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      • Trusted Partner
        Management of land & natural resources
        January 2007

        Transfrontier Conservation in Africa

        At the Confluence of Capital, Politics and Nature

        by Maano Ramutsindela

        Transfrontier conservation is a global concept which encompasses the protection of biodiversity spanning the borders of two or more countries in ways that support local economic development, international relations and peace. Nowhere is this more relevant but highly debatable than in Africa, which is home to a third of the world's terrestrial biodiversity, while at the same time hosting its poorest nations. This is one of the first books to account for the emergence of transfrontier conservation in Africa against international experiences in bioregional planning. The roles of the state and local populations are analysed, as well as the ecological, socio-economic and political implications.

      • Trusted Partner
        Management of land & natural resources
        August 2014

        Invasive Species and Global Climate Change

        by John P Thompson, Karen Garrett, Andrew Guitierrez, Dana Blumenthal, Elsa Cleland, Kevin Hughes, Jacques Regniere, Cascade Sorte, Makra Laszlo, Arne Witt, Tom Stohlgren, Jil Swearingen, Hilda Diaz-Soltero, Bethany Bradley, Toni DiTommaso, Randy Westbrooks, Li Bo, Matthew Barnes. Edited by Lewis Ziska, Jeffery Dukes.

        This book examines what will happen to global invasive species, including plants, animals and pathogens with current and expected man-made climate change. The effects on distribution, success, spread and impact of invasive species are considered for a series of case studies from a number of countries. This book will be of great value to researchers, policymakers and industry in responding to changing management needs.

      • Trusted Partner
        Management of land & natural resources
        September 2015

        Land-Use Change Impacts on Soil Processes

        Tropical and Savannah Ecosystems

        by Raghavan Dinesh, Arkalgud Ganeshamurthy, Subrata Ghoshal Chaudhuri, Heather D’Angelo, Krista L. McGuire, Caitlyn Gillikin, Dina C. Merrer. Edited by Francis Q Brearley, Andrew D Thomas

        This book examines the effects that land-use changes (notably agricultural intensification, logging, soil erosion, urbanisation and mining) have on soil characteristics and processes in tropical and savannah environments. It covers a range of geographical regions and environments as impacts of land use change are often site specific. The effects of land use change on various aspects of the soil ecosystem from both a chemical and biological perspective will be examined.

      • Trusted Partner
        Geography & the Environment
        July 2008

        Conserving Land, Protecting Water

        by Deborah Bossio, Deborah Bossio, Frits W T Penning de Vries, Kim Geheb, Kim Geheb, Line J. Gordon, Antonio Trabucco, William Critchley, Pay Drechsel, Hanspeter Liniger, Francis Gichuki, Lech Ryszkowski, Jules Pretty, Andrew Noble

        The degradation of land and water resources resulting primarily from agricultural activities has had enormous impact on human society. In order to alleviate this problem an advanced understanding of the state of our resources and the process of degradation is needed. Conserving Land, Protecting Water includes an overview of existing literature focusing on global patterns of land and water degradation and discussions of new insights drawn from successful case studies on reversing soil and water degradation and their impact on food and environmental security. ; Conserving Land, Protecting Water includes an overview of existing literature focusing on global patterns of land and water degradation and discussions of new insights drawn from successful case studies on reversing soil and water degradation and their impact on food and environmental security. ; Part 1: Land and Water Degradation: Assessment and Issues1.1: Learning from bright spots to enhance food security and to combat degradation of water and land resources.1.2: Land degradation and water productivity in agricultural landscapes.1.3: Land Degradation, ecosystem services and resilience of smallholder farmers in Makanya catachment, Tanzania.1.4: Political ecologies of bright spots1.5: Large scale fluxes of crop nutrients in food cause environmental problems at the sources and at sinks1.6: Carbon sequestration, land degradation and waterPart 2: Towards Better Land and Water Management2.1: Local Innovation in ‘Green Water’ Management2.2: Sustainability and Resilience of the Urban Agricultural Phenomenon in Africa2.3: Safeguarding water resources by making the land greener: knowledge management through WOCAT2.4: Bright basins - do many bright spots make a basin shine?2.5: The influence of plant cover structures on water fluxes in agricultural landscapes2.6: Investments in collective capacity and social capitalPart 3: ‘ Bright Spots’3.1: ‘Bright spots’: Pathways to ensuring food security and environmental integrity3.2: Ecosystem benefits of ‘Bright Spots’

      • Trusted Partner
        Geography & the Environment
        September 2019

        Invasive Species and Global Climate Change

        by Lewis Ziska, Jeffery Dukes

        This book examines what will happen to global invasive species, including plants, animals and pathogens with current and expected man-made climate change. The effects on distribution, success, spread and impact of invasive species are considered for a series of case studies from a number of countries. This book will be of great value to researchers, policymakers and industry in responding to changing management needs.

      • Geography & the Environment

        Science and Hope

        a Forest History

        by John Dargavel and Elisabeth Johann

        A HISTORY OF THE SCIENCE AND IDEAS OF FORESTRY OVER THE PAST THREE CENTURIES This book tells the story of the hopeful science and trusting art of forestry. It is a story about the hopes of foresters and other scientists to understand the forests more deeply, and about their unspoken trust that their knowledge could ensure an enduring sylvan future. Much has been written on the origins and development of modern forestry in various countries, and on the people and institutions involved, but there is little in the forest history literature that explains what the science actually is. Forest knowledge has an ancient history documented since classical times and applied within the intricate social and legal systems of medieval Europe. This volume is concerned with the modern form of forest science, founded in Europe early in the nineteenth century, when regimes for managing the forests that could be traced to the ancient world and had flourished in the Middle Ages were disrupted. New ways had to be found. Foresters have tried to know their forests scientifically for over three centuries and have hoped to apply their knowledge to good effect, even though they could not live to see the futures they envisioned. How far did their scientific understanding enable a sylvan future? What, over the three centuries discussed in this book, were their successes and failures? And now what might the future hold for forest science and its application? This is no tale of triumph: the outlook for the world’s forests is too bleak for that. While many forests are flourishing, the climate is changing, tropical forests are disappearing, others are degrading, species are being lost, governments dither, international conferences fail. This is another, longer story – one of inquiry, of science and persistent endeavour to find a better future for the forests.

      • Geography & the Environment
        June 2014

        Eco-History

        An Introduction to Biodiversity and Conservation

        by Ian Rotherham

        AN ACCESSIBLE INTRODUCTION TO BIODIVERSITY, CONSERVATION AND THE ECO-CULTURAL NATURE OF LANDSCAPES Key issues are addressed in short, focused chapters, supported by a detailed thousand-year timeline based on the British Isles. Rotherham is convinced that to conserve wildlife or ecology, and to heal the wounds of human impacts, we must understand our own history and how, over countless centuries, we have forged today’s ecologies from our impacts on, and utilisation of, nature. He argues that the interlinked concepts of biodiversity, nature conservation and of sustainability are too often mixed with notions of ‘wilderness’ and ‘nature’ and ‘naturalness’. Much of the biodiversity that we hope to conserve is the result of long-term interactions between people and nature. It is a ‘cultural ecology’, the product of the environment, history and tradition. Recognising that the landscapes around us are ‘eco-cultural’ not ‘natural’ is, Rotherham suggests, the key to understanding contemporary biodiversity and major challenges for ideas of future conservation and sustainability. The book introduces the background to humanity’s interactions with Nature and the forces at work in shaping today’s world. It is essential reading for anyone wishing to understand the nature of the global environmental crisis and how we got here. In particular, it will be a stimulating guide to students and teachers or lecturers from sixth form and college to university. It will also appeal to the ordinary wildlife enthusiast wishing understand the past, and to gain insight into what might be in store for the future.

      • Geography & the Environment
        September 2020

        Bringing Back the Beaver

        The Story of One Man’s Quest to Rewild Britain’s Waterways

        by Derek Gow

        A bold new voice in nature writing, from the front lines of Britain’s rewilding movement Bringing Back the Beaver is farmer-turned-ecologist Derek Gow’s inspirational and often riotously funny firsthand account of how the movement to rewild the British landscape with beavers has become the single most dramatic and subversive nature conservation act of the modern era. Since the early 1990s – in the face of outright opposition from government, landowning elites and even some conservation professionals – Gow has imported, quarantined and assisted the reestablishment of beavers in waterways across England and Scotland.  In addition to detailing the ups and downs of rewilding beavers, Bringing Back the Beaver makes a passionate case as to why the return of one of nature’s great problem solvers will be critical as part of a sustainable fix for flooding and future drought, whilst ensuring the creation of essential lifescapes that enable the broadest possible spectrum of Britain’s wildlife to thrive.

      • Travel & Transport

        The Western San Juan Mountains

        Their Geology, Ecology, and Human History

        by Rob Blair

        This book has four parts. The first part concerns the physical environment and includes a description of landform evolution, geologic history, economic geology, and weather. The second edition describes the various ecosystems encountered, primarily with reference to vegetation zones because they remain relatively fixed and are easy to identify. The third part focuses on the human history of the area, beginning with the earliest known inhabitants, followed by the incursion of the Spanish and, later miners, searching for the 'mother lode'. The fourth section is a 'points of interest' guide around the Skyway, the Alpine Loop and the railroad between Durango and Silverton.

      • The environment

        George W. Bush's Healthy Forests

        Reframing the Environmental Debate

        by Jacqueline Vaughn, Hannah Cortner

        Jacqueline Vaughn and Hanna J. Cortner detail how the Bush administration, by changing the terms and processes of debate, side-stepped opposition and put in place policies that restrict public and scientific involvement in environmental decisions. Their groundbreaking study analyses the context and legal effects of the Healthy Forests Initiative, the Healthy Forests Restoration Act, and related regulatory changes. The authors show how the administration used news events such as wildfires to propel legislation through Congress. Focusing blame for wildfires on environmentalists' use of appeals to challenge fuel-reduction projects, the administration restricted opportunities for environmental analysis, administrative appeals, and litigation. The authors argue that these tools have a history of use by diverse interests and have long protected Americans' right to question government decisions. This readable study identifies the players, events, and strategies that expedited the policy shift and contextualises it in the president's career and in legislative and administrative history. Revealing a policy change with major implications for the future of public lands and public process, "George W. Bush's Healthy Forests" will fascinate readers interested in the environment, politics, the Bush administration, and current affairs.

      • Management of land & natural resources

        The Nature of Southwestern Colorado

        Recognizing Human Legacies and Restoring Natural Places

        by Deborah D Paulson

        Travellers pass through one jaw-dropping landscape after another where the snowy San Juan Mountains meet the canyon and mesa country of the Colorado Plateau in southwestern Colorado. Yet this small but remarkably varied region also plainly reveals a history of hard use, including logging scars, mine-polluted rivers, and overgrazed grasslands and forests. In The Nature of Southwestern Colorado, Deborah D. Paulson and William L. Baker guide readers through this awe-inspiring land and its human legacies, describing in detail the ecology of its six sub-regions, showing readers how to recognise human influences on the flora and fauna, and discussing current trends. Although some of the policies and attitudes in southwestern Colorado continue to harm the natural world, a number of community projects suggest a promising future. Examining these trends, the authors search for signs of a new relationship between people and nature emerging here, one that enables people to protect, restore, and coexist with the wild.

      • Geography & the Environment
        July 2011

        Conservation Song

        A History of Peasant-State Relations and the Environment in Malawi, 1860-2000

        by Wapulumuka Oliver Mulwafu

        Conservation Song explores ways in which colonial relations shaped meanings and conflicts over environmental control and management in Malawi. By focusing on soil conservation, which required an integrated approach to the use and management of such natural resources as land, water and forestry, it examines the origins and effects of policies and their legacies in the post-colonial era. That interrelationship has fundamental contemporary significance and is not simply a phenomenon created in the colonial period. For instance, like other countries in the region, post-colonial Malawi has been bedevilled by increasing rates of environmental degradation due, in part, to the expansion of human and animal populations, cash crop production, drought and consequent deforestation. These issues are as critical today as they were six or seven decades ago. In fact, they are part of a conservation song that has a long and complex history. The song of conservation was initially composed and performed in the colonial period, modified during the immediate postcolonial period and further refashioned in the post-dictatorship period to suit the evolving political climate; but the basic lyrics remain essentially the same. This book attempts to explain the evolution of the conservationist idea whilst demonstrating changes and continuities in peasant-state relations under different political systems.The dominant narrative posits conservation as a progressive movement aimed at re-organising natural resources and protecting them from destruction but the idea was contested and deeply embedded in colonial power relations and scientific ethos. Conservation emerged as an important tool of colonial state intervention and control concerning people and scarce resources. Conservation Song shows how the idea of conservation was rooted in and driven by a particular type of science about the organisation of space and landscapes. It offers a strategic entry point to understanding the historical roots of Africa's social and ecological problems over time, which are also intertwined with power and poverty relationships. In the postcolonial period, the conservation tempo subsided and became neglected in public discourse, only to re-emerge in the 1990s through the democratisation movement.

      • Management of land & natural resources

        Prosperous Way Down

        Principles and Policies

        by Howard T. Odum (Author), Elisabeth C. Odum (Author)

        A Prosperous Way Down (2001), the last book by Howard T. and Elisabeth C. Odum, has shaped politics and planning as nations, states, and localities begin the search for ways to adapt to a future with vastly increased competition for energy. A Prosperous Way Down considers ways in which a future with less fossil fuel could be peaceful and prosperous. Although history records the collapse of countless civilizations, some societies and ecosystems have managed to descend in orderly stages, reducing demands and selecting and saving what is most important. The authors make recommendations for a more equitable and cooperative world society, with specific suggestions based on their evaluations of trends in global population, wealth distribution, energy sources, conservation, urban development, capitalism and international trade, information technology, and education. Available for the first time in paperback, this thoughtful, provocative book forces us to confront assumptions about our world 's future and provides both a steadying hand and a call to action with its pragmatic analysis of a global transition.

      • Applied ecology

        Embracing Watershed Politics

        by Edella Schlager (Author) , William Blomquist (Editor)

        As Americans try to better manage and protect the natural resources of our watersheds, is politics getting in the way? Why does watershed management end up being so political? In "Embracing Watershed Politics", political scientists Edella Schlager and William Blomquist provide timely illustrations and thought-provoking explanations of why political considerations are essential, unavoidable, and in some ways even desirable elements of decision making about water and watersheds. With decades of combined study of water management in the United States, they focus on the many contending interests and communities found in America's watersheds, the fundamental dimensions of decision making, and the impacts of science, complexity, and uncertainty on watershed management. Enriched by case studies of the organisations and decision-making processes in several major U.S. watersheds (the Delaware River Basin, San Gabriel River, Platte River, and the Columbia River Basin), "Embracing Watershed Politics" presents a reasoned explanation of why there are so few watershed-scale integrated management agencies and how the more diverse multi-organisational arrangements found in the vast majorities of watersheds work. Although the presence of multiple organisations representing a multitude of communities of interest complicates watershed management, these institutional arrangements can -- under certain conditions -- suit the complexity and uncertainty associated with watershed management in the twenty-first century.

      • The natural world, country life & pets

        Westwater Lost and Found

        by Mike Milligan

      • The natural world, country life & pets

        Rocky Mountain National Park

        by C W Buchholtz

        This is more than just the story of Rocky Mountain in its brief tenure as a national park. Its scope includes the earliest traces of human activity in the region and outlines the major events of exploration, settlement, and exploitation. Origins of the national park ideas are followed into the recent decades of the Park's overwhelming popularity. It is a story of change, of mountains reflecting the tenor of the times. From being a hunting ground to becoming ranchland, from being a region of resorts to becoming a national park, this small segment of the Rocky Mountains displays a record of human activities that helps explain the present and may guide us toward the future.

      • Management of land & natural resources

        Invasion of Indian Country in the Twentieth Century

        American Capitalism & Tribal Natural Resources

        by Donald L Fixico

        This new edition is updated through the first decade of the twenty-first century and contains a new chapter challenging Americans' Indian and non-Indian -- to begin healing the earth. This analysis of the struggle to protect not only natural resources but also a way of life serves as an indispensable tool for students or anyone interested in Native American history and current government policy with regard to Indian lands or the environment.

      • Geography & the Environment
        March 2012

        Changing Deserts

        Integrating People and their Environment

        by Troy Sternberg, Lisa Mol

        Deserts – vast, empty places where time appears to stand still. The very word conjures images of endless seas of sand, blistering heat and a virtual absence of life. However, deserts encompass a large variety of landscapes and life beyond oury stereotypes. As well as magnificent Saharan dunes under blazing sun, the desert concept encompasses the intensely cold winters of the Gobi, the snow-covered expanse of Antarctica and the rock-strewn drylands of Pakistan. Deserts are environments in perpetual flux and home to peoples as diverse as their surroundings, peoples who grapple with a broad spectrum of cultural, political and environmental issues as they wrest livelihoods from marginal lands. The cultures, environments and histories of deserts, while fundamentally entangled, are rarely studied as part of a network. To bring different disciplines together, the 1st Oxford Interdisciplinary Deserts Conference in March 2010 brought together a wide range of researchers from backgrounds as varied as physics, history, archaeology anthropology, geology and geography. This volume draws on the diversity of papers presented to give an overview of current research in deserts and drylands. Readers are invited to explore the wide range of desert environments and peoples and the ever-evolving challenges they face.

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