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Abundant Earth documents the loss of biodiversity underway and lays out the drivers of this destruction. It goes beyond the litany of causes—a growing population, rising livestock numbers, expanding economies and trade, and spreading infrastructures—to ask the question: Since it is well-understood that humanity’s expansionism is irreparably diminishing life’s richness, why are we not taking the needed steps to halt our expansionism? It argues that the worldview of human supremacy—the conviction that humans are superior to all other life-forms and entitled to use them and their places—stands in the way, for it normalizes humanity’s ongoing expansion. This worldview is an obstacle to recognizing that the conjoined strategy of scaling down the human enterprise and pulling back from expanses of land and seas is the means for addressing the ecological crisis and preempting the suffering and dislocations of both humans and nonhumans. Scaling down calls us to lower the global population within a human-rights framework, move toward deindustrializing food production, and work to localize economies and contract global trade. Pulling back is the project of restoring terrestrial and marine ecologies, so that life’s abundance may resurge. The book argues that humanity will not advance by entrenching its domination over the biosphere, but will stagnate in the debased identity of nature-colonizer and decline in the predicament of vying for “natural resources.” Instead, humanity can chart another course, choosing to live in fellowship with our Earthly wild and domestic cohort, within vibrant ecologies, nestling human inhabitation inside a biodiverse, living planet.

Societies have long turned to experts for advice on controversial matters, but in the past, the arrangements to solicit expert advice were largely ad hoc. In recent years we have witnessed the development of an institutionalized system in which scientists offer knowledge in exchange for influence on the policy process, creating, in effect, a permanent assessment economy. We examine this process of expert assessment through detailed analyses of three groups of large, formal scientific assessments: the U.S. National Acid Precipitation Assessment Program, international assessments of ozone depletion, and assessments examining the potential disintegration of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet. We show that assessments not only summarize existing knowledge, but also can create new knowledge and set research agendas. Assessments can also impede the development of knowledge, particularly if scientists focus unduly on uncertainty or on achieving consensus. The desire to achieve consensus can also weaken assessment outcomes by leading scientists to converge on least common denominator results. Assessments often try to stay on the science side of a poorly defined and intermittently enforced boundary between science and policy because of a concern with objectivity and efficacy. Assessments often try to neutralize bias by being inclusive in terms of nationality, gender, and prior intellectual commitments—adopting what we call a “balance of bias” strategy. We conclude that the assessment process is one of expert discernment, but nevertheless surprisingly sensitive to the institutional arrangements that establish it.

Long-simmering environmental problems originate in human actions that alter nature in ways deemed abusive or degrading. The root causes of environmental ills are thus the forces and factors that prompt people to act as they do: to misuse nature, to remain insensitive to underlying causes and resulting harms, and to resist calls for reform. Many root causes lie within modern culture, particularly in prevailing ways of seeing and valuing nature and understanding human-nature links. Beginning from various places this book probes these root causes, seeking not just the origins of land abuse but the cultural reasons why reform efforts have largely stalled and are so deeply resisted. It draws together the core wisdom of three leading environmental voices—Aldo Leopold, Wendell Berry, and David Orr—and of Pope Francis from his encyclical, Laudate Si’. It seeks fresh cultural insights from a deeper probing of the tragedy of the commons, the controversy over wilderness as place and idea, and the institution of private property rights in nature. By steps the book links environmental ills and current impasses to key elements of modern culture, many embedded in contemporary liberal individualism, and to central social institutions (particularly the capitalist market and private property) that embody and strengthen these elements. The book issues a strong call for more communitarian understandings and values, in ecological and social realms, and for a unified conservation effort chiefly aimed not at scientific education or policy reform but at long-term cultural change.

Our environmental ills are due to the ways we interact with nature, variously using it appropriately and abusing it. These interactions, in turn, are much influenced by—their root causes are found in--modern culture, particularly how we see and value nature and our place in it. This book takes on the ambitious task of making sense, literally, of our place in nature, thereby assisting in what conservationist Aldo Leopold termed “our oldest task”—to live in nature without degrading it. The book addresses the topic in its fullness, in a way few scholars have attempted. Drawing as much on history, sociology, economics, ecology, and environmental politics as it does environmental philosophy the work transcends academic fields to engage basic issues pushed aside in environmental studies programs and calls for a “new economy.” The opening chapter explores how we gain knowledge (epistemology), what the world contains (metaphysics), how we make normative choices, how we define truth, and how parts of nature (humans included) interact to form larger wholes with emergent proprieties. This inquiry sets the stage for considering how we might best distinguish good from bad interactions with nature. The discussion critiques our overuse of science and dominant liberal moral frames in the course of identifying and drawing together the many normative considerations—social and inter-generational justice as well as ecological concerns—that bear on the challenge. Concluding chapters offer an ambitious program for reform of liberal culture and of the key institutions (the market and private property) that reflect and strengthen that flawed culture.

This book captures contributions from the 2.5-day summit entitled “Science for Parks, Parks for Science: The Next Century” held at the University of California, Berkeley from 25 to 27 March 2015 to celebrate the centennial of events at UC Berkeley that helped launch the US National Park Service, and the role of UC Berkeley graduates in staffing the National Park Service and in conducting early and influential research in national parks. It addresses the unprecedented challenges to sustain the ecological integrity of parks and to promote their welfare to a public that has become more urbanized and less connected to nature. Contributions fall into four main sections: (1) the mission and relevance of national parks and protected areas, which features an essay by and discussion with E. O. Wilson on parks, biodiversity, and education that is followed by chapters addressing marine parks and global perspectives on parks; (2) stewardship of parks in a changing world, with chapters examining climate change, novel disturbance regimes, air pollution, invasive species, and conservation of large mammals; (3) engaging people in parks, which features contributions on parks as coupled human-natural systems, science and conflict in parks, citizen science in parks, and the spiritual and cultural significance of parks; and (4) the future of science and parks, with chapters that consider how parks and science may evolve together over the next century. The first three sections each conclude with edited transcripts of strategic conversations from the summit that addressed related themes.

The golden age of field biology in North America lasted from the last half of the nineteenth century until perhaps just after the Second World War. During this time, natural history surveys were organized, museums constructed to house their specimens, and field stations cobbled together to civilize the experience. At this time, many of the finest field biologists in history came out of the U.S. Midwest. They grew up at a time when the Midwest was frontier; when hunting and fishing and trapping were a part of a boy’s life, and to be successful you had to know the habits and habitats of the animals you sought. Today, field biology is enjoying a resurgence due to several factors, including the recognition that ecological relationships are complicated—much more complicated than even our most sophisticated computer-generated statistical/mathematical models can offer. It is now time for field biologists to explore their origins, claim their history, and ask fundamental existential questions such as where did we come from, do we have a cohesive story we can tell, and do we have a legacy? This book offers some answers to these questions. It is a history of field biology in North America and what it meant to the world. It is a bottom-up, field-based, rubber booted history of a life style conducted by some of its most talented early practitioners. The world today is a far better place today than it would have been otherwise, thanks to field biologists and the consequences of their discoveries.

Exploring how people can become attuned to the wild community of life and also contribute to the well-being of the wild places in which we live, work, and play, Wildness brings together esteemed authors from a variety of landscapes, cultures, and backgrounds to share their stories about the interdependence of everyday human lifeways and wildness. Far from being an all or nothing proposition, wildness exists in variations and degrees that range from cultivated soils to multigenerational forests to sunflowers pushing through cracks in a city alley. Spanning diverse geographies, these essays celebrate the continuum of wildness, revealing the many ways in which human communities can nurture, adapt to, and thrive alongside their wild nonhuman kin. From the contoured lands of Wisconsin’s Driftless region to remote Alaska, from animals and plants thriving in urban areas to indigenous lands and harvest ceremonies, from backyards to reclaimed industrial sites, from microcosms to bioregions and atmospheres, manifestations of wildness are everywhere. This book illuminates what wildness is and could be, as well as how it might be recovered in our lives—and with it, how we might unearth a more profound, wilder understanding of what it means to be human.