Around the Web

The Honest Broker: Making Sense of Science in Policy and Politics

The Honest Broker: Making Sense of Science in Policy and Politics
Roger A. Pielke, Jr.
New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2007, 188 pages.

A stranger approaches you and asks for a referral to a restaurant in your town. How would you respond?

With this engaging question, Roger Pielke, an environmental studies professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder, opens his book concerning four idealized ways that science and environmental policy interact.

It would probably surprise the stranger if you handed him… [Click here to read more!] Continue reading The Honest Broker: Making Sense of Science in Policy and Politics

Water

Instituting Change

Canadian Water Politics: Conflicts and Institutions
Mark Sproule-Jones, Carolyn Johns, B. Timothy Heinmiller (eds.)
Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press
2008, 360 pages.

Institutions and Environmental Change: Principal Findings, Applications, and Research Frontiers
Oran R. Young, Leslie A. King and Heike Schroeder (eds.)
Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press
2008, 400 pages.

Admitting a keen interest in policy reform won’t make you popular at cocktail parties. Trust me. But policy is simply shorthand for decisions that determine our collective action, and those havea way of exciting people. The rights, rules and procedures that we use to make decisions and take action are woven
together by the machinery of institutions. While confirming that institutions are important, both Canadian Water Politics and Institutions and Environmental Change describe how we might tinker with, or even renovate, institutions so that they make better decisions – particularly environmental ones.

Canadian Water Politics addresses a fundamental problem in managing water: the incompatibility between the fluid properties of the resource and the seemingly immutable characteristics of its management. Institutions give rise to social practices and guide social interactions, and in this context, Canadian Water Politics examines how institutions mediate, amplify,… [Click here to read more!] Continue reading Instituting Change

Around the Web

Bottomfeeder: How to Eat Ethically in a World of Vanishing Seafood

Bottomfeeder: How to Eat Ethically in a World of Vanishing Seafood
Taras Grescoe
Toronto: HarperCollins Publishers
2008, 326 pages.

Do you treat yourself to oysters or salmon from time to time? Are you tempted by tiger shrimp? Is tuna your comfort food?

If you are among the billions of people around the world who enjoy fish and other delicacies from the sea, this book is for you. Depending on which types of seafood you consume, you may be driving a species toward extinction, or contributing unknowingly to the destruction of coastal ecosystems and the local human communities that depend on them. Closer to home, you may be putting your own health at risk…. [Click here to read more!] Continue reading Bottomfeeder: How to Eat Ethically in a World of Vanishing Seafood

The Ecosystem Approach: Complexity, Uncertainty, and Managing for Sustainability
Around the Web

The Ecosystem Approach: Complexity, Uncertainty, and Managing for Sustainability

The Ecosystem Approach: Complexity, Uncertainty, and Managing for Sustainability
David Waltner-Toews, James J. Kay and Nina-Marie E. Lister (eds.)
New York: Columbia University Pressds
2008, 383 pages.

A copy of The Ecosystem Approach should be placed on the desk of every engineer, manager, environmentalist, politician and teacher. It is one of the first comprehensive efforts to discuss environmental management and sustainability in the interrelated fields of complexity and post-normal science (science where the facts are uncertain, the values are in dispute, the stakes are high and there is a sense of urgency – think climate change)… [Click here to read more!] Continue reading The Ecosystem Approach: Complexity, Uncertainty, and Managing for Sustainability

Law, Policy, and Standards

An Introduction to Environmental Law and Policy in Canada and Defending the Environment: Civil Society Strategies to Enforce International Environmental Law

An Introduction to Environmental Law and Policy in Canada
Paul Muldoon, Alastair Lucas, Robert B. Gibson and Peter Pickfield
Toronto: Emond Montgomery Publications Limited
2009, 285 pages.

Defending the Environment: Civil Society Strategies to Enforce International Environmental Law
Linda A. Malone and Scott Pasternack
Washington, DC: Island Press
2006, 359 pages.

An Introduction to Environmental Law and Policy in Canada is the perfect book for university or even high-school students who want to understand the basic language of environmental debate. From an outline of environmental protection regimes to endangered species issues and environmental assessment, this text covers a diverse range of themes, and is marked by clear writing and effective explanations.

Quite literally, this text has something for everyone: Aboriginal jurisdiction, the making of laws, international law, and law enforcement in particular problem areas such as nuclear energy, mining, fisheries and watershed… [Click here to read more!] Continue reading An Introduction to Environmental Law and Policy in Canada and Defending the Environment: Civil Society Strategies to Enforce International Environmental Law

Law, Policy, and Standards

Silence of the Songbirds: How We Are Losing the World’s Songbirds and What We Can Do to Save Them and Where the Wild Things Were: Life, Death, and Ecological Wreckage in a Land of Vanishing Predators

In Silence of the Songbirds, Bridget Stutchbury, a biology professor at York University, writes clearly and expressively about the dramatic declines of many songbirds. In her words, “By some estimates, we may have already lost almost half of the songbirds that filled the skies only forty years ago.” Continue reading Silence of the Songbirds: How We Are Losing the World’s Songbirds and What We Can Do to Save Them and Where the Wild Things Were: Life, Death, and Ecological Wreckage in a Land of Vanishing Predators

Law, Policy, and Standards

Design Charrettes for Sustainable Communities and Integral City: Evolutionary Intelligences for the Human Hive

The book uses the example of a bee colony to explain the idea of the city as a complex adaptive system. The “co- intelligence” of the hive sustains the colony, while also adding value to the fields and orchards through pollination. Although it is interesting, the beehive- city analogy wears thin with repetition and becomes tiresome over the course of the book. Continue reading Design Charrettes for Sustainable Communities and Integral City: Evolutionary Intelligences for the Human Hive

Around the Web

Where Our Food Comes From: Retracing Nikolay Vavilov’s Quest to End Famine and The Murder of Nikolai Vavilov: The Story of Stalin’s Persecution of One of the Great Scientists of the Twentieth Century

Where Our Food Comes From: Retracing Nikolay Vavilov’s Quest to End Famine Gary Paul Nabhan, Washington, DC: Island Press 2008, … Continue reading Where Our Food Comes From: Retracing Nikolay Vavilov’s Quest to End Famine and The Murder of Nikolai Vavilov: The Story of Stalin’s Persecution of One of the Great Scientists of the Twentieth Century