Bøger udgivet af Island Press

As world population grows, and more people move to cities and suburbs, they place greater stress on the operating system of our whole planet. But urbanization and increasing densities also present our best opportunity for improving sustainability, by transforming urban development into desirable, lower-carbon, compact and walkable communities and business centers.Jonathan Barnett and Larry Beasley seek to demonstrate that a sustainable built and natural environment can be achieved through ecodesign, which integrates the practice of planning and urban design with environmental conservation, through normal business practices and the kinds of capital programs and regulations already in use in most communities. Ecodesign helps adapt the design of our built environment to both a changing climate and a rapidly growing world, creating more desirable places in the process.In six comprehensively illustrated chapters, the authors explain ecodesign concepts, including the importance of preserving and restoring natural systems while also adapting to climate change; minimizing congestion on highways and at airports by making development more compact, and by making it easier to walk, cycle and take trains and mass transit; crafting and managing regulations to insure better placemaking and fulfill consumer preferences, while incentivizing preferred practices; creating an inviting and environmentally responsible public realm from parks to streets to forgotten spaces; and finally how to implement these ecodesign concepts.Throughout the book, the ecodesign framework is demonstrated by innovative practices that are already underway or have been accomplished in many cities and suburbs-from Hammarby Sjstad in Stockholm to False Creek North in Vancouver to Battery Park City in Manhattan, as well as many smaller-scale examples that can be adopted in any community.Ecodesign thinking is relevant to anyone who has a part in shaping or influencing the future of cities and suburbs - designers, public officials, and politicians.

Stormwater management as art? Absolutely. Rain is a resource that should be valued and celebrated, not merely treated as an urban design problem, and yet, traditional stormwater treatment methods often range from ugly to forgettable. This book shows that it's possible to effectively manage runoff while also creating attractive landscapes.

Despite an uncertain economy, the market for green building is exploding. The US green building market has expanded dramatically since 2008 and is projected to double in size by 2015 (from $42 billion in construction starts to $135 billion). But green-building pioneer Sim Van der Ryn says, "e;greening"e; our buildings is not enough. He advocates for "e;empathic design"e;, in which a designer not only works in concert with nature, but with an understanding of and empathy for the end user and for ones self. It is not just one of these connections, but all three that are necessary to design for a future that is more humane, equitable, and resilient.Sim's lifelong focus has been in shifting the paradigm in architecture and design. Instead of thinking about design primarily in relation to the infrastructure we live in and with-everything from buildings to wireless routing-he advocates for a focus on the people who use and are affected by this infrastructure. Basic design must include a real understanding of human ecology or end-user preferences. Understanding ones motivations and spirituality, Sim believes, is critical to designing with empathy for natural and human communities.In Design for an Empathic World Van der Ryn shares his thoughts and experience about the design of our world today. With a focus on the strengths and weaknesses in our approach to the design of our communities, regions, and buildings he looks at promising trends and projects that demonstrate how we can help create a better world for others and ourselves. Architects, urban designers, and students of architecture will all enjoy this beautifully illustrated book drawing on a rich and revered career of a noted leader in their field. The journey described in Design for an Empathic World will help to inspire change and foster the collaboration and thoughtfulness necessary to achieve a more empathic future.

How do you achieve effective low-carbon design beyond the building level? How do you create a community that is both liveable and sustainable? This title provides an evaluation of four first generation low-carbon neighbourhoods in Europe, and shows how those lessons can be applied.

With increased awareness of the role of plans in shaping urban and suburban landscapes has come increased criticism of planners and the planning profession. Developers, politicians, and citizens alike blame "e;poor planning"e; for a hof community ills. But what are plans really supposed to do? How do they work? What problems can they successfully address, and what is beyond their scope? In Urban Development, leading planning scholar Lewis Hopkins tackles these thorny issues as he explains the logic of plans for urban developmand justifies prescriptions about when and how to make them. He explores the concepts behind plans, some that are widely accepted but seldom examined, and others that modify conventional wisdom about the use and usefulness of plans. The book: places the role of plans and planners within the complex system of urban developmoffers examples from the history of plans and planning discusses when plans should be made (and when they should not be made) gives a realistic idea of what can be expected from plans examines ways of gauging the success or failure of plansThe author supports his explanations with graphics, case examples, and hypothetical illustrations that enliven, clarify, and make concrete the discussions of how decisions about plans are and should be made.Urban Developmwill give all those involved with planning human settlements a more thorough understanding of why and how plans are made, enabling them to make better choices about using and making plans. It is an important contribution that will be essential for students and faculty in planning theory, land use planning, and planning project courses.

Suitable for students in environmental studies, political science, and conflict resolution; academics and professionals in mediation and conflict resolution fields; and those concerned with environmental conflicts, this title shows how issues of culture, personality, history, and power effect environmental negotiations.

There is an emerging consensus that all is not well with today's market-centric economic model. Although it has delivered wealth over the last half century and pulled millions out of poverty, it is recession-prone, leaves too many unemployed, creates ecological scarcities and environmental risks, and widens the gap between the rich and the poor. Around $1 trillion a year in perverse subsidies and barriers to entry for alternative products maintain "e;business-as-usual"e; while obscuring their associated environmental and societal costs. The result is the broken system of social inequity, environmental degradation, and political manipulation that marks today's corporations.We aren't stuck with this dysfunctional corporate model, but business needs a new DNA if it is to enact the comprehensive approach we need. Pavan Sukhdev lays out a sweeping new vision for tomorrow's corporation: one that will increase human wellbeing and social equity, decrease environmental risks and ecological losses, and still generate profit. Through a combination of internal changes in corporate governance and external regulations and policies, Corporation 2020 can become a reality in the next decade-and it must, argues Sukhdev, if we are to avert catastrophic social imbalance and ecological harm.Corporation 2020 presents new approaches to measuring the true costs of business and the corporation's obligation to society. From his insightful look into the history of the corporation to his thoughtful discussion of the steps needed to craft a better corporate model, Sukhdev offers a hopeful vision for the role of business in shaping a more equitable, sustainable future.

The need to understand and address large-scale environmental problems that are difficult to study in controlled environments-issues ranging from climate change to overfishing to invasive species-is driving the field of ecology in new and important directions. Observation and Ecology documents that transformation, exploring how scientists and researchers are expanding their methodological toolbox to incorporate an array of new and reexamined observational approaches-from traditional ecological knowledge to animal-borne sensors to genomic and remote-sensing technologies-to track, study, and understand currenvironmental problems and their implications.The authors paint a clear picture of what observational approaches to ecology are and where they fit in the context of ecological science. They consider the full range of observational abilities we have available to us and explore the challenges and practical difficulties of using a primarily observational approach to achieve scientific understanding. They also show how observations can be a bridge from ecological science to education, environmental policy, and resource management.Observations in ecology can play a key role in understanding our changing planet and the consequences of human activities on ecological processes. This book will serve as an important resource for future scientists and conservation leaders who are seeking a more holistic and applicable approach to ecological science.

Shows that change undertaken at the building and community level can reach carbon-reduction goals rapidly. This title highlights tactics that create multiplier effects, which means that ecologically driven change can shore up economic opportunity, can make more productive workplaces, and can help revive neglected communities.

Identifies the obstacles to creating thriving environments, and presents a six-step process to overcome them: prospect, polish, propose, prototype, promote, and present. The author illustrates the process with ten projects, from Envision Utah to Open Space Seattle. It is suitable for planners, urban designers, community developers, and students.

We have entered a new phase of the global food crisis. Wealthy countries that import much of their food, along with private investors, are racing to buy or lease huge swaths of farmland abroad. This book examines this burgeoning trend in all its complexity, considering the implications for investors, host countries, and the world as a whole.

Today, there are more than three parking spaces for every car in the United States. No one likes searching for a space, but in many areas, there is an oversupply, wasting valuable land, damaging the environment, and deterring development. Richard W. Willson argues that the problem stems from outdated minimum parking requirements. In this practical guide, he shows practitioners how to reform parking requirements in a way that supports planning goals and creates vibrant cities.Local planners and policymakers, traffic engineers, developers, and community members are actively seeking this information as they institute principles of Smart Growth. But making effective changes requires more than relying on national averages or copying information from neighboring communities. Instead, Willson shows how professionals can confidently create requirements based on local parking data, an understanding of future trends affecting parking use, and clear policy choices.After putting parking and parking requirements in context, the book offers an accessible tool kit to get started and repair outdated requirements. It looks in depth at parking requirements for multifamily developments, including income-restricted housing, workplaces, and mixed-use, transit-oriented development. Case studies for each type of parking illustrate what works, what doesn't, and how to overcome challenges. Willson also explores the process of codifying regulations and how to work with stakeholders to avoid political conflicts.With Parking Reform Made Easy, practitioners will learn, step-by-step, how to improve requirements. The result will be higher density, healthier, more energy-efficient, and livable communities. This book will be exceptionally useful for local and regional land use and transportation planners, transportation engineers, real estate developers, citizen activists, and students of transportation planning and urban policy.

With BPA in baby bottles, mercury in fish, and lead in computer monitors, the world has become a toxic place. The author traces the development of life's defence systems - the mechanisms that transform, excrete, and stow away potentially harmful chemicals - from over three billion years ago to today.

Nature's Fortune shows how viewing nature as green infrastructure allows for breakthroughs not only in conservation, protecting water supplies; enhancing the health of fisheries; making cities more sustainable, liveable, and safe; and dealing with unavoidable climate change, but in economic progress, as well.

From New York City's urban forest and farmland in Virginia to the vast Sonoran Desert of Arizona and riverside parks in Vancouver, Washington, green infrastructure is becoming a priority for cities, counties, and states across America. Recognition of the need to manage our natural assets-trees, soils, water, and habitats-as part of our green infrastructure is vital to creating livable places and healthful landscapes. But the land managemdecisions about how to create plans, where to invest money, and how to get the mfrom these investments are complex, influenced by differing landscapes, goals, and stakeholders.Strategic Green Infrastructure Planning addresses the nuts and bolts of planning and preserving natural assets at a variety of scales-from dense urban environments to scenic rural landscapes. A practical guide to creating effective and well-crafted plans and then implementing them, the book presents a six-step process developed and field-tested by the Green Infrastructure Center in Charlottesville, Virginia. Well-organized chapters explain how each step, from setting goals to implementing opportunities, can be applied to a variety of scenarios, customizable to the reader's target geographical location. Chapters draw on a diverse group of case studies, from the arid open spaces of the Sonoran Desert to the streets of Jersey City. Abundant full color maps, photographs, and illustrations complemthe text.For planners, elected officials, developers, conservationists, and others interested in the creation and maintenance of open space lands and urban green infrastructure projects or promoting a healthy economy, this book offers a comprehensive yet flexible approach to conceiving, refining, and implementing successful projects.

There has been a revolution in urban transportation over the past five years-set off by start-ups across the US and internationally. Sleek, legible mobility platforms are connecting people to cars, trains, buses, and bikes as never before, opening up a range of new transportation options while improving existing ones. While many large city governments, such as Chicago, New York, and Washington, D.C., have begun to embrace creative forms and processes of government, mstill operate under the weight of an unwieldy, risk-averse bureaucracy.With the advof self-driving vehicles and other technological shifts upon us, Gabe Klein asks how we can close the gap between the energized, aggressive world of start-ups and the complex bureaucracies struggling to change beyond a geologic time scale. From his experience as a food-truck entrepreneur to a ZipCar executive and a city transportation commissioner, Klein's career has focused on bridging the public-private divide, finding and celebrating shared goals, and forging better cities with more nimble, consumer-oriented bureaucracies.In Start-Up City, Klein, with David Vega-Barachowitz, demonstrates how to affect big, directional change in cities-and how to do it fast. Klein's objective is to inspire what he calls "e;public entrepreneurship,"e; a start-up-pace energy within the public sector, brought about by leveraging the immense resources at its disposal. Klein offers guidance for cutting through the morass, and a roadmap for getting real, meaningful projects done quickly and having fun while doing it.This book is for anyone who wants to change the way we live in cities without waiting for the glacial pace of change in government.

How long should a leaf live? When should blueberries ripen? And what shoulda clever moose eat? Questions like these may seem simple or downright strange-yet they form the backbone of natural history, a discipline that fostered some of our mimportant scientific theories, from natural selection to glaciation. Through careful, patiobservations of the organisms that live in an area, their distributions, and how they interact with other species, we gain a more complete picture of the world around us, and our place in it.In What Should a Clever Moose Eat?, John Pastor explores the natural history of the North Woods, an immense and complex forest that stretches from the western shore of Lake Superior to the far coast of Newfoundland. The North Woods is one of the mecologically and geologically interesting places on the planet, with a hof natural history questions arising from each spruce or sugar maple. From the geological history of the region to the shapes of leaves and the relationship between aspens, caterpillars, and predators, Pastor delves into a captivating range of topics as diverse as the North Woods themselves. Through his meticulous observations of the natural world, scientists and nonscientists alike learn to ask natural history questions and form their own theories, gaining a greater understanding of and love for the North Woods-and other natural places precious to them.In the tradition of Charles Darwin and Henry David Thoreau, John Pastor is a joyful observer of nature who makes sharp connections and moves deftly from observation to theory. Take a walk in John Pastor's North Woods-you'll come away with a new appreciation for details, for the game trails, beaver ponds, and patterns of growth around you, and won't look at the natural world in the same way again.

What we make and buy is a major indicator of society's collective priorities. Among twenty-four key trends, Vital Signs Volume 22 explores significant global patterns in production and consumption. The result is a fascinating snapshot of how we invest our resources and the implications for the world's well-being.The book examines developments in six main areas: energy, environment and climate, transportation, food and agriculture, global economy and resources, and population and society. Readers will learn how aquaculture is making gains on wild fish catches, where high speed rail is accelerating, why plastic production is on the rise, who is escaping chronic hunger, and who is still suffering.Researchers at the Worldwatch Institute not only provide the most up-to-date statistics, but put them in context. The analysis in Vital Signsteaches us bothabout our current priorities and how they could be shaped to create a better future.

Can nature-in all its unruly wildness-be an integral part of creative landscape design? In her beautifully illustrated book, Wild by Design, award-winning designer Margie Ruddick urges designers to look beyond the rules often imposed by both landscaping convention and sustainability checklists. Instead, she offers a set of principles for a more creative and intuitive approach that challenges the entrenched belief that natural processes cannot complemhigh-level landscape design.Wild by Design defines and explains the five fundamental strategies Ruddick employs, often in combination, to give life, beauty, and meaning to landscapes: Reinvention, Restoration, Conservation, Regeneration, and Expression. Drawing on her own projects-from New York City's Queens Plaza, formerly a concrete jungle of traffic, to a desertscape backyard in Baja, California, to the Living Water Park in Chengdu, China-she offers guidance on creating beautiful, healthy landscapes that successfully reconnect people with larger natural systems.A revealing look into the approach of one of sustainable landscape design's minnovative practitioners, Wild by Design stretches the boundaries of landscape design, offering readers a set of broader, more flexible strategies and practical examples that allow for the unexpected exuberance of nature to be a welcome part of our gardens, parks, backyards, and cities.

Resilient by Design provides managers with a more complete approach to creating lasting success in a changing world. Rich with examples and case studies, it explains how to connect the external systems, stakeholders, communities, infrastructure, supply chains, and natural resources, to create innovative organisations that survive and prosper.

In Satellites in the High Country, journalist and adventurer Jason Mark travels beyond the bright lights and certainties of our cities to seek wildness wherever it survives. In California's Point Reyes National Seashore, a battle over oyster farming and designated wilderness pits former allies against one another, as locals wonder whether wilderness should be untouched, farmed, or something in between. In Washington's Cascade Mountains, a modern-day wild woman and her students learn to tan hides and start fires without matches, attempting to connect with a primal past out of reach for the rest of society. And in Colorado's High Country, dark skies and clear air reveal a breathtaking expanse of stars, flawed only by the arc of a satellite passing-beauty interrupted by the traffic of a million conversations. These expeditions to the edges of civilization's grid show us that, although our notions of pristine nature may be shattering, the mystery of the wild still exists-and in fact, it is more crucial than ever.

Anyone who has ever stood on the shores of Monterey Bay, watching the rolling ocean waves and frolicking otters, knows it is a unique place. Monterey is one of the most celebrated shorelines in the world. This title tells the story of life, death, and revival of the Bay.

Provides the scientific foundation and guidance necessary for coastal zone stewards to initiate salt marsh tidal restoration programmes. This book is suitable for managers, planners, regulators, and others engaged in planning, designing, and implementing projects or programmes aimed at restoring tidal flow to tide-restricted or diked salt marshes.

Begins with an overview and introduction to resilience thinking and then takes the reader through the process of describing systems, assessing their resilience, and intervening as appropriate. This book offers a scientifically robust guide through the real-world application of the concept of resilience.

Plugged by no fewer than twenty-five dams, the Colorado is the world's most regulated river, providing most of the water supply of Las Vegas, Tucson, and San Diego, and much of the power and water of Los Angeles and Phoenix. This book takes you on a journey down the river and through mankind's relationship with it.

The jaguar is one of the mmysterious and least-known big cats of the world. The largest cat in the Americas, it has survived an onslaught of environmental and human threats partly because of an evolutionary history unique among wild felines, but also because of a power and indomitable spirit so strong, the jaguar has shaped indigenous cultures and the beliefs of early civilizations on two continents. In An Indomitable Beast: The Remarkable Journey of the Jaguar, big-cat expert Alan Rabinowitz shares his own personal journey to conserve a species that, despite its past resilience, is now on a slide toward extinction if something is not done to preserve the pathways it prowls through an ever-changing, ever-shifting landscape dominated by humans. Rabinowitz reveals how he learned from newly available genetic data that the jaguar was a single species connected genetically throughout its entire range from Mexico to Argentina, making it unique among all other large carnivores in the world. In a mix of personal discovery and scientific inquiry, he sweeps his readers deep into the realm of the jaguar, offering fascinating accounts from the field. Enhanced with maps, tables, and color plates, An Indomitable Beast brings important new research to life for scientists, anthropologists, and animal lovers alike. This book is not only about jaguars, but also about tenacity and survival. From the jaguar we can learn better strategies for saving other species and also how to save ourselves when faced with immediate and long-term catastrophic changes to our environment.

Management policies have tended to promote a one-size-fits-all mentality for large, complex landscapes. The author argues that instead we need a science-based approach that accounts for the dynamic nature of complex systems and gives local stakeholders a say in their futures.

What would it be like to live in a world with no predators roaming our landscapes? Would their elimination, which humans have sought with ever greater urgency in rectimes, bring about a pastoral, peaceful human civilization? Or in fact is their existence critical to our own, and do we need to be doing more to assure their health and the health of the landscapes they need to thrive?In The Carnivore Way, Cristina Eisenberg argues compellingly for the necessity of top predators in large, undisturbed landscapes, and how a continental-long corridor-carnivore way-provides the room they need to roam and connected landscapes that allow them to disperse. Eisenberg follows the footsteps of six large carnivores-wolves, grizzly bears, lynx, jaguars, wolverines, and cougars-on a 7,500-mile wildlife corridor from Alaska to Mexico along the Rocky Mountains. Backed by robust science, she shows how their well-being is a critical factor in sustaining healthy landscapes and how it is possible for humans and large carnivores to coexist peacefully and even to thrive.University students in natural resource science programs, resource managers, conservation organizations, and anyone curious about carnivore ecology and managemin a changing world will find a thoughtful guide to large carnivore conservation that dispels long-held myths about their ecology and contributions to healthy, resililandscapes.

Suitable for practitioners and theoreticians from a variety of backgrounds and perspectives from backyard volunteers to trained academic scientists and professional consultants, this title focuses on clarifying terminology, stressing the importance of precision in language for a field that is quickly becoming an established discipline.

The author has spent much of his life traversing wild and isolated places in his quest to understand and conserve threatened species - from mountain gorillas in the Virunga to snow leopards in the Himalaya. This book presents his account of three decades of exploration in the most remote stretches of Tibet.