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After the Fires: The Ecology of Change in Yellowstone National Park

Linda L. Wallace (ed.)

This book presents the history and aftereffects of the fires of 1988 that swept through the Greater Yellowstone ecosystem (GYE) describes the chronology of the fires, the areas burned, and the extent ... More

This book presents the history and aftereffects of the fires of 1988 that swept through the Greater Yellowstone ecosystem (GYE) describes the chronology of the fires, the areas burned, and the extent of fire in those regions. One of the biggest concerns of the public was how individual plants and animals fared. Thinking hierarchically, we know that the patterns seen at the community and ecosystem levels are the result of mechanistic responses at the individual and population levels. It is important to know how forest trees and grass-land species responded. Some of the greatest public concern was for large animals, particularly Elk. Elk mortality and population responses after the fires took some surprising turns. The GYE is an extremely heterogeneous environment. Plant communities provide essential habitat for the megaherbivores of the GYE as well. Although we know numbers and how the populations of these animals have changed since the fires, it is difficult to determine the mechanisms behind these changes. Using simulation models and comparing their results with reality can yield important insights as to the mechanisms governing ungulate response to fire. The sediments of Yellowstone's lakes provide an opportunity to reconstruct the vegetation and fire history of the region back to the time of late-Pleistocene deglaciation.Less

The Baltimore School of Urban Ecology: Space, Scale, and Time for the Study of Cities

J. Morgan Grove, Mary Cadenasso, Steward Pickett, and Gary Machlis

The first “urban century” in history has arrived: a majority of the world's population now resides in cities and their surrounding suburbs. Urban expansion marches on, and the planning and design of ... More

The first “urban century” in history has arrived: a majority of the world's population now resides in cities and their surrounding suburbs. Urban expansion marches on, and the planning and design of future cities requires attention to such diverse issues as human migration, public health, economic restructuring, water supply, climate and sea-level change, and much more. This book draws on two decades of pioneering social and ecological studies in Baltimore to propose a new way to think about cities and their social, political, and ecological complexity that will apply in many different parts of the world. The aim is to give fresh perspectives on how to study, build, and manage cities in innovative and sustainable ways.Less

Banned: A History of Pesticides and the Science of Toxicology

Frederick Rowe Davis

Rachel Carson's eloquent book Silent Spring stands as one of the most important books of the twentieth century and inspired important and long-lasting changes in environmental science and government ... More

Rachel Carson's eloquent book Silent Spring stands as one of the most important books of the twentieth century and inspired important and long-lasting changes in environmental science and government policy. This text sets Carson's study in the context of the twentieth century, reconsiders her achievement, and analyzes its legacy in light of toxic chemical use and regulation today. The book examines the history of pesticide development alongside the evolution of the science of toxicology and tracks legislation governing exposure to chemicals across the twentieth century. It affirms the brilliance of Carson's careful scientific interpretations drawing on data from university and government toxicologists. Although Silent Spring instigated legislation that successfully terminated DDT use, other warnings were ignored. Ironically, we replaced one poison with even more toxic ones. The book concludes that we urgently need new thinking about how we evaluate and regulate pesticides in accounting for their ecological and human toll.Less

Belonging on an Island: Birds, Extinction, and Evolution in Hawai'i

Daniel Lewis

A lively, rich natural history of Hawaiian birds that challenges existing ideas about what constitutes biocultural nativeness and belonging, this natural history takes readers on a thousand-year ... More

A lively, rich natural history of Hawaiian birds that challenges existing ideas about what constitutes biocultural nativeness and belonging, this natural history takes readers on a thousand-year journey as it explores the Hawaiian Islands' beautiful birds and a variety of topics including extinction, evolution, survival, conservationists and their work, and, most significantly, the concept of belonging. The text is built around the stories of four species: the Stumbling Moa-Nalo, the Kauaʻi ʻŌʻō, the Palila, and the Japanese White-Eye. The book offers innovative ways to think about what it means to be native and proposes new definitions that apply to people as well as to birds. Being native, the book argues, is a relative state influenced by factors including the passage of time, charisma, scarcity, utility to others, short-term evolutionary processes, and changing relationships with other organisms. This book also describes how bird conservation started in Hawaiʻi, and the naturalists and environmentalists who did extraordinary work.Less

Dancing with the River: People and Life on the Chars of South Asia

Kuntala Lahiri-Dutt and Gopa Samanta

This book discusses chars as uniquely fluid environments where the demarcation between land and water is neither well defined nor permanent. Chars form a fluid and problematic category, as much of ... More

This book discusses chars as uniquely fluid environments where the demarcation between land and water is neither well defined nor permanent. Chars form a fluid and problematic category, as much of politics and history as of the environment; both of these social and natural elements are products of control. Within the Gangetic plains, the focus in this book is on the Bengal delta, and specifically the bagri, or the western part of the delta. Lying outside or at the margins of the land revenue system, the complex and fluid environment of chars presents opportunities to some people. Understanding the transition to British rule is explained in this book. The livelihoods of people who neither benefited from rehabilitation programs nor were able to fully merge with the mainstream life are also explored. To study women-headed households, broadly ethnographic qualitative methods are employed. The livelihoods linked to the hybrid hydraulic regimes of tropical rivers are also intrinsically hybrid. On chars, water remains the most important source of wealth as well as the biggest threat to a secure life. No conventional ways of understanding security and vulnerability apply to the lives that are defined by water; people do the best they can on an everyday basis, either individually or collectively.Less

Escaping the Dark, Gray City: Fear and Hope in Progressive-Era Conservation

Benjamin Heber Johnson

This book is an exploration of the Progressive-era conservation movement, and its lasting effects on American culture, politics, and contemporary environmentalism. The turn of the twentieth century ... More

This book is an exploration of the Progressive-era conservation movement, and its lasting effects on American culture, politics, and contemporary environmentalism. The turn of the twentieth century caught America at a crossroads, shaking the dust from a bygone era and hurtling toward the promises of modernity. Factories, railroads, banks, and oil fields all reshaped the American landscape and people. In the gulf between growing wealth and the ills of an urbanizing nation, the spirit of Progressivism emerged. Promising a return to democracy and a check on concentrated wealth, Progressives confronted this changing relationship to the environment, not only in the countryside but also in dense industrial cities and leafy suburbs. Drawing on extensive work in urban history and Progressive politics, this book weaves together environmental history, material culture, and politics to reveal the successes and failures of the conservation movement and its lasting legacy. By following the efforts of a broad range of people and groups—women's clubs, labor advocates, architects, and politicians—the book shows how conservation embodied the ideals of Progressivism, ultimately becoming one of its most important legacies.Less

The First Domestication: How Wolves and Humans Coevolved

Raymond Pierotti and Brandy R Fogg

This book changes the narrative about how wolves became dogs and in turn, humanity's best friend. Rather than describe how people mastered and tamed an aggressive, dangerous species, the authors ... More

This book changes the narrative about how wolves became dogs and in turn, humanity's best friend. Rather than describe how people mastered and tamed an aggressive, dangerous species, the authors describe coevolution and mutualism. Wolves, particularly ones shunned by their packs, most likely initiated the relationship with Paleolithic humans, forming bonds built on mutually recognized skills and emotional capacity. This interdisciplinary study draws on sources from evolutionary biology as well as tribal and indigenous histories to produce an intelligent, insightful, and often unexpected story of cooperative hunting, wolves protecting camps, and wolf–human companionship. This fascinating assessment is a must-read for anyone interested in human evolution, ecology, animal behavior, anthropology, and the history of canine domestication.Less

A Golden Weed: Tobacco and Environment in the Piedmont South

Drew A Swanson

This book presents an “environmental” history about a crop of great historical and economic significance: American tobacco. A preferred agricultural product for much of the South, the tobacco plant ... More

This book presents an “environmental” history about a crop of great historical and economic significance: American tobacco. A preferred agricultural product for much of the South, the tobacco plant would ultimately degrade the land that nurtured it, but as the book provocatively argues, the choice of crop initially made perfect agrarian as well as financial sense for southern planters. This book explores how one attempt at agricultural permanence went seriously awry. It weaves together social, agricultural, and cultural history of the Piedmont region and illustrates how ideas about race and landscape management became entangled under slavery and afterward. Challenging long-held perceptions, this study examines not only the material relationships that connected crop, land, and people but also the justifications that encouraged tobacco farming in the region.Less

The Grid and the Village: Losing Electricity, Finding Community, Surviving Disaster

Stephen Doheny-Farina

This book focuses on electric grids and tells the stories about two villages separated by time, connected by proximity, and united by the challenges of maintaining a community under duress. The story ... More

This book focuses on electric grids and tells the stories about two villages separated by time, connected by proximity, and united by the challenges of maintaining a community under duress. The story of one village presents an insider's view of a natural disaster, describing the destruction of the electric grid in January 1998 and the emergence of a community that filled the resulting void. It begins with moments in the lives of people in the village of Potsdam, New York and expands to cover the breadth of the disaster. The book concludes with a timeline of events that traces the disaster from the storm's origins in the Gulf of Mexico to the lethal flooding it caused as it moved slowly up the eastern seaboard to the icy devastation it brought to the Northeast. The story of the other village begins nearly 200 years before the ice storm in a place called Louisville Landing, about twenty miles from Potsdam on the border between the United States and Canada. This narrative provides a glimpse of what it took to build the kind of grids that made America, the grids which connect people to one another, and is told through the experiences of some of the people who sacrificed the most to build the grids.Less

Hemlock: A Forest Giant on the Edge

Anthony D'Amato and Benjamin Baiser

David R. Foster (ed.)

The Eastern Hemlock, massive and majestic, has played a unique role in structuring northeastern forest environments, from Nova Scotia to Wisconsin and through the Appalachian Mountains to North ... More

The Eastern Hemlock, massive and majestic, has played a unique role in structuring northeastern forest environments, from Nova Scotia to Wisconsin and through the Appalachian Mountains to North Carolina, Tennessee, and Alabama. A “foundation species” influencing all the species in the ecosystem surrounding it, this iconic North American tree has long inspired poets and artists as well as naturalists and scientists. Five thousand years ago, the hemlock collapsed as a result of abrupt global climate change. Now this iconic tree faces extinction once again because of an invasive insect, the hemlock woolly adelgid. Drawing from a century of studies at Harvard University's Harvard Forest, one of the most well-regarded long-term ecological research programs in North America, the authors explore what the hemlock's decline can tell us about the challenges facing nature and society in an era of habitat changes and fragmentation, as well as global change.Less

High and Dry: Meeting the Challenges of the World's Growing Dependence on Groundwater

William M Alley and Rosemarie Alley

Groundwater is the primary source of drinking water for half of the world’s population and is critical for global food security. Simultaneously, groundwater provides enormous environmental benefits ... More

Groundwater is the primary source of drinking water for half of the world’s population and is critical for global food security. Simultaneously, groundwater provides enormous environmental benefits by sustaining rivers, lakes, and wetlands, especially during droughts. A growing global population, widespread use of industrial chemicals, and climate change now threaten this vital resource. Groundwater depletion and contamination has spread from isolated areas to many countries throughout the world. Groundwater is shared among many users and effective groundwater governance is hard to achieve. Solutions require active community engagement and collaboration of diverse stakeholders. External pressure is usually also required to achieve necessary changes and accountability. Groundwater depletion and contamination are prime examples of how many of the world’s most pressing environmental problems require cooperation and collective action. Drawing on examples from around the world, this book examines groundwater from key scientific and socioeconomic perspectives. Major themes woven throughout the book are: (1) the importance of integrating groundwater into overall water and land management, (2) how to achieve sustainable long-term yields from aquifers, (3) protection of groundwater quality, (4) groundwater and surface water as a single resource, (5) preservation of groundwater-dependent ecosystems, (6) measures to address the delayed effects of groundwater pumping, and (7) the role of groundwater in the face of climate change. While addressing the serious nature of groundwater problems, the book includes stories of people who are making a difference in protecting this critical resource.Less

Keeping Faith with Nature: Ecosystems, Democracy, and America's Public Lands

Robert Keiter

This book, which analyzes the contemporary public land policy debates with a view to bringing some perspective and coherence to a newly emerging era, addresses public land policy in its entirety, ... More

This book, which analyzes the contemporary public land policy debates with a view to bringing some perspective and coherence to a newly emerging era, addresses public land policy in its entirety, focusing on the interconnections between the diverse lands, resources, agencies, and communities that occupy so much of the western landscape. The alarming rate of species decline has pushed biodiversity conservation into the limelight; and the amorphous concept of ecosystem management has taken hold within the federal bureaucracy. Long-standing preservation notions—whether of entire landscapes, river corridors, wetlands, or species—have assumed new urgency in the face of the growing extinction crisis, burgeoning urban sprawl, and widespread environmental deterioration. These developments have profoundly influenced public land policy and shifted its focus toward ecological management, preservation, and ecosystem restoration. This book chronicles the changes that forecast a new direction in public land policy, examines the institutional forces driving those changes, and offers tentative observations on what the future may hold. To do so, it highlights key examples of the new ecological management movement: the Pacific Northwest's spotted owl controversy; the Yellowstone wolf reintroduction; fire as an agent of ecological change; the new wilderness debates; the transformation of southern Utah's Colorado Plateau; and the Quincy Library Group's forest management initiative. Drawing upon these examples, the book focuses on the ideas, forces, and institutions that are effecting—or resisting—change on the public lands.Less

Rumphius' Orchids: Orchid Texts from The Ambonese Herbal

Georgius Rumphius

This book presents features and the development of different type of orchids. More than three-quarters of known orchid species are tropical and about three-quarters of all species are epiphytes, that ... More

This book presents features and the development of different type of orchids. More than three-quarters of known orchid species are tropical and about three-quarters of all species are epiphytes, that is to say they live on but not from trees. The first half of the book discusses how the Ambonese Herbal describes the most noteworthy trees, shrubs, herbs, and land- and water-plants, which are found in Amboina, and the surrounding Islands, according to their shape, various names, cultivations, and use, together with several insects and animals. The book also describes the thirty-six orchid species, plus twelve uncertified ones, which are the first Indonesian orchids described by anyone.Less

Spare the Birds!: George Bird Grinnell and the First Audubon Society

Carolyn Merchant

In 1887, a year after founding the Audubon Society, explorer and conservationist George Bird Grinnell launched The Audubon Magazine. The magazine constituted one of the first efforts to preserve bird ... More

In 1887, a year after founding the Audubon Society, explorer and conservationist George Bird Grinnell launched The Audubon Magazine. The magazine constituted one of the first efforts to preserve bird species decimated by the women's hat trade, hunting, and loss of habitat. Within two years, however, for practical reasons, Grinnell dissolved both the magazine and the society. Remarkably, Grinnell's mission was soon revived by women and men who believed in it, and the work continues today. This book, the only comprehensive history of the first Audubon Society (1886–1889), presents the exceptional story of George Bird Grinnell and his writings and legacy. The book features Grinnell's biographies of ornithologists John James Audubon and Alexander Wilson and his editorials and descriptions of Audubon's bird paintings. This primary documentation combined with insightful analysis casts new light on Grinnell, the origins of the first Audubon Society, and the conservation of avifauna.Less

The Structure and Dynamics of Human Ecosystems: Toward a Model for Understanding and Action

William R Burch, Gary E Machlis, and Jo Ellen Force

This is a landmark book that strives to provide both grand theory and practical application, innovatively describing the structure and dynamics of human ecosystems. As the world faces ever more ... More

This is a landmark book that strives to provide both grand theory and practical application, innovatively describing the structure and dynamics of human ecosystems. As the world faces ever more complex and demanding environmental and social challenges, the need for interdisciplinary models and practical guidance becomes acute. The Human Ecosystem Model described in this book provides an innovative response. Broad in scope, detailed in method, at once theoretical and applied, this study offers an in-depth understanding of human ecosystems and tools for action. The authors draw from classic anthropology and sociology studies, contemporary ecosystem ecology, Buddhist ethics, and more to create a paradigm-shifting model and a major advance in interdisciplinary ecology.Less

Sustaining Lake Superior: An Extraordinary Lake in a Changing World

Nancy Langston

Sustaining Lake Superior asks, What can we learn from the conservation recoveries of Lake Superior over the past century as we face new challenges of persistent pollutants that are mobilizing with ... More

Sustaining Lake Superior asks, What can we learn from the conservation recoveries of Lake Superior over the past century as we face new challenges of persistent pollutants that are mobilizing with climate change? Communities around Lake Superior have long struggled to address pollution concerns, and local, regional, and international efforts met with significant successes in the twentieth century. Pollution—and concerns about that pollution—have a complex history in the Great Lakes. As soon as industrial development burgeoned in the region during the nineteenth century, people began trying to comprehend and control industrial wastes. Some of the earliest efforts to control pollution worked surprisingly well, for they rested on understandings of natural resiliency that made a great deal of sense at the time—and still have much to teach us. The nature of pollutants has changed since World War II, but, nevertheless, exploring the success—and failures—of pollution control in the past can help us devise resilient strategies for facing the challenges of pollution in a globalized, warming world.Less

Why Conservation Is Failing and How It Can Regain Ground

Eric Freyfogle

This book examines different aspects of land conservation. Using land in its broadest ecological sense, to include not just soils but wildlife, water, ecological processes, and humans, it approaches ... More

This book examines different aspects of land conservation. Using land in its broadest ecological sense, to include not just soils but wildlife, water, ecological processes, and humans, it approaches the battlegrounds from two quite different directions. Those who promote conservation typically respond to some inner longing to respect nature's processes. They care about living creatures, often passionately, and want nature's beauties and life forms close at hand. When taken seriously, as a vital strand of political and cultural thought, conservation poses a forceful challenge to elements of modern culture accepted as fundamental. It questions not only specific land-use practices but also our entrenched ways of seeing and valuing nature, and challenges our excessive faith in science and the capitalist market along with our exaggerated emphasis on individual autonomy. By situating humans within a value-infused natural order, the cause overlaps with religious traditions that honor the creation, and, by emphasizing connections among people and between people and lands, promotes a community-centered perspective of life which contrasts with social views exalting individualism. With its call for citizens to broaden their moral and aesthetic sensibilities, conservation fits within America's long heritage of progressive social reform.Less