Environmental concerns are on the corporate agenda, and companies are searching for effective managerial strategies. Multinational corporations command huge financial resources and technical skills, and their actions toward the environment can have a profound impact. Drawing detailed examples from major multinational companies, this book provides a wealth of practical insight on how companies approach the difficult task of responding to an increasing variety of environmental challenges. The authors identify several specific programs being developed and implemented by corporations to establish accountability for environment, health and safety and to integrate environmental concerns throughout the corporate decision making process.

The material in this work is drawn from extensive interviews conducted in U.S.-based companies, and examinations of production facilities in developed and developing countries. In addition, results of a survey on corporate environment, health and safety practices are woven into the analysis. Although they note that there are inadequacies in some corporate responses to environmental challenges, the authors contend that improved practice will result from actions on the part of government and universities, as well as companies themselves. This book will help decision makers review their environmental programs and develop sound strategies to overcome the corporate environmental anxiety that, We know we're out of compliance somewhere in the world all of the time.

Eco-criticism, as explored in this volume edited by Sr. Candy D'Cunha, begins with the concept of imagination, in other words, eco-aesthetics through which the power of words, stories, images, essence, and meaning are directly applied to environmental problems that afflict planet earth today. On the other hand, eco-criticism also concurs with the other branches of environmental humanities in the realm of history, ethics, anthropology, religious studies, and humanistic geography, among others. Arising from developing world perspectives, these fields harmonize environmental phenomena to comprehend the array of environmental concerns through a transnational perspective. In addition to these, the honest depiction of the harm done to the environment is to enable human to rethink and reorient themselves for radically transforming the present eco-system.

This book, the result of the author's experience in psychology and forestry studies, studies the relation between these two seemingly different disciplines. The author indicates how human actions and programs affect a range of threatened or endangered situations ranging from forests and species of animals to our own traditional values and cultural groups. Sustainers, the persons who advocate and support sustainability, possess or must come to possess certain characteristics that are shown to be renunciation, knowledge, attitude, controllability, and patterning. This book seeks to discover and advocates how and why those attributes must be strengthened if we are to sustain our environment and ourselves.

Deciding what user impacts are natural or unnatural has inspired much debate. Biophysically, moose cause similar kinds of soil and vegetation impacts as hikers. Yet moose are the sign of nature while hikers are the sign of damage. The field of outdoor recreation is beset with paradoxes, and this book presents a unique, alternative framework to address these dilemmas. Examining outdoor recreation through the lens of ecological theory, Ryan draws from theorists such as Foucault, Derrida and Latour. The book explores minimum impact strategies designed to protect and enhance ecological integrity, but that also require a disturbing amount of policing of users, which runs counter to the freedom users seek. Recent ecological theory suggests that outdoor recreation's view of nature as balanced when impacts are removed is outdated and incorrect. What is needed, and indeed Ryan presents, is a paradoxical and ecological view of humans as neither natural nor unnatural, a view that embraces some traces in nature.

Extinction is an attempt to understand, through photographs and text, the factors threatening numerous species of animal and plant with extinction and to explore man s relationship with life on Earth. It showcases ten years of photographing endangered and extinct specimens in The Field Museum in Chicago one of the world s greatest and most important sets of natural history collections. The photographs in Extinction were made behind the scenes in the Field Museum s collections, revealing specimens that are not on public display. Extinction illustrates the crucial importance of museum collections for conservation, education and research. The images lead the reader to the species stories, promoting a greater understanding of conservation efforts, reasons for decline (including climate change, habitat loss and overexploitation) and mankind s stewardship of life on Earth at a critical time in history. The United Nations recent Global Assessment Report on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services makes the set of issues affecting biodiversity even more topical. The book has been designed to have pages with black backgrounds for extinct species and white backgrounds for species nearing extinction. A yellow flag highlights conservation successes, which are interspersed throughout. The conservation success stories highlight the positive work that is happening and the potential there is to prevent the extinction of these and other species.

This book presents a comprehensive overview and analysis of mangrove ecological processes, structure, and function at the local, biogeographic, and global scales and how these properties interact to provide key ecosystem services to society. The analysis is based on an international collaborative effort that focuses on regions and countries holding the largest mangrove resources and encompasses the major biogeographic and socio-economic settings of mangrove distribution. Given the economic and ecological importance of mangrove wetlands at the global scale, the chapters aim to integrate ecological and socio-economic perspectives on mangrove function and management using a system-level hierarchical analysis framework. The book explores the nexus between mangrove ecology and the capacity for ecosystem services, with an emphasis on thresholds, multiple stressors, and local conditions that determine this capacity. The interdisciplinary approach and illustrative study cases included in the book will provide valuable resources in data, information, and knowledge about the current status of one of the most productive coastal ecosystem in the world.

The contributors to Kin draw on the work of anthropologist Deborah Bird Rose (1946-2018), a foundational voice in environmental humanities, to examine the relationships of interdependence and obligation between human and nonhuman lives. Through a close engagement over many decades with the Aboriginal communities of Yarralin and Lingara in northern Australia, Rose's work explored possibilities for entangled forms of social and environmental justice. She sought to bring the insights of her Indigenous teachers into dialogue with the humanities and the natural sciences to describe and passionately advocate for a world of kin grounded in a profound sense of the connectivities and relationships that hold us together. Kin's contributors take up Rose's conceptual frameworks, often pushing academic fields beyond their traditional objects and methods of study. Together, the essays do more than pay tribute to Rose's scholarship; they extend her ideas and underscore her ongoing critical and ethical relevance for a world still enduring and resisting ecocide and genocide. Contributors. The Bawaka Collective, Matthew Chrulew, Colin Dayan, Linda Payi Ford, Donna Haraway, James Hatley, Owain Jones, Stephen Muecke, Kate Rigby, Catriona (Cate) Sandilands, Isabelle Stengers, Anna Tsing, Thom van Dooren, Kate Wright

This book explains why international negotiations have not produced a sustainable solution to tropical rainforest degradation. Using an innovative, critical approach to international regimes, the author analyzes the structure and operation of the International Tropical Timber Organization (ITTO). He shows how the timber industry and producing- and consuming-country governments created a blocking alliance that favored developmentalist interests and ideas. The ITTO bolstered this alliance by permitting environmentalists merely to voice, but not negotiate, their concerns.

In Available to be Poisoned: Toxicity as a Form of Life, Dipali Mathur contends that the saturation of the planet with toxic chemicals is not the "inevitable" price of progress but marks a deliberate, violent relationship with the Earth and its "others," born of colonialism and capitalism's entwined histories. Mathur offers the innovative concept of "toxicity as a form of life" to signpost the normalization of toxic exposure. Mathur analyzes how states use toxicity to control populations on the fringes of our global political economy. Drawing on three case studies from India, Mathur shows how exposure to toxicity is weaponized to make certain populations "available for poisoning."

This book owes a great deal to the outstanding universal value of the natural heritage of Hubei Shennongjia, which offers an outstanding example of the ongoing ecological processes occurring in the development of intact subtropical mixed broad-leaved evergreen and deciduous forests in the northern hemisphere. The book demonstrates the value from the typical example of mountain altitudinal biological zones in the Oriental Deciduous Forest Biogeographical Province, and the vital origin location for global temperate flora, harboring the highest concentration of global temperate genera. Moreover, the heritage value in exceptional biodiversity and key habitat for numerous relic, rare, endangered, endemic, and type specimen species are presented. The richness of deciduous woody species in Shennongjia is the highest in the world.

The annual cost of medical care in the U niled States is rapidly approaching a trillion dollars. Without doubt, much of the rise in costs is due to our health industry's concentration on high technology remediation and risk avoidance measures. From recent public discussions it is becoming in creasingly evident that to contain the costs and at the same time extend the benefits of health care without national bankruptcy will necessitate much greater attention to preventative medicine. The total cost of waste disposal by our health industry is well over a billion dollars. It is rising rapidly as we increasingly rely on high technol ogy remediation measures. Here, too, in the opinion of the authors of this work, it would be prudent to give much greater attention to preventative approaches. Incineration technology has largely been developed for disposing mu nicipal solid waste (MSW) and hazardous waste (HW). As a result of the multibillion dollar funding for the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA), most experts believe that pollution control is the key to minimizing toxic emissions from incinerators. This view is now beginning to take hold in medical waste (MW) incineration as well. However, the authors contributing to this book have concluded that precombustion measures can be most effective in reducing the toxic products of medical waste incineration."

From the kings of the Indus Valley to Hannibal's Alpine cavalry, humans have been living and working with elephants for millennia. In Giants of the Monsoon Forest, Jacob Shell travels to communities that still rely on this ancient partnership. After the 2004 tsunami, Indonesian officials deployed trained Sumatran elephants to clear wreckage. Along the mountainous Indian-Burmese border, the logging industry employs several thousand elephants. They share these forests with Kachin rebels, who navigate a secret network of trails atop elephant mounts. Blending history, science and reportage, Giants of the Monsoon Forest offers a new perspective on animal intelligence and reveals an unexpected relationship between evolution in the natural world and political struggles in the human one. By working together, fugitive elephants and humans help preserve the wild spaces they both need to survive.

This open access volume presents a comprehensive account of all aspects of biological invasions in South Africa, where research has been conducted over more than three decades, and where bold initiatives have been implemented in attempts to control invasions and to reduce their ecological, economic and social effects. It covers a broad range of themes, including history, policy development and implementation, the status of invasions of animals and plants in terrestrial, marine and freshwater environments, the development of a robust ecological theory around biological invasions, the effectiveness of management interventions, and scenarios for the future. The South African situation stands out because of the remarkable diversity of the country, and the wide range of problems encountered in its varied ecosystems, which has resulted in a disproportionate investment into both research and management. The South African experience holds many lessons for other parts of the world, and this book should be of immense value to researchers, students, managers, and policy-makers who deal with biological invasions and ecosystem management and conservation in most other regions.

This book takes readers on a journey through the history of water in the Coahuila desert. It starts by describing the beauty and mysteries of the landscape, and then explores the rock art of the original desert cultures in Coahuila, offering readers a glimpse of the sacred nature of water in the desert, as well as the rituals surrounding it. Moving on to the colonial times and the post- independence development of the region, it discusses early water management, and explores how water is managed in modern times, as well as the legal complications of the law, and how these faulty laws, designed for less arid regions, have affected a highly diverse wetland, the Cuatro Cienegas oasis. The book then examines the biological consequences of the water loss for the aquatic plants and animals in Churince - a now extinct system within Cuatro Cienegas. Further, it addresses how even bacteria can become extinct in this hyper-diverse microbial oasis. Lastly, after this despair and sense of loss, the book provides hope, offering suggestions for how we can transform the future, from a social and educational point of view as well as through good science and changes in policy.

This book discusses soil and recycling management in the Anthropocene era. Nitrogen shortage is one of nature's most important productivity regulators, but since the advent of technical nitrogen fixation (TNF), biological nitrogen fixation (BNF) input has nearly doubled, particularly in grass and arable lands covering over 13 million km2 of the Earth's surface. This book explores how monoculture grass, arable lands and forests are often over fertilized with TNF, animal slurries, sewage sludge, or municipally produced composts, and as a result, flora and fauna that have adapted to a nitrogen shortage in the soil will have to adjust to a surplus; those that are unable to adapt will disappear.

The #1 New York Times bestseller by Time's 2019 Person of the Year "Greta Thunberg is already one of our planet's greatest advocates." -Barack Obama The groundbreaking speeches of Greta Thunberg, the young climate activist who has become the voice of a generation, including her historic address to the United Nations In August 2018 a fifteen-year-old Swedish girl, Greta Thunberg, decided not to go to school one day in order to protest the climate crisis. Her actions sparked a global movement, inspiring millions of students to go on strike for our planet, forcing governments to listen, and earning her a Nobel Peace Prize nomination. No One Is Too Small to Make A Difference brings you Greta in her own words, for the first time. Collecting her speeches that have made history across the globe, from the United Nations to Capitol Hill and mass street protests, her book is a rallying cry for why we must all wake up and fight to protect the living planet, no matter how powerless we feel. Our future depends upon it.

This book aims to structure, in a complete and sequential way, the mainstream technical knowledge which is related to eutrophication control. The book considers the development of innovative technologies for phosphate removal, while supporting the restoration of currently degraded lakes and reservoir systems. In addition, this book contains key-aspects of future benchmark interests being specially framed under the ongoing development of a circular economy. In particular, the book will contribute to a better understanding of the problem of internal P-loads and P-sources disposition towards a more effective control of nutrients' enrichment in lakes. The chemical routes and environmental fate of such lake nutrients will be viewed in the light of innovative technologies (engineering dimensions) and circular economy perspectives (economics dimensions). The main theme extends to an economic appreciation of environmental polluted aquifers. The book will appeal to an interdisciplinary audience, covering a wide spectrum of scientific fields, such as environment, physical chemistry, surface chemistry, interfacial phenomena, coastal engineering, bio-engineering, environmental policy makers, and economists.

This is the first book to provide assessments of multidecadal changes in resources and environments of the Large Marine Ecosystems (LMEs) of the North Atlantic. Using the case study method, researchers examine the forces driving the changes and actions underway aimed at turning the corner from declining trends in biomass yields, toward recovery of depleted species populations and improvements in ecosystem integrity.

Recently a distinguished group of 24 scientists argued eloquently that a new "Sustainability Science" was emerging that was focused on "meeting fundamental human needs while preserving the life support systems of planet Earth." The contributions contained in this volume are at the cutting edge of "Sustainability Science" and the results presented by the contributors are pertinent to one of the core questions: "How are long-term trends in environment and development, including consumption and population, reshaping nature-society interactions in ways relevant to sustainability?" ("Science" Vol. 292, 27 April 2001). The case studies demonstrate the utility of an ecosystem-based approach to the assessment and management of biomass yields and species sustainability.

Movements toward ecosystem-based management have emerged from the case studies on the initiation of recoveries of several depleted groundfish stocks of the US Northeast Shelf LME; the collapse of the Newfoundland-Labrador Shelf cod; the assessment of physical and biological changes on the Scotian Shelf, West Greenland Shelf, Iceland Shelf LME, and the Faroe Plateau, the North Sea, and the Barents Sea LMEs. Uncertainties, with regard to environmental and human-generated forcing, are addressed in assessment of the states of the Iberian Coastal and Biscay-Celtic LMEs, and in broad-scale studies of the influences at the base of the food chain of climatic variability on the productivity and biodiversity of plankton communities of the North Atlantic. The volume concludes with an insightful perspective on the approaches used and the results reported by the eminent marine scientist and former President of ICES, Professor Gotthilf Hempel.

The rapid thriving of industries, conversion of agricultural land to residential areas, habitat destruction, deforestation and use of recalcitrant synthetic substances enhanced the rate of degradation of the environment. Although there are various conventional techniques for degradation and cleaning of noxious pollutants from disturbed environs, they are energy inefficient and costly to install. Bioremediation has emerged recently as an alternative and novel approach to manage and control environmental pollutants. This volume focuses explicitly on the remediation of noxious substances in stressed environs. It includes expert-contributed chapters on bio-monitoring by way of evaluating the relationship of biota with the polluted/stressed environs, sustainable plant-based degradation of noxious pollutants, and the application of biotechnologies to achieve tailored responses. Academicians, researchers, scientists and students will find this work essential for sustainable treatment of noxious pollutants. This book also serves as a core guide for training, teaching and research in conservation biology and environmental rehabilitation.

This fully updated and comprehensively revised edition of a classic text concentrates on the economics of conserving the living environment. It begins by covering the ethical foundations and basic economic paradigms' essential for understanding and assessing ecological economics. General strategies for global environmental conservation, policies for government intervention, developing countries, preserving wildlife and biodiversity, open-access to and common property in natural resources, conservation of natural areas, forestry, agriculture and the environment, tourism, sustainable development and demographic change are also all covered. This second edition deals with contemporary environmental policy issues that can be expected to be of lasting concern and importance - each chapter benefiting from either the addition of substantial sections of new material, valuable explanations or updates and revisions in light of developments in theory or world events and conditions. Updated techniques of economic analysis are also introduced, explained simply, and applied as appropriate. Economics of Environmental Conservation, Second Edition is written in an engaging and accessible manner and as such will be warmly received by both specialists and non-specialists in economics. It will find a wide readership amongst academics and policymakers in the fields of ecological, environmental and natural resource economics as well as those involved in development studies, environmental management and science, and conservation ecology and biology. Particular chapters will be of interest to those in tourism studies, agriculture, wildlife management and forestr

Aspects of Brazilian Floristic Diversity: From Botany to Traditional Communities offers a unique approach in floristic diversity of the Neotropical region, specifically encompassing the Brazilian flora. This volume combines both theoretical and applied aspects of scientific making knowledge in different perspectives of Botanical Science. In this volume, botanical specialists discuss the many different approaches of taxonomic, reproductive, ecological and ethnobotanical aspects of Brazilian floristic diversity, thereby enlightening the global interest in Neotropical species, in particular those from the Brazilian territory. The book addresses relevant questions from many points of view, including anatomy, reproduction, palinology, conservation and ethnobotany, creating an in-depth perception of the flora in its complexity constitution. The book provides a comprehensive outlook on Botany Sciences, considering the history and traditional knowledge of plants, and relating it to contemporary problems and concerns of flora conservation today. With this current perspective, this book reaches a vast audience from the research lines of Botany, and encompasses a broader and interdisciplinary understanding of Aspects of Brazilian Floristic Diversity.

A large-scale outbreak of red tide along coastal areas is becoming a global marine hazard, which is associated with fish and shellfish mass mortalities through poisoning. The Seto Inland Sea, the largest semi-enclosed sea in Japan has suffered from red tide outbreaks since the late 1950's. This book discusses the red tide phenomena throughout the world, which includes biological research results on taxonomy of cyst and vegetative cells of red tide organisms and ecological and physiological studies using ecological modeling. This book is undoubtedly useful for scientists and students in the field of biological oceanography, marine environment science and aquaculture, as well as governmental researchers working for the conservation of marine coastal environment.