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Life on the Brink aspires to reignite a robust discussion of population issues among environmentalists, environmental studies scholars, policymakers, and the general public. Some of the leading voices in the American environmental movement restate the case that population growth is a major force behind many of our most serious ecological problems, including global climate change, habitat loss and species extinctions, air and water pollution, and food and water scarcity. As we surpass seven billion world inhabitants, contributors argue that ending population growth worldwide and in the United States is a moral imperative that deserves renewed commitment. Hailing from a range of disciplines an...
Fire, both inevitable and ubiquitous, plays a crucial role in North American ecosystems. But as necessary as fire is to maintaining healthy ecosystems, it threatens human lives and livelihoods in unacceptable ways. This volume explores the rich yet largely uncharted terrain at the intersection of fire policy, fire science, and fire management in order to find better ways of addressing this pressing dilemma. Written in clear language, it will help scientists, policy makers, and the general public, especially residents of fire-prone areas, better understand where we are today in regard to coping with wildfires, how we got here, and where we need to go. Drawing on abundant historical and analytic information to shed new light on current controversies, Living with Fire offers a dynamic new paradigm for coping with fire that recognizes its critical environmental role. The book also tells how we can rebuild the important ecological and political processes that are necessary for finding better ways to cope with fire and with other complex policy dilemmas.
Back from the Collapse is a clarion call for restoring one of North America’s most underappreciated and overlooked ecosystems: the grasslands of the Great Plains. This region has been called America’s Serengeti in recognition of its historically extraordinary abundance of wildlife. Since Euro-American colonization, however, populations of at least twenty-four species of Great Plains wildlife have collapsed—from pallid sturgeon and burrowing owls to all major mammals, including bison and grizzly bears. In response to this incalculable loss, Curtis H. Freese and other conservationists founded American Prairie, a nonprofit organization with the mission of supporting the region’s native ...
"In Southern Rivers: Restoring America's Freshwater Biodiversity, R. Scot Duncan explores the environmental history and future of the rivers of the southeastern United States. These river systems are the epicenter of North American freshwater biodiversity and the top global hotspot for several aquatic taxa including mussels, turtles, snails, crayfish, and temperate zone fish; these rivers also play a prominent role in the region's history, culture, and economy. Unfortunately, centuries of industrialization have impaired the region's river systems, sacrificing biodiversity and compromising their ability to provide essential ecosystem services like drinking water, waste disposal, irrigation, n...
2022 Choice Outstanding Academic Title 2022 WHA Caughey Western History Prize for the most distinguished book on the American West Can a sea be a settler? What if it is a sea that exists only in the form of incongruous, head-scratching contradictions: a wetland in a desert, a wildlife refuge that poisons birds, a body of water in which fish suffocate? Traci Brynne Voyles's history of the Salton Sea examines how settler colonialism restructures physical environments in ways that further Indigenous dispossession, racial capitalism, and degradation of the natural world. In other words, The Settler Sea asks how settler colonialism entraps nature to do settlers' work for them. The Salton Sea, Sou...
The field of developmental instability has generated a large amount of controversy recently, mostly because of fierce disagreement over the genetic basis of fluctuating asymmetry and its role in mate selection. This book is a timely and innovative critical evaluation of a burgeoning field. The book explores the premise that complex organismal, ecological and evolutionary processes can be understood as emergent properties of the "epigenetic machine," that is, the mechanisms fundamental to all organisms responsible for building and organizing phenotypes from information translated from DNA.
An inspiring look at wildlife species that are defying the odds and teaching important lessons about how to share a planet. The news about wildlife is dire—more than 900 species have been wiped off the planet since industrialization. Against this bleak backdrop, however, there are also glimmers of hope and crucial lessons to be learned from animals that have defied global trends toward extinction. Bear in Italy, bison in North America, whales in the Atlantic. These populations are back from the brink, some of them in numbers unimaginable in a century. How has this happened? What shifts in thinking did it demand? In crisp, transporting prose, Christopher Preston reveals the mysteries and ch...
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