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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 Richard W. Willson argues that the problem stems from outdated minimum parking requirements.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putting parking and parking requirements in context, the book offers an accessible tool kit to get started and repair outdated requirements.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.

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.

Explores the relationship between science and practice in ecological restoration. Despite the often distinct cultures and methodologies of scientists and practitioners, this title shows how each has a vital role in effective restoration and offers suggestions for improving working relationships.

A Guide to Planning for Community Character adds a wealth of practical applications to the framework that Lane Kendig describes in his previous book, Community Character. The purpose of the earlier book is to give citizens and planners a systematic way of thinking about the attributes of their communities and a common language to use for planning and zoning in a consistand reliable way. This follow-up volume addresses actual design in the three general classes of communities in Kendig's framework-urban, suburban, and rural.The author's practical approaches enable designers to create communities "e;with the character that citizens actually want."e; Kendig also provides a guide for incorporating community character into a comprehensive plan. In addition, this book shows how to use community character in planning and zoning as a way of making communities more sustainable. All examples in the volume are designed to meet real-world challenges. They show how to design a community so that the desired character is actually achieved in the built result. The book also provides useful tools for analyzing or measuring relevant design features.Together, the books provide a comprehensive treatmof community character, offering both a tested theory of planning based on visual and physical character and practical ways to plan and measure communities. The strength of this comprehensive approach is that it is ultimately less rigid and more adaptable than many rec"e;flexible"e; zoning codes.

Between 1994 and 2008, American voters approved almost $32 billion for local land conservation. This title compiles and distills advice from professionals involved in successful conservation efforts across the country, including a list of 'best practices' for the most critical issues conservationists can expect to face.

Ecological resilience provides a theoretical foundation for understanding how complex systems adapt to and recover from localized disturbances like hurricanes, fires, pest outbreaks, and floods, as well as large-scale perturbations such as climate change. This book collects important articles on the subject of ecological resilience.

Public space and street design in commercial districts can dictate the success or failure of walkable community centers. This book uses examples from communities across the United States to illustrate the potential for restoring the balance provided by older urban centers between automobile access and 'walkability.'

Explains the landscape of conservation along with case studies. This book includes fourteen chapters and twelve case studies that demonstrate the benefits of government agencies partnering with diverse stakeholders. It explores how natural resources management is evolving.

A household icon of the environmental movement, Aldo Leopold (1887-1948) may be the most quoted conservationist in history. This work illuminates his lifelong quest for answers to a fundamental issue: how can people live prosperously on the land and keep it healthy, too? It serves as a guide to one man's intellectual growth.

Brings together leading researchers in the range of specialties that are relevant to the study of human dimensions of fish and wildlife work around the globe to provide theoretical and historical context as well as a demonstration of tools, methodologies, and idea-sharing for practical implementation and integration of practices.

Contains extracts from the pages of "Science" and is supplemented by contributions from the magazine's editors. This book has the articles arranged thematically and each section is introduced by a scientist or science writer. It also contains several news pieces that highlight particular issues and cases relevant to the main scientific findings.

Whether you are managing wetlands, protecting endangered species, or restoring ecosystems, you need to be able to communicate effectively in order to solve conservation and resource management problems. This practical book helps you do just that, focusing on achieving conservation goals through effective communication.