An essential guide for those dealing with the Cape Water Crisis and for general water saving in South and southern Africa, a notoriously water-scarce region.

Three provinces in South Africa have been declared national disaster zones because of drought. The way we think about water needs to change, and fast. This is especially true for those of us who have running water and flush sanitation piped into our homes. For millions of South Africans, water is already a precious resource that costs toil to collect and fuel to heat. Our middle-class expectations that water will gush steaming from our dozens of indoor taps 24/7 are going to look as bizarre to future generations as the spectacle of Cleopatra bathing in asses’ milk. Our Roman-orgy relationship with water is over.

This book will hopefully help to alleviate water panic and distress. A “can-do” compendium, it’s meant to be a guide, not prescriptive – not all solutions or tips are one-size-fits-all. Think of it as an ally in your fight to save water and part of your survival kit, along with the first-aid box; Valium for water-worriers.

After centuries of relative isolation, the Karoo – South Africa’s parched heartland – is a latecomer to the tourist industry. What was once viewed as a harsh and desolate place of limited attraction is rapidly gaining popularity with visitors who now make the Karoo their destination, keen to partake of its legendary charm, its extraordinary flora and the resurgence of wildlife that once again populates its plains.

Wild Karoo documents Mitch Reardon’s 4,000-kilometre journey of discovery through the region. The book focuses on:

• local nature conservation in all its facets
• the game, large and small – some recently reintroduced – plus birds, reptiles and invertebrates
• the unique, arid-adapted flora
• the landscape and geology
• the history and lifestyle of the people who have made a home here
• plans to combine public and private protected land to create wildlife corridors between isolated parks, re-establishing old migration routes and so reversing some of the effects of human settlement

Beautifully written, and illustrated with evocative photographs, this book is a must read for anyone interested in travel, wildlife and the environment.

From the depths of the oceans to the highest reaches of the atmosphere, the human impact on the environment is significant and undeniable. These forms of global and local environmental change collectively appear to signal the arrival of a new geological epoch: the Anthropocene. This is a geological era defined not by natural environmental fluctuations or meteorite impacts, but by collective actions of humanity. Environmental Transformations offers a concise and accessible introduction to the human practices and systems that sustain the Anthropocene. It combines accounts of the carbon cycle, global heat balances, entropy, hydrology, forest ecology and pedology, with theories of demography, war, industrial capitalism, urban development, state theory and behavioural psychology. This book charts the particular role of geography and geographers in studying environmental change and its human drivers. It provides a review of critical theories that can help to uncover the socio-economic and political factors that influence environmental change. It also explores key issues in contemporary environmental studies, such as resource use, water scarcity, climate change, industrial pollution and deforestation. These issues are 'mapped' through a series of geographical case studies to illustrate the particular value of geographical notions of space, place and scale, in uncovering the complex nature of environmental change in different socio-economic, political and cultural contexts. Finally, the book considers the different ways in which nations, communities and individuals around the world are adapting to environmental change in the twenty-first century. Particular attention is given throughout to the uneven geographical opportunities that different communities have to adapt to environmental change and to the questions of social justice this situation raises. This book encourages students to engage in the scientific uncertainties that surround the study of environmental change, while also discussing both pessimistic and more optimistic views on the ability of humanity to address the environmental challenges of our current era.

You know you should be doing something to help save our planet, but it sounds hard, something that you will tackle another day.

Going green all at once is too much for almost anyone to achieve. Instead, try to make just one change, or add one new sustainable habit, each week. After one year you will be amazed at how much you have accomplished.

A Greener Tomorrow will give you tips on simple things that you can start doing straight away – be it at work, at home, and in your garden. Let’s all do our part in saving this planet – allowing our children’s grandchildren to still live in a world that is beautiful.

A Greener Tomorrow contains over 150 bite-sized chunks of greening advice from the likes of eco-friendly South Africans Arthur Goldstuck; Ashley Hayden; Barry Ronge; Brand Pretorius; Bryan Habana; Casey B. Dolan; Caspe De Vries; Damon Galgut; Gary Kirsten; Jan Braai; Jane Griffiths; Jassy Mackenzie; John van de Ruit; Marc Lottering; Max du Preez; Michiel Heyns; Paige Nick; Romy Titus; Tanit Phoenix; Tony Leon and more.

Although evangelicals and environmentalists at large still find themselves on opposing sides of an increasingly contentious issue, there is a counternarrative that has received little attention. Since the late 1970s, evangelical creation care advocates have worked relentlessly both to find a common cause with environmentalists and to convince fellow evangelicals to engage in environmental debate and action. In God's Wounded World , Melanie Gish analyzes the evolution of evangelical environmental advocacy in the United States. Drawing on qualitative interviews, organizational documents, and other texts, her interdisciplinary approach focuses on the work of evangelical environmental organizations and the motivations of the individuals who created them. Gish positions creation care by placing mainstream environmentalism on one side and organized evangelical environmental skepticism on the other. The religiopolitical space evangelical environmental leaders have established "in-between but still within" is carefully explored, with close attention to larger historical context as well as to creation care's political opportunities and intraevangelical challenges. The nuanced portrait that emerges defies simple distinctions.Not only are creation care leaders wrestling with questions of environmental degradation and engagement, they also must grapple with what it means to be an evangelical living faithfully in both present-day America and the global community. As Gish reveals, evangelical advocates' answers to these questions place moral responsibility and mediation above ideology and dogmatic certainty. Such a posture risks political irrelevance in our hyperpartisan and combative political culture, but if it succeeds it could transform the creation care movement into a powerful advocate fora more accommodating and holistically oriented evangelicalism.

Now revised and updated, Van Jones's provocative and cutting edge New York Times bestseller The Green Collar Economy delivers a viable plan for solving the two biggest issues facing the country today--the economy and the environment.

The Delaware Naturalist Handbook is the primary public face of a major university-led public educational outreach and community engagement initiative. This statewide master naturalist certification program is designed to train hundreds of citizen scientists, K-12 environmental educators, ecological restoration volunteers, and habitat managers each year. The initiative is conducted in collaboration with multiple disciplines at the University of Delaware, the University of Delaware Cooperative Extension, the Delaware Environmental Institute (DENIN), the state Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Conservation (DNREC), the state Division of Parks, the state Forest Service, the state Division of Fish and Wildlife, and local nonprofit educational institutions, including the Mount Cuba Center, the Delaware Nature Society and Ashland Nature Center, Delaware Wildlands, Northeast Climate Hub, Center for Inland Bays, and White Clay Creek State Park.

This interdisciplinary collection of eleven original essays focuses on the environmental impact of transportation, which is, as Tatiana Prorokova-Konrad and Brian C. Black note in their introduction, responsible for 26 percent of global energy use. Approaching mobility not solely as a material, logistical question but as a phenomenon mediated by culture, the book interrogates popular assumptions deeply entangled with energy choices. Rethinking transportation, the contributors argue, necessarily involves fundamental understandings of consumption, freedom, and self. The essays in Transportation and the Culture of Climate Change cover an eclectic range of subject matter, from the association of bicycles with childhood to the songs of Bruce Springsteen, but are united in a central conviction: "Transport is a considerable part of our culture that is as hard to transform as it is for us to stop using fossil fuels - but we do not have an alternative.

From the hill country in the north to the marshy lowlands in the south, Louisiana and its citizens have long enjoyed the hard-earned fruits of the oil and gas industry's labor. Economic prosperity flowed from pioneering exploration as the industry heralded engineering achievements and innovative production technologies. Those successes, however, often came at the expense of other natural resources, leading to contamination and degradation of land and water. In A Thousand Ways Denied, John T. Arnold documents the oil industry's sharp interface with Louisiana's environment. Drawing on government, corporate, and personal files, many previously untapped, he traces the history of oil-field practices and their ecological impacts in tandem with battles over regulation. Arnold reveals that in the early twentieth century, Louisiana helped lead the nation in conservation policy, instituting some of the first programs to sustain its vast wealth of natural resources. But with the proliferation of oil output, government agencies splintered between those promoting production and others committed to preventing pollution. As oil's economic and political strength grew, regulations commonly went unobserved and unenforced. Over the decades, oil, saltwater, and chemicals flowed across the ground, through natural drainages, and down waterways. Fish and wildlife fled their habitats, and drinking-water supplies were ruined. In the wetlands, drilling facilities sat like factories in the midst of a maze of interconnected canals dredged to support exploration, manufacture, and transportation of oil and gas. In later years, debates raged over the contribution of these activities to coastal land loss. Oil is an inseparable part of Louisiana's culture and politics, Arnold asserts, but the state's original vision for safeguarding its natural resources has become compromised. He urges a return to those foundational conservation principles. Otherwise, Louisiana risks the loss of viable uses of its land and, in some places, its very way of life.

Beginning in 1872 with the establishment of Yellowstone, national parks were set aside to preserve for future generations the most spectacular and inspirational features of the country. The best representative examples were sought out of major ecosystems, such as Yosemite, geologic forms, such as the Grand Canyon, archaeological sites, such as Mesa Verde, and scenes of human events, such as Gettysburg. But one type of habitat-the desert-was overlooked until travel writers and the Automobile Age began to change Americans' perceptions about desert landscapes. As the National Park Service began to explore the better-known Mojave and Colorado Deserts of southern California during the 1920s for a possible desert park, many agency leaders still held the same negative image of arid lands shared by many Americans-that they are hostile environments and largely useless. But one wealthy woman-Minerva Hamilton Hoyt, from Pasadena-came forward, believing in the value of the desert, and convinced President Franklin D. Roosevelt to establish a national monument that would protect the unique and iconic Joshua trees and other desert flora and fauna. Thus was Joshua Tree National Monument officially established in 1936, and when the area later was expanded in 1994, it became Joshua Tree National Park. Since 1936 the National Park Service and a growing cadre of environmentalists and recreationalists have fought to block ongoing proposals from miners, ranchers, private landowners, and real estate developers who historically have refused to accept the idea that desert might be suitable for anything other than their consumptive activities. Joshua Tree National Park, even with its often-conflicting land uses, is more popular today than ever, serving more than one million visitors per year who find the desert to be a place worthy of respect and preservation.

Bringing Back the Beaver is farmer-turned-ecologist Derek Gow's inspirational and often riotously funny firsthand account of how the movement to rewild the British landscape with beavers has become the single most dramatic and subversive nature conservation act of the modern era. Since the early 1990s - in the face of outright opposition from government, landowning elites and even some conservation professionals - Gow has imported, quarantined and assisted the reestablishment of beavers in waterways across England and Scotland. In addition to detailing the ups and downs of rewilding beavers, Bringing Back the Beaver makes a passionate case as to why the return of one of nature's great problem solvers will be critical as part of a sustainable fix for flooding and future drought, whilst ensuring the creation of essential lifescapes that enable the broadest possible spectrum of Britain's wildlife to thrive.

Since its genesis in 1980, Crosby Arboretum in southern Mississippi has attracted international recognition for its contributions to architecture, biology, and landscape design. Now owned and operated by Mississippi State University, Crosby is the first fully realized ecologically designed arboretum in the United States and the premier native plant conservatory in the Southeast.

Former site director and curator Robert F. Brzuszek provides a detailed survey of the arboretum's origins, planning, construction, and ongoing management. More than just a botanical center, Crosby emerged as one of the first American landscape projects to successfully balance natural habitat and planned design. The book's generous selection of photographs and drawings illustrate the beauty and purpose of the site's components: the award-winning Pinecote Pavilion, designed by architect Fay Jones; a 104-acre focus area that includes the Piney Woods Lake, which displays native water plants in their natural setting; and seven hundred additional acres of savanna, woodland, and aquatic environments that nurture more than 300 species of indigenous trees, shrubs, wildflowers, and grasses.

Utilizing the interactions between two opposing natural forces -- fire and water -- Crosby Arboretum protects the biological diversity indigenous to the Pearl River Drainage Basin, in southern Mississippi and southeastern Louisiana. Brzuszek's inspiring and informative account will help further Crosby's role as a model of sustainable landscape design and management across the country.

The River Road between New Orleans and Baton Rouge hosts a fascinating mix of people, traditions, and stories. Author Mary Ann Sternberg has spent over two decades exploring this richly historic corridor, uncovering intriguing and often underappreciated places. In River Road Rambler, she presents fifteen sketches about sites along this scenic route. From familiar stops, such as the National Hansen s Disease Center Museum at Carville, with its octogenarian guide, and the sui generis perique tobacco area of St. James Parish to the less well-noted yet highly distinctive Our Lady of Lourdes grotto in Convent and the gradually disappearing Colonial Sugars Historic District, Sternberg presents a new perspective on some of the region s most colorful places. While many of the places remain easily accessible to any River Road rambler, Sternberg also presents others closed to the public, giving armchair travelers an introduction to these otherwise unreachable attractions. Throughout, Sternberg captures the ambiance of her surroundings with a clear, engaging, and sometimes quirky examination of the relationships between past and present. In a poignant piece on the Valcour Aime garden, for example, she delves into the history of this lavish, nationally acclaimed planter s garden, created and abandoned in the mid-nineteenth century. Her visit to the now private and protected site, which has never been altered or replanted since its origins, reveals an extraordinary landscape the relic of what Valcour Aime created, slowly overwhelmed by nature. The essay-like stories brim with insights and observations about everything from the fire that razed The Cottage plantation to the failed attempts to salvage the reproduction of the seventeenth century French warship Le Pelican from the bottom of the Mississippi. River Road Rambler takes us along to River Road treasures, linking us to both past and present and bringing some delightful and unexpected surprises in the process.

Seasonal roads are defined as one-lane dirt roads not maintained during the winter. They function as connectors linking farmers to their fields, neighbors to neighbors, or two more well-traveled roads to each other. Some access hunting lands and recreational areas. Some pass by cemeteries, allowing people to visit and honor their dead. They can be abandoned as people move and towns fade. In every incarnation, the seasonal road touches the land in a gentler way than do other roads. Having traveled nearly every seasonal road in Steuben County, New York, Hood finds they provide the ideal vantage to contemplate the meaning of place, offering intimate contact with plant and wildlife and the beauty of a rural landscape. Each road reveals how our land is used, how our land is protected, and how environmental factors have impacted the land. As a literary naturalist, Hood reflects on endangered species and invasive species, as well as on issues of conservation and sustainability. From state forests to potato fields, from development along Keuka Lake to vineyards, from old family cemeteries to logging sites, Walking Seasonal Roads is a celebration and an honoring of the rural and the regionalism of place, illustrating the ways we connect to our home and to each other.

Winner of the Illinois State Historical Society Outstanding Achievement Award Efforts to preserve wild places in the United States began with the allure of scenic grandeur: Yosemite, Yellowstone, the Grand Canyon. But what about the many significant natural sites too small or fragile to qualify as state or federal parks? Force of Nature reveals how George Fell initiated the natural areas movement to save those areas. Fell transformed a loose band of ecologists into The Nature Conservancy, drove the passage of the influential Illinois Nature Preserves Act, and helped spark allied local and national conservation organizations in the United States and beyond.

Find your route to a more sustainable lifestyle with Dick Strawbridge, of Channel 4's Escape to the Chateau, and his son James. We can all take steps to reduce our carbon footprint and be more self-sufficient. For some, that might mean upping sticks and living off the land. For the rest of us, the reality might involve smaller, but no less important, lifestyle changes: cutting back on plastic or food waste, growing vegetables, preserving meat and fish, preparing jams and chutneys, baking sourdough bread, making your own plant-based milks, or keeping a chicken or two. Dick and James Strawbridge know what it's like to make these changes. Between them, they've lived on a smallholding, in a terraced house, and even a chateau. In this updated edition of Practical Self-sufficiency they share everything they've learned, and give you the tools you need for a more rewarding and environmentally conscious life.

A global tour of earth repair and some of the unsung heroes pushing the boundaries of ecological restoration to show how even the world's most wounded places can be revived The book begins in China's Loess Plateau, where a landmark project successfully restored a blighted region the size of Belgium, lifting millions of people out of poverty. Journalist Judith D. Schwartz shows how solutions to seemingly intractable problems can be, in the words of permaculture pioneer Bill Mollison, "embarrassingly simple." And surprisingly inexpensive, as the chief tools are keen observation and a desire to follow nature's lead. Schwartz introduces us to people around the world who are restoring degraded lands at any scale, in any climate, and often at minimal cost by embracing an understanding of how a given landscape "works" and allying with nature's inherent inclination to heal. The Reindeer Chronicles also challenges orthodoxies of conservation, such as that culling semi-wild animals like wild donkeys, reindeer, or dingoes is beneficial to the environment. Schwartz explores regenerative solutions in different landscapes: deserts, grasslands, tropics, tundra, Mediterranean. She also highlights various human landscapes, which may involve the legacy of colonialism and industrial agriculture, and the endurance of indigenous knowledge. These stories show that land restoration needn't simply mean returning to a previous state but to the renewal of ecological function: restoring the water, carbon, nutrient, and energy cycles. And how this renewal can play an important role in stabilizing the Earth's climate. Ultimately, The Reindeer Chronicles reveals how much is in our hands. It provides a roadmap to help us reorient ourselves during a time of uncertainty toward productive, empowering work on behalf of the home we all share and cherish.

How the rewilding of eight acres of Norfolk marshland inspired a family and brought nature even closer to home. When writer Simon Barnes heard a Cetti's warbler sing out as he turned up to look at a house for sale, he knew immediately that he had found his new home. The fact that his garden backed onto an area of marshy land only increased the possibilities, but there was always the fear that it might end up in the wrong hands and be lost to development or intensive farming. His wife saw through the delicate negotiations for the purchase. Once they'd bought it, they began to manage it as a conservation area, working with the Wildlife Trust to ensure it became as appealing as possible to all species. For their son Eddie, who has Down's syndrome, it became a place of calm and inspiration. In On The Marsh, we see how nature can always bring surprises, and share in the triumphs as new animals - Chinese water deer, otters and hedgehogs - arrive, and watch as the number of species of bird tops 100 and keeps on growing. As the seasons go by, there are moments of triumph when not one but two marsh harrier families use the marsh as a hunting ground, but also disappointments as chemical run-off from neighbouring farmland creates a nettles monoculture in newly turned earth. For anyone who enjoyed books such as Meadowland, or the writing of Stephen Moss, Roger Deakin or Adam Nicolson, this is a vivid and beautifully written account of the wonders that can sometimes be found on our doorsteps, and how nature can transform us all.

Naturalist John James Audubon found the Great Plains and their wildlife so riveting when he visited the region in 1834 that he broke off a letter to his wife because he was too excited to write. In the almost two hundred years since then, the Wyoming landscape, deemed the ""Italy of America"" by landscape painter Albert Bierstadt, has retained its glory if not its place in the imagination of the American public. This book reminds us of the remarkable bounty contained in the wild beauty and rich history of the Wyoming grasslands - even as these riches are under threat from both human and natural forces. This landscape is now captured in all its spectacular diversity in the photography of Michael P. Berman and William S. Sutton, two of the modern American West's most accomplished and well-known landscape photographers. Essays by Frank H. Goodyear, Jr., and Charles R. Preston provide a contextual framework for the images. Goodyear introduces us to the imagery of the American West and explains the place of Berman's and Sutton's work within that tradition, and Preston focuses on the natural history of the grasslands, illuminating the area's ecological diversity and changes through the seasons and over the years. In 2012 Berman and Sutton launched their massive Wyoming Grasslands Photographic Project, a partnership between The Nature Conservancy, Wyoming Chapter, and the Buffalo Bill Center of the West. Working in the tradition of late-nineteenth-century explorers and photographers of the American West, Berman and Sutton shot more than 50,000 digital photographs of Wyoming prairie, from the Red Desert of southwestern Wyoming to the Thunder Basin National Grassland of the state's northeastern corner. The best of their extraordinarily sensitive, revealing, and powerful images appear in these pages, documenting the sweep and the seasons of the Wyoming landscape. In eloquent words and pictures, including a foreword by environmental historian Dan Flores, Wyoming Grasslands offers dramatic proof of how the land that inspired the likes of Audubon and Bierstadt, while having altered over time, still holds and demands our attention.

The environment has long been the undisputed territory of the political Left, which casts international capitalism, consumerism, and the over-exploitation of natural resources as the principle threats to the planet, and sees top-down interventions as the most effective solution.
In How to Think Seriously About the Planet, Roger Scruton rejects this view and offers a fresh approach to tackling the most important political problem of our time. The environmental movement, he contends, is philosophically confused and has unrealistic agendas. Its sights are directed at the largescale events and the confrontation between international politics and multinational business. But Scruton argues that no large-scale environmental project, however well-intentioned, will succeed if it is not rooted in small-scale practical reasoning. Seeing things on a large scale promotes top-down solutions, managed by unaccountable bureaucracies that fail to assess local conditions and are rife with unintended consequences. Scruton argues for the greater efficacy of local initiatives over global schemes, civil association over political activism, and small-scale institutions of friendship over regulatory hyper-vigilance. And he suggests that conservatism is far better suited to solving environmental problems than either liberalism or socialism. Rather than entrusting the environment to unwieldy NGOs and international committees, we must assume personal responsibility and foster local control. People must be empowered to take charge of their environment, to care for it as they would a home, and to involve themselves through the kind of local associations that have been the traditional goal of conservative politics.
Our common future is by no means assured, but as Roger Scruton clearly demonstrates in this important book, there is a path that can ensure the future safety of our planet and our species.

It is widely understood that the burdens of ecological destruction are borne disproportionately by working-class and poor communities, both through illness and disease caused by pollutants and through the depletion of natural resources from which they make a living. Yet, consistently, the voices of the working class are the most marginalized, excluded, and silenced when discussing how to address ecological concerns and protect the environment from future destruction. Both mainstream environmental groups, such as the Sierra Club and Greenpeace, and radical environmentalists, such as EarthFirst!, are reluctant to engage with working-class and poor communities, often viewing blue-collar workers as responsible for the destruction these groups are trying to prevent. In Green Syndicalism, Shantz issues a call to action to the environmental movement and labor activists, particularly rank and file workers, to join forces in a common struggle to protect the environment from capitalism, corporate greed, and the extraction of resources. He argues for a major transformation to address the ""jobs versus the environment"" rhetoric that divides these two groups along lines of race and class. Combining practical initiatives and theoretical perspectives, Shantz offers an approach that brings together radical ecology and revolutionary unionism in a promising vision of green politics. Green syndicalists work as coalitions to increase community-based economics and productive decision making that encourages the participation of all stakeholders in the process. Drawing, in part, on his own experiences growing up in a working-class family and organizing within radical ecology and labor movements, Shantz charts a path that accesses the commonalities between these groups in an effort to take on the forces that destroy the environment, exploit people, and harm their communities.