NAFTA has initiated a procedure for addressing transborder economic problems in a more adequate and predictable fashion, potentially encouraging policy convergence between three disparate political cultures. Rather than addressing economic, social and environmental policy issues separately, trade policy now serves as a vehicle for negotiating policy convergence. Consequently trade officials are being forced to deal with an expanded array of domestic policy isues. This text presents a detailed examination of the initial NAFTA experience and evaluates its long-term implications beyond those of ending trade and tarriff barriers. In particular, it examines the cultural implications of this international arrangement. In addition, environmental protection and conservation issues are increasingly at the forefront of the international political agenda. NAFTA's environmental side agreement has created a way of addressing environmental concerns whilke protecting local standards, illustrating the attempt to achieve policy convergence by means of a trade apparatus. NAFTA now represents the continuing tension between integration and the maintenance of national autonomy.

Near-earth space, with extends to geosynchronous orbits where satellites remain faithfully over a fixed spot on the ground, does not lend itself to romantic fantasies of science fiction. It is a working place from which services can be delivered with ease and efficiency. Meteorology, seismic and crop-yield predictions, environmental monitoring, communications of all sorts, guidance and navigation, medical and educational services, treaty verification and photographic reconnaissance, news-gathering, scientific observation across the entire electromagnetic spectrum, prospecting, remote sensing, and monitoring of human activities are all in a day's work for near-earth space. Global cellular telephony, only a few years ago the exclusive privilege of comic-book heroes, is becoming a space-based commonplace. Planes that land in fog and cars that find their way in the labyrinthine steels of Tokyo guided from space are beyond a near horizon. Space is delivering its promise. This volume describes many of these activities and their prospects for changing the way we live, communicate, and travel on this Earth.

The global market is the largest and most powerful socioeconomic institution on the planet, and as such it demands that those who desire to benefit from it or those who seek to regulate it realize the economic and environmental consequences of their actions. The contributors to Environmental Ethics and the Global Marketplace argue that the health of the environment is inextricably linked to the health of the economy, and economic strength depends on the preservation of environmental values. Ultimately, economic and environmental sciences must merge more completely if we are to arrive at ethically justified principles as the basis for national and international environmental policy process, enabling environmental ethics to move beyond academic venues into domestic and international decision making.

Nature writers know that to be fully human is to be engaged with our natural surroundings. Elemental South is a gathering of works by some of the region's best nature writers - people who can coax from words the mysteries of our place in the landscape and the human relationship to wildness. Arranged by theme according to the basic elements by which many cultures on earth interpret themselves and their place in the world - earth, air, fire, water - the writings consider our actual and assumed connections in the greater scheme of functioning ecosystems. As we read of bears, ancient magnolias, swallow-tail kites, the serenity of a country childhood, the pleasure of eating real food, the remarkable provenance of ancient pottery shards, and much more, these works lure us deep into the southern landscape, away from the constructs of humanity and closer to a recognition of our inextricable ties to the earth. The writers are all participants in the Southern Nature Project, an ongoing endeavor founded on the conviction that writing like the kind gathered here can help us to lead more human, profound, and courageous lives in terms of how we use our earth. Some of the featured writers are originally from the South, and others migrated here - but all have honed their voices on the region's distinctive landscapes.

The human impact on vast areas of the oceans remains relatively unregulated. Sometimes, in fact, the only controls over our exploitation of marine resources lie in our environmental consciousness. However, while the field of environmental ethics has explored rights and duties for land use, stewardship, and policy, relatively little attention has been given to comparable issues of marine environments.

Values at Sea constitutes an important step toward moving environmental ethics discussions into a broader framework. Gathered here are fifteen papers by an interdisciplinary group of scholars, including ethicists, marine scientists, anthropologists, economists, geographers, lawyers, and activists. From the Great Lakes to the Pacific Islands, from the open sea to coastal areas, the papers cover a broad array of ethical issues and policy matters related to such topics as valuation of marine life, indigenous people's knowledge and environmental stewardship, endemic and exotic species, aquaculture, oil spills, and species protection.

Values at Sea will refocus environmental ethics, enrich its literature, and guide policy makers and academics toward improving decisions that can affect over 70 percent of the earth's surface.

The global market is the largest and most powerful socioeconomic institution on the planet, and as such it demands that those who desire to benefit from it or those who seek to regulate it realize the economic and environmental consequences of their actions. The contributors to Environmental Ethics and the Global Marketplace argue that the health of the environment is inextricably linked to the health of the economy, and economic strength depends on the preservation of environmental values. Ultimately, economic and environmental sciences must merge more completely if we are to arrive at ethically justified principles as the basis for national and international environmental policy process, enabling environmental ethics to move beyond academic venues into domestic and international decision making.

New essays that illuminate and interpret William Bartram's journey through what would become the southeastern United States William Bartram, author of Travels through North and South Carolina, Georgia, East and West Florida, the Cherokee Country, the Extensive Territories of the Muscogulees, or Creek Confederacy, and the Country of the Chactaws, was colonial America's first native born naturalist and artist, and the first author in the modern genre of writers who portrayed nature through personal experience as well as scientific observation. His book, first published in 1791, was based on his journeys through southern Indian nations and Britain's southern colonies in the years just prior to the American Revolution and provides descriptions of the natural and cultural environments of what would soon become the American South. Scholars and general readers alike have long appreciated Bartram's lush, vivid prose, his clarity of observation and evident wonder at the landscapes he traversed, and his engagement with the native nations whose lands he traveled through. The Attention of a Traveller: Essays on William Bartram's "Travels" and Legacy offers an interdisciplinary assessment of Bartram's influence and evolving legacy, opening new avenues of research concerning the flora, fauna, and people connected to Bartram and his writings. Featuring 13 essays divided into five sections, contributors to the volume weave together scholarly perspectives from geology, art history, literary criticism, geography, and philosophy, alongside the more traditional Bartram-affiliated disciplines of biology and history. The collection concludes with a comprehensive treatment of the book as a material historical artifact.