by Virginia D. Nazarea (1998)
Virginia Nazarea now makes a case for preserving cultural memory along with biodiversity. Interweaving a wealth of ecological and cognitive data with oral history, Nazarea details a "memory banking" protocol for collecting and conserving cultural information to complement the genetic, agronomic, and biochemical characterization of important crops. She shows that memory banking offers significant benefits for local populations - not only the preservation of traditional knowledge but also the maintenance of alternatives to large-scale agricultural development and commercialization. She also compares alternative forms of germplasm conservation conducted by a male-dominated hierarchy with those of an informal network of migrant women. Cultural Memory and Biodiversity establishes valuable guidelines for people who aspire to support community-based in situ conservation of local varieties. Perhaps more important, it shows that the traditional methods of local farmers are often as important as the "advanced" methods encouraged by advocates of modernization.
Peter Kareiva ... [et al
The editors have assembled the world's leading scientists in the fields of conservation, policy analysis, and resource economics to provide the most intensive and best technical analyses of ecosystem services to date.
Albert E. Cowdrey
Here is the story of the long interaction between humans, land, and climate in the American South. It is a tale of exploitation and erosion, of destruction, disease, and defeat, but also of the persistent search for knowledge and wisdom. It is a story whose villains were also its victims and sometimes its heroes. Ancient forces created the southern landscape, but, as Albert E. Cowdrey shows, humankind from the time of earliest habitation has been at work reshaping it. The southern Indians, far from being the "natural ecologists" of myth, radically transformed their environment by hunting and burning. Such patterns were greatly accelerated by the arrival of Europeans, who viewed the land as a commodity to be exploited for immediate economic benefit. Their greed and ignorance took a heavy toll on the land and all those it supported. Cowdrey documents not only the long decline but the painfully slow struggle to repair the damage of human folly. The eighteenth century saw widespread though ineffectual efforts to protect game and conserve the soil. In the nineteenth century the first hesitant steps were taken toward scientific flood control, forestry, wildlife protection, and improved medicine. In this century, the New Deal, the explosion in scientific knowledge, and the national environmental movement have spurred more rapid improvements. But the efforts to harness the South's great rivers, to save its wild species, and to avert serious environmental pollution have often had equivocal results.
Gretchen C. Daily
Nature's Services brings together world-renowned scientists from a variety of disciplines to examine the character and value of ecosystem services, the damage that has been done to them, and the consequent implications for human society. Contributors present a detailed synthesis of our current understanding of a suite of ecosystem services and a preliminary assessment of their economic value. Nature's Services represents one of the first efforts by scientists to provide an overview of the many benefits and services that nature offers to people and the extent to which we are all vitally dependent on those services. The book enhances our understanding of the value of the natural systems that surround us and can play an essential role in encouraging greater efforts to protect the earth's basic life-support systems before it is too late.
Jeffrey Young
In stories filled with human drama and high-tech excitement, Forbes Greatest Technology Stories takes you inside today's Digital Age business empires and introduces you to the dreamers and schemers, visionaries and moguls, and entrepreneurs and inventors who built them. Beginning in 1937, with the invention of the first crude electronic calculator by a renegade physics professor at the University of Iowa, and culminating with the Internet Wars on 1998, Jeffrey Young chronicles six decades of unbridled technological innovation and business genius. And he provides compelling portraits of entrepreneurs and inventors such as John Vincent Atanasoff, Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Andy Grove, and Craig McCaw, as well as the little-known inventors, audacious also-rans, and magnificent failures whose pioneering efforts gave birth to the Digital Age.