Conservation in perspective

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Tim Dee

"In this book, Tim Dee tells the story of four green fields spread around the world: their grasses, their hedges, their birds, their skies, and both their natural and human histories. These four fields-walkable, mappable, man-made, mowable, knowable, but also secretive, mysterious, wild, contested, and changing-play central roles in the sweeping panorama of world history and in the lives of individuals. In Dee's telling, a field is never just a setting for great battles or natural disasters, though it is often this as well. A field is the oldest and simplest and truest measure of what a man needs in life, especially when looked at, contemplated, worked in, lived with, and written about. Dee's four fields, which he has known and studied for more than twenty years, are the fen field at the bottom of his private garden, a field in southern Zambia, a prairie in Little Bighorn, Montana, and a grass meadow in the Exclusion Zone at Chernobyl, Ukraine. Meditating on these four fields, Dee makes us look anew at where we live and how. He argues that we must attend to what we have made of the wild"--

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Emma Marris

"For decades people have unquestioningly accepted the idea that our goal is to preserve nature in its pristine, pre-human state. But many scientists have come to see this as an outdated dream that thwarts bold new plans to save the environment and prevents us from having a fuller relationship with nature. Humans have changed the landscapes they inhabit since prehistory, and climate change means even the remotest places now bear the fingerprints of humanity. Emma Marris argues ... that it is time to look forward and create the "rambunctious garden," a hybrid of wild nature and human management. In this ... book, readers meet leading scientists and environmentalists and visit imaginary Edens, designer ecosystems, and Pleistocene parks. Marris describes innovative conservation approaches, including rewilding, assisted migration, and the embrace of so-called novel ecosystems ..."--Jacket.

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Jeannine Atkins

Based on true events in India in the 1970s, young Aani and the other women in her village defend their forest from developers by wrapping their arms around the trees, making it impossible to cut them down.

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David Smith, Merrill Leffler, Gail Mackiernan

This book examines the processes that create and sustain anoxia (the absence of oxygen) and hypoxia (the near absence of oxygen) in bottom waters of the Chesapeake Bay. The authors of the book's four chapters discuss major findings and summarize the gradually developing consensus on the implications of these findings for resource management. William C. Boicourt focuses on the physical aspects of Chesapeake Bay in order to distinguish the role and relative importance of circulation processes in the creation of low dissolved oxygen levels. Thomas C. Malone examines the role of water column processes, including the importance and interaction of nutrients, phytoplankton and zooplankton. Robert Jonas discusses the significance of microbial populations, while W. Michael Kemp and Walter R. Boynton discuss the role and importance of benthicpelagic coupling on Chesapeake Bay dissolved oxygen.