Jules Pretty

Over the course of a year, Jules Pretty walked along the shoreline of East Anglia in southeastern England, eventually exploring four hundred miles on foot (and another hundred miles by boat). It is a coast and a culture that is about to be lost—not yet, perhaps, but soon—to rising tides and industrial sprawl. This Luminous Coast takes the reader with him on his journey over land and water; over sea walls of dried grass, beside stretched fields of golden crops, alongside white sails gliding across the intricate lacework of invisible creeks and estuaries, under vast skies that are home to curlews and redshanks and the outpourings of skylarks. East Anglia’s coastline is as much a human landscape as it is a natural one, and Pretty is equally perceptive about the region’s cultural heritage and its "industrial wild": fishing villages and the modern seaside resorts, family farms and oil refineries, pleasure piers and concrete seawalls, cozy pubs and military installations. Through words and photographs, Pretty interweaves stories of the land and sea with people past and present. He is a passionate and sensitive guide to a region in transition, under stress, and perhaps even doomed, as finely attuned to its history as he is to its unique sensory world.

Walking England's Eastern Edge

This Luminous Coast

Cheryl Palm

Norman Uphoff

Andrew S. Ball

Erick Fernandes

Hans Herren

Olivier Husson

Mark Laing

Pedro Sanchez

Nteranya Sanginga

Janice Thies

Global agriculture is now at the crossroads. The Green Revolution of the last century is losing momentum. Rates of growth in food production are now declining, with land and water resources becoming scarcer, while world population continues to grow. We need to continue to identify and share the knowledge that will support successful and sustainable agriculture systems. These depend crucially on soil. Gaining international attention, Dr. Uphoff’s efforts to promote and develop sustainable agriculture was recently featured in the N.Y. Times Led by Norman Uphoff, internationally renowned for his proactive approach to world hunger, this volume brings together 102 experts representing 28 nations and multiple disciplines to report on achievements in sustainable soil-system management. While accepting some continuing role for chemical and other external inputs, this book presents ways in which crops can be produced cost effectively in greater abundance with lessened dependence on the exogenous resources that have driven the expansion of agriculture in the past. Including the work of both researchers and practitioners, this important volume — · Explores soil systems in a variety of climate conditions · Discusses the importance of symbiotic relationships between plants and soil organisms, looking at crops as integral and interdependent participants in ecosystems · Seeks to reduce the distance between scientific research and technical practice · Examines related considerations such as pest and disease control, climate change, fertility restoration, and uses of monitoring and modeling With 50 self-contained chapters, this work provides researchers, practitioners, and policy makers with a comprehensive understanding of the science and steps needed to utilize soil systems for the long-term benefit of humankind. For information on the SRI, System of Rice Intensification being developed by Uphoff and others, go to http://ciifad.cornell.edu/sri/

Biological Approaches to Sustainable Soil Systems

The Low-Carbon Good Life is about how to reverse and repair four interlocking crises arising from modern material consumption: the climate crisis, growing inequality, biodiversity loss and food-related ill-health. Across the world today and throughout history, good lives are characterised by healthy food, connections to nature, being active, togetherness, personal growth, a spiritual framework and sustainable consumption. A low-carbon good life offers opportunities to live in ways that will bring greater happiness and contentment. Slower ways of living await. A global target of no more than one tonne of carbon per person would allow the poorest to consume more and everyone to find our models of low-carbon good lives. But dropping old habits is hard, and large-scale impacts will need fresh forms of public engagement and citizen action. Local to national governments need to act; equally, they need pushing by the power and collective action of citizens. Innovative and engaging and written in a style that combines storytelling with scientific evidence, this book will be of great interest to students and scholars of climate change, sustainability, environmental economics and sustainable consumption, as well as non-specialist readers concerned about the climate crisis.

The Low-Carbon Good Life

David Orr

Ted Benton

Andy Ball

Julia Guivant

David R Lee

Max Pfeffer

Professor Hugh Ward

"A monumental and timely contribution to scholarship on society and environments. The handbook makes it easy and compelling for anyone to learn about that scholarship in its full manifestations and as represented by some of the most highly respected researchers and thinkers in the English-speaking world. It is wide-reaching in scope and far-reaching in its implications for public and private action, a definite must for serious researchers and their libraries." - Bonnie J McCay, Rutgers University "This is the desert island book for anyone interested in the relationship between society and the environment. The editors have assembled a masterful collection of contributions on every conceivable dimension of environmental thinking in the social sciences and humanities. No library should be without it!' - Robyn Eckersley, University of Melbourne The SAGE Handbook of Environment and Society focuses on the interactions between people, societies and economies, and the state of nature and the environment. Editorially integrated but written from multi-disciplinary perspectives, it is organised in seven sections: Environmental thought: past and present Valuing the environment Knowledges and knowing Political economy of environmental change Environmental technologies Redesigning natures Institutions and policies for influencing the environment Key themes include: locations where the environment-society relation is most acute: where, for example, there are few natural resources or where industrialization is unregulated; the discussion of these issues at different scales: local, regional, national, and global; the cost of damage to resources; and the relation between principal actors in the environment-society nexus. Aimed at an international audience of academics, research students, researchers, practitioners and policy makers, The SAGE Handbook of Environment and Society presents readers in social science and natural science with a manual of the past, present and future of environment-society links.

The SAGE Handbook of Environment and Society

In The Edge of Extinction, Jules Pretty explores life and change in a dozen environments and cultures across the world, taking us on a series of remarkable journeys through deserts, coasts, mountains, steppes, snowscapes, marshes, and farms to show that there are many different ways to live in cooperation with nature. From these accounts of people living close to the land and close to the edge emerge a larger story about sustainability and the future of the planet. Pretty addresses not only current threats to natural and cultural diversity but also the unsustainability of modern lifestyles typical of industrialized countries. In a very real sense, Pretty discovers, what we manage to preserve now may well save us later. Jules Pretty’s travels take him among the Māori people along the coasts of the Pacific, into the mountains of China, and across petroglyph-rich deserts of Australia. He treks with nomads over the continent-wide steppes of Tuva in southern Siberia, walks and boats in the wildlife-rich inland swamps of southern Africa, and experiences the Arctic with ice fishermen in Finland. He explores the coasts and inland marshes of eastern England and Northern Ireland and accompanies Innu people across the taiga’s snowy forests and the lakes of the Labrador interior. Pretty concludes his global journey immersed in the discrete cultures and landscapes embedded within the American landscape: the small farms of the Amish, the swamps of the Cajuns in the deep South, and the deserts of California. The diverse people Pretty meets in The Edge of Extinction display deep pride in their relationships with the land and are only willing to join with the modern world on their own terms. By the examples they set, they offer valuable lessons for anyone seeking to find harmony in a world cracking under the pressures of apparently insatiable consumption patterns of the affluent.

Travels with Enduring People in Vanishing Lands

The Edge of Extinction

Jo Barton

Rachel Bragg

Carly Wood

The concept of Green Exercise has now been widely adopted and implies a synergistic health benefit of being active in the presence of nature. This book provides a balanced overview and synthesis text on all aspects of Green Exercise and integrates evidence from many different disciplines including physiology, ecology, psychology, sociology and the environmental sciences, and across a wide range of countries. It describes the impact of Green Exercise on human health and well-being through all stages of the lifecourse and covers a wide spectrum from cellular processes such as immune function through to facilitating human behavioural change. It demonstrates the value of Green Exercise for activity and education purposes in both schools and the workplace, as well as its therapeutic properties. Green Exercise is an effective intervention for vulnerable groups and promoting healthy ageing, with activities including wilderness therapy, therapeutic horticulture and the use of forests and water. Chapters also integrate cross-cutting key themes which are relevant to all stages of the lifecourse and have significantly contributed to the Green Exercise research base, such as forest bathing and blue exercise. The book also explores the future of Green Exercise, the way in which research can be used to influence green design and planning and how health, social care and environmental agendas can be integrated to enable Green Exercise to be more widely used as a mechanism for improving health.

Linking Nature, Health and Well-being

Green Exercise

Ranjay Kumar Singh

Nancy J. Turner

Victoria Reyes-Garcia

This book draws on world-wide experiences and valuable lessons to highlight community-ecosystem interactions and the role of traditional knowledge in sustaining biocultural resources through community-based adaptations. The book targets different audiences including researchers working on human-environment interactions and climate adaptation practices, biodiversity conservators, non-government organizations and policy makers involved in revitalizing traditional foods and community-based conservation and adaptation in diverse ecosystems. This volume is also a source book for educators advocating for and collaborating with indigenous and local peoples to promote location-specific adaptations to overcome the impacts of multiple biotic and abiotic stresses. Note: T&F does not sell or distribute the hardback in India, Pakistan, Nepal, Bhutan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka. This title is co-published with NIPA.

Opportunities from the Biocultural World

Social-Ecological Diversity and Traditional Food Systems

Jules Pretty

Books

Your next favorite book is out there