Related Research Articles
The conservation movement, also known as nature conservation, is a political, environmental, and social movement that seeks to manage and protect natural resources, including animal, fungus, and plant species as well as their habitat for the future. Conservationists are concerned with leaving the environment in a better state than the condition they found it in. Evidence-based conservation seeks to use high quality scientific evidence to make conservation efforts more effective.
A landscape is the visible features of an area of land, its landforms, and how they integrate with natural or man-made features, often considered in terms of their aesthetic appeal. A landscape includes the physical elements of geophysically defined landforms such as (ice-capped) mountains, hills, water bodies such as rivers, lakes, ponds and the sea, living elements of land cover including indigenous vegetation, human elements including different forms of land use, buildings, and structures, and transitory elements such as lighting and weather conditions. Combining both their physical origins and the cultural overlay of human presence, often created over millennia, landscapes reflect a living synthesis of people and place that is vital to local and national identity.
Wilderness or wildlands are natural environments on Earth that have not been significantly modified by human activity or any nonurbanized land not under extensive agricultural cultivation. The term has traditionally referred to terrestrial environments, though growing attention is being placed on marine wilderness. Recent maps of wilderness suggest it covers roughly one quarter of Earth's terrestrial surface, but is being rapidly degraded by human activity. Even less wilderness remains in the ocean, with only 13.2% free from intense human activity.
Restoration ecology is the scientific study supporting the practice of ecological restoration, which is the practice of renewing and restoring degraded, damaged, or destroyed ecosystems and habitats in the environment by active human interruption and action. Effective restoration requires an explicit goal or policy, preferably an unambiguous one that is articulated, accepted, and codified. Restoration goals reflect societal choices from among competing policy priorities, but extracting such goals is typically contentious and politically challenging.
Environmental history is the study of human interaction with the natural world over time, emphasising the active role nature plays in influencing human affairs and vice versa.
Historical ecology is a research program that focuses on the interactions between humans and their environment over long-term periods of time, typically over the course of centuries. In order to carry out this work, historical ecologists synthesize long-series data collected by practitioners in diverse fields. Rather than concentrating on one specific event, historical ecology aims to study and understand this interaction across both time and space in order to gain a full understanding of its cumulative effects. Through this interplay, humans adapt to and shape the environment, continuously contributing to landscape transformation. Historical ecologists recognize that humans have had world-wide influences, impact landscape in dissimilar ways which increase or decrease species diversity, and that a holistic perspective is critical to be able to understand that system.
Whole Terrain: Journal of Reflective Environmental Practice is an environmentally-themed literary journal that is published approximately once a year by Antioch University New England (ANE). Each volume explores emerging ecological and social issues from the perspectives of practitioners working in the environmental field. The editor position is open to current ANE students as a practicum experience.
Antioch University New England is a private graduate school located in Keene, New Hampshire, United States. It is part of the Antioch University system, a private, non-profit, 501(c)(3) institution that includes campuses in Seattle, Washington; Los Angeles, California; and Santa Barbara, California. It is accredited by the Higher Learning Commission. The most well-known campus was Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio, which is now independent of the Antioch University system.
John Tallmadge Ph.D., is an author and essayist on issues related to nature and culture. He is currently in private practice as an educational and literary consultant after thirty-year career in higher education, most recently as a core professor of Literature and Environmental Studies at Union Institute and University (TUI)(?) in Cincinnati, Ohio. He served as president of the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (ASLE) and director of the Orion Society. He is a U.S. Army veteran.
Carlos Augusto Peres is a Brazilian field biologist and conservation biologist who works in the Amazon rainforest and other neotropical forest regions on questions involving wildlife and biological conservation. His research interests are in the large-scale patterns of large-bodied vertebrate diversity and abundance in Amazonian forests; the effects of different forms on human disturbance, including hunting, habitat fragmentation and wildfires, on Amazonian forest vertebrates; and reserve selection and design criteria in relation to regional gradients of biodiversity value and implementation costs. He currently co-directs three research programs on natural resource management in the eastern, southern and western Amazon basin focusing on the ecology of natural and heavily modified landscapes and their role in the retention of biodiversity.
H. Emerson Blake is an ecologist, writer, and editor of many books. He was formerly the editor-in-chief at Orion Magazine, executive director of the Orion Society, and editor-in-chief at Milkweed Editions.
Steve Chase was the director of the Advocacy for Social Justice and Sustainability program in the department of Environmental Studies at Antioch University New England. He is an activist, organizer, Quaker, lecturer, and editor.
Stephen Switzer (1682–1745) was an English gardener, garden designer and writer on garden subjects, often credited as an early exponent of the English landscape garden. He is most notable for his views of the transition between the large garden, still very formal in his writings, and the surrounding countryside, especially woodland.
Teatown Lake Reservation is a nonprofit nature preserve and environmental education center in Westchester County, New York, U.S., located in the towns of Ossining, Yorktown, Cortlandt, and New Castle. The reservation includes an 1,000-acre (4.0 km2) nature preserve and education center, visited annually by around 25,000 people.
Ecological art is an art genre and artistic practice that seeks to preserve, remediate and/or vitalize the life forms, resources and ecology of Earth. Ecological art practitioners do this by applying the principles of ecosystems to living species and their habitats throughout the lithosphere, atmosphere, biosphere, and hydrosphere, including wilderness, rural, suburban and urban locations. Ecological art is a distinct genre from Environmental art in that it involves functional ecological systems-restoration, as well as socially engaged, activist, community-based interventions. Ecological art also addresses politics, culture, economics, ethics and aesthetics as they impact the conditions of ecosystems. Ecological art practitioners include artists, scientists, philosophers and activists who often collaborate on restoration, remediation and public awareness projects.
A gradsect or gradient-directed transect is a low-input, high-return sampling method where the aim is to maximise information about the distribution of biota in any area of study. Most living things are rarely distributed at random, their placement being largely determined by a hierarchy of environmental factors. For this reason, standard statistical designs based on purely random sampling or systematic systems tend to be less efficient in recovering information about the distribution of taxa than sample designs that are purposively directed instead along deterministic environmental gradients.
John D. Aber is University Professor Emeritus of Natural Resources & the Environment at the University of New Hampshire, and was also for many years affiliated with the Institute for the Study of Earth, Oceans, and Space at UNH. His fields of study included Ecosystem Analysis and Modeling, Global Change, Acid Rain, Nitrogen Deposition and Sustainable Agriculture.
James Peter Stanton is an Australian landscape ecologist, fire ecologist, botanist and biogeographer who individually conducted systematic environmental resource surveys throughout Queensland whilst working for the National Parks department of Forestry (Qld.) from 1967–1974. He carried out his assessments in a range of dissimilar landscapes leading to the identification and protection of many critically threatened ecosystems across the state during a period of rapid and widespread land development under the Joh Bjelke-Petersen government. For this work he became the first Australian to receive the IUCN Fred M. Packard Award in 1982.
References
- Moose Dung Gazette: ESSP Attends Tom Wessels’ Talk
- Unity College Keynote Speaker
- University Press of New England site for The Myth of Progress
- Wessels' Antioch University New England website
- Wessels' Bio on Medomak Camp website
