Kategoria BISAC: Science >> Environmental Science (see also Chemistry - Environmental)

Numerous studies have revealed that the poor disproportionately bear the burden of environmental problems in America today. Issues range from higher levels of poisonous wastes, carbon dioxide, and ozone, to greater than normal incidences of asthma and lead poisoning. The environmental justice movement, which has emerged in working class and low-income African American and Latino communities since the early 1990s, is an effort that is reinterpreting the definition of the environment as where we live, work, and play to connect new constituencies traditionally outside of the postwar...

The brave new world of environmental economics--complete with pollution markets, emission brokers, and commodity auctions of emission allowances--has been developing in the U.S. for several decades. This book traces the evolution of such environmental management techniques in industrial Philadelphia. Initially as a greene country towne, the city's development led to significant pollution concerns, including rivers filled with sewage, typhoid deaths, and smoky plumes from coal combustion. Technological pollution controls improved conditions, but blunt regulatory tools eventually evolved...

Environmental and natural resource policy decision making is changing. Increasingly citizens and management agency personnel are seeking ways to do things differently; to participate meaningfully in the decision making process as parties work through policy conflicts. Doing things differently has come to mean doing things collaboratively.

Daniels and Walker examine collaboration in environmental and natural resource policy decision making and conflict management. They address collaboration by featuring a method collaborative learning, that has been designed to address decision making...

Can sustainable economic development be achieved without strong environmental protections? Bringing together theoretical issues in development economics and a wide range of empirical evidence, this book examines this question and explores ways that environmental sustainability has been--and might be--incorporated into existing theories of economic development. Protection of the environment is an essential part of development, and the best chance for achieving long-term sustainable development is to systematically incorporate environmental issues into key aspects of economic development...

Munch and his colleagues examine how democracy works in the practice of political regulation. Based on empirical research on the politics of clean air in the United Kingdom, France, Germany, and the United States, they provide a comparative sociological perspective. Thus, they look at social change and social integration rather than issues of governance and administration in terms of effectiveness and democratic legitimation.

The analysis looks at how different forms of democracy given in the four countries achieve more or less in the political regulation of clean air in terms of...

Forty years after the publication of Rachel Carson's "Silent Spring," this important study examines the history, industrial uses, and harmful effects of the twelve most commonly used organochloride chemicals. All have been fully or partially banned by the Stockholm Protocol, an international treaty signed by about 120 countries in December 2000. Among the twelve are the dioxins (the active ingredient in Agent Orange) and polychlorinated byphenyls (PCBs), which are toxic in minute quantities. Johansen pays special attention to the Inuit of the Arctic, where these chemicals have been...

Highlighting the connections between climate change and human security, this book elucidates what might happen when a mere 10-degree drop in average temperature results in a sudden inability to produce enough food, when rapidly advancing desertification produces water scarcities where none existed before, and when newly frozen landscapes lead to more power plants for energy, resulting in increased air pollution. The destabilizing effects of these possibilities create many potential challenges for U.S. national security in a globalized world in which we may have to intervene militarily to...

Pesticide exposure has long been a cause for concern, and with good reason. Studies have shown that all persons, but especially children, pregnant women, farmers, farmworkers, and the elderly, may experience negative health effects from pesticide exposure. These effects may include acute poisoning, cancer, neurological damage, birth defects, reduced sperm count, suppressed immune systems, and reproductive and developmental harm. This book is a comprehensive examination of pesticide use, pesticide harm, and alternatives to harmful pesticides.

Levine highlights the role of farming,...

When nature goes haywire in Texas, it isn't usually an earthshaking event. Though droughts, floods, tornadoes, and hail all keep Texans talking about the unpredictable weather, when it comes to earthquakes, most of us think we're on terra firma in this state. But we're wrong Nearly every year, earthquakes large enough to be felt by the public occur somewhere in Texas.

This entertaining, yet authoritative book covers "all you really need to know" about earthquakes in general and in Texas specifically. The authors explain how earthquakes are caused by natural forces or human...

Writing especially for people who've tuned out the environmental debate, Rob Jackson persuasively argues that we're at a crucial turning point in environmental history, where choices we make now will determine the quality of life into the unforeseeable future. Laying out the scientific facts in plain language and with flashes of humor, he shows how the escalation of population growth and resource consumption in the twentieth century caused problems from ozone depletion to global warming, habitat destruction, and biodiversity loss. At the same time, however, he highlights ongoing solutions...

In the quarter-century since his first book, Killing the Hidden Waters, was published in 1977, Charles Bowden has become one of the premier writers on the American environment, rousing a generation of readers to both the wonder and the tragedy of humanity's relationship with the land.

Revisiting his earliest work with a new introduction, "What I Learned Watching the Wells Go Down," Bowden looks back at his first effort to awaken people to the costs and limits of using natural resources through a simple and obvious example--water. He drives home the point that years of...

" W. T. Edmondson has spent his career answering questions about the ecological impacts of human experiments on lakes in Washington State. In this volume, he recounts these studies and captures from his experiences a larger view of the nature of our environmental problems. . . . While the commentary is wide ranging, the foundation is a personal account of one ecologist's lifetime experience on the dual points of research and public application of that research."--Research and Exploration"W. T. Edmondson, a zoologist, extracts enduring lessons from his more than 50 years of experience in...

From prehistory to the present-day conservation movement, Pyne explores the efforts of successive American cultures to master wildfire and to use it to shape the landscape.

Back in PrintWorld Fire is the story of how fire and humans have coevolved. The two are inseparable, and together they have repeatedly remade the planet.�Pyne considers the evolution of fire in such diverse regions as Australia, Africa, Brazil, Sweden, Greece, Iberia, Russia, and India and then ponders Antarctica, the land without fire. As he examines changing techniques for and attitudes toward fire control, Pyne challenges our concepts of nature and wilderness and explains why the study and management of fire have tremendous environmental, cultural, and political...

Pyne traces the impact of fire in Australia, from its influence on vegetation to its use by Aborigines and European settlers."Mr. Pyne, showing what a historian deeply schooled in environmental science can contribute to our awareness of nature and culture, has produced a provocative work that is a major contribution to the literature of environmental studies."--New York Times Book Review

Stephen Pyne has been described as having a consciousness "composed of equal parts historian, ecologist, philosopher, critic, poet, and sociologist." At this time in history when many people are trying to understand their true relationship with the natural environment, this book offers a remarkable contribution--breathtaking in the scope of its research and exhilarating to read.

Pyne takes the reader on a journey through time, exploring the terrain of Europe and the uses and abuses of its lands as well as, through migration and conquest, many parts of the rest of the world. Whether...

This biography of Aldo Leopold follows him from his childhood as a precocious naturalist to his profoundly influential role in the development of conservation and modern environmentalism in the United States.