There is a growing need for public buy-in if democratic processes are to run smoothly. But who exactly is "the public"? What does their engagement in policy-making processes look like? How can our understanding of "the public" be expanded to include - or be led by - diverse voices and experiences, particularly of those who have been historically marginalized? And what does this expansion mean not only for public policies and their development, but for how we teach policy? Drawing upon public engagement case studies, sites of inquiry, and vignettes, this volume raises and responds to these and other questions while advancing policy justice as a framework for public engagement and public policy. Stretching the boundaries of deliberative democracy in theory and practice, Creating Spaces of Engagement offers critical reflections on how diverse publics are engaged in policy processes.

Disentangling the facts from the hype, this 'Domesday book' of the British and Irish countryside offers a definitive and up-to-date survey of the state of our wildlife today. Norman Maclean, editor of the bestselling Silent Summer, examines the latest findings of Britain and Ireland's top wildlife experts and interprets them for a wider audience. Each chapter provides reliable estimates of animal populations, showing which species are thriving and which are in decline. The book also considers the effects of climate change on our wildlife and how human population growth is influencing its development. Beautifully illustrated with colour plates and wood engravings throughout, this accessible and timely study reveals just how rapidly our countryside and its wildlife are changing, why we should be concerned, and what we can do about it.

Wildlife and the countryside are highly valued by people in the UK, and for good reason. Healthy habitats are invaluable assets and promote human wellbeing. However, they are under increasing threat from, among other things, relentless urban expansion and intensive modern agriculture. These pressures largely stem from a major underlying cause - the high and growing population of humans living in the UK. This book provides an overview of wildlife in the UK and its recent status; factors contributing to wildlife declines; trends in human numbers; international deliberations about the impacts of human population growth; and the implications for the future of wildlife conservation in the UK. The evidence-based text includes comparisons of wildlife declines and their causes in other countries, providing a global perspective. This book is for ecologists, naturalists and conservation biologists studying and working in academia or in consultancies, as well as all those interested in wildlife conservation.

Although the American bison was saved from near-extinction in the nineteenth century, today almost all herds are managed like livestock. The Yellowstone area is the only place in the United States where wild bison have been present since before the first Euro-Americans arrived. But these bison pose risks to property and people when they roam outside the park, including the possibility that they can spread the abortion-inducing disease brucellosis to cattle. Yet measures to constrain the population threaten their status as wild animals.Mary Ann Franke's To Save the Wild Bison is the first book to examine the ecological and political aspects of the bison controversy and how it reflects changing attitudes toward wildlife. The debate has evoked strong emotions from all sides, including park officials, environmentalists, livestock growers, and American Indians. In describing political compromises among competing positions, Franke does not so much champion a cause as critique the process by which federal and state officials have made and carried out bison management policies. She shows that science, however valuable a tool, cannot by itself resolve what is ultimately a choice among conflicting values.

Conservationist Grant Fowlds lives to save and protect Africa's rhinos, elephants and other iconic wildlife, to preserve their habitats, to increase their range and bring back the animals where they have been decimated by decades of war, as in Angola, Mozambique and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. This vivid account of his work tells of a fellow conservationist tragically killed by the elephants he was seeking to save and a face-off with poachers, impoverished rural people exploited by rapacious local businessmen. Fowlds describes the impact of the Covid pandemic on conservation efforts, the vital wildlife tourism that sustains these and rural communities; and tells of conservationists' efforts to support people through the crisis. Lockdowns may have brought a welcome lull in rhino and other poaching, but also brought precious tourism to a standstill. He shows how the pandemic has highlighted the danger to the world of the illicit trade in endangered wildlife, some of it sold in 'wet markets', where pathogens incubate and spread. He describes a restoration project of apartheid-era, ex-South African soldiers seeking to make reparations in Angola, engulfed for many years in a profoundly damaging civil war, which drew in outside forces, from Cuba, Russia and South Africa, with a catastophic impact on that country's wildlife. Those who fund conservation, whether in the US, Zambia or South Africa itself, are of vital importance to efforts to conserve and rewild: some supposed angel-investors turn out to be not what they had appeared, some are thwarted in their efforts, but others are open-hearted and generous in the extreme, which makes their sudden, unexpected death an even greater tragedy. A passionate desire to conserve nature has also brought conservationists previously active in far-off Venezuela to southern Africa. Fowlds describes fraught meetings to negotiate the coexistence of wildlife and rural communities. There are vivid accounts of the skilled and dangerous work of using helicopters to keep wildebeest, carrying disease, and cattle apart, and to keep elephants from damaging communal land and eating crops such as sugar cane. He tells of a project to restore Africa's previously vast herds of elephants, particularly the famed 'tuskers', with their unusually large tusks, once prized and hunted almost to extinction. The range expansion that this entails is key to enabling Africa's iconic wildlife to survive, to preserving its wilderness and, in turn, helping humankind to survive. There is a heartening look at conservation efforts in Mozambique, a country scarred by years of war, which are starting to bear fruit, though just as a new ISIS insurgency creates havoc in the north of the country. What will humanity's relationship with nature be post-pandemic? Will we have begun to learn that by conserving iconic wildlife and their habitats we help to preserve and restore precious pockets of wilderness, which are so vital not only the survival of wildlife, but to our own survival on our one precious planet.

Much of what you’ve heard about plastic pollution may be wrong. Instead of a great island of trash, the infamous Great Pacific Garbage Patch is made up of manmade debris spread over hundreds of miles of sea—more like a soup than a floating garbage dump. Recycling is more complicated than we were taught: less than nine percent of the plastic we create is reused, and the majority ends up in the ocean. And plastic pollution isn’t confined to the open ocean: it’s in much of the air we breathe and the food we eat. In Thicker Than Water: The Quest for Solutions to the Plastic Crisis, journalist Erica Cirino brings readers on a globe-hopping journey to meet the scientists and activists telling the real story of the plastic crisis. From the deck of a plastic-hunting sailboat with a disabled engine, to the labs doing cutting-edge research on microplastics and the chemicals we ingest, Cirino paints a full picture of how plastic pollution is threatening wildlife and human health. Thicker Than Water reveals that the plastic crisis is also a tale of environmental injustice, as poorer nations take in a larger share of the world’s trash, and manufacturing chemicals threaten predominantly Black and low-income communities. There is some hope on the horizon, with new laws banning single-use items and technological innovations to replace plastic in our lives. But Cirino shows that we can only fix the problem if we face its full scope and begin to repair our throwaway culture. Thicker Than Water is an eloquent call to reexamine the systems churning out waves of plastic waste.

The management and conservation of natural populations relies heavily on concepts and results generated from models of population dynamics. Yet this is the first book to present a unified and coherent explanation of the underlying theory. This novel text begins with a consideration of what makes a good state variable, progressing from the simplest models (those with a single variable such as abundance or biomass) to more complex models with other key variables of population structure (including age, size, life history stage, and space). Throughout the book, attention is paid to concepts such as population variability, population stability, population viability/persistence, and harvest yield. Later chapters address specific applications to conservation such as recovery planning for species at risk, fishery management, and the spatial management of marine resources. Population Dynamics for Conservation is suitable for graduate-level students. It will also be valuable to academic and applied researchers in population biology. This overview of population dynamic theory can serve to further their population research, as well as to improve their understanding of population management.