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Adopts global environmental change & its repercussions for society, as the coherent integrating theme to reinvigorate the physical geography of the 21st century.Paper. ... Read more

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The challenge of joining physical geographic studies with global environmental change
Chapters: The nature of physical geography, the nature of global env change, understanding past env changes, the challenge for geography, tropical forest dynamics, desertification and the physical geography of the semi-arid env, polar environments and climate change, physical geography in an uncertain env future.

Slaymaker broke ground with this book by attempting to reinvigorate specifically physical geography by claiming the field needs to avoid the temptations of specialization and focus on what it knows best: the study of environmental change.

All of the books in the Understanding Environmental Change series are excellent, but see also Mountain Geomorphology, The Cryosphere, and especially, Geomorphology and Global Environmental Change, all by Slaymaker. ... Read more

Product Description
Global Environmental Change reviews the facts and the uncertainties relating to some of the major environmental issues facing us today--greenhouse warming, loss of stratospheric ozone, and acid precipitation--and shows how these facts and uncertainties are dealt with by both governmental and nongovernmental agencies. Anticipated environmental changes in future decades are described and explained, and the consequences of those projected changes are described for rise of sea level, water resources, agriculture, ecological systems, and other topics. Three chapters of the study are devoted to the roles of academic institutions, government agencies, and nongovernmental agencies in developing and implementing policies. Another chapter discusses the relationship of U.S. research and environmental policy to international research and environmental policy, emphasizing how new concepts relating to global change have emerged from earlier research and out of the growing recognition of the seriousness of environmental problems. Finally, the work addresses the need for more effective interactions of science and policy. ... Read more

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Timely
With the Exxon/GM Motors sponsored jury still out on this issue, Fleagles book poses the pertinent question - what causes the most severe damage to the environment? Cutting down millions of trees or planting one Bush? ... Read more

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This is the first attempt to promote good practice in global change science at schools and universities. Thirty chapters written by practitioners from eleven countries outline present trends, dealing with successful innovations and problems associated with interdisciplinary courses. They are arranged in three principal sections: one setting the scene, the second describing various courses and the third advancing specific teaching strategies and ideas. ... Read more

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Suitable as a primary text for a variety of introductory undergraduate courses including global environmental change or earth and human history found in departments of geology, geophysics, or earth science. Aimed for the non- science major, the text assumes a knowledge of high school chemistry or physics. Also suitable as a supplemental text in other courses.Using a chronological narrative to unravel the record of global environmental change, this text explores the full range of naturally-occurring and human-induced/affected environmental changes. ... Read more

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Every year NATO subsidizes the organisation of many scientifically outstanding summer schools and international symposia. The results are now published in a new thematical series, namely Global Environmental Change. This is the first volume in the new series and as its title suggests, Global Environmental Change addresses one of the most pervasive scientific issues of our time. Global change is increasingly dominating the agenda of world leaders, who as a result are becoming more concerned with the potential economic, social, and political consequences of global environmental change. The contents of this text are derived from a special NATO Workshop which sought to explain the main themes and state of the science which describe the Earth as a system and identify the natural and anthropogenic factors which affect its dynamics. ... Read more

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The analysis of polar ice cores has proven to be very instructive about past environmental conditions on the time scale of several climatic cycles, and recent drilling operations have provided information of great value for global change issues. The book presents the most recent data extracted from Greenland ice cores and surface experiments and compares them with former Antarctic results. It contains background articles, original contributions and group reports of interest to scientists, climatologists, atmospheric chemists, and glaciologists involved in global change research. ... Read more

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The subject of this volume is the observation and modelling of the gravity wave field in the atmosphere. The focus is on the question of how to include the effects of small-scale gravity waves in sophisticated global climate models. The book comprises 26 chapters, including contributions from distinguished experts in observation and theory, along with results from studies of gravity wave parameterization within comprehensive climate models. ... Read more

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Webster's bibliographic and event-based timelines are comprehensive in scope, covering virtually all topics, geographic locations and people. They do so from a linguistic point of view, and in the case of this book, the focus is on "Global Environmental Change," including when used in literature (e.g. all authors that might have Global Environmental Change in their name). As such, this book represents the largest compilation of timeline events associated with Global Environmental Change when it is used in proper noun form. Webster's timelines cover bibliographic citations, patented inventions, as well as non-conventional and alternative meanings which capture ambiguities in usage. These furthermore cover all parts of speech (possessive, institutional usage, geographic usage) and contexts, including pop culture, the arts, social sciences (linguistics, history, geography, economics, sociology, political science), business, computer science, literature, law, medicine, psychology, mathematics, chemistry, physics, biology and other physical sciences. This "data dump" results in a comprehensive set of entries for a bibliographic and/or event-based timeline on the proper name Global Environmental Change, since editorial decisions to include or exclude events is purely a linguistic process. The resulting entries are used under license or with permission, used under "fair use" conditions, used in agreement with the original authors, or are in the public domain. ... Read more

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Numerous experts including ecologists, geneticists, paleontologists and climatologists, investigate the response of terrestrial organisms to changes in their environment. The volume comprises an introductory and a final chapter by the editors as well as another 35 contributions. These are divided into six sections: 1. past environmental changes - the late-Quaternary; 2. spatial responses to past changes; 3. mechanisms enabling spatial responses; 4. evolutionary responses to past changes; 5. mechanisms enabling evolutionary responses; 6. predicted future environmental changes and simulated responses. The overwhelming and unanimous conclusion of all contributors is that forecasted global environmental changes pose a severe threat to the integrity of ecosystems worldwide and to the survival of at least some species. ... Read more

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Concerns about the impact of economic development upon the global environment have increased in recent years. Sustainable development has been proposed as a means of reconciling the pressures between the two, allowing the integration of economic, environmental and social concerns. This book focuses upon the potential to integrate economic and environmental policies at teh local and regional scale. ... Read more

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Drawing on four years of field research, the authors look at how farmers manage biological resources, crop and non-crop biodiversity, soil fertility, and transform the landscape through agricultural intensification in the Sahel region of Northern Nigeria. ... Read more

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Working the Sahel
Mortimore, a British geographer with 28 years of residence in northern Nigeria and several books to his name, is an adept and rigorous practitioner of local-level cultural ecology. Bill Adams began his career examining the fate of Northern Nigeria's large irrigation schemes, and has since written extensively on conservation and sustainability questions. Working the Sahel emerged from a five year British-funded investigation into patterns of agricultural intensification and labor use in four sub-locations located on a transect of varying population density between Kano and the Nigeria-Niger border. This book subsumes some of Mortimore's long term datasets and archival material, permitting longitudinal evaluations.

Working the Sahel is a tightly focused research monograph. The key question it poses is how individual skills are exercised in "strategic and tactical" ways by households in Northern Nigeria, and how resource endowments are managed under varying population densities.The starting point is that constraints on farming activities can be distilled into four categories; rainfall, bioproductivity of plants and soil, labor, and the availability of capital. Labor constraints in Nigeria and elsewhere have been generally been relaxed as population densities rise, permitting some combination of intensification of agricultural production in-situ, economic diversification out of agriculture, and circular migration. Adaptation - a term much critiqued by anthropologists - is used quite sensibly here to describe the reflexive, longer term restructuring of Sahelian rural systems in the response to these four constraints. Both flexibility and adaptability are demanded of Sahelian farmers.

The core of the book concerns the day to day management of labor. In the four villages, high frequency time-budget observations by local researchers took place over four years, initially with the men, women and children of around 45 households. The study found that some labor inefficiencies are inevitable in dryland farming systems. Short cropping seasons in the drier villages concentrate labor demand; but since crop growth is dependent on rainfall, drought years can actually provoke labor surpluses. To maintain flexibility, therefore, labor is matched to resource endowments, and by switching between livelihood activities. Women and children make significant contributions to agricultural labor, that are greater in the drier and more extensive farming systems where Islamic seclusion is more relaxed.

A picture emerges of biodiversity maintained by cultivation practices, and only localized episodes of degradation, largely driven by precipitation fluctuations. In their view, "Nothing could be further from the scenario of reckless resource degradation which has been put about by some academics and development agencies" (p193). The book also argues farmers have already developed pathways to "indigenous intensification" (p97) in the drylands, where denied access to fertilizer.

Adaptive responses in the four villages include significant non-farm activities, since as Mortimore and Adams are at pains to stress, risk is spread through diversification. Impelled by economic factors, such as the instabilities generated by Nigeria's commodity booms and busts, and the recognition that animals offer investment opportunities, a pattern has emerged of "the more crops produced, the more livestock kept" (p132), in mixed farming systems. Private accumulation through petty trading in rural periodic markets is just part of a widely developed trading system, and markets also provide a wide range of social functions. Long distance migration, described much too briefly in the book, articulates with broader economic opportunity in regional hinterlands, and nationally.

The authors personalize some of these labor tradeoffs and decision-making processes by profiling six farmers, by means of activity charts and brief personal histories. These profiles highlight how and when households deploy their labor. The book concludes by stressing that agricultural development initiatives in the Sahel fail when they are reductionist, and ignore diversity and variability. There is a dig here at farming systems research, which has underpinned agronomic development programs in the Sahel, for its focus on efficiency criteria. Dryland farmers are not profit or efficiency maximizers, since "..'efficiency' would leave no room for flexible maneuver" (p192). The message for future development interventions is a simple one; big schemes won't work, and "the most impressive stories of development are those where a need for multiple choices, to suit a range of smallholder families, has been met, implicitly or explicitly, in the type of interventions and opportunities affecting rural households." (p191).

Politics receives too little discussion in the book, and is missing from the conceptual model used: it is only discussed as a starting point for the analysis of local farmer responses. Social and political conflict is downplayed, and not much is said about struggle and open resistance - and why such struggles (often gendered, or to do with resource access issues) might be necessary.
Nonetheless the insistence on rigorous comparative fieldwork in Working the Sahel is salutary. The authors remind us that smallholder agriculture is potentially productive, and environmentally benign, in parts of the world where the presence of globalized agricultural knowledge, pervasive development discourses, and far-reaching commodity markets is still fragmentary. To do this, the authors afford equal analytical weight to natural environments and to human activities. The book shows the real contribution that committed geographers can make to African agrarian and development studies. ... Read more

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Scientists concerned with the processes occurring in the stratosphere are becoming more and more aware of the role that the stratosphere may play in the global climate and in global change in general. This book focuses on the basic processes taking place in the stratosphere and on the stratospheric changes which may occur from either natural or anthropogenic forcing. Of major concern here is the consequence of the increasing Antarctic Ozone Hole and the possibility of similar processes occurring at northern latitudes. One of the expected consequences of the change in the stratospheric composition, mainly ozone depletion, is the change in the penetration of UV-B in the troposphere, at the surface, and in the top layers of the ocean. Monitoring and modeling of those changes are still in infancy, even though the implications may be of utmost importance for the entire biosphere. Several aspects of these consequences with regard to aquatic ecosystems, terrestrial vegetation and human health are presented by experts in these fields. ... Read more

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The possible impacts of global warming on transboundary resources such as water and fish and the ability of regional organizations to deal with those impacts are closely examined. Using a historical approach, the ways in which regional organizations have responded to changes in the location and amount of resources are assessed. The book closes in suggesting that policymakers review the possible roles for regional organization in issues related to environmental change. If the climate changes, resources are likely to shift at local and regional levels, possibly leading to interstate conflicts. ... Read more

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Debating the relationship between business and environment, and where this relationship is heading, this book gives voice to the industrial actors in context within industrial sectors or as part of wider institution regimes. ... Read more

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A comprehensive progress report on the multi-disciplinary field of ocean and climate change research is given. It compiles introductory background papers and leading scientific results on the ocean-atmosphere carbon cycle with emphasis on the ocean's carbon inventory and the various components involved. The relationship between plankton productivity, carbon fixation, oceanic PCO2 and climate change is investigated from the viewpoint of long-term climatic change during the late Quaternary cycles of ice ages and warm ages. The various approaches range from micropaleontology over organic and trace element geochemistry to molecular isotope geochemistry. ... Read more

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Global Trade and Global Social Issues challenges seeks a new understanding of the relationship between world trade and social issues. The authors examine ways in which we choose to understand world trade and the changes taking place within the industry. In the book, several points of view are presented by leading academics and NGO workers to offer a much-needed counterweight to the liberal consensus. ... Read more

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Focusing upon energy conservation and the built environment, this book engages with areas of debate and policy currently dominated by technologists and natural scientists. Based upon empirical research, the book develops a sociological analysis of the science and technology of sustainability and energy efficiency. ... Read more

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Fascinating Subject
This is a most fascinating and well-written account of what would seem to be a most dry and uninteresting subject.Simon Guy brings to life the subject of insulation, explaining why people have resistance to change even when the change might be beneficial in the long run.The subject of this book applies well to the challenge of climate change and why it is so difficult to change attitudes and behavior to adopt the necessary changes in lifestyle to reduce our carbon footprint.This story is compelling, hard to put the book down. ... Read more

Product Description
The analysis of polar ice cores has proven to be very instructive about past environmental conditions on the time scale of several climatic cycles, and recent drilling operations have provided information of great value for global change issues. The book presents the most recent data extracted from Greenland ice cores and surface experiments and compares them with former Antarctic results. It contains background articles, original contributions and group reports of interest to scientists, climatologists, atmospheric chemists, and glaciologists involved in global change research. ... Read more