Now in its second edition, Global Capitalism and Climate Change: The Need for an Alternative World System examines anthropogenic climate change in the context of global capitalism, a political economy that emphasizes profit-making, is committed to on-going economic growth, results in massive social inequality, fosters a treadmill of production and consumption, and is heavily reliant on fossil fuels. Looking ahead, Hans A. Baer explores the systemic changes necessary to create a more socially just, democratic, and environmentally sustainable world system capable of moving humanity toward a safer climate. This book is recommended for readers interested in anti-systemic efforts, including eco-anarchism, eco-feminism, the de-growth perspective, Indigenous voices, and the climate justice movement.

This book explores the interactions of local inhabitants and environmental systems in the Protected Natural Areas of Mexico. Its goal is to help understand how social groups contextualize ecological knowledge, how human activities contribute to modifying the environmental matrix, how cultural and economic aspects influence the use, management and conservation of their ecological environment, and how social phenomena are to be viewed against the backdrop of ecological knowledge. The book reviews the epistemological and historical bases of the socio-ecological relationship, and addresses the evolution of human-natural systems. From a methodological standpoint, it assesses the tools required for the integration of "human" and "natural" dimensions in the management of the environmental matrix. Further, in the case studies section, it reviews valuable recent experiences concerning the retro-interactions of local inhabitants with their environmental matrix. Given its scope, the book offers a valuable asset for researchers and professionals all over the world, especially those working in Latin American countries.

Our Environmental Handprints: Recover the Land, Reverse Global Warming, Reclaim the Future is the first book to fully explore your “Handprint” – how you can create sustainability in your life and in the world. Your Handprint is limited only by yourimagination. The good you do can be greater than your Footprint. It is time to put more energy into your Handprint! The smart beauty of the Handprint is that it can be self-perpetuating. Take planting a tree as an example. You put a seedling into the ground, water it, and then leave it alone. That tree will then grow itself and pull carbon dioxide from the air and create oxygen for us to breathe for as long as it lives. And, seeds from that tree create more trees. Our Environmental Handprints: Recover the Land, Reverse Global Warming, Reclaim the Future draws our attention to proven strategies across the spectrum. We make a difference with intelligent clothing and investments. We can promote environmental justice and sustainable development. We can teach environmental literacy and eat earth-friendly foods. Handprint Thinking applies to shelter (eco-remodeling and LEED buildings), motion (electric cars and living without a car), and earth-friendly energy. We create Collective Handprints whenever we set aside a park, recover a toxic waste site, revive a river, or ban plastic bags. Spending our money intentionally sets the stage for a Circular Economy. We are finding creative ways to make the Paris Climate Change Agreement work. Our Environmental Handprints: Recover the Land, Reverse Global Warming, Reclaim the Future makes the United Nations’ 17 Sustainable Development Goals personal. The final chapters show how you can become a hero in your own story – while creating twelve Collective Future Handprints.

For centuries, thinking about the earth's increasing human population has been tied to environmental ideas and political action. This highly teachable collection of contextualized primary sources allows students to follow European and North American discussions about intertwined and evolving concepts of population, resources, and the natural environment from early contexts in the sixteenth century through to the present day. Edited and introduced by Robert J. Mayhew, a noted biographer of Thomas Robert Malthus-whose Essay on the Principle of Population (1798), excerpted here, is an influential and controversial take on the topic-this volume explores themes including evolution, eugenics, war, social justice, birth control, environmental Armageddon, and climate change. Other responses to the idea of new "population bombs" are represented here by radical feminist work, by Indigenous views of the population-environment nexus, and by intersectional race-gender approaches. By learning the patterns of this discourse, students will be better able to critically evaluate historical conversations and contemporary debates.

In this book, an international team of leading marine mammal scientists, with a remarkably diverse set of backgrounds and areas of expertise, lead you through a synthesis of current knowledge on baleen whales. Baleen whales are the largest animals ever to have lived on this planet. They also have the lowest and most intense voices on Earth, most likely evolved to take advantage of ocean acoustic transmission conditions so as to be detectable across ocean basins. Some baleen whales can live to be 150-200 years old. They migrate many thousands of kilometers between feeding and breeding areas. They produce songs and calls that serve as behavioral foundations for establishing, maintaining and expanding their cultural identities. To conclude that we know the behavioral limits of these large brained, long-lived animals would be naive. As baleen whale scientists, we are still beginning to comprehend the enormous complexities and natural histories of these remarkable animals. Today, the fact that whales sing is known throughout much of the world. This awareness started 50 years ago with the publication and popularization of a collection of humpback song recordings that motivated research into baleen whale behavioral ethology. In this book's chapters, a reader's experiences will stretch from learning about baleen whale laryngeal anatomy associated with their different voices to learning about the vast ocean areas over which their voices can be heard and the emerging complexities of their culturally defined societies. These are accompanied by chapters on the fundamental ethological contexts of socializing, migrating, and foraging. Two common themes permeate the book. One theme highlights the phenomenal increase in scientific knowledge achieved through technological advancements. The other theme recognizes the impacts of human-made activities on ocean acoustic environments and the resultant influences on the health and survival of individual whales and their populations. Although the book is intentionally ambitious in its scope, as scientists, we fully recognize that baleen whale science is still in its infancy. Many profound revelations await discovery by cohorts of young, multi-talented explorers, some of whom are stretching their wings in this volume and some of whom are reading these scientific stories for the first time.

Human well-being depends in many ways on maintaining the stock of natural resources which deliver the services from which human's benefit. However, these resources and flows of services are increasingly threatened by unsustainable and competing land uses. Particular threats exist to those public goods whose values are not well-represented in markets or whose deterioration will only affect future generations. As market forces alone are not sufficient, effective means for local and regional planning are needed in order to safeguard scarce natural resources, coordinate land uses and create sustainable landscape structures. This book argues that a solution to such challenges in Europe can be found by merging the landscape planning tradition with ecosystem services concepts. Landscape planning has strengths in recognition of public benefits and implementation mechanisms, while the ecosystem services approach makes the connection between the status of natural assets and human well-being more explicit. It can also provide an economic perspective, focused on individual preferences and benefits, which helps validate the acceptability of environmental planning goals. Thus linking landscape planning and ecosystem services provides a two-way benefit, creating a usable science to meet the needs of local and regional decision making. The book is structured around the Driving forces-Pressures-States-Impacts-Responses framework, providing an introduction to relevant concepts, methodologies and techniques. It presents a new, ecosystem services-informed, approach to landscape planning that constitutes both a framework and toolbox for students and practitioners to address the environmental and landscape challenges of 21st century Europe.

Why does ethics only weakly contribute to the most crucial problems of the current world? Relational Agency and Environmental Ethics: A Journey Beyond Humanism as We Know It explores how the concept of moral agency embedded in modern humanist ethics, in its reliance on environmentally harmful and scientifically implausible presuppositions, prevents ethics from efficiently supporting a sustainability transition. The modernist individualist notion of agency includes conceptual dichotomies between moral agency and human nature, mind and body, reason and emotion, and knowledge and will, yet it should be revised without dismissing responsibility, normativity, and a shared ground for critical assessment. Suvielise Nurmi proposes an agential shift resting on a relational concept of agency, combining ecofeminist and evolutionary criticisms of modernism together with various interdisciplinary discussions involving philosophy of mind, cognitive science, anthropology, social ontology, and developmental biology and psychology. This book argues that the relational shift can resolve the dilemma and bring environmental relationships to the core of ethical discourse: there is no ethics distinct from environmental ethics. Environmental responsibilities can be justified as responsibilities for one’s relationally considered agency.

This volume describes and explores the emerging discipline of conservation paleobiology, and addresses challenges faced by established and young Conservation Paleobiologist's alike. In addition, this volume includes applied research highlighting how conservation paleobiology can be used to understand ecosystem response to perturbation in near and deep time. Across 10 chapters, the book aims to (1) explore the goals of conservation paleoecology as a science, (2) highlight how conservation paleoecology can be used to understand ecosystems' responses to crises, (3) provide case studies of applications to modern ecosystems, (4) develop novel applications of paleontological approaches to neontological data, and (5) present a range of ecosystem response and recovery through environmental crises, from high-resolution impacts on organism interactions to the broadest scale of responses of the entire marine biosphere to global change. The volume will be of interest to paleoecologists, paleobiologists, and conservation biologists.

The international perspective for this book is the unprecedented level of concern over deforestation, recognized by the meeting of world leaders at the 1992 Earth Summit, in Rio do Janeiro, and culminating in the appoint ment of the Intergovernmental Panel on Forests (IPF), under the auspices of the UN Commission on Sustainable Development. The wide range of issues covered by the authors in this volume reflects the breadth of the interna tional debate, from national policies and activist campaigning, through eco nomic and social objectives, to the sustainable management of forest and soil resources. Since the conservation campaigns of the 1980s, the focus of international concern has widened from tropical rain forests to all forest formations, in all regions, with increased recognition of global values and common responsibil ities. However, while forest cover in some temperate countries is increasing, irrational deforestation, at historically unprecedented levels of damage to biodiversity and to other environmental values, remains most acute in tropi cal countries, where the need to use the natural resources for sustainable development is greatest, and the capability weakest. While accepting the urgency of the situation, and the need for greater coherence of action at a global level, the 1997 report of the IPF to the UN Commission emphasized the powers and responsibilities of national governments, and the importance of National Forest Programmes, but with the fuller participation of local communities, and with enhanced access to international assistance."

Living Deep Ecology: A Bioregional Journey is an exploration of our evolving relationship with a specific bioregion. It is set in Humboldt County in northwestern California, in the Klamath-Siskiyou bioregion. By focusing on a specific bioregion and reflecting on anthropogenic changes in this bioregion over three decades, Bill Devall engages the reader in asking deeper questions about the meaning we find in Nature. He addresses questions such as how do we relate the facts and theories presented by science with our feelings, our intimacy, and our sense of Place as we dwell in a specific bioregion. This book engages the reader to consider our place in Nature. Devall approaches the bioregion not from the perspective of agencies and government, but from the perspective of the landscape itself.

Social and economic systems worldwide are changing rapidly. These changes are accompanied by an increasing demand for natural resources, including land, water, minerals, energy sources, food and timber. Today's foremost challenge lies in finding the tools to address the complexity of these interrelated trends, and in implementing strategies to balance environmental and socioeconomic needs. This volume contributes to this search by presenting original research, topical case studies and emerging best practice from a range of key stakeholders to examine the interface between ape conservation and industrial agriculture. In assessing the drivers behind agricultural expansion and land investments, it sheds light on governance challenges and legal frameworks that shape land use. Intended for policy makers, industry experts, decision makers, academics, researchers and NGOs, it is designed to inform debate, practice and policy to help reconcile the goals of industrial agriculture with those of ape conservation and welfare, and social and economic development. This title is also available as Open Access via Cambridge Books Online.

Global climate change requires the development of programs that consider the active restoration of degraded forests and the use of native trees in afforestation to preserve the natural environment. International commitments like the UN REDD program, the Montreal Process and the Convention on Biological Diversity call for the breeding of species rarely contemplated by large industrial companies. Low-intensity breeding is the most rational strategy for those species: simple but robust, and not dependent on continuously increasing funding, and therefore effective even with a relatively small budget. It commonly focuses on high genetic diversity rather than improving economic traits and adaptability rather than productivity. Controlled crosses with full pedigrees typical of high-intensity breeding are replaced by open pollination. This book presents state-of-the-art breeding strategies from the last two decades for several forest tree species of prime importance in the natural forests of Argentina. They are distributed in the three main forestry ecoregions of the country: the subtropical dry forest (Chaco), the subtropical rain forests (Yungas and Alto Parana rainforests) and the temperate forests of Patagonia. The book also discusses the genetic patterns of the selected species defined using genetic markers together with the analysis of the variation in quantitative traits. Further, it examines the crucial features of their reproductive biology, such as the mating system and gene flow and describes the current breeding programs. Lastly, it presents the latest developments in genetic resources and their emerging applications, concluding with some reflections and perspectives related to the conditioning imposed by climate change.

Ice humanities is a pioneering collection of essays that tackles the existential crisis posed by the planet's diminishing ice reserves. By the end of this century, we will likely be facing a world where sea ice no longer reliably forms in large areas of the Arctic Ocean, where glaciers have not just retreated but disappeared, where ice sheets collapse, and where permafrost is far from permanent. The ramifications of such change are not simply geophysical and biochemical. They are societal and cultural, and they are about value and loss. Where does this change leave our inherited ideas, knowledge and experiences of ice, snow, frost and frozen ground? How will human, animal and plant communities superbly adapted to cold and high places cope with less ice, or even none at all? The ecological services provided by ice are breath-taking, providing mobility, water and food security for hundreds of millions of people around the world, often Indigenous and vulnerable communities. The stakes could not be higher. Drawing on sources ranging from oral testimony to technical scientific expertise, this path-breaking collection sets out a highly compelling claim for the emerging field of ice humanities, convincingly demonstrating that the centrality of ice in human and non-human life is now impossible to ignore. This book is relevant to United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 13, Climate action -- .

This book traces the emergence of wildlife policy in colonial eastern and central Africa over the course of a century. Spanning from imperial conquest through the consolidation of colonial rule, the rise of nationalism, and the emergence of neocolonial and neoliberal institutions, this book shows how these fundamental themes of the twentieth century shaped the relationships between humans and animals in what are today Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, Zambia, and Malawi. A set of key themes emerges-changing administrative forms, militarization, nationalism, science, and a relentlessly broadening constituency for wildlife. Jeff Schauer illuminates how each of these developments were contingent upon the colonial experience, and how they fashioned a web of structures for understanding and governing wildlife in Africa-one which has lasted into the twenty-first century.

Bobcat: Master of Survival tells the story of the most adaptable and resilient wild feline in the world. While half the wild cat species worldwide are in danger, the bobcat is thriving, even expanding its range in North America. Why are bobcats flourishing when so many other wild felines are advancing towards extinction? The book explains how scientists apply the latest in wildlife research technology to probe this diminutive predator's habits and behavior. The reader is invited inside the bobcat's world to see how they hunt, kill prey, raise their young, coexist with humans, and deftly navigate the endless obstacles to survival.
The bobcat is both the most studied and the most exploited wild feline in the world. Millions have been killed for the fur trade. They were the focus of major controversy in the 1970s that transformed international conservation of wild felines. The book discusses how economics and politics play a far greater role in bobcat management and conservation than does science. Bobcat is the most comprehensive and up-to-date book on the natural history and management of bobcats to appear in 40 years.

This volume sets out to provide an overview of recent research on all aspects of amphibian ecology and behaviour and to illustrate its application to practical conservation measures for this major group of animals. Its broad scope makes it of relevance to students of general biology, ecology and conservation, but also to professionals in industries and agencies involved with environmental issues and nature conservation.

Despite their rich fossil history, there are only four surviving species of sirenians or sea cows, the only fully aquatic herbivorous mammals. The three species of manatees and the dugong live in the coastal waters rivers and lakes of more than 80 tropical and subtropical countries and are all on the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species. This book examines sirenian conservation biology through the lens of their behavioral ecology and ethology. Sirenian feeding, diving, movement, social and reproductive behaviors are reviewed by an international team of scientists from eight countries, with an emphasis on data gathered in the past 15 years.

The plant species that humans rely upon have an extended family of wild counterparts that are an important source of genetic diversity used to breed productive crops. These wild and weedy cousins are valuable as a resource for adapting our food, forage, industrial and other crops to climate change. Many wild plant species are also directly used, especially for revegetation, and as medicinal and ornamental plants. North America is rich in these wild plant genetic resources. This book is a valuable reference that describes the important crop wild relatives and wild utilized species found in Canada, the United States and Mexico. The book highlights efforts taken by these countries to conserve and use wild resources and provides essential information on best practices for collecting and conserving them. Numerous maps using up-to-date information and methods illustrate the distribution of important species, and supplement detailed description on the potential value these resources have to agriculture, as well as their conservation statuses and needs. There is broad recognition of the urgent need to conserve plant diversity; however, a small fraction of wild species is distinguished by their potential to support agricultural production. Many of these species are common, even weedy, and are easily overshadowed by rare or endangered plants. Nevertheless, because of their genetic proximity to agriculturally important crops or direct use, they deserve to be recognized, celebrated, conserved, and made available to support food and agricultural security. This comprehensive two-volume reference will be valuable for students and scientists interested in economic botany, and for practitioners at all levels tasked with conserving plant biodiversity. The chapters 'Public Education and Outreach Opportunities for Crop Wild Relatives in North America' and 'Genetic Resources of Crop Wild Relatives - A Canadian Perspective' are open access under a CC BY 4.0 license via link.springer.com.

In the early 1920s, in many a sawmill town across the South, the last quitting-time whistle signaled the cutting of the last log of a company's timber holdings and the end of an era in southern lumbering. It marked the end as well of the great primeval forest that covered most of the South when Europeans first invaded it. Much of the first forest, despite the labors of pioneer loggers, remained intact after the Civil War. But after the restrictions of the Southern Homestead Act were removed in 1876, lumbermen and speculators rushed in to acquire millions of acres of virgin woodland for minimal outlays. The frantic harvest of the South's first forest began; it was not to end until thousands of square miles lay denuded and desolate, their fragile soils -- like those of the abandoned cotton lands -- exposed to rapid destruction by the elements. With the end of the sawmill era and the collapse of the southern farm economy, the emigration routes from the South to the industrial cities of the North and Midwest were thronged with people forced from the land. Yet in the first quarter of this century, even as the destruction of forest and land continued, a day of renewal was dawning. The rise of the conservation movement, the beginnings of the national forests, the development of scientific forestry and establishment of forest schools, the advance of chemical research into the use of wood pulp -- all converged even as the 1930s brought to the South the sweeping reclamation programs of the Civilian Conservation Corps and the Tennessee Valley Authority; in their wake came a new generation of wood-using industries concerned not so much with the immediate exploitation of timber as with the maintenance of a renewable resource. In The Greening of the South, this dramatic story is told by one of the participants in the renewal of the forest. Thomas D. Clark, author of many books about southern history, is also an active timber producer on lands in both Kentucky and South Carolina

This captivating book simply and engagingly captures the vital role forests play in combating the effects of climate change. The reasons for the current and historical demise of the forest are clearly outlined, followed by a fascinating insight into how a forest works to help the local and global environment. There is a solution to global warming which is realistic, attainable and beneficial to the Earth and her inhabitants. Bill Liao and WeForest's laudable goals of making the earth cooler, alleviating poverty and restoring eco-systems are enshrined in the case studies from around the world; vividly demonstrating reasons to be hopeful.

In this book the authors have applied research knowledge to the solution of practical problems facing wildlife conservation in freshwater habitats. Subjects covered include: evaluation of the conservation interest of sites; practical protection and management of freshwater habitats; species conservation.

This book describes the biodiversity and biogeography of nothern Mexico, documents the biological importance of regional ecosystems and the impacts of human land use on the conservation status of plants and wildlife. It should become the standard source document for the conservation status of species and ecosystems in this region, which is of unusual biological interest because of its high biodiversity and highly varied landscape and biological zonation.