Biodiversity Planning and Design empowers landscape architects, urban planners, and environmental professionals to take an active, informed role in protecting biodiversity through practical design and planning strategies. As habitat loss continues to be the leading driver of biodiversity decline, this book offers a clear path for integrating ecological goals into built and natural environments—without compromising on functionality or aesthetics.

Authors Jack Ahern, Elizabeth Leduc, and Mary Lee York provide readers with essential tools to understand, measure, and apply biodiversity concepts in real-world projects. They break down complex terminology and outline effective planning methods that balance ecological conservation with land use, development, and recreation. Through accessible language and interdisciplinary guidance, the book helps professionals translate conservation science into impactful design choices.

Case studies from across the U.S.—including the Florida Statewide Greenway System, Seattle’s Woodland Park Zoo, and wetland restoration in Michigan—demonstrate how biodiversity goals can be embedded into both large-scale regional plans and site-specific projects. These examples highlight collaborations among planners, biologists, and community stakeholders to achieve resilient, multifunctional landscapes.

Whether designing green infrastructure, managing stormwater, or developing urban greenspaces, Biodiversity Planning and Design gives professionals the insight and confidence to lead on biodiversity issues—delivering projects that protect ecosystems while enriching communities.

Humans are plagued by shortsighted thinking, preferring to put off work on complex, deep-seated, or difficult problems in favor of quick-fix solutions to immediate needs. When short-term thinking is applied to economic development, especially in fragile nations, the results—corruption, waste, and faulty planning—are often disastrous. In Bringing in the Future, William Ascher draws on the latest research from psychology, economics, institutional design, and legal theory to suggest strategies to overcome powerful obstacles to long-term planning in developing countries.

Drawing on cases from Africa, Asia, and Latin America, Ascher applies strategies such as the creation and scheduling of tangible and intangible rewards, cognitive exercises to increase the understanding of longer-term consequences, self-restraint mechanisms to protect long-term commitments and enhance credibility, and restructuring policy-making processes to permit greater influence of long-term considerations. Featuring theoretically informed research findings and sound policy examples, this volume will assist policy makers, activists, and scholars seeking to understand how the vagaries of human behavior affect international development.

The first decade of the twenty-first century has been characterized by a growing global awareness of the tremendous strains that human economic activity place on natural resources and the environment. As the world’s population increases, so does the demand for energy, food, and other resources, which adds to existing stresses on ecosystems, with potentially disastrous consequences. Humanity is at a crossroads in our pathway to future prosperity, and our next steps will impact our long-term sustainability immensely. In this timely volume, leading ecological economics scholars offer a variety of perspectives on building a green economy. Grounded in a critique of conventional thinking about unrestrained economic expansion and the costs of environmental degradation, this book presents a roadmap for an economy that prioritizes human welfare over consumerism and growth. As the authors represented here demonstrate, the objective of ecological economics is to address contemporary problems and achieve long-term socioeconomic well-being without undermining the capacity of the ecosphere. The volume is organized around three sections: “Perspectives on a Green Economy,” “Historical and Theoretical Perspectives,” and “Applications and Practice.” A rich resource in its own right, Building a Green Economy contains the most innovative thinking in ecological economics at a critical time in the reexamination of the human relationship with the natural world.