Product Description
In 1994, representatives from all over the world met in Costa Rica to discuss the impact of ecological economics on developing countries. That groundbreaking conference laid the foundation for this new collection of research on environmental sustainability. While most discussions on sustainable development focus on the industrialized nations, Environmental Sustainability: Practical Global Applications takes a different angle: it presents the views of the developing countries themselves on issues such as wildlife resources in Nambia, timber production in Costa Rica, property rights and land reform in South Africa, and other steps being taken to implement environmentally sustainable economies around the world.This is an ideal text for students of natural and social sciences, development professionals and entrepreneurs seeking opportunities for ecologically sustainable businesses. Academics will find it useful as a source of current research and for making new contacts in the field. For anyone interested in exploring the link between man and his environment-specifically, the relationship between economics and ecology- Environmental Sustainability, is a must. ... Read more

Product Description
This digital document is a journal article from Resources, Conservation & Recycling, published by Elsevier in 2005. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Media Library immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Description:
This paper focuses on the environmental component of sustainability of technology, taking into account the role of industrial ecology. Assessment of environmental sustainability of technology traditionally focuses on immediate impact of technology on the environment through quantifying resource extraction and generated emissions. However, technology does not only exchange materials with the environment but also with the industrial society as a whole, the so-called industrial metabolism. A higher compatibility of a specific technology with the industrial system, as studied in industrial ecology, can result in lower resource extraction and reduced waste emission, indirectly contributing to a better environmental sustainability. Starting from the considerations above and based on the second law of thermodynamics, the paper presents a set of five environmental sustainability indicators for the assessment of products and production pathways, integrating industrial ecology principles. The indicators, all scaled between 0 and 1, take into account: (1) renewability of resources; (2) toxicity of emissions; (3) input of used materials; (4) recoverability of products at the end of their use; (5) process efficiency. The applicability of the elaborated set of indicators is illustrated for different production pathways of alcohols (petrochemical and oleochemical based), polyethylene end-of-life options and electricity production from non-renewable (natural gas and fossil oil) and renewable resources (hydropower, photovoltaic conversion of solar irradiation). ... Read more

Product Description
This is a market-based call to action for companies to stop global warming by articulating the business case and addressing the business community in their language; profit and brand value. It details how climate change impacts companies, and how they can turn this risk into an opportunity to improve their financial, brand, and sustainability (environmental, social, climate) performance. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

This book is unreadable on Kindle
I THINK this is a pretty good book, but I made the mistake of ordering it for my Kindle.The conversion process renders it unreadable -- illustrations are too small to be legible, and tables and text are garbled.I overlooked these problems for the first few chapters, but finally gave up.This book was highly recommended by a friend, so I guess I'll try again with the hard copy version.Unfortunately, I didn't didn't discover the problem until the 7-day return period had expired. ... Read more

Product Description
The international community has committed itself to achieve, by 2010, a significant reduction of the current rate of biodiversity loss at the global, regional, and national levels. Yet, despite growing awareness, and major efforts in all countries, the latest evidence indicates that biodiversity continues to be lost at a terrifying pace, resulting in what some call the greatest mass extinction since dinosaurs roamed the planet, 65 million years ago. A range of methods have been developed to value ecosystems, and the services they provide, as well as the costs of conservation. The methods available are increasingly sensitive, and robust, but they are often incorrectly used. One reason is poor understanding of the purposes of valuation and what questions it can, or cannot, answer. As a result, decision makers may get misleading guidance on the value of ecosystems, and their conservation. In this context, the Bank, IUCN-The World Conservation Union, and the Nature Conservancy have worked together to clarify the aims and uses of economic valuation, focusing on the types of questions that valuation can answer, and the type of valuation that is best suited to each purpose. How Much is an Ecosystem Worth? is the result of that cooperation. It aims to provide guidance on how economic valuation can be used to address specific, policy-relevant questions about nature conservation. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

How Much is an Ecosystem Worth ?
This text is well written and quite easy to read.It provides a brief overview of valuation techniques available for those who wish to gauge the value of an ecosystem as well as commenting on some case studies.


C Forsyth ... Read more

Product Description
This digital document is an article from Journal of Soil and Water Conservation, published by Soil & Water Conservation Society on July 1, 1993. The length of the article is 2632 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

From the supplier: American agriculture has witnessed a 'Green Revolution' that has increased crop yields through the substitution of capital and technology for labor and land as farm inputs. The benefits of agricultural productivity affected Americans most and the concept of shared responsibility is best demonstrated on the urban fringe, where the greening of agriculture must begin.

Citation Details
Title: A Green Evolution: retooling agricultural policy for greater sustainability.
Author: Ralph E. Grossi
Publication: Journal of Soil and Water Conservation (Refereed)
Date: July 1, 1993
Publisher: Soil & Water Conservation Society
Volume: v48Issue: n4Page: p285(4)

Distributed by Thomson Gale ... Read more

Product Description
This digital document is an article from Journal of Soil and Water Conservation, published by Soil & Water Conservation Society on March 1, 1995. The length of the article is 5743 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Citation Details
Title: Landcare: participative Australian approaches to inquiry and learning for sustainability.
Author: C. Andrew Campbell
Publication: Journal of Soil and Water Conservation (Refereed)
Date: March 1, 1995
Publisher: Soil & Water Conservation Society
Volume: 50Issue: 2Page: 125(7)

Distributed by Thomson Gale ... Read more

Product Description
Both Agenda 21 and the IUCN's "Caring for the Earth" recommend that every country should prepare and implement a National Sustainable Development Strategy, in order to mobilize and focus the country's efforts to achieve sustainability. This text demonstrates how the task can be approached. Using existing Environmental Action Plans, National Conservation Plans and individual sectoral plans, it shows how strategies need to adopt a participatory process if they are to work successfully. ... Read more

Product Description
Scientific Principles to Guide Sustainable Design Decisions

From thermodynamics to fluid dynamics to computational chemistry, this book sets forth the scientific principles underlying the need for sustainable design, explaining not just the "hows" of sustainable design and green engineering, but also the "whys." Moreover, it provides readers with the scientific principles needed to guide their own sustainable design decisions. Throughout the book, the authors draw from their experience in architecture, civil engineering, environmental engineering, planning, and public policy in order to build an understanding of the interdisciplinary nature of sustainable design.

Written to enable readers to take a more scientific approach to sustainable design, the book offers many practical features, including:

• Case studies presenting the authors' firsthand accounts of actual green projects
• Lessons learned from Duke University's Smart House Program that demonstrate the concepts and techniques discussed in the book
• Exercises that encourage readers to use their newfound knowledge to solve green design problems
• Figures, tables, and sidebars illustrating key concepts and summarizing important points

Product Description
In Envisioning Sustainability Planet Drum Foundation Founder Peter Berg provides us with a collection of the important essays that helped define the bioregional movement and established Berg as an icon in the environmental community. This collection, which spans three decades of Berg's life work, combines the candor, humor and vision that helped shape the sustainability revolution. From his home environment of San Francisco, to his work in Japan and Ecuador, Berg speaks with
authority on the bioregional aspects of sustainability as cities around the world adopt and execute his Green City model.

"Reader, you hold an important book in your hands. It’s a forty-year compendium of some of the profoundest ecosocial thinking to date concerning what are misnomered, meagerly, environmental problems. Here you will find the outlines of lifeways that could return our species to diverse, place-located, long haul biotic flourishing."
Stephanie Mills, author of Tough Little Beauties and Whatever Happened to Ecology?

"It’s rare and wonderful to be able to see an idea grow from the cogitations of your friends to part of the framework of grand state policy. But such is the trajectory of bioregionalism, originally cooked up by cultural innovator and activist Peter Berg and conservation biologist Ray Dasmann, and now an accepted phrase in California state government agencies."
Ernest Callenbach, author of Ecotopia, Ecotopia Emerging, Ecology: A Pocket Guide, and Bring Back the Buffalo! A Sustainable Future for America's Great Plains ... Read more

Product Description
This digital document is a journal article from Resources, Conservation & Recycling, published by Elsevier in 2005. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Media Library immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Description:
This paper describes a framework for collaboration on environmental thinking and management, including three types of multi-disciplinary trading zones and three types of shared expertise. Getting agreement among multiple stakeholders requires the exercise of moral imagination, which involves:*Perceiving one's own mental model of a system, both as it exists (descriptive) and as one would like it to be (normative). *Comparing different mental models across expertises and stakeholder interests. *Generating and evaluating alternatives that would facilitate a transition from descriptive to normative scenarios.This framework is applied to genetically-modified organisms and to the development of an environmentally-intelligent textile. The article concludes with a discussion of Earth Systems Engineering Management (ESEM), which represents a novel, interdisciplinary approach to working with complex, integrated human/natural systems. Increasingly, such systems involve close coupling among environmental, social and technological elements. Such systems are not entirely predictable. ESEM calls for:*Systems thinking that sees the interaction between parts of system and avoids problems like optimizing one part of a system at the expense of the whole. *The use of reversible technologies that can be reconfigured based on results from: *Close monitoring of systems interactions-including dialogue with multiple experts and stakeholders.To succeed, ESEM will have to offer more than a framework for thinking about complex human/natural systems-it will have to adapt or evolve a set of tools that facilitate collaborative monitoring and management. ... Read more

Product Description
This digital document is a journal article from Biological Conservation, published by Elsevier in . The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Media Library immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Description:
Subsistence hunting practiced by poor rural and indigenous people in Latin America differentially affects the three species of peccaries (Artiodactyla: Tayassuidae). Sustainability of subsistence hunting of peccaries in the Argentine semi-arid Chaco, where the three species coexist, was unknown. My objectives were to determine the importance of peccaries for the local people, describe the current pattern of hunting and its impact on the three species of peccary and identify the factors that affect hunting sustainability. I found that many rural (70%) and village people (40%) consumed peccaries. White-lipped and chacoan peccaries were more susceptible to overharvesting than collared peccary. Current rates of hunting of white-lipped and chacoan peccaries are likely not sustainable because: (a) density of both species was between two to three times higher inside a protected area than outside; (b) populations have declined near larger villages and in older settlements; (c) herds sizes were small in comparison with other regions; (d) large number of juveniles less than one year old were harvested; (e) hunting did not discriminate based on sex or reproductive status and (f) The unified harvest model indicated unsustainable harvest because more than 40% of the reproductive production was taken and populations densities were less than 60% carrying capacities. In contrast, harvest of collared peccary seems sustainable at the current rates of hunting by rural peasants. Other threats such as forest exploitation, however, are accelerating, and are likely to reduce sustainability. ... Read more

Product Description
Conservation psychology is the scientific study of themutual relationships, and the connections between humans andthe rest of nature, with a particular focus on how toencourage conservation of the natural world.This field isless of a specialty area within psychology itself but agrowing way to help scientists of all fields to cometogether and help each other and the community betterunderstand the earth and what can be done to preserve it. Itis a field to help understand why people hurt or help theenvironment and what can be done to change that. Using theterm ?Conservation Psychology? only refers to scientists inany fields of psychology that have understandable knowledgeof environment and the effects humans have on it to usetheir abilities in ?greening? psychology, and by makingsociety ecologically sustainable (Myers 2002.) The scienceof conservation psychology is oriented toward environmentalsustainability, which includes concerns like conservation ofresources, conservation of ecosystems, and quality of lifeissues for humans and other species (Saunders 2003). ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Not for conservationists OR psychologists
This book is NOT a serious source of information for scholars or people simply curious about this subject. It was not put together by scholars, researchers, or people who are at all knowledgeable about this field of knowledge.

This volume is literally a bunch of articles literally copied and pasted off Wikipedia literally as is, with literally no clean-up of text or anything else. Literally. The text is very clunky since it was not cleaned up or formatted properly. You can see arrows where on Wikipedia there were links, as well as 'citation needed' and other html markup. Foreign language text along with symbols are also missing from the printed text in this book.

There's nothing with with Wikipedia itself. It's a lovely source of free information, but it needs to be taken with a grain of salt due to vandals and people posting - intentionally or not - inaccurate information. To exacerbate the problem, the original subject of this book actually only makes up part of this volume. If you've read Wikipedia, you are familiar with how some words within the article provide links to other articles (for those curious and wishing to expand their research/reading) and while this can be helpful, not all of the links within any particular Wikipedia article are too relevant to the original subject matter. There is also often a list of other articles at the bottom of any Wikipedia article that are 'See also...' but these articles vary in relevance. Sadly, the 'editors' of this book simply click these links and copy and paste these articles, whether or not they're truly relevant (or even related) to the original subject matter, so a decent portion of this book actually has nothing to do with the original subject matter.

The pictures within this book are also poor-quality, shrunk down from their original versions on Wikipedia and made black-and-white. Diagrams and other technical images therefore become near impossible to read or study. The size of the actual book itself isn't very large, and is about the size of a larger-size paperback (the ones that measure about 8"x5.5" and are generally the next size of standard paperback after your common pocket paperback), and the text itself is actually hard to read on top of being poorly formatted (some pages actually have rather large gaps/blank spaces)

You're better off reading the original articles on Wikipedia for free, and if you wish for longer and more relevant books on this particular subject, you can look right here on Amazon for books written and edited by people who are genuinely passionate and knowledgeable about the subject. ... Read more

Product Description
Examines why and how schools should be made 'green', presenting 8 case studies in detail. ... Read more

Product Description
This text, in two volumes, is a collection of papers depicting the current status of both ecological and economic aspects of biodiversity. It is intended to provide students, decision-makers and practitioners with a synthesis of ecological and economic preceptions of biodiversity and its valuation. ... Read more

Product Description
This digital document is a journal article from Journal for Nature Conservation, published by Elsevier in 2006. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Media Library immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Description:
The restoration of natural capital is arguably one of the most radical ideas to emerge in recent years as it links two imperatives whose exponents have been at loggerheads for decades. These are the need to protect biodiversity and conserve natural resources as espoused by conservationists and environmentalists, and the demand for natural resources as dictated by economists and society at large, at local, regional, national and international scales. We need to work together, or even 'leap together', across traditional disciplinary frontiers or polemical stances, in order to find innovative solutions that counter the prevailing ideological divide separating economics and ecology. We close this special issue with a proposition of five pillars and three principal tasks for sustainable living, including conservation and restoration. ... Read more