[CPEO-MEF] "The American West at Risk"

[Lenny Siegel <lennysiegel@gmail.com>]

The American West at Risk
Science, Myths, and Politics of Land Abuse and Recovery

Howard G. Wilshire, Richard W. Hazlett and Jane E. Nielson
ISBN13: 9780195142051ISBN10: 0195142055 hardback, 544 pages
May 2008,  Not Yet Published due Apr 29 2008


Description

The American West at Risk summarizes the dominant human-generated 
environmental challenges in the 11 contiguous arid western United 
States-America's legendary, even mythical, frontier. When discovered by 
European explorers and later settlers, the west boasted rich soils, 
bountiful fisheries, immense, dense forests, sparkling streams, untapped 
ore deposits, and oil bonanzas. It now faces depletion of many of these 
resources, and potentially serious threats to its few "renewable" resources.

The importance of this story is that preserving lands has a central role 
for protecting air and water quality, and water supplies--and all 
support a healthy living environment. The idea that all life on earth is 
connected in a great chain of being, and that all life is connected to 
the physical earth in many obvious and subtle ways, is not some new-age 
fad, it is scientifically demonstrable. An understanding of earth 
processes, and the significance of their biological connections, is 
critical in shaping societal values so that national land use policies 
will conserve the earth and avoid the worst impacts of natural 
processes. These connections inevitably lead science into the murkier 
realms of political controversy and bureaucratic stasis. Most of the 
chapters in The American West at Risk focus on a human land use or 
activity that depletes resources and degrades environmental integrity of 
this resource-rich, but tender and slow-to-heal, western U.S.

The activities include forest clearing for many purposes; farming and 
grazing; mining for aggregate, metals, and other materials; energy 
extraction and use; military training and weapons manufacturing and 
testing; road and utility transmission corridors; recreation; 
urbanization; and disposing of the wastes generated by everything that 
we do. We focus on how our land-degrading activities are connected to 
natural earth processes, which act to accelerate and spread the damages 
we inflict on the land.


...

For additional information, see
http://www.us.oup.com/us/catalog/general/subject/EarthSciences/Ecology/?view=usa&view=usa&sf=toc&ci=9780195142051

-- 


Lenny Siegel
Executive Director, Center for Public Environmental Oversight
a project of the Pacific Studies Center
278-A Hope St., Mountain View, CA 94041
Voice: 650/961-8918 or 650/969-1545
Fax: 650/961-8918
<lsiegel@cpeo.org>
http://www.cpeo.org



_______________________________________________
Military mailing list
Military@lists.cpeo.org
http://lists.cpeo.org/listinfo.cgi/military-cpeo.org