Conservation biology literature in print
Here is a sampling of written literature on conservation topics that we've found useful (not a comprehensive list).
Against the Brownlash
Ehrlich, P.R. and A.H. Ehrlich (1996). Betrayal of Science and Reason: How Anti-Environmental Rhetoric Threatens Our Future. Washington, DC, Island Press.
A rebuttal of many misconceptions about population growth and environmental issues.
A CLEAR View: The bulletin of CLEAR, the anti-environmentalism watchdog. CLEAR helps citizens understand and counter misinformation about environmental issues and the impacts of environmental law on the economy and private property. To subscribe to the CLEAR_View read only list, send an email message to: list_requests@c-t-g.com In the body of the message, type "subscribe CLEAR_View." The subject line can be blank.
Helvarg, D. (1994). The War against the Greens; The "Wise Use" Movement, the New Right, and Anti-environmental Violence, San Francisco, CA, Sierra Club Books.
Biodiversity
Baskin, Y. (1997). The Work of Nature: How the Diversity of Life Sustains Us. Washington, DC, Island Press.
A popular explication of ecosystems services (nature's services).
Heywood, V.H., Ed. (1995). Global Biodiversity Assessment.Cambridge, UK. Cambridge University Press.
An exhaustive survey of the world's species and their ecological health; a critical resource.
Wilson, E.O. (1992). The Diversity of Life. Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press.
Ehrlich, P.R. and A.H. Ehrlich (1992). The value of biodiversity. Ambio 21(3): 219-226.
An attempt to assess the real (but non-monetized) value of other species to human well-being.
Hughes, J.B., G.C. Daily, et al. (1997). Population diversity: its extent and extinction. Science 278(24 October): 689-692.
The escalating losses of populations -- genetic variants within species - and the importance of preserving them.
Climate Change
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) (1996). Climate Change 1995. Cambridge UK, Cambridge University Press.
A summary of the second report of this remarkable global organization of scientists who are synthesizing the scientific findings about the causes and consequences of global climate change, ways that civilization might adapt to it and retard its progress.
Schneider, S.H. (1989). Global Warming; Are We Entering the Greenhouse Century?. San Francisco, Sierra Club. A popular summary of the causes and probable effects of global warming.
Schneider, S.H. (1997). Laboratory Earth: The Planetary Gamble We Can't Afford to Lose. New York, Basic Books.
A popular summary of the causes, effects, and possible approaches to mitigation of global warming.
Schneider, S.H. and R. Londer (1984). The Coevolution of Climate and Life. San Francisco, Sierra Club Books.
A history of Earth, focusing on how the conditions of the early planet determined the course of early evolution of life and how that life's evolution changed the planet's atmosphere, oceans, land, and climate over the eons.
Conservation
Wilcove, D.S. (1999). The Condor's Shadow: The Loss and Recovery of Wildlife in America. New York, W.H. Freeman.
Disease Connections
Daily, G.C. and P.R. Ehrlich (1996). Global change and human susceptibilty to disease. Annual Review of Energy and the Environment 21: 125-144.
The interactions of human population growth and increasing density, mobility, and environmental disturbance are increasing vulnerability to disease outbreaks.
Garrett, L. (1994). The Coming Plague; Newly Emerging Diseases in a World out of Balance. New York, Farr, Strauss, and Giroux.
Ecosystem Services
Daily, G.C., Ed. (1997). Nature's Services: Societal Dependence on Natural Ecosystems. Washington, DC, Island Press.
Ecosystem services and their importance.
Energy and the Environment
Holdren, J. P. (1990). Energy in transition. Scientific American 263:156-163.
A study of worldwide energy use and scenarios that could lead to patterns of use that were both more equitable and less environmentally damaging by the end of the 21st century.
Holdren, J.P. (1991). Population and the energy problem. Population and Environment 12:231-255.
An examination of the relationship between population size, growth, and energy use patterns.
Environment (general)
Ehrlich, P.R. and A.H. Ehrlich (1991). Healing the Planet. Reading, MA, Addison-Wesley.
A survey of the population-resources-environment predicament and suggested policies to manage it.
Environment and equity
Dasgupta, P. (1993). An Inquiry into Well-being and Destitution.Oxford, UK. Oxford University Press.
An analysis of the social and environmenal effects of poverty by a distinguished economist.
Ehrlich, P.R., A.H. Ehrlich, et al. (1995). The Stork and the Plow: The Equity Answer to the Human Dilemma. New York, Putnam.
An exploration of the connections between population growth, environmental deterioration, and equity within and between societies and between the sexes.
Environment and Security
Myers, N. (1993). Ultimate Security: The Environmental Basis of Political Stability. New York, Norton.
Homer-Dixon, T. and V. Percival (1996). Environmental Scarcity and Violent Conflict: Briefing Book. Washington, DC, American Association for the Advancement of Science.
How environmental degradation and scarce resources contribute to violent conflicts; several case histories.
Kennedy, D., D. Holloway, et al. (1998). Environmental Quality and Regional Conflict. New York, NY, Carnegie Corporation.
A Carnegie study on the connections between conflict and environmental deterioration.
Environmental economics
Costanza, R., Ed. (1991). Ecological Economics: The Science and Management of Sustainability. New York, Columbia University Press.
Daly, H. E. and J. B. Cobb Jr (1989). For the Common Good: Redirecting the Economy toward Community, the Environment, and a Sustainable Future. Boston, Beacon Press.
Douthwaite, R. (1993). The Growth Illusion. Tulsa, OK, Council Oaks Books.
A rousing debunking of the fixation on growth.
Gowdy, J. (1994). Coevolutionary Economics: The Economy, Society and the Environment. Boston, MA, Kluwer Academic.
Jansson, A., M. Hammer, et al., Eds. (1994). Investing in Natural Capital: The Ecological Economics Approach to Sustainability. Washington, DC, Island Press.
Myers, N. and J. Kent (1998). Perverse Subsidies. Winnipeg, Manitoba, International Institute for Sustainable Development.
How government subsidies can pervert treatment of resources.
Schmidheiny, S. (1992). Changing Course: A Global Business Perspective on Development and the Environment. Cambridge, MA, MIT Press.
A founder of The Natural Step describes how business interests can become part of the solution to the environmental dilemma rather than part of the cause.
Ehrlich, P. R. (1989). The limits to substitution: Metaresource depletion and a new economic-ecological paradigm. Ecological Economics 1:9-16. An early paper in the collaboration between ecologists and economists.
Food
Conway, G. (1997). The Doubly Green Revolution: Food for All in the 21st Century. Ithaca, NY, Cornell University Press.
Dyson, T. (1999). World food trends and prospects to 2025. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA 96: 5929-5936.
Ehrlich, P.R., A.H. Ehrlich, and G.C. Daily. (1993). Food security, population, and environment. Population and Development Review 19(1):1-32.
A study of the world food situation, population trends, and the potential impacts of environmental deterioration on future food production.
Falcon, W. (1995). Food Policy Analysis, 1975-95: Reflections by a Practitioner. Washington, DC, International Food Policy Research Institute: 1-16.
Naylor, R. (1996). Intensive Agricultural Production. Annual Review of Energy and the Environment 21: 99-123.
The environmental problems and constraints to intensive agriculture.
Naylor, R.L., R.J. Goldburg, et al. (1998). Nature's subsidies to shrimp and salmon farming. Science 282: 883-884 (30 October).
Like terrestrial agriculture, fish farming carries environmental costs.
Pinstrup-Anderson, P., R. Pandya-Lorch, et al. (1999). World Food Prospects: Critical Issues for the Early Twenty-first Century. Washington, DC, International Food Policy Research Institute: 1-32.
Postel, S. (1990). Water for Agriculture: Facing the Limits. Washington, DC, Worldwatch Institute.
A consideration of the increasing constraints on availability of fresh water for agriculture.
Postel, S. (1999). Pillar of Sand: Can the Irrigation Miracle Last? New York, NY, W.W. Norton.
An exploration of the environmental problems that attend irrigation.
Forests
Myers, N. (1996). The world's forests: problems and potentials. Environmental Conservation 23(2):156-168.
An assessment of global forests and the outlook for them.
Also see, on the Web: UNEP report on the world's remaining closed forest canopy.
Global Change (general)
Vitousek, P.M., J.D. Aber, et al. (1997). Human alteration of the global nitrogen cycle: sources and consequences. Ecological Applications 7(3):737-750.
Vitousek, P.M., C.M. D'Antonio, et al. (1996). Biological invasions as global environmental change. American Scientist 84:468-478 (September-October).
On the environmental damage and biodiversity loss that introduced species cause around the world.
Vitousek, P.M., H.A. Mooney, et al. (1997). Human domination of Earth's ecosystems. Science 277:494-499 (25 July).
Turner II, B.L., Ed. (1990). The Earth as Transformed by Human Action: Global and Regional Changes in the Biosphere over the Past 300 Years. Cambridge, UK, Cambridge University Press.
Daily, G.C. (1995). Restoring value to the world's degraded lands. Science 269:350-354 (21 July).
Describes the extent of degradation and proposes measures to reverse it.
Hormone Mimicking Pollutants
Colborn, T., D. Dumanoski, and J.P. Myers (1996). Our Stolen Future. New York, Dutton.
The definitive popular account of the insidious and long-overlooked problem of subtle consequences of exposure to hormone-mimicking chemicals.
Oceans
Safina, C. (1997). Song for the Blue Ocean. New York, Henry Holt.
A poetic appeal to save the biodiversity and ecological integrity of the world's oceans.
Population
National Academy of Sciences USA (1993). A Joint Statement by Fifty-eight of the World's Scientific Academies. Population Summit of the World's Scientific Academies, New Delhi, India, National Academy Press.
A strong statement by the world's leading scientific academies on the risks of overpopulation and unsustainable development.
Union of Concerned Scientists (1993). World Scientists' Warning to Humanity. Cambridge, MA. Union of Concerned Scientists.
Another warning about overpopulation and unsustainable activities, signed by hundreds of distinguished scientists, including dozens of Nobel Prize winners.
Ehrlich, P.R. and A.H. Ehrlich (1990). The Population Explosion. New York, Simon and Schuster.
An exposition of the population-resources-environment predicament, focusing on human population dynamics, social issues, and policies.
Daily, G.C., A.H. Ehrlich, et al. (1994). Optimum human population size. Population and Environment 15(6): 469-475.
An analysis based on estimates of the world's carrying capacity.
Daily, G.C. and P.R. Ehrlich (1992). Population, sustainability, and Earth's carrying capacity. BioScience 42(10):761-771.
Wackernagel, M. and W. Rees (1996). Our Ecological Footprint: Reducing Human Impact on the Earth. Gabriola Island, BC, New Society Publishers.
A pioneering study on how impacts can be measured and how they might be reduced.
Population Reference Bureau. World Population Data Sheet. Washington, DC 20009-5728, Population Reference Bureau, 1875 Connecticut Ave., Suite 520.
An annual publication, this small data sheet or booklet contains a highly useful snapshot in time of the population, its size, growth, and other demographic, social, and economic factors of each nation, region, and the world.
Water
Postel, S.L., G.C. Daily, and P.R. Ehrlich. (1996). Human appropriation of renewable fresh water. Science 271:785-788 (9 February).
An assessment of how much of the world's available fresh water is used by humanity.
Gleick, P.H., Ed. (1993). Water in Crisis: A Guide to the World's Fresh Water Resources. New York, Oxford University Press.
An encyclopedia of water resources.
Gleick, P.H. 1998 and 2000, The World's Water 1998-1999 and 2000-2001. Washington DC, Island Press.
A biennial report on freshwater resources.
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