Environment and Nature Books

This comprehensive book is written by one of the worlds most prominent herpetologists and it certainly shows! Very practical and well written book covering aspects of amphibian conservation, including the Global Amphibian Decline. Highly recommended.

A must for anyone concerned with the people of India. This book is written in simple language and is precise. I know people whose whole attitude toward our Indian problem have changed after reading this book. This book clearly shows how even the middle-class Indians have been responsible (indirectly) for the degeneration of India.

Excellent educational resource for students who have difficulty extracting important points and explaining material from reading passages. Content is perfect for Environmental Science-HS. Walks students through the process of rewriting the material in their own words and making analogies. It is classified as ESL, but I find it useful for any student who has difficulty explaining content.

I would highly recommend this book to anyone interested in vegetation ecology and plant geography. Most other books on these subjects tend to focus on one continent or country, which may in some respects give more detail but tend to leave out "the big picture." Not that I have any complaints about the amount of detail here. There is a brief but thorough introductory chapter, then each biome type (tropical savannas, polar and high mountain tundras, terrestrial wetlands, etc.) is described in its own chapter including sections on its climate, soils, regional distribution, species adaptations, and numerous other subjects. It is a great read, and as one of my professors says "I wish I had written it."

This book contains a lot of mathematics. Even for master degree students, it is not easy to understand. You need be good in mathematics. However, al least to me, it contains a good text about welfare economics and exhaustible resources. This book has been well-known as a "bible" of the natural resources economics. If you want to have the most important book of natural resources, it is a good choice but if you only want to understand easily the natural resources economics, I suggest you other book: Pearce and Turner (1990) "Economics of Natural Resources and the Enviroment"

The book represents the best reference for "distributions oriented" verification of probabilistic forecasts. Developed and described in the context of meteorological forecasts, the DO paradigm is robust, and has ubiquitous applications, when one recognizes that EVERY forecast is inherently based on a conditional probability distribution.

The focus on meteorological forecasts does not make applications in other disciplines transparent, in a tutorial way, but anyone who thinks rigorously about the "quality" of forecasts will make the connection. An essential, and universal concept demonstrated from meteorology is the realization of "quality-value reversals" in which forecasts with higher "quality" (quantified by traditional error measures such as correlation or RMS error) have lower "value" in terms of net benefit of the forecast when used in a specific decision making context. This fundamental concept is well extablished in other fields with high-stakes forecast-based decisions (, e.g. medical decision making) and should be fundamental to any development/evaluation of forecasts (meteorologiical or otherwise).

The latest edition to the Edward Elgar Publishing series 'New Horizons In Environmental Economics', "The Economics Of Global Environment Change" is co-edited by Mario Cogoy (Professor of international Economics, University of Trieste, Italy) and Karl W. Steininger (Professor of Economics, Wegener Center for Climate and Global Change, University of Graz, Austria). Benefitting from the contributions of acknowledged experts in their fields, this informed and informed compendium of information is organized into three main sections beginning with an introduction and overview of the subject of global climate change and its economic implications. Four major papers comprise the section on 'The Economics Dimensions of Global Environmental Change"; three contributions comprise the third section addresses issues related to 'International Cooperation in Global Environmental Change'. The contributors address the issues of distributions conflicts, unresolved equity issues, asymmetric distribution of the coasts and benefits of environmental policy, the d4evelopment of an international institutional framework, long-run international aspects of global environmental change; international trade, land-use change, biodiversity preservation, management of water resources and conflicts, as well as global warming and strategic aspects of international environmental agreements. An impressive and seminal body of work in compliance with the highest standards of research and scholarship making it an essential addition to academic, corporate, governmental, and environmental organization reference collections, "The Economics Of Global Environment Change" will prove to be of immense and timely interest to economists, environmentalists, academicians, and non-specialist general readers with an interest in the economic impact of global warming.

Though it does not address the small picture very much, this book provides a thorough introduction to the field of ecosystem management. For vocabulary purposes, readers of this book may be better off with some background in ecology or forestry, but once you understand the words, the subject makes perfect sense.

For more than a decade, 'Ecosystems of Florida' has become the standard by which all other books on Florida's unique ecology are judged. The flora, fauna, soil, climate, and hydrological characteristics of all of Floridas ecosystems are explained in exhaustive yet accessible detail. The book also has general information about the soil, climate, and geological history of Florida that helps the reader explore the ecosytem chapters with a broader understanding of the ecology of the state as a whole. Concluding chapters tie in the influence of people to the history of Florida's ecology and explain the role people will take in shaping or breaking Florida's natural areas in the future. This book has become more than a reference to me. It presents a very complex set of information in a clear, easily-read, and entertaining format that makes it hard to put down.

I don't think it is big enough yet to call it a trend, but there is certainly a movement, an interest of mostly isolated people to live with less of an impact on our society. We see this in the occassional solar powered house, the growth of the self-sustaining small (or even tiny) farms, the commune system that began to be set up in years past.

All of these, of course, had problems associated with them. The solar house may well not, probably doesn't meet building codes, so they may have to be built outside a cities limits, they are difficult to sell, difficult to find someone who will issue a mortgage on them.

The tiny farm takes an awful lot of work, more than most people want to do. And the cost of the food is expensive in terms of working at a real job and buying at the supermarket.

Communes work only when everyone get along with each other. But soon people begin to feel that they do more than their fair share.

The next logical step is to put together a small village. Perhaps a dozen famlies, perhaps 20 or 30. Here you begin to get the small town mentality that is so famous in literature. This book talks about local communities that have come together with shared goals. It offers a lot of the advantages of the traditional small village, with a vision that transcends and enhances the individual goals of the residents.