Whole Earth Discipline: Why Dense Cities, Nuclear Power, Transgenic Crops, Restored Wildlands, and Geoengineering Are Necessary

Charles D. Kolstad

Environmental Economics

Environmental Economics is the first text to concentrate solely on environmental economics--the problems of earth, air, and water pollution from an economic perspective--with an emphasis on both government regulation and private-sector anti-pollution incentives. With the assumption that readers already have an understanding of intermediate microeconomics, the book reaches into more detail on theory and analysis than most other textbooks in this area. Now fully revised in its second edition, Environmental Economics is divided into four primary sections: the first section defines the field of environmental economics in relation to general economics and to ecological and resource economics; the second section is normative, looking at market failure and asks why, even with apparent environmental protection, the market often fails to work properly; the third section is positive, examining government regulation of pollution using the industrial organization literature; and the final section covers more advanced topics, looking at risk, uncertainty, green accounting, international competition and cooperation and development. Including many international examples, the book places special ...

Peter D. Ward

Under a Green Sky: Global Warming, the Mass Extinctions of the Past, and What They Can Tell Us about Our Future

More than 200 million years ago, a cataclysmic event known as the Permian extinction destroyed more than 90% of all species and nearly 97% of all living things. Its origins have long been a puzzle for paleontologists, and during the 1990s and the early part of this century a great battle was fought between those who thought that death had come from above and those who thought something more complicated was at work. Paleontologist Peter D. Ward, fresh from helping prove that an asteroid had killed the dinosaurs, turned to the Permian problem, and he has come to a stunning conclusion. In his investigations of the fates of several groups of mollusks during those extinctions and others, he discovered that the near-total devastation at the end of the Permian was caused by rising levels of carbon dioxide leading to climate change. But it's not the heat (nor the humidity) that's directly responsible for the extinctions, and the story of the discovery of what is responsible makes for an fascinating, globe-spanning adventure.

Larry Gonick

Cartoon Guide to the Environment

Do you think that the Ozone Hole is a grunge rock club? Or that the Food Web is an on-line restaurant guide? Or that the Green Revolution happened in Greenland? Then you need The Cartoon Guide to the Environment to put you on the road to environmental literacy. The Cartoon Guide to the Environment covers the main topics of environmental science: chemical cycles, life communities, food webs, agriculture, human population growth, sources of energy and raw materials, waste disposal and recycling, cities, pollution, deforestation, ozone depletion, and global warming--and puts them in the context of ecology, with discussions of population dynamics, thermodynamics, and the behavior of complex systems.