Download or read book The Future of Arid Lands Revisited written by Charles F. Hutchinson and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2007-12-07 with total page 239 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Future of Arid Lands, edited by Gilbert White and published in 1956, comprised papers delivered at the "International Arid Lands Meetings" held in New Mexico in 1955. At these meetings, experts considered the major issues then confronting the world’s arid lands and developed a research agenda to address these issues. This book reexamines this earlier work and explores changes in the science and management of arid lands over the past 50 years within their historical contexts.
Download or read book The Future of Drylands written by Cathy Lee and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2008-10-29 with total page 816 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drylands have been cradles to some of the world’s greatest civilizations, and contemporary dryland communities feature rich and unique cultures. Dryland ecosystems support a surprising amount of biodiversity. Desertification, however, is a significant land degradation problem in the arid, semi-arid and dry sub-humid regions of the world. Deterioration of soil and plant cover has adversely affected 70% of the world’s drylands as a result of extended droughts as well as mismanagement of range and cultivated lands. The situation is likely to worsen with high population growth rates and accompanying land-use conflicts. The contributions to The Future of Drylands – an international scientific conference held under the leadership of UNESCO – address these issues and offer practical solutions for combating desertification along with conserving and sustainably managing dryland ecosystems. Major themes include the conservation of dryland biological and cultural diversity and the human dryland interface. This volume documents how our improved understanding of drylands provides insight into the health and future prospects of these precious ecosystems that should help ensure that dryland communities enjoy a sustainable future.
Download or read book The Arid Lands written by Diana K. Davis and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2016-03-25 with total page 302 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An argument that the perception of arid lands as wastelands is politically motivated and that these landscapes are variable, biodiverse ecosystems, whose inhabitants must be empowered. Deserts are commonly imagined as barren, defiled, worthless places, wastelands in need of development. This understanding has fueled extensive anti-desertification efforts—a multimillion-dollar global campaign driven by perceptions of a looming crisis. In this book, Diana Davis argues that estimates of desertification have been significantly exaggerated and that deserts and drylands—which constitute about 41% of the earth's landmass—are actually resilient and biodiverse environments in which a great many indigenous people have long lived sustainably. Meanwhile, contemporary arid lands development programs and anti-desertification efforts have met with little success. As Davis explains, these environments are not governed by the equilibrium ecological dynamics that apply in most other regions. Davis shows that our notion of the arid lands as wastelands derives largely from politically motivated Anglo-European colonial assumptions that these regions had been laid waste by “traditional” uses of the land. Unfortunately, such assumptions still frequently inform policy. Drawing on political ecology and environmental history, Davis traces changes in our understanding of deserts, from the benign views of the classical era to Christian associations of the desert with sinful activities to later (neo)colonial assumptions of destruction. She further explains how our thinking about deserts is problematically related to our conceptions of forests and desiccation. Davis concludes that a new understanding of the arid lands as healthy, natural, but variable ecosystems that do not necessarily need improvement or development will facilitate a more sustainable future for the world's magnificent drylands.
Download or read book A Lab for All Seasons written by Sharon E. Kingsland and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2023-07-25 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first book to chronicle how innovation in laboratory designs for botanical research energized the emergence of physiological plant ecology as a vibrant subdiscipline Laboratory innovation since the mid-twentieth century has powered advances in the study of plant adaptation, evolution, and ecosystem function. The phytotron, an integrated complex of controlled-environment greenhouse and laboratory spaces, invented by Frits W. Went in the 1950s, set off a worldwide laboratory movement and transformed the plant sciences. Sharon Kingsland explores this revolution through a comparative study of work in the United States, France, Australia, Israel, the USSR, and Hungary. These advances in botanical research energized physiological plant ecology. Case studies explore the development of phytotron spinoffs such as mobile laboratories, rhizotrons, and ecotrons. Scientific problems include the significance of plant emissions of volatile organic compounds, symbiosis between plants and soil fungi, and the discovery of new pathways for photosynthesis as an adaptation to hot, dry climates. The advancement of knowledge through synthesis is a running theme: linking disciplines, combining laboratory and field research, and moving across ecological scales from leaf to ecosystem. The book also charts the history of modern scientific responses to the emerging crisis of food insecurity in the era of global warming.
Download or read book EPA 600 5 written by and published by . This book was released on 1974-02 with total page 876 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Final Report written by United States. Advisory Committee on Weather Control and published by . This book was released on 1958 with total page 494 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Proceedings written by and published by . This book was released on 1961 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Reports and Documents written by United States. Congress and published by . This book was released on 1961 with total page 2030 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Environmental Quality in a Growing Economy written by Henry Jarrett and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-10-18 with total page 194 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Twelve scholars examine some leading problems in environmental quality, analyze present situations and future prospects, and suggest what might be done about them. Originally published in 1966
Download or read book Enchantment and Exploitation written by William DeBuys and published by University of New Mexico Press. This book was released on 2015 with total page 382 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Now, more than thirty years later, this revised and expanded edition provides a long-awaited assessment of the quality of the journey that New Mexican society has traveled in that time--and continues to travel.
Download or read book Geography Resources and Environment Volume 1 written by Gilbert F. White and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 1986 with total page 498 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Gilbert F. White is the preeminent geographer of natural resources, hazards, and the human environment. During fifty years of professional work as civil servant, scientist, and educator, he authored numerous books and papers. This volume is the first collection of White's work, spanning his interests and career from 1934 to 1984. Individual introductions by the editors place each selection in historical perspective and assay its significance. With the companion volume, Theme from the Work of Gilbert F. White, White's writings, and the work that he inspired, are now readily accessible to all who share his concern for the stewardship of the earth.
Download or read book Catalog of Copyright Entries Third Series written by Library of Congress. Copyright Office and published by Copyright Office, Library of Congress. This book was released on 1957 with total page 1672 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Includes Part 1, Number 1 & 2: Books and Pamphlets, Including Serials and Contributions to Periodicals (January - December)
Download or read book Culture Change and Shifting Populations in Central Northern Mexico written by William B. Griffen and published by University of Arizona Press. This book was released on 2015-10-01 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Historical investigation of culture contact between raiding aboriginal Indian groups and Spanish colonists. Significant insights concerning conflicting concepts of ownership and property.
Download or read book The Collapse of Complex Societies written by Joseph Tainter and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1988 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Dr Tainter describes nearly two dozen cases of collapse and reviews more than 2000 years of explanations. He then develops a new and far-reaching theory.
Download or read book Irrigation In The Bajio Region Of Colonial Mexico written by Michael E Murphy and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-03-13 with total page 221 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book provides detailed histories of colonial water systems in four localities in the Mexican Baja-o-Celaya, Salvatierra, Valle de Santiago, and Queretaro. It includes studies of irrigated agriculture, hydraulic technology, and water law in the region. The local histories richly illustrate, through the patterns of irrigation, the interactions b
Download or read book The Postwar Origins of the Global Environment written by Perrin Selcer and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2018-09-25 with total page 405 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the wake of the Second World War, internationalists identified science as both the cause of and the solution to world crisis. Unless civilization learned to control the unprecedented powers science had unleashed, global catastrophe was imminent. But the internationalists found hope in the idea of world government. In The Postwar Origins of the Global Environment, Perrin Selcer argues that the metaphor of “Spaceship Earth”—the idea of the planet as a single interconnected system—exemplifies this moment, when a mix of anxiety and hope inspired visions of world community and the proliferation of international institutions. Selcer tells the story of how the United Nations built the international knowledge infrastructure that made the global-scale environment visible. Experts affiliated with UN agencies helped make the “global”—as in global population, global climate, and global economy—an object in need of governance. Selcer traces how UN programs such as UNESCO’s Arid Lands Project, the production of a soil map of the world, and plans for a global environmental-monitoring system fell short of utopian ambitions to cultivate world citizens but did produce an international community of experts with influential connections to national governments. He shows how events and personalities, cultures and ecologies, bureaucracies and ideologies, decolonization and the Cold War interacted to make global knowledge. A major contribution to global history, environmental history, and the history of development, this book relocates the origins of planetary environmentalism in the postwar politics of scale.
Download or read book Colonial Geology and Mineral Resources written by and published by . This book was released on 1957 with total page 644 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
