Blogs

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When will America, world make sustainability a priority?

Twenty years ago, I took a week off from my job at the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Resources and attended the U.N. Conference on Environment and Development as a private citizen. At this conference, also known as the Earth Summit, nations of the world, including the United States, endorsed a nonbinding plan for a new form of development: environmentally sustainable development.
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Island Press Staff Picks

This week's staff pick is from Angela Osborn, Island Press' Promotions and Fulfillment Manager:
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Rants from the Hill: I brake for Rants

I've never been a fan of bumper stickers, though I’ve always thought the idea had potential. Done right, you’d think a bumper sticker could be a sort of ideological haiku, an elegant little distillation of a person’s unique perception of the world. Or, alternatively, that it could express genuine wit by being a joke that doesn’t take too long to tell. And even if a bumper sticker isn’t very likely to prompt people to act, it should at least make them imagine. As in, for example, “Visualize Whirled Peas.”
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Ghost Trees

The standing dead trees were everywhere, their boles weathered silver where the bark had peeled. The carcasses of their fallen comrades littered the understory, with few aspen sprouting from the deadfall. The occasional mangled saplings we observed provided graphic evidence of heavy elk browsing.
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Forests at Risk: Real and Personal

As I gathered with other concerned Coloradans for the “Forests at Risk” symposium in Aspen, Colorado last week, the importance of climate change and forests became immediately clear with the absence of two key speakers.
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When Will the Fish & Wildlife Service Give a Hoot for Spotted Owls?

Perhaps no other species symbolizes the conflict over logging in the Pacific Northwest more than the northern spotted owl. This medium-sized, forest-dwelling raptor has been credited with shutting down the logging industry in the 1990s and with shouldering the responsibility of conservation for hundreds of species that share its old-growth forest habitat.

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