In quest of a shared planet

An eye-opening firsthand account of the negotiating rooms responsible for the direction of the most urgent issue of our time

Democratic management of an ecosystem under threat

Using case studies from Florida and the Caribbean, this book summarizes the state of coral reef conservation today, exploring the most effective way to protect vulnerable coral reef ecosystems while ensuring people’s voices are heard. 

Contested sustainability

Richly detailed and timely study on conservation, development and sustainability in Tanzania.Provides valuable insights into the successes and failures of the management and governance of wildlife, forestry and coastal resources.Responding to the urgent need to examine the outcome of intervention...

What is extinction?

WINNER, 25th ANNUAL SUSANNE M. GLASSCOCK BOOK PRIZELife on Earth is facing a mass extinction event of our own making. Human activity is changing the biology and the meaning of extinction. What Is Extinction? examines several key moments that have come to define the terms of extinction over the pa...

The unconstructable earth

This book contributes to the environmental humanities field by offering an analysis of the Anthropocene fantasy: the idea that the Anthropocene is an opportunity to remake our terrestrial environment thanks to the power of technology. The author argues that the earth always escapes the human desi...

Up to heaven and down to hell

A riveting portrait of a rural Pennsylvania town at the center of the fracking controversyShale gas extraction—commonly known as fracking—is often portrayed as an energy revolution that will transform the American economy and geopolitics. But in greater Williamsport, Pennsylvania, fracking is per...

Cooling down

Climate change is a slowly advancing crisis sweeping over the planet and affecting different habitats in strikingly diverse ways. While nations have signed treaties and implemented policies, most actual climate change assessments, adaptations, and countermeasures take place at the local level. ...

Gasoline dreams

A graphic novel that confronts our habits, narratives, and fantasies head-on to helpbreak our petroleum dependencyWhat if the biggest barriers to responding to climate change are not technological or governmental but, rather, cultural? In other words, what if we ourselves could help to enact chan...

Sparking a worldwide energy revolution

The earth's not dying, it's being killed. Only a movement for renewable energy will save it.

Green tyranny

Climate change was political long before Al Gore first started talking about it. In the 1970s, the Swedish Social Democrats used global warming to get political support for building a string of nuclear power stations. It was the second phase of their war on coal, which began with the acid rain sc...

Nimby is beautiful

Offers new perspective on "Not in my Back Yard" protests. Demonstrates that NIMBY protests, although always arising from a local concern in a particular community, often result in broader political, social, and technological change. Argues that NIMBY movements can have a positive and...

Hydropolitics

An in-depth look at the people and institutions connected with the Itaipu Dam, the world’s biggest producer of renewable energyHydropolitics is a groundbreaking investigation of the world’s largest power plant and the ways the energy we use shapes politics and economics. Itaipu Binational Hydroel...

Smoke on the water

Smoke on the Water traces the rise and fall of ocean incineration, showing how a transnational environmental movement tested the limits of U.S. political and economic power.

The answer is still no

The Answer Is Still No is an important, urgent book that compiles interviews with people who live along the route of the proposed Enbridge pipeline in Northern British Columbia. The oil pipeline and supertankers – linking the tar sands of Alberta to the demand of the growing Asian market – are a ...

The cinema of extractions

Brian Jacobson traces the surprising and inextricable connections between extractive industries and cinema, developing new ways to read films in light of the typically unseen material practices out of which they are built.

Urban planning tools for climate change mitigation

Land use patterns and urban form can strongly impact an urban community’s contribution to global climate change through the production of greenhouse gas emissions (GHG). Key contributors to a city’s climate footprint include the physical arrangement of streets and public transportation infrastruc...

Being animal

Conducting the first systematic examination of the place of animals in scholarly and popular thinking about nature, Anna L. Peterson builds a nature ethic that conceives of nonhuman animals as active subjects simultaneously a part of nature and human society.

Human impacts on amazonia

From the pre-Columbian era to the present, native Amazonians have shaped the land around them, emphasizing utilization, conservation, and sustainability. These priorities stand in stark contrast to colonial and contemporary exploitation of Amazonia by outside interests. With essays from environme...

Common boundaries

How do we – and how should we – engage with the natural environment through the concepts of rights and responsibilities? Michael Cox develops a theory and practice of environmental property rights, moving beyond simplistic assumptions that do not reflect the diversity of arrangements we see in th...

Adaptive governance

Drawing on five detailed case studies from the American West, the authors explore and clarify how to expedite a transition toward adaptive governance and break the gridlock in natural resource policymaking. Unlike scientific management, which relies on science as the foundation for policies made ...

Perishability fatigue

Vincent Bruyere offers an invitation to look at the present we live in through a fresh lens: the difference between storage and burial in the age of sustainability science. He reflects on the nature and significance of perishability in a culture of preparedness and survival.

Population management for survival and recovery

Lessons from sandy

This report, spurred by the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, identifies a set of policies, regulations, and administrative practices that federal agencies can adopt to help coastal metropolitan regions recover quickly from natural disasters and reduce future risk in the face of climate change and ri...

Dispossession and the environment

Paige West’s searing study of Papua New Guinea reveals how a range of actors produce and reinforce inequalities in today’s globalized world. She shows how racist rhetorics of representation underlie all uneven patterns of development and seeks a more robust understanding of the ideological work t...

What walks this way

Combining lyrical memoir with an introduction to wildlife tracking, What Walks This Way explores the joys of learning to recognize the traces of the creatures with whom we share our world.

Dark ecology

Timothy Morton explores the foundations of the ecological crisis to reestablish our ties to nonhuman beings and rediscover playfulness and joy. Dark ecology puts us in an uncanny position of radical self-knowledge, illuminating our place in the biosphere and our belonging to a species in a sense ...

Character and environment

Virtue ethics is now widely recognized as an alternative to Kantian and consequentialist ethical theories. However, moral philosophers have been slow to bring virtue ethics to bear on topics in applied ethics. Moreover, environmental virtue ethics is an underdeveloped area of environmental ethics...

Environment and development challenges

The Blue Planet Prize, awarded by the Asahi Glass Foundation, is one of the world's oldest and most prestigious international honors for scientists and researchers in environmental studies. This book features contributions from recent award winners eager to add their voices to the global debate o...

Conservation catalysts

This volume collects more than a dozen firsthand accounts of how conservationists at academic institutions are contending with biodiversity loss and climate change. Readers will learn how to protect wildlife habitats, improve water quality, build sustainable economies, and upgrade public amenitie...

Discontinuities in ecosystems and other complex systems

Following the publication of C. S. Holling's seminal work on the relationship between animal body mass patterns and scale-specific landscape structure, ecologists began to explore the theoretical and applied consequences of discontinuities in ecosystems and other complex systems. Are ecosystems a...

People in nature

This book reviews wildlife management and conservation in Central and South America. The book discusses the threats to biodiversity in this area including habitat fragmentation, development, ranching, tourism as well as hunting. The book contains contributions from many local Latin American autho...

The aesthetics of everyday life

The aesthetics of everyday life, originally developed by Henri Lefebvre and other modernist theorists, is an extension of traditional aesthetics, usually confined to works of art. It is not limited to the study of humble objects but is rather concerned with all of the undeniably aesthetic experie...

Working across boundaries

This book presents tested strategies for regional collaboration across a broad range of issues related to land use, natural resources, and the environment. Practitioners, policy makers, and citizens will find guiding principles, key questions for regional governance, and examples of effective imp...

Scaling relations in experimental ecology

This book discusses the impact of recent advances in the theory of "scaling relationships" and identifies critical issues that must be considered if experimental results are used to understand the temporal and spatial scales of actual ecosystems.The complexity of ecosystems complicates experiment...

How green is the city?

This book deals with practical ways to reach a more sustainable state in urban areas through such tools as strategic environmental assessment, sustainability assessment, direction analysis, baseline setting and progress measurement, sustainability targets, and ecological footprint analysis.

To be a water protector

Winona LaDuke is a leader in cultural-based sustainable development strategies, renewable energy, sustainable food systems and Indigenous rights. To Be a Water Protector, explores issues that have been central to her activism for many years — sacred Mother Earth, our despoiling of Earth and the a...

Reinventing conservation easements

No recent happening in land conservation rivals the rapid expansion of conservation easements and the related growth in the number of land trusts over the past 15 years. Among the forces driving this phenomenon are tax and other public subsidies and the view that the conservation easement is a wi...