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This book asks an age-old question about the relationship between human consciousness and the environment: How do we think about our own thoughts and actions? How can we transcend the exigencies of daily life? How can we achieve sufficient distance from our own everyday realities to think and act more sustainably? To address these questions, the book draws on the results of decades of research in South and Southeast Asia on how local cultures have circumvented the “curse of consciousness” — the paradox that we cannot completely comprehend the ecosystem of which we are part. The book is focussed on three principles: perspectivism (seeing oneself from outside oneself), metamorphosis (becoming something that one is not), and mimesis (copying something that one is not), which help a society to transcend the hubris and myopia of everyday existence and achieve greater insight into its ecosystem.

This book provides a detailed account of Israeli forests, tracing their history from the Bible to the present, and outlines the effort to transform drylands and degraded soils into prosperous parks, rangelands, and ecosystems. The book's description of Israel's trials and errors, and its exploration of both the environmental history and the current policy dilemmas surrounding that country'ss forests, hope to provide valuable lessons in the years to come for other parts of the world seeking to reestablish timberlands.

This book investigates the environmental roots of the Scottish Enlightenment. What was the place of the natural world in Adam Smith's famous defense of free trade? The author recovers the forgotten networks of improvers and natural historians that sought to transform the soil, plants, and climate of Scotland in the eighteenth century. The Highlands offered a vast outdoor laboratory for rival liberal and conservative views of nature and society. But when the improvement schemes foundered toward the end of the century, northern Scotland instead became a crucible for anxieties about overpopulation, resource exhaustion, and the physical limits to economic growth. Thus, the rise and fall of the Enlightenment in the Highlands sheds new light on the origins of environmentalism.

The press and other media constantly report news stories about dangerous chemicals in the environment, miracle cures, the safety of therapeutic treatments, and potential cancer-causing agents. But what exactly is meant by “increased risk”—should we worry if we are told that we are at twice the risk of developing an illness? And how do we interpret “reduced risk” to properly assess the benefits of noisily touted dietary supplements? Demonstrating the difficulty of separating the hype from the hypothesis, the author of this book clearly communicates how clinical epidemiology works. Using everyday terms, he describes how professional scientists approach questions of disease causation and therapeutic efficacy to provide readers with the tools to help them understand whether warnings of environmental risk are truly warranted, or if claims of therapeutic benefit are justified.

East Germany, its economy, and its society were in decline long before the country's political collapse in the late 1980s. This book argues that the clues were there in the natural landscape, but policy analysts were blind to them. Had they noted the record of the leadership's values and goals manifest in the landscape, they would not have hailed East Germany as a Marxist-Leninist success story. The book sets East German history within the context of the landscape history of two centuries to underscore how forest and ecosystem change offered a reliable barometer to the health and stability of the political system that governed them. It explains how East German leaders' indifference to human rights and their disregard for the landscape affected the rural economy, forests, and population. This lesson from history suggests new ways of thinking about the health of ecosystems and landscapes, and proposes assessing the stability of modern political systems based on the environment's system qualities rather than on political leaders' goals and beliefs.