126 research outputs found
Marjory Stoneman Douglas
No full textFlorida author Marjory Stoneman Douglas. Her books include Florida, The Long Frontier, The Everglades: River of Gras
Marjory Stoneman Douglas
No full textFlorida author Marjory Stoneman Douglas. Her books include Florida, The Long Frontier, The Everglades: River of Gras
Peatland restoration and ecosystem services: an introduction
No full textSetting the scene In September 1997, the airports of Singapore and Kuala Lumpur shut down for several days. Fires from drained peatlands in Indonesia, over 1000 km away, were emitting vast clouds of smoke causing haze and poor visibility across large parts of South East Asia in the extremely dry El Niño year. Schools and businesses had to close, and people were admitted to hospitals with acute breathing problems. The amount of CO2 emitted from these fires was equivalent to 13-40% of annual global emissions from fossil fuels (Page et al. 2002). Economic losses due to the 1997-1998 wildfires exceeded several billion US dollars (ADB 1999). In the hot August of 2010, people in Moscow were advised to stay at home, keep their windows closed and wear gauze masks to avoid inhaling ash particles when walking on the streets. Again the cause was fires, this time raging across nearly 2000 km2 of degraded peatlands in Russia. Carbon monoxide levels in the capital reached six times the maximum acceptable levels and death rates doubled due to heat and smog (Barriopedro et al. 2011). These fires, resulting from peatland drainage and degradation that made them vulnerable to fire, dramatically highlight the huge liability that peatlands pose once degraded, especially in a changing climate. In sharp contrast, there is now wide recognition of the importance to human well-being of ecosystem services delivered by the peatland environment, not least the wildlife that underpins those ecosystem services. While peatlands cover not even 3% of the world’s surface, they hold two times more carbon than the entire global forest biomass pool, and represent more than 30% of the total global soil carbon store (see Chapter 4). As long-term carbon sinks, they provide crucial global climate-regulating services. If not safeguarded, however, the release of this carbon could further exacerbate climate change. The range of peatland ecosystem services is far greater than simply their role in the carbon cycle. Pivotal peatland ecosystem services further include, for example, the provision of high-quality drinking water derived from peatland catchments. Peatlands also play a role in flood-water regulation, especially in lowland or coastal settings.</p
Peatland restoration and ecosystem services: nature-based solutions for societal goals
No full text‘Peatland conservation is a prime example of a nature-based solution to climate change but we urgently need to switch from aspiration to action to secure the benefits that peatlands provide’. Julia Marton Lefèvre, former Director-General, IUCN Introduction The chapters of this book provide a compelling account of the crucial role of peatlands for human well-being and the role restoration can play in providing nature-based solutions to societal goals. Across the world, natural peatlands provide important ecosystem services, with a special role in climate regulation, water regulation, provision of cultural services, such as historical archives and recreation opportunities, and hosting important habitats for wildlife. In contrast, damaged peatlands on only 0.3% of the earth’s land surface contribute disproportionally to global GHG emissions, producing probably up to 50% of the total global land bound and 5% of the total global annual anthropogenic CO2 emissions. Degraded peatlands therefore pose a high risk and, ultimately, a high cost to society. At the heart of peatland degradation is the unsustainable exploitation of peatland resources, mainly to maximise provisioning services for agricultural and forestry produce (Chapters 2 and 9-14). There are still perverse incentives and economic drivers in place fostering short-term profits (Chapters 2, 15 and 19), while neglecting consequences for global natural capital and sustainable livelihoods. The speed of degradation is alarming, especially in the tropics. Natural peatland habitats in Indonesia have shrunk to just 32% of the original peatland area, with most of those losses occurring in the last two decades as peatlands are drained and logged and converted to oil palm or pulpwood plantations. These plantations often cannot be sustained for more than one or a few production cycles, because subsidence eventually makes drainage of the low-lying peat soils impossible (Chapter 14). In temperate Europe, the majority of the peatlands has already been degraded by land use and land-use change over the past 150 years (Chapters 2, 10, 12). In Canada, recent technological advances and a desire for energy independence have meant that tar sand extraction will destroy peatlands to a significant extent. Also in Europe some of the remaining peatlands remain under current threat from the energy industry.</p
Marjory Stoneman Douglas
No full textAuthor and conservationist Marjory Stoneman Douglas (April 7, 1890 -- May 14, 1998) is profiled in this 1993 program. She talks about her various books, including River of Grass and Voice of the River, as well as her lifelong defense of the Everglades
The Author of the Alexander Romance
No full textThis paper, which is based on a portion of the introduction of the author’s edition of Il Romanzo di Alessandro (Mondadori: Fondazione Valla 2007), surveys the generic components of the Alexander Romance in an attempt to arrive at a definition of the work. The argument builds on Merkelbach’s categorisation of elements and uses Fusillo’s insight into the novel as an ‘encyclopaedic genre’ to propose that ‘historical novel’ is not, as Hägg contended, a misnomer for the work. The main components I discuss are: ‘life’; praxeis; chreiai; Cynic elements, including choliambic poetry and utopian perspectives; and the Egyptian aspects of the narrative. A concluding jeu d’esprit offers a characterisation of the putative author, his antecedents and his process of composition.Richard Stoneman was for 25 years editor for classics at Croom Helm and then Routledge. In 1997 he was appointed an Honorary Fellow in the department of classics, University of Exeter. After retiring from publishing in 2006 he has been pursuing his researches on the Alexander legends and teaching a course on the subject at Exeter. His Penguin translation of the Alexander Romance was published in 1991, and a volume of translated Legends of Alexander the Great appeared from Everyman in 1994. Also in 1994 he co-edited Greek Fiction with John Morgan. His edition of the Greek recensions of the Alexander Romance was published (volume I) by the Fondazione Valla in 2007 – volumes II and III will follow over the next few years – and his Alexander the Great: A Life in Legend appeared from Yale University Press in spring 2008. He is the author of a number of other books on Greek history and travel, and is writing a book on oracles
Peatland conservation at the science–practice interface
No full textIntroduction The conservation and management of peatlands by practitioners is often assumed to work best when guided by science (e.g. Maltby 1997). However, there are also many excellent peatland management and restoration projects, which have built upon years of practical experience (sometimes through trial and error), undertaken by organisations involved in hands-on peatland conservation. Parry, Holden and Chapman (2014) provide many examples of techniques developed through common sense and ingenuity on the part of practitioners, often with little input from the science community. Often restoration projects have to make progress well before the science is fully understood. Significant investment is being poured into peatland management projects across the world (Parish et al. 2008), and it is important for those investing resources in peatland environments that there is some evaluation of the impacts of such investment. Evaluating the success of peatland management projects may involve the scientific community (e.g. taking measurements of carbon fluxes). In many instances, however, practitioners may involve less stringent measures with success measured by recording some simple visible changes to the landscape. The evaluation of success may indeed be an economic one (Kent 2000) based on cost-benefit analyses (Christie et al. 2011) of, for example, money spent on restoration that has been or will be saved elsewhere through, for instance, improved water quality entering water company treatment works. The observations for measuring peatland conservation success may depend on spatial and temporal scale, geographic settings and project targets, as well as available expertise and funding. There are therefore questions about how we measure success and how scientists, practitioners and policy makers can work closely together to deliver the best outcomes for peatland ecosystem services. Careful attention should be given to the mechanisms for science knowledge exchange between science and practical application so that practical experience and knowledge by those managing peatlands is transferred into the scientific understanding of peatlands. Scientists value the opinions and ideas of the restoration community and there have been recent attempts to move towards improved co-design of research and co-production of knowledge of science and practitioner communities in peatland restoration environments (Reed 2008; Reed et al. 2009). Taking an ecosystem services approach to peatland conservation means that scientists, practitioners and policy makers have to understand the wider interconnectedness of peatland processes that lead to the provision of goods and services to society.</p
Management costs for small protected areas and economies of scale in habitat conservation
No full textProtected area management must be resourced adequately to achieve its conservation objectives. The variability in management costs across candidate sites for protection therefore should inform conservation planning. For example, when considering whether to accept a donation of a property, a conservation organisation must determine whether an adequate endowment is available to fund future management activities. We examine variation in management costs across 78 small protected areas in the UK that are
managed by a conservation NGO, the Yorkshire Wildlife Trust. Management costs exceed acquisition costs when funded on an endowment basis and are not correlated with acquisition costs or with proxy measures for conservation costs commonly relied upon in conservation planning studies. A combination of geographic, ecological and socioeconomic characteristics of sites explains 50% of the variation in management costs. Site area is the most important determinant of management costs, which demonstrate
economies of scale; implementing conservation management on an additional hectare adjacent to a larger protected area would incur a lower cost than doing the same adjacent to a smaller site. In evidencing this effect of site area, we avoid problems of spurious correlation that confound previous studies. Protected areas that encompass a greater richness of priority habitats for conservation also require more expensive management. Conservation organisations may have little option but to create small protected areas to conserve biodiversity in highly fragmented landscapes, but the decision to do so should take account of the greater cost burden that small protected areas incur
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