Revealed Biodiversity
Revealed Biodiversity

Author: Eric L. Jones

Publisher: World Scientific

Published: 2014

Total Pages: 292

ISBN-13: 9814522570

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Revealed Biodiversity: An Economic History of the Human Impact aims to show that for several centuries environmental conditions have been substantially the product of economic fluctuations. It contests the notion of perpetual decline in species composition. The arguments are supported by far more precise historical detail than is usual in books about ecology. The need to take the gains to human society into account when assessing environmental change is strongly emphasized. The book features case studies including England, the Netherlands, USA, East Asia, Brazil, and the areas of modern agricultural OCyland grabOCO. This book is important for its close attention to the documented historical record of environmental change in several countries over several centuries; for its demonstration of how much wildlife populations have been influenced by fluctuations in market activity; for revealing the need to be sensitive to historical baselines; and for emphasizing the imperative of taking the gains to human society into account when assessing environmental change. It, therefore, has considerable significance for environmental and conservation policies as well as for future studies in ecological history.

A History of Livestock and Wildlife
A History of Livestock and Wildlife

Author: Eric Jones

Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Published: 2023-08-01

Total Pages: 286

ISBN-13: 1527525430

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The use of wildlife products, together with advances in livestock feeding, were essential in propelling Western economic growth. Extraordinarily, these early modern and early industrial features are side-lined relative to the role of manufacturing. This book restores the balance, detailing how many species were relocated around the world and how late natural products persisted into the age of synthetics. This text describes how animals were driven immense distances to market and harnessed for transportation and to power machines; even after industrialisation, animals were employed for innumerable purposes, besides being co-opted as pets. The recent rebound from a wholesale persecution of wild nature, and how the plundering of the animal kingdom and the development of livestock farming jointly created the Smithian Growth that ushered in the Industrial Revolution, are also described.

Institutions, Innovation, and Industrialization
Institutions, Innovation, and Industrialization

Author: Avner Greif

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2020-05-26

Total Pages: 438

ISBN-13: 0691202737

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This book brings together a group of leading economic historians to examine how institutions, innovation, and industrialization have determined the development of nations. Presented in honor of Joel Mokyr—arguably the preeminent economic historian of his generation—these wide-ranging essays address a host of core economic questions. What are the origins of markets? How do governments shape our economic fortunes? What role has entrepreneurship played in the rise and success of capitalism? Tackling these and other issues, the book looks at coercion and exchange in the markets of twelfth-century China, sovereign debt in the age of Philip II of Spain, the regulation of child labor in nineteenth-century Europe, meat provisioning in pre–Civil War New York, aircraft manufacturing before World War I, and more. The book also features an essay that surveys Mokyr's important contributions to the field of economic history, and an essay by Mokyr himself on the origins of the Industrial Revolution. In addition to the editors, the contributors are Gergely Baics, Hoyt Bleakley, Fabio Braggion, Joyce Burnette, Louis Cain, Mauricio Drelichman, Narly Dwarkasing, Joseph Ferrie, Noel Johnson, Eric Jones, Mark Koyama, Ralf Meisenzahl, Peter Meyer, Joel Mokyr, Lyndon Moore, Cormac Ó Gráda, Rick Szostak, Carolyn Tuttle, Karine van der Beek, Hans-Joachim Voth, and Simone Wegge.

Landscape History and Rural Society in Southern England
Landscape History and Rural Society in Southern England

Author: Eric L. Jones

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2021-03-08

Total Pages: 200

ISBN-13: 3030686167

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This book applies an economic and environmental perspective to the history of landscape and the rural economy, highlighting their inter-connections through specific case studies. After explaining how the author made his discoveries and when they started, it analyses relations between documentary and landscape evidence. It is based on exceptional first-hand observation of a dozen sites and close consideration of topics in the ecological and economic history of southern England. They range from reclaiming chalk down-land, occupying low-lying heaths and reconstructing parkland, to wool-stapling and the manufacture of gunstocks for the African slave trade. Additional themes include the tension between ecology and institutions in decisions about the location of economic activity; the decay of communal farming ahead of enclosure; and other interesting puzzles in rural economic history. This book offers an original approach to questions in economic history through its synthesis of different types of evidence. It will be of interest to a diverse range of readers because it addresses how economic change was registered in the landscape, and how that change was influenced by landscape. It is a book with highly original features, contributing simultaneously to economic, agricultural, environmental, and landscape history.

Barriers to Growth
Barriers to Growth

Author: Eric L. Jones

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2020-04-04

Total Pages: 157

ISBN-13: 3030442748

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This book deals sequentially with major impediments to economic growth and their slow dissolution. It is original and quite different from standard economic history, which has always sought for one prime mover of the industrial revolution after another. These supposed positive forces are usually depicted as novel and little reference is made to inertia. Instead the barriers dealt with here run, in the first section, from early misallocations of resources to nineteenth-century reforms which of their nature indicate the problems to be overcome. The second section deals with more physical impediments and shocks, such as floods and settlement fires. These too are ignored in ordinary treatments, which this book will supplement or even replace. It will be of interest to academic economic historians and practitioners of neighbouring subjects such as economists, historians, historical geographers, and of course their students.

Border Ecology
Border Ecology

Author: Ila Nicole Sheren

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2023-03-10

Total Pages: 232

ISBN-13: 303125953X

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This book analyzes how contemporary visual art can visualize environmental crisis. It draws on Karen Barad’s method of “agential realism,” which understands disparate factors as working together and “entangled.” Through an analysis of digital eco art, the book shows how the entwining of new materialist and decolonized approaches accounts for the nonhuman factors shaping ecological crises while understanding that a purely object-driven approach misses the histories of human inequality and subjugation encoded in the environment. The resulting synthesis is what the author terms a border ecology, an approach to eco art from its margins, gaps, and liminal zones, deliberately evoking the idea of an ecotone. This book is suitable for scholarly audiences within art history, criticism and practice, but also across disciplines such as the environmental humanities, media studies, border studies and literary eco-criticism.

The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity: Ecological and Economic Foundations
The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity: Ecological and Economic Foundations

Author: Pushpam Kumar

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2012-12-20

Total Pages: 455

ISBN-13: 1136538798

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Human well-being relies critically on ecosystem services provided by nature. Examples include water and air quality regulation, nutrient cycling and decomposition, plant pollination and flood control, all of which are dependent on biodiversity. They are predominantly public goods with limited or no markets and do not command any price in the conventional economic system, so their loss is often not detected and continues unaddressed and unabated. This in turn not only impacts human well-being, but also seriously undermines the sustainability of the economic system. It is against this background that TEEB: The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity project was set up in 2007 and led by the United Nations Environment Programme to provide a comprehensive global assessment of economic aspects of these issues. This book, written by a team of international experts, represents the scientific state of the art, providing a comprehensive assessment of the fundamental ecological and economic principles of measuring and valuing ecosystem services and biodiversity, and showing how these can be mainstreamed into public policies. This volume and subsequent TEEB outputs will provide the authoritative knowledge and guidance to drive forward the biodiversity conservation agenda for the next decade.

The Economic Value of Biodiversity
The Economic Value of Biodiversity

Author: David Pearce

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2013-11-05

Total Pages: 187

ISBN-13: 1134165226

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Biodiversity loss is one of the major resource problems facing the world, and the policy options available are restricted by inappropriate economic tools which fail to capture the value of species and their variety. This study describes in non-technical terms how cost-benefit analysis techniques can be applied to species and species loss, and how they provide a measure of the efficiency of conservation measures. Only when conservation can be shown to pass such a basic economic test, the authors claim, will it be incorporated into policies.;David Pearce has also written Blueprint for a Green Economy.

Conserving Biodiversity
Conserving Biodiversity

Author: National Research Council

Publisher: National Academies Press

Published: 1992-02-01

Total Pages: 138

ISBN-13: 0309046831

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The loss of the earth's biological diversity is widely recognized as a critical environmental problem. That loss is most severe in developing countries, where the conditions of human existence are most difficult. Conserving Biodiversity presents an agenda for research that can provide information to formulate policy and design conservation programs in the Third World. The book includes discussions of research needs in the biological sciences as well as economics and anthropology, areas of critical importance to conservation and sustainable development. Although specifically directed toward development agencies, non-governmental organizations, and decisionmakers in developing nations, this volume should be of interest to all who are involved in the conservation of biological diversity.

Humans Versus Nature
Humans Versus Nature

Author: Daniel R. Headrick

Publisher:

Published: 2020

Total Pages: 625

ISBN-13: 0190864710

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Since the appearance of Homo sapiens on the planet hundreds of thousands of years ago, human beings have sought to exploit their environments, extracting as many resources as their technological ingenuity has allowed. As technologies have advanced in recent centuries, that impulse has remained largely unchecked, exponentially accelerating the human impact on the environment. Humans versus Nature tells a history of the global environment from the Stone Age to the present, emphasizing the adversarial relationship between the human and natural worlds. Nature is cast as an active protagonist, rather than a mere backdrop or victim of human malfeasance. Daniel R. Headrick shows how environmental changes--epidemics, climate shocks, and volcanic eruptions--have molded human societies and cultures, sometimes overwhelming them. At the same time, he traces the history of anthropogenic changes in the environment--species extinctions, global warming, deforestation, and resource depletion--back to the age of hunters and gatherers and the first farmers and herders. He shows how human interventions such as irrigation systems, over-fishing, and the Industrial Revolution have in turn harmed the very societies that initiated them. Throughout, Headrick examines how human-driven environmental changes are interwoven with larger global systems, dramatically reshaping the complex relationship between people and the natural world. In doing so, he roots the current environmental crisis in the deep past.