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Books > Earth & environment > The environment > Applied ecology > General
How businesses can and are acting to redress social and
environmental issues is a question of growing academic interest.
Bringing together a range of interdisciplinary perspectives, this
insightful Research Agenda evaluates the current state of the art
of sustainability and business and assesses key challenges for the
field. Multidisciplinary chapters provide instrumental, economic,
network and political perspectives on issues that are crucial in
gaining insight into sustainability challenges facing businesses
today, from socially responsible consumption behaviours and
organisational resilience to climate change and sustainability
transitions in extractive industries. Its diverse contributions
highlight the breadth and depth of analyses and perspectives that
are necessary to set a dynamic agenda for future research on
sustainability and business. Advancing novel research questions and
methodologies, the editors illustrate the path ahead for carrying
out research that impacts the science and practice of business and
sustainability, as well as creating meaningful change for our
species and planet. Offering an advanced yet accessible
introduction to the current state and future direction of
sustainability and business, this incisive Research Agenda will be
an invaluable resource for students and scholars of business,
sustainability studies, and environment studies. Its practical
insights will also benefit MBA students and business executives
moving into sustainability.
On Human Nature: Biology, Psychology, Ethics, Politics, and
Religion covers the present state of knowledge on human diversity
and its adaptative significance through a broad and eclectic
selection of representative chapters. This transdisciplinary work
brings together specialists from various fields who rarely
interact, including geneticists, evolutionists, physicians,
ethologists, psychoanalysts, anthropologists, sociologists,
theologians, historians, linguists, and philosophers. Genomic
diversity is covered in several chapters dealing with biology,
including the differences in men and apes and the genetic diversity
of mankind. Top specialists, known for their open mind and broad
knowledge have been carefully selected to cover each topic. The
book is therefore at the crossroads between biology and human
sciences, going beyond classical science in the Popperian sense.
The book is accessible not only to specialists, but also to
students, professors, and the educated public. Glossaries of
specialized terms and general public references help nonspecialists
understand complex notions, with contributions avoiding technical
jargon.
Four decades ago, the areas around Yellowstone and Glacier National
Parks sheltered the last few hundred surviving grizzlies in the
Lower 48 states. Protected by the Endangered Species Act, their
population has surged to more than 1,500, and this burgeoning
number of grizzlies now collides with the increasingly populated
landscape of the twenty-first-century American West. While humans
and bears have long shared space, today's grizzlies navigate a
shrinking amount of wilderness: cars whiz like bullets through
their habitats, tourists check Facebook to pinpoint locations for a
quick selfie with a grizzly, and hunters seek trophy prey. People,
too, must learn to live and work within a potential predator's
territory they have chosen to call home. Mixing fast-paced
storytelling with rich details about the hidden lives of grizzly
bears, Montana journalist Robert Chaney chronicles the resurgence
of this charismatic species against the backdrop of the country's
long history with the bear. Chaney captures the clash between
groups with radically different visions: ranchers frustrated at
losing livestock, environmental advocates, hunters, and
conservation and historic preservation officers of tribal nations.
Underneath, he probes the balance between our demands on nature and
our tolerance for risk.
Colloid and Interface Chemistry for Water Quality Control provides
basic but essential knowledge of colloid and interface science for
water and wastewater treatment. Divided into two sections, chapters
1 to 8 presents colloid chemistry including simple history and
basic concepts, diffusion and Brown Motion, sedimentation, osmotic
pressure, optical properties, rheology properties, electric
properties, emulsion, foam and gel, and so on; chapters 9 to
provides interface chemistry theories including the surface of
liquid, the surface of solution, and the surface of solid. This
valuable book is the only one that presents colloid and interface
chemistry from the water quality control perspective. This book was
written for graduate students in the area of water treatment and
environmental engineering, and it could be used as the reference
for researchers and engineers in the same area.
Marine Paleobiodiversity presents a concise history, development
and current status of paleobiodiversity research, thus forming a
reference work for beginners, graduates and postgraduates, who are
interested in this subject and intend venture into serious
research. This book provides a link-reference between text book and
highly-specialized journal articles, and so will be valuable for a
wide audience of geologists and climatologists.
Humpback Dolphins (Sousa spp.): Current Status and Conservation,
Part 2 is part of Advances in Marine Biology, a series that has
been providing in-depth and up-to-date reviews on all aspects of
marine biology since 1963 - more than 50 years of outstanding
coverage from a reference that is well known for its contents and
editing. This latest addition to the series includes updates on
many topics that will appeal to postgraduates and researchers in
marine biology, fisheries science, ecology, zoology, and biological
oceanography. Specialty areas for the series include marine
science, both applied and basic, a wide range of topical areas from
all corners of marine ecology, oceanography, fisheries management,
and molecular biology, and the full range of geographic areas from
polar seas to tropical coral reefs.
Today's highly industrialized and technologically controlled global
food systems dominate our lives, shaping our access and attitudes
towards food and deeply influencing and defining our identities. At
the same time, these food systems are profoundly and destructively
impacting the health of the environment and threatening all of us,
human and nonhuman, who must subsist in ecological conditions of
increasing fragility and scarcity. This collection examines and
exposes the myriad ways that the food systems, driven by global
commodity capitalism and its imperative of growth at any cost,
increasingly controls us and conforms us to our roles as consumers
and producers. This collection covers a range of topics from the
excess of consumers in the post-industrial world and the often
unacknowledged yet intrinsic connection of their consumption to the
growing ecological and health crises in developing nations, to
topics of surveillance and control of human and nonhuman bodies
through food, to the deep linkages of cultural values and norms
toward food to the myriad crises we face on a global scale.
Modern civilization and the social reproduction of capitalism are
bound inextricably with fossil fuel consumption. But as carbon
energy resources become scarcer, what implications will this have
for energy-intensive modes of life? Can renewable energy sustain
high levels of accumulation?? Or will we witness the end of
existing capitalist economies? This book provides an innovative and
timely study that mobilizes a new theory of capitalism to explain
the rise and fall of petro-market civilization. Di Muzio
investigates how theorists of political economy have largely taken
energy for granted and illuminates how the exploitation of fossil
fuels increased the universalization and magnitude of capital
accumulation. He then examines the likelihood of renewable
resources providing a feasible alternative and asks whether they
can beat peak oil prices to sustain food production, health care,
science and democracy. Using the capital as power framework, this
book considers the unevenly experienced consequences of monetizing
fossil fuels for people and the planet.
Experiencing Climate Change in Bangladesh: Vulnerability and
Adaptation in Coastal Regions provides a conceptual and empirical
framework for understanding the vulnerability of coastal
communities in Bangladesh to multiple stressors and presents the
process by which rural households adapt their livelihoods. The
livelihoods of the poor people in many developing countries are
disproportionately vulnerable to multiple shocks and stresses. The
effects of climate change interacting with these livelihood
disturbances further amplify human vulnerability. Future climate
change is likely to aggravate this precarious situation. This book
offers a solid framework for analyzing the process and components
of adaptation of rural livelihoods to a changing hydro-climatic
environment and presents empirical evidence of livelihood
adaptation at the local level. The book creates a knowledge-base
for the small island developing states (SIDS) experiencing similar
socio-economic and climatic conditions. Also fills a market need by
providing a conceptual framework, case studies, and reflections on
lessons learned from policy responses for vulnerability reduction
and adaptation to climate variability, extremes, and change.
The landscapes of the Middle East have captured our imaginations
throughout history. Images of endless golden dunes, camel caravans,
isolated desert oases, and rivers lined with palm trees have often
framed written and visual representations of the region. Embedded
in these portrayals is the common belief that the environment, in
most places, has been deforested and desertified by centuries of
misuse. It is precisely such orientalist environmental imaginaries,
increasingly undermined by contemporary ecological data, that the
eleven authors in this volume question. This is the first volume to
critically examine culturally constructed views of the
environmental history of the Middle East and suggest that they have
often benefitted elites at the expense of the ecologies and the
peoples of the region. The contributors expose many of the
questionable policies and practices born of these environmental
imaginaries and related histories that have been utilized in the
region since the colonial period. They further reveal how power, in
the form of development programs, notions of nationalism, and
hydrological maps, for instance, relates to environmental knowledge
production. Contributors: Samer Alatout, Edmund Burke III, Shaul
Cohen, Diana K. Davis, Jennifer L. Derr, Leila M. Harris, Alan
Mikhail, Timothy Mitchell, Priya Satia, Jeannie Sowers, and George
R. Trumbull IV
Understanding Complex Ecosystem Dynamics: A Systems and Engineering
Perspective takes a fresh, interdisciplinary perspective on complex
system dynamics, beginning with a discussion of relevant systems
and engineering skills and practices, including an explanation of
the systems approach and its major elements. From this perspective,
the author formulates an ecosystem dynamics functionality-based
framework to guide ecological investigations. Next, because complex
system theory (across many subject matter areas) is crucial to the
work of this book, relevant network theory, nonlinear dynamics
theory, cellular automata theory, and roughness (fractal) theory is
covered in some detail. This material serves as an important
resource as the book proceeds. In the context of all of the
foregoing discussion and investigation, a view of the
characteristics of ecological network dynamics is constructed. This
view, in turn, is the basis for the central hypothesis of the book,
i.e., ecological networks are ever-changing networks with
propagation dynamics that are punctuated, local-to-global, and
perhaps most importantly fractal. To analyze and fully test this
hypothesis, an innovative ecological network dynamics model is
defined, designed, and developed. The modeling approach, which
seeks to emulate features of real-world ecological networks, does
not make a priori assumptions about ecological network dynamics,
but rather lets the dynamics develop as the model simulation runs.
Model analysis results corroborate the central hypothesis.
Additional important insights and principles are suggested by the
model analysis results and by the other supporting investigations
of this book - and can serve as a basis for going-forward complex
system dynamics research, not only for ecological systems but for
complex systems in general.
Living Hot tells the blunt truth about our current climate change
predicament: it's time to get cracking on making Australia resilient to
intensifying climate extremes. If we prepare well, we can give
ourselves a fighting chance to preserve some of the best of what we
have, build stronger and fairer communities, find a path through the
escalating pressures of a warming world – and even find new ways to
flourish.
To get there, we must leave behind both the doomism and the wishful
thinking currently holding us back. In Living Hot, highly respected
academic Clive Hamilton and policy consultant George Wilkenfeld shift
the emphasis away from reducing carbon emissions and on to making
Australia resilient, outlining a vision for an all-embracing and
on-going program of investment and social change to protect ourselves
from the ravages of a changing climate.
Living Hot is a sober assessment of the challenges we face, and a
farsighted road map for what we must do next if we want to survive and
even thrive on our heating planet.
Alongside increasing demands for transparency and accountability,
business governance is transforming due to decades of economic
turmoil, regulatory reform, and technological change. There is now
a holistic approach to this concept, as it is no longer just about
running companies and organization efficiently. Ethics and
Decision-Making for Sustainable Business Practices is a critical
scholarly resource that examines issues of sustainability, ethics,
governance, and cultural influence in the business world. Featuring
coverage on a broad range of topics such as entrepreneurship, cost
management, environmental business, and cultural diversity, this
book is geared towards managers, leaders, researchers, and
organizations interested in the integration of sustainable business
practices.
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