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King Of Fish: The Thousand-Year Run Of Salmon
David R. Montgomery Manufacturer: Westview Press ProductGroup: Book Binding: Paperback Similar Items:
ASIN: 0813342996 Release Date: 2004-12-28 |
Book Description
A passionate recounting of the natural history of the rise and fall of salmon in England, New England, and the Pacific Northwest-with recommendations for bringing the salmon back.The salmon that symbolize the Pacific Northwest's natural splendor are now threatened with extinction across much of their ancestral range. In studying the natural and human forces that shape the rivers and mountains of that region, geologist David Montgomery has learned to see the evolution and near-extinction of the salmon as a story of changing landscapes. Montgomery shows how a succession of historical experiences -first in the United Kingdom, then in New England, and now in the Pacific Northwest -repeat a disheartening story in which overfishing and sweeping changes to rivers and seas render the world inhospitable to salmon. In King of Fish, Montgomery traces the human impacts on salmon over the last thousand years and examines the implications both for salmon recovery efforts and for the more general problem of human impacts on the natural world. What does it say for the long-term prospects of the world's many endangered species if one of the most prosperous regions of the richest country on earth cannot accommodate its icon species? All too aware of the possible bleak outcome for the salmon, King of Fish concludes with provocative recommendations for reinventing the ways in which we make environmental decisions about land, water, and fish.
Customer Reviews:
Say Goodbye to Salmon.......2005-09-13
Capitalism can't protect the Salmon.......2004-05-22
He quotes accounts from the early 19th century including from Henry David Thoreau about the severe depletion of salmon stocks in Northeast U.S. rivers caused by the disruption of salmon spawning beds by the transportion of boats and logs down the river, dams, factory poisons and so on.
Salmon stocks continued to decline to near extinction in Eastern U.S. waters. The Danish government agreed to ban its fisherman from engaging in their highly destructive open ocean fishing off the coast of Greenland, where salmon from Britain, the U.S, and Canada often converge for their sojourns in the Ocean, in 1972. However Danes continued to fish heavily near the Greenland shore, and used vessels under other nation's flags to circumvent their salmon catch quota under the 1972 agreement.
Montgomery shows how salmon have been sacrificed since the Great Depression in favor of the dams which have provided water and electricity in the Eastern Pacific Northwest from the Snake and Colombia Rivers. In 1937, U.S. fisheries commissioner Franklin Bell let it be known that he wasn't going to strain himself too much on behalf of the Salmon. "Aside from blind restriction" of commercial fishing, he explained, "the protection of individual runs menaced by virtual extinction must be left to chance."
Native Americans in the Pacific Northwest thrived on salmon for subsistence, and to preserve the run, would commonly allow half of the run to pass through its nets. But with the coming of commercial fishing dominated by whites, Indian livelihood was wiped out. They could not compete in commercial fishing, lacking the wealth to purchase the sophisticated boats and nets increasingly becoming common. Indians became a racist scapegoat for the depletion of salmon stocks. He notes He notes though that state records that the entire Indian fishing catch from 1935 to 1950 was less than the total commercial catch during a typical year.
Washington State had always claimed that on traditional Indian fishing grounds based on treaties made regarding Colombian basin rivers in the 1850's, Indians merely had the same rights as whites to exploit salmon. But in 1970, federal district court judge George Boldt ruled that the treaties actually reserved for Indians half of the annual salmon supply. In 1975, the Supreme Court upheld Boldt's decision. In 1980, Federal Judge William Orrick declared that under the old treaties, maintaining decent habitat for salmon spawning fell to Washington state. Shortly thereafter a three-judge panel of the 9th circuit overturned the decision. The issue of maintaining the habitat has not been resolved. He points out that native Americans have not been given "special rights" in fishing, as white fisherman and the demagogues inflaming them have claimed but the treaties, signed as they were under pressure, were grants by the Indians to the White man on the Indian's land. Not grants by the white man to the Indian.
, Hatcheries were promoted as the catchall solution to salmon shortages. Huge investments were made in this new technology by Washington and Oregon governments beginning the late 19th century. However, writes Montgomery, in the long term, hatcheries have clearly failed. Salmon cannot simply adapt to any stream or river. They seem genetically programmed to operate in limited regions. Hatcheries salmon are selected from a very limited gene pool i.e. lack of genetic diversity and can produce defective offspring with their wild brethren. The hatchery salmon are found to be much more aggressive than their wild counterparts in eating up the food supply, thus making the wild ones lose out in the survival of the fittest. In particular hatchery fish, can introduce deadly diseases to their wild brethren. In the mid-70's a parasite from hatchery fish wiped out restored wild salmon stocks in Norwegian rivers.
By the early 1990's, while the Colombia river held an estimated 11 to 16 million salmon before the arrival of Europeans, by then it had dwindled to around 2 million wild fish. Yet the number of hatchery fish in the river was estimated at the time to be around a hundred million.
Likewise, on the East coast, salmon produced in "farms" i.e. maintained in cages at sea, sometimes accounted for the majority of spawning salmon in a river. An estimate of the National Research Council declares that 180,000 fish a year escape from their farms in Maine. They spread disease to wild salmon and mate with them, creating large numbers of genetically limited salmon. According to Montgomery, those 180,000 fish are ten times the number of wild salmon left in New England. In Europe, he notes, the amount of farm salmon being produced was 100 times the catch of wild salmon.
He advocates strictly enforced moratoriums on fishing, increased preservations of wetlands to allow for the creation of flood produced salmon-friendly side-channels, strictly enforced regulations on placing passageways for salmon in dams, regulations to prevent salmon waterways from being polluted and to make sure that salmon do not end up as carcasses on farmland after being swallowed through irrigation pumps. The economic actors involved continue to block serious efforts to protect the salmon as they always have. He notes how the Bush administration has blocked efforts to address over-fishing.
How to Save Salmon - Lessons from History.......2004-03-20
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Countryside Conservation: Land Fcology, Planning and Management
Bryn Green Manufacturer: Taylor & Francis ProductGroup: Book Binding: Paperback ASIN: 0419218807 |
Book Description
This third edition of the standard text Countryside Conservation charts and evaluates those changes which represent a fundamental revolution in the ways in which the countryside is planned and managed. It sets out the principles, policies and practice which underlie the ecology, planning and management of the new countryside, discussing ways in which countryside conservation objectives are evolving and how they can best be achieved.
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The Light-Green Society: Ecology and Technological Modernity in France, 1960-2000
Michael Bess Manufacturer: University Of Chicago Press ProductGroup: Book Binding: Paperback Similar Items:
ASIN: 0226044181 |
Book Description
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Forests in Time: The Environmental Consequences of 1,000 Years of Change in New England
Manufacturer: Yale University Press ProductGroup: Book Binding: Paperback Similar Items:
ASIN: 0300115377 |
Book Description
Customer Reviews:
Mmmm..........2007-01-19
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The Rhine: An Eco-biography, 18152000 (Weyerhaeuser Environmental Books)
Mark Cioc Manufacturer: University of Washington Press ProductGroup: Book Binding: Paperback Similar Items:
ASIN: 0295985003 |
Book Description
The Rhine River is Europe's most important commercial waterway, channeling the flow of trade among Switzerland, France, Germany, and the Netherlands. In this innovative study, Mark Cioc focuses on the river from the moment when the Congress of Vienna established a multinational commission charged with making the river more efficient for purposes of trade and commerce in 1815. He examines the engineering and administrative decisions of the next century and a half that resulted in rapid industrial growth as well as profound environmental degradation, and highlights the partially successful restoration efforts undertaken from the 1970s to the present.The Rhine is a classic example of a "multipurpose" river -- used simultaneously for transportation, for industry and agriculture, for urban drinking and sanitation needs, for hydroelectric production, and for recreation. It thus invites comparison with similarly over-burdened rivers such as the Mississippi, Hudson, Colorado, and Columbia. The Rhine's environmental problems are, however, even greater than those of other rivers because it is so densely populated (50 million people live along its borders), so highly industrialized (10% of global chemical production), and so short (775 miles in length).
Two centuries of nonstop hydraulic tinkering have resulted in a Rhine with a sleek and slender profile. In their quest for a perfect canal-like river, engineers have modified it more than any other large river in the world. As a consequence, between 1815 and 1975, the river lost most of its natural floodplain, riverside vegetation, migratory fish, and biodiversity. Recent efforts to restore that biodiversity, though heartening, can have only limited success because so many of the structural changes to the river are irreversible.
The Rhine: An Eco-Biography, 1815-2000 makes clear just how central the river has been to all aspects of European political, economic, and environmental life for the past two hundred years.
Customer Reviews:
The Life and Times of the Rhine.......2006-03-26
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Methods of Environmental Impact Assessment (The Natural and Built Environment Series)
Peter Morris Manufacturer: Spon Press ProductGroup: Book Binding: Paperback Similar Items:
ASIN: 0415239591 |
Book Description
A practical, up-to-date explanation and guide to how EIAs are, and should be, carried out for specific environmental components (e.g. air, water, ecological systems, and socio-economic systems). For each component, it includes a discussion of relevant regulations and standards, how baseline surveys are conducted, how impact predictions are made, what mitigation measures can be used, how the effectiveness of such measures should be monitored, and the limitations of the methods. This new edition has a new second part, consisting of chapters on "cross-cutting" methods that can be applied to, and can often facilitate integration between, many of the environmental components discussed in the first part.
Customer Reviews:
A WORLDWIDE HELPFUL BOOK.......2005-10-23
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IDEAS & CAREERS OF SIMON
Darline Gay Levy Manufacturer: University of Illinois Press ProductGroup: Book Binding: Hardcover ASIN: 025200311X |
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The Song of the Earth
Jonathan Bate Manufacturer: Harvard University Press ProductGroup: Book Binding: Hardcover Similar Items:
ASIN: 0674001680 |
Book Description
As we enter a new millennium ruled by technology, will poetry still matter? The Song of the Earth answers eloquently in the affirmative. A book about our growing alienation from nature, it is also a brilliant meditation on the capacity of the writer to bring us back to earth, our home.
In the first ecological reading of English literature, Jonathan Bate traces the distinctions among "nature," "culture," and "environment" and shows how their meanings have changed since their appearance in the literature of the eighteenth century. An intricate interweaving of climatic, topographical, and political elements poetically deployed, his book ranges from greenhouses in Jane Austen's novels to fruit bats in the poetry of Les Murray, by way of Thomas Hardy's woodlands, Dr. Frankenstein's Creature, John Clare's birds' nests, Wordsworth's rivers, Byron's bear, and an early nineteenth-century novel about an orangutan who stands for Parliament. Though grounded in the English Romantic tradition, the book also explores American, Central European, and Caribbean poets and engages theoretically with Rousseau, Adorno, Bachelard, and especially Heidegger.
The model for an innovative and sophisticated new "ecopoetics," The Song of the Earth is at once an essential history of environmental consciousness and an impassioned argument for the necessity of literature in a time of ecological crisis.
Customer Reviews:
The Song of the Earth.......2007-06-08
'ecocriticism' comes of age.......2001-02-06
The purpose of the book is to show how poetry is not only relevant but necessary in an age of increasing environmental unease. It is a manifesto for the urgency of 'ecopoetics'. Bate writes: 'This is a book about why poetry continues to matter as we enter a new millennium that will be ruled by technology. It is a book about modern western man's alienation from nature. It is about the capacity of the writer to restore us to the earth which is our home' (vii)
Chapters are as follows: 1. Going, Going 2. The State of Nature 3. A Voice for Ariel 4. Major Weather 5. The Picturesque Environment 6. Nests, Shell, Landmarks 7. Poets, Apes and Other Animals 8. The Place of Poetry 9. What are Poets For?
My favourite chapter is 'Major Weather' which, in some quite startling and original ways, charts the influence of climate on writing . The centre piece of the chapter is a reading of Keat's 'Ode to Autumn' as a 'weather poem', resembling 'a well-regulated ecosystem'. For Bate, the ode 'is not an escapist fantasy which turns its back on the ruptures of Regency culture, as late twentieth century criticism tended to suggest. No: it is a meditation on how human culture can only function through links and reciprocal relations with nature.'(103-4). I learned 'Ode to Autumn' as a schoolchild, and it has always stayed with me. Now I see eloquently expressed the reasons for its significance to me.
Bate has set himself a difficult but worthy task, to argue for poetry as 'the place where we save the earth', that if culture is the cause of environmental destruction it can also be its remedy. This, then, is a book that should be read by everyone with an interest in literature, by everyone with an interest in the continuation of life on the planet.
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The Environment of Britain in the First Millennium AD
Petra Dark Manufacturer: Duckworth Publishing ProductGroup: Book Binding: Paperback ASIN: 0715629093 |
Product Description
This study of the relationship between human activity and environmental change from the Iron Age to the end of the Anglo-Saxon period brings together the results of the latest research in many fields to reconstruct changes in climate, sea level, soils and vegetation. The consequences of the major cultural changes of the first millennium are examined, including the Roman Conquest, the end of Roman Britain, and the Anglo-Saxon settlement, revealing the different ways in which human activity modified the environment. Copiously illustrated with photographs, maps and line drawings, the book will be of particular relevance to anyone with an interest in archaeology, history, geography, palaeoecology, botany, or environmental science. Preface List of figures 1. Reconstructing enviroments of the first millennium AD 2. Climate and sea level in the first millennium AD 3. The Iron Age context 4. The Roman period 5. The end of Roman Britain and the Anglo-Saxon period to AD800 6. Late Anglo-Saxon England and the Viking Age 7. Discussion References Index
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Habitat Creation and Repair
Oliver L. Gilbert , and Penny Anderson Manufacturer: Oxford University Press, USA ProductGroup: Book Binding: Paperback Similar Items: ASIN: 0198549660 |
Book Description
With increasing public awareness of environmental issues, landscape managers and developers are being required to creatic substantial areas of naturalistic planting, particularly in urban areas, and to restore habitats degraded by building, development, or overuse. This book provides the definitive guide to habitat creation and repair, ranging from ethics, theory, and principles to the practical detail of designing habitats for wildlife. The authors, who have been working and teaching in the field for many years, draw on a wealth of practical experience - as well as an in-depth knowledge of the existing widely scattered literature - to provide an authoritative and accessible account of this rapidly developing subject. From coastal and freshwater ecosystems to mountains, forest, and grasslands, the book spans all of the major types of habitat to be found in the UK. Oliver Gilbert and Penny Anderson give advice on deciding when habitat creation is the correct path to follow, and then cover all steps from site survey through to the final design and actual realization of the scheme. For each habitat, the authors describe the options, problems, and solutions most likely to be encountered, and give examples of good and bad habitat creation in practice drawn from the UK and other countries. Habitat Creation and Repair is the first comprehensive guide to habitat creation to be published for several years. It will be a key text for advanced undergraduate and postgraduate courses in ecology, landscape architecture, resource management, and environmental science.With habitat conservation, creation, and repair increasingly a priority amongst planners, developers, and policy-makers, this book will also be welcomed by professional ecologists, environmental consultants, resource managers, and landscape architects.Books:
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