Working With Water in Medieval Europe: Technology and Resource-Use (Technology and Change in History)

Book Description

This volume highlights the need for enhancing the effectiveness of land stewardship and management of the world's natural resources to meet the need of the growing global population for conservation, sustainable development, and the use of land, water, and other natural resources. Ecosystem-based, multiple-use land stewardship is necessary when considering the present and future uses of land, water, and other natural resources on an operationally efficient scale. The chapters focus on global watershed management perspectives, problems, and programs; a retrospective survey of watershed management, lessons learned, emerging tools and technologies, and locally-led initiatives; the issues confronted when implementing a watershed management approach to land stewardship; the anticipated future contributions of watershed management to land stewardship; and the protocols necessary to realize the contributions of watershed management to land stewardship in practices, projects, and programs.

Earth Ponds Sourcebook: The Pond Owner's Manual and Resource Guide

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Earth Ponds

Earth Ponds Sourcebook: The Pond Owner's Manual and Resource Guide
Tim Matson
Manufacturer: Countryman Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 0881503584

Book Description

In the sequel to his bestselling Earth Ponds, Tim Matson offers new ideas, advice, a wealth of resources, and his trademark wit in this sourcebook full of practical information for pond owners. Those who want to build a new pond today are likely to face tighter regulations on wetlands and complicated questions about building methods; those who already own ponds may wonder how to stock it with fish, how to cure an alga or weed problem, or how to cope with beavers. This book addresses all of these issues, and more.

Topics covered include:

* Pond Building: a concise guide, A to Z
* Maintenance: symptoms of a dying pond and some basic and off-the-wall ideas about how to prevent, or reverse, this aging process
* Wildlife: how to attract those you want; how to repel those you don't.
* Activities and Use: skating, raising fish, saunas and hot tubs, kits for building rafts, docks, and gazebos, pumps for irrigation and pond protection,
* Garden ponds: goldfish, ornamental plants
* Details about the products on the market, where to buy supplies, and how to get the best for your buck.

Customer Reviews:

Earth Ponds.......2000-06-24

This is meant as a companion for his other book on ponds but does a very nice job by itself.

Landslides: Processes, Prediction, and Land Use (Water Resources Monograph)

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Landslides: Processes, Prediction, and Land Use (Water Resources Monograph)
Roy C. Sidle , and Hirotaka Ochiai
Manufacturer: American Geophysical Union
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 0875903223

Acequia Culture: Water, Land, and Community in the Southwest

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Acequia Culture: Water, Land, and Community in the Southwest
JosÃ© A. Rivera
Manufacturer: University of New Mexico Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 0826318592

Book Description

Conflicts between Hispanic farmers and developers made for compelling reading in The Milagro Beanfield War, the famous novel of life in a northern New Mexico village in which tradition triumphs over modernity. But as cities grow and industries expand, are acequias, or community irrigation ditches, a wise and efficient use of water in the arid Southwest? JosÃƒÂ© Rivera presents the contemporary case for the value of acequias and the communities they nurture in the river valleys of southern Colorado and New Mexico.

Recognizing that "water is the lifeblood of the community," Rivera delineates an acequia culture based on a reciprocal relationship between irrigation and community. The acequia experience grows out of a conservation ethic and a tradition of sharing that should be recognized and preserved in an age of increasing competition for scarce water resources.

Book Description

The only major U.S. railroad to be operated by westerners and the only railroad built from west to east, the Southern Pacific acquired a unique history and character. It also acquired a reputation, especially in California, as a railroad that people loved to hate. This magisterial history tells the full story of the Southern Pacific for the first time, shattering myths about the company that have prevailed to this day. A landmark account, Sunset Limited explores the railroad's development and influence--especially as it affected land settlement, agriculture, water policy, and the environment--and offers a new perspective on the tremendous, often surprising, role the company played in shaping the American West.
Based on his unprecedented and extensive research into the company's historical archives, Richard Orsi finds that, contrary to conventional understanding, the Southern Pacific Company identified its corporate well-being with population growth and social and economic development in the railroad's hinterland. As he traces the complex and shifting intersections between corporate and public interest, Orsi documents the railroad's little-known promotion of land distribution, small-scale farming, scientific agriculture, and less wasteful environmental practices and policies--including water conservation and wilderness and recreational parklands preservation.
Meticulously researched, lucidly written, and judiciously balanced, Sunset Limited opens a new window onto the American West in a crucial phase of its development and will forever change our perceptions of one of the largest and most important western corporations in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Customer Reviews:

The Rise and Fall of the Southern pacific.......2007-03-31

The Sunset Limited is a fitting name for this book. Of course it's the name of the flagship train of the Southern Pacific that ran between New Orleans and Los Angeles. It's also fitting because sunset came to the Southern Pacific and ended its identity - although most of its trackage is still being operated by the successor Union Pacific.

The story of railroading in the United States is the story of little railroads getting started to serve some particular market and then dozens to hundreds of theae smaller roads eventually being bought or merged together. The Southern Pacific started and ended exactly this way.

This book is an excellent telling of the story of the Southern Pacific from it's beginning as a bunch of small independents through its glory years as one of the major railroads in the country down to its inglorious years. The only real surprise in the book is the benevolent attitude towards the company compared with the writing of many who condemed for a variety of evils.

Orsi Gets it Right.......2005-12-01

As an historian said about this book; "It should be required reading for those interested in the West, the environment and business". Indeed it should. Because more than just blowing away all the dis-information that the Southern Pacific suffered from for decades (and contributed to its collapse), this book provides excellent case studies of how industry, government, NGO's, and the Press cooperated on solving complex and politically charged problems. In fact it was amazing to me to see how well and patiently these disparate groups worked with each other. Much more so than today. There is a lesson here.

Not for Model Railroaders.......2005-08-13

Orsi has written an extensive history of the SP that I found informative and interesting from the viewpoint of a historian. I was looking for help/insight in my planning of a model railroad centered around the Southern Pacific and quickly discovered I was looking in the wrong place.
Fortunately one of my other hobbies is History, and Orsi came through for me in that respect. His research was quite extensive and his access to the SP records uncovered much that I had never read or heard about previously.
What caused me to rate this book at 3 stars instead of 4 0r 5 was Orsi's tendency to repeat events in different chapters. I found myself frequently going back to an earlier chapter to verify I had read the information eariler.
History buffs, particularlly those interested in California History will find this a good read. Model railroaders that are looking for specific information should probably look elsewhere.

All Hail the S & P!.......2005-06-29

This actually could have been a three star review, but I have to give credit to the thuroughness of the scholarship, the excellent photographs and the superb 200+ end notes, which are a mini-book in themselves.

Orsi's book is "revisionist" if it is proper to call a thesis that glorifies a massive American corporation "revisionist". I suppose that it qualifies if one is taking the scholarship of major American and French universities from the sixties onward as the standard.

Simply put, Orsi's goal is to set the record straight about the Southern Pacific. No "Octopus" in his eyes, the Southern Pacific was an important innovator in the area of agriculture, conservation and scientific forestry. Indeed, without the Southern Pacific, California and the west as we know it would not have been possible.

Aside from rewriting bits of history from the railroad's perspective, Orsi's main scholarly contribution is his access to the Southern Pacific's own corporate records. Certainly this is an approach that gives a more complicated picture of the corporations motives and morals then the simplistic "Octopus" portrait of Frank Norris.

Orsi also has access to better statistics then scholars operating in the past had (i.e. the railroad's internal statistics), so that allows him to fairly castigate those who have painted an unrealistic portrait of, say, the size of the Southern Pacific's land grants.

Although I am sympathetic to his attempt to rehabilitate the image of the Southern Pacific, I found some of the assertions regarding the tremendous difficulties the S & P had in carrying out its good intentions hard to take. If one was to rely on Orsi's book as one's only source, you might believe that the Southern Pacific was a money losing venture, operated out of sheer philanthropy of the "Big Four".

I'm serious about that comment: There is no mention about the tremendous personal fortunes of Stanford, Huntington and Co., let alone any discussion of the profit of the railroad as a whole. On the other hand, Orsi goes out of his way to demonstrate expenditures the railroad made in support of the common good.

Of course, I can hear the authorial response: Everyone already knows about the money that was made, I'm trying to fill in the stuff that everyone doesn't know.

Still, one example: The S & P operated the Pacific Land Company, which operated at the behest of the Big Four by subdividing land for sale. Orsi says that there wasn't any record of how much money that Land Company made and says it's impossible to even determine how the land and profit was accounted for within the S & P. Is that so? I find it curious, as I found the curious the almost complete lack of (positive) financial data.

On the whole, I thought Orsi does a great job. However, I would have liked more balance, even if he is writing this book to even the score.

Balancing Water for Humans and Nature: The New Approach in Ecohydrology

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Balancing Water for Humans and Nature: The New Approach in Ecohydrology
Malin Falkenmark , and Johan Rockström
Manufacturer: Earthscan Publications Ltd.
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 1853839272

Book Description

This book exposes how water flow links nature and society through water's many parallel functions as the 'blood stream' of both the biosphere and the imbedded anthroposphere, and the resulting conflicts that arise. The authors argue that a sustainable future depends fundamentally on our ability to manage these trade-offs.
They advocate an ecological approach to land/water/environmental problems and argue for viewing precipitation as the gross water resource. Distinguishing between terrestrial aquatic ecosystems they show how an ecological approach can be expressed in water-related trade-offs, incorporating criteria for long-term resilience.
Based on per capita needs for an acceptable nutritional diet, the authors analyze the amounts of water needed for global food production by 2050 and identify potential sources. Drawing on small-scale experiences in Africa and Asia, they also cover the vulnerability of the semi-arid tropics, disentangling it into green and blue water scarcity components.

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Blue Revolution
Ian Calder
Manufacturer: Earthscan Publications Ltd.
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 1844072398

Book Description

This update to Blue Revolution provides further evidence of the need to integrate land management decisionmaking into the process of integrated water resources management. It presents the key issues involved in finding the balance between the competing demands for land and water: for food and other forms of economic production, for sustaining livelihoods, and for conservation, amenity, recreation, and the requirements of the environment. It also advocates the means and methodologies for addressing them.

A new chapter, Policies, Power and Perversity, describes the perverse outcomes that can result from present, often myth-based, land and water policies which do not consider these land and water interactions. New research and case studies involving ILWRM concepts are presented for the Panama Canal catchments and in relation to afforestation proposals for the U.K. Midlands.

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The Economic Value of Water (RFF Press)
Diana C. Gibbons
Manufacturer: RFF Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 0915707233

Book Description

Gibbons examines the water supply problem through five case studies. The problems faced by these regions and the methods suggested to overcome them provide excellent models for the entire United States. The case studies---typically, expanding supplies---but economic efficiency principles lead to emphasizing managing the demand. In many cases, this means reducing demand by raising prices.

Virtual Rivers: Lessons from the Mountain Rivers of the Colorado Front Range

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If you thought you knew front-range rivers, read this...

Virtual Rivers: Lessons from the Mountain Rivers of the Colorado Front Range
Ellen Wohl
Manufacturer: Yale University Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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Disconnected Rivers: Linking Rivers to Landscapes

ASIN: 0300084846

Book Description

Sparsely settled mountain areas of the world, such as Colorado's Front Range, give an impression of wild, untouched, and unchanging nature. Yet in many cases mountain rivers that appear to be pristine natural systems actually have been impaired as a result of human activities. In this timely and accessible book, Ellen Wohl documents two hundred years of land-use patterns on the Front Range and their wide-ranging effects on river ecosystems.

If we hope to manage river resources effectively and preserve functioning river ecosystems, the author warns, we must recognize how beaver trapping, placer mining, timber harvesting, flow regulation, road and railroad construction, recreation, cattle grazing, and other human activities have impaired rivers—and continue to do so. The rivers of the Colorado Front Range are representative of mountain rivers throughout the world: land-use patterns affecting their form and function are little-recognized or - understood. This book fills an important gap with a clear and comprehensive explanation of how rivers are changed by human activity and includes a generous selection of striking historical and contemporary photographs, maps, and diagrams.

Customer Reviews:

If you thought you knew front-range rivers, read this..........2004-01-17

Ellen's book gives a historical perspective on the forces that have shaped the rivers of Colorado's front range. I grew up on the Colorado's front-range and would never have suspected the extent of change that these rivers have undergone. She covers the period from the Beaver Men to the present. During a recent fishing vacation back to the area I was able to stand where some of the photos were taken, read the descriptions, and envision the changes for myself. Hopefully, concerned citizens and their elected officials will take her advice throughout the book seriously and protect these valuable resources for the future!

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