Download or read book Reclaiming the Last Wild Places written by Roger L. DiSilvestro and published by . This book was released on 1993-06-18 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In tracing the history of conservation and federal land management in America from the nineteenth century to the present, DiSilvestro highlights the fundamental misconceptions, tactical errors, and fatal compromises that were made along the way.
Download or read book The Last Wild Places of Kansas written by George Frazier and published by University Press of Kansas. This book was released on 2017-02-16 with total page 230 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since the last wild bison found refuge on the back of a nickel, the public image of natural Kansas has progressed from Great American Desert to dust bowl to flyover country that has been landscaped, fenced, and farmed. But look a little harder, George Frazier suggests, and you can find the last places where tenacious stretches of prairie, forest, and wetland cheat death and incubate the DNA of lost, wild America. Documenting three years spent roaming the state in search of these hidden treasures, The Last Wild Places of Kansas is Frazier's idiosyncratic and eye-opening travelogue of nature's secret holdouts in the Sunflower State. These are places where extirpated mammalian species are making comebacks; where flying squirrels leap between centuries-old trees lit by the unearthly green glow of foxfire; where cold springs feed ancient watercress pools; where the ice moon paints the Smoky Hills with memories of the buffalo, wolf, and the lonesome rattle of false indigo; where the blue lid of the sky forms a vacuum seal over treeless pastel hills, orange in winter; where bluestem rises. Some are impossible to find on maps. Most are magnificently bereft of anything beneficial to 99.9 percent of modern America. True wildernesses they may not be, but at the correct angle of light, when the wind blows pollen carrying biological memories of the glaciers, these places are a crack between the worlds, portals to the lost buffalo wilderness. En route Frazier takes us from the unexpected wilds of the Kansas City suburbs to the Cimarron National Grassland in the far southwestern corner of the state. He visits ancient springs, shares a beer with prairie dog hunters, and fails in his mission to canoe the upper Marais des Cygnes—a trip that requires permission from every landowner on the route. Along the way we encounter a host of curious characters—ranchers, farmers, Native Americans, explorers, wildlife experts, and outdoor enthusiasts—all fellow travelers in a quest to know, preserve, and share the last wild places of Kansas.
Download or read book Salvaging Nature written by Marcus Colchester and published by DIANE Publishing. This book was released on 1994 with total page 91 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: BG (copy 1): From the John Holmes Library collection.
Download or read book Biological Diversity written by L. N. Petrov and published by Nova Publishers. This book was released on 2003 with total page 262 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of the cornerstones of life's wonders is the vast array of species filling the planet. From plants to animals to humans, there is no shortage of beings to provide 'spice of life' variety is said to be. Periodically, scientists announce the discovery of a 'new' form of life, so it seems as if Earth is capable of producing new species just to keep us on our toes. At times, the immense breadth of living things can even feel overwhelming, as one pauses to ponder how numerically insignificant humans are when compared to the insect population. Given the biological diversity of the planet, it is incumbent upon humans to safeguard the natural beauty of the environment. To that end, conservation takes on special importance, necessitating the balancing of industrial expansion with preserving the flora and fauna surrounding us. This book is an important tool in understanding and researching the many different life forms spanning the globe. Collected here is a substantial and carefully selected listing of relevant literature on biological diversity and its conservation. Following this bibliography are author, title, and subject indexes to allow for further access to this information. The sheer bulk of the works about biological diversity can be so intimidating that a book such as this one becomes useful in sorting through the resources about the importance of life's variety.
Download or read book Return of the Bison written by Roger Di Silvestro and published by Mountaineers Books. This book was released on 2023-09-01 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Offers a hopeful view of threatened species, grounded in history and science Addresses current conservation trends: wildlife corridors, prairie restoration, cultural restoration for the American Indian community Return of the Bison is the story of how this symbol of the American West was once almost lost to history and of the continuing journey to bring bison back from the brink. Author and naturalist Roger Di Silvestro explores the complex history of the bison’s decimation and how a rising awareness of their possible extinction formed the roots of many modern wildlife conservation approaches. Weaving in natural history and fascinating historical context featuring personalities such as Teddy Roosevelt, George Bird Grinnell, and William T. Hornaday, Di Silvestro traces the decades it took to begin to save the bison, often with little hope and plagued by discouraging setbacks. Di Silvestro explores the key role in the story of America’s Indigenous people, whose fate was intertwined with the bison’s and whose conservation work is important not only for the animal’s recovery but also for their own cultural renewal. Di Silvestro also examines the plight of European bison and the latest challenges facing the species in the US: Are the bison doomed to be treated like cattle, fenced and contained? Or will they be listed as an endangered species, requiring us to treat them like the wild animals they are?
Download or read book Preserving Public Lands for the Future written by William R. Lowry and published by Georgetown University Press. This book was released on 1998-10-01 with total page 326 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Comparing national efforts to preserve public lands, William R. Lowry investigates how effectively and under what conditions governments can provide goods for future generations. Providing intergenerational goods, ranging from balanced budgets to space programs and natural environments, is particularly challenging because most political incentives reward short-term behavior. Lowry examines the effect of institutional structure on the public delivery of these goods. He offers a theoretical framework accounting for both the necessary conditions — public demand, political stability, and official commitment to long-term delivery — and constraining factors — the tensions between public agencies and politicians as well as between different levels of government — that determine the ability of a nation to achieve long-term goals. In support of this argument, Lowry evaluates data on park systems from more than one hundred countries and provides in-depth case studies of four — he United States, Australia, Canada, and Costa Rica — to show how and why the delivery of intergenerational goods can vary. For each of the cases, he reviews background information, discusses constraints on agency behavior, and assesses expansion of the park systems and restoration of natural conditions at specific locations. This extensive comparative analysis of the preservation of public lands offers new insights into the capability of nations to pursue long-term goals.
Download or read book Conservation written by Monique Borgerhoff Mulder and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2018-06-05 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Nearly 90 percent of the earth's land surface is directly affected by human infrastructure and activities, yet less than 5 percent is legally "protected" for biodiversity conservation--and even most large protected areas have people living inside their boundaries. In all but a small fraction of the earth's land area, then, conservation and people must coexist. Conservation is a resource for all those who aim to reconcile biodiversity with human livelihoods. It traces the historical roots of modern conservation thought and practice, and explores current perspectives from evolutionary and community ecology, conservation biology, anthropology, political ecology, economics, and policy. The authors examine a suite of conservation strategies and perspectives from around the world, highlighting the most innovative and promising avenues for future efforts. Exploring, highlighting, and bridging gaps between the social and natural sciences as applied in the practice of conservation, this book provides a broad, practically oriented view. It is essential reading for anyone involved in the conservation process--from academic conservation biology to the management of protected areas, rural livelihood development to poverty alleviation, and from community-based natural resource management to national and global policymaking.
Download or read book Bioregional Planning written by D J Brunckhorst and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-10-11 with total page 173 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Presenting a pragmatic mixture of science, landscape ecology, ecosystem management, sociology, policy development and methods for transforming social and institutional cultures. Bioregional Planning: Resource Management Beyond the New Millennium is a timely and practical guide for the analysis, planning and development of bioregional projects for a sustainable future. Significantly, this book presents the strategic actions necessary to plan for, manage and adapt to Ecologically Sustainable Development with a view beyond the new millennium and towards the next. Postgraduates, researchers and policy makers in natural resources management, land planning, sustainable agriculture, rural sciences, ecosystem management and conservation biology will find this book captures the essence of bioregional planning succinctly and makes a compelling argument for why it is a key mechanism in the development of effective governance institutions.
Download or read book The Full Value of Parks written by David Harmon and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2003 with total page 364 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Parks are important economic vehicles, generating billions of dollars worldwide in tourism revenue. However, the reasons for that visitation are found in the non-material, non-economic values that parks offer to people: values that are cultural, therapeutic, scientific, spiritual, recreational, educational, and aesthetic/artistic. The Full Value of Parks is the first comprehensive analysis of these important, but intangible, values.
Download or read book The American Wilderness written by Thomas R. Vale and published by University of Virginia Press. This book was released on 2005 with total page 310 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Interpretations of wild nature and wilderness are particularly diverse in the American mind, given our history, our collective economic success, and our diverse social and cultural mix. Although the meanings we attribute to nature reflect our different views of the role humans should play in the natural world, there remains a divide between how we embrace protected landscapes and how we consider natural landscapes, or nature itself. Thomas Vale explores this phenomenon in The American Wilderness: Reflections on Nature Protection in the United States. In his examination of protected landscapes at all scales, from the wooded corners of a city park and the local reserve of wetland, to the vast wilderness of the Everglades and Okeefenokee, to Central Park and Yosemite, Vale argues that nature protection is an act of place-creation, an act that necessarily links humans to nature and depends on a diverse array of human interactions. A rare combination of celebration and criticism, Vale's argument is twofold: landscapes of protected nature in the United States represent a legitimate natural resource, and contrary to expressions in some recent literature, such landscapes bond people to nature. Providing extensive historical and modern data about the national park, national wilderness, and national wildlife refuge systems, Vale argues for the validity of landscape protection and the benefits of achieving both strict preserves and mixed-commodity places in a democratic society. His goal is to unite the often disparate threads of nature protection into a fabric that will enhance an appreciation for the extent and richness of nature protection sentiment and action in the United States.
Download or read book Future Nature written by W.M. Adams and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2004-04-26 with total page 295 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The countryside is changing faster than ever. Fifty years of conservation achievements in the UK are now being confronted by a new complexion of economic forces that are driving change in the countryside. At the same time new ideas in conservation are altering the role that conservation is being asked to play in negotiating the transition from past to future. This revised edition of Bill Adams classic work Future Nature tackles the new challenges in the countryside and wildlife conservation head-on through a new Introduction and Postscript with updated arguments about naturalness and our social engagement with nature, and complemented by a new Foreword by Adrian Phillips. Concepts such as biodiversity and sustainability, and changes in our understanding, appreciation and concern for nature, offer unprecedented opportunities. Bill Adams explores the scientific, cultural and economic significance of conservation. He argues that conservation must move beyond the boundaries of parks and reserves to embrace the whole countryside. The importance of conservation for the future is enormous. It holds the potential to create new spaces for nature, both in the landscape and in our lives and imaginations. This factual, beautifully written and thought-provoking book offers a fundamental reassessment of conservation, its importance, and how to achieve it. Published with BANC
Download or read book The Abstract Wild written by Jack Turner and published by University of Arizona Press. This book was released on 2021-12-21 with total page 156 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: If anything is endangered in America it is our experience of wild nature—gross contact. There is knowledge only the wild can give us, knowledge specific to it, knowledge specific to the experience of it. These are its gifts to us. How wild is wilderness and how wild are our experiences in it, asks Jack Turner in the pages of The Abstract Wild. His answer: not very wild. National parks and even so-called wilderness areas fall far short of offering the primal, mystic connection possible in wild places. And this is so, Turner avows, because any managed land, never mind what it's called, ceases to be wild. Moreover, what little wildness we have left is fast being destroyed by the very systems designed to preserve it. Natural resource managers, conservation biologists, environmental economists, park rangers, zoo directors, and environmental activists: Turner's new book takes aim at these and all others who labor in the name of preservation. He argues for a new conservation ethic that focuses less on preserving things and more on preserving process and "leaving things be." He takes off after zoos and wilderness tourism with a vengeance, and he cautions us to resist language that calls a tree "a resource" and wilderness "a management unit." Eloquent and fast-paced, The Abstract Wild takes a long view to ask whether ecosystem management isn't "a bit of a sham" and the control of grizzlies and wolves "at best a travesty." Next, the author might bring his readers up-close for a look at pelicans, mountain lions, or Shamu the whale. From whatever angle, Turner stirs into his arguments the words of dozens of other American writers including Thoreau, Hemingway, Faulkner, and environmentalist Doug Peacock. We hunger for a kind of experience deep enough to change our selves, our form of life, writes Turner. Readers who take his words to heart will find, if not their selves, their perspectives on the natural world recast in ways that are hard to ignore and harder to forget.
Download or read book North America written by Kevin Hillstrom and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2003-08-26 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A concise yet thorough overview of the environmental issues, problems, and controversies facing the vast and diverse continent that is North America. North America, tells the story of this environmental awakening and the continuing problems that the continent faces. It tackles the tough issues, the complex problems, and the political controversies of the North American environment. According to some estimates, one out of every nine barrels of oil used in the world every day is consumed by a North American motorist. In 1996, World Wildlife Fund Canada estimated that the country was losing wilderness to development at a rate of more than one acre every 15 seconds. Today, this pace of destruction has been faulted for eroding much of the continent's fabulous natural wealth, and new emphasis is being placed on finding a more appropriate balance between development and conservation.
Download or read book The Geography of Childhood written by Gary Paul Nabhan and published by Beacon Press (MA). This book was released on 1994 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "In this unique collaboration, naturalists Gary Nabhan and Stephen Trimble investigate how children come to care deeply about the natural world. They ask searching questions about what may happen to children denied exposure to wild places - a reality for more children today than at any time in human history." "The authors remember pivotal events in their own childhood that led each to a life-long relationship with the land: Nabhan's wanderings in the wasteland of steel mills and power plants of Gary, Indiana, and in the Indiana Dunes; Trimble's travels in the West with a geologist father. They tell stories of children learning about wild places and creatures in settings ranging from cities and suburbs to isolated Nevada sheep ranches to Native American communities in the Southwest and Mexico." "The Geography of Childhood draws insights from fields as various as evolutionary biology, child psychology, education, and ethnography. The book urges adults to rethink our children's contact with nature. Small children have less need for large-scale wilderness than for a garden, gully, or field to create a crucial tie to the natural world. Nabhan suggests that traditional wilderness-oriented rites of passage may help cure the alienation of adolescence: "Those who as adolescents fail to pass through such rites remain in an arrested state of immaturity for the remainder of their lives." Trimble's fatherhood leads him to question how we grant different freedoms to girls and boys in their exploration of nature - and how this bias powerfully affects adult lives. Both authors return to their experiences with indigenous peoples to show how nature is taught and wilderness understood in cultures historically grounded outside of America's cities and suburbs." "The Geography of Childhood makes clear how human growth remains rooted, as it always has, both in childhood and in wild landscapes. It is an essential book for all parents and teachers who wonder what our children may miss if they never experience local wildlife or wild landscapes."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved
Download or read book Rethinking Wilderness written by Mark Woods and published by Broadview Press. This book was released on 2017-07-13 with total page 314 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The concept and values of wilderness, along with the practice of wilderness preservation, have been under attack for the past several decades. In Rethinking Wilderness, Mark Woods responds to seven prominent anti-wilderness arguments. Woods offers a rethinking of the received concept of wilderness, developing a positive account of wilderness as a significant location for the other-than-human value-adding properties of naturalness, wildness, and freedom. Interdisciplinary in approach, the book combines environmental philosophy, environmental history, environmental social sciences, the science of ecology, and the science of conservation biology.
Download or read book Reclaiming American Cities written by Rutherford H. Platt and published by . This book was released on 2014 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Cover -- Title Page -- Copyright Page -- Dedication Page -- Table of Contents -- Preface -- Introduction: A Train Journey into the Past and Future -- Part I: The Patrician Decades, 1900-1940 -- 1. American Cities in 1900: A Patchwork of Silk and Rags -- 2. Competing Visions in the Progressive Era -- Part II: The Technocrat Decades, 1945-1990 -- 3. The Central City Renewal Engine -- 4. The Suburban Sprawl Engine -- 5. Battling the Bulldozer: The Indiana Dunes and Other Sacred Places -- 6. Legacies of Sprawl: A Witch's Brew -- Part III: The (More) Humane Decades, 1990-Present -- 7. Replanting Urbanism in the 1990s: A Garden of Acronyms -- 8. New Age "Central Parks": Two Grand Slams and a Single -- 9. Reclaiming Urban Waterways: One Stream at a Time -- 10. Humane Urbanism at Ground Level -- Epilogue -- Notes -- Further Reading -- Index -- Back Cover
Download or read book Conservation and Environmentalism written by Robert Paehlke and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 1995 with total page 810 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Focusing on problems and solutions, this authoritative reference work covers all aspects of the environment, from the Everglades to the Himalayas, from legislation in Australia to pollution problems in Eastern Europe, from tropical rain forests to the Porcupine Caribou herd of the Alaskan and Canadian Arctic." "Some of the best-known environmental professionals from 14 countries around the world have written original articles for this multidisciplinary Encyclopedia, including Norman Myers, Eugene C. Hargrove, Reed F. Noss, Max Oelschlaeger, J. Baird Callicott, George Sessions, M. S. Swaminathan, Gilbert F. White, Michael E. Kraft, Michael P. Cohen, Paul Ekins, and many others."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved
