Social-Environmental Planning (Social Environmental Sustainability)

Business & Money

Maser, Chris

Economics

CRC-Press

Decision-Making for a Sustainable Environment: A Systemic Approach (Social Environmental Sustainability)

Increasingly, environmental decision making is like playing a multidimensional game of chess. With interactions between the atmosphere, the litho-hydrosphere, and the biosphere, the game is at once a measure of complexity, uncertainty, interdisciplinary acuity, social-environmental sustainability, and social justice for all generations. As such, it demands a systemic point of view. Decision Making for a Sustainable Environment: A Systemic Approach gives readers the tools to replace the dysfunctional, symptomatic decision making that has plunged the world into environmental crises with a systemic approach that fosters social-environmental sustainability. A New Paradigm for Environmental Decision Making Based on the author's more than 45 years of research and broad, international experience, this book guides policy makers and managers to work with--rather than within--theoretical and methodological frameworks to achieve multidimensional and multilayered policy decisions. It discusses systemic thinking as a rational, viable alternative to competitive, materialistic, and symptomatic decision making. Insights, Approaches, and Examples for Leadership Organized into three parts, the book begins by describing the inviolable biophysical principles that define the limitations of human choices. The second part examines in depth why the conventional command-and-control form of decision making tends to become dysfunctional and fails. It also explains how to break the cycle of such behavior. A case study by Jessica K. La Porte explores the challenges of creating a program of environmentally sustainable decision making. The third part of the book explores what it takes to be a psychologically mature decision maker. A Peaceful Path toward Social-Environmental Sustainability for All Generations

Land-Use Planning for Sustainable Development (Social Environmental Sustainability)

Thirteen years ago, the first edition of Land-Use Planning for Sustainable Development examined the question: is the environmental doomsday scenario inevitable? It then presented the underlying concepts of sustainable land-use planning and an array of alternatives for modifying conventional planning for and regulation of the development of land. This second edition captures current success stories, showcasing creative, resilient strategies for fundamentally changing the way we alter our landscape.
See What’s New in the Second Edition:
 <ul>
 <li>Explains the relationship between innovative land-use planning and nature’s impartial, inviolate biophysical principles that govern the outcome of all planning</li>
 <li>Focuses on how decision making that flows from and aligns with nature’s biophysical principles benefits all generations by consciously protecting and maintaining social-environmental sustainability</li>
 <li>Proposes an alternative framework for municipal comprehensive plans framing the community as a living system</li>
 
</ul>
 Written by two experienced professionals in sustainable development planning, the second edition revisits the successes as well as barriers to progress associated with establishing new community development models, such as EcoMunicipalities. The authors emphasize the necessity and potency of citizen involvement and initiatives. They provide proposals for alternative approaches that rest on lessons from history as well as the research, wisdom, and vision of many individuals and communities whose work they have studied. The book supplies a sturdy platform on which to continually build and innovate progress in sustainable land use planning.

Silberstein, M.A.

Environmental & Natural Resources Law

Sustainability and the Rights of Nature: An Introduction (Social Environmental Sustainability)

Sustainability and the Rights of Nature: An Introduction is a much-needed guide that addresses the exciting and significant paradigm shift to the Rights of Nature, as it is occurring both in the United States and internationally in the fields of environmental law and environmental sustainability. This shift advocates building a relationship of integrity and reciprocity with the planet by placing Nature in the forefront of our rights-based legal systems. The authors discuss means of achieving this by laying out Nature's Laws of Reciprocity and providing a roadmap of the strategies and directions needed to create a Rights of Nature-oriented legal system that will shape and maintain human activities in an environmentally sustainable manner. This work is enriched with an array of unique and relevant points of reference such as the feudal notions of obligation, principles of traditional indigenous cultivation, the Pope Francis Encyclical on the environment, and the new Rights of Nature-based legal systems of Ecuador and Bolivia that can serve as prototypes for the United States and other countries around the world to help ensure a future of environmental sustainability for all living systems.

La Follette, Cameron

The Redesigned Forest

Stoddart

This unique 'biography' encompasses a thousand years of the natural history and evolution of an old-growth forest in the western Cascade Mountains of Oregon. Called an "estimable piece of work" by the Boston Globe, Forest Primeval traces the life cycle of a forest from its fiery inception in the year 987 to the present day, when logging threatens the forest and its inhabitants.

Forest Primeval: The Natural History of an Ancient Forest

Science & Math

Biological Sciences

Stoddart+publishing

In this classic work of ecology, Chris Maser traces the growth of an ancient forest in Oregon's Cascade Mountains from its fiery birth in the year 987 to the present. A unique biography of an ecosystem, Forest Primeval portrays a diverse fabric of plants, animals, and microorganisms working in unison.Maser offers precise yet evocative accounts of the lives and events within the burgeoning forest: the habits of deer mice who help reseed the burned earth, the seemingly accidental but vitally necessary symbiotic associations between fungus and tree root tips that stimulate growth, the constant predation among wildlife. He reveals how over the course of a millennium, microbes and fungi change a forest just as surely as a raging fire, only inconspicuously and more slowly.As the life cycles of the forest progress, Maser's minute scientific observations unfold against the backdrop of history, a chronology of human struggle and suffering that is paralleled in the life of . . . a single 1000-year-old Douglas fir. In taking this millennial view, Maser shows how the forest represents our spiritual and historical roots as human beings. Arguing that our survival is as intertwined with the forests as are the myriad interlocking life cycles that created them, Maser makes a plea for the immediate global implementation of restoration forestry.

History

Americas

Oregon State University Press

In this unique "biography: of a beautiful forest in Oregon's Cascade Mountains, Chris Maser traces the growth of the forest from its birth in 988 to its current glory as an ancient forest much loved by the author since his childhood. He offers precise yet evocative accounts of the diverse lives and events within the forested portion of the ecosystem, such as the habits of deer mice who help re-seed the burned earth, the seemingly accidental but vitally necessary symbiotic associations between fungus and tree root tips that stimulate and maintain growth, the constant predation among wildlife that joins life to death to life, and a host of other miraculously and mysteriously interlocking life cycles. He shows how over the course of a millennium, "microbes and fungi change a forest just as surely as a ranging fire, only inconspiculously and more slowly."

Forest Primeval

Sierra Club Books

Drawing on twenty years of experience as a research scientist in forest ecology and his own gradual yet profound spiritual development, Maser effectively advocates bringing a sacred appreciation of nature into resource management and into the average persons life. Maser gives us a mandate for change in order to strike an essential balance between our culture's wants and needs and Nature's capacity to maintain a sustainable planetary equilibrium.

Global Imperative: Harmonizing Culture and Nature

Politics & Social Sciences

Philosophy

Stillpoint Pub.

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Books by Maser, Chris