This is an auto-narrated audiobook edition of this book.
Two leaders of the National Park Service provide a front-row seat to the disastrous impact of partisan politics over the past fifty years—and offer a bold vision for the parks’ future.
The US National Parks, what environmentalist and historian Wallace Stegner called America’s “best idea,” are under siege. Since 1972, partisan political appointees in the Department of the Interior have offered two conflicting views of the National Park Service (NPS): one vision emphasizes preservation and science-based decision-making, and another prioritizes economic benefits and privatization. These politically driven shifts represent a pernicious, existential threat to the very future of our parks.
For the past fifty years, brothers Jonathan B. and T. Destry Jarvis have worked both within and outside NPS as leaders and advocates. National Parks Forever interweaves their two voices to show how our parks must be protected from those who would open them to economic exploitation, while still allowing generations to explore and learn in them. Their history also details how Congress and administration appointees have used budget and staffing cuts to sabotage NPS’s ability to manage the parks and even threatened their existence. Drawing on their experience, Jarvis and Jarvis make a bold and compelling proposal: that it is time for NPS to be removed from the Department of the Interior and made an independent agency, similar to the Smithsonian Institution, giving NPS leaders the ability to manage park resources and plan our parks’ protection, priorities, and future.
The National Wildlife Refuges provides a comprehensive examination of the laws and policies governing management of the national wildlife refuges, offering for the first time a practical description and analysis of the management regime outlined in the 1997 National Wildlife Refuge System Improvement Act. The 1997 act is the first new statute governing a system of federal public lands enacted since the 1970s. The evolution of law governing the refuge system parallels broader trends in public land management and environmental protection, making the refuge system a valuable case study for those interested in environmental management, policy, and law. The book:
A separate chapter examines the special rules governing refuges in Alaska and considers the contentious debate over the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Appendixes offer a reference of acronyms and abbreviations, a chronology of the refuge system's development, key statutory provisions (including the full text of the 1997 act), and basic information about each national wildlife refuge.
With an approach to conservation that is increasingly prevalent around the world, the National Wildlife Refuge System is an important model for sustainable resource management, and the book's analyses of the refuge system's ecological management criteria, conflicts between primary and subsidiary uses, and tension between site-specific standards and uniform national goals all offer important lessons for environmental governance generally.
Low-income communities frequently suffer from a lack of access to, or lack of control over, the natural resources that surround them. In many cases, their local environment has been degraded by years of resource extraction and pollution by distant corporations or government agencies. In such settings, initiatives that build natural assets in the hands of the poor can play an important role in poverty-fighting efforts.
Natural Assets explores a range of strategies for expanding the quantity and enhancing the quality of natural assets in the hands of low-income individuals and communities. The book:
The first half of the 1990s saw the largest and most costly floods, hurricanes, and earthquakes in the history of the United States. While natural hazards cannot be prevented, their human impacts can be greatly reduced through advance action that mitigates risks and reduces vulnerability.
Natural Hazard Mitigation describes and analyzes the way that hazard mitigation has been carried out in the U.S. under our national disaster law, the Robert T. Stafford Disaster Relief and Emergency Assistance Act. It is the first systematic study of the complete intergovernmental system for natural hazard mitigation, including its major elements and the linkages among them.
The book:
Damages from natural disasters are reaching catastrophic proportions, making natural hazard mitigation an important national policy issue. The findings and recommendations presented in this volume should help to strengthen natural hazard mitigation policy and practice, thereby serving to reduce drains on the federal treasury that pay for preventable recovery and relief costs, and to spare residents in areas hit by natural disasters undue suffering and expense. It is an informative and eye-opening study for planners, policymakers, students of planning and geography, and professionals working for government agencies that deal with natural hazards.
On our side, a vast arsenal of chemical pesticides. On their side? They don't have a side, the pests who must do nature's bidding. This is our war, and should we win it, ours would be a sorry planet. With disturbing news from the front, Nature Wars sounds the alarm against our dangerous tactics for controlling the pests that are an annoying but integral part of our world.
Thirty years after Silent Spring woke us to the devastation wrought by DDT, chemical pesticides are as pervasive as ever, deployed at a rate of 4 pounds a year for every man, woman, and child in this country. This ongoing commitment to pesticides, Mark Winston argues, reflects our sense of place in nature: embattled, beleaguered, driven to aggression. His book, as sensible as it is wise, seeks to change this mindset, to show how a more measured and discriminating approach to pests, one based on management rather than eradication, might serve us and the natural world far better than our ill-fated all-out war.
Winston backs up this approach with a full battery of case studies that take us from lawns and kitchens to farms and orchards, from insects and weeds to rats and coyotes. Here we see the complex political, biological, economic, social, and personal interactions that lie behind each pest management decision. Against this background Winston considers diverse instances of past pest management that reveal a consistent pattern of mistakes and problems--and lead to realistic, workable proposals for reducing pesticide use.
A compelling book about ethics and choices, Nature Wars shows us the difference between protecting ourselves from real pests and poisoning ourselves and the planet. It turns us from our war on nature to our task as stewards of the environment.
Minnesota’s Twin Cities have long been powerful engines of change. From their origins in the early nineteenth century, the Twin Cities helped drive the dispossession of the region’s Native American peoples, turned their riverfronts into bustling industrial and commercial centers, spread streets and homes outward to the horizon, and reached well beyond their urban confines, setting in motion the environmental transformation of distant hinterlands. As these processes unfolded, residents inscribed their culture into the landscape, complete with all its tensions, disagreements, contradictions, prejudices, and social inequalities. These stories lie at the heart of Nature’s Crossroads. The book features an interdisciplinary team of distinguished scholars who aim to open new conversations about the environmental history of the Twin Cities and Greater Minnesota.
New Natures broadens the dialogue between the disciplines of science and technology studies (STS) and environmental history in hopes of deepening and even transforming understandings of human-nature interactions. The volume presents richly developed historical studies that explicitly engage with key STS theories, offering models for how these theories can help crystallize central lessons from empirical histories, facilitate comparative analysis, and provide a language for complicated historical phenomena. Overall, the collection exemplifies the fruitfulness of cross-disciplinary thinking.
The chapters follow three central themes: ways of knowing, or how knowledge is produced and how this mediates our understanding of the environment; constructions of environmental expertise, showing how expertise is evaluated according to categories, categorization, hierarchies, and the power afforded to expertise; and lastly, an analysis of networks, mobilities, and boundaries, demonstrating how knowledge is both diffused and constrained and what this means for humans and the environment.
Contributors explore these themes by discussing a wide array of topics, including farming, forestry, indigenous land management, ecological science, pollution, trade, energy, and outer space, among others. The epilogue, by the eminent environmental historian Sverker Sörlin, views the deep entanglements of humans and nature in contemporary urbanity and argues we should preserve this relationship in the future. Additionally, the volume looks to extend the valuable conversation between STS and environmental history to wider communities that include policy makers and other stakeholders, as many of the issues raised can inform future courses of action.
A comprehensive new history of the Eastern Roman Empire based on the science of the human past.
As modern empires rise and fall, ancient Rome becomes ever more significant. We yearn for Rome’s power but fear Rome’s ruin—will we turn out like the Romans, we wonder, or can we escape their fate? That question has obsessed centuries of historians and leaders, who have explored diverse political, religious, and economic forces to explain Roman decline. Yet the decisive factor remains elusive.
In New Rome, Paul Stephenson looks beyond traditional texts and well-known artifacts to offer a novel, scientifically minded interpretation of antiquity’s end. It turns out that the descent of Rome is inscribed not only in parchments but also in ice cores and DNA. From these and other sources, we learn that pollution and pandemics influenced the fate of Constantinople and the Eastern Roman Empire. During its final five centuries, the empire in the east survived devastation by natural disasters, the degradation of the human environment, and pathogens previously unknown to the empire’s densely populated, unsanitary cities. Despite the Plague of Justinian, regular “barbarian” invasions, a war with Persia, and the rise of Islam, the empire endured as a political entity. However, Greco-Roman civilization, a world of interconnected cities that had shared a common material culture for a millennium, did not.
Politics, war, and religious strife drove the transformation of Eastern Rome, but they do not tell the whole story. Braiding the political history of the empire together with its urban, material, environmental, and epidemiological history, New Rome offers the most comprehensive explanation to date of the Eastern Empire’s transformation into Byzantium.
A Times of London Book of the Year
Longlisted for the Runciman Award
“The most compelling fusion yet of narrative history with the recent findings of environmental research and scientific data. It will change the way we understand key events and transformations in the Eastern Empire.”—Anthony Kaldellis, author of Romanland
“[A] major contribution…Brings the world of New Rome alive with exceptional learning and a magnificent openness to modern scientific methods that breathe life into conventional narratives of political and social history.”—Peter Brown, New York Review of Books
“A sweeping survey of the disintegration of the western Roman empire and the emergence of Byzantium…This impressive chronicle offers an eye-opening perspective on a period of dramatic change.”—Publishers Weekly
Long before Rome fell to the Ostrogoths in 476 AD, a new city had risen to take its place as the beating heart of the empire, the glittering Constantinople, known as New Rome. In this strikingly original account of the collapse of the Western Roman Empire and emergence of Byzantium, Paul Stephenson offers a new interpretation of the forces that coalesced—dynastic, religious, climactic—to shift the center of power to the east. His novel, scientifically minded interpretation of antiquity's end presents evidence found not only in parchments and personalities, but also in ice cores and DNA.
From 395 to 700 AD, the empire in the east was subjected to a series of invasions and pandemics, confronting natural disasters and outbreaks in pathogens previously unknown to the empire’s densely populated, unsanitary cities. Politics, war, and religious strife sparked by the rise of Islam drove the transformation of Eastern Rome, but they do not tell the whole story. Deftly braiding the political history of the empire together with its material, environmental, and epidemiological history, New Rome offers a surprising new explanation of why Rome fell and how the Eastern Empire became Byzantium.
Explores ecological impasses and opportunities of our fossil-fueled civilization
It is more and more obvious that our fossilized civilization has no sustainable future. It is an ecological Ponzi scheme stealing away the lives of countless species and the wellbeing of future generations in exchange for contemporary conveniences and the luxuries of a small subset of the human population. Yet a civilization wholly beyond fossils still seems difficult to grasp.
In No More Fossils, Dominic Boyer tells the story of the rise of fossil civilization through successive phases of sucropolitics (plantation sugar), carbopolitics (industrial coal), and petropolitics (oily automobility and plasticity), showing what tethers us to the ecocidal trajectory of petroculture today and what it will take to overcome the forces that mire us in place. He also looks ahead toward the world that the rapid electrification of vehicles, buildings, and power is creating. What can we do to make electroculture more just and sustainable than the petroculture we are leaving behind?
Originating from a series of workshops held at the Alaska Forum of the Fourth International Polar Year, this interdisciplinary volume addresses a host of current concerns regarding the ecology and rapid transformation of the arctic. Concentrating on the most important linked social-ecological systems, including fresh water, marine resources, and oil and gas development, this volume explores opportunities for sustainable development from a variety of perspectives, among them social sciences, natural and applied sciences, and the arts. Individual chapters highlight expressions of climate change in dance, music, and film, as well as from an indigenous knowledge–based perspective.
The Northeast's Changing Forest reviews the history and conditions of the forest in the nine northeastern states. This diverse region stretches from the shores of Lake Erie to Passamaquoddy Bay and from Cape May, New Jersey to northern Maine. The forests range from the dune forest of the New Jersey beaches to subalpine forests in the White Mountains and the Adirondacks. Heavily cleared for agriculture in the nineteenth century, the region's forests have increased in area since 1909 by an amount equal to the entire forest area of Maine, which is 17 million acres.
The region's forests can be thought of as five "forests," each playing a distinct economic role. In the Industrial Forest, the growing and harvesting of industrial wood is the primary use, accompanied by substantial use for hunting, fishing, snowmobiling, and wilderness canoeing. In the Suburban Forest, the general emphasis on "green backdrop" roles belies the importance of casual recreation, firewood cutting, and industrial wood uses. In the Rural Forest of the region's farming and thinly settled rural areas, traditional forest uses continue. In the Recreational Forest, heavily developed areas for skiing, lakeside camps and resorts, and coastal developments set the tone. Finally, in the Wild Forest, preservation of nature is dominant.
After generations when few aside from the landowner and technical communities paid the forests much attention, they have now become focal points for policy conflicts. Proposals for large additions to the Adirondack Park's Forever Wild lands, for creating a Maine Woods National Park, and for eliminating all timber harvesting on the region's National Forests are prominent examples. The legislatures of every state in the region deal annually with issues of forest taxation, forest practices regulation, public ownership, and land uses affecting forests. The Northeast's Changing Forest gives readers an historic, geographic, and ecological background for understanding the condition of the forests of the Northeast and the outlook for their future.
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