Worldchanging: A Users Guide for the 21st Century is a groundbreaking compendium of the most innovative solutions, ideas and inventions emerging today for building a sustainable, livable, prosperous future.
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Rigorous, passionate and totally surprising, this book could change the world.
Continue reading “Heat: How to Stop the Planet from Burning”
Strips of urban and suburban “fabric” have extended into the countryside, creating a ragged settlement pattern that blurs the distinction between rural, urban, and suburban. As traditional rural industries like farming, forestry, and mining rapidly give way to residential and commercial development, the land at the edges of developed areas-the rural-urban fringe-is becoming the middle landscape between city and countryside that the suburbs once were.
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Ecological economics addresses a flaw found in much economic thought — the failure to consider biophysical and social systems in analyses and equations. Ecological Economics: Principles and Applications is an introductory-level textbook that offers a pedagogically complete examination of this dynamic new field.
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Together with its companion Volume 191 Wetlands: Functioning, Biodiversity Conservation, and Restoration, this volume gives a broad and well-integrated overview of recent major scientific results in wetland science and their applications in natural resource management issues.
Sustainable Landscape Construction re-evaluates the assumption that all built landscapes are environmentally sound, and offers practical, professional alternatives for more sustainable landscape construction, design, an d maintenance. Packed with clear concepts and never-before-compiled resources on “green” landscape work, the book is an inspiring overview of important practices and concerns.
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Increasingly sophisticated technology and an ever-expand-ing base of knowledge have not been enough to allow humans to halt the worldwide progression of environmental degradation. Extensive fieldwork in both Africa and the United States convinced Allan Savory that neither the forces of nature nor commonly blamed culprits — overpopulation, poor farming practices, lack of financial support — were causing the decline of once-healthy ecosystems. He also noted that once land has become degraded, leaving it alone seldom helps revitalize it. Savory eventually came to realize that on the most fundamental level, environmental problems are caused by human management decisions, and only through wholesale changes in the way decisions are made can functioning ecosystems be restored. In response to that startling discovery, Savory began to develop a revolutionary new approach to decision-making and management.
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Community Planning is an introductory textbook that provides a thorough examination of the comprehensive planning process as practiced in the United States today. The authors consider all aspects of the comprehensive plan: its elements, adoption, and implementation.
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Corridor Ecology presents guidelines that combine conservation science and practical experience for maintaining, enhancing, and creating connectivity between natural areas with an overarching goal of conserving biodiversity. It offers an objective, carefully interpreted review of the issues and is a one-of-a-kind resource for scientists, landscape architects, planners, land managers, decision-makers, and all those working to protect and restore landscapes and species diversity.
In metropolitan areas across the country, you can hear the laments over the loss of green space to new subdivisions and strip malls. But some city residents have taken unprecedented measures to protect their open land, and a growing movement seeks not only to preserve these lands but to link them in green corridors.
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The Great Lakes are the largest collection of fresh surface water on earth, and more than 40 million Americans and Canadians live in their basin. Will we divert water from the Great Lakes, causing them to end up like Central Asia’s Aral Sea, which has lost 90 percent of its surface area and 75 percent of its volume since 1960? Or will we come to see that unregulated water withdrawals are ultimately catastrophic?
The Digital Age was supposed to usher in an era of clean production, but as Elizabeth Grossman reveals, digital may be sleek ? but it?s any-thing but clean. Just think of the more than 3 million laptop batteries Dell and Apple recalled this summer out of fear they might explode. If you want to find out where those batteries go, the answers are inside High Tech Trash. Called ?eye-opening? and ?alarming,? High Tech Trash is the first book to examine the tech industry?s envi-ronmental and health impacts. Grossman investigates what becomes of the 35 million tons of electronics that we discard each year and the resulting toxic pollution. She exposes the damage caused by mining and chemical use in manufacturing high tech products, and offers solutions to what the Wall Street Jo u rn a l has called the ?world’s fastest growing and potentially most dangerous waste problem.?
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