This book is designed to show how ecotourism theory can be put into practice by exploring innovation, program applications, and research-supported case studies in ecotourism. The chapters reflect results of applied research focused on socio-economics of community development; the value of considering system-wide approaches to the relationships between communities and natural resources; the intricacies of capacity building and training facilitators in ecotourism; and education through ecotourism experiences. The cumulative impact of the research presented highlights innovative approaches to visitor management, community engagement, and education to critically address the complexities associated with visitation to natural areas and the dependence upon conservation of ecosystems and associated communities. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Ecotourism.

This provocative book documents how national and global politics intersected to bring about changes in Brazil's environmental preservation laws. Luiz Barbosa argues that global forces coupled with two decades of military rule in Brazil led to policies that promoted deforestation for the sake of development, ultimately having devastating consequences for AmazTnia's ecosystem and its native populations. By the mid-1980s, changes in global ecopolitics and the onset of democracy in Brazil paved the way for new environmental preservation laws. Barbosa's study is unique in showing the impact of global processes on third-world environmental degradation and in its claim that democracy can facilitate preservation. The latter point is further emphasized in a comparative chapter in which Barbosa demonstrates the importance of democracy for environmental preservation in Costa Rica, Malaysia, and Indonesia. Sociologists and anthropologists interested in issues surrounding economic development as well as environmental activists will find much to their liking in this work.

Policy-makers are increasingly trying to assign economic values to areas such as ecologies, the atmosphere, even human lives. These new values, assigned to areas previously considered outside of economic systems, often act to qualify, alter or replace former non-pecuniary values. Valuing Development, Environment and Conservation looks to explore the complex interdependencies, contradictions and trade-offs that can take place between economic values and the social, environmental, political and ethical systems that inform non-monetary valuation processes. Using rich empirical material, the book explores the processes of valuation, their components, calculative technologies, and outcomes in different social, ecological and conservation domains. The book gives reasons for why economic calculation tends to dominate in practice, but also presents new insights on how the disobedient materiality of things and the ingenuity of human and non-human agencies can combine and frustrate the dominant economic models within calculative processes. This book highlights the tension between, on the one hand, a dominant model that emphasises technical and 'universalising' criteria, and on the other hand, valuation practice in specific local contexts which is more likely to negotiate criteria that are plural, incommensurable and political. This book is perfect for researchers and students within development studies, environment, geography, politics, sociology and anthropology who are looking for new insights into how processes of valuation take place in the 21st century, and with what consequential outcomes.

Protecting Watershed Areas: Case of the Panama Canal provides foresters, hydrologists, and park managers with a case study of the Panama Canal watershed area to help you make the most of your efforts in protecting ecological areas. Through this unique book, you will discover how the Carter-Torrijos treaty that will return the Panama Canal to the Republic of Panama on December 31, 1999 will affect the 2.6 million inhabitants of that area as well as this complex ecosystem. This valuable book includes a focus on both technical and biological observations in the field as well as library research to help you make the most of book learning and field research in your endeavors to protect forest reserves and other protected areas. Protecting Watershed Areas offers you insight into the Panama Canal area through informal interviews, key informants, field data, and research that focuses on both the technical and biological aspects of environmental management, such as agroforestry and reforestation, of environmental management and on policy and institutional dimensions of management to provide you with a unique perspective of the dynamics of this area. The Panama canal watershed area is one of the world?s most complex managed ecosystems and through this insightful volume, you will find new ways to deal with the myriad of problems you may encounter in ecosystem management, such as: realizing that single resource management is no longer adequate and taking a more holistic approach to management, such as taking into consideration whole ecosystems or watersheds will enable you to fully protect the area you are trying to serve discovering how the trend of privitization and nongovernmental ownership of protected areas impacts the job of managing our precious national resources understanding that for effective and stable protected area management to occur, you must have a clear understanding of the historical and social context that has shaped the particular circumstances of each site recognizing larger national and international factors in order to control the often devastating effects of tourism on protected areas creating clear directives and priorities before developing conservation programs to make program implementation easierInformative and insightful, Protecting Watershed Areas examines the most current ideas in protected areas management through a unique case study of the Panama Canal. This essential book provides you with several answers to the challenges facing Panama that you can apply to forest reserve and other protected areas programs around the globe due to the paramount importance of developing sustainable land-use systems. With Protecting Watershed Areas, you will discover how to effectively balance securing goods and services from a region, such as farming and tourism without threatening the overall integrity of the ecological systems and meeting human needs and values.

A Wild Idea shares the complete story of the difficult birth of the Adirondack Park Agency (APA). The Adirondack region of New York's rural North Country forms the nation's largest State Park, with a territory as large as Vermont. Planning experts view the APA as a triumph of sustainability that balances human activity with the preservation of wild ecosystems. The truth isn't as pretty. The story of the APA, told here for the first time, is a complex, troubled tale of political dueling and communities pushed to the brink of violence. The North Country's environmental movement started among a small group of hunters and hikers, rose on a huge wave of public concern about pollution that crested in the early 1970s, and overcame multiple obstacles to "save" the Adirondacks. Edmondson shows how the movement's leaders persuaded a powerful Governor to recruit planners, naturalists, and advisors and assign a task that had never been attempted before. The team and the politicians who supported them worked around the clock to draft two visionary land-use plans and turn them into law. But they also made mistakes, and their strict regulations were met with determined opposition from local landowners who insisted that private property is private. A Wild Idea is based on in-depth interviews with five dozen insiders who are central to the story. Their observations contain many surprising and shocking revelations. This is a rich, exciting narrative about state power and how it was imposed on rural residents. It shows how the Adirondacks were "saved," and also why that campaign sparked a passionate rebellion.

The idea and practice of the 'green economy' is gaining momentum, coinciding with financial instability and continued economic woe in the Global North, but generally more positive economic circumstances in the Global South. 'Green economic initiatives' in the Global South are multiplying, and include carbon payments, ecotourism, community-based wildlife management, sustainability certification initiatives, and offsets by mining companies exploiting new resources. These initiatives are reallocating resources, redefining inequalities and redistributing the fortune and misfortune of participants of the green economy and those excluded from it. They have also led to resistance - locally, nationally, and transnationally - and to demands for alternatives to market-driven instruments and solutions, which are generally gaining strength and coherence. The articles included in this volume bring together a multi-disciplinary team of scholars from North and South to provide nuanced analyses of green economy experiences in the Global South - analysing the opportunities they provide, but also the redistributions they entail and the kinds of resistances they face. The ultimate aim of the collection is to provide a critical, but balanced, overview of the emerging green economy in the Global South and point the way to possible adjustments, alternatives or radical resistance, depending on different situations. This book was originally published as a special issue of Third World Quarterly.

H2O. The Dead Sea. Rain. Acid rain. Heavy water. The Pacific, the Atlantic, the Indian Ocean, the source of the Nile. A tap, and on and on More than 1 billion people have insufficient water to sustain life. The World Health Organisation has the figures. The River Jordan, the Biblical epitome of water, is dying, like a man with his throat cut, his blood seeping down a drain. In Water Culture, Francesca Sorrenti of ske group, in collaboration with Ocean Futures Society's Jean-Michel Cousteau, has collected a kaleidoscope of the elemental qualities of water in a series of photographs that are breathtaking to behold in their fantasy and equilibrium. They chose the works of Mario Sorrenti, Nan Goldin, Fabien Baron, Andres Gursky, Eugene Smith, and Boris Michailov, among others, to represent this world. Against these extraordinary images are set the records of the follies of mankind, the greed and despair and ignorance of the source of life that will again leave a bewildered albatross or a seal coated in oil by another Amoco Cadiz that has spilt 250,000 tons of human degradation into the oceans.

A fascinating and unprecedented ethnography of animal sanctuaries in the United States   In the past three decades, animal rights advocates have established everything from elephant sanctuaries in Africa to shelters that rehabilitate animals used in medical testing, to homes for farmed animals, abandoned pets, and entertainment animals that have outlived their “usefulness.� Saving Animals is the first major ethnography to focus on the ethical issues animating the establishment of such places, where animals who have been mistreated or destined for slaughter are allowed to live out their lives simply being animals.    Based on fieldwork at animal rescue facilities across the United States, Elan Abrell asks what “saving,� “caring for,� and “sanctuary� actually mean. He considers sanctuaries as laboratories where caregivers conceive and implement new models of caring for and relating to animals. He explores the ethical decision making around sanctuary efforts to unmake property-based human–animal relations by creating spaces in which humans interact with animals as autonomous subjects. Saving Animals illustrates how caregivers and animals respond by cocreating new human–animal ecologies adapted to the material and social conditions of the Anthropocene. Bridging anthropology with animal studies and political philosophy, Saving Animals asks us to imagine less harmful modes of existence in a troubled world where both animals and humans seek sanctuary.

Interest in phytoremediation as a solution for contaminants in groundwater and soil has exploded. The project documented in Phytoremediation of Hydrocarbon Contaminated Soils presents innovative technology for environmental clean up using in situ treatment. It describes the results of a field study focusing on hydrocarbon contamination, especially polynuclear aromatic hydrocarbons, in surface and near surface soils. The field demonstration used soils contaminated with aged diesel fuels. The random block design enabled the investigators to test the statistical difference in the effects of different vegetated and unvegetated treatments. They tested the degradation of diesel and polynuclear aromatic hydrocarbon components in plots containing three different vegetation treatments, two grasses and a legume, and a non-vegetated control. Part one of the monograph gives a complete and thorough account of the results of the field study. Part two covers the design and potential costs of a full-scale implementation of the demonstration system as well as the performance and potential application of the new technology. Phytoremediation of Hydrocarbon Contaminated Soils supplies quantitative results about the use of vegetation in soil remediation. The information given on the niches and limitations of the technologies allows for a more informed selection of remedial solutions for environmental cleanup.

This timely volume examines the work of the National Estuary Program, the prominent federally-funded initiative dealing with pollution and other anthropogenic impacts on estuarine ecosystems and the management plans necessary to ensure that these invaluable natural treasures remain healthy and productive for future generations.

Estuary Restoration and Maintenance sets into clear perspective the state of America's estuarine waters, the effects of human development in watersheds, and the impacts of pollution and anthropogenic activities on living resources and habitats in these critically important coastal systems.

Effective management and protection of estuarine environments

Edited by a leading estuarine scientist, the book focuses on the technical and management issues involved in National Estuary Program sites across the United States-Long Island Sound, Delaware Bay, Galveston Bay, and San Francisco Bay. Each case study explains and assesses the following critical issues:
-a historical description of the priority problems
-status and trends of water quality, habitat conditions, natural resources and the uses of the estuary
-human impacts on water quality and habitats, natural resources and the uses of the estuary
-the links between pollutant loadings and watershed development, natural resources and the uses of the estuary
-the identification of priority problems and their cause and effect,
-management plans to ensure ecological integrity of the estuary

Estuary Restoration and Maintenance covers the gamut of issues, from the technical assessment of problems to management action plans for the improvement of the environmental quality of estuaries.

Features

Examining the debate between activists and professional planners over the vision of the future of a large growth corridor in Sydney, Australia, this case study maps the history of development from the late sixties to the mid-nineties, during which time serious environmental and financial problems arose. The book outlines five major visions of the future development and examines forms of political, economic, and institutional power applied by the parties in the project, with emphasis on the processes of infrastructure privatization and ecological impacts. The conclusion reflects on contemporary dilemmas about pluralism.

Reflecting the R&D efforts in the field that have resulted in a plethora of novel applications over the past decade, this handbook gives a comprehensive overview of the tangible benefits of nanotechnology in catalysis. By bridging fundamental research and industrial development, it provides a unique perspective on this scientifically and economically important field. While the first three parts are devoted to preparation and characterization of nanocatalysts, the final three provide in-depth insights into their applications in the fine chemicals industry, the energy industry, and for environmental protection, with expert authors reporting on real-life applications that are on the brink of commercialization. Timely reading for catalytic chemists, materials scientists, chemists in industry, and process engineers.

Remediation and Management of Degraded Lands presents the program of the first International Conference on the Remediation and Management of Degraded Lands. This collection reviews the extent of resource debasement and offers solutions for their restoration. The 14-part first section deals with mine management and rehabilitation. Topics include the devastating results of open-cut mining, open-pit mining, lignite surface mining and acid mining. Despite such ruin, the articles reveal the possibilities for reclamation. Part two devotes nine chapters to the management of derelict lands. Reforestation, soil fertility prognosis, and the uses of nitrogen are just a few of the covered subjects. This portion of the book pays special attention to the successful results of remediation in China and Hong Kong. The final division addresses soil contamination and reclamation. There are eleven chapters on subjects that include the single and interactive effects of aluminum, the effectiveness of EDTA/HCI and the value of pig-on-litter compost as a tool for edible crop growth. These and other innovative techniques make Remediation and Management of Degraded Lands a valuable addition to any environmental library.

Named by Forbes as one of the 12 Best Books About Birds and Birding in 2017 After stumbling upon a book of photographs depicting extinct animals, B.J. Hollars became fascinated by creatures that are no longer with us: specifically, extinct North American birds. How, he wondered, could we preserve so beautifully on film what we've failed to preserve in life? And so begins his yearlong journey to find out, one that leads him from bogs to art museums, from archives to Christmas Bird Counts, until he at last comes as close to extinct birds as he ever will during a behind-the-scenes visit at the Chicago Field Museum. Heartbroken by the birds we've lost, Hollars takes refuge in those that remain. Armed with binoculars, a field guide, and knowledgeable friends, he begins his transition from budding birder to environmentally conscious citizen, a first step on a longer journey toward understanding the true tragedy of a bird's song silenced forever. Told with charm and wit, Flock Together is a remarkable memoir that shows how "knowing" the natural world-even just a small part-illuminates what it means to be a global citizen and how only by embracing our ecological responsibilities do we ever become fully human. A moving elegy to birds we've lost, Hollars's exploration of what we can learn from extinct species will resonate in the minds of readers long beyond the final page.

Conservation Farming in the United States: The Methods and Accomplishments of the STEEP Program explains the success of the multidisciplinary STEEP (Solutions to Economic and Environmental Problems) conservation project, currently in its third decade, which focuses on the Palouse and the western Pacific Northwest. Topics addressed include integrated pest management; equipment for conservation farming; and conservation farming technology transfer to producers.

Volume I contains a brief review of adsorption history and its development for practical purposes up until now. It also presents some important information on adsorbents and catalysts as well as on the methods of their characterization. The part of this volume dealing with practical industrial applications includes chapters presenting advanced technical tools for high capacity adsorption separation of liquid and gas mixtures, development of new adsorbents for removal of hazardous contaminants from combustion flue gases and wastewaters, degasification of coal seams and fabrication of inorganic membranes and their applications. A comprehensive review is also included on contemporary utility of self-assembled monolayers, adsorption proteins and their role in modern industry, adsorption methods in technology of optical fibre glasses, sol-gel technology, solid desiccant dehumidification systems, etc. The articles give both the scientific backgrounds of the phenomena discussed and emphasize their practical aspects.

The chapters give not only brief current knowledge about the studied problems, but are also a source of topical literature on the subject. A comprehensive bibliography on adsorption principles, design data and adsorbent materials for industrial applications for the period 1967-1997 concludes the book.

Gaylord Nelson is known and respected throughout the world as a founding father of the modern environmental movement and creator of one of the most successful and influential public awareness campaigns ever undertaken on behalf of global stewardship: Earth Day.
Now in his eighties, Nelson delivers a timely and urgent message with the same eloquence with which he has articulated the nation's environmental ills through the decades. He details the planet's most critical concerns--from species and habitat losses to global climate changes and population growth. In outlining his strategy for planetary health, he inspires citizens to reassert the environment as a top priority.
A book for anyone who cares deeply about our environment and wants to know what we can and must do now to save it, "Beyond Earth Day" is a classic guide by one of the natural world's great defenders.

Paints a general picture of the Asian situation, backing it up with several case studies. Two major points are made: environmental campaigns in Asia tend to have a local focus and they cannot be understood in terms of environmental issues alone.

This book rejects apocalyptic pronouncements that the end of the millennium represents the 'end' of nature as well. "Remaking Reality" brings together contributors from across the human sciences who argue that a notion of "social nature" provides great hope for the future. Applying a variety of theoretical approaches to social nature, and engaging with debates in politics, science, technology and social movements surrounding race, gender and class, the contributors explore important and emerging sites where nature is now being remade with considerable social and ecological consequences.

Remaking Reality rejects apocalyptic pronouncements that the end of the millennium represents the 'end' of nature as well. Bringing together leading international contributors this book argues that a notion of 'social nature' provides great hope for the future. Engaging with debates in politics, science, technology and social movements surrounding race, gender and class, the contributors explore important and emerging sites where nature is now being remade with considerable social and ecological consequences.
For critics and activists alike Remaking Reality provides essential theoretical and political tools to rethink environmentalism and progressive social natures for the twenty-first century.

Agendas and Sustainability considers the processes used for devising global environment and development agendas and provides practical suggestions for their future development and influence. A collaboration of the latest research from the Stockholm Environment Institute and the Earth Council, the book presents similarities and differences in problem definition, objectives, principles, priorities and actions across eleven of the major agendas put forward for environment and development after Rio.
Points of divergence and areas of common ground are investigated for over 30 environment and development-related topics, such as biodiversity, consumption patterns, trade, urbanization, population, education, deforestation and water resources.

eBook available with sample pages: 0203021053

Pollution control, a key component of U.S. environmental policy, has made important progress in recent decades. Yet important problems remain and there is need for improvement in the pollution control regulatory system. This book is the most extensive evaluation of that system ever produced. It reveals many strengths and accomplishments, but also illustrates serious shortcomings and the need for reform. The volume emerges from three years of research on a fragmented 'system' of institutions, statutes, and procedures that is often inefficient and ineffective, hobbled by misplaced priorities. Part I provides an in-depth description of this system, centered on the federal Environmental Protection Agency and the labyrinthine laws it must implement. The authors evaluate the federal legislation, administrative decisionmaking, and the state-federal division of labor that defines the system. Davies and Mazurek assess the effectiveness and efficiency of U.S. pollution control. They discuss the performance of U.S. laws and regulations in comparison with those of other nations, assess the ability of the U.S. pollution control system to meet future problems, and consider proposals for reform and repair. Within this far reaching analysis, they include criteria that are often overlooked by policymakers and analysts, including social values, equity, nonintrusiveness, and public participation.

For more than a thousand years, people in the rainforests of India and Burma have worked with elephants to log these otherwise impassable forests and move people and goods (often illicitly) under cover of the forest canopy. Jacob Shell takes us deep into this strange elephant country to explore the lives of these extraordinarily intelligent creatures and their relationship with humans. Visiting tiny logging villages and forest camps, Shell describes fascinating characters, both elephant and human, and interweaves his account with the incredible history of this centuries-long alliance. Giants of the Monsoon Forest offers new perspective on animal intelligence and shows us how Asia's secret forest culture might offer a way to save elephants and protect our wilderness.

Robert Elliot offers a provocative insight into the ethical problems of environmental strategy. He explores the arguments surrounding the concept of ecological restoration and develops the groundwork laid by his highly acclaimed 1982 article, "Faking Nature."
Ecological restoration is a crucial process in the modern world and is central to companies' environmental policy. Elliot considers whether areas restored after ecological destruction are less valuable than before the damage took place. "Faking Nature" observes the pros and cons of the argument and examines the role of humans in the natural world. This book is a timely analysis of the simultaneous destruction and restoration of the natural world and the ethics related to those processes, in an era of accelerated environmental damage and repair.