this brilliant portrait of the oceans’ unlikely hero, H. Bruce Franklin shows how menhaden have shaped America’s national—and natural—history, and why reckless overfishing now threatens their place in both. Since Native Americans began using menhaden as fertilizer, this amazing fish has greased the wheels of U.S. agriculture and industry. By the mid-1870s, menhaden had replaced whales as a principal source of industrial lubricant, with hundreds of ships and dozens of factories along the eastern seaboard working feverishly to produce fish oil. Since the Civil War, menhaden have provided the largest catch of any American fishery. Today, one company—Omega Protein—has a monopoly on the menhaden “reduction industry.” Every year it sweeps billions of fish from the sea, grinds them up, and turns them into animal feed, fertilizer, and oil used in everything from linoleum to health-food supplements.
 
The massive harvest wouldn’t be such a problem if menhaden were only good for making lipstick and soap. But they are crucial to the diet of bigger fish and they filter the waters of the Atlantic and Gulf coasts, playing an essential dual role in marine ecology perhaps unmatched anywhere on the planet. As their numbers have plummeted, fish and birds dependent on them have been decimatedand toxic algae have begun to choke our bays and seas. In Franklin’s vibrant prose, the decline of a once ubiquitous fish becomes an adventure story, an exploration of the U.S. political economy, a groundbreaking history of America’s emerging ecological consciousness, and an inspiring vision of a growing alliance between environmentalists and recreational anglers.
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The Most Important Fish in the Sea
Menhaden and America
H. Bruce Franklin
Island Press, 2008
In this brilliant portrait of the oceans’ unlikely hero, H. Bruce Franklin shows how menhaden have shaped America’s national—and natural—history, and why reckless overfishing now threatens their place in both. Since Native Americans began using menhaden as fertilizer, this amazing fish has greased the wheels of U.S. agriculture and industry. By the mid-1870s, menhaden had replaced whales as a principal source of industrial lubricant, with hundreds of ships and dozens of factories along the eastern seaboard working feverishly to produce fish oil. Since the Civil War, menhaden have provided the largest catch of any American fishery. Today, one company—Omega Protein—has a monopoly on the menhaden “reduction industry.” Every year it sweeps billions of fish from the sea, grinds them up, and turns them into animal feed, fertilizer, and oil used in everything from linoleum to health-food supplements.
 
The massive harvest wouldn’t be such a problem if menhaden were only good for making lipstick and soap. But they are crucial to the diet of bigger fish and they filter the waters of the Atlantic and Gulf coasts, playing an essential dual role in marine ecology perhaps unmatched anywhere on the planet. As their numbers have plummeted, fish and birds dependent on them have been decimatedand toxic algae have begun to choke our bays and seas. In Franklin’s vibrant prose, the decline of a once ubiquitous fish becomes an adventure story, an exploration of the U.S. political economy, a groundbreaking history of America’s emerging ecological consciousness, and an inspiring vision of a growing alliance between environmentalists and recreational anglers.
[more]

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Mother Earth and Uncle Sam
How Pollution and Hollow Government Hurt Our Kids
By Rena I. Steinzor
University of Texas Press, 2007

In this compelling study, Rena Steinzor highlights the ways in which the government, over the past twenty years, has failed to protect children from harm caused by toxic chemicals. She believes these failures—under-funding, excessive and misguided use of cost/benefit analysis, distortion of science, and devolution of regulatory authority—have produced a situation in which harm that could be reduced or eliminated instead persists.

Steinzor states that, as a society, we are neglecting our children's health to an extent that we would find unthinkable as individual parents, primarily due to the erosion of the government's role in protecting public health and the environment. At this pace, she asserts, our children will inherit a planet under grave threat. We can arrest these developments if a critical mass of Americans become convinced that these problems are urgent and the solutions are near at hand.

By focusing on three specific case studies—mercury contamination through the human food chain, perchlorate (rocket fuel) in drinking water, and the effects of ozone (smog) on children playing outdoors—Steinzor creates an analysis grounded in law, economics, and science to prove her assertions about the existing dysfunctional system.

Steinzor then recommends a concise and realistic series of reforms that could reverse these detrimental trends and serve as a blueprint for restoring effective governmental intervention. She argues that these recommendations offer enough material to guide government officials and advocacy groups toward prompt implementation, for the sake of America's—and the world's—future generations.

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Mountains of Injustice
Social and Environmental Justice in Appalachia
Michele Morrone
Ohio University Press, 2011

Research in environmental justice reveals that low-income and minority neighborhoods in our nation’s cities are often the preferred sites for landfills, power plants, and polluting factories. Those who live in these sacrifice zones are forced to shoulder the burden of harmful environmental effects so that others can prosper. Mountains of Injustice broadens the discussion from the city to the country by focusing on the legacy of disproportionate environmental health impacts on communities in the Appalachian region, where the costs of cheap energy and cheap goods are actually quite high.

Through compelling stories and interviews with people who are fighting for environmental justice, Mountains of Injustice contributes to the ongoing debate over how to equitably distribute the long-term environmental costs and consequences of economic development.

Contributors:
Laura Allen, Brian Black, Geoffrey L. Buckley, Donald Edward Davis, Wren Kruse, Nancy Irwin Maxwell, Chad Montrie, Michele Morrone, Kathryn Newfont, John Nolt, Jedediah S. Purdy, and Stephen J. Scanlan.

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Mourning in the Anthropocene
Ecological Grief and Earthly Coexistence
Joshua Trey Barnett
Michigan State University Press, 2022
Enormous ecological losses and profound planetary transformations mean that ours is a time to grieve beyond the human. Yet, Joshua Trey Barnett argues in this eloquent and urgent book, our capacity to grieve for more-than-human others is neither natural nor inevitable. Weaving together personal narratives, theoretical meditations, and insightful readings of cultural artifacts, he suggests that ecological grief is best understood as a rhetorical achievement. As a collection of worldmaking practices, rhetoric makes things matter, bestows value, directs attention, generates knowledge, and foments feelings. By dwelling on three rhetorical practices—naming, archiving, and making visible—Barnett shows how they prepare us to grieve past, present, and future ecological losses. Simultaneously diagnostic and prescriptive, this book reveals rhetorical practices that set our ecological grief into motion and illuminates pathways to more connected, caring earthly coexistence.
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A Movement of the People
The Roots of Environmental Education and Advocacy in Alabama
Katie Lamar Jackson, Foreword by David Mathews
University of Alabama Press, 2017
How a grassroots movement led primarily by women shaped Alabama’s environmental consciousness.

A Movement of the People: The Roots of Environmental Education and Advocacy in Alabama is a detailed history of the Alabama Environmental Quality Association (AEQA). The AEQA helped to establish groundbreaking environmental protection and natural resource preservation policies for the state and the region and grew into one of the nation’s most progressive environmental education efforts.

The AEQA began in 1966 with the relatively simple political action agenda of cleaning up unsightly and unsanitary roadside trash. These inspired citizens collaborated with civic leaders to identify and remove illegal rural dumps and create more regulated landfills statewide. Eventually they became involved in the “Keep America Beautiful” campaign and with the US Public Health Service in its attempt to rid the state of the yellow-fever mosquito vector, Aedes aegypti, which breeds in standing, fetid water. The acme of these early efforts was the passage of Alabama’s Solid Waste Disposal Law of 1969, one of the nation’s first such bills.

The AEQA’s dedicated staff and supporters spearheaded other environmental projects, many of which remain active today, such as recycling programs with industry giants throughout the Southeast and the founding of the Bartram Trail Conference, a multistate initiative to identify and preserve the path that Quaker botanist William Bartram took through the territory before its formation into states.

Using recorded interviews with Martha McInnis, executive vice president of the AEQA, and full access to a meticulously preserved archive of the organization’s papers and artifacts, Katie Lamar Jackson relates this previously untold story of remarkable “citizen activism.” A Movementof the People is a valuable account of the organization’s growth and advancement, both economically and societally, which serves as a blueprint for successful civic activism and grassroots organizing.
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Mythical River
Chasing the Mirage of New Water in the American Southwest
Melissa L. Sevigny
University of Iowa Press, 2016
In a lyrical mix of natural science, history, and memoir, Melissa L. Sevigny ponders what it means to make a home in the American Southwest at a time when its most essential resource, water, is overexploited and undervalued. Mythical River takes the reader on a historical sojourn into the story of the Buenaventura, an imaginary river that led eighteenth- and nineteenth-century explorers, fur trappers, and emigrants astray for seventy-five years. This mythical river becomes a metaphor for our modern-day attempts to supply water to a growing population in the Colorado River Basin. Readers encounter a landscape literally remapped by the search for “new” water, where rivers flow uphill, dams and deep wells reshape geography, trees become intolerable competitors for water, and new technologies tap into clouds and oceans.

In contrast to this fantasy of abundance, Sevigny explores acts of restoration. From a dismantled dam in Arizona to an accidental wetland in Mexico, she examines how ecologists, engineers, politicians, and citizens have attempted to secure water for desert ecosystems. In a place scarred by conflict, she shows how recognizing the rights of rivers is a path toward water security. Ultimately, Sevigny writes a new map for the future of the American Southwest, a vision of a society that accepts the desert’s limits in exchange for an intimate relationship with the natural world. 
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