Author: Roger D. Stone Publisher: Univ of California Press ISBN: 0520936078 Category : Nature Languages : en Pages : 327
Book Description
Tropical forests are vanishing at an alarming rate. This book, based on extensive international field research, highlights one solution for preserving this precious resource: empowering local people who depend on the forest for survival. Synthesizing a vast amount of information that has never been brought together in one place, Roger D. Stone and Claudia D'Andrea provide a clearly written and energizing tour of global efforts to empower community-based forest stewards. Along the way, they show the fundamental importance of tropical forest ecosystems and deepen our sense of urgency to save them for the benefit of billions of rural people in tropical and subtropical regions as well as for countless species of plants and animals. In their travels to research this book, the authors saw many remarkable examples of how proficient even the poorest local people can be in stabilizing and recovering formerly destitute forests. With engagingly written case studies from Thailand's Golden Triangle to Mindanao in the Philippines, from Indonesia, India, and Africa to Brazil, Mexico, and Central America, they introduce us to the communities and the individuals, the governments, the loggers, the agencies, and the local groups who vie for forest resources. Contrasting community-based efforts and traditional forest management with government and donor efforts, they discuss the many reasons why international institutions and national governments have been unable and unwilling to stem the accelerating loss of tropical forestland. This book argues we are paying a terrible price--politically, economically, and environmentally--for allowing tropical forests to be stripped. Community-based forestry is no panacea, but this book clearly shows its effectiveness as a management technique.
Author: Roger D. Stone Publisher: Univ of California Press ISBN: 9780520936072 Category : Nature Languages : en Pages : 330
Book Description
Tropical forests are vanishing at an alarming rate. This book, based on extensive international field research, highlights one solution for preserving this precious resource: empowering local people who depend on the forest for survival. Synthesizing a vast amount of information that has never been brought together in one place, Roger D. Stone and Claudia D'Andrea provide a clearly written and energizing tour of global efforts to empower community-based forest stewards. Along the way, they show the fundamental importance of tropical forest ecosystems and deepen our sense of urgency to save them for the benefit of billions of rural people in tropical and subtropical regions as well as for countless species of plants and animals. In their travels to research this book, the authors saw many remarkable examples of how proficient even the poorest local people can be in stabilizing and recovering formerly destitute forests. With engagingly written case studies from Thailand's Golden Triangle to Mindanao in the Philippines, from Indonesia, India, and Africa to Brazil, Mexico, and Central America, they introduce us to the communities and the individuals, the governments, the loggers, the agencies, and the local groups who vie for forest resources. Contrasting community-based efforts and traditional forest management with government and donor efforts, they discuss the many reasons why international institutions and national governments have been unable and unwilling to stem the accelerating loss of tropical forestland. This book argues we are paying a terrible price--politically, economically, and environmentally--for allowing tropical forests to be stripped. Community-based forestry is no panacea, but this book clearly shows its effectiveness as a management technique.
Author: Ruth Wilson Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing ISBN: 1527524361 Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 155
Book Description
This volume presents a treatise on trees and how they relate to the human spirit. Through its in-depth discussion of the meaning of trees, a need for a shift in thinking becomes clear. Historically, people in dominant cultures have viewed trees as resources to be used and forests as obstacles to such endeavors as farming and ranching. This publication presents a different view of trees and forests, one calling for a shift from domination and irreverence to respect and care—even kinship. While the text includes a discussion about some of the amazing characteristics of trees, the primary focus here is on the philosophical meaning of, and emotional connections with, trees. Its integration of disciplines and the recognition of different ways of knowing will make this book appealing to a wide variety of readers.
Author: Frances Seymour Publisher: Brookings Institution Press ISBN: 1933286865 Category : Business & Economics Languages : en Pages : 438
Book Description
Tropical forests are an undervalued asset in meeting the greatest global challenges of our time—averting climate change and promoting development. Despite their importance, tropical forests and their ecosystems are being destroyed at a high and even increasing rate in most forest-rich countries. The good news is that the science, economics, and politics are aligned to support a major international effort over the next five years to reverse tropical deforestation. Why Forests? Why Now? synthesizes the latest evidence on the importance of tropical forests in a way that is accessible to anyone interested in climate change and development and to readers already familiar with the problem of deforestation. It makes the case to decisionmakers in rich countries that rewarding developing countries for protecting their forests is urgent, affordable, and achievable.
Author: Thomas K. Rudel Publisher: Columbia University Press ISBN: 023113195X Category : Deforestation Languages : en Pages : 252
Book Description
In Tropical Forests, Rudel analyzes hundreds of local studies from the past twenty years to develop a much-needed, global perspective on deforestation. With separate chapters on individual regions, including South and Central America, the Caribbean, and Africa, Rudel's work offers an up-to-date assessment of the world's tropical forests. In the concluding chapter, Rudel considers the implications of these trends and describes policy directions for conserving biodiversity and promoting sustainable development in each region.
Author: Florencia Montagnini Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media ISBN: 3540272445 Category : Technology & Engineering Languages : en Pages : 295
Book Description
Research in tropical forestry is confronted with the task of finding strategies to alleviate pressure on remaining forests, and techniques to enhance forest regeneration and restore abandoned lands, using productive alternatives that can be attractive to local human populations. In addition, sustainable forestry in tropical countries must be supported by adequate policies to promote and maintain specific activities at local and regional scales. Here, a multi-disciplinary approach is presented, to better the understanding of tropical forest ecology, as a necessary step in developing adequate strategies for conservation and management. The authors have long experience in both academic and practical matters related to tropical forest ecology and management.
Author: James Gustave Speth Publisher: Orient Blackswan ISBN: 9788125027409 Category : Global environmental change Languages : en Pages : 320
Book Description
This book will change the way we understand the future of our planet. It is both alarming and hopeful. James Gustave Spetch, renowned as a visionary environmentalist leader, warns that in spite of all the international negotiations and agreements of the past two decades, efforts to protect Earth's environment are not succeeding. Still, he says, the challenges are not insurmountable. He offers environmental threats around the world. The author explains why current approaches to critical global environmental problems Climate change, biodiversity loss, deterioration of marine environments, deforestation, water shortages, and others don't work now and won't work in the future. He provides a stinging critique of the failure of U.S. leadership and offers intriguing insights into why the U.S. has been able to address domestic environmental threats with some success while largely failing at the international level. Setting forth eight specific steps to a sustainable future, Speth convincingly argues that dramatically different and far-reaching actions by citizens and governments are now urgent. If ever a book could be described as essential , this is it.
Author: James Gustave Speth Publisher: Yale University Press ISBN: 0300102321 Category : Science Languages : en Pages : 321
Book Description
Presents an analysis of the worsening global environmental crisis, citing ten contributors to environmental deterioration, including affluence, the American culture and its values, population, and poverty.
Author: Candace Slater Publisher: Duke University Press ISBN: 0822385279 Category : Science Languages : en Pages : 329
Book Description
The essays collected here offer important new reflections on the multiple images of and rhetoric surrounding the rain forest. The slogan “Save the Rain Forest!”—emblazoned on glossy posters of tall trees wreathed in vines and studded with monkeys and parrots—promotes the popular image of a marvelously wild and vulnerable rain forest. Although representations like these have fueled laudable rescue efforts, in many ways they have done more harm than good, as these essays show. Such icons tend to conceal both the biological variety of rain forests and the diversity of their human inhabitants. They also frequently obscure the specific local and global interactions that are as much a part of today’s rain forests as are the array of plants and animals. In attending to these complexities, this volume focuses on specific portrayals of rain forests and the consequences of these characterizations for both forest inhabitants and outsiders. From diverse disciplines—history, archaeology, sociology, literature, law, and cultural anthropology—the contributors provide case studies from Latin America, Asia, and Africa. They point the way toward a search for a rain forest that is both a natural entity and a social history, an inhabited place and a shifting set of ideas. The essayists demonstrate how the single image of a wild and yet fragile forest became fixed in the popular mind in the late twentieth century, thereby influencing the policies of corporations, environmental groups, and governments. Such simplistic conceptions, In Search of the Rain Forest shows, might lead companies to tout their “green” technologies even as they try to downplay the dissenting voices of native populations. Or they might cause a government to create a tiger reserve that displaces peaceful peasants while opening the doors to poachers and bandits. By encouraging a nuanced understanding of distinctive, constantly evolving forests with different social and natural histories, this volume provides an important impetus for protection efforts that take into account the rain forest in all of its complexity. Contributors. Scott Fedick, Alex Greene, Paul Greenough, Nancy Peluso, Suzana Sawyer, Candace Slater, Charles Zerner
Author: Egbert Giles Leigh Jr. Publisher: Oxford University Press ISBN: 0195357264 Category : Science Languages : en Pages : 262
Book Description
In Tropical Forest Ecology, Egbert G. Leigh, Jr., one of the world's foremost tropical ecologists, introduces readers to the tropical forest and describes the intricate web of interdependence among the great diversity of tropical plants and animals. Focusing on the tropical forest of Barro Colorado Island, Panama, Leigh shows what Barro Colorado can tell us about other tropical forests--and what tropical forests can tell us about Barro Colorado. This book considers three essential questions for understanding the ecological organization of tropical forests. How do they stay green with their abundance of herbivores? Why do they have such a diversity of plants and animals? And what role does mutualism play in the ecology of tropical forests? Beautifully written and abundantly illustrated, Tropical Forest Ecology will certainly appeal to a wide variety of scientists in the fields of evolution, tropical biology, botany, zoology, and natural history.
Author: Roger D. Stone
Author: Roger D. Stone
Author: Ruth Wilson
Author: Frances Seymour
Author: Thomas K. Rudel
Author: Florencia Montagnini
Author: James Gustave Speth
Author: James Gustave Speth
Author: Candace Slater
Author: Egbert Giles Leigh Jr.