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Archive for February, 2010
The Honest Broker: Making Sense of Science in Policy and Politics
Roger A. Pielke, Jr.
New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2007, 188 pages.
A stranger approaches you and asks for a referral to a restaurant in your town. How would you respond?
With this engaging question, Roger Pielke, an environmental studies professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder, opens his book concerning four idealized ways that science and environmental policy interact.
It would probably surprise the stranger if you handed him… [Click here to read more!]
Canadian Water Politics: Conflicts and Institutions
Mark Sproule-Jones, Carolyn Johns, B. Timothy Heinmiller (eds.)
Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press
2008, 360 pages.
Institutions and Environmental Change: Principal Findings, Applications, and Research Frontiers
Oran R. Young, Leslie A. King and Heike Schroeder (eds.)
Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press
2008, 400 pages.
Admitting a keen interest in policy reform won’t make you popular at cocktail parties. Trust me. But policy is simply shorthand for decisions that determine our collective action, and those havea way of exciting people. The rights, rules and procedures that we use to make decisions and take action are woven 
together by the machinery of institutions. While confirming that institutions are important, both Canadian Water Politics and Institutions and Environmental Change describe how we might tinker with, or even renovate, institutions so that they make better decisions – particularly environmental ones.
Canadian Water Politics addresses a fundamental problem in managing water: the incompatibility between the fluid properties of the resource and the seemingly immutable characteristics of its management. Institutions give rise to social practices and guide social interactions, and in this context, Canadian Water Politics examines how institutions mediate, amplify,… [Click here to read more!]
Bottomfeeder: How to Eat Ethically in a World of Vanishing Seafood
Taras Grescoe
Toronto: HarperCollins Publishers
2008, 326 pages.
Do you treat yourself to oysters or salmon from time to time? Are you tempted by tiger shrimp? Is tuna your comfort food?
If you are among the billions of people around the world who enjoy fish and other delicacies from the sea, this book is for you. Depending on which types of seafood you consume, you may be driving a species toward extinction, or contributing unknowingly to the destruction of coastal ecosystems and the local human communities that depend on them. Closer to home, you may be putting your own health at risk…. [Click here to read more!]
The Ecosystem Approach: Complexity, Uncertainty, and Managing for Sustainability
The Ecosystem Approach: Complexity, Uncertainty, and Ma
naging for Sustainability
David Waltner-Toews, James J. Kay and Nina-Marie E. Lister (eds.)
New York: Columbia University Pressds
2008, 383 pages.
A copy of The Ecosystem Approach should be placed on the desk of every engineer, manager, environmentalist, politician and teacher. It is one of the first comprehensive efforts to discuss environmental management and sustainability in the interrelated fields of complexity and post-normal science (science where the facts are uncertain, the values are in dispute, the stakes are high and there is a sense of urgency – think climate change)… [Click here to read more!]
