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Island Press began with a simple idea: knowledge is power—the power to imagine a better future and find ways for getting us there. Founded in 1984, Island Press’ mission is to provide the best ideas and information to those seeking to understand and protect the environment and create solutions to its complex problems.

Showing 151-180 of 311 items.

Three Revolutions

Steering Automated, Shared, and Electric Vehicles to a Better Future

Island Press

In Three Revolutions, transportation expert Dan Sperling and his collaborators share research-based insights on potential public benefits and impacts of the three transportation revolutions of vehicle automation, shared mobility, and vehicle electrification. They describe innovative ideas and partnerships, and explore the role government policy can play in steering the new transportation paradigm toward the public interest—toward our dream scenario of social equity, environmental sustainability, and urban livability.

Three Revolutions offers policy recommendations and provides insight and knowledge that could lead to wiser choices by all. With this book, Sperling and his collaborators hope to steer these revolutions toward the public interest and a better quality of life for everyone.
 

  • Copyright year: 2018
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Sustainable Landscape Construction, Third Edition

A Guide to Green Building Outdoors

Island Press

Since the publication of its first edition in 2000, Sustainable Landscape Construction has helped spur a movement towards resilient outdoor environments, in the U.S. and throughout the world. The third edition has been updated to address important recent developments in this landscape revolution, including expanded coverage of industry trends toward performance monitoring, as well as the necessity to plan for the realities of changing climates. Some of the trends covered will shift how landscape architects and contractors will do business in the challenging years ahead: many professionals and clients will focus on restoration projects, motivated by ecosystem services and social justice, and funded by innovative methods.

Sustainable Landscape Construction is part of the canon of landscape construction texts, and with this update, remains a visionary, one of a kind reference for professionals and students.

  • Copyright year: 2018
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Suburban Remix

Creating the Next Generation of Urban Places

Edited by Jason Beske and David Dixon
Island Press

Investment has flooded back to cities because dense, walkable, mixed-use urban environments offer choices that support diverse dreams. Auto-oriented, single-use suburbs have a hard time competing.

Suburban Remix brings together experts in planning, urban design, real estate development, and urban policy to demonstrate how suburbs can use growing demand for urban living to renew their appeal as places to live, work, play, and invest. The case studies and analysis show how compact new urban places are being created in suburbs to produce health, economic, and environmental benefits, and contribute to solving a growing equity crisis.

  • Copyright year: 2018
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Design as Democracy

Techniques for Collective Creativity

Island Press

How can we design places that fulfill urgent needs of the community, achieve environmental justice, and inspire long-term stewardship? By bringing community members to the table with designers to collectively create vibrant, important places in cities and neighborhoods. For decades, participatory design practices have helped enliven neighborhoods and promote cultural understanding. Yet, many designers still rely on the same techniques that were developed in the 1950s and 60s. These approaches offer predictability, but hold waning promise for addressing current and future design challenges. Design as Democracy is written to reinvigorate democratic design, providing inspiration, techniques, and case stories for a wide range of contexts. Edited by six leading practitioners and academics in the field of participatory design, with nearly 50 contributors from around the world, it offers fresh insights for creating meaningful dialogue between designers and communities and for transforming places with justice and democracy in mind.

  • Copyright year: 2017
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Beyond Mobility

Planning Cities for People and Places

Island Press

Beyond Mobility is about prioritizing the needs and aspirations of people and the creation of great places. This is as important, if not more important, than expediting movement. A stronger focus on accessibility and place creates better communities, environments, and economies.
 
There are many examples of communities across the globe working to create a seamless fit between transit and surrounding land uses, retrofit car-oriented suburbs, reclaim surplus or dangerous roadways for other activities, and revitalize neglected urban spaces like abandoned railways in urban centers.
 
The authors draw on experiences and data from a range of cities and countries around the globe in making the case for moving beyond mobility.

  • Copyright year: 2017
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The Community Resilience Reader

Essential Resources for an Era of Upheaval

Edited by Daniel Lerch
Island Press

National and global efforts have failed to stop climate change, transition from fossil fuels, and reduce inequality. We must now confront these and other increasingly complex problems by building resilience at the community level. The Community Resilience Reader combines a fresh look at the challenges humanity faces in the 21st century, the essential tools of resilience science, and the wisdom of activists, scholars, and analysts working on the ground to present a new vision for creating resilience. It shows that resilience is a process, not a goal; how it requires learning to adapt but also preparing to transform; and that it starts and ends with the people living in a community.

From Post Carbon Institute, the producers of the award-winning The Post Carbon Reader, The Community Resilience Reader is a valuable resource for community leaders, college students, and concerned citizens.

  • Copyright year: 2017
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Energy Democracy

Advancing Equity in Clean Energy Solutions

Island Press

The near-unanimous consensus among climate scientists is that the massive burning of gas, oil, and coal is having cataclysmic impacts on our atmosphere and climate. These climate and environmental impacts are particularly magnified and debilitating for low-income communities and communities of color.  
 
Energy democracy tenders a response and joins the environmental and climate movement with broader movements for social and economic change in this country and around the world.
 
Energy Democracy brings together racial, cultural, and generational perspectives to show what an alternative, democratized energy future can look like. The book will inspire others to take up the struggle to build the energy democracy movement. 

  • Copyright year: 2017
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Whitewash

The Story of a Weed Killer, Cancer, and the Corruption of Science

Island Press

Rachel Carson Environment Book Award, First Place (2017)
"Reads like a mystery novel as Gillam skillfully uncovers Monsanto's secretive strategies."—Erin Brockovich
"A damning picture...Gillam expertly covers a contentious front." —Publishers Weekly
"A must-read." —Booklist
"Hard-hitting, eye-opening narrative." —Kirkus

In Whitewash, veteran journalist Carey Gillam uncovers one of the most controversial stories in the history of food and agriculture. Gillam explores the global debate over the safety of a herbicide so pervasive that it is found in our cereals, snacks, and even in our urine. Known as Monsanto’s Roundup by consumers and as glyphosate by scientists, the world’s most popular weed killer is sold as safe enough to drink, but Gillam’s research shows that message has been carefully crafted to conceal a host of dangers. Whitewash is more than an exposé about the hazards of one chemical. It’s a story of power, politics, and the deadly consequences of putting corporate interests ahead of public safety.

  • Copyright year: 2017
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Design for Good

A New Era of Architecture for Everyone

Island Press

"I can't recommend John Cary's book, Design for Good, highly enough. His argument...is clear and revolutionary." —Melinda Gates

In Design for Good, John Cary offers character-driven, real-world stories about projects across the globe that are designed and created with and for the people who will use them. The book reveals a new understanding of the ways that design shapes our lives and gives professionals and interested citizens the tools necessary to seek out and demand designs that dignify. 
 
From Rwanda’s Butaro Hospital to Kalamazoo College’s Arcus Center for Social Justice Leadership, the examples in the book show what is possible when design is a collaborative, dignified, empathic process. Cary draws from his own experience as well as dozens of interviews to show not only that everyone deserves good design, but how it can be achieved.

  • Copyright year: 2017
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The Spirit of Dialogue

Lessons from Faith Traditions in Transforming Conflict

Island Press

Over more than twenty years as a mediator, Aaron T. Wolf has learned that successful conflict resolution is shaped by complicated dynamics—from how comfortable the meeting room is to the participants’ deepest senses of self. Bridging seemingly intractable issues means addressing multiple layers of needs. Wolf’s approach may be surprising to Westerners who are accustomed to separating rationality from spirituality and science from religion. The Spirit of Dialogue draws lessons from a diversity of faith traditions to transform conflict, from identifying the root cause of anger to aligning with an energy beyond oneself—what Christians call grace—to the true listening practiced by Buddhist monks. Whether atheist or fundamentalist, Muslim or Jewish, Quaker or Hindu, any reader involved in difficult dialogue will find concrete steps towards a meeting of souls.

  • Copyright year: 2017
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Urban Street Stormwater Guide

By National Association of City Transportation Officials
Island Press

The Urban Street Stormwater Guide begins from the principle that street design can support—or degrade—the urban area’s overall environmental health. By incorporating Green Stormwater Infrastructure (GSI) into the right-of-way, cities can manage stormwater and reap the public health, environmental, and aesthetic benefits of street trees, planters, and greenery in the public realm.

Building on the successful NACTO urban street guides, the Urban Street Stormwater Guide provides the best practices for the design of GSI along transportation corridors. The state-of-the-art solutions in this guide will assist urban planners and designers, transportation engineers, city officials, ecologists, public works officials, and others interested in the role of the built urban landscape in protecting the climate, water quality, and natural environment.

  • Copyright year: 2017
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Natural Defense

Enlisting Bugs and Germs to Protect Our Food and Health

Island Press

We rely on chemical cures to keep our bodies free from disease and our farms free from bugs and weeds. While human and agricultural health are rarely considered together, both are based on the same ecology, and both are being threatened by organisms that have evolved to resist our antibiotics and pesticides. Fortunately, scientists are finding new solutions that work with, rather than against, nature. There are viruses that bust apart bacteria; insect pheromones that throw crop-destroying moths into a misguided sexual frenzy; plant genes edited to protect against disease; and a resurgence of the ancient practice of fecal transplants. In this hopeful book, Monosson offers a fascinating look into the future of natural defenses. 

  • Copyright year: 2017
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Energy Sprawl Solutions

Balancing Global Development and Conservation

Island Press

Over the next several decades, as human populations grow, the demand for energy will soar. But renewable energy sources have a large energy sprawl—the amount of land needed to produce energy—which can threaten biodiversity. In Energy Sprawl Solutions, scientists Joseph M. Kiesecker and David Naugle provide a roadmap for preserving biodiversity despite the threats of energy sprawl. Their strategy—development by design—identifies and sets aside land where biodiversity can thrive while consolidating development in areas with lower biodiversity value.
 
This contributed volume features case studies from countries around the world, each describing a different energy sector and the way they have successfully maximized biodiversity protection. This book provides a needed guide for elected officials, industry representatives, NGOs and community groups who have a stake in sustainable energy-development planning.

  • Copyright year: 2017
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Bike Boom

The Unexpected Resurgence of Cycling

Island Press

Bicycling advocates envision a future in which bikes are a widespread daily form of transportation, but this reality is still far away. Will we ever witness a true “bike boom” in cities? What can we learn from past successes and failures to make cycling safer, easier, and more accessible?
 
In Bike Boom, journalist Carlton Reid uses history to shine a spotlight on the present and demonstrates how bicycling has the potential to grow even further, if the right measures are put in place by the politicians and planners of today and tomorrow. He explores the benefits and challenges of cycling, the roles of infrastructure and advocacy, and what we can learn from cities that have successfully supported and encouraged bike booms. In this entertaining and thought-provoking book, Reid sets out to discover what we can learn from the history of bike “booms.” 

  • Copyright year: 2017
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Resilient Cities, Second Edition

Overcoming Fossil Fuel Dependence

Island Press

In Resilient Cities, Second Edition, Peter Newman, Timothy Beatley, and Heather Boyer explore what it means to be resilient in an age of changing climate and growing inequity. Since the first edition was published in 2009, interest in resilience has surged, in part due to increasingly frequent and deadly natural disasters, and in part due to the contribution of our cities to climate change. The new initiatives and approaches from citizens and all levels of government show the promise as well as the challenges of creating cities that are truly resilient.
 
Resilient Cities, Second Edition reveals how cities around the world are working  to become more resilient. The authors offer stories, insights, and inspiration for urban planners, policymakers, and professionals interested in creating more sustainable, equitable, and, eventually, regenerative cities. Most importantly, the book is about overcoming fear and generating hope in our cities. The challenge of resilient cities is to claim a different future that helps us regenerate the whole planet.

  • Copyright year: 2017
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Within Walking Distance

Creating Livable Communities for All

Island Press

In Within Walking Distance, journalist and urban critic Philip Langdon looks at why and how Americans are shifting toward a more human-scale way of building and living. He shows how people are creating, improving, and caring for walkable communities. To draw the most important lessons, Langdon spent time in six communities that differ in size, history, wealth, diversity, and education, yet share crucial traits: compactness, a mix of uses and activities, and human scale. To improve conditions and opportunities for everyone, Langdon argues that places where the best of life is within walking distance ought to be at the core of our thinking. This book is for anyone who wants to understand what can be done to build, rebuild, or improve a community while retaining the things that make it distinctive.

  • Copyright year: 2017
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No One Eats Alone

Food as a Social Enterprise

Island Press

No One Eats Alone argues that human connections are essential for creating a healthy, equitable, and sustainable food system. Michael Carolan shares the stories of individuals who are working to become citizens first and consumers second.

  • Copyright year: 2017
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People, Forests, and Change

Lessons from the Pacific Northwest

Island Press

We owe much of our economic prosperity to the vast forested landscapes that cover the earth. But forests are under more pressure than ever. It is time to forgo the entrenched thinking that forests can be managed outside of human influence, and shift instead to management strategies that consider humans to be part of the forest ecosystem.

People, Forests, and Change: Lessons from the Pacific Northwest, considers the nature of forests in flux and how to balance the needs of forests and rural communities. In the US northwest, forest ecosystem management has been underway for two decades, and key lessons are emerging.  This book brings together ideas for policy makers, managers, students, and conservationists seeking to manage forests conscientiously and assure their long-term viability.

  • Copyright year: 2017
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EarthEd (State of the World)

Rethinking Education on a Changing Planet

By The Worldwatch Institute
Island Press

Today’s students will face the unprecedented challenges of a rapidly warming world, including emerging diseases, food shortages, drought, and waterlogged cities. How do we prepare 9.5 billion people for life in the Anthropocene, to thrive in this uncharted and more chaotic future? Answers are being developed in universities, preschools, professional schools, and even prisons around the world. In the latest volume of State of the World, a diverse group of education experts share innovative approaches to teaching and learning in a new era. EarthEd will inspire anyone who wants to prepare students not only for the storms ahead but to become the next generation of sustainability leaders.  
 

  • Copyright year: 2017
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Immersion

The Science and Mystery of Freshwater Mussels

Island Press

"This is nature writing at its best." —E.O. Wilson

"Eloquent treatise...Landis's book is as much call to action as paean to mesmerizing molluscs." —Nature

"Rich, accurate, and moving." —New Scientist

"A lyrical love letter to the imperiled freshwater mussel." —Science

Abbie Gascho Landis first fell for freshwater mussels while pregnant and submerged in an Alabama creek, watching a female filter the water through her body while her gills bulged with offspring. In that moment of connection, Landis became a mussel groupie, obsessed with learning more about the creatures’ hidden lives. She isn’t the only fanatic; the shy mollusks, so vital to the health of rivers around the world, have a way of inspiring unusual devotion. In Immersion: The Science and Mystery of Freshwater Mussels, Landis brings readers to a hotbed of mussel diversity, the American Southeast, to seek mussels where they eat, procreate, and, too often, perish. Landis shares her journey from perilous river surveys to dry streambeds and into laboratories where endangered mussels are raised one life at a time.

Mussels have much to teach us about the health of the watershed if we step into the creek and take a closer look at their lives. In turns joyful and sobering, Immersion is an invitation to see rivers from a mussel’s perspective, a celebration of the wild lives visible to those who learn to search.

  • Copyright year: 2017
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Marine Ecosystem-Based Management in Practice

Different Pathways, Common Lessons

Island Press

What are the key ingredients of successful marine ecosystem planning? The surprising answer, according to authors Julia Wondolleck and Stephen Yaffee, is that a successful approach calls for more than just sound organizational structure and resources, but also a comfortable atmosphere of trust, understanding, and collaboration.
 
Marine Ecosystem-Based Management in Practice is the first practical guide for the marine conservation realm. In a unique collection of case studies, the authors showcase successful  collaborative approaches to ecosystem-based management. This book offers a hopeful message to policy makers, managers, practitioners, and students who will find this an indispensable guide to field-tested, replicable marine conservation management practices that work.

  • Copyright year: 2017
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Seeing the Better City

How to Explore, Observe, and Improve Urban Space

Island Press

In order to understand and improve cities today, personal observation remains as important as ever.  While big data, digital mapping, and simulated cityscapes are valuable tools for understanding urban space, using them without on-the-ground, human impressions risks creating places that do not reflect authentic local context. Seeing the Better City brings our attention back to the real world right in front of us, focusing it once more on the sights, sounds, and experiences of place in order to craft policies, plans, and regulations to shape better urban environments.

Through clear prose and vibrant photographs, Charles Wolfe shows how to catalog the influences of urban form, public transportation, and other basic city elements. He then shares insights into how to use recorded observations to contribute to better planning and design decisions. Wolfe calls this the “urban diary” approach, and highlights how the perspective of the observer is key to understanding the dynamics of urban space. He concludes by offering guidance on how to use carefully recorded and organized observations as a tool to create change in urban planning conversations and practice.



  • Copyright year: 2016
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Nature's Allies

Eight Conservationists Who Changed Our World

Island Press

It’s easy to feel powerless in the face of big environmental challenges—but we need inspiration now more than ever. In Nature’s Allies, Larry Nielsen presents the inspiring stories of eight conservation pioneers who show that through passion and perseverance we can each make a difference, even in the face of political opposition. Nielsen’s vivid biographies of John Muir, Ding Darling, Aldo Leopold, Rachel Carson, Chico Mendes, Billy Frank Jr., Wangari Maathai, and Gro Harlem Brundtland are meant to rally a new generation of conservationists to follow in their footsteps and inspire students, conservationists, and nature lovers to speak up for nature and prove that individuals can affect positive change in the world.

  • Copyright year: 2017
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Handbook of Biophilic City Planning & Design

Island Press

What if, even in the heart of a densely developed city, people could have meaningful encounters with nature?
 
The Handbook of Biophilic City Planning & Design offers practical advice and inspiration for ensuring that nature in the city is more than infrastructure—that it also creates an emotional connection to the earth and promotes well-being among urban residents. Divided into six parts, the Handbook introduces key ideas about biophilic urbanism, highlights urban biophilic innovations in more than a dozen global cities, and concludes with lessons and resources for advancing urban biophilia.
 
As the most comprehensive reference on the emerging field of biophilic urbanism, the Handbook is essential reading for students and practitioners looking to place nature at the core of their planning and design ideas.

  • Copyright year: 2016
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Landscape Architecture Theory

An Ecological Approach

Island Press

For decades, landscape architecture was driven solely by artistic sensibilities. But in these times of global change, the opportunity to reshape the world comes with a responsibility to consider how it can be resilient, fostering health and vitality for humans and nature. Landscape Architecture Theory re-examines the fundamentals of the field, offering a new approach to landscape design.

Drawing on his extensive career in teaching and practice, Michael Murphy begins with an examination of influences on landscape architecture. He then delves into systems and procedural theory, while making connections to ecosystem and human factors, the design process, and more. He concludes by showing how a strong theoretical understanding can be applied to practical, every-day decision making and design work to create more holistic, sustainable, and creative landscapes.

  • Copyright year: 2016
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Prospects for Resilience

Insights from New York City's Jamaica Bay

Island Press

Given the realities of climate change and sea-level rise, coastal cities around the world are struggling with questions of resilience.  Resilience, at its core, is about desirable states of the urban social-ecological system and working to sustain those states in an uncertain and tumultuous future.  How do physical conditions, ecological processes, social objectives, human politics, and history shape the prospects for resilience?  Most books set out “the answer.”  This book sets out a process of grappling with holistic resilience from multiple perspectives, drawing on the insights and experiences of more than fifty scholars and practitioners working together to make Jamaica Bay in New York City an example for the world.

Ranging from a framework for understanding resilience practice in urban watersheds to essential tools for research and practice, Prospects for Resilience is filled with information and advice for scientists, urban planners, students, and others who are working to create more resilient cities that work with, not against, nature.

  • Copyright year: 2016
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People Cities

The Life and Legacy of Jan Gehl

Island Press

Over the last 50 years architect Jan Gehl has changed the way that we think about architecture and city planning—moving from the Modernist separation of uses to a human-scale approach inviting people to use their cities.
People Cities tells the inside story of how Gehl learned to study urban spaces and implement his people-centered approach in car-dominated cities. It discusses the work, theory, life, and influence of Gehl from the perspective of those who have worked with him in cities across the globe. It will inspire anyone who wants to create vibrant, human-scale cities and understand the ideas and work of the architect who has most influenced urban design. 

  • Copyright year: 2016
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Design Professional's Guide to Zero Net Energy Buildings

Island Press

In the Design Professional’s Guide to Zero Net Energy Buildings, Charles Eley draws from over 40 years of his own experience, and interviews with other industry experts, to lay out the principles for achieving zero net energy (ZNE) buildings, which produce as much energy as they use over the course of a year. Eley emphasizes the importance of building energy use in achieving a sustainable future; describes how building energy use can be minimized through smart design and energy efficiency technologies; and presents practical information on how to incorporate renewable energy technologies to meet the lowered energy needs. The book shows the reader through examples and explanations that these solutions are viable and cost effective.

  • Copyright year: 2016
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Holistic Management, Third Edition

A Commonsense Revolution to Restore Our Environment

Island Press

Holistic management is a systems-thinking approach for managing resources developed by former wildlife biologist and farmer Allan Savory decades ago, after observing the devastation of desertification in his native Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). Properly managed livestock are key to restoring the world’s grassland soils and the natural world we rely upon.

In this third edition of Holistic Management, Savory and coauthor Jody Butterfield update and streamline guidelines to reverse desertification, halt climate change, retain biodiversity, and eliminate causes of global human impoverishment. Reorganized chapters streamline concepts and new color photographs showcase examples of land restored by properly managed livestock.

Holistic Management is written for new generations of ranchers, farmers, pastoralists, eco- and social entrepreneurs, and government agencies, NGOs, and development professionals working to address global environmental and social degradation.
 

  • Copyright year: 2016
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Foundations of Restoration Ecology

Island Press

The practice of ecological restoration provides governments, organizations, and landowners a means to halt degradation and restore function to stressed ecosystems. Foundational theory is a critical component of the underlying science, providing valuable insights into restoring ecological systems and understanding why some efforts can fail.

Foundations of Restoration Ecology, Second Edition, has been dramatically updated to reflect new research in restoration ecology, including new sections on specific ecosystem processes, including hydrology, nutrient dynamics, and carbon.  Case studies describe real-life restoration scenarios in North and South America, Europe, and Australia. Lists at the end of each chapter summarize new theory and practical applications.

Written by acclaimed researchers in the field, this book provides practitioners as well as graduate and undergraduate students with a solid grounding in the newest advances in ecological science and theory.

  • Copyright year: 2016
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