Think Like An Ecosystem

Start a peaceful revolution by planting an edible ecosystem and sharing the experience with your neighbors Humans have always thrived in rich, diverse, edible ecosystems. Yet most cities and suburbs are blanketed by lawns, ornamentals, and a lack of biodiversity, let alone anything edible. It is within these sterile landscapes that seeds of an edible ecosystem lie. The Edible Ecosystem Solution is a comprehensive, practical guidebook that looks at underutilized spaces to reveal the many opportunities for landscape transformation that are both far-reaching and immediately beneficial and enjoyable. Contents include: Hundreds of full-color infographics, illustrations, and photographs that clearly outline the principles and concepts of edible landscape design and benefits How to get started with as little as 25 square feet of land How to transition a garden plot into a place of edible abundance and an edible biodiversity hot spot, living laboratory, and a source point for transitioning and transforming community and culture Choosing appropriate plants for insects, wildlife, and food production Scaling up and networking backyard edible ecosystems at the neighborhood level and beyond to build community food security and resilience. The Edible Ecosystem Solution is for everyone with access to a bit of yard, a desire for food security, biodiversity, and a beautiful and resilient community, and for anyone who wants to reclaim humanity's place in a rich, abundant, edible ecosystem.

Ingram Spark Version

This extensively revised and expanded edition broadens the reach and depth of the permaculture approach for urban and suburban gardeners. The text's message is that working with nature, not against it, results in more beautiful, abundant, and forgiving gardens.

As human activity and environmental change come to be increasingly recognized as intertwined phenomena on a rapidly urbanizing planet, the field of urban ecology has risen to offer useful ways of thinking about coupled human and natural systems. On the forefront of this discipline is Marina Alberti, whose innovative work offers a conceptual framework for uncovering fundamental laws that govern the complexity and resilience of cities, which she sees as key to understanding and responding to planetary change and the evolution of Earth. Bridging the fields of urban planning and ecology, Alberti describes a science of cities that work on a planetary scale and that links unpredictable dynamics to the potential for innovation. It is a science that considers interactions - at all scales - between people and built environments and between cities and their larger environments. Cities That Think like Planets advances strategies for planning a future that may look very different from the present, as rapid urbanization could tip the Earth toward abrupt and nonlinear change. Alberti's analyses of the various hybrid ecosystems, such as self-organization, heterogeneity, modularity, multiple equilibria, feedback, and transformation, may help humans participate in guiding the Earth away from inadvertent collapse and toward a new era of planetary co-evolution and resilience.

Increasingly, cracks are appearing in the capacity of communities, ecosystems, and landscapes to provide the goods and services that sustain our planet's well-being. The response from most quarters has been for "more of the same" that created the situation in the first place: more control, more intensification, and greater efficiency. "Resilience thinking" offers a different way of understanding the world and a new approach to managing resources. It embraces human and natural systems as complex entities continually adapting through cycles of change, and seeks to understand the qualities of a system that must be maintained or enhanced in order to achieve sustainability. It explains why greater efficiency by itself cannot solve resource problems and offers a constructive alternative that opens up options rather than closing them down. In Resilience Thinking, scientist Brian Walker and science writer David Salt present an accessible introduction to the emerging paradigm of resilience. The book arose out of appeals from colleagues in science and industry for a plainly written account of what resilience is all about and how a resilience approach differs from current practices. Rather than complicated theory, the book offers a conceptual overview along with five case studies of resilience thinking in the real world. It is an engaging and important work for anyone interested in managing risk in a complex world.

The need for cooperation among government agencies as well as an interdisciplinary approach to the increasingly challenging and complicated problem of managing park and wilderness areas prompted the University of Washington College of Forest Resources, the National Park Service, and the Forest Service to sponsor an ecosystem management workshop for scientists, planners, and managers. To develop an improved conceptual approach to managing change in ecosystems crossing natural and political boundaries, the workshop focused on defining terms, uncovering areas of misunderstanding and barriers to cooperation, and developing methods to determine the most important problems and issues. Three needs emerged from the prioritization process: a precise definition of the management objectives for park and wilderness lands and how to integrate them with objectives for surrounding lands, nationally as well as site-specific; more information about physical, biological, and social components of park and wilderness ecosystems from both sides of political boundaries; and key indicators of ecosystem condition as well as methods for evaluating management effectiveness. All of these common themes point to a need for more precise direction in management goal setting and more accurate assessment of progress toward goals. The book includes an introductory chapter by the editors and summary in which they outline a direction for ecosystem management in the next critical decades. The other chapters by individual contributors include studies on laws governing park and wilderness lands, paleoecological records that reveal the historic effects of climatic variations on vegetation change, succession and natural disturbance in relation to the problems of what can and should be preserved, managing ecosystems for large populations of vertebrates, the management of large carnivores, effects of air pollution, lake acidification, human ecology and environmental management, the role of economics, cooperation in ecosystem management, and management challenges in Yellowstone National Park.