Environmental Solution? Joint and Several Liability
8.1 Environmental Solution? Preserving “Alien” Species in Wild Horse Conservation
9.1 Environmental Solution? Adorable plastic sensors and feminist marine science
10.1 Solution? Treatment as State (or Sovereign) under the Clean Water Act
11.1 Environmental Solution? Geoengineering
12.1 Environmental Solution? Shade-Grown Coffee
13.1 Environmental Solution? Wildlife Friendly Beef and Wool
14.1 Environmental Solution? Energy-Efficient Buildings
15.1 Environmental Solution? Plant-based Meat
16.1 Environmental Solution? Organic Lawn Inputs
17.1 Environmental Solution? A Circular Economy for PET Plastics?
18.1 Environmental Solution? Fighting Food Apartheid and Growing Food Sovereignty
19.1 Environmental Solution? The E-Stewards Program
Acknowledgments
This book would have been impossible without the impeccably polite prodding of Justin Vaughan at Wiley Blackwell, an editor whose creative interventions extend beyond editing and were key sparks in imagining the book and setting us writing. He also sprang for dinner that time in Boston. Many thanks too to Charlie Hamlyn at Wiley Blackwell for his endless patience and hard work.
Paul Robbins and Sarah Moore would like to thank the University of Wisconsin-Madison, its Department of Geography, and the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies. They would especially like to thank the students of their Environment and Society classes there, and at the University of Arizona, for slogging through early performances and later iterations of some of the material presented here. They owe a debt of gratitude to their current and former graduate students who embody and convey much of the plural thinking in the book. Paul is indebted to Dr. Dustin Mulvaney for insights on Cal Fire and the Amah Mutsun and to Dr. Kyle White for his work on settler colonialism. Paul and Sarah would also like to thank Marty Robbins, Vicki Robbins, and Mari Jo Joiner. Shout out to Alexander Robbins-Moore, who antedates the last edition of this book, and has usually demonstrated patience with the co-inhabitants of his house. Special thanks to Zoey the Great Dane, who is a profound society–environment puzzle in her own right.
John Hintz would like to thank his wife Michelle for her unwavering love and support across twenty-plus years of graduate school and academic life. Many thanks go to Susan Roberts, David Correia, Taro Futamura, Jean Lavigne, and Jamie Gillen, each of whom for years has played whatever role of friend, colleague, or mentor was necessary in the moment. He would also like to thank his colleagues in the Department of Environmental, Geographical and Geological Sciences (EGGS) at Bloomsburg University, as well as the countless passionate Bloomsburg students whose idealism and fresh insights make Mondays bearable. Finally, John would like to thank the birds, the bees, the fish, the trees, the sun, the grass, and the desert sand. Hopefully, time is on our side.
About the Companion Website
This book is accompanied by a companion website which includes a number of resources created by author for students and instructors that you will find helpful. www.wiley.com/go/robbins/environment
The Instructor website includes the following resources for each chapter:
Activities
Instructor Notes
PowerPoint Slides
Supplemental Resources
Test Banks
The Student website includes the following resources for each chapter:
Student Notes
Supplemental Resources
Student Exercises
Please note that the resources in instructor website are password protected and can only be accessed by instructors who register with the site.
1 Introduction The View from a Human-Made Wild
Keywords
Anthropocene
Ecological novelty
Political ecology
Reconciliation ecology
Rewilding
Source: Tribune Content Agency LLC/Alamy Stock Photo.
Chapter Menu
What is This Book?
The Authors’ Points of View
News headlines from forests, fields, rivers, and oceans suggest we are in a world of trouble. Storms ravage the coasts of Asia and the Americas, with more looming as sea levels slowly rise. Fresh water is increasingly scarce around the globe, owing not only to heavy water use but also widespread pollution; there is not a single drop of water in the Colorado River in the United States or the Rhone River in France that is not managed through complex dams and distribution systems, or affected by city and industrial waste along their paths to the sea. Agricultural soils are depleted from years of intensive cropping and from the ongoing application of fertilizers and pesticides in the search for ever-sustained increases of food and fiber; in North India, after decades of increasing production, yields of wheat and rice have hit a plateau. Global temperatures are on the rise and, with this increase, whole ecosystems are at risk. Species of plants and animals are vanishing from the Earth, never to return. Perhaps most profoundly, the world’s oceans – upon which these global systems rest – show signs of impending collapse. The accumulation of these acute problems has led observers to conclude that the environment may be irreversibly lost or that we may have reached “the end of nature” (McKibben 1990).
And yet on Isle Royale, a nearly untouched wilderness located in the middle of Lake Superior, these complications only invite harder thinking about what, if anything, people must do to achieve and foster thriving ecosystems. Consider that Isle Royale, a 544-square-kilometer island near the coast of Ontario Canada, is the least-visited of all the National Parks in the lower 48 states of the United States, and is an officially designated wilderness area. Set aside as a natural experiment to see how predators and prey interact, the island is a fantastic scientific instrument to show what nature does when “untouched” by people. Wolves (Canis lupus) and moose (Alces alces) have been studied here for six decades, and the rise and fall of each population reveals the complex interactions between species in the wild.
The nature of global change, however, leaves no part of the world truly beyond interactions with people. Isle Royale
