We have only one earth, and how we choose to live in it matters. This highly readable and challenging text sets out some important topical issues that tells us we are not making a very good job of it. From the tropical rainforests to the teeming cities of the developing world and the energy hungry nations of Europe and North America, One World for One Earth shows that many of today's environmental problems can only be understood in terms of both the physical and the social processes involved. At present we are in a vicious circle. Uneven development creates problems of affluence in some areas and problems of poverty in others In both, the environment suffers. Independent local action has a crucial part to play, but to be really effective, sustainable development needs a new context which can only be put in place by international government co-operation. This book, by going beyond the conventional accounts of environmental problems, provides a basis for action. Originally published in 1991

This book focuses on central themes related to the conservation of bats. It details their response to land-use change and management practices, intensified urbanization and roost disturbance and loss. Increasing interactions between humans and bats as a result of hunting, disease relationships, occupation of human dwellings, and conflict over fruit crops are explored in depth. Finally, contributors highlight the roles that taxonomy, conservation networks and conservation psychology have to play in conserving this imperilled but vital taxon. With over 1300 species, bats are the second largest order of mammals, yet as the Anthropocene dawns, bat populations around the world are in decline. Greater understanding of the anthropogenic drivers of this decline and exploration of possible mitigation measures are urgently needed if we are to retain global bat diversity in the coming decades. This book brings together teams of international experts to provide a global review of current understanding and recommend directions for future research and mitigation.

Over the last two decades, the topic of forest ecosystem services has attracted the attention of researchers, land managers, and policy makers around the globe. The services rendered by forest ecosystems range from intrinsic to anthropocentric benefits that are typically grouped as provisioning, regulating, supporting, and cultural. The research efforts, assessments, and attempts to manage forest ecosystems for their sustained services are now widely published in scientific literature. This volume focuses on broad-scale aspects of forest ecosystem services, beyond individual stands to large landscapes. In doing so, it illustrates the conceptual and practical opportunities as well as challenges involved with planning for forest ecosystem services across landscapes, regions, and nations. The goal here is to broaden the scope of land use planning through the adoption of a landscape-scale approach. Even though this approach is complex and involves multiple ecological, social, cultural, economic, and political dimensions, the landscape perspective appears to offer the best opportunity for a sustained provision of forest ecosystem services.

The New Age Hunter is a provocative and captivating account of the pivotal role hunters play as guardians of healthy and balanced wildlife populations in the 21st century. present-day falsehoods and prejudices about hunting and clearly outlines a perspective that ushers in an era of renewed appreciation and understanding of the fundamental assistance hunters provide to conservation efforts the world over. agencies, private organizations, and renown experts for supporting its bold insights, which cover a wide range of topics that include:

This volume explores the links between the rapidly growing phenomenon of social entrepreneurship (SE) and the international tourism and hospitality industry. This unique industry is particularly ripe for transformation by SE and the book's authors delve deeply into the reasons for this. The book has three parts. The first creates a conceptual and theoretical framework for understanding the uniqueness of SE in the tourism context. The second examines different communities of practice where SE is being applied in tourism. The third is a rich collection of case studies from eight countries where tourism SE is already having an impact. The book's authors address the topic from many different angles, disciplinary backgrounds and geographic areas. Many case study authors are practicing social entrepreneurs who share their successes, challenges and experience with tourism-related projects. The book also proposes a research agenda and educational programmatic changes needed to support tourism SE. As these are developed, tourism SE will bring innovation to destinations, transformation of their economic and social structures, and contribution to a better world. The book has many insights and resources for scholars and practitioners alike to usher in this transformation.

Although ?biodiversity? is a relatively new coinage, scientists have been studying the subject it describes long before the word's first appearance in the language in the mid-1980s. In 1973, for instance, the UK Systematics Association held a symposium on ?The Changing Flora and Fauna of Britain? which concluded that not enough attention was being paid to the conservation of rarities, a conclusion also reached, said the symposium, at a meeting of the Linnaean Society some forty years earlier. By 1980, the Global 2000 Report to the President published by the US Council on Environmental Quality starkly warned of a diminution of up to one-fifth of all species by the turn of the century, and there is now a growing consensus that the world faces a ?biodiversity crisis a potentially catastrophic global loss of genetic, ecosystem, and, most obviously, species diversity. Indeed, especially since the UN Convention on Biological Diversity was promulgated in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, conserving biodiversity has become the principal focus of the global conservation movement. Indeed, the study of the origins, maintenance, and protection of diversity has become perhaps the most vibrant offshoot of ecology and conservation studies. It is increasingly taught and studied in universities?and other research institutions?around the world.

Addressing the need for an authoritative reference work to make sense of this rapidly growing subject, and its ever more complex and multidisciplinary corpus of scholarly literature, Biodiversity and Conservation is a new title in the Routledge series, Critical Concepts in the Environment. Edited by Richard Ladle of Oxford University's Centre for the Environment, this new Major Work brings together in five volumes the foundational and the very best cutting-edge scholarship to provide a synoptic view of all the key issues and current debates.

The first volume in the collection (?History, Background, and Concepts?) brings together the most important scholarship covering all the major themes that have come to define the scope of the subject. For example, what is biodiversity and how is it measured? Also, what are the geographic and temporal patterns of biodiversity? And what are its values? Volumes II and III, meanwhile, collect the vital research on topics such as: population growth and development; habitat loss and fragmentation; pollution; invasive species; terrestrial, freshwater, and marine biomes; and climate change.

The scope of the materials in Volume IV (?Responses to Biodiversity Loss?) includes international legal frameworks for conservation biodiversity; protected areas and networks; conservation planning; restoration and rewilding; reintroductions and translocations; and ex-situ conservation (via, for instance, zoos, seed and gene banks); conservation education; and community conservation.

The scholarship assembled in the final volume (?Future Directions in Biodiversity Conservation?) collects the best and most influential work on themes such as paleo-ecology (or how to use the past to understand the future); the emergence of conservation biogeography; conservation outside protected areas (or ?reconciliation ecology?); and the effects of the revolution in IT. Also gathered here is the finest research on the idea of a converging agenda around sustainable development, poverty, and biodiversity, as well as the crucial work on economics and market-led conservation.

Biodiversity and Conservation is fully indexed and includes a comprehensive introduction, newly written by the editor, which places the collected material in its historical and intellectual context. The collection's fresh and explicitly interdisciplinary approach provides a unique insight into the development of the subject from a predominantly science-based topic to a vibrant interdisciplinary concern, with an increasing appreciation of the social obligations of conservation. Biodiversity and Conservation is an essential reference collection and is destined to be valued by scholars and students?as well as conservation policy-makers and practitioners?as a vital one-stop research and pedagogic resource.

This book gathers interdisciplinary reflections from researchers, educators, and other experts on the subject of biodiversity closer to education and learning. The book also highlights its role as an added value to strategic principles for healthy ecosystems and sustainable human development. It promotes critical thinking and foster practices and attitudes for Education for Sustainable Development reconciling education with principles of human behaviour and nature. Readers especially find this book a timely resource in light of the Strategic Plan for Biodiversity 2011-2020, the Aichi Targets, and the new EU biodiversity strategy "Our life insurance, our natural capital: an EU biodiversity strategy to 2020". Along with the challenge of ecosystems and public health, biodiversity conservation is essential for humanity's continued security and sustainability, as it touches on all aspects of people's lives.

This book provides a comprehensive, updated syntheses of all the information available on Mar Chiquita, covering various aspects of the geography, geological history, biology and ecology of the site, as well as a detailed analysis of the current land-use patterns, environmental threats, and conservation issues. Mar Chiquita, located in the province of Cordoba, Argentina, is a protected wilderness area that includes South America's largest saline lake and wetland. It has a very rich bird biodiversity, including three of the six species of flamingos that exist in the world, and high numbers of intercontinental migratory shorebirds. For this reason, the area has been declared an International Site by the Ramsar Convention on Wetlands of International Importance, and also a Site of Hemispheric Importance by the Western Hemisphere Shorebird Reserves Network. Largely unknown until very recently, particularly in terms of the English literature, the site is rapidly gaining international visibility, not only in terms of scientific research, but also as site of interest for the nature lovers around the globe. Written in a language accessible to the non-specialists, the book focuses on integrating the dynamic, functional processes in the ecosystem, while at the same time providing the necessary descriptive information. Accordingly, it is of interest to scientists from diverse disciplines interested in saline wetlands, as well as to students, managers, and the general public.

The Baltic Sea and its coastal zones have been intensively utilised for centuries. Settlements, industry, fisheries and trade are still concentrated in the coastal zones. Concurrently, the coast is a web of sensitive and highly valuable ecosystems which suffer from ongoing degradation. Increasing demands and pressures on coastal ecosystems require integrated coastal zone management. This book reflects the current state and problems of coastal ecosystems in the entire Baltic region, highlighting obstacles and future solutions for integrated management.

While politicians, entrepreneurs, and even school children could tell you that sustainability is an important and nearly universal value, many of them, and many of us, may struggle to define the term, let alone trace its history. What is sustainability? Is it always about the environment? What science do we need to fully grasp what it requires? What does sustainability mean for business? How can governments plan for a sustainable future? This short, accessible book written in the signature question-and-answer format of the What Everyone Needs to Know (R) series tackles these and numerous other questions. Sustainability is a porous topic, which has been adapted and reshaped for developing ecological models, improving corporate responsibility, setting environmental and land-use policies, organizing educational curricula, and reimagining the goals of governance and democracy. Where other treatments of this topic tend to focus on just one application of sustainability, this primer encompasses everything from global development and welfare to social justice and climate change. With chapters that discuss sustainability in the contexts of profitable businesses, environmental risks, scientific research, and the day-to-day business of local government, it gives readers a deep understanding of one of the most essential concepts of our time. Bringing to bear experience in natural resource conservation, agriculture, the food industry, and environmental ethics, authors Paul B. Thompson and Patricia E. Norris explain clearly what sustainability means, and why getting it right is so important for the future of our planet.

They Called Us River Rats: The Last Batture Settlement of New Orleans is the previously untold story of perhaps the oldest outsider settlement in America, an invisible community on the annually flooded shores of the Mississippi River. This community exists in the place between the normal high and low water line of the Mississippi River, a zone known in Louisiana as the batture. For the better part of two centuries, batture dwellers such as Macon Fry have raised shanty-boats on stilts, built water-adapted homes, foraged, fished, and survived using the skills a river teaches. Until now the stories of this way of life have existed only in the memories of those who have lived here. Beginning in 2000, Fry set about recording the stories of all the old batture dwellers he could find: maritime workers, willow furniture makers, fishermen, artists, and river shrimpers. Along the way, Fry uncovered fascinating tales of fortune tellers, faith healers, and wild bird trappers who defiantly lived on the river. They Called Us River Rats also explores the troubled relationship between people inside the levees, the often-reviled batture folks, and the river itself. It traces the struggle between batture folks and city authorities, the commercial interests that claimed the river, and Louisiana's most powerful politicians. These conflicts have ended in legal battles, displacement, incarceration, and even lynching. Today Fry is among the senior generation of ""River Rats"" living in a vestigial colony of twelve ""camps"" on New Orleans's river batture, a fragment of a settlement that once stretched nearly six miles and numbered hundreds of homes. It is the last riparian settlement on the Lower Mississippi and a contrarian, independent life outside urban zoning, planning, and flood protection. This book is for everyone who ever felt the pull of the Mississippi River or saw its towering levees and wondered who could live on the other side.

With a population of more than eighteen million people, Mexico City is a major metropolitan area where the effects of urban development on air quality are of immediate concern. Air pollution exposures and effects on forests in the Mexico City Air Basin are in many respects similar to those reported in the Los Angeles, California Air Basin. Studies of air pollution impacts on forests in these two regions may serve as models for urban areas all over the world. Although scientists have studied air pollution and its effects on forests and vegetation in the Mexico City Air Basin for years, this book reviews and synthesizes this body of work for the first time. This synthesis is particularly valuable as air pollution increases at an alarming rate along with global urbanization. A thorough discussion of regional geology, climate and hydrology, historical natural resource utilization, and sociological factors provide the context for evaluating air pollution impacts on the highly valued forests surrounding this megacity. The environmental and ecological consequences of chronic exposure to biologically important pollutants are considered in various case studies. Finally, the editors discuss the state of air pollution research in the Mexico City Air Basin and the outlook for the health and sustainability of forests within the Basin.

The typical image of the Gezira Scheme, the large-scale irrigation scheme started under British colonial rule in Sudan, is of a centrally planned effort by a central colonial power controlling tenants and cotton production. However, any idea(l)s of planned irrigation and profit in Gezira had to be realized by African farmers and European officials, who both had their own agendas. Projects like Gezira are best understood in terms of continuous negotiations. This book rewrites Gezira's history in terms of colonial control, farmers' actions and resistance, and the broader development debate.

International concern in scientific, industrial, and governmental commumtIes over traces of xenobiotics in foods and in both abiotic and biotic environments has justified the present triumvirate of specialized publications in this field: comprehensive reviews, rapidly published research papers and progress reports, and archival documentations. These three international publications are inte grated and scheduled to provide the coherency essential for nonduplicative and current progress in a field as dynamic and complex as environmental contamina tion and toxicology. This series is reserved exclusively for the diversified litera ture on "toxic" chemicals in our food, our feeds, our homes, recreational and working surroundings, our domestic animals, our wildlife and ourselves. Tre mendous efforts worldwide have been mobilized to evaluate the nature, pres ence, magnitude, fate, and toxicology of the chemicals loosed upon the earth. Among the sequelae of this broad new emphasis is an undeniable need for an articulated set of authoritative publications, where one can find the latest impor tant world literature produced by these emerging areas of science together with documentation of pertinent ancillary legislation. Research directors and legislative or administrative advisers do not have the time to scan the escalating number of technical publications that may contain articles important to current responsibility. Rather, these individuals need the background provided by detailed reviews and the assurance that the latest infor mation is made available to them, all with minimal literature searching."

A survey of the development and practice of butterfly conservation in south east Australia, tracing evolution of the science through a series of cases from focus on single subspecies through increasing levels of ecological complexity to critical biotopes and communities. The book summarises much previously scattered information, and provides access to much regional information of considerable interest to practitioners elsewhere.

International concern in scientific, industrial, and governmental communities over traces of xenobiotics in foods and in both abiotic and biotic environments has justified the present triumvirate of specialized publications in this field: comprehensive reviews, rapidly published research papers and progress reports, and archival documentations. These three international publications are inte grated and scheduled to provide the coherency essential for nonduplicative and current progress in a field as dynamic and complex as environmental contamina tion and toxicology. This series is reserved exclusively for the diversified litera ture on "toxic" chemicals in our food, our feeds, our homes, recreational and working surroundings, our domestic animals, our wildlife and ourselves. Tre mendous efforts worldwide have been mobilized to evaluate the nature, pres ence, magnitude, fate, and toxicology of the chemicals loosed upon the earth. Among the sequelae of this broad new emphasis is an undeniable need for an articulated set of authoritative publications, where one can find the latest impor tant world literature produced by these emerging areas of science together with documentation of pertinent ancillary legislation. Research directors and legislative or administrative advisers do not have the time to scan the escalating number of technical publications that may contain articles important to current responsibility. Rather, these individuals need the background provided by detailed reviews and the assurance that the latest infor mation is made available to them, all with minimal literature searching."

For a long time, resource conservationists have viewed environmental conservation as synonymous with wilderness and wildlife resources only, oblivious to the contributions made by cultural and heritage resources. However, cultural heritage resources in many parts of the developing world are gradually becoming key in social (e.g. communities' identities and museums), economic (heritage tourism and eco-tourism), educational (curriculum development), civic (intergenerational awareness), and international resources management (e.g. UNESCO). In universities, African cultural heritage resources are facing a challenge of being brought into various academic discourses and syllabi in a rather reactive and/or haphazard approach, resulting in failure to fully address and research these resources' conservation needs to ensure that their use in multiple platforms and by various stakeholders is sustainable. This book seeks to place African cultural heritage studies and conservation practices within an international and modern world discourse of conservation by presenting its varied themes and topics that are important for the development of the wider field of cultural heritage studies and management.

Community participation in fighting climate change is crucial, and the authors here assess the potential for action at the community level as well as some of its limitations. For example, community action offers a significant way to reach global climate targets and bring participants into programs on a relatively personal level, but also has drawbacks in that it can operate contrary to broader programs and constraints. Some topics include: facilitating the low carbon transition, challenges for local level climate change policy and alternative models for low carbon community governance, and models of sustainable and low carbon community activities. Editors Peters, Fudege, and Jackson (RESOLVE, U. of Surrey, U.K), and 17 co-authors contributed to the book.

Adapting the green critique of the external costs of economic growth, this volume examines the links between stress, social division and excessive competition that are associated with the neoliberal discourse. Discourse analysis is used in a critical manner to examine the way that environmental issues are shaped. The book challenges established notions of the role of scientists, environmental groups and the widely presumed centrality of rational choice analysis in political science is questioned.

National institutions involved in environmental policy planning respond more to the accommodation of special interests, whether vested, parochial, or societal, than to the realities of technological advances. This situation, combined with the added problem of widespread scientific illiteracy, makes the formulation of effective environmental policy a very difficult task to accomplish.

Our politico-legal system and relationships among science, scientists, and society are explored here with specific attention to issues arising from pharmaceutical innovation and biotechnology. The identification of the resultant dilemmas reveal disenfranchisement and point to possible means of reform. Howell focuses on the need for multilateral responsibility for communication to improve the accommodation of science in policy. A truly multidisciplinary study, this book is for environmental planners as well as the interested public.

Get cutting-edge agroforestry research and data Deforestation and the rampant use of fossil fuels are major contributors to increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide and are enormous influences on global warming. Agroforestry systems and tree plantations can help mitigate the resulting climate change and degradation of biodiversity and accelerating climate change. Environmental Services of Agroforestry Systems addresses these global concerns with an essential collection of presentations on biodiversity and climate change from the First World Congress in Agroforestry (Orlando, Florida, 2004). Respected experts discuss the latest research and data on how agroforestry systems can help solve environmental problems through carbon sequestration and biodiversity conservation. Years ago, agroforestry's environmental benefits were mainly seen as being soil amelioration, erosion control, microclimate control, and the alleviation of the effects of drought in semiarid areas. Environmental Services of Agroforestry Systems goes beyond the regional considerations of years past to focus on the challenges of today's most pressing global environmental concerns. The contributors describe the latest research and concepts in agroforestry systems, reforestation efforts, soils, vegetation, and agriculture while reviewing their economic aspects. Incentives for reforestation and agroforestry are explored in detail. Each chapter is carefully referenced and includes tables to clarify ideas and data. Environmental Services of Agroforestry Systems addresses: advantages of mixed-species plantations tropical pasture and silvo-pastoral systems tropical forest ecosystem management research on the economic feasibility of various land-use systems socio-economic considerations of coffee-growing ecosystems agroforestry systems in Costa Rica Environmental Services of Agroforestry Systems is essential reading for researchers and scientists, as well as professionals in agroforestry, forestry, soils, global change, climate change, and environmental studies, educators, and graduate and undergraduate students.