A Plague Of Rats And Rubbervines

Author : Yvonne Baskin
Publisher : Island Press
ISBN 13 : 1610911008
Total Pages : 330 pages
Book Rating : 4.09/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book A Plague of Rats and Rubbervines written by Yvonne Baskin and published by Island Press. This book was released on 2013-04-15 with total page 330 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The human love of novelty and desire to make one place look like another, coupled with massive increases in global trade and transport, are creating a growing economic and ecological threat. The same forces that are rapidly "McDonaldizing" the world's diverse cultures are also driving us toward an era of monotonous, weedy, and uniformly impoverished landscapes. Unique plant and animal communities are slowly succumbing to the world's "rats and rubbervines" -- animals like zebra mussels and feral pigs, and plants like kudzu and water hyacinth -- that, once moved into new territory, can disrupt human enterprise and well-being as well as native habitats and biodiversity. From songbird-eating snakes in Guam to cheatgrass in the Great Plains, "invasives" are wreaking havoc around the world. In A Plague of Rats and Rubbervines, widely published science writer Yvonne Baskin draws on extensive research to provide an engaging and authoritative overview of the problem of harmful invasive alien species. She takes the reader on a worldwide tour of grasslands, gardens, waterways, and forests, describing the troubles caused by exotic organisms that run amok in new settings and examining how commerce and travel on an increasingly connected planet are exacerbating this oldest of human-created problems. She offers examples of potential solutions and profiles dedicated individuals worldwide who are working tirelessly to protect the places and creatures they love. While our attention is quick to focus on purposeful attempts to disrupt our lives and economies by releasing harmful biological agents, we often ignore equally serious but much more insidious threats, those that we inadvertently cause by our own seemingly harmless actions. A Plague of Rats and Rubbervines takes a compelling look at this underappreciated problem and sets forth positive suggestions for what we as consumers, gardeners, travelers, nurserymen, fishermen, pet owners, business people -- indeed all of us who by our very local choices drive global commerce -- can do to help. "

Author : Yvonne Baskin
Publisher : Turtleback Books
ISBN 13 : 9780613915144
Total Pages : 377 pages
Book Rating : 4.43/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book A Plague of Rats and Rubbervines written by Yvonne Baskin and published by Turtleback Books. This book was released on 2003-11-01 with total page 377 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Explores the issue of bioinvasions, covering the extent and consequences of human rearrangement of the Earth's species and the search for solutions.

Author : Mark R Finlay
Publisher : Rutgers University Press
ISBN 13 : 9780813548708
Total Pages : 360 pages
Book Rating : 4.05/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book Growing American Rubber written by Mark R Finlay and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 2009-04-24 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Growing American Rubber explores America's quest during tense decades of the twentieth century to identify a viable source of domestic rubber. Straddling international revolutions and world wars, this unique and well-researched history chronicles efforts of leaders in business, science, and government to sever American dependence on foreign suppliers. Mark Finlay plots out intersecting networks of actors including Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, prominent botanists, interned Japanese Americans, Haitian peasants, and ordinary citizensùall of whom contributed to this search for economic self-sufficiency. Challenging once-familiar boundaries between agriculture and industry and field and laboratory, Finlay also identifies an era in which perceived boundaries between natural and synthetic came under review. Although synthetic rubber emerged from World War II as one solution, the issue of ever-diminishing natural resources and the question of how to meet twenty-first-century consumer, military, and business demands lingers today.

Author : Daniel R. Headrick
Publisher : Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN 13 : 0190864710
Total Pages : 625 pages
Book Rating : 4.12/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book Humans Versus Nature written by Daniel R. Headrick and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2020 with total page 625 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This book is about the ongoing conflict between humanity and the natural environment. Over the past 200,000 years, humans have multiplied and populated the Earth. When they domesticated plants and animals and replaced foraging with agriculture and herding, they depleted natural resources, deforested the land, and caused mass extinctions. But nature has agency too, causing pandemics of plague, smallpox, measles, influenza, and other diseases and a climate change called the Little Ice Age. In recent centuries, industrialization has accelerated extinctions, deforestation, and resource depletion, even in the oceans. Twentieth-century developmentalism and mass consumerism have caused global warming and other climate changes. Environmental movements have argued for the need to mitigate the negative consequences of technological and economic change. The future of humanity and the Earth depends on choices between achieving a sustainable balance between humans and nature, carrying on as before, or learning to manage the biosphere. environment, mass extinction, domestication, agriculture, pandemic, industrialization, developmentalism, consumerism, global warming"--

Author : John Scott Watson
Publisher : University of Illinois Press
ISBN 13 : 0252097971
Total Pages : 232 pages
Book Rating : 4.73/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book Prairie Crossing written by John Scott Watson and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2016-01-30 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Carved out of century-old farmland near Chicago, the Prairie Crossing development is a novel experiment in urban public policy that preserves 69 percent of the land as open space. The for-profit project has set out to do nothing less than use access to nature as a means to challenge America's failed culture of suburban sprawl. The first comprehensive look at an American conservation community, Prairie Crossing goes beyond windmills and nest boxes to examine an effort to connect adults to the land while creating a healthy and humane setting for raising a new generation attuned to nature. John Scott Watson places Prairie Crossing within the wider context of suburban planning, revealing how two first-time developers implemented a visionary new land ethic that saved green space by building on it. The remarkable achievements include a high rate of resident civic participation, the reestablishment of a thriving prairie ecosystem, the reintroduction of endangered and threatened species, and improved water and air quality. Yet, as Watson shows, considerations like economic uncertainty, lack of racial and class diversity, and politics have challenged, and continue to challenge, Prairie Crossing and its residents.

Author : William Stolzenburg
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN 13 : 1608193314
Total Pages : 218 pages
Book Rating : 4.18/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book Rat Island written by William Stolzenburg and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2011-06-21 with total page 218 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Rat Island rises from the icy gray waters of the Bering Sea, a mass of volcanic rock covered with tundra, midway between Alaska and Siberia. Once a remote sanctuary for enormous flocks of seabirds, the island gained a new name when shipwrecked rats colonized, savaging the nesting birds by the thousands. Now, on this and hundreds of other remote islands around the world, a massive-and massively controversial-wildlife rescue mission is under way. Islands, making up just 3 percent of Earth's landmass, harbor more than half of its endangered species. These fragile ecosystems, home to unique species that evolved in peaceful isolation, have been catastrophically disrupted by mainland predators-rats, cats, goats, and pigs ferried by humans to islands around the globe. To save these endangered islanders, academic ecologists have teamed up with professional hunters and semiretired poachers in a radical act of conservation now bent on annihilating the invaders. Sharpshooters are sniping at goat herds from helicopters. Biological SWAT teams are blanketing mountainous isles with rat poison. Rat Island reveals a little-known and much-debated side of today's conservation movement, founded on a cruel-to-be-kind philosophy. Touring exotic locales with a ragtag group of environmental fighters, William Stolzenburg delivers both perilous adventure and intimate portraits of human, beast, hero, and villain. And amid manifold threats to life on Earth, he reveals a new reason to hope.

Author : Benjamin Meiches
Publisher : U of Minnesota Press
ISBN 13 : 1452969442
Total Pages : 210 pages
Book Rating : 4.42/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book Nonhuman Humanitarians written by Benjamin Meiches and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 2023-06-27 with total page 210 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examining the appearance of nonhuman animals laboring alongside humans in humanitarian operations Both critical and mainstream scholarly work on humanitarianism have largely been framed from anthropocentric perspectives highlighting humanity as the rationale for providing care to others. In Nonhuman Humanitarians, Benjamin Meiches explores the role of animals laboring alongside humans in humanitarian operations, generating new ethical possibilities of care in humanitarian practice. Nonhuman Humanitarians examines how these animals not only improve specific practices of humanitarian aid but have started to transform the basic tenets of humanitarianism. Analyzing case studies of mine-clearance dogs, milk-producing cows and goats, and disease-identifying rats, Nonhuman Humanitarians ultimately argues that nonhuman animal contributions problematize foundational assumptions about the emotional and rational capacities of humanitarian actors as well as the ethical focus on human suffering that defines humanitarianism. Meiches reveals that by integrating nonhuman animals into humanitarian practice, several humanitarian organizations have effectively demonstrated that care, compassion, and creativity are creaturely rather than human and that responses to suffering and injustice do not—and cannot—stop at the boundaries of the human.

Author : Daniel Imhoff
Publisher : Post Carbon Institute
ISBN 13 : 0984630422
Total Pages : 552 pages
Book Rating : 4.24/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book Farming and the Fate of Wild Nature written by Daniel Imhoff and published by Post Carbon Institute. This book was released on 2012-07-16 with total page 552 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Farming and the Fate of Wild Nature addresses an urgent and complex issue facing communities and cultures throughout the world: the need for heightened land stewardship and conservation in an era of diminishing natural resources. Agricultural lands in rural areas are being purchased for development. Water scarcities are pitting urban and development expansion against agriculture and conservation needs. The farming population is ageing and retiring, while those who remain struggle against low commodity prices, international competition, rising production costs, and the threat of disappearing subsidies. We are living amidst a major extinction crisis--much of it driven by agriculture--as well as an increasing shift toward a global urban populace. The modern diet, driven by a grain-fed livestock industry, is no longer connected with the ecosystems that support it. In international circles, experts are arguing that further intensification of agriculture (through industrialization and genetic modification) will be necessary to both feed an exploding human population and to save what is left of wild biodiversity. This book takes up where its predecessor, the award-winning Farming with the Wild, left off. Featuring a wide range of in-depth essays, articles, and other materials by such authors as Aldo Leopold, Wendell Berry, Michael Pollan, Fred Kirschenmann, and Daniel Imhoff, this book persuasively demonstrates that farm and ranch operations which coexist with wild nature are necessary to sustain biodiversity and beauty on the landscape. In fact, as this invaluable educational resource demonstrates, they are essential in the challenge of building sane, healthy, and hopeful human societies.

Author :
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 468 pages
Book Rating : 4.11/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book Park Science written by and published by . This book was released on 1997 with total page 468 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Author : Paul R. Ehrlich
Publisher : Island Press
ISBN 13 : 1610910524
Total Pages : 464 pages
Book Rating : 4.21/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book One With Nineveh written by Paul R. Ehrlich and published by Island Press. This book was released on 2013-04-10 with total page 464 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Named a Notable Book for 2005 by the American Library Association, One with Nineveh is a fresh synthesis of the major issues of our time, now brought up to date with an afterword for the paperback edition. Through lucid explanations, telling anecdotes, and incisive analysis, the book spotlights the three elephants in our global living room-rising consumption, still-growing world population, and unchecked political and economic inequity-that together are increasingly shaping today's politics and humankind's future. One with Nineveh brilliantly puts today's political and environmental debates in a larger context and offers some bold proposals for improving our future prospect.