Habitat loss and degradation that comes as a result of human activity is the single biggest threat to biodiversity in the world today. Habitat Fragmentation and Landscape Change is a groundbreaking work that brings together a wealth of information from a wide range of sources to define the ecological problems caused by landscape change and to highlight the relationships among landscape change, habitat fragmentation, and biodiversity conservation. The book:

• synthesizes a large body of information from the scientific literature
• considers key theoretical principles for examining and predicting effects
• examines the range of effects that can arise
• explores ways of mitigating impacts
• reviews approaches to studying the problem
• discusses knowledge gaps and future areas for research and management

Habitat Fragmentation and Landscape Change offers a unique mix of theoretical and practical information, outlining general principles and approaches and illustrating those principles with case studies from around the world. It represents a definitive overview and synthesis on the full range of topics that fall under the widely used but often vaguely defined term "habitat fragmentation."

During the early 1990s, the ability of dangerous diseases to pass between animals and humans was brought once more to the public consciousness. These concerns continue to raise questions about how livestock diseases have been managed over time and in different social, economic, and political circumstances. Healing the Herds: Disease, Livestock Economies, and the Globalization of Veterinary Medicine brings together case studies from the Americas, western Europe, and the European and Japanese colonies to illustrate how the rapid growth of the international trade in animals through the nineteenth century engendered the spread of infectious diseases, sometimes with devastating consequences for indigenous pastoral societies. At different times and across much of the globe, livestock epidemics have challenged social order and provoked state interventions, often opposed by farmers and herders. The intensification of agriculture has transformed environments, with consequences for animal and human health.

But the last two centuries have also witnessed major changes in the way societies have conceptualized diseases and sought to control them. From the late nineteenth century, advances in veterinary technologies afforded veterinary scientists a new professional status and allowed them to wield greater political influence. While older methods have remained important to strategies of control and prevention, as demonstrated during the outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease in Britain in 2001, the rise of germ theories and the discovery of vaccines against some infections made it possible to move beyond the blunt tools of animal culls and restrictive quarantines of the past. Healing the Herds: Disease, Livestock Economies, and the Globalization of Veterinary Medicine offers a new and exciting comparative approach to the complex interrelationships of microbes, markets, and medicine in the global economy.

Although complexity surrounds us, its inherent uncertainty, ambiguity, and contradiction can at first make complex systems appear inscrutable. Ecosystems, for instance, are nonlinear, self-organizing, seemingly chaotic structures in which individuals interact both with each other and with the myriad biotic and abiotic components of their surroundings across geographies as well as spatial and temporal scales. In the face of such complexity, ecologists have long sought tools to streamline and aggregate information. Among them, in the 1980s, T. F. H. Allen and Thomas B. Starr implemented a burgeoning concept from business administration: hierarchy theory. Cutting-edge when Hierarchy was first published, their approach to unraveling complexity is now integrated into mainstream ecological thought.

This thoroughly revised and expanded second edition of Hierarchy reflects the assimilation of hierarchy theory into ecological research, its successful application to the understanding of complex systems, and the many developments in thought since. Because hierarchies and levels are habitual parts of human thinking, hierarchy theory has proven to be the most intuitive and tractable vehicle for addressing complexity. By allowing researchers to look explicitly at only the entities and interconnections that are relevant to a specific research question, hierarchically informed data analysis has enabled a revolution in ecological understanding. With this new edition of Hierarchy, that revolution continues.

Hope on Earth is the thought-provoking result of a lively and wide-ranging conversation between two of the world’s leading interdisciplinary environmental scientists: Paul R. Ehrlich, whose book The Population Bomb shook the world in 1968 (and continues to shake it), and Michael Charles Tobias, whose over 40 books and 150 films have been read and/or viewed throughout the world.  Hope on Earth offers a rare opportunity to listen in as these deeply knowledgeable and highly creative thinkers offer their takes on the most pressing environmental concerns of the moment.

Both Ehrlich and Tobias argue that we are on the verge of environmental catastrophe, as the human population continues to grow without restraint and without significant attempts to deal with overconsumption and the vast depletion of resources and climate problems it creates. Though their views are sympathetic, they differ in their approach and in some key moral stances, giving rise to a heated and engaging dialogue that opens up dozens of new avenues of exploration.  They both believe that the impact of a human society on its environment is the direct result of its population size, and through their dialogue they break down the complex social problems that are wrapped up in this idea and attempts to overcome it, hitting firmly upon many controversial topics such as circumcision, religion, reproduction, abortion, animal rights, diet, and gun control.  For Ehrlich and Tobias, ethics involve not only how we treat other people directly, but how we treat them and other organisms indirectly through our effects on the environment.  University of California, Berkeley professor John Harte joins the duo for part of the conversation, and his substantial expertise on energy and climate change adds a crucial perspective to the discussion of the impact of population on global warming.

This engaging and timely book invites readers into an intimate conversation with some of the most eminent voices in science as they offer a powerful and approachable argument that the ethical and scientific issues involved in solving our environmental crisis are deeply intertwined, while offering us an optimistic way forward. Hope on Earth is indeed a conversation we should all be having.

A collection of essays on nature, naturalists, and the natural history of fishes in central Appalachia. A nature lover’s paradise, central Appalachia supports a diversity of life in an extensive network of waterways and is home to a dazzling array of fish species. This book focuses not only on the fishes of central Appalachia but also on the fascinating things these fishes do in their natural habitats. An ecological dance unfolds from a species and population perspective, although the influence of the community and the ecosystem also figures in the text. Stuart A. Welsh’s essays link central Appalachian fishes with the complexities of competition and predation, species conservation, parasitic infections, climate change, public attitudes, reproductive and foraging ecology, unique morphology, habitat use, and nonnative species. The book addresses a selection of the families of central Appalachian fishes, including lampreys, gars, freshwater eels, pikes, minnows, suckers, catfishes, trouts, trout-perches, sculpins, sunfishes, and perches. These essays often refer to the works of naturalists who contributed to our knowledge of nature during previous centuries and who recorded their discoveries when science writing was less concise than it is today. Although many of these works are nearly forgotten, these early naturalists built a strong knowledge base that supports much of our current science and thus merits reexamination. Most people are not scientists, but many have an interest in nature and are, in their own way, naturalists. This book is for those people willing to peer beneath the water’s surface.

In 2003, Bill Sargent bought a big pink house in Ipswich, Massachusetts. His home sits on what is known as the Great Marsh, a fascinating patch of wetland shared by Massachusetts and New Hampshire. Sargent received a grant to study some of the rare and endangered ground-nesting birds that inhabit the public land adjacent to his property. Ipswich Marsh is about these birds, but much else as well. Organized by the seasons of the year, The House on Ipswich Marsh features Sargent’s trademark interplay of information about the natural world, ecology, and politics. In “Spring,” the reader learns about the geological history of the Marsh; the migration patterns of bobolinks; the courtship flights of woodcocks; ticks and Lyme disease; the mating of horseshoe crabs and the underwater arrival of zooplankton, fish eggs, and moon jellyfish. “Summer” introduces plate tectonics and glaciers; sea level rise and glacial rebound; diving at night among lobsters and stone crabs; a day on Crane’s Beach; and a bike trip on Argilla Road. “Autumn” illuminates fishing; the natural and cultural history of Hog Island; harvest time on Appelton Farm; and a Native American Thanksgiving. “Winter” describes the formation of dunes and sandbars; the mating behavior of seals; coyote hunting deer at night; and a late-winter blizzard in which Sargent spies a red-tailed hawk, waiting, like the author, for the return of spring.

Lessons About Our Environment from the World’s Oldest Living Things
Trees have been essential to the success of human beings, providing food, shelter, warmth, transportation, and products (consider the paper you are holding). Trees are also necessary for a healthy atmosphere, literally connecting the earth with the sky. Once in wild abundance— the entire eastern North America was a gigantic forest—they have receded as we have clearcut the landscape in favor of building cities and farms, using up and abusing our forests in the process. Over the centuries, we have trained food trees, such as peach and apple trees, to produce more and better fruit at the expense of their lives. As Jeff Gillman, a specialist in the production and care of trees, explains in his acclaimed work, How Trees Die: The Past, Present, and Future of Our Forests, the death of a tree is as important to understanding our environment as how it lives. While not as readily apparent as other forms of domestication, our ancient and intimate relationship with trees has caused their lives to be inseparably entwined with ours. The environment we have created—what we put into the air and into the water, and how we change the land through farming, construction, irrigation, and highways—affects the world’s entire population of trees, while the lives of the trees under our direct care in farms, orchards, or along a city boulevard depend almost entirely on our actions. Taking the reader on a fascinating journey through time and place, the author explains how we kill trees, often for profit, but also unintentionally with kindness through overwatering or overmulching, and sometimes simply by our movements around the globe, carrying foreign insects or disease. No matter how a tree’s life ends, though, understanding the reason is essential to understanding the future of our environment.

When it comes to implementing successful ecological restoration projects, the social, political, economic, and cultural dimensions are often as important as-and sometimes more important than-technical or biophysical knowledge.

Human Dimensions of Ecological Restoration takes an interdisciplinary look at the myriad human aspects of ecological restoration. In twenty-six chapters written by experts from around the world, it provides practical and theoretical information, analysis, models, and guidelines for optimizing human involvement in restoration projects. Six categories of social activities are examined:

• collaboration between land manager and stakeholders
• ecological economics
• volunteerism and community-based restoration
• environmental education
• ecocultural and artistic practices
• policy and politics

For each category, the book offers an introductory theoretical chapter followed by multiple case studies, each of which focuses on a particular aspect of the category and provides a perspective from within a unique social/political/cultural setting.

Human Dimensions of Ecological Restoration delves into the often-neglected aspects of ecological restoration that ultimately make the difference between projects that are successfully executed and maintained with the support of informed, engaged citizens, and those that are unable to advance past the conceptual stage due to misunderstandings or apathy. The lessons contained will be valuable to restoration veterans and greenhorns alike, scholars and students in a range of fields, and individuals who care about restoring their local lands and waters.

Human ecology is an emerging discipline that studies the interrelationships between humans and their environment, drawing on insights from biology, sociology, anthropology, geography, engineering, architecture, landscape architecture, planning, and conservation. A vast, multidisciplinary literature underscores this approach, and in Human Ecology, noted landscape planner Frederick Steiner synthesizes the work of diverse, sometimes divergent, scholars to illustrate how human interactions can be understood as ecological relationships, using hierarchy as an organizing device.

Steiner builds on the work of leading thinkers including Christopher Alexander, William Cronon, Clifford Geertz, James Lovelock, Eugene Odum, Paul Shepard, Anne Whiston Spirn, E. O. Wilson, Gerald Young, and many others to present a historical and analytical examination of how humans interact with each other as well as with other organisms and their surroundings.

The first two chapters summarize the development of this "new ecology" and the theory of human ecology. The remainder of the book provides an accessible introduction to the major elements of human ecological theory including language, culture, and technology; structure, function, and change; edges and boundaries; interaction, integration, and institution; diversity; and adaptation. The chapters are organized hierarchically from the smallest scale to the largest with each chapter addressing a specific level as an ecosystem. The final chapter probes some of the ethical implications of this new field.

Human Ecology brings together for the first time scholarship from the social and natural sciences as well as the environmental design arts to offer an overview of the field of human ecology and to show how the field may help us to envision our futures. While the approach is largely theoretical, it has broad policy and practical implications, and represents an important new work for anyone concerned with interactions between humans and the environment.

A selection of savvy observations on urban ecology from one of the Midwest's foremost authorities on the subject, Hunting for Frogs on Elston collects the best of naturalist Jerry Sullivan's weekly Field & Street columns, originally published in the Chicago Reader. Engaging, opinionated, inspiring, and occasionally irreverent, Hunting for Frogs on Elston pays tribute to Chicago's natural history while celebrating one of its greatest champions.

Published in association with the Chicago Wilderness coalition, Hunting for Frogs on Elston comprehensively chronicles Chicagoland's unique urban ecology, from its indigenous prairie and oft-delayed seasons to its urban coyotes and passenger pigeons. In witty, informed prose, Sullivan evokes his adventures netting dog-faced butterflies, hunting rattlesnakes, and watching fireflies mate. Inspired by regional flora and fauna, Sullivan ventures throughout the metropolis and its environs in search of sludge worms, gyrfalcons, and wild onions. In reporting his findings to otherwise oblivious urbanites, Sullivan endeavors to make "alienated, atomized, postmodern people feel at home, connected to something beyond ourselves."

In the sprawling Chicagoland region, where an urban ecosystem teeming with remarkable life evolves between skyscrapers and train tracks, no writer chronicled the delicate balance of nature and industry more vividly than Jerry Sullivan. An homage to the urban ecology Sullivan loved so dearly, Hunting for Frogs on Elston is his fitting legacy as well as a lasting gift to the urban naturalist in us all.