Frank B. Golley - Böcker

The ecosystem concept—the idea that flora and fauna interact with the environment to form an ecological complex—has long been central to the public perception of ecology and to increasing awareness of environmental degradation. In this book an eminent ecologist explains the ecosystem concept, tracing its evolution, describing how numerous American and European researchers contributed to its evolution, and discussing the explosive growth of ecosystem studies. Golley surveys the development of the ecosystem concept in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and discusses the coining of the term ecosystem by the English ecologist Sir Arthur George Tansley in 1935. He then reviews how the American ecologist Raymond Lindeman applied the concept to a small lake in Minnesota and showed how the biota and the environment of the lake interacted through the exchange of energy. Golley describes how a seminal textbook on ecology written by Eugene P. Odum helped to popularize the ecosystem concept and how numerous other scientists investigated its principles and published their results. He relates how ecosystem studies dominated ecology in the 1960s and became a key element of the International Biological Program biome studies in the United States—a program aimed at "the betterment of mankind" specifically through conservation, human genetics, and improvements in the use of natural resources; how a study of watershed ecosystems in Hubbard Brook, New Hampshire, blazed new paths in ecosystem research by defining the limits of the system in a natural way; and how current research uses the ecosystem concept. Throughout Golley shows how the ecosystem concept has been shaped internationally by both developments in other disciplines and by personalities and politics.

This book synthesizes knowledge from several fields that are crucial to sustainable rural development: the physical environment, biological and agricultural production, rural sociology and economics. It takes a systems perspective incorporating systems analysis, landscape analysis and soil, water, and land planning. Rural Planning from an Environmental Systems Perspective is directed toward graduate students and professionals, providing a source of information and concepts for those concerned with land and water policies and practice. It presents an integrated approach using practical and applicable models and methods and takes a middle position between an elementary conceptual approach to land and water management and a highly mathematically advanced treatise based exclusively on system modeling. The book is based on almost twenty years of experience in teaching a course on rural planning and the environment at the International Centre for Advanced Mediterranean Agronomic Studies in Zaragoza, Spain. The authors are specialists from universities, research institutions and companies in Europe and North America.

This is the first introductory anthology on the philosophy of ecology edited by an ecologist and a philosopher. It illustrates the range of philosophical approaches available to ecologists and provides a basis for understanding the thinking on which many of today's environmental ideas are founded. Collectively, these seminal readings make a powerful statement on the value of ecological knowledge and thinking in alleviating the many problems of modern industrial civilization.Issues covered include:the challenges of defining scientific ecology, tracing its genealogy, and distinguishing the science from various forms of "ecological-like" thinkingthe ontology of ecological entities and processesselected concepts of community, stability, diversity, and nichethe methodology of ecology (rationalism and empiricism, reductionism and holism)the significance of evolutionary law for ecological science