Based on graph theory studies this book seeks to understand how tropical species interact with each other and how these interactions are affected by perturbations in some of the most species-rich habitats on earth. Due to the great diversity of species and interactions in the tropics, this book addresses a wide range of current and future issues with empirical examples and complete revisions on different types of ecological networks: from mutualisms to antagonisms. The goal of this publication is not to be only for researchers but also for undergraduates in different areas of knowledge, and also to serve as a reference text for graduate-level courses mainly in the life sciences.

The battle to save the world is being joined by a powerful new group of warriors. Celebrities are lending their name to conservation causes, and conservation itself is growing its own stars to fight and speak for nature. In this timely and essential book, Dan Brockington argues that this alliance grows from the mutually supportive publicity celebrity and conservation causes provide for each other, and more fundamentally, that the flourishing of celebrity and charismatic conservation is part of an ever-closer intertwining of conservation and corporate capitalism. Celebrity promotions, the investments of rich executives, and the wealthy social networks of charismatic conservationists are producing more commodified and commercial conservation strategies; conservation becomes an ever more important means of generating profit. Celebrity and the Environment provides vital critical analysis of this new phenomena and argues that, ironically, there may be a hidden cost to celebrity power to individual's relationships with the wild. The author argues that whilst wildlife television documentaries flourish, there is a significant decline in visits to national parks in many countries around the world and this is evidence that t a time when conservationists are calling for us to restore our relationships with the wild, many people are doing so simply by following the exploits of celebrity conservationists.

Uganda has extensive protected areas and iconic wildlife (including mountain gorillas), which exist within a complex social and political environment. In recent years Uganda has been seen as a test bed and model case study for numerous and varied approaches to address complex and connected conservation and development challenges. This volume reviews and assesses these initiatives, collecting new research and analyses both from emerging scholars and well-established academics in Uganda and around the globe. Approaches covered range from community-based conservation to the more recent proliferation of neoliberalised interventions based on markets and payments for ecosystem services. Drawing on insights from political ecology, human geography, institutional economics, and environmental science, the authors explore the challenges of operationalising truly sustainable forms of development in a country whose recent history is characterised by a highly volatile governance and development context. They highlight the stakes for vulnerable human populations in relation to of large and growing socioeconomic inequalities, as well as for Uganda's rich, unique, and globally significant biodiversity. They illustrate the conflicts that occur between competing claims of conservation, agriculture, tourism, and the energy and mining industries. Crucially, the book draws out lessons that can be learned from the Ugandan experience for conservation and development practitioners and scholars around the world.

Since the mid-1990s, growing concerns about environmental degradation, declining agricultural productivity, and increasing population pressures have led governments and agencies to seek new approaches to natural resource management.;This text addresses this problem by presenting the findings of a formal study and in-depth research project into the impacts of participatory watershed management in a wide range of agroecological and socioeconomic settings in Africa, Asia, Australia and Latin America.;The 23 case studies included here present a complex picture of the problems, achievements and continuing challenges faced by conservation professionals and farmers around the world. They provide compelling evidence of the importance of local people's involvement in natural resource planning and management. At the same time, they reveal how difficult it is to scale-up and institutionalize participatory approaches in large, sector-based programmes, particularly in government bureaucracies.;This collection offers no shortcuts to better land husbandry or enhanced rural livelihoods, but it does provide an analysis of the biophysical, socioeconomic and institutional impacts of development and management practices, and to point to practicable and realistic ways forward for both governments and external support agencies.

The Great Depression coincided with a wave of natural disasters, including the Dust Bowl and devastating floods of the Ohio and Mississippi rivers. Recovering from these calamities--and preventing their reoccurrence--was a major goal of the New Deal.
In Nature's New Deal, Neil M. Maher examines the history of one of Franklin D. Roosevelt's boldest and most successful experiments, the Civilian Conservation Corps, describing it as a turning point both in national politics and in the emergence of modern environmentalism. Indeed, Roosevelt addressed both the economic and environmental crises by putting Americans to work at conserving natural resources, through the Soil Conservation Service, the Tennessee Valley Authority, and the Civilian Conservation Corps (or CCC). The CCC created public landscapes--natural terrain altered by federal work projects--that helped environmentalism blossom after World War II, Maher notes. Millions of Americans devoted themselves to a new vision of conservation, one that went beyond the old model of simply maximizing the efficient use of natural resources, to include the promotion of human health through outdoor recreation, wilderness preservation, and ecological balance. And yet, as Maher explores the rise and development of the CCC, he also shows how the critique of its campgrounds, picnic areas, hiking trails, and motor roads frames the debate over environmentalism to this day.
From the colorful life at CCC camps, to political discussions in the White House and the philosophical debates dating back to John Muir and Frederick Law Olmsted, Nature's New Deal captures a key moment in the emergence of modern environmentalism.

This study discusses an original proposal aimed at critically analyzing the power relations that exist in contemporary agriculture. The author endeavors herein to clarify some of the strategies that industrial agribusiness, in collusion with the state and multilateral structures, sets in motion in order to functionalize the lives of millions of farmers, so that their bodies, enunciations, and sensibilities can be repurposed in accordance with the dynamics of capital accumulation. The argument is based on the idea that agro-extractivism cannot be thought of exclusively as an economic-political and technological system, but as a complex interweaving of cultural meanings, aesthetics, and affections, which, amalgamated under the abstract name of "development", act as a support for the whole system's scaffolding. The book also explores the other side of the coin, describing how, and under what conditions, social movements are responding to the calamities generated by this model. The central thesis is that many ongoing agroecological processes are providing one of the most interesting guidelines at present for visualizing transitions towards post-development, post-extractivism, and the construction of multiple worlds beyond the sphere of capital. Political ecology of agriculture joins the calls that question the cultural project of modernity and the predatory sense imposed by the globalized food empire, and invites recognition of the importance of agroecology in the context of the end of the fossil-fuel era and the likely collapse of our industry-based civilization.

Conflicting and competing claims over the actual and imagined use of land and seascapes are exacerbated on islands with high population density. The management of culture and heritage is particularly tested in island environments where space is finite and the population struggles to preserve cultural and natural assets in the face of the demands of the construction industry, immigration, high tourism and capital investment. Drawn from extreme island scenarios, the ten case studies in this volume review practices and policies for effective heritage management and offer rich descriptive and analytic material about land-use conflict. In addition, they point to interesting, new directions in which research, public policy and heritage management intersect.

Cultural and spiritual bonds with 'nature' are among the strongest motivators for nature conservation; yet they are seldom taken into account in the governance and management of protected and conserved areas. The starting point of this book is that to be sustainable, effective, and equitable, approaches to the management and governance of these areas need to engage with people's deeply held cultural, spiritual, personal, and community values, alongside inspiring action to conserve biological, geological, and cultural diversity. Since protected area management and governance have traditionally been based on scientific research, a combination of science and spirituality can engage and empower a variety of stakeholders from different cultural and religious backgrounds. As evidenced in this volume, stakeholders range from indigenous peoples and local communities to those following mainstream religions and those representing the wider public. The authors argue that the scope of protected area management and governance needs to be extended to acknowledge the rights, responsibilities, obligations, and aspirations of stakeholder groups and to recognise the cultural and spiritual significance that 'nature' holds for people. The book also has direct practical applications. These follow the IUCN Best Practice Guidelines for protected and conserved area managers and present a wide range of case studies from around the world, including Africa, Asia, Australia, Europe, and the Americas.

Read a free excerpt here! American engineers have done astounding things to bend the Mississippi River to their will: forcing one of its tributaries to flow uphill, transforming over a thousand miles of roiling currents into a placid staircase of water, and wresting the lower half of the river apart from its floodplain. American law has aided and abetted these feats. But despite our best efforts, so-called "natural disasters" continue to strike the Mississippi basin, as raging floodwaters decimate waterfront communities and abandoned towns literally crumble into the Gulf of Mexico. In some places, only the tombstones remain, leaning at odd angles as the underlying soil erodes away. Mississippi River Tragedies reveals that it is seductively deceptive-but horribly misleading-to call such catastrophes "natural." Authors Christine A. Klein and Sandra B. Zellmer present a sympathetic account of the human dreams, pride, and foibles that got us to this point, weaving together engaging historical narratives and accessible law stories drawn from actual courtroom dramas. The authors deftly uncover the larger story of how the law reflects and even amplifies our ambivalent attitude toward nature-simultaneously revering wild rivers and places for what they are, while working feverishly to change them into something else. Despite their sobering revelations, the authors' final message is one of hope. Although the acknowledgement of human responsibility for unnatural disasters can lead to blame, guilt, and liability, it can also prod us to confront the consequences of our actions, leading to a liberating sense of possibility and to the knowledge necessary to avoid future disasters.

Enrolling over 30 million acres, the U.S. Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) is the largest conservation program in the United States. Under the guidelines of the CRP, the federal government pays farmers to stop farming their land in the hopes of achieving a variety of conservation goals, including the reduction of soil erosion, improvement of water quality, and creation of wildlife habitat. In Conserving Data, James T. Hamilton explores the role of information in the policy cycle as it relates to the CRP. The author asks how the creation and distribution of information about what is going on across these millions of enrolled acres has influenced the development of the program itself. Of the many CRP stakeholders, each accesses a different set of information about the CRP s operations. Regulators have developed the Environmental Benefits Index as a rough indicator of a field s conservation benefits and adopted that measure as a way to determine which lands should be granted conservation contracts. NGOs have used publicly available data from these contracts to show how CRP monies are allocated. Members of Congress have used oversight hearings and GAO reports to monitor the Farm Service Agency s conservation policy decisions. Reporters have localized the impact of the CRP by writing stories about increases in wildlife and hunting on CRP fields in their areas. Conserving Data brings together and analyzes these various streams of information, drawing upon original interviews with regulators, new data from Freedom of Information Act requests, and regulatory filings. Using the CRP as a launch point, Hamilton explores the role of information, including 'hidden information, ' in the design and implementation of regulatory policy

Ecologists and economists both use models to help develop strategies for biodiversity management. The practical use of disciplinary models, however, can be limited because ecological models tend not to address the socioeconomic dimension of biodiversity management, whereas economic models tend to neglect the ecological dimension. Given these shortcomings of disciplinary models, there is a necessity to combine ecological and economic knowledge into ecological-economic models. Gradually guiding the reader into the field of ecological-economic modelling by introducing mathematical models and their role in general, this book provides an overview on ecological and economic modelling approaches relevant for research in the field of biodiversity conservation. It discusses the advantages of and challenges associated with ecological-economic modelling, together with an overview of useful ways of integration. Although being a book about mathematical modelling, ecological and economic concepts play an equally important role, making it accessible for readers from very different disciplinary backgrounds.

As the impacts of anthropogenic activities increase in both magnitude and extent, biodiversity is coming under increasing pressure. Scientists and policy makers are frequently hampered by a lack of information on biological systems, particularly information relating to long-term trends. Such information is crucial to developing an understanding as to how biodiversity may respond to global environmental change. Knowledge gaps make it very difficult to develop effective policies and legislation to reduce and reverse biodiversity loss. This book explores the gap between global commitments to biodiversity conservation, and local action to track biodiversity change and implement conservation action. High profile international political commitments to improve biodiversity conservation, such as the targets set by the Convention on Biological Diversity, require innovative and rapid responses from both science and policy. This multi-disciplinary perspective highlights barriers to conservation and offers novel solutions to evaluating trends in biodiversity at multiple scales.

Wildlife expert Eanna Ni Lamhna takes us on a tour of all things to do with our wonderful natural world: from a celebration of our fascinating birds and bees, and their powers of migration and pollination, to the thorny challenges of our time, such as climate change, sustainability and our carbon footprint. Her mantra is that learning about our wild world is not just for young children or David Attenborough fans, it is a lifelong necessary knowledge for our survival - and we need to open our eyes and our minds to the challenges that face us and our world into the future. The key is to find the balance between our needs and wants and the future of our precious planet and all its inhabitants. This brand new book raises, and discusses, questions such as; Why should we care about this natural world? Do we need and value the great outdoors now more than ever? But who wants spiders in their house? And what use are wasps anyway? Should we be worried by genetic engineering and windfarms? Biodiversity - what did it ever do for us? Does it mean the end of the world if the whales become extinct? Are global warming and climate change the same thing? What happened to the hole in the ozone layer? Is veganism the answer to sustainable food? What is carbon sequestration - just fancy words for trees? And why are carbon sinks so important? Is the mobile phone taking over our lives for good or for evil? How does a virus become a pandemic, and why?

For the first time since the Neolithic, we have the opportunity to transform not only our food system but our entire relationship to the living world.

Farming is the world's greatest cause of environmental destruction - and the one we are least prepared to talk about. We criticise urban sprawl, but farming sprawls across thirty times as much land. We have ploughed, fenced and grazed great tracts of the planet, felling forests, killing wildlife, and poisoning rivers and oceans to feed ourselves. Yet millions still go hungry.

Now the food system itself is beginning to falter. But, as George Monbiot shows us in this brilliant, bracingly original new book, we can resolve the biggest of our dilemmas and feed the world without devouring the planet.

Regenesis is a breathtaking vision of a new future for food and for humanity. Drawing on astonishing advances in soil ecology, Monbiot reveals how our changing understanding of the world beneath our feet could allow us to grow more food with less farming. He meets the people who are unlocking these methods, from the fruit and vegetable grower revolutionising our understanding of fertility; through breeders of perennial grains, liberating the land from ploughs and poisons; to the scientists pioneering new ways to grow protein and fat. Together, they show how the tiniest life forms could help us make peace with the planet, restore its living systems, and replace the age of extinction with an age of regenesis.

The aim of these volumes is not to cover all phases of ion-exchange theory, which may be found in general texts, nor to cover every application in the literature, or to show an engineer ways on how to become an expert in the field so he coulddo it all by himself. The main purpose of these books is to show the practical engineer what has been done in various types of applications of ion-exchange processes in pollution control, how to set up laboratory tests, the problems that may be encountered to identify the individuals and organizations who are experts in the various phases of ion exchange, and most importantly, to emphasize the new developments in the polymers with active sites that offer new approaches to wastewater treatment methods.

Tropical rain forests are increasingly expected to serve for climate change mitigation and biodiversity conservation amid global climate change and increasing human demands for land. Natural production forests that are legally designated to produce timber occur widely in the Southeast Asian tropics. Synergizing timber production, climate change mitigation and biodiversity conservation in such tropical production forests is one of the most realistic means to resolve these contemporary global problems. Next-generation sustainable forest management is being practiced in the natural tropical rain forest of a model site in Sabah, Malaysian Borneo, while earlier sustainable management practices have generally failed, leading to extensive deforestation and forest degradation elsewhere in the tropics. Ecologists have examined co-benefits of sustainable forestry in the model forest in terms of forest regeneration, carbon sequestration and biodiversity in comparison to a forest managed by destructive conventional methods. Taxonomic groups studied have included trees, decomposers, soil microbes, insects and mammals. A wide array of field methods and technology has been used including count plots, sensor cameras, and satellite remote-sensing. This book is a compilation of the results of those thorough ecological investigations and elucidates ecological processes of tropical rain forests after logging. The book furnishes useful information for foresters and conservation NGOs, and it also provides baseline information for biologists and ecologists. A further aim is to examine the environmental effects of a forest certification scheme as the model forest has been certified by the Forest Stewardship Council. Taken as a whole, this book proves that the desired synergy is possible.

The national parks of North America are great public treasures, visited by 300 million people each year. Set aside to be kept in relatively natural condition, these remarkable places of forests, rivers, mountains, and wildlife still inspire our "capacity for wonder". Today, however, the parks are threatened by increasingly difficult problems from both inside and outside their borders. This book, enriched with personal anecdotes of the author's trips throughout the parks of North America, examines changes in the park services of the United States and Canada over the past fifteen years. William Lowry describes the many challenges facing the parks - such as rising crime, tourism and overcrowding, pollution, eroding funding for environmental research, and the contentious debate over preservation versus use - and the abilities of the agencies to deal with them. The Capacity for Wonder provides a revealing comparison of the U.S. National Park Service (NPS) and the Canadian Parks Service (CPS). The author explains that, while the services are similar in many ways, the priorities of these two agencies have changed dramatically in recent years. Lowry shows how increasing conflicts over agency goals and decreasing institutional support have made the NPS vulnerable to interagency disputes, reluctant to take any risks in its operations, and extremely responsive to political pressures. As a result, U.S. national parks are now managed mainly to serve political purposes. Lowry illustrates how in the 1980s politicians pushed the NPS to expand private uses of national parks through development, timber harvesting, grazing, and mining, while environmental groups pushed the NPS in the other direction. Overthe same period, the CPS enjoyed a clarification of goals and increased institutional support. As a result, the CPS has been able to decentralize its structure, empower its employees, and renew its commitment to preservation as the highest priority. Lowry considers several proposals to change the institutions governing the parks. His own recommendations are more in line with proposals to revitalize public agencies than with those that suggest replacing them with private enterprise, state agencies, or endowment boards. Lowry concludes that preserving nature should be the primary, explicit goal of the park services, and he calls for a stronger commitment to that goal in the United States.

Miami, Florida, is likely to be entirely underwater by the end of this century. Residents are already starting to see the effects of sea level rise today. From sunny day flooding caused by higher tides to a sewer system on the brink of total collapse, the city undeniably lives in a climate changed world. In Disposable City, Miami resident Mario Alejandro Ariza shows us not only what climate change looks like on the ground today, but also what Miami will look like 100 years from now, and how that future has been shaped by the city's racist past and present. As politicians continue to kick the can down the road and Miami becomes increasingly unlivable, real estate vultures and wealthy residents will be able to get out or move to higher ground, but the most vulnerable communities, disproportionately composed of people of color, will face flood damage, rising housing costs, dangerously higher temperatures, and stronger hurricanes that they can't afford to escape. Miami may be on the front lines of climate change, but the battle it's fighting today is coming for the rest of the U.S.--and the rest of the world--far sooner than we could have imagined even a decade ago. Disposable City is a thoughtful portrait of both a vibrant city with a unique culture and the social, economic, and psychic costs of climate change that call us to act before it's too late.

China is currently afflicted by enormous environmental problems. This book, drawing on ancient and modern Chinese environmental thinking, considers what it is that makes an environment a desirable place for living. The book emphasises ideas of beauty, and discusses how these ideas can be applied in natural, agricultural and urban environments in order to produce desirable environments. The book argues that environment is both a product of nature and of human beings, and as such is potentially alterable by culture. The book explores the three aspects of environmental beauty whereby such alteration might be beneficially made: integrated and holistic; ecological and man-made; and authentic and everyday. This book addresses environmental issues by distinctively suggesting that an aesthetic approach inspired from ancient Chinese tradition could help us overcome the many problems that human beings have created at local and global levels. Although its main focus is the traditional and current contexts of the People's Republic of China, the book transcends national borders. A typical example is the ancient Chinese thought system and cultural practice of Feng Shui ( ) that sought to negotiate how the natural environment and human constructions can cohabit without destructing each other. The author evokes that sought-after harmony through the powerful image of gardens of life whose environmental beauty can be found in traditional Chinese gardens and palaces as well as historically and culturally preserved cities.

The Amazon region is the focus of intense conflict between conservationists concerned with deforestation and advocates of agro-industrial development. This book focuses on the contributions of environmental organizations to the preservation of Brazilian Amazonia. It reveals how environmental organizations such as Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth, WWF and others have fought fiercely to stop deforestation in the region. It documents how the history of frontier expansion and environmental struggle in the region is linked to Brazil's position in an evolving capitalist world-economy. It is shown how Brazil's effort to become a developed country has led successive Brazilian governments to devise development projects for Amazonia. The author analyses how globalization has led to the expansion of international commodity chains in the region, particularly for mineral ores, soybeans and beef. He shows how environmental organizations have politicized these commodity chains as weapons of conservation, through boycotting certain products, while other pro-development groups within Brazil claim that such organizations threaten Brazil's sovereignty over its own resources.

George Catlin gained renown for his nineteenth-century paintings of Indians and their lands, sympathetic portraits that counterbalanced those of other Americans eager to conquer and dominate both. In this first book to probe the attitudes that shaped and constrained Catlin's career, John Hausdoerffer argues that, despite his sympathies, Catlin's work embodied the same prevailing sentiment toward Nature that sanctioned Indian removal and thus undercut his own alternate vision for westward expansion.

Some see Catlin as an ethical spokesman for Indians, others as a mere exploiter. Hausdoerffer steers a middle course, recognizing Catlin as an entrepreneur without invalidating his ethical perceptions. Yet through a close reading of Catlin's writings, Hausdoerffer adjusts interpretations of Catlin as a proto-environmentalist and friend of the Indian, arguing that contradictions in his work reveal his failure to comprehend his own complicity in Native America's demise.

Hausdoerffer examines key events from Catlin's career to show how his work consistently teeters between resistance and consent to nineteenth-century ideologies of Nature. He reviews Catlin's decision to devote his talents to Native American concerns, his journey west to document "vanishing" lifeways, his presentation of his findings to American audiences, and his performance of his work in Europe. He also shows the importance of Yellowstone National Park in understanding Catlin, given his vision for it as a means of preserving what is essential about environments and cultures.

Exploring the tension between Catlin's search for success and his awareness of the plight of his subjects, Hausdoerffer argues that Catlin's tacit acceptance of the inevitable demise of Native culture undermined his interest in fomenting political change. Catlin's lament for the vanishing Indian combined with his belief that art preserves the essence of nature ultimately contradicted his hopes for Indian justice and environmental preservation.

"Catlin's Lament" challenges views of Catlin's career as an ethical downfall, revealing instead a complexity of character that complicates views of dissent in the Jacksonian era. More important, it questions underlying assumptions of Manifest Destiny, showing that they were so deeply set in American life that even critics of the age helped perpetuate them.

The Spirit of Thoreau series is a fresh new collection of Thoreau's best writing and thinking on various themes, drawn from both unpublished and published sources.

THOREAU ON LAND NATURE'S CANVAS Edited by Joseph Valentine

This elegant volume chronicles Thoreau's fascination with nature, from his well-known reflections on Walden to an unexpected meeting with loggers in the woods: "No doubt our employment is more alike than we suspect, and we are each serving the great Master's needs more than our own." He shows a Thoreau much broader in his interests and sympathies than most of us imagine.

Many people investigating the operation of large-scale environmentalist organizations see signs of power, knowledge and governance in their policies and projects. This collection indicates that such an analysis appears to be justified from one perspective, but not from another. The chapters in this collection show that the critics, concerned with the power of these organizations to impose their policies in different parts of the world, appear justified when we look at environmentalist visions and at organizational policies and programs. However, they are much less justified when we look at the practical operation of such organizations and their ability to generate and carry out projects intended to reshape the world.