front cover of Radiant Infrastructures
Radiant Infrastructures
Media, Environment, and Cultures of Uncertainty
Rahul Mukherjee
Duke University Press, 2020
In Radiant Infrastructures Rahul Mukherjee explores how the media coverage of nuclear power plants and cellular phone antennas in India—what he calls radiant infrastructures—creates environmental publics: groups of activists, scientists, and policy makers who use media to influence public opinion. In documentaries, lifestyle television shows, newspapers, and Bollywood films, and through other forms of media (including radiation-sensing technologies), these publics articulate contesting views about the relationships between modernity, wireless signals, and nuclear power. From testimonies of cancer patients who live close to cell towers to power plant operators working to contain information about radiation leaks and health risks, discussions in the media show how radiant infrastructures are at once harbingers of optimism about India's development and emitters of potentially carcinogenic radiation. In tracing these dynamics, Mukherjee expands understandings of the relationship between media and infrastructure and how people make sense of their everyday encounters with technology and the environment.
[more]

front cover of Rainforest Cowboys
Rainforest Cowboys
The Rise of Ranching and Cattle Culture in Western Amazonia
By Jeffrey Hoelle
University of Texas Press, 2015

This ambitious interdisciplinary study is the first to examine the interlinked economic uses and cultural practices and beliefs surrounding cattle in Western Amazonia, where cattle raising is at the center of debates about economic development and environ

Winner, Brazil Section Book Award, Latin American Studies Association, 2016

The opening of the Amazon to colonization in the 1970s brought cattle, land conflict, and widespread deforestation. In the remote state of Acre, Brazil, rubber tappers fought against migrant ranchers to preserve the forest they relied on, and in the process, these “forest guardians” showed the world that it was possible to unite forest livelihoods and environmental preservation. Nowadays, many rubber tappers and their children are turning away from the forest-based lifestyle they once sought to protect and are becoming cattle-raisers or even caubois (cowboys). Rainforest Cowboys is the first book to examine the social and cultural forces driving the expansion of Amazonian cattle raising in all of their complexity.

Drawing on eighteen months of fieldwork, Jeffrey Hoelle shows how cattle raising is about much more than beef production or deforestation in Acre, even among “carnivorous” environmentalists, vilified ranchers, and urbanites with no land or cattle. He contextualizes the rise of ranching in relation to political economic structures and broader meanings to understand the spread of “cattle culture.” This cattle-centered vision of rural life builds on local experiences and influences from across the Americas and even resembles East African cultural practices. Written in a broadly accessible and interdisciplinary style, Rainforest Cowboys is essential reading for a global audience interested in understanding the economic and cultural features of cattle raising, deforestation, and the continuing tensions between conservation and development in the Amazon.

[more]

front cover of Reckoning with Harm
Reckoning with Harm
The Toxic Relations of Oil in Amazonia
Amelia Fiske
University of Texas Press, 2023

An ethnography of the Ecuadorian Amazon that demonstrates the need for a relational, place-based, contingent understanding of harm and toxicity.

Reckoning with Harm is a striking ethnographic analysis of the harm resulting from oil extraction. Covering fifty years of settler colonization and industrial transformation of the Ecuadorian Amazon, Amelia Fiske interrogates the relations of harm. She moves between forest-courtrooms and oily waste pits, farms and toxic tours, to explore both the ways in which harm from oil is entangled with daily life and the tensions surrounding efforts to verify and redress it in practice. Attempts to address harm from the oil industry in Ecuador have been consistently confounded by narrow, technocratic understandings of evidence, toxicity, and responsibility. Building on collaborators’ work to contest state and oil company insistence that harm is controlled and principally chemical in nature, Fiske shows that it is necessary to refigure harm as relational in order to reckon with unremediated contamination of the past while pushing for broad forms of accountability in the present. She theorizes that harm is both a relationship and an animating feature of relationships in this place, a contingent understanding that is needed to contemplate what comes next when living in a toxic world.

[more]

front cover of Recycling Land
Recycling Land
Understanding the Legal Landscape of Brownfield Development
Elizabeth Glass Geltman
University of Michigan Press, 2000
Older--and often economically depressed--industrial cities generally have a number of well located but abandoned industrial sites. Too frequently these sites are heavily polluted by the residue of toxic wastes dumped when old factories were still in use. These "brownfield" sites must be cleaned up under existing law before they can be redeveloped. And yet the question of who will bear the cost of this cleanup frequently stymies efforts to return these sites to productive use. A complicated net of federal, state and local regulations can involve several generations of owners in potential liability for the cleanup, frequently resulting only in extended litigation, not often in the cleanup of the site. In this book, Elizabeth Glass Geltman surveys the laws on both the federal and state level with regard to the cleanup of brownfield sites. The author makes valuable suggestions for reforming these laws that will help encourage land reuse and the accompanying redevelopment of the industrial base of many American cities both large and small.
Elizabeth Glass Geltman is Professor of Law, George Washington University Law School and is the author of many books on environmental law, including Modern Environmental Law: Policy and Practice.
[more]

front cover of Reducing Toxics
Reducing Toxics
A New Approach To Policy And Industrial Decisionmaking
Edited by Robert Gottlieb
Island Press, 1995
In Reducing Toxics, leading experts address industry, technology, health, and policy issues and explore the potential for pollution prevention at the industry and facility levels. They consider both the regulatory and institutional settings of toxics reduction initiatives, prescribe strategies for developing a prevention framework, and apply these principles in analyzing industry case studies. Among the topics considered are:
  • the evolution of, and limits to, current environmental policy
  • incorporating prevention into production planning and decisionmaking
  • do voluntary programs lead to industry greening or greenwashing?
  • case studies of the chemical, aerosols, radiator repair and electric vehicle industries
  • opportunities for and barriers to pollution prevention
Reducing Toxics offers an analytic framework for defining and understanding different approaches in the toxics area and describes the basis for a new policy and industrial decisionmaking construct.
[more]

front cover of Refining Nature
Refining Nature
Standard Oil and the limits of Efficiency
Jonathan Wlasiuk
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2017
The Standard Oil Company emerged out of obscurity in the 1860s to capture 90 percent of the petroleum refining industry in the United States during the Gilded Age. John D. Rockefeller, the company’s founder, organized the company around an almost religious dedication to principles of efficiency. Economic success masked the dark side of efficiency as Standard Oil dumped oil waste into public waterways, filled the urban atmosphere with acrid smoke, and created a consumer safety crisis by selling kerosene below congressional standards.

Local governments, guided by a desire to favor the interests of business, deployed elaborate engineering solutions to tackle petroleum pollution at taxpayer expense rather than heed public calls to abate waste streams at their source. Only when refinery pollutants threatened the health of the Great Lakes in the twentieth century did the federal government respond to a nascent environmental movement. Organized around the four classical elements at the core of Standard Oil’s success (earth, air, fire, and water), Refining Nature provides an ecological context for the rise of one of the most important corporations in American history.
[more]

front cover of A Region at Risk
A Region at Risk
The Third Regional Plan For The New York-New Jersey-Connecticut Metropolitan Area
Robert D. Yaro and Tony Hiss
Island Press, 1996

Regional Plan Association, the nation's oldest regional planning organization, has worked since 1929 to improve the quality of life in the New York-New Jersey-Connecticut metropolitan area. The Association has crafted two long-term plans and successfully promoted their implementation through advocacy and coalition building.

The Association's Third Regional Plan describes a series of key initiatives aimed at not only improving quality of life, but also at increasing economic competitiveness, encouraging more sustainable patterns of growth, and expanding opportunities and choice in employment, housing, and community.

The Plan presents five major campaigns, each of which combines the goals of economic, equity, and environmental improvements. They are:

  • Greensward -- to protect and restore large natural resource systems at the periphery of urbanized areas
  • Centers -- to "recenter" regions that have experienced decades of sprawl growth
  • Mobility -- to transform existing transit infrastructure to create a regional express rail network that would dramatically improve public transit, reduce highway congestion, and speed freight movement
  • Workforce -- to provide the region's workforce with the skills and opportunities needed to participate in the economy of the future
  • Governance -- to rationalize the activities of existing authorities, encourage service sharing among municipal governments, and encourage more effective state and regional land-use planning programs

While focusing on the New York-New Jersey-Connecticut metropolitan area, the Plan's broad themes have universal applicability to regions throughout the industrialized world.

[more]

front cover of Reimagining Livelihoods
Reimagining Livelihoods
Life beyond Economy, Society, and Environment
Ethan Miller
University of Minnesota Press, 2019

A provocative reassessment of the concepts underlying the struggle for sustainable development

Much of the debate over sustainable development revolves around how to balance the competing demands of economic development, social well-being, and environmental protection. “Jobs vs. environment” is only one of the many forms that such struggles take. But what if the very terms of this debate are part of the problem? Reimagining Livelihoods argues that the “hegemonic trio” of economy, society, and environment not only fails to describe the actual world around us but poses a tremendous obstacle to enacting a truly sustainable future.

In a rich blend of ethnography and theory, Reimagining Livelihoods engages with questions of development in the state of Maine to trace the dangerous effects of contemporary stories that simplify and domesticate conflict. As in so many other places around the world, the trio of economy, society, and environment in Maine produces a particular space of “common sense” within which struggles over life and livelihood unfold. Yet the terms of engagement embodied by this trio are neither innocent nor inevitable. It is a contingent, historically produced configuration, born from the throes of capitalist industrialism and colonialism. Drawing in part on his own participation in the struggle over the Plum Creek Corporation’s “concept plan” for a major resort development on the shores of Moosehead Lake in northern Maine, Ethan Miller articulates a rich framework for engaging with the ethical and political challenges of building ecological livelihoods among diverse human and nonhuman communities. 

In seeking a pathway for transformative thought that is both critical and affirmative, Reimagining Livelihoods provides new frames of reference for living together on an increasingly volatile Earth.

[more]

front cover of Reinventing Electric Utilities
Reinventing Electric Utilities
Competition, Citizen Action, and Clean Power
Ed Smeloff and Peter Asmus; Foreword by Amory Lovins
Island Press, 1997

Traditionally protected as monopolies, electric utilities are now being caught in the fervor for deregulation that is sweeping the country. Nearly forty states have enacted or are considering laws and regulations that will profoundly alter the way the electric utility industry is governed. Concerned citizens are beginning to ponder the environmental implications of such a change, and while many fear that the pressure of competition will exacerbate environmental problems, others argue that deregulation provides a tremendous opportunity for citizens to work toward promoting cleaner energy and a more sustainable way of life.

In Reinventing Electric Utilities, Ed Smeloff and Peter Asmus consider the challenges for citizens and the utility industry in this new era of competition. Through an in-depth case study of the Sacramento Municipal Utility District (SMUD), a once-troubled utility that is now widely regarded as a model for energy efficiency and renewable energy development, they explore the changes that have occurred in the utility industry, and the implications of those changes for the future. The SMUD portrait is complemented by regional case studies of Portland General Electric and the Washington Public Power Supply System, the New England Electric Service, Northern States Power, the Electricity Reliability Council of Texas, and others that highlight the efforts of citizen groups and utilities to eliminate unproductive and environmentally damaging sources of power and to promote the use of new, cleaner energy technologies.

The authors present and explain some of the fundamental principles that govern restructuring, while acknowledging that solutions will depend upon the unique resource needs, culture, and utility structure of each particular region. Smeloff and Asmus argue that any politically sustainable restructuring of the electric services industry must address the industry's high capital cost commitments and environmental burdens.

Throughout, they make the case that with creative leadership, open and competitive markets, and the active participation of citizens, this upheaval offers a unique opportunity for electric utilities to lessen the burden of electricity production on the environment and reduce the cost of electric services through the use of more competitive, cleaner power sources.

While neither technological innovation nor the magic of the market will in and of itself reinvent the electric utility industry, the influence of those dynamic forces must be understood. Reinventing Electric Utilities is an important work for policymakers, energy professionals, and anyone concerned about the future of the electric services industry.

[more]

front cover of Reshaping the Built Environment
Reshaping the Built Environment
Ecology, Ethics, and Economics
Edited by Charles J. Kibert; Foreword by Alex Wilson
Island Press, 1999

Because of the profound effects of the built environment on the availability of natural resources for future generations, those involved with designing, creating, operating, renovating, and demolishing human structures have a vital role to play in working to put society on a path toward sustainability.

This volume presents the thinking of leading academics and professionals in planning, civil engineering, economics, ecology, architecture, landscape architecture, construction, and related fields who are seeking to discover ways of creating a more sustainable built environment. Contributors address the broad range of issues involved, offering both insights and practical examples. In the book:

  • Stephen Kellert describes the scope of the looming ecological crisis
  • Herman Daly explains the unsustainability of the world's economic system and the dangers inherent in the current movement toward globalization
  • John Todd describes the evolution of wastewater processing systems inspired by natural systems
  • John Tillman Lyle discusses the importance of landscape in the creation of the human environment
  • Randall Arendt argues for a fundamental shift in land development patterns that would not only provide for more green space in new developments, but would also increase the profitability of developers and the quality of life for new home owners
  • Thomas E. Graedel proposes the application of lessons learned from the emerging science of industrial ecology to the creation of "green" building.
While the transition to sustainability will not be easy, natural systems provide abundant models of architecture, engineering, production, and waste conversion that can be used in rethinking the human habitat and its interconnections. This volume provides insights that can light the way to a new era in which a reshaped built environment will not only provide improved human living conditions, but will also protect and respect the earth's essential natural life-support systems and resources.
[more]

front cover of Residual Governance
Residual Governance
How South Africa Foretells Planetary Futures
Gabrielle Hecht
Duke University Press, 2023
In Residual Governance, Gabrielle Hecht dives into the wastes of gold and uranium mining in South Africa to explore how communities, experts, and artists fight for infrastructural and environmental justice. Hecht outlines how mining in South Africa is a prime example of what she theorizes as residual governance—the governance of waste and discard, governance that is purposefully inefficient, and governance that treats people and places as waste and wastelands. She centers the voices of people who resist residual governance and the harms of toxic mining waste to highlight how mining’s centrality to South African history reveals the links between race, capitalism, the state, and the environment. In this way, Hecht shows how the history of mining in South Africa and the resistance to residual governance and environmental degradation is a planetary story: the underlying logic of residual governance lies at the heart of contemporary global racial capitalism and is a major accelerant of the Anthropocene.
[more]

front cover of Residues
Residues
Thinking Through Chemical Environments
Soraya Boudia
Rutgers University Press, 2022
Residues offers readers a new approach for conceptualizing the environmental impacts of chemicals production, consumption, disposal, and regulation. Environmental protection regimes tend to be highly segmented according to place, media, substance, and effect; academic scholarship often reflects this same segmented approach. Yet, in chemical substances we encounter phenomena that are at once voluminous and miniscule, singular and ubiquitous, regulated yet unruly. Inspired by recent studies of materiality and infrastructures, we introduce “residual materialism” as a framework for attending to the socio-material properties of chemicals and their world-making powers. Tracking residues through time, space, and understanding helps us see how the past has been built into our present chemical environments and future-oriented regulatory systems, why contaminants seem to always evade control, and why the Anthropocene is as inextricably harnessed to the synthesis of carbon into new molecules as it is driven by carbon’s combustion.
[more]

front cover of Resource Guide for Creating Successful Communities
Resource Guide for Creating Successful Communities
Michael A. Mantell, Stephen F. Harper, and Luther Propst; Conservation Foundation
Island Press, 1990

Developed to assist users of Creating Successful Communities, the Resource Guide for Creating Successful Communities includes a detailed outline of the many tax benefits of private land conservation; examples of ordinances covering all land types, articles of incorporation, bylaws, and easements; and a glossary of growth management tools.

[more]

front cover of Resource Radicals
Resource Radicals
From Petro-Nationalism to Post-Extractivism in Ecuador
Thea Riofrancos
Duke University Press, 2020
In 2007, the left came to power in Ecuador. In the years that followed, the “twenty-first-century socialist” government and a coalition of grassroots activists came to blows over the extraction of natural resources. Each side declared the other a perversion of leftism and the principles of socioeconomic equality, popular empowerment, and anti-imperialism. In Resource Radicals, Thea Riofrancos unpacks the conflict between these two leftisms: on the one hand, the administration's resource nationalism and focus on economic development; and on the other, the anti-extractivism of grassroots activists who condemned the government's disregard for nature and indigenous communities. In this archival and ethnographic study, Riofrancos expands the study of resource politics by decentering state resource policy and locating it in a field of political struggle populated by actors with conflicting visions of resource extraction. She demonstrates how Ecuador's commodity-dependent economy and history of indigenous uprisings offer a unique opportunity to understand development, democracy, and the ecological foundations of global capitalism.
[more]

front cover of Risk and Adaptation in a Cancer Cluster Town
Risk and Adaptation in a Cancer Cluster Town
Laura Hart
Rutgers University Press, 2023
In disease cluster communities across the country, environmental contamination from local industries is often suspected as a source of disease. But civic action is notoriously hampered by the slow response from government agencies to investigate the cause of disease and the complexities of risk assessment. 

In Risk and Adaptation in a Cancer Cluster Town, Laura Hart examines another understudied dimension of community inaction: the role of emotion and its relationship to community experiences of social belonging and inequality. Using a cancer cluster community in Northwest Ohio as a case study, Hart advances an approach to risk that grapples with the complexities of community belonging, disconnect, and disruption in the wake of suspected industrial pollution. Her research points to a fear driven not only by economic anxiety, but also by a fear of losing security within the community—a sort of pride that is not only about status, but connectedness. Hart reveals the importance of this social form of risk—the desire for belonging and the risk of not belonging—ultimately arguing that this is consequential to how people make judgements and respond to issues. Within this context where the imperative for self-protection is elusive, affected families experience psychosocial and practical conflicts as they adapt to cancer as a way of life. Considering a future where debates about risk and science will inevitably increase, Hart considers possibilities for the democratization of risk management and the need for transformative approaches to environmental justice.
[more]

front cover of Ritual House
Ritual House
Drawing on Nature's Rhythms for Architecture and Urban Design
Ralph Knowles
Island Press, 2006
Celebrated architect Ralph Knowles, Distinguished Emeritus at USC’s School of Architecture, has carefully crafted a book for architects, designers, planners—anyone who yearns to reconnect to the natural world through the built environment. He shows us how to re-examine a shadow, a wall, a window, a landscape, as they respond to the natural cycles of heat, light, wind, and rain. Analyzing methods of sheltering that range from a Berber tent to a Spanish courtyard to the cityscape of contemporary Los Angeles, Ritual House shows us the future: by coining the concept of solar access zoning, he introduces a radical yet increasingly viable solution for tomorrow’s mega-cities.
[more]

logo for Harvard University Press
River Cities, City Rivers
Thaïsa Way
Harvard University Press

Cities have been built alongside rivers throughout history. These rivers can shape a city’s success or cause its destruction. At the same time, city-building reshapes rivers and their landscapes. Cities have harnessed, modified, and engineered rivers, altering ecologies and creating new landscapes in the process of urbanization. Rivers are also shaped by the development of cities as urban landscapes, just as the cities are shaped by their relationship to the river.

In the river city, the city river is a dynamic contributor to the urban landscape with its flow of urban economies, geographies, and cultures. Yet we have rarely given these urban landscapes their due. Building on emerging interest in the resilience of cities, this book and the original symposium consider river cities and city rivers to explore how histories have shaped the present and how they might inform our visions of the future.

[more]

front cover of River City and Valley Life
River City and Valley Life
An Environmental History of the Sacramento Region
Christopher J. Castaneda
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2013
Often referred to as “the Big Tomato,” Sacramento is a city whose makeup is significantly more complex than its agriculture-based sobriquet implies. In River City and Valley Life, seventeen contributors reveal the major transformations to the natural and built environment that have shaped Sacramento and its suburbs, residents, politics, and economics throughout its history.

The site that would become Sacramento was settled in 1839, when Johann Augustus Sutter attempted to convert his Mexican land grant into New Helvetia (or “New Switzerland”). It was at Sutter’s sawmill fifty miles to the east that gold was first discovered, leading to the California Gold Rush of 1849. Nearly overnight, Sacramento became a boomtown, and cityhood followed in 1850.

Ideally situated at the confluence of the American and Sacramento Rivers, the city was connected by waterway to San Francisco and the surrounding region. Combined with the area’s warm and sunny climate, the rivers provided the necessary water supply for agriculture to flourish. The devastation wrought by floods and cholera, however, took a huge toll on early populations and led to the construction of an extensive levee system that raised the downtown street level to combat flooding. Great fortune came when local entrepreneurs built the Central Pacific Railroad, and in 1869 it connected with the Union Pacific Railroad to form the first transcontinental passage. Sacramento soon became an industrial hub and major food-processing center. By 1879, it was named the state capital and seat of government.

In the twentieth century, the Sacramento area benefitted from the federal government’s major investment in the construction and operation of three military bases and other regional public works projects. Rapid suburbanization followed along with the building of highways, bridges, schools, parks, hydroelectric dams, and the Rancho Seco nuclear power plant, which activists would later shut down. Today, several tribal gaming resorts attract patrons to the area, while “Old Sacramento” revitalizes the original downtown as it celebrates Sacramento’s pioneering past.

This environmental history of Sacramento provides a compelling case study of urban and suburban development in California and the American West. As the contributors show, Sacramento has seen its landscape both ravaged and reborn. As blighted areas, rail yards, and riverfronts have been reclaimed, and parks and green spaces created and expanded, Sacramento’s identity continues to evolve. As it moves beyond its Gold Rush, Transcontinental Railroad, and government-town heritage, Sacramento remains a city and region deeply rooted in its natural environment.
[more]

front cover of The River Is in Us
The River Is in Us
Fighting Toxics in a Mohawk Community
Elizabeth Hoover
University of Minnesota Press, 2017

Winner of the Labriola Center American Indian National Book Award 2017

Mohawk midwife Katsi Cook lives in Akwesasne, an indigenous community in upstate New York that is downwind and downstream from three Superfund sites. For years she witnessed elevated rates of miscarriages, birth defects, and cancer in her town, ultimately drawing connections between environmental contamination and these maladies. When she brought her findings to environmental health researchers, Cook sparked the United States’ first large-scale community-based participatory research project.

In The River Is in Us, author Elizabeth Hoover takes us deep into this remarkable community that has partnered with scientists and developed grassroots programs to fight the contamination of its lands and reclaim its health and culture. Through in-depth research into archives, newspapers, and public meetings, as well as numerous interviews with community members and scientists, Hoover shows the exact efforts taken by Akwesasne’s massive research project and the grassroots efforts to preserve the Native culture and lands. She also documents how contaminants have altered tribal life, including changes to the Mohawk fishing culture and the rise of diabetes in Akwesasne.

Featuring community members such as farmers, health-care providers, area leaders, and environmental specialists, while rigorously evaluating the efficacy of tribal efforts to preserve its culture and protect its health, The River Is in Us offers important lessons for improving environmental health research and health care, plus detailed insights into the struggles and methods of indigenous groups. This moving, uplifting book is an essential read for anyone interested in Native Americans, social justice, and the pollutants contaminating our food, water, and bodies.

[more]

front cover of Rivers at Risk
Rivers at Risk
Concerned Citizen's Guide To Hydropower
John D. Echeverria, Pope Barrow, and Richard Roos-Collins; American Rivers
Island Press, 1989

Rivers at Risk is an invaluable handbook that offers a practical understanding of how to influence government decisions about hydropower development on America's rivers.

[more]

front cover of Rivers Lost, Rivers Regained
Rivers Lost, Rivers Regained
Rethinking City-River Relations
Martin Knoll
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2016
Many cities across the globe are rediscovering their rivers. After decades or even centuries of environmental decline and cultural neglect, waterfronts have been vamped up and become focal points of urban life again; hidden and covered streams have been daylighted while restoration projects have returned urban rivers in many places to a supposedly more natural state. This volume traces the complex and winding history of how cities have appropriated, lost, and regained their rivers. But rather than telling a linear story of progress, the chapters of this book highlight the ambivalence of these developments.
            The four sections in Rivers Lost, Rivers Regained discuss how cities have gained control and exerted power over rivers and waterways far upstream and downstream; how rivers and floodplains in cityscapes have been transformed by urbanization and industrialization; how urban rivers have been represented in cultural manifestations, such as novels and songs; and how more recent strategies work to redefine and recreate the place of the river within the urban setting.
            At the nexus between environmental, urban, and water histories, Rivers Lost, Rivers Regained points out how the urban-river relationship can serve as a prime vantage point to analyze fundamental issues of modern environmental attitudes and practices.
[more]

front cover of Road Ecology
Road Ecology
Science and Solutions
Richard T.T. Forman, Kevin Heanue, Julia Jones, Frederick Swanson, Thomas Turrentine, Thomas C. Winter, Daniel Sperling, John Bissonette, Anthony P. Clevenger, Carol D. Cutshall, Virginia H. Dale, Lenore Fahrig, Robert France, and Charles R. Goldman
Island Press, 2002

A central goal of transportation is the delivery of safe and efficient services with minimal environmental impact. In practice, though, human mobility has flourished while nature has suffered. Awareness of the environmental impacts of roads is increasing, yet information remains scarce for those interested in studying, understanding, or minimizing the ecological effects of roads and vehicles.

Road Ecology addresses that shortcoming by elevating previously localized and fragmented knowledge into a broad and inclusive framework for understanding and developing solutions. The book brings together fourteen leading ecologists and transportation experts to articulate state-of-the-science road ecology principles, and presents specific examples that demonstrate the application of those principles. Diverse theories, concepts, and models in the new field of road ecology are integrated to establish a coherent framework for transportation policy, planning, and projects. Topics examined include:

  • foundations of road ecology
  • roads, vehicles, and transportation planning
  • vegetation and roadsides
  • wildlife populations and mitigation
  • water, sediment, and chemical flows
  • aquatic ecosystems
  • wind, noise, and atmospheric effects
  • road networks and landscape fragmentation
Road Ecology links ecological theories and concepts with transportation planning, engineering, and travel behavior. With more than 100 illustrations and examples from around the world, it is an indispensable and pioneering work for anyone involved with transportation, including practitioners and planners in state and province transportation departments, federal agencies, and nongovernmental organizations. The book also opens up an important new research frontier for ecologists.
[more]

front cover of Rock | Water | Life
Rock | Water | Life
Ecology and Humanities for a Decolonial South Africa
Lesley Green
Duke University Press, 2020
In Rock | Water | Life Lesley Green examines the interwoven realities of inequality, racism, colonialism, and environmental destruction in South Africa, calling for environmental research and governance to transition to an ecopolitical approach that could address South Africa's history of racial oppression and environmental exploitation. Green analyzes conflicting accounts of nature in environmental sciences that claim neutrality amid ongoing struggles for land restitution and environmental justice. Offering in-depth studies of environmental conflict in contemporary South Africa, Green addresses the history of contested water access in Cape Town; struggles over natural gas fracking in the Karoo; debates about decolonizing science; the potential for a politics of soil in the call for land restitution; urban baboon management; and the consequences of sending sewage to urban oceans.
[more]

front cover of Rural Renaissance
Rural Renaissance
Revitalizing America’s Hometowns through Clean Power
L. Michelle Moore
Island Press, 2022
For decades, we’ve heard that local, renewable power is on the horizon, and cheaper technologies will one day revolutionize our energy system. Michelle Moore has spent her career proving this opportunity is already here—and any community, no matter how small, can build their own clean energy future. Rural Renaissance: Revitalizing America’s Hometowns Through Clean Power is the inspiring and practical guide to igniting this transition today.

In Rural Renaissance, Moore argues we don’t have to wait for new legislation or technologies to begin our work. From the White House to her hometown in rural Georgia, Moore has gathered the tools needed to bring the far-reaching benefits of clean power to small communities, particularly in rural America. In this accessible guide, Moore provides an overview of the current energy landscape, including the federal, state, and local policies that will shape each community’s unique approach. Next, she describes five pathways to clean power in rural America and strategies for achieving them, including energy efficiency, renewable power, resilience (including microgrids and battery storage), the electrification of transportation, and finally, broadband internet. Throughout this journey, Moore shares stories of challenges and successes and encourages readers to design programs that address inequality.

Clean energy shouldn’t be reserved for the wealthy or for sleek and modern city centers. Rural Renaissance offers a vision of thriving rural communities where clean power is the spark that leads to greater investment, vitality, and equity. We can start today—and this book provides the toolbox.
 
[more]


Send via email Share on Facebook Share on Twitter