Download PDF Practical Ecology for Planners, Developers, and Citizens by Dan L. Perlman

Download PDF Practical Ecology for Planners, Developers, and Citizens  by Dan L. Perlman

Sinopsis

Each year, the United States and Canada add more than 3.5 million people to their combined population. Each year, our appetite for land and resources grows as we demand more housing, more cars, more roads, more food, more forest products, and more leisure opportunities. As the human world expands, we leave lessroom and fewer resources for native species and ecosystems, and the natural world suffers. So, too, do we ourselves suffer when we fail to define a harmonious relationship with nature. Each year, natural disasters such as wildfires, floods, and devastating hurricanes cost lives and cause billions of dollars of damage to human communities; from 1995 to 1997, the United States alone suffered about $1 billion of natural hazard damages each week.1 More insidiously, generations of children are growing up separated from nature and the wisdom, pleasure, and spiritual wealth that it offers.

Some environmentalists would address this crisis by setting aside large portions of the landscape as nature reserves that are off-limits to people. But while conservation areas are an important part of the solution, they fail to address the 80 or 90 percent of the land that humans do inhabit and use. For these areas, the challenge is to integrate humans and nature more beneficially by retaining ecological values in largely domesticated landscapes. Planners, designers, and developers must be at the forefront of this effort, for their activities transform the landscape in ways that are seldom environmentally neutral. If these professionals are not consciously working to bring forth an ecologically sounder world, they are often contributing, if only inadvertently, to the creation of a wasteful and potentially dangerous one.

Content

1. Humans, Nature, and Interactions
2. Humans Plan
3. New York City’s Water
4. Fire in Colorado
5. Different Ways of Thinking about the Future
6. Planning with Context in Mind
7. Safeguarding Human Communities: Ecological Due Diligence
8. Respecting Natural Processes That Cross Boundaries
9. An Introduction to Ecology and Biodiversity
10. Biodiversity: The Stuff of Life
11. The Study of Biodiversity: Ecology and Its Subdisciplines
12. Why Protect the Natural Environment and Biodiversity?
13. Native versus Non-Native Biodiversity
14. Factors That Contribute to High Biodiversity
15. Humans: A Part of Nature or Apart from Nature?
16. When Humans and Nature Collide
17. Consequences of Human Settlement
18. Powerful Effects of Local Human Activity
19. The Science of Ecology
20. Change through Time
21. An Ecological and Land Use History of Petersham, Massachusetts
22. Ecosystems Change Predictably, Sometimes: Effects of Climate and Succession
23. Ecosystems Change Unpredictably, Sometimes: Effects of Disturbance
24. Disturbance in the Context of Human Communities
25. Populations and Communities
26. Levels of Organization in Ecology
27. Population Issues
28. Ecological Communities
29. Planning for Ecosystems, Planning for Species
30. The Ecology of Landscapes
31. A Word about Scale
32. Form and Function of Matrices, Patches, and Corridors
33. Land Mosaics, Land Transformation, and Implications for Planning
34. Ecosystem Ecology
35. Freshwater Ecosystems and Their Relation to the Land
36. Ecological Integrity and Sustainability
37. Applications
38. Conservation Planning
39. Different Types of Conservation and Open Space Areas
40. Selecting and Designing Nature Reserves
41. Small Locally Important Reserves and Large Nationally Important Reserves
42. Nature in the Neighborhood
43. Values and Functions of Local Natural Areas
44. Planning and Designing Local Open Spaces
45. Benefits and Costs of Interspersing Humans and Nature
46. Restoration and Management
47. Reclaiming Land after Mining in Butte,Montana
48. Restoring Grasslands in Grayslake, Illinois
49. The Restoration Process
50. Land Management
51. Ecologically Based Planning and Design Techniques
52. Using Ecological Data
53. Landscape Scale (Counties and Regions)
54. Sublandscape Scale (Cities, Towns, and Counties)
55. Habitat Scale (Sites and Lots)
56. Protecting Human Safety in the Ecological Context
57. Principles in Practice
58. Part 1: Residential Development at the Site Scale
59. Part 2: Planning for Growth by Listening to Ecology

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