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Sharks: Conservation, Governance And Management (Earthscan Oceans #24)
By Natalie Klein, Erika J. Techera. 2014
The key aim of this book is to explore the global conservation and management of sharks. There has been a…
rapid decline in populations of many shark species, while new science has emerged of the critical role they play in marine ecosystems. However, the authors show that conservation law and policy have been slow to develop, with only a small number of iconic species being protected worldwide. The increase in fishing impact – primarily through shark finning and by-catch - has led to shark conservation receiving greater international attention in recent years. The book explores our current knowledge and status of the law and science in relation to sharks with a particular focus on improving frameworks for their conservation and management. Recent trends are analysed, including shark finning bans that have been put in place in several countries, the widening number of nations establishing shark sanctuaries and the growth of shark-based tourism. The efficacy of current listing processes for endangered species and fisheries regulations is also examined. Tourism is explored as an alternative to fishing and the risks and impacts associated with this industry are analysed. Contributors include leading authorities from universities and conservation organizations in North America, Europe and Australia. A common theme is to emphasise the importance of collaborative governance between various interest groups and the need for inter-disciplinary research and management approaches that are necessary to address the decline in sharks.The Peace of Blue: Water Journeys
By Bill Belleville. 2014
The Earth’s surface is mostly oceans, the human body is approximately 60% water, and the human imagination has been captivated…
by this life-giving, life-sustaining liquid from time immemorial.According to Carl Hiaasen, Bill Belleville “writes gorgeously and straight from the heart. In The Peace of Blue, the documentarian and nature writer guides you on a lyrical journey to the natural places in Florida and the Caribbean that have been forged and shaped by water. He poetically underscores the vitality of this most essential substance in our lives by showing the many ways in which water-driven landscapes nurture plants, wildlife—and the human spirit.Experience the thrill of traveling to the remote islands of Cuba and to sacred cenotes in the Dominican Republic. Contemplate the shores of Florida’s rivers and lakes and marvel at swamps and seepage slopes. Immerse yourself in the underwater world of clear, fresh springs, and dive into the deep karst caves that are worlds unto themselves.Through adventure and contemplative excursions, Belleville shares his contagious respect—and awe—for the singularity and transcendence of the natural world. We are companions in his search for a distinct sense of place, fellow journeymen in his quest to discover within the watery depths a greater awareness that informs and shapes our common identity.The New Agrarianism: Land, Culture, and the Community of Life
By Eric T. Freyfogle. 2001
The engaging writings gathered in this new book explore an important but little-publicized movement in American culture -- the marked…
resurgence of agrarian practices and values in rural areas, suburbs, and even cities. It is a movement that in widely varied ways is attempting to strengthen society's roots in the land while bringing greater health to families, neighborhoods, and communities. The New Agrarianism vividly displays the movement's breadth and vigor, with selections by such award-winning writers as Wendell Berry, William Kittredge, Stephanie Mills, David Orr, Scott Russell Sanders, and Donald Worster. As editor Eric Freyfogle observes in his introduction, agrarianism is properly conceived in broad terms, as reaching beyond food production to include a wide constellation of ideals, loyalties, sentiments, and hopes. It is a temperament and a moral orientation as well as a suite of diverse economic practices -- all based on the insistent truth that people everywhere are part of the land community, as dependent as other life on its fertility and just as shaped by its mysteries and possibilities. The writings included here have been chosen for their engaging narratives as well as their depiction of the New Agrarianism's broad scope. Many of the selections illustrate agrarian practitioners in action, while other selections offer pointed critiques of contemporary American culture and its market-driven, resource-depleting competitiveness. Together, they reveal what Freyfogle identifies as the heart and soul of the New Agrarianism: its yearning to regain society's connections to the land and its quest to help craft a more land-based and enduring set of shared values. The New Agrarianism offers a compelling vision of this hopeful new way of living. It is an essential book for social critics, community activists, organic gardeners, conservationists, and all those seeking to forge sustaining ties with the entire community of life.Negotiating Water Governance: Why the Politics of Scale Matter (Routledge Studies in Environmental Policy and Practice)
By Emma S. Norman, Christina Cook. 2015
Those who control water, hold power. Complicating matters, water is a flow resource; constantly changing states between liquid, solid, and…
gas, being incorporated into living and non-living things and crossing boundaries of all kinds. As a result, water governance has much to do with the question of boundaries and scale: who is in and who is out of decision-making structures? Which of the many boundaries that water crosses should be used for decision-making related to its governance? Recently, efforts to understand the relationship between water and political boundaries have come to the fore of water governance debates: how and why does water governance fragment across sectors and governmental departments? How can we govern shared waters more effectively? How do politics and power play out in water governance? This book brings together and connects the work of scholars to engage with such questions. The introduction of scalar debates into water governance discussions is a significant advancement of both governance studies and scalar theory: decision-making with respect to water is often, implicitly, a decision about scale and its related politics. When water managers or scholars explore municipal water service delivery systems, argue that integrated approaches to salmon stewardship are critical to their survival, query the damming of a river to provide power to another region and investigate access to potable water - they are deliberating the politics of scale. Accessible, engaging, and informative, the volume offers an overview and advancement of both scalar and governance studies while examining practical solutions to the challenges of water governance.Gladesmen: Gator Hunters, Moonshiners, and Skiffers (Florida History and Culture)
By Glen Simmons, Laura Ogden. 2010
Few people today can claim a living memory of Florida's frontier Everglades. Glen Simmons, who has hunted alligators, camped on…
hammock-covered islands, and poled his skiff through the mangrove swamps of the glades since the 1920s, is one who can. Together with Laura Ogden, he tells the story of backcountry life in the southern Everglades from his youth until the establishment of the Everglades National Park in 1947.During the economic bust of the late ‘20s, when many natives turned to the land to survive, Simmons began accompanying older local men into Everglades backcountry, the inhospitable prairie of soft muck and mosquitoes, of outlaws and moonshiners, that rings the southern part of the state. As Simmons recalls life in this community with humor and nostalgia, he also documents the forgotten lifestyles of south Florida gladesmen.By necessity, they understood the natural features of the Everglades ecosystem. They observed the seasonal fluctuations of wildlife, fire, and water levels. Their knowledge of the mostly unmapped labyrinth of grassy water enabled them to serve as guides for visiting naturalists and scientists. Simmons reconstructs this world, providing not only fascinating stories of individual personalities, places, and events, but an account that is accurate, both scientifically and historically, of one of the least known and longest surviving portions of the American frontier.Environmental Concerns and Sustainable Development: Volume 1: Air, Water and Energy Resources
By Narendra Kumar, Vertika Shukla. 2020
The prevailing global environmental crisis is primarily because of non-standardized parameters for environmental regulation. Unplanned expansion of economic activities, consideration…
for environmental conservation and several associated problems are emerging due to degradation in quality of ambient environment such as clean air, safe drinking water and quality of food, particularly in developing nations. Due to poor/casual execution of EIA protocol, newly developing countries are preferred destination for establishing pollution emitting industries, which results in degradation and depletion of natural resources. Lack of environmental policy intervention is another major attraction for establishing such industries in these nations. In order to ensure sustainable development, the highest priority issues include the monitoring and eradication of environmental problems which arise due to economic development. Initiation of any form of economic development primarily results in loss of forests and thus biodiversity, followed by deterioration in quality of air and contamination of natural resources. The worst impact of non-standardized economic development is the contamination of air, water and soil. Sustainable development ensures responsible interface with the environment to minimize the depletion or degradation of natural resources and ensure long term environmental quality. It involves integrated approaches in understanding the importance of environmental management systems and policy inventions leading to improved environmental performance. The present book is proposed to address the environmental concerns associated with economic development and approaches involved to attain sustainable economic development, which include monitoring of the quality of air, deforestation, quality of water resources, soil erosion and degradation of the natural environment.Enforcement of European Union Environmental Law: Legal Issues and Challenges
By Martin Hedemann-Robinson. 2015
Offering a detailed account of the various legal arrangements at European Union level, this book is an ideal reference tool…
for practitioners and legal scholars. As well as examining the principal sources of EU environmental law enforcement, it also contributes to the legal and political debates that surround the subject. Spanning three parts, the author examines the practical impact of the legal arrangements at Union level that are used to uphold EU environmental norms. Offering a comprehensive account of the current state of EU environmental law enforcement and the developments affecting it, Martin Hedemann-Robinson explores the role of the European Commission, the possibilities for private law enforcement, and the responsibilities of member state national authorities. Key legal developments that have occurred since the first edition have been incorporated, including new statutory developments and case law. Particular attention is paid to the impact of the 2007 Lisbon Treaty on foundational EU treaty provisions enabling the European Commission to take legal action against EU member states infringing Union environmental law, the establishment of a new legal architecture at Union level on the topic of environmental criminal policy, as well as increased EU legislative intervention in the area of environmental inspections. The impact of the 1998 Århus Convention on EU environmental law enforcement is also addressed in detail, including the influence of recommendations of the Århus Convention’s Compliance Committee.Community Seed Banks: Origins, Evolution and Prospects (Issues in Agricultural Biodiversity)
By Bhuwon Sthapit, Ronnie Vernooy, Pitambar Shrestha. 2010
Community seed banks first appeared towards the end of the 1980s, established with the support of international and national non-governmental…
organizations. This book is the first to provide a global review of their development and includes a wide range of case studies. Countries that pioneered various types of community seed banks include Bangladesh, Brazil, Ethiopia, India, Nepal, Nicaragua, the Philippines and Zimbabwe. In the North, a particular type of community seed bank emerged known as a seed-savers network. Such networks were first established in Australia, Canada, the UK and the USA before spreading to other countries. Over time, the number and diversity of seed banks has grown. In Nepal, for example, there are now more than 100 self-described community seed banks whose functions range from pure conservation to commercial seed production. In Brazil, community seed banks operate in various regions of the country. Surprisingly, despite 25 years of history and the rapid growth in number, organizational diversity and geographical coverage of community seed banks, recognition of their roles and contributions has remained scanty. The book reviews their history, evolution, experiences, successes and failures (and reasons why), challenges and prospects. It fills a significant gap in the literature on agricultural biodiversity and conservation, and their contribution to food sovereignty and security.The Bottlenose Dolphin: Biology and Conservation
By Randall S. Wells, John E. Reynolds, Samantha D. Eide. 2013
The Bottlenose Dolphin presents for the first time a comprehensive, colorfully illustrated, and concise overview of a species that has…
fascinated humans for at least 3,000 years.After reviewing historical myths and legends of the dolphin back to the ancient Greeks and discussing current human attitudes and interactions, the author replaces myths with facts--up-to-date scientific assessment of dolphin evolution, behavior, ecology, morphology, reproduction, and genetics--while also tackling the difficult issues of dolphin conservation and management.Although comprehensive enough to be of great value to professionals, educators, and students, the book is written in a manner that all dolphin lovers will enjoy. Randall Wells’s anecdotes interspersed throughout the work offer a first-hand view of dolphin encounters and research based on three decades working with them. Color photographs and nearly 100 black and white illustrations, including many by National Geographic photographer Flip Nicklin, beautifully enhance the text.Trees of Power: Ten Essential Arboreal Allies
By Akiva Silver. 2019
The organic grower's guide to planting, propagation, culture, and ecology Trees are our allies in healing the world. Partnering with…
trees allows us to build soil, enhance biodiversity, increase wildlife populations, grow food and medicine, and pull carbon out of the atmosphere, sequestering it in the soil. Trees of Power explains how we can work with these arboreal allies, specifically focusing on propagation, planting, and individual species. Author Akiva Silver is an enthusiastic tree grower with years of experience running his own commercial nursery. In this book he clearly explains the most important concepts necessary for success with perennial woody plants. It’s broken down into two parts: the first covering concepts and horticultural skills and the second with in-depth information on individual species. You’ll learn different ways to propagate trees: by seed, grafting, layering, or with cuttings. These time-honored techniques make it easy for anyone to increase their stock of trees, simply and inexpensively. Ten chapters focus on the specific ecology, culture, and uses of different trees, ones that are common to North America and in other temperate parts of the world: Chestnut: The Bread Tree Apples: The Magnetic Center Poplar: The Homemaker Ash: Maker of Wood Mulberry: The Giving Tree Elderberry: The Caretaker Hickory: Pillars of Life Hazelnut: The Provider Black Locust: The Restoration Tree Beech: The Root Runner Trees of Power fills an urgent need for up-to-date information on some of our most important tree species, those that have multiple benefits for humans, animals, and nature. It also provides inspiration for new generations of tree stewards and caretakers who will not only benefit themselves, but leave a lasting legacy for future generations. Trees of Power is for everyone who wants to connect with trees. It is for the survivalist, the gardener, the homesteader, the forager, the permaculturist, the environmentalist, the parent, the schoolteacher, the farmer, and anyone who feels a deep kinship with these magnificent beings.A Sense of Wonder Towards Nature: Healing the Planet through Belonging
By Haydn Washington. 2019
Environmental scientist and writer Haydn Washington argues that we will not solve the environmental crisis unless we change our worldview…
and ethics, and to do so we must rejuvenate our sense of wonder at nature. This book focuses on humanity’s relation with nature, and the sense of wonder and belonging common to indigenous cultures and children everywhere. Drawing on events in the author’s own four decades working to protect wild places, and the current literature on wonder, it examines what a sense of wonder is, what it has been called in different cultures, and our high points of wonder at nature. It also looks at the ‘Great Divide’ in worldview between anthropocentrism and ecocentrism, and considers the problem of anthropocentric theory in academia, arguing that the focus should instead be on harmony with nature. The book concludes with an examination of why wonder has become buried in Western society and considers ways in which it can be revived, including rituals and education. It also considers how wonder helps humanity to become ‘whole’. The final chapter presents the road back to wonder and how wonder towards nature can be restored in Western society. This book will be of great interest to environmental scientists, conservation biologists, environmental philosophers and ecological ethicists, as well as environmentalists, educators, eco-psychologists, and students looking at sustainability, deep ecology, and environmental philosophy and ethics.Natural Encounters: Biking, Hiking, and Birding Through the Seasons
By Bruce M. Beehler. 2019
A twelve-month excursion through nature’s seasons as recounted by a lifetime naturalist In this “personal encyclopedia of nature’s seasons,” lifetime…
naturalist Bruce Beehler reflects on his three decades of encountering nature in Washington, D.C. The author takes the reader on a year-long journey through the seasons as he describes the wildlife seen and special natural places savored in his travels up and down the Potomac River and other localities in the eastern and central United States. Some of these experiences are as familiar as observing ducks on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., or as unexpected as collecting fifty-million-year-old fossils on a Potomac beach. Beyond our nation’s capital, Beehler describes trips to nature’s most beautiful green spaces up and down the East Coast that, he says, should be on every nature lover’s bucket list. Combining diary entries, riffs on natural subjects, field trips, photographs, and beautiful half-tone wash drawings, this book shows how many outdoor adventures are out there waiting in one’s own backyard. The author inspires the reader to embrace nature to achieve a more peaceful existence.Measures of Success: Designing, Managing, and Monitoring Conservation and Development Projects
By Nick Salafsky, Anna Balla, Richard A. Margoluis. 1998
Measures of Success is a practical, hands-on guide to designing, managing, and measuring the impacts of community-oriented conservation and development…
projects. It presents a simple, clear, logical, and yet comprehensive approach to developing and implementing effective programs, and can help conservation and development practitioners use principles of adaptive management to test assumptions about their projects and learn from the results.The book presents a systematic approach to improving the focus, effectiveness, and efficiency of projects, with specific guidelines and advice on:designing a realistic conceptual framework based on local site conditions developing clearly defined goals, objectives, and activities creating a monitoring plan that can be used to assess whether goals and objectives are being met integrating social and biological science techniques to collect the most relevant and useful data in the most cost-effective way using the information obtained through the monitoring plan to modify the project and learn from the resultThe text is developed in eight chapters that follow the structure of a planning process from conception to completion, with the chapters linked by four scenarios that serve as teaching case studies throughout the book. Examples from these scenarios illustrate the processes and tools discussed, and each scenario case study is presented in its entirety in an appendix to the volume. The approach has been developed and field tested by practitioners working in many different projects in Latin America, Africa, and Asia, and their experience and input ensure that the guide is both practical and useful.Measures of Success is the only work of its kind currently available, and represents an invaluable resource for field-based practitioners, project managers, and local community leaders, as well as for international NGO staff, college and university teachers and students, researchers, and government officials.Over the past hundred years, gulls have been brought ashore by modernity. They now live not only on the coasts…
but in our slipstream following trawlers, barges, and garbage trucks. They are more our contemporaries than most birds, living their wild lives among us in towns and cities. In many ways they live as we do, walking the built-up world and grabbing a bite where they can. Yet this disturbs us. We’ve started fearing gulls for getting good at being among us. We see them as scavengers, not entrepreneurs; ocean-going aliens, not refugees. They are too big for the world they have entered. Their story is our story too. Landfill is the original and compelling story of how in the Anthropocene we have learned about the natural world, named and catalogued it, and then colonized it, planted it, or filled it with our junk. While most other birds have gone in the opposite direction, hiding away from us, some vanishing forever, gulls continue to tell us how the wild can share our world. For these reasons Landfill is the nature book for our times, groundbreaking and genre-bending. Without nostalgia or eulogy, it kicks beneath the littered surface of the things to discover stranger truths.The Kruger Experience: Ecology And Management Of Savanna Heterogeneity
By Brian Walker, Anthony R.E. Sinclair, Kevin H. Rogers, Johan T. du Toit, Harry C. Biggs. 2003
The Kruger Experience is an invaluable new resource for scientists and managers involved with large, conserved ecosystems as well as…
for conservation practitioners and others with interests in adaptive management, the societal context of conservation, links between research and management in parks, and parks/academic partnerships.Conversations with Trees: An Intimate Ecology
By Stephanie Kaza. 2019
From a pioneering thinker in the field of religion and ecology, a collection of evocative meditations on the beauty, fragility,…
and resilience of trees. Included are twenty-seven original lithographs of the trees profiled in each chapter.First published in 1993, Stephanie Kaza's heartfelt book helped thousands of readers kindle a sense of spiritual connection through communing with our ancient relatives - trees. Shambhala Publications is proud to reissue this book, with a beautiful new cover and a new Introduction by the author. More pertinent now than ever, Kaza's intimate exploration of the lives and relationships of individual trees exemplifies the conjunction of inquiry and emotion, of science and spirituality. In an era of species extinction and worsening climate change, this book is a warm and earnest invitation to personal and ecological sanity.Margery Kempe and the Lonely Reader
By Rebecca Krug. 2017
Since its rediscovery in 1934, the fifteenth-century Book of Margery Kempe has become a canonical text for students of medieval…
Christian mysticism and spirituality. Its author was a fifteenth-century English laywoman who, after the birth of her first child, experienced vivid religious visions and vowed to lead a deeply religious life while remaining part of the secular world. After twenty years, Kempe began to compose with the help of scribes a book of consolation, a type of devotional writing found in late medieval religious culture that taught readers how to find spiritual comfort and how to feel about one's spiritual life. In Margery Kempe and the Lonely Reader, Rebecca Krug shows how and why Kempe wrote her Book, arguing that in her engagement with written culture she discovered a desire to experience spiritual comfort and to interact with fellow believers who also sought to live lives of intense emotional engagement.An unlikely candidate for authorship in the late medieval period given her gender and lack of formal education, Kempe wrote her Book as a revisionary act. Krug shows how the Book reinterprets concepts from late medieval devotional writing (comfort, despair, shame, fear, and loneliness) in its search to create a spiritual community that reaches out to and includes Kempe, her friends, family, advisers, and potential readers. Krug offers a fresh analysis of the Book as a written work and draws attention to the importance of reading, revision, and collaboration for understanding both Kempe’s particular decision to write and the social conditions of late medieval women’s authorship.Maimonides and Spinoza: Their Conflicting Views of Human Nature
By Joshua Parens. 2012
Until the last century, it was generally agreed that Maimonides was a great defender of Judaism, and Spinoza--as an Enlightenment…
advocate for secularization--among its key opponents. However, a new scholarly consensus has recently emerged that the teachings of the two philosophers were in fact much closer than was previously thought. In his perceptive new book, Joshua Parens sets out to challenge the now predominant view of Maimonides as a protomodern forerunner to Spinoza--and to show that a chief reason to read Maimonides is in fact to gain distance from our progressively secularized worldview. Turning the focus from Spinoza's oft-analyzed Theologico-Political Treatise, this book has at its heart a nuanced analysis of his theory of human nature in the Ethics. Viewing this work in contrast to Maimonides's Guide of the Perplexed, it makes clear that Spinoza can no longer be thought of as the founder of modern Jewish identity, nor should Maimonides be thought of as having paved the way for a modern secular worldview. Maimonides and Spinoza dramatically revises our understanding of both philosophers.Positioned within current ecocritical scholarship, this volume is the first book-length study of the representations of plants in contemporary American,…
English, and Australian poetry. Through readings of botanically-minded writers including Les Murray, Louise Glück, and Alice Oswald, it addresses the relationship between language and the subjectivity, agency, sentience, consciousness, and intelligence of vegetal life. Scientific, philosophical, and literary frameworks enable the author to develop an interdisciplinary approach to examining the role of plants in poetry. Drawing from recent plant science and contributing to the exciting new field of critical plant studies, the author develops a methodology he calls "botanical criticism" that aims to redress the lack of emphasis on plant life in studies of poetry. As a subset of ecocriticism, botanical criticism investigates how poets engage with plants literally and figuratively, materially and symbolically, in their works. Key themes covered in this volume include plants as invasives and weeds in human settings; as sources of physical and spiritual nourishment; as signifiers of region, home, and identity; as objects of aesthetics and objectivism; and, crucially, as beings with their own perspectives, voices, and modes of dialogue. Ryan demonstrates that poetic imagination is as essential as scientific rationality to elucidating and appreciating the mysteries of plant-being. This book will appeal to a multidisciplinary readership in the fields of ecocriticism, ecopoetry, environmental humanities, and ecocultural studies, and will be of interest to researchers in the emerging area of critical plant studies.Applied Geoinformatics for Sustainable Integrated Land and Water Resources Management (ILWRM) in the Brahmaputra River basin: Results from the EC-project BRAHMATWINN
By Nayan Sharma, Wolfgang-Albert Flügel. 2015
The central theme of this book is focused on the analyses and the results which emerged from the international research…
project BRAHMATWINN sponsored by European Commission EC and conducted during 2006 - 2009 The book highlights the achievements of BRAHMATWINN to carry out a harmonised integrated water resources management IWRM approach as addressed by the European Water Initiative EWI in headwater river systems of alpine mountain massifs The latter are already impacted from climate change and the BRAHMATWINN project established transfer of professional IWRM expertise approaches and tools based on case studies carried out in twinning European and Asian river basins The project addresses all important IWRM issues in a balanced way including conflict resolution in the trans- boundary Danube and Brahmaputra River Basins in Europe and South Asia respectively This book will be useful to researchers professionals managers and decision makers associated with study and application of sustainable integrated land and water resources management ILWRM in the backdrop of climate change