A SCHOLARLY BOOK REPOSITORY319 start with E start with E
Companion volumes by Ann Leighton
American Gardens in the Eighteenth Century "For Use or for Delight"
American Gardens of the Nineteenth Century "For Comfort and Affluence"
With its colorful landscape and wonderful diversity of plant and animal communities, the southwestern borderlands have attracted naturalists for centuries. As Col. Thomas Henry noted in 1853, there “are to be found many curious birds, peculiar to the country.” This book identifies more than 100 early ornithologists and explorers who entered the Southwest from 1528 to 1900, all of whom have contributed in significant ways to our understanding of the region’s avian life.
Dan Fischer identifies those individuals who documented the natural history of the Southwest and summarizes their contributions to our knowledge about the region’s birds—particularly through discovering and naming them. He tells why the ornithologists came to the region, what they saw, who described and named the new discoveries, and who were the first to sketch or paint new birds.
Beginning with accounts of the earliest Spanish explorers such as Cabeza de Vaca and Coronado, Fischer considers all who visited the region through the end of the nineteenth century, including such renowned naturalists as William Gambel, John McCown, Adolphus Heermann, Elliott Coues, Charles Bendire, and Henry Henshaw. In between, he recalls English mining speculators, French traders, army explorers, railroad surveyors, and more—all of whom contributed to ornithological knowledge.
Although focusing on ornithologists, Fischer’s text reveals the wonderful variety of avian species in the region and their relationship with human history. Featuring a comprehensive bibliography, illustrations, and maps that portray the westward march of exploration, it is a major sourcebook for southwestern ornithology and an essential volume for anyone interested in birds.
Earth and Mars is a fusion of art and science, a blend of images and essays celebrating the successful creation of our life-sustaining planet and the beauty and mystery of Mars. Through images of terrestrial landscapes and photographs selected from recent NASA and European Space Agency missions to Mars, Earth and Mars reveals the profound beauty resulting from the action of volcanism, wind, and water. The accompanying text provides a context for appreciating the role of these elemental forces in shaping the surfaces of each planet, as well as the divergent evolutionary paths that led to an Earth that is teeming with life, and Mars that is seemingly lifeless.
Earth and Mars inspires reflection on the extraordinarily delicate balance of forces that has resulted in our good fortune: to be alive and sentient on a bountiful blue world.
Exploring one of the greatest potential contributors to climate change—thawing permafrost—and the anxiety of extinction on an increasingly hostile planet
Climate scientists point to permafrost as a “ticking time bomb” for the planet, and from the Arctic, apocalyptic narratives proliferate on the devastating effects permafrost thaw poses to human survival. In Earth, Ice, Bone, Blood, Charlotte Wrigley considers how permafrost—and its disappearance—redefines extinction to be a lack of continuity, both material and social, and something that affects not only life on earth but nonlife, too.
Earth, Ice, Bone, Blood approaches the topic of thawing permafrost and the wild new economies and mitigation strategies forming in the far north through a study of the Sakha Republic, Russia’s largest region, and its capital city Yakutsk, which is the coldest city in the world and built on permafrost. Wrigley examines people who are creating commerce out of thawing permafrost, including scientists wishing to recreate the prehistoric “Mammoth steppe” ecosystem by eventually rewilding resurrected woolly mammoths, Indigenous people who forage the tundra for exposed mammoth bodies to sell their tusks, and government officials hoping to keep their city standing as the ground collapses under it. Warming begets thawing begets economic activity— and as a result, permafrost becomes discontinuous, both as land and as a social category, in ways that have implications for the entire planet. Discontinuity, Wrigley shows, eventually evolves into extinction.
Offering a new way of defining extinction through the concept of “discontinuity,” Earth, Ice, Bone, Blood presents a meditative and story-focused engagement with permafrost as more than just frozen ground.
So writes Chris Maser in this compelling study of three interactive spheres of the ecosystem: atmosphere (air), litho-hydrosphere (rock that comprises the restless continents and the water that surrounds them), and biosphere (all life sandwiched in between).
Rich in detail and insightful analogies, Earth in Our Care addresses key issues including land-use policies, ecological restoration, forest management, local living, and sustainability thinking. Exploring our interconnectedness with the Earth, Maser examines today's problems and, more importantly, provides solutions for the future.
The increase in our knowledge of the solar system during the five years since the author last revised this book (1963) greatly exceeds that in the previous two decades. The program of the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration and the space program of the U.S.S.R. have been prime contributors to this rapid progress, but the impetus has carried over to groundbased studies of the Moon and planets as well. The advances in radio and radar astronomy alone are striking, and are continuing at an accelerating pace.
This third edition of Mr. Whipple's popular and authoritative book is thoroughly revised in light of this new knowledge. The most extensive revisions are in the chapters on the Moon, Mars, and Venus--the members of the solar system on which the various space programs have concentrated. The author has included many new and dramatic illustrations in this third edition, among them photographs taken from U.S. and Russian space craft. There are striking photographs of the Moon, with close-up views of its surface texture, pictures of Mars taken from Mariner IV, and radar pictures of Venus that "see through" that planet's obscuring cloud layer.
The book is written in nontechnical language and with a lucid, witty style that is readily understandable to the interested layman. Mathematics has been avoided, and scientific methods and processes are described in simple terms. In presenting the latest information about the planets and their moons, Mr. Whipple discusses their origin and evolution, motions, atmospheres, temperatures, surface conditions, the environment essential for life as we know it, and the possibilities of life outside the Earth. He concludes with a discussion of current theories about the origin of the solar system.
Shrewd science-writers, O’Connor shows, marketed spectacular visions of past worlds, piquing the public imagination with glimpses of man-eating mammoths, talking dinosaurs, and sea-dragons spawned by Satan himself. These authors—including men of science, women, clergymen, biblical literalists, hack writers, blackmailers, and prophets—borrowed freely from the Bible, modern poetry, and the urban entertainment industry, creating new forms of literature in order to transport their readers into a vanished and alien past.
In exploring the use of poetry and spectacle in the promotion of popular science, O’Connor proves that geology’s success owed much to the literary techniques of its authors. An innovative blend of the history of science, literary criticism, book history, and visual culture, The Earth on Show rethinks the relationship between science and literature in the nineteenth century.
Answers are being developed in universities, preschools, professional schools, and even prisons around the world. In the latest volume of State of the World, a diverse group of education experts share innovative approaches to teaching and learning in a new era. Topics include systems thinking for kids; the importance of play in early education; social emotional learning; comprehensive sexuality education; indigenous knowledge; sustainable business; medical training to treat the whole person; teaching law in the Anthropocene; and more.
EarthEd addresses schooling at all levels of development, from preschool to professional. Its lessons can inform teachers, policy makers, school administrators, community leaders, parents, and students alike. And its vision will inspire anyone who wants to prepare students not only for the storms ahead but to become the next generation of sustainability leaders.
In The Earthquake Observers, Deborah R. Coen acquaints readers not only with the century’s most eloquent seismic commentators, including Alexander von Humboldt, Charles Darwin, Mark Twain, Charles Dickens, Karl Kraus, Ernst Mach, John Muir, and William James, but also with countless other citizen-observers, many of whom were women. Coen explains how observing networks transformed an instant of panic and confusion into a field for scientific research, turning earthquakes into natural experiments at the nexus of the physical and human sciences. Seismology abandoned this project of citizen science with the introduction of the Richter Scale in the 1930s, only to revive it in the twenty-first century in the face of new hazards and uncertainties. The Earthquake Observers tells the history of this interrupted dialogue between scientists and citizens about living with environmental risk.
Rudwick begins in the seventeenth century with Archbishop James Ussher, who famously dated the creation of the cosmos to 4004 BC. His narrative later turns to the crucial period of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, when inquisitive intellectuals, who came to call themselves “geologists,” began to interpret rocks and fossils, mountains and volcanoes, as natural archives of Earth’s history. He then shows how this geological evidence was used—and is still being used—to reconstruct a history of the Earth that is as varied and unpredictable as human history itself. Along the way, Rudwick rejects the popular view of this story as a conflict between science and religion and shows how the modern scientific account of the Earth’s deep history retains strong roots in Judaeo-Christian ideas.
Extensively illustrated, Earth’s Deep History is an engaging and impressive capstone to Rudwick’s distinguished career. Though the story of the Earth is inconceivable in length, Rudwick moves with grace from the earliest imaginings of our planet’s deep past to today’s scientific discoveries, proving that this is a tale at once timeless and timely.
Throughout the Middle Ages, enormously popular bestiaries presented people with descriptions of rare and unusual animals, typically paired with a moral or religious lesson. The real and the imaginary blended seamlessly in these books—at the time, the existence of a rhinoceros was as credible as a unicorn or dragon. Although audiences now scoff at the impossibility of mythological beasts, there remains an extraordinary willingness to suspend skepticism and believe wild stories about nature, particularly about insects and their relatives in the Phylum Arthropoda.
In The Earwig’s Tail, entomologist May Berenbaum and illustrator Jay Hosler draw on the powerful cultural symbols of these antiquated books to create a beautiful and witty bestiary of the insect world. Berenbaum’s compendium of tales is an alphabetical tour of modern myths that humorously illuminates aerodynamically unsound bees, ear-boring earwigs, and libido-enhancing Spanish flies. She tracks down the germ of scientific truth that inspires each insect urban legend and shares some wild biological lessons, which, because of the amazing nature of the insect world, can be more fantastic than even the mythic misperceptions.
Volume IIA of East African Mammals begins a two-part study of East Africa's smallest and least conspicuous mammals. It deals with bats and insectivores, including tenrecs, moles, hedgehogs, and shrews.
In each volume Kingdon combines his text with hundreds of finished drawings and quick sketches, the latter a form of field note that provides an incomparable description of the animal's movements and personality. Kingdom explains his drawings "as a wordless questioning of form. . . . The probing pencil is like the dissecting scalpel, seeking to expose relevant structures that may not be immediately obvious and are certainly hidden from the shadowy world of the camera lens." As an artist, Kingdon's achievement has been compared with Audubon's; as a scientist, his work has made these volumes indispensable to any serious student of East African mammals.
Eating and Being is a history of Western thinking about food, eating, knowledge, and ourselves. In modern thought, eating is about what is good for you, not about what is good. Eating is about health, not about virtue. Yet this has not always been the case. For a great span of the past—from antiquity through about the middle of the eighteenth century—one of the most pervasive branches of medicine was known as dietetics, prescribing not only what people should eat but also how they should order many aspects of their lives—including sleep, exercise, and emotional management. Dietetics did not distinguish between the medical and the moral, nor did it acknowledge the difference between what was good for you and what was good. Dietetics counseled moderation in all things, where moderation was counted as a virtue as well as the way to health. But during the nineteenth century, nutrition science began to replace the language of traditional dietetics with the vocabulary of proteins, fats, carbohydrates, and calories, and the medical and the moral went their separate ways. Steven Shapin shows how much depended upon that shift, and he also explores the extent to which the sensibilities of dietetics have indeed been lost.
Throughout this rich history, he evokes what it felt like to eat during another historical period and he invites us to reflect on what it means to feel about food as we now do. Shapin shows how the change from dietetics to nutrition science fundamentally changed how we think about our food and its powers, our bodies, and our minds.
Echolocation in Bats and Dolphins consists of six sections: mechanisms of echolocation signal production; the anatomy and physiology of signal reception and interpretation; performance and cognition; ecological and evolutionary aspects of echolocation mammals; theoretical and methodological topics; and possible echolocation capabilities in other mammals, including shrews, seals, and baleen whales. Animal behaviorists, ecologists, physiologists, and both scientists and engineers who work in the field of bioacoustics will benefit from this book.
Ecocriticism, whether coming from “back to nature” conservatives, Nature Conservancy liberals, or Earth First! radicals, is familiar enough. But when we listen do we really hear what these groups are saying? In a book that examines the terms of ecocriticism, Timothy W. Luke exposes how ecological critics, organizations, and movements manipulate our conception of the environment. Turning the tables on the ecocritics, Luke demonstrates how ecocriticism can move beyond its familiar confines to engage larger cultural, economic, and political questions.
Ecocritique rereads ecocriticism to reveal how power and economy, society and culture, community and technology compete over what are now widely regarded as the embattled ecosystems of nature. Luke considers in particular how the meanings and values attached to the environment by various groups—from the Worldwatch Institute, the Nature Conservancy, and Earth First! to proponents of green consumerism, social ecology, and sustainable development—articulate new visions of power and subjectivity for a post-Cold War era.
This accessibly written work opens with deep ecology and concludes with social ecology, along the way reconsidering thinkers with green philosophical leanings, including Herbert Marcuse, Paolo Soleri, and Murray Bookchin. In systematic critiques reexamining the cultural practices and ethical values of contemporary environmentalism, Luke highlights the political dilemmas of biocentrism and anthropocentrism in modern ecological thinking.
With its critical analysis of many contemporary environmental discourses and organizations, Ecocritique makes a major contribution to ongoing debates about the political relationships among nature, culture, and economics in the current global system.
First published as Systems Ecology in 1983, Ecological and General Systems proposes principles of self-organization and the designs that prevail by maximizing power and efficiency. Comparisons to fifty other systems languages are provided. Innovative presentations are given on earth homeostasis (Gaia); the inadequacy of presenting equations without network relationships and energy constraints; the alternative interpretation of high entropy complexity as adaptive structure; basic equations of ecological economics; and the energy basis of scientific hierarchy.
Part I introduces energetics, hierarchy, and systems modeling. Part II features design elements: intersections, autocatalytic modules, loops, series, parallel elements, and webs. Part III includes embodied energy, spectra of energy quality, temperature, complexity, spatial distribution, and diversity. Part IV discusses production, consumption, ecosystems, succession, economic systems, anthropological models, urban and regional models, global biogeochemistry, and the universe.
Although several contributors are natural scientists, the book focuses on matters of public policy and public-private collaboration. The aim is not only to assess the impact of increasing urbanization on biodiversity, but also to propose new ways of preserving and restoring the balance between the natural and the built environment through planning and design.
Luhmann extends the concept of "ecology" to refer to any analysis that looks at connections between social systems and the surrounding environment. He traces the development of the notion of "environment" from the medieval idea—which encompasses both human and natural systems—to our modern definition, which separates social systems from the external environment.
In Luhmann's thought, human beings form part of the environment, while social systems consist only of communications. Utilizing this distinctive theoretical perspective, Luhmann presents a comprehensive catalog of society's reactions to environmental problems. He investigates the spheres of the economy, law, science, politics, religion, and education to show how these areas relate to environmental issues.
Ecological Communication is an important work that critically examines claims central to our society—claims to modernity and rationality. It will be of great importance to scholars and students in sociology, political science, philosophy, anthropology, and law.
While certain ecological problems associated with artificial night lighting are widely known-for instance, the disorientation of sea turtle hatchlings by beachfront lighting-the vast range of influences on all types of animals and plants is only beginning to be recognized. From nest choice and breeding success of birds to behavioral and physiological changes in salamanders, many organisms are seriously affected by human alterations in natural patterns of light and dark.
Ecological Consequences of Artificial Night Lighting is the first book to consider the environmental effects of the intentional illumination of the night. It brings together leading scientists from around the world to review the state of knowledge on the subject and to describe specific effects that have been observed across a full range of taxonomic groups, including mammals, birds, reptiles and amphibians, fishes, invertebrates, and plants.
Ecological Consequences of Artificial Night Lighting provides a scientific basis to begin addressing the challenge of conserving the nighttime environment. It cogently demonstrates the vital importance of this until-now neglected topic and is an essential new work for conservation planners, researchers, and anyone concerned with human impacts on the natural world.
Ecological economics addresses one of the fundamental flaws in conventional economics--its failure to consider biophysical and social reality in its analyses and equations. Ecological Economics: Principles and Applications is an introductory-level textbook that offers a pedagogically complete examination of this dynamic new field.
As a workbook accompanying the text, this volume breaks new ground in applying the principles of ecological economics in a problem- or service-based learning setting. Both the textbook and this workbook are situated within a new interdisciplinary framework that embraces the linkages among economic growth, environmental degradation, and social inequity in an effort to guide policy in a way that respects fundamental human values. The workbook takes the approach a step further in placing ecological economic analysis within a systems perspective, in order to help students identify leverage points by which they can help to affect change. The workbook helps students to develop a practical, operational understanding of the principles and concepts explored in the text through real-world activities, and describes numerous case studies in which students have successfully completed projects.
Ecological Economics: A Workbook for Problem-Based Learning represents an important new resource for undergraduate and graduate environmental studies courses focusing on economics, environmental policy, and environmental problem-solving.
As our economic and natural systems continue on their collision course, Bruce Jennings asks whether we have the political capacity to avoid large-scale environmental disaster. Can liberal democracy, he wonders, respond in time to ecological challenges that require dramatic changes in the way we approach the natural world? Must a more effective governance be less democratic and more autocratic? Or can a new form of grassroots ecological democracy save us from ourselves and the false promises of material consumption run amok?
Ecological Governance is an ethicist’s reckoning with how our political culture, broadly construed, must change in response to climate change. Jennings argues that during the Anthropocene era a social contract of consumption has been forged. Under it people have given political and economic control to elites in exchange for the promise of economic growth. In a new political economy of the future, the terms of the consumptive contract cannot be met without severe ecological damage. We will need a new guiding vision and collective aim, a new social contract of ecological trusteeship and responsibility.
Through this interdisciplinary study, scientists have been able to understand, for instance, how bat wing design affects habitat use and bat diet; how the size of a predator affects its ability to capture and eat certain prey; and how certain mosquitoes have evolved physiologically and morphologically to tolerate salt-water habitats. Ecological Morphology also covers the history of the field, the role of the comparative method in studying adaptation, and the use of data from modern organisms for understanding the ecology of fossil communities.
This book provides an overview of the achievements and potential of ecological morphology for all biologists and students interested in the way animal design, ecology, and evolution interact.
Chase and Leibold define the niche as including both what an organism needs from its environment and how that organism's activities shape its environment. Drawing on the theory of consumer-resource interactions, as well as its graphical analysis, they develop a framework for understanding niches that is flexible enough to include a variety of small- and large-scale processes, from resource competition, predation, and stress to community structure, biodiversity, and ecosystem function. Chase and Leibold's synthetic approach will interest ecologists from a wide range of subdisciplines.
Ecological Restoration offers for the first time a unified vision of ecological restoration as a field of study, one that clearly states the discipline’s precepts and emphasizes issues of importance to those involved at all levels. In a lively, personal fashion, the authors discuss scientific and practical aspects of the field as well as the human needs and values that motivate practitioners. The book:
-identifies fundamental concepts upon which restoration is based
-considers the principles of restoration practice
-explores the diverse values that are fulfilled with the restoration of ecosystems
-reviews the structure of restoration practice, including the various contexts for restoration work, the professional development of its practitioners, and the relationships of restoration with allied fields and activities
A unique feature of the book is the inclusion of eight “virtual field trips,” short photo essays of project sites around the world that illustrate various points made in the book and are “led” by those who were intimately involved with the project described.
Throughout, ecological restoration is conceived as a holistic endeavor, one that addresses issues of ecological degradation, biodiversity loss, and sustainability science simultaneously, and draws upon cultural resources and local skills and knowledge in restoration work.
In a lively, personal fashion, the authors discuss scientific and practical aspects of the field as well as the human needs and values that motivate practitioners. The book
- identifies fundamental concepts upon which restoration is based
- considers the principles of restoration practice
- explores the diverse values that are fulfilled with the restoration of ecosystems
- reviews the structure of restoration practice, including the various contexts for restoration work, the professional development of its practitioners, and the relationships of restoration with allied fields and activities
The book also includes case studies and Virtual Field Trips around the world that illustrate points made in the book with on-the-ground information from those who were intimately involved with the projects described. Throughout, ecological restoration is conceived as a holistic endeavor, one that addresses issues of ecological degradation, biodiversity loss, personal engagement, and sustainability science simultaneously, and draws upon cultural resources and local skills and knowledge in restoration work.
In her volume, Ecologics, Howe narrates how an antidote to the Anthropocene became both failure and success. Tracking the development of what would have been Latin America's largest wind park, Howe documents indigenous people's resistance to the project and the political and corporate climate that derailed its renewable energy potential. Using feminist and more-than-human theories, Howe demonstrates how the dynamics of energy and environment cannot be captured without understanding how human aspirations for energy articulate with nonhuman beings, technomaterial objects, and the geophysical forces that are at the heart of wind and power.
Bocking tells this history through four case studies: the origins and early research of the Nature Conservancy in Great Britain; the development of ecology at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee; the work of the Hubbard Brook Ecosystem Study in New Hampshire; and research in fisheries ecology at the University of Toronto. By comparing these case studies, Bocking demonstrates how the places of contemporary science—laboratories, landscapes, and funding agencies—and science’s purposes, as expressed through the political roles of expertise and specific managerial and regulatory responsibilities, have shaped contemporary ecology and its application to pressing environmental problems.
Consisting of more than six thousand species, amphibians are more diverse than mammals and are found on every continent save Antarctica. Despite the abundance and diversity of these animals, many aspects of the biology of amphibians remain unstudied or misunderstood. The Ecology and Behavior of Amphibians aims to fill this gap in the literature on this remarkable taxon. It is a celebration of the diversity of amphibian life and the ecological and behavioral adaptations that have made it a successful component of terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems.
Synthesizing seventy years of research on amphibian biology, Kentwood D. Wells addresses all major areas of inquiry, including phylogeny, classification, and morphology; aspects of physiological ecology such as water and temperature relations, respiration, metabolism, and energetics; movements and orientation; communication and social behavior; reproduction and parental care; ecology and behavior of amphibian larvae and ecological aspects of metamorphosis; ecological impact of predation on amphibian populations and antipredator defenses; and aspects of amphibian community ecology. With an eye towards modern concerns, The Ecology and Behavior of Amphibians concludes with a chapter devoted to amphibian conservation.
An unprecedented scholarly contribution to amphibian biology, this book is eagerly anticipated among specialists.
Building on fourteen years of research, Margaret F. Kinnaird and Timothy G. O’Brien offer in Ecology and Conservation of Asian Hornbills the most up-to-date information on the evolution, reproduction, feeding ecology, and movement patterns of thirty-one species of Asian hornbills. The authors address questions of ecological functionality, ecosystem services, and keystone relationships, as well as the disturbing influence of forest loss and fragmentation on hornbills. Complemented by superb full-color images by renowned photographer Tim Laman that provide rare glimpses of hornbills in their native habitat and black-and-white illustrations by Jonathan Kingdon that highlight the intriguing aspects of hornbill behavior, Ecology and Conservation of Asian Hornbills will stand tall in the pantheon of natural history studies for years to come.
This book provides an extensive knowledge base on all aspects of the San Pedro, from flora and fauna to hydrology and human use to preservation. It describes the ecological patterns and processes of this aridland river and explores both the ongoing science-driven efforts by nonprofit groups and government agencies to sustain and restore its riparian ecosystems and the science that supports these management decisions.
An interdisciplinary team of fifty-seven contributors—biologists, ecologists, geomorphologists, historians, hydrologists, lawyers, political scientists—weave together threads from their diverse perspectives to reveal the processes that shape the past, present, and future of the San Pedro’s riparian and aquatic ecosystems. They review the biological communities of the San Pedro and the stream hydrology and geomorphology that affect its riparian biota. They then look at conservation and management challenges along three sections of the San Pedro, from its headwaters in Mexico to its confluence with the Gila River, describing legal and policy issues and their interface with science; activities related to mitigation, conservation, and restoration; and a prognosis of the potential for sustaining the basin’s riparian system.
These chapters demonstrate the complexity of the San Pedro’s ecological and hydrological conditions, showing that there are no easy answers to the problems—and that existing laws are inadequate to fully address them. Collectively, they offer students, professionals, and environmental advocates a better grasp of the San Pedro’s status as well as important lessons for restoring physical processes and biotic communities to rivers in arid and semiarid regions.
The book begins by exploring the need for ecological science in understanding current environmental issues and briefly discussing what ecology is and isn’t. Subsequent chapters address critical issues in conservation and show how ecological science can be applied to them. The book explores questions such as:
• What is the role of ecological science in decision making?
• What factors govern the assembly of ecosystems and determine their response to various stressors?
• How does Earth’s climate system function and determine the distribution of life on Earth?
• What factors control the size of populations?
• How does fragmentation of the landscape affect the persistence of species on the landscape?
• How does biological diversity influence ecosystem processes?
Ants are probably the most dominant insect group on Earth, representing ten to fifteen percent of animal biomass in terrestrial ecosystems. Flowering plants, meanwhile, owe their evolutionary success to an array of interspecific interactions—such as pollination, seed dispersal, and herbivory—that have helped to shape their great diversity. The Ecology and Evolution of Ant-Plant Interactions brings together findings from the scientific literature on the coevolution of ants and plants to provide a better understanding of the unparalleled success of these two remarkable groups, of interspecific interactions in general, and ultimately of terrestrial biological communities.
The Ecology and Evolution of Ant-Plant Interactions synthesizes the dynamics of ant-plant interactions, including the sources of variation in their outcomes. Victor Rico-Gray and Paulo S. Oliveira capture both the emerging appreciation of the importance of these interactions within ecosystems and the developing approaches that place studies of these interactions into a broader ecological and evolutionary context. The collaboration of two internationally renowned scientists, The Ecology and Evolution of Ant-Plant Interactions will become a standard reference for understanding the complex interactions between these two taxa.
In recent times, the science of ecology has been rejuvenated and has moved to a central position in biology. This volume contains eighteen original, major contributions by leaders in the field, all associates of the late Robert MacArthur, whose work has stimulated many of the recent developments in ecology. The intellectual ferment of the field is reflected in these papers, which offer new models for ecological processes, new applications of theoretical and quantitative techniques, and new methods for analyzing and interpreting a wide variety of empirical data.
The first five chapters explore the evolution of species abundance and diversity (R. Levins, E. Leigh, J. MacArthur, R. May, and M. Rosenzweig). The theory of loop analysis is newly applied to understanding stability of species communities under both mendelian and group selection. Species abundance relations, population fluctuations, and continental patterns of species diversity are illustrated and interpreted theoretically. The next section examines the competitive strategies of optimal resource allocation variously employed in plant life histories (W. Schaffer and M. Gadgil), bird diets and foraging techniques (H. Hespenheide), butterfly seasonal flights (A. Shapiro), and forest succession examined by the theory of Markov processes (H. Horn).
The seven chapters of the third section study the structure of species communities, by comparing different natural communities in similar habitats (M. Cody, J. Karr and F. James, E. Pianka, J. Brown, J. Diamond), or by manipulating field situations experimentally (R. Patrick, J. Connell). The analyses are of communities of species as diverse as freshwater stream organisms, desert lizards and rodents, birds, invertebrates, and plants. These studies yield insights into the assembly of continental and insular communities, convergent evolution of morphology and of ecological structure, and the relative roles of predation, competition, and harsh physical conditions in limiting species ranges.
Finally, the two remaining chapters illustrate how ecological advances depend on interaction of theory with field and laboratory observations (G. E. Hutchinson), and how ecological studies such as those of this volume may find practical application to conservation problems posed by man's accelerating modification of the natural world (E. Wilson and E. Willis).
The history of biology is populated by numerous model species or organisms. But few vertebrate groups have aided evolutionary and ecological research more than the live-bearing fishes of the family Poeciliidae. Found throughout tropical and subtropical waters, poeciliids exhibit a fascinating variety of reproductive specializations, including viviparity, matrotrophy, unisexual reproduction, and alternative mating strategies, making them ideal models for research on patterns and processes in ecology, behavior, and evolution.
Ecology and Evolution of Poeciliid Fishes is a much-needed overview of the scientific potential and understanding of these live-bearing fishes. Chapters by leading researchers take up a wide range of topics, including the evolution of unisexual reproduction, life in extreme environments, life-history evolution, and genetics. Designed to provide a single and highly approachable reference, Ecology and Evolution of Poeciliid Fishes will appeal to students and specialists interested in all aspects of evolutionary ecology.
Contributors include Warren B. Ballard, Arnold H. Boer, Anthony B. Bubenik, M. E. Buss, Kenneth N. Child, Vincent F.J. Crichton, Albert W. Franzmann, Kris J. Hundertmark, Patrick D. Karns, Murray W. Lankester, Richard E. McCabe, James M. Peek, Henry M. Reeves, Wayne L. Regelin, Lyle A. Renecker, William M. Samuel, Charles C. Schwartz, Robert W. Stewart, Ian D. Thompson, H. R. Timmermann, and Victor Van Ballenberghe. A Wildlife Management Institute book
Forest ecologists William Keeton and Andrew Barton bring together a volume that breaks new ground in our understanding of ecological systems and their importance for forest resilience in an age of rapid environmental change. This edited volume covers a broad geographic canvas, from eastern Canada and the Upper Great Lakes states to the deep South. It looks at a wide diversity of ecosystems, including spruce-fir, northern deciduous, southern Appalachian deciduous, southern swamp hardwoods, and longleaf pine. Chapters authored by leading old-growth experts examine topics of contemporary forest ecology including forest structure and dynamics, below-ground soil processes, biological diversity, differences between historical and modern forests, carbon and climate change mitigation, management of old growth, and more.
This thoughtful treatise broadly communicates important new discoveries to scientists, land managers, and students and breathes fresh life into the hope for sensible, effective management of old-growth stands in eastern forests.
The scientific, political, and economic policy debates about the global environmental crisis have tended to ignore its historical, ethical, religious, and aesthetic dimensions. This book redresses that omission by highlighting these humanistic components that are integral to the fabric of our ecological understanding and, consequentially, essential to a broad, multidisciplinary approach to environmental studies and public policy initiatives.
In this slim volume, seven world-class scholars discuss the wide range of perspectives that the fields of literature, history, religion, philosophy, environmental ethics, and anthropology bring to the natural environment and our place in it. The preface summarizes the development of the religion and ecology movement; the editor’s critical introduction highlights the essays’ major themes. Bringing insights from the humanities to bear on ecological concerns, this volume will appeal to a wide audience in the humanities and environmental studies, policy makers, and the general public. The book represents a continuation of the Center for the Study of World Religions’ highly regarded Religions of the World and Ecology series.
Ecology and the Environment: The Mechanisms, Marring, and Maintenance of Nature is the ninth title published in the Templeton Science and Religion Series, in which scientists from a wide range of fields distill their experience and knowledge into brief tours of their respective specialties. In this volume, R. J. Berry, a well-known leader in the field of ecology, describes the basic concepts of ecology and seeks to put them into a general context for a reader who lacks any scientific background.
"This book is not just about deserts; it is an update of the contributions that research in desert systems is making to community ecology. . . This book will provide a useful reference for desert ecologists, as well as indicate critical directions where progress needs to be made."—Ecology
"This important book fills a significant gap in previous syntheses by presenting a detailed series of reviews of current understanding of community patterns and structure in desert environments. . . . Each chapter is thorough and well written and . . . closes with a discussion of suggested future research. . . . [T]hese ideas will do much to focus interest on the importance of desert systems in understanding community. Thus, this book has interest well beyond desert ecologists alone."—BioScience
"Valuable reading and reference for ecology students, teachers and researchers."—Quarterly Review of Biology
In this clever and wide-ranging work, Lambin draws on new scientific evidence in the fields of geography, political ecology, environmental psychology, urban studies, and disease ecology, among others, to answer such questions as: To what extent do we need nature for our well-being? How does environmental degradation affect our happiness? What can be done to protect the environment and increase our well-being at the same time? Drawing on case studies from Asia, Africa, Europe, and North America, Lambin makes a persuasive case for the strong link between healthy ecosystems and happy humans.
Unique in its scope and evenhanded synthesis of research from many fields, An Ecology of Happiness offers a compelling human-centered argument that is impossible to overlook when we marvel at murmurations of starlings or seek out the most brilliant fall foliage: nature makes our steps a little lighter and our eyes a little brighter. What better reason to protect an ecosystem or save a species than for our own pleasure?
Elton explains the devastating effects that invasive species can have on local ecosystems in clear, concise language and with numerous examples. The first book on invasion biology, and still the most cited, Elton's masterpiece provides an accessible, engaging introduction to one of the most important environmental crises of our time.
Charles S. Elton was one of the founders of ecology, who also established and led Oxford University's Bureau of Animal Population. His work has influenced generations of ecologists and zoologists, and his publications remain central to the literature in modern biology.
"History has caught up with Charles Elton's foresight, and The Ecology of Invasions can now be seen as one of the central scientific books of our century."—David Quammen, from the Foreword to Killer Algae: The True Tale of a Biological Invasion
Savanna ecosystems play a major role in the natural landscape and in the economic life of vast areas of the tropics. These grasslands are inherently fragile, yet Third World economic development makes human exploitation inevitable. The question that remains is whether utilization of the savannas for agriculture and other purposes will create sustained economic growth or a desert waste.
Guillermo Sarmiento is an unquestionable authority on the grasslands of the New World. His book is the first modern, integrated view of the genesis and function of this important natural system--a synthesis of savanna architecture, seasonal rhythms, productive processes, and water and nutrient economy. Sarmiento's emphasis is on the Venezuelan savannas that he has spent a lifetime studying, but his outlook is far broader. He makes frequent comparisons with other neotropical and tropical savannas and with temperate prairies, and he offers conclusions of global importance, not only for ecologists and agronomist but for anyone concerned with the politics of Third World development.
Ecologists can spend a lifetime researching a small patch of the earth, studying the interactions between organisms and the environment, and exploring the roles those interactions play in determining distribution, abundance, and evolutionary change. With so few ecologists and so many systems to study, generalizations are essential. But how do you extrapolate knowledge about a well-studied area and apply it elsewhere?
Through a range of original essays written by eminent ecologists and naturalists, The Ecology of Place explores how place-focused research yields exportable general knowledge as well as practical local knowledge, and how society can facilitate ecological understanding by investing in field sites, place-centered databases, interdisciplinary collaborations, and field-oriented education programs that emphasize natural history. This unique patchwork of case-study narratives, philosophical musings, and historical analyses is tied together with commentaries from editors Ian Billick and Mary Price that develop and synthesize common threads. The result is a unique volume rich with all-too-rare insights into how science is actually done, as told by scientists themselves.
Eight original essays by Sonoran Desert specialists provide an overview of the practice of ecology at landscape, community, and organismal scales. The essays explore the rich diversity of plant life in the Sonoran Desert and the ecological patterns and processes that underlie it. They also reveal the history and scientific legacy of the Desert Laboratory in Tucson, which has conducted research on the Sonoran Desert since 1903.
Coverage includes diversity and affinities of the flora, physical environments and vegetation, landscape complexity and ecological diversity, population dynamics of annual plants, form and function of cacti, and the relationship between plants and the animals that use them as feeding and breeding resources. The text also examines the ecological consequences of modern agricultural development, as well as the impact on the modern biota of 40,000 years of change in climate, vegetation, megafauna, and ancient cultures.
This comprehensive book covers a broad range of spatial and temporal scales to highlight the diversity of research being pursued in the Sonoran Desert. It is both a testament to these ongoing studies and an authoritative introduction to the diverse plant life in the region.
Contents
1. Diversity and Affinities of the Flora of the Sonoran Floristic Province, Steven P. McLaughlin and Janice E. Bowers
2. Vegetation and Habitat Diversity at the Southern Edge of the Sonoran Desert, Alberto Bórquez, Angelina Martínez Yrízar, Richard S. Felger, and David Yetman
4. Population Ecology of Sonoran Desert Annual Plants, D. Lawrence Venable and Catherine E. Pake
5. Form and Function of Cacti, Park S. Nobel and Michael E. Loik
6. Ecological Genetics of Cactophilic Drosophila, William J. Etges, W. R. Johnson, G. A. Duncan, G. Huckins, and W. B. Heed
7. Ecological Consequences of Agricultural Development in a Sonoran Desert Valley, Laura L. Jackson and Patricia W. Comus
8. Deep History and a Wilder West, Paul S. Martin
For almost a decade, economists Kevin M. Simmons and Daniel Sutter have been studying the economic impacts and social consequences of the approximately 1,200 tornadoes that touch down across the United States annually. During this time, Simmons and Sutter have been compiling information from sources such as the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the U.S. Census in order to examine the casualties caused by tornadoes and to evaluate the National Weather Service’s efforts to reduce these casualties. In Economic and Societal Impacts of Tornadoes, Simmons and Sutter present their findings. This analysis will be extremely useful to anyone studying meteorology and imperative for anyone working in emergency disaster management.
Volume 1 collects for the first time in one source Johnson's most important work. These classic papers explore the consequences of government intervention in United States and world agriculture; the economics of agricultural supply and of rural labor and human capital issues; and the analysis of agricultural productivity in poor countries, including the centrally planned economies of China and Eastern Europe. Models of precise reasoning and powerful empirical research, the papers cover a wide range of topics—from U.S. commodity price policy to the economics of population control and farm policy reform in China. Volume 1 includes a definitive bibliography of Johnson's published writings.
Volume 2 presents twenty-two papers by Johnson's former students and colleagues. International in scope, these papers explore themes and topics inspired by Johnson's work, including agricultural policy and U.S. farm prices; European Common Agricultural Policy; and agricultural and rural development in the Third World. Contributors to Volume 2 are David G. Abler, John M. Antle, Richard R. Barichello, Andrew P. Barkley, Karen Brooks, David S. Bullock, Robert E. Evenson, B. Delworth Gardner, Bruce L. Gardner, Dale M. Hoover, Wallace E. Huffman, Paul R. Johnson, Yoav Kislev, Justin Yifu Lin, Yair Mundlak, John Nash, Keijuro Otsuka, Willis Peterson, Todd E. Petzel, Vernon W. Ruttan, Maurice Schiff, G. Edward Schuh, Theodore W. Schultz, James Snyder, Vasant Sukhatme, Daniel A. Sumner, Vinod Thomas, George Tolley, and Alberto Valdes.
Volume 1 collects for the first time in one source Johnson's most important work. These classic papers explore the consequences of government intervention in United States and world agriculture; the economics of agricultural supply and of rural labor and human capital issues; and the analysis of agricultural productivity in poor countries, including the centrally planned economies of China and Eastern Europe. Models of precise reasoning and powerful empirical research, the papers cover a wide range of topics—from U.S. commodity price policy to the economics of population control and farm policy reform in China. Volume 1 includes a definitive bibliography of Johnson's published writings.
Volume 2 presents twenty-two papers by Johnson's former students and colleagues. International in scope, these papers explore themes and topics inspired by Johnson's work, including agricultural policy and U.S. farm prices; European Common Agricultural Policy; and agricultural and rural development in the Third World. Contributors to Volume 2 are David G. Abler, John M. Antle, Richard R. Barichello, Andrew P. Barkley, Karen Brooks, David S. Bullock, Robert E. Evenson, B. Delworth Gardner, Bruce L. Gardner, Dale M. Hoover, Wallace E. Huffman, Paul R. Johnson, Yoav Kislev, Justin Yifu Lin, Yair Mundlak, John Nash, Keijuro Otsuka, Willis Peterson, Todd E. Petzel, Vernon W. Ruttan, Maurice Schiff, G. Edward Schuh, Theodore W. Schultz, James Snyder, Vasant Sukhatme, Daniel A. Sumner, Vinod Thomas, George Tolley, and Alberto Valdes.
Ecopoetics probes the complex relationship between artifice and the natural world in the work of modern American poets—in particular Wallace Stevens, Elizabeth Bishop, Richard Wilbur, and Sylvia Plath. These poets relate to nature as a deep wellspring of meaning, although they all avoid using language the way most nature writers do, merely to reflect or refer directly to the world. Each of these poets, in his or her own distinct way, employs instead what Knickerbocker terms sensuous poesis, the process of rematerializing language through sound effects and other formal devices as a sophisticated response to nonhuman nature.
Rather than attempt to erase the artifice of their own poems, to make them seem more natural and thus supposedly closer to nature, the poets in this book unapologetically embrace artifice—not for its own sake but in order to perform and enact the natural world. Indeed, for them, artifice is natural. In examining their work, Knickerbocker charts a new direction for ecocriticism.
"A comprehensive well-argued effort to address many of the most difficult issues facing legislators concerned with environmental issues."—Stephen P. Adamian, Boston Book Review
"A timely and well-argued contribution."—Calestous Juma, Nature
In this book, M. Jimmie Killingsworth and Jacqueline S. Palmer have a twofold purpose: to analyze the patterns of rhetoric used in written discourse about environmental politics and to make a practical contribution to the art of rhetorical criticism through the study of rhetoric in use.
The language, professional objectivity, and research programs of scientists insulate these best-informed citizens in enclaves of specialization, limiting access to crucial information and hindering effective reformative action. Science, the authors stress, is not merely a database to rely upon but a view of the world that must be broadened in order to affect social morality. Science-based activism must arise to ensure the care and future of the environment.
Killingsworth and Palmer argue that for grassroots activism to be tied to this globally conscious philosophy, a rhetoric of sustainability must be cultivated.
Today's natural resource managers must be able to navigate among the complicated interactions and conflicting interests of diverse stakeholders and decisionmakers. Technical and scientific knowledge, though necessary, are not sufficient. Science is merely one component in a multifaceted world of decision making. And while the demands of resource management have changed greatly, natural resource education and textbooks have not. Until now.
Ecosystem Management represents a different kind of textbook for a different kind of course. It offers a new and exciting approach that engages students in active problem solving by using detailed landscape scenarios that reflect the complex issues and conflicting interests that face today's resource managers and scientists. Focusing on the application of the sciences of ecology and conservation biology to real-world concerns, it emphasizes the intricate ecological, socioeconomic, and institutional matrix in which natural resource management functions, and illustrates how to be more effective in that challenging arena.
Each chapter is rich with exercises to help facilitate problem-based learning. The main text is supplemented by boxes and figures that provide examples, perspectives, definitions, summaries, and learning tools, along with a variety of essays written by practitioners with on-the-ground experience in applying the principles of ecosystem management.
Accompanying the textbook is an instructor's manual that provides a detailed overview of the book and specific guidance on designing a course around it.
Ecosystem Management grew out of a training course developed and presented by the authors for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service at its National Training Center in Shepherdstown, West Virginia. In 20 offerings to more than 600 natural resource professionals, the authors learned a great deal about what is needed to function successfully as a professional resource manager. The book offers important insights and a unique perspective dervied from that invaluable experience.
At its core, ecosystem-based management (EBM) is about acknowledging connections. Instead of focusing on the impacts of single activities on the delivery of individual ecosystem services, EBM focuses on the array of services that we receive from marine systems, the interactive and cumulative effects of multiple human activities on these coupled ecological and social systems, and the importance of working towards common goals across sectors. Ecosystem-Based Management for the Oceans provides a conceptual framework for students and professionals who want to understand and utilize this powerful approach. And it employs case studies that draw on the experiences of EBM practitioners to demonstrate how EBM principles can be applied to real-world problems.
The book emphasizes the importance of understanding the factors that contribute to social and ecological resilience —the extent to which a system can maintain its structure, function, and identity in the face of disturbance. Utilizing the resilience framework, professionals can better predict how systems will respond to a variety of disturbances, as well as to a range of management alternatives. Ecosystem-Based Management for the Oceans presents the latest science of resilience, while it provides tools for the design and implementation of responsive EBM solutions.
Ecosystems and Human Well-being is the first product of the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MA), a four-year international work program designed to meet the needs of decision-makers for scientific information on the links between ecosystem change and human well-being. The Millennium Ecosystem Assessment is modeled on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and will provide information requested by governments, through four international conventions, as well as meeting needs within the private sector and civil society. Ecosystems and Human Well-being offers an overview of the assessment, describing the conceptual framework that is being used, defining its scope and providing a baseline of understanding that all participants need to move forward.
The Millennium Ecosystem Assessment focuses on how humans have altered ecosystems, and how changes in ecosystems have affected human well-being. The assessment also evaluates how ecosystem changes may affect people in future decades and what responses can be adopted at local, national, or global scales to improve ecosystem management and thereby contribute to human well-being and poverty alleviation. The assessment was launched by United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan in June 2001, and the primary assessment reports will be released by Island Press in 2005.
The Millennium Ecosystem Assessment series is an invaluable new resource for professionals and policy-makers concerned with international development, environmental science, environmental policy, and related fields. It will help both in choosing among existing options and in identifying new approaches for achieving integrated management of land, water, and living resources while strengthening regional, national, and local capacities. The Millennium Ecosystem Assessment series will also improve policy and decision-making at all levels by increasing collaboration between natural and social scientists, and between scientists and policy-makers. Ecosystems and Human Well-being is an essential introduction to the program.
The manual is a stand-alone “how to” guide to conducting assessments of the impacts on humans of ecosystem changes. In addition, assessment practitioners who are looking for guidance on particular aspects of the assessment process will find individual chapters of this manual to be useful in advancing their understanding of best practices in ecosystem assessment. The manual builds on the experiences and lessons learned from the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment global and sub-global assessment initiatives, with chapters written by well-known participants in those initiatives. It also includes insights and experiences gained from a wider range of ecosystem service-focused assessment activities since the completion of the MA in 2005.
The ensete plant is only one among the many “unloved” crops that are marginalized and pushed close to disappearance by the advance of farming modernization and monocultural thinking. And yet its human companions, caught in a symbiotic and sensuous dialogue with the plant, still relate to each exemplar as having individual appearance, sensibility, charisma, and taste, as an epiphany of beauty and prosperity, and even believe that the plant can feel pain. Here a different story is recounted of these human-plant communities, one of reciprocal love at times practiced in an act of secrecy. The plot unfolds from the subversive and tasteful dimensions of gardening for subsistence and cooking in the garden of ensete through reflections on the cultural and edible dimensions of biodiversity to embrace hunger and beauty as absorbing aesthetic experiences in small-scale agriculture. Through this story, the reader will enter the material and spiritual world of ensete and contemplate it as a modest yet inspiring example of hope in rapidly deteriorating landscapes.
Based on prolonged engagement with this “virtuous” plant of southwestern Ethiopia, this book provides a nuanced reading of the ensete ventricosum (avant-)garden and explores how the life in tiny, diverse, and womanly plots offers alternative visions of nature, food policy, and conservation efforts.
Lavishly illustrated with nearly three hundred gorgeous full-color photos, this engaging guidebook carefully describes forty different edible species of wild mushrooms found around Illinois and surrounding states, including Iowa, Wisconsin, Missouri, Indiana, and Kentucky. With conversational and witty prose, the book provides extensive detail on each edible species, including photographs of potential look-alikes to help you safely identify and avoid poisonous species. Mushroom lovers from Chicago to Cairo will find their favorite local varieties, including morels, chanterelles, boletes, puffballs, and many others. Veteran mushroom hunters Joe McFarland and Gregory M. Mueller also impart their wisdom about the best times and places to find these hidden gems.
Edible Wild Mushrooms of Illinois and Surrounding States also offers practical advice on preparing, storing, drying, and cooking with wild mushrooms, presenting more than two dozen tantalizing mushroom recipes from some of the best restaurants and chefs in Illinois, including one of Food & Wine magazine's top 10 new chefs of 2007. Recipes include classics like Beer Battered Morels, Parasol Mushroom Frittatas, and even the highly improbable (yet delectable) Morel Tiramisu for dessert.
As the first new book about Illinois mushrooms in more than eighty years, this is the guide that mushroom hunters and cooks have been craving.
Visit the book's companion website at www.illinoismushrooms.com.
Edward Condon’s Cooperative Vision explores the life cycle of that vision during the Great Depression, the Second World War, and the early Cold War. Condon’s cooperative model of research and development evolved over time and by consequence laid bare sharp disagreements among academic, corporate, and government stakeholders about the practical value of new knowledge, where and how it should be produced, and ultimately, on whose behalf it ought to be put to use.
One Nobel Prize–winning physicist called Edward Teller, “A great man of vast imagination…[one of the] most thoughtful statesmen of science.” Another called him, “A danger to all that is important… It would have been a better world without [him].” That both opinions about Teller were commonly held and equally true is one of the enduring mysteries about the man dubbed “the father of the H-bomb.” In the story of Teller’s life and career, told here in greater depth and detail than ever before, Peter Goodchild unravels the complex web of harsh early experiences, character flaws, and personal and professional frustrations that lay behind the paradox of “the real Dr. Strangelove.”
Goodchild’s biography draws on interviews with more than fifty of Teller’s colleagues and friends. Their voices echo through the book, expressing admiration and contempt, affection and hatred, as we observe Teller’s involvement in every stage of building the atomic bomb, and his subsequent pursuit of causes that drew the world deeper into the Cold War—alienating many of his scientific colleagues even as he provided the intellectual lead for politicians, the military, and presidents as they shaped Western policy. Goodchild interviewed Teller himself at the end of his life, and what emerges from this interview, as well as from Teller’s memoirs and recently unearthed correspondence, is a clearer view of the contradictions and controversies that riddled the man’s life. Most of all, though, this absorbing biography rescues Edward Teller from the caricatures that have served to describe him until now. In their place, Goodchild shows us one of the most powerful scientists of the twentieth century in all his enigmatic humanity.
end of the decade, he proved that the universe is expanding, thus laying
the very cornerstone of the big bang theory. A revealing portrait of a
scientific genius at work, this book also offers an incisive narrative
of the history of astronomy, and an evocation of what we see when gazing
at the stars.
"Highly entertaining. . . . Hubble may have been the most important
astronomer since Galileo. Perhaps since Copernicus."—Dick Teresi,
New York Times Book Review
"Hubble's own story has not been adequately told until now. . . . A
riveting portrait of a great scientist and a haunted man, and the best
look we are likely to have of the real Hubble."—Dennis Overby, Los
Angeles Times Book Review
"Displays remarkable strength in its steadfast balance and scrupulous
honesty. The greatness of the discoveries is set off against the
contrasting pettiness of the man."—Hans Christian von Baeyer,
Boston Sunday Globe
"Fascinating. . . . This is one of the most impressive scientific
biographies of recent years."—Kirkus Review, starred review
— "Notable Books for the Year 1995" selection, New York Times Book
Review
—"Best Books of 1995" selection, Library Journal
—Selected as one of the five best science books in 1995 by Carl Sagen,
Washington Post
“Blood,” Goethe observed in Faust, “is a very special juice.” How special it is and how complex as well is revealed in Douglas Surgenor’s Edwin J. Cohn and the Development of Protein Chemistry.
As Surgenor aptly shows, what began as a modest program in basic research at the Harvard Medical School in 1920 with the establishment of a small laboratory for the study of the physical chemistry of proteins, suddenly and quite unexpectedly took on immensely practical proportions twenty years later when the onset of World War II made requisite new sophisticated blood techniques and blood substitutes for the treatment of military casualties.
The knowledge and expertise gained by Edwin Cohn and his laboratory associates in the study of proteins, amino acids, and peptides in blood after 1920 put them in a unique position to carry out the search for new blood products. Edwin J. Cohn and the Development of Protein Chemistry discloses how the wartime emergency called into play Cohn’s talents as a leader who drew together chemists, clinicians, pathologists, immunologists, and others in the attainment of a complex goal. The revolution Cohn started has still not run its course.
Effective Conservation is based on Jiménez’s experience managing conservation projects on three continents over thirty years. Jiménez offers a pragmatic approach to conservation that puts the focus on working with people—neighbors, governments, politicians, businesses, media—to ensure they have a long-term stake in protecting and restoring parks and wildlife. Jiménez guides readers through the practical considerations of designing, analyzing, and managing effective conservation programs. Chapters explore intelligence gathering, communication, planning, conflict management, and evaluation techniques, and include numerous text boxes showcasing examples of successful conservation projects from all continents. A companion website (islandpress.org/effective-conservation) includes additional case studies, expanded texts, and links to additional resources.
This highly readable manual, newly translated into English after successful Spanish and Portuguese editions, provides a groundbreaking and time-proven formula for successful conservation projects around the world that bring together parks, people, and nature.
Mirowski contends that neoclassical economists have persistently presumed and advanced an “effortless economy of science,” a misleading model of a self-sufficient and conceptually self-referential social structure that transcends market operations in pursuit of absolute truth. In the stunning essays collected here, he presents a radical critique of the ways that neoclassical economics is used to support, explain, and legitimate the current social practices underlying the funding and selection of “successful” science projects. He questions a host of theories, including the portraits of science put forth by Karl Popper, Michael Polanyi, and Thomas Kuhn. Among the many topics he examines are the social stabilization of quantitative measurement, the repressed history of econometrics, and the social construction of the laws of supply and demand and their putative opposite, the gift economy. In The Effortless Economy of Science? Mirowski moves beyond grand abstractions about science, truth, and democracy in order to begin to talk about the way science is lived and practiced today.
This interdisciplinary volume provides a history of the mummies’ discovery and relocation to Colorado. It guides the reader through various analytical techniques, detailing past research and introducing new data and best practices for future conservation efforts. The new analysis includes more accurate radiocarbon dating, fully comprehensive data from updated CT scans, examples of Egyptian blue and yellow pigments on the coffins uncovered by non-invasive x-ray fluorescence, unprecedented analysis of the coffin wood, updated translations and stylistic analysis of the text and imagery on the coffins, gas chromatography of the paints and resins, linen analysis, and much more.
The Egyptian Mummies and Coffins of the Denver Museum of Nature & Science provides replicable findings and consistent terminology for institutions performing holistic studies on extant museum collections of a range of material types. It will add substantially to what we know about the effective conservation of Egyptian mummies and coffins.
Contributors: Christopher H. Baisan, Hans Barnard, Bonnie Clark, Pearce Paul Creasman, Farrah Cundiff, Jessica M. Fletcher, Kari L. Hayes, Kathryn Howley, Stephen Humphries, Keith Miller, Vanessa Muros, Robyn Price, David Rubinstein, Judith Southward, Jason Weinman
For Albert Einstein, 1905 was a remarkable year. It was also a miraculous year for the history and future of science. In six short months, from March through September of that year, Einstein published five papers that would transform our understanding of nature. This unparalleled period is the subject of John Rigden's book, which deftly explains what distinguishes 1905 from all other years in the annals of science, and elevates Einstein above all other scientists of the twentieth century.
Rigden chronicles the momentous theories that Einstein put forth beginning in March 1905: his particle theory of light, rejected for decades but now a staple of physics; his overlooked dissertation on molecular dimensions; his theory of Brownian motion; his theory of special relativity; and the work in which his famous equation, E = mc2, first appeared. Through his lucid exposition of these ideas, the context in which they were presented, and the impact they had--and still have--on society, Rigden makes the circumstances of Einstein's greatness thoroughly and captivatingly clear. To help readers understand how these ideas continued to develop, he briefly describes Einstein's post-1905 contributions, including the general theory of relativity.
One hundred years after Einstein's prodigious accomplishment, this book invites us to learn about ideas that have influenced our lives in almost inconceivable ways, and to appreciate their author's status as the standard of greatness in twentieth-century science.
Albert Einstein and J. Robert Oppenheimer, two iconic scientists of the twentieth century, belonged to different generations, with the boundary marked by the advent of quantum mechanics. By exploring how these men differed—in their worldview, in their work, and in their day—this book provides powerful insights into the lives of two critical figures and into the scientific culture of their times. In Einstein’s and Oppenheimer’s philosophical and ethical positions, their views of nuclear weapons, their ethnic and cultural commitments, their opinions on the unification of physics, even the role of Buddhist detachment in their thinking, the book traces the broader issues that have shaped science and the world.
Einstein is invariably seen as a lone and singular genius, while Oppenheimer is generally viewed in a particular scientific, political, and historical context. Silvan Schweber considers the circumstances behind this perception, in Einstein’s coherent and consistent self-image, and its relation to his singular vision of the world, and in Oppenheimer’s contrasting lack of certainty and related non-belief in a unitary, ultimate theory. Of greater importance, perhaps, is the role that timing and chance seem to have played in the two scientists’ contrasting characters and accomplishments—with Einstein’s having the advantage of maturing at a propitious time for theoretical physics, when the Newtonian framework was showing weaknesses.
Bringing to light little-examined aspects of these lives, Schweber expands our understanding of two great figures of twentieth-century physics—but also our sense of what such greatness means, in personal, scientific, and cultural terms.
At the start of the twentieth century, the first quantum revolution upset our vision of the world. New physics offered surprising realities, such as wave-particle duality, and led to major inventions: the transistor, the laser, and today’s computers. Less known is the second quantum revolution, arguably initiated in 1935 during a debate between giants Albert Einstein and Niels Bohr. This revolution is still unfolding. Its revolutionaries—including the author of this short accessible book, Nobel Prize–winning physicist Alain Aspect—explore the notion of entangled particles, able to interact at seemingly impossible distances. Aspect’s research has helped to show how entanglement may both upend existing technologies, like cryptography, and usher in entirely new ones, like quantum computing. Explaining this physics of the future, this work tells a story of how philosophical debates can shape new realities.
“[The] book makes a wonderfully cohesive whole. It is rich in ideas, elegantly expressed. I highly recommend it to any serious student of science and culture.”—Lucy Horwitz, Boston Book Review
“An important and lasting contribution to a more profound understanding of the place of science in our culture.”—Hans C. von Baeyer, Boston Sunday Globe
“[Holton’s] themes are central to an understanding of the nature of science, and Holton does an excellent job of identifying and explaining key features of the scientific enterprise, both in the historical sense and in modern science…I know of no better informed scientist who has studied the nature of science for half a century.”—Ron Good, Science and Education
Through his rich exploration of Einstein’s thought, Gerald Holton shows how the best science depends on great intuitive leaps of imagination, and how science is indeed the creative expression of the traditions of Western civilization.
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