Holding Our Ground
Holding Our Ground

Author: Deborah Bowers

Publisher: Island Press

Published: 1997-03-01

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781559634823

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Farmers, who own or rent most of the private land in America, hold the key not only to the nation's food supply, but also to managing community growth, maintaining an attractive landscape, and protecting water and wildlife resources. While the issue of protecting farmland and open space is not new, the intensity of the challenge has increased. Farmers are harder pressed to make a living, and rural and suburban communities are struggling to accommodate increasing populations and the development that comes with them. Holding Our Ground can help landowners and communities devise and implement effective strategies for protecting farmland. The book: discusses the reasons for protecting farmland and how to make those reasons widely known and understood describes the business of farming, federal government farm programs, and the role of land in farmers's decisions analyzes federal, state, and local farmland protection efforts and techniques explores a variety of land protection options including purchase of development rights; transfer of development rights; private land trusts; and financial, tax, and estate planning reviews the strengths and weaknesses of the farmland protection tools available The authors describe the many challenges involved in protecting farmland and explain how to create a package of techniques that can meet those challenges. In addition, they offer appendixes with model zoning ordinances, nuisance disclaimers, conservation easements, and other documents that individuals and communities need to carry out the programs discussed. Holding Our Ground provides citizens, elected officials, planners, and landowners with a solid basis for understanding the issues behind farmland protection, and will be an invaluable resource in developing techniques and programs for achieving long-term protection goals.

LifePlace
LifePlace

Author: Robert L. Thayer Jr.

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2003-04-22

Total Pages: 320

ISBN-13: 0520936809

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Robert Thayer brings the concepts and promises of the growing bioregional movement to a wide audience in a book that passionately urges us to discover "where we are" as an antidote to our rootless, stressful modern lives. LifePlace is a provocative meditation on bioregionalism and what it means to live, work, eat, and play in relation to naturally, rather than politically, defined areas. In it, Thayer gives a richly textured portrait of his own home, the Putah-Cache watershed in California's Sacramento Valley, demonstrating how bioregionalism can be practiced in everyday life. Written in a lively anecdotal style and expressing a profound love of place, this book is a guide to the personal rewards and the social benefits of reinhabiting the natural world on a local scale. In LifePlace, Thayer shares what he has learned over the course of thirty years about the Sacramento Valley's geography, minerals, flora, and fauna; its relation to fire, agriculture, and water; and its indigenous peoples, farmers, and artists. He shows how the spirit of bioregionalism springs from learning the history of a place, from participating in its local economy, from living in housing designed in the context of the region. He asks: How can we instill a love of place and knowledge of the local into our education system? How can the economy become more responsive to the ecology of region? This valuable book is also a window onto current writing on bioregionalism, introducing the ideas of its most notable proponents in accessible and highly engaging prose. At the same time that it gives an entirely new appreciation of California's Central Valley, LifePlace shows how we can move toward a new way of being, thinking, and acting in the world that can lead to a sustainable, harmonious, and more satisfying future.

Review of the New York City Watershed Protection Program
Review of the New York City Watershed Protection Program

Author: National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine

Publisher: National Academies Press

Published: 2020-12-04

Total Pages: 423

ISBN-13: 0309679702

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New York City's municipal water supply system provides about 1 billion gallons of drinking water a day to over 8.5 million people in New York City and about 1 million people living in nearby Westchester, Putnam, Ulster, and Orange counties. The combined water supply system includes 19 reservoirs and three controlled lakes with a total storage capacity of approximately 580 billion gallons. The city's Watershed Protection Program is intended to maintain and enhance the high quality of these surface water sources. Review of the New York City Watershed Protection Program assesses the efficacy and future of New York City's watershed management activities. The report identifies program areas that may require future change or action, including continued efforts to address turbidity and responding to changes in reservoir water quality as a result of climate change.

Who Will Feed China?
Who Will Feed China?

Author: Lester Brown

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2023-08-18

Total Pages: 109

ISBN-13: 1000968499

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Originally published in 1995, but with enduring relevance in a time of global population growth and food insecurity, when it was first published, this book attracted much global attention, and criticism from Beijing. It argued that even as water becomes scarcer in a land where 80% of the grain crop is irrigated, as per-acre yield gains are erased by the loss of agricultural land to industrialization, and as food production stagnates, China still increases its population by the equivalent of a new Beijing each year. This book predicts that in an integrated world economy, China’s rising food prices will become the world’s rising food prices. China’s land scarcity will come everyone’s land scarcity and water scarcity in China will affect the entire world. China’s dependence on massive imports, like the collapse of the world’s fisheries, will be a wake-up call that we are colliding with the earth’s capacity to feed us. Over time, Janet Larsen argued, China’s leaders came to ‘acknowledge how Who Will Feed China? changed their thinking..’ As China’s wealth increases, so do the dietary demands of its population. The increasing middle classes demand more grain-intensive meat and farmed fish. The issue of who will feed China has not gone away.

An Institutionalist Guide to Economics and Public Policy
An Institutionalist Guide to Economics and Public Policy

Author: Marc R. Tool

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2019-07-25

Total Pages: 337

ISBN-13: 1315495430

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This narrative recounts the 18th and 19th century "shipping out" of Pacific islanders aboard European and American vessels, a kind of "counter-exploring", that echoed the ancient voyages of settlement of their island ancestors.

Municipal Boundary Battles
Municipal Boundary Battles

Author: Sandeep Agrawal

Publisher: University of Alberta

Published: 2024-07-18

Total Pages: 233

ISBN-13: 1772127450

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"Municipal Boundary Battles explores the motivations, land use effects, and financial implications of municipal boundary adjustments across Canada, focusing mainly on annexations and amalgamations--the most frequent means to adjust boundaries and reform local governments in this country. The authors uncover hidden motivations, untangle behind-the-scenes political machinations, and document the ensuing boundary battles, with a focus on mid-size cities and small towns rather than major Canadian metropolitan areas. Through empirical evidence, case studies, and examples among several provinces, the collection helps develop generalizations and inform best practices for municipal boundary adjustments and reform. The volume aims to study this phenomenon to explain how the esoteric aspects of boundary adjustments work in more practical applications, offering political scientists, geographers, municipal officials, and planning practitioners fresh perspectives that contradict much of the prevailing understanding of boundary adjustments. Contributors: Sandeep Agrawal, Cody Gretzinger, John Heseltine, John Meligrana, Jordan Rea, Amrita Singh, Jon Taylor, Zack Taylor. Afterword by Andrew Sancton."--