Electronic Waste
This book examines the detrimental impact of electronic waste on human health, animal welfare, and environmental ecosystems. The initial chapter discusses the sources, composition, and toxicity of electronic waste. From the contamination of air, water, and soil to the alarming threats to wildlife, insects, and microorganisms, the book exposes the far-reaching consequences of electronic waste on our planet. It also underscores the risks of e-waste to food safety, animal farming practices, public health, and the nervous system. Furthermore, the book delves into innovative recycling technologies, systematic management strategies, and the economic impacts associated with e-waste management, emphasizing the necessity of sustainable value chains and adopting a circular economy approach. It offers insights into the financial dimensions of e-waste management and the potential for creating sustainable value chains, providing a comprehensive perspective on this global challenge and offering sustainable solutions for the future. This book is a valuable resource for researchers, policymakers, and environmentalists working to understand the harmful impact of electronic waste on health, the environment, and sustainability.Key features- Examines the threats posed by electronic waste (e-waste) to human, animal, and environmental health.- Presents sources, types, composition, and toxicity of electronic waste.- Places a strong emphasis on the impact of e-waste on wildlife and biodiversity, highlighting threats to ecosystems.- Reviews impact of electronic waste on animal farming practices and the associated health concerns.- Discusses innovative recycling technologies and systematic management strategies for e-waste.- Explores the potential for a circular economy approach in e-waste management, emphasizing sustainability.
Hot Talk, Cold Science
The revised and expanded third edition of Hot Talk, Cold Science forms the capstone of the distinguished astrophysicist Dr. S. Fred Singer's lucid, yet hard scientific look at climate change. And the book is no less explosive than its predecessors--and certainly never more timely. Singer explores the inaccuracies in historical climate data and the failures of climate models, as well as the impact of solar variability, clouds, ocean currents, and sea levels on global climate--plus factors that could mitigate any human impact on world climate. Singer's masterful analysis decisively shows that the pessimistic, and often alarming, global-warming scenarios depicted in the media have no scientific basis. In fact, he finds that many aspects of increased levels of CO2, as well as any modest warming, such as a longer growing seasons for food and a reduced need to use fossil fuels for heating, would have a highly positive impact on the human race. As alarmists clamor to impose draconian government restrictions on entire populations in order to combat "climate change," this book reveals some other startling, stubborn contradictory facts, including: CO2 has not caused temperatures or sea levels to rise beyond historical rates. Severe storms have not increased in frequency or intensity since 1970--neither have heat waves nor droughts. Global "climate change" is not harming coral reefs. Any increases in CO2 concentrations across huge time spans haven't preceded rising global temperatures, they've followed them by about 600 to 800 years--just the opposite of alarmist claims. "Carbon" taxes and other "solutions" to the global warming "crisis" would have severe consequences for economically disadvantaged groups and nations. Alarmist climate scientists have hidden their raw temperature data and deleted emails--then undermined the peer-review system to squelch debate. In sum, despite all the hot talk--and outright duplicity--there is no "climate crisis" resulting from human activities and no such threat on the horizon. With the assistance of renowned climate scientists David R. Legates and Anthony R. Lupo, Singer's Hot Talk, Cold Science is an essential, clear-headed book of scope and substance that no one who claims to value science, the environment, and human well-being can afford to ignore.
White Light
A profound and lyrical reflection on the cyclical nature of life, what happens when we break that cycle, and how to repair it--told through the fate of phosphorus "There would be no life without constant death." So begins Jack Lohmann's remarkable debut, White Light, a mesmerizing swirl of ecology, geology, chemistry, history, agricultural science, investigative reporting, and the poetry of the natural world. Wherever life has roamed, its record is left in the sediment; over centuries, that dead matter is compacted into rock; and in that rock is phosphate--one phosphorus atom bonded to four oxygen atoms--life preserved in death, with all its surging force. In 1842, when the naturalist John Stevens Henslow, Darwin's beloved botany professor, discovered the potential of that rock as a fertilizer, little did he know his countrymen would soon be grinding up the bones of dead soldiers and mummified Egyptian cats to exploit their phos­phate content. Little did he know he'd spawn a global mining industry that would change our diets, our lifestyles, and the face of the planet.Lohmann guides us from Henslow's Suffolk, where the phosphate fertilizer industry took root, to Bone Valley in Central Florida, where it has boomed alongside big ag--leaving wreckage like the Piney Point disaster in its wake--to far-flung Nauru, an island stripped of its life force by the ravenous young industry. We sift through the earth's geological layers and eras, speak in depth with experts and locals, and explore our past relationship with sustainable farming--including in seventeenth-century Japan, when one could pay rent with their excrement--before we started wasting just as much phosphate as we mine. Sui generis, filled with passion and rigorous reporting, White Light invites us to renew our broken relationship not just with the earth but with our own death--and the life it brings after us.
Replumbing the City
Moving between shower drains, aqueducts, rain gardens, and even kitchen sinks, Replumbing the City traces the enormous urban waterscape of Los Angeles in a state of flux. For more than a century, the city of Los Angeles has relied on faraway water for the vast majority of its municipal supply, but climate change is making these distant sources much less dependable. To adapt, Angelenos--including city engineers, advocates at NGOs, and residents--are developing new water supplies within the space of the city. Sayd Randle's ethnography examines the labor of replumbing LA's sprawling water system, detailing how a desire to sustain unlimited and uninterrupted water provision for paying customers is reshaping the urban environment and its management. Tracking how such projects redistribute the work of water management, the book explores thorny questions of how the labor of climate adaptation should be mobilized and valued.
The Field Guide to Mixing Social and Biophysical Methods in Environmental Research
Environmental Resilience in the Pandemic Years 2020-2021
This book focuses on the indirect effects on environmental resilience. The COVID-19 epidemic and the 2020 global pandemic have had an unprecedented public health impact. These included not only economic impacts but also social activities, and environmental and ecological impacts. This study examined the fact that net effects were positive, for example, in terms of greenhouse gas emissions, oil and gas exploration activities, and reductions in pollution. The most notable and most positive environmental impact of COVID-19 is the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions from transportation sources. Air and road transport cause a huge portion of the pollution from closures and outages. Restrictions on economic and social mobility have had positive impacts, with reductions in transport and trade contributing significantly to reducing greenhouse gas emissions. By increasing their scale, endangered ecosystems benefit from improved environmental quality. To better understand how the environment is maintained, we summarize the evolution of COVID-19 and subsequent pandemics. The COVID-19 pandemic has had an unexpected and lasting impact on the environment. At the same time, ecological hotspots where human activity is commonly prevalent benefit from improved environmental quality, allowing wildlife and other life forms to thrive. For this reason, we can conclude that the COVID-19 outbreak and subsequent pandemic were beneficial to environmental stewardship.
View from the Top
View From the Top features oral history interviews with three former U.S. Forest Service deputy chiefs of research regarding fire prevention, forest experiment stations, forestry research, international forestry, the Society of American Foresters, the International Society of Tropical Foresters, and the International Union of Forestry Research Organizations.
Climate to a Fish Sandwich: Why We Study the Ocean's Circulation
Textbook of General Virology
This book is an introductory text that presents fundamental knowledge and recent advances in virology. It provides comprehensive coverage of different aspects like classification, structure, emerging viruses, cancer-causing viruses, and viral vaccines. It covers the basic biology of virus existence, evolution, and reoccurrence. It also incorporates the fundamentals of biophysical and biochemical aspects of viral replication. The book discusses important topics such as immunity to viral infections, bacteriophages, and techniques used in virology. The Textbook of General Virology is meant for undergraduate and postgraduate students of microbiology, immunology, genetics, and medicine.Key Features: Discusses introductory and foundational knowledge of viruses for students of life sciences and medicine Covers the virus history, diversity of its infection strategy, and classification Summarizes the characteristics of different viruses on the basis of nucleic acid genome type Describes the biology of RNA and DNA viruses and their effect on cell growth control in animals and humans after infection Reviews topics like immunity to viruses and viral vaccines
Textbook of General Virology
This book is an introductory text that presents fundamental knowledge and recent advances in virology. It provides comprehensive coverage of different aspects like classification, structure, emerging viruses, cancer-causing viruses, and viral vaccines. It covers the basic biology of virus existence, evolution, and reoccurrence. It also incorporates the fundamentals of biophysical and biochemical aspects of viral replication. The book discusses important topics such as immunity to viral infections, bacteriophages, and techniques used in virology. The Textbook of General Virology is meant for undergraduate and postgraduate students of microbiology, immunology, genetics, and medicine.Key Features: Discusses introductory and foundational knowledge of viruses for students of life sciences and medicine Covers the virus history, diversity of its infection strategy, and classification Summarizes the characteristics of different viruses on the basis of nucleic acid genome type Describes the biology of RNA and DNA viruses and their effect on cell growth control in animals and humans after infection Reviews topics like immunity to viruses and viral vaccines
New Engagement Strategies for Energy Justice
This book offers an innovative exploration of energy justice, from concept to action, highlighting its role as a crucial tool for navigating the complexities of a just and sustainable energy transition. The book is timely and as the global energy transition rapidly progresses, it will serve as an essential resource, offering practical guidance to advancing a just and sustainable energy future. The perspectives presented in this book are presented by early career energy justice scholars from around the world, each highlighting and proposing ways to navigate the transition. The discussion focuses on three key themes: the integration and repurposing of energy infrastructures with the use of technology, the need for affordable and accessible energy services, and the promotion of responsible governance through effective policymaking and corporate social responsibility. At the heart of this book is the presentation of the 'Toolkit to Achieve the Just Transition using the Energy Justice Framework'.
Elemental
An ecologist explores how life itself shapes Earth using the elemental constituents we all share It is rare for life to change Earth, yet three organisms have profoundly transformed our planet over the long course of its history. Elemental reveals how microbes, plants, and people used the fundamental building blocks of life to alter the climate, and with it, the trajectory of life on Earth in the past, present, and future. Taking readers from the deep geologic past to our current era of human dominance, Stephen Porder focuses on five of life's essential elements--hydrogen, oxygen, carbon, nitrogen, and phosphorus. He describes how single-celled cyanobacteria and plants harnessed them to wildly proliferate across the oceans and the land, only to eventually precipitate environmental catastrophes. He then brings us to the present, and shows how these elements underpin the success of human civilization, and how their mismanagement threatens similarly catastrophic unintended consequences. But, Porder argues, if we can learn from our world-changing predecessors, we can construct a more sustainable future. Blending conversational storytelling with the latest science, Porder takes us deep into the Amazon, across fresh lava flows in Hawaii, and to the cornfields of the American Midwest to illuminate a potential path to sustainability, informed by the constraints imposed by life's essential elements and the four-billion-year history of life on Earth.
Engendering the Energy System
This book brings together a comprehensive overview of gender and energy to provide an invaluable resource for researchers and practitioners. It addresses how energy access at the individual/household/community level is gendered in terms of decision making and where and how benefits accrue. At the institutional level it examines the role women play in the sector and the barriers they have to overcome to participate. At the policy level experiences with mainstreaming gender into energy policy are discussed. The book provides examples from both the Global South and the Global North and is set in the context of the energy transition. The book is a timely publication that highlights the global energy initiatives of SEforAll, the SDGs and the Paris Agreement on Climate Change.
Air-Borne
The fascinating, untold story of the air we breathe, the hidden life it contains, and invisible dangers that can turn the world upside down Every day we draw in two thousand gallons of air--and thousands of living things. From the ground to the stratosphere, the air teems with invisible life. This last great biological frontier remains so mysterious that it took over two years for scientists to finally agree that the Covid pandemic was caused by an airborne virus. In Air-Borne, award-winning New York Times columnist and author Carl Zimmer leads us on an odyssey through the living atmosphere and through the history of its discovery. We travel to the tops of mountain glaciers, where Louis Pasteur caught germs from the air, and follow Amelia Earhart and Charles Lindbergh above the clouds, where they conducted groundbreaking experiments. We meet the long-forgotten pioneers of aerobiology including William and Mildred Wells, who tried for decades to warn the world about airborne infections, only to die in obscurity. Air-Borne chronicles the dark side of aerobiology with gripping accounts of how the United States and the Soviet Union clandestinely built arsenals of airborne biological weapons designed to spread anthrax, smallpox, and an array of other pathogens. Air-Borne also leaves readers looking at the world with new eyes--as a place where the oceans and forests loft trillions of cells into the air, where microbes eat clouds, and where life soars thousands of miles on the wind. Weaving together gripping history with the latest reporting on Covid and other threats to global health, Air-Borne surprises us on every page as it reveals the hidden world of the air.
Malaria Demographics and Associations in Humanitarian Emergencies
River Microbial Water Quality in a Changing Climate and Socio Economic Conditions
Conservation Aquaculture
Stocking hatchery-produced fish has been a standard component of fisheries management for over 100 years. This book discusses the production of hatchery fish used in aquaculture-assisted fisheries programs to help stabilize and recover endangered species. For the most part, these programs have been unsuccessful, and a reason why is that the traditional approach to fish culture produces fish that are genetically and behaviorally ill-suited to help recover an imperiled species. The hatchery environment and management used to culture the fish makes them sub-viable in the wild. Even if most of the augmented fish die, survivors that mate with wild fish lower the fitness of the endangered population, making the conservation program counter-productive. Since traditional aquaculture programs have been shown to produce fish that are ill-suited to help recovery, a new way of producing fish is needed. That new way is conservation aquaculture. In conservation aquaculture, fish are raised in naturalized mesocosms that mimic the environment in which the endangered species lives. Management is naturalized, so domestication does not produce genetic changes, and so fish develop a full and effective suite of behaviors that enable them to forage efficiently and detect and avoid predators when stocked. The conservation aquaculture management techniques described in the book can also be used to improve commercial and recreational fish stocking programs.
Building Resilience to Climate Change in Selected Districts in Zimbabwe
Handbook of Himalayan Ecosystems and Sustainability, Volume 2
Structural and Biological Applications of Schiff Base Metal Complexes
Starlings
Has there ever been a more hated bird than the European starling? Let loose in New York City's Central Park by a misguided aristocrat, the starlings were supposed to help curb insect outbreaks and add to the tuneful choir of other songbirds. Rather than staying put, the dark and speckled starlings marched across the continent like a conquering army. In less than sixty years, they were in every state in the contiguous United States and their numbers topped two hundred million. Cities came under siege; crops buckled beneath their weight. Public sentiment quickly soured. A bitter, baffling, and sometimes comical war on starlings ensued. Weapons included dynamite, guns, bounties, fake owls, real owls, rubber snakes, balloons, itching powder, and greased building ledges. Still, artists and scientists marveled at their undulating aerial formations, which seemed equal parts poetry and mathematics. Keen listeners recognized the starling as one of the world's great vocal mimics, imitating everything from fellow birds and cell phones to barking dogs, car alarms, and TV commercials. And then there were their undeniable skills of adaptation and survival. What if there was more to these stubborn villains than once thought? Mike Stark's Starlings is a first-of-its-kind history of starlings in America, an oddball, love-hate story at the intersection of human folly, ornithology, and one bird's tenacious will to endure.
Knowledge Models and Dissemination for Sustainable Development
This book delves into the invaluable contributions made by the Italian UNESCO Chairs toward addressing the intricate and pressing global challenges of our era. Established within the UNITWIN/UNESCO Chairs program initiated by UNESCO in 1992, these Chairs serve as vital links between the realms of academic research and civil society. They offer a conduit for disseminating knowledge, thereby advancing the objectives of global development. By facilitating the transfer and adoption of scientific methodologies through intellectual collaboration, they strive to enhance the sustainability and resilience of both individual communities and society at large. Through a series of dialogues, the Italian UNESCO Chairs critically examine the challenges inherent in this mission, the objectives they aim to achieve, the strategies employed in scientific research, and the development of novel areas of study. They approach these endeavors with a conscientious and responsible mindset, recognizing them as essential responses to the multifaceted issues arising in our rapidly evolving world. The contributions put forth by the Italian UNESCO Chairs serve as practical tools for the implementation of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals, making them relevant to various stakeholders. These include not only citizens, scholars, public and private institutions, research centers, and administrators but also anyone with an interest in tackling the challenges of sustainable development in our everyday lives.
