nature

The Most Depressing Talk I Ever Heard

By Robert I. McDonald / On November 3rd, 2015
Conservation for Cities author Rob McDonald reflects on a comment he received after giving a lecture at the Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History. Two weeks ago I was lucky enough to give a lecture at the Peabody Museum of Natural History at Yale entitled "What Does Nature Have to Offer Cities During the Coming Massive Urbanization?" It was

#ForewordFriday: Fortune Edition

By Jason Leppig / On August 7th, 2015
Is there an economic value to nature's services? Should this value be incentive enough for us to fund conservation? Can lessons from the corporate world come to the rescue? In an age of increasing environmental degradation and risk, The Nature Conservancy CEO Mark Tercek believes environmentalists need to incorporate business as a partner in making the world sustainable—and that corporations need a healthy environment to stay in business.
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Books are Maps of Nature, Screens are Maps of Nothing

By Rafe Sagarin / On January 28th, 2014
Aníbal Pauchard and I argued in Observation and Ecology that despite the great advances information technology has helped us make in complex fields like ecology, the increasing time both children and adults spend in front of screens instead of out in nature will erode our abilities to deal with complexity. Our argument was experiential—our years of working in the field with many students showed us that those with the best abilities to discern patterns were those who spent abundant time as children just wandering around observing natu
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Island Press Staff Picks - Epicurean Simplicity

By Admin / On October 24th, 2013
Today's staff pick, Epicurean Simplicity, comes from our Associate Editor, Courtney Lix. I discovered Epicurean Simplicity when I first started working for Island Press—five years ago, now—and the book has become an old friend through re-readings.  Stephanie Mills’ beautiful, intimate writing style never fails to remind me of how much fun it is to simply pay attention to life around me, and I find new resonance in her
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And Winter Broke

By Cristina Eisenberg / On March 31st, 2011
In March I participated in a University of Nebraska literary retreat at the Platte River Whooping Crane Maintenance Trust. It was the climax of spring migration on the river, where sandhill cranes pause to feed during their 5,000 mile journey from Mexico to as far as Siberia. I spent my time there ensconced in a primitive blind with several eminent poets, bearing witness to the cranes' sempiternal return.
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Nature-al Resources

By Anthony Barnosky / On April 20th, 2009
What comes to mind when you hear the words "natural resources?" Oil. Water. Nature. Nature? In fact, yes, nature is one of the big ones. Ecologists and economists have a name for the natural resources that nature provides: "ecosystem services." They've calculated that globally the dollar-value of those services could be $54 trillion annually in 1997 dollars--for comparison the Gross World Product for 2008 was around $62 trillion. Most people don't call nature's resources "ecosystem services" though.
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After the Storm

By Anthony Barnosky / On March 18th, 2009
When you’re in the middle of a forest fire, trees exploding all around you, smoke burning your lungs, and fireballs dropping from the sky, it’s hard to think about much except getting out of there alive.  That’s kind of where we are with thinking about global warming nowadays—the direct impacts on people.  How many lose their homes when sea level rises?  What new diseases are going to make their way out of the tropics?  How many dollars will it take to cut carbon emissions? But really, those flames and fireballs are just the beginning of the problem, if you survive them.

How Do We Instill a Reverence For Place?

By Timothy Beatley / On January 16th, 2009
Perhaps because we are such Olympians at moving, at shifting and transitioning to new lives, new jobs and new houses, Americans know relatively little about the places in which they live. Much of my own work has been about the creative ideas for educating about place and region, and for deepening connections to nature and landscape. There are many possibilities, some tried, others only pondered. Part of the task I think is to make learning about community and place fun; something that you would want to do, and that would compete well with the many other life diversions available.

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