Ecological Memory in Farmed Landscapes
Author: Erim Gomez
Publisher:
Published: 2011
Total Pages: 44
ISBN-13:
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Reimagining Environmental History
Author: Christian Knoeller
Publisher: University of Nevada Press
Published: 2017-10-11
Total Pages: 306
ISBN-13: 0874176042
DOWNLOAD EBOOKChristian Knoeller presents a radical reinterpretation of environmental history set in the heartland of America. In an excellent model of narrative-based scholarship, this book dynamically reimagines American environmentalism across generations of writers, artists, and scientists. Knoeller starts out with Audubon, and cites Thoreau’s journals in the 1850s as he assesses an early 17th century account of New England’s natural resources by William Wood, showing the epic decline in game and bird populations in Concord. This reading of environmental history is replicated throughout with a gallery of novelists, poets, essayists, and other commentators as they explore ecological memory and environmental destruction. In apt discussions of Matthiessen, Lopez, Wendell Berry, William Stafford and many others, Knoeller offers vibrant insights into literary history. He also cites his own memoir of perpetual development on his family’s farm in Indiana, enriching the scholarship and making an urgent plea for the healing aesthetics of the imagination. Reading across centuries and genres, Knoeller gives us a vibrant new appraisal of Midwestern/North American interior literary traditions and makes clear how vital environmental writing is to this region. To date, no one has written such an eloquent and comprehensive cross-genre analysis of Midwestern environmental literature.
Agrarian Landscapes in Transition
Author: Charles Redman
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2008-07-18
Total Pages: 296
ISBN-13: 0190451297
DOWNLOAD EBOOKAgrarian Landscapes in Transition researches human interaction with the earth. With hundreds of acres of agricultural land going out of production every day, the introduction, spread, and abandonment of agriculture represents the most pervasive alteration of the Earth's environment for several thousand years. What happens when humans impose their spatial and temporal signatures on ecological regimes, and how does this manipulation affect the earth and nature's desire for equilibrium? Studies were conducted at six Long Term Ecological Research sites within the US, including New England, the Appalachian Mountains, Colorado, Michigan, Kansas, and Arizona. While each site has its own unique agricultural history, patterns emerge that help make sense of how our actions have affected the earth, and how the earth pushes back. The book addresses how human activities influence the spatial and temporal structures of agrarian landscapes, and how this varies over time and across biogeographic regions. It also looks at the ecological and environmental consequences of the resulting structural changes, the human responses to these changes, and how these responses drive further changes in agrarian landscapes. The time frames studied include the ecology of the earth before human interaction, pre-European human interaction during the rise and fall of agricultural land use, and finally the biological and cultural response to the abandonment of farming, due to complete abandonment or a land-use change such as urbanization.
Reshaping Environments
Author: Helena Bender
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2012-07-17
Total Pages: 417
ISBN-13: 1107688663
DOWNLOAD EBOOKAn interdisciplinary textbook that incorporates case material and theoretical tools for the Earth changers of today and tomorrow.
Biodiversity Loss
Author: Charles Perrings
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 1997-01-28
Total Pages: 356
ISBN-13: 9780521588669
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThis volume reports key findings of the Biodiversity Program of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences' Beijer Institute. The program brought together a number of eminent ecologists and economists to consider the nature and significance of the biodiversity problem. In encouraging collaborative work between these closely related disciplines it sought to shed new light on the concept of diversity; the implications of biological diversity for the functioning of ecosystems; the driving forces behind biodiversity loss; and the options for promoting biodiversity conservation. The results of the program are surprising. It is shown that the core of the biodiversity problem is a loss of ecosystem resilience and the insurance it provides against the uncertain environmental effects of economic and population growth. This is as much a local as a global problem, implying that biodiversity conservation offers benefits that are as much local as global. The solutions as well as the causes of biodiversity loss lie in incentives to local users.
Rewilding Agricultural Landscapes
Author: H. Scott Butterfield
Publisher: Island Press
Published: 2021-04-08
Total Pages: 290
ISBN-13: 1642831263
DOWNLOAD EBOOKAs the world population grows, so does the demand for food, putting unprecedented pressure on agricultural lands. In many desert dryland regions, however, intensive cultivation is causing their productivity to decline precipitously. "Rewilding" the least productive of these landscapes offers a sensible way to reverse the damage, recover natural diversity, and ensure long-term sustainability of remaining farms and the communities they support. This accessibly written, groundbreaking contributed volume is the first to examine in detail what it would take to retire eligible farmland and restore functioning natural ecosystems. The lessons in Rewilding Agricultural Landscapes will be useful to conservation leaders, policymakers, groundwater agencies, and water managers looking for inspiration and practical advice for solving the complicated issues of agricultural sustainability and water management.
Landscape Ecology in Theory and Practice
Author: Monica G. Turner
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
Published: 2007-05-08
Total Pages: 353
ISBN-13: 0387216944
DOWNLOAD EBOOKAn ideal text for students taking a course in landscape ecology. The book has been written by very well-known practitioners and pioneers in the new field of ecological analysis. Landscape ecology has emerged during the past two decades as a new and exciting level of ecological study. Environmental problems such as global climate change, land use change, habitat fragmentation and loss of biodiversity have required ecologists to expand their traditional spatial and temporal scales and the widespread availability of remote imagery, geographic information systems, and desk top computing has permitted the development of spatially explicit analyses. In this new text book this new field of landscape ecology is given the first fully integrated treatment suitable for the student. Throughout, the theoretical developments, modeling approaches and results, and empirical data are merged together, so as not to introduce barriers to the synthesis of the various approaches that constitute an effective ecological synthesis. The book also emphasizes selected topic areas in which landscape ecology has made the most contributions to our understanding of ecological processes, as well as identifying areas where its contributions have been limited. Each chapter features questions for discussion as well as recommended reading.
Issues and Concepts in Historical Ecology
Author: Carole L. Crumley
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2018
Total Pages: 347
ISBN-13: 1108420982
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThis book presents a practical, holistic research framework to help us both understand our past and build an appealing human future.
Landscape Bionomics Biological-Integrated Landscape Ecology
Author: Vittorio Ingegnoli
Publisher: Springer
Published: 2015-03-03
Total Pages: 448
ISBN-13: 8847052262
DOWNLOAD EBOOK"Landscape Bionomics,” or “Bio-integrated Landscape Ecology,” radically transforms the main principles of traditional Landscape Ecology by recognizing the landscape as a living entity rather than merely the spatial distribution of species and communities on the territory, often analysed in separate themes (water, species, pollution, etc.). To be more exact, the landscape is identified as the "life organization integrating a set of plants, animals and human communities and its system of natural, semi-natural, and human cultural ecosystems in a certain spatial configuration." This new perspective inevitably leads to significant changes in how to assess and manage the environment. This book represents the culmination of an endeavor begun by the author, with the support of Richard Forman and Zev Naveh, more than a dozen years ago. It builds on the author’s previous successful publication, Landscape Ecology, A Widening Foundation, by addressing a range of additional topics and discussing the new theoretical and methodological concepts that have emerged during the past decade of research. Particular attention is paid to the fact that interventions in the landscape can be made with the best intentions yet cause serious damage! Against this background, the author explains the need to study "landscape units" by applying methods comparable to those used in clinical diagnosis – hence ecologists can be viewed as the “physicians” of ecological systems.
Telling Environmental Histories
Author: Katie Holmes
Publisher: Springer
Published: 2017-12-12
Total Pages: 338
ISBN-13: 331963772X
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThis collection explores the intersections of oral history and environmental history. Oral history offers environmental historians the opportunity to understand the ways people’s perceptions, experiences and beliefs about environments change over time. In turn, the insights of environmental history challenge oral historians to think more critically about the ways an active, more-than-human world shapes experiences and people. The integration of these approaches enables us to more fully and critically understand the ways cultural and individual memory and experience shapes human interactions with the more-than-human world, just as it enables us to identify the ways human memory, identity and experience is moulded by the landscapes and environments in which people live and labour. It includes contributions from Australia, India, the UK, Canada and the USA.
