The People's Republic of China (PRC) is seeking new approaches to improve water management outcomes in the face of a growing water crisis caused by ongoing pollution control and watershed management challenges. This has included numerous experiments in «eco-compensation» (which shares characteristics with payments for ecological services). This paper details progress in creating a national eco-compensation ordinance and discusses the ongoin ...
The People's Republic of China (PRC) suffers from some large-scale land degradation problems, posing a significant threat to the lives of local residents and to the future economic welfare of the nation. The dryland areas of the western PRC, which cover approximately 40% of the country's land area, contain some of the most severely degraded land in the world. With only about 7% of the world's farmland and 6% of the world's an ...
Climate change is one of a few major factors that ensure the country will continue to struggle to supply its cities and industries and fields with enough water, particularly in the North, as well as face more frequent and longer droughts. The country has shown a stunningly agile disaster response system, but its system for disaster prevention and management is far less developed. The road to greater drought management and sustainable water suppl ...
This paper was originally produced for the «International Conference on Payments for Environmental Services,» held in Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region in China on 6-7 September 2009, and jointly hosted by the People's Republic of China's National Development and Reform Commission, the Ministry of Environmental Protection, the government of Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region, and the Asian Development Bank (ADB). It is part of the full volume o ...
In this magnificently illustrated book, conservationist and celebrated outdoors photographer Tim Palmer launches us on a revealing journey among the hemlock and beech trees that have for millennia towered over America’s eastern woodlands. The eastern hemlock and North American beech once thrived from Maine to Georgia, casting shade on trout streams, nourishing wildlife large and small, and gracing uncounted valleys, mountainsides, pa ...
Japanese colonial rule in Korea (1905–1945) ushered in natural resource management programs that profoundly altered access to and ownership of the peninsula’s extensive mountains and forests. Under the banner of “forest love,” the colonial government set out to restructure the rhythms and routines of agrarian life, targeting everything from home heating to food preparation. Timber industrialists, meanwhile ...
A collection of essays first published in 1986, Having Everything Right revolves around the history, folklore, and physical beauty of the Pacific Northwest. In terms of genre the book comes closest to books like Wallace Stegner’s Wolf Willow or the essay collections of Edward Abbey and Wendell Berry, books that blend personal vision and regional evocation. Stafford's essays in this tradition range from the direct exploration of «A ...
In the Willapa Hills of southwest Washington, both the human community and the forest community are threatened with extinction. Virtually every acre of the hills has been logged, often repeatedly, in the past hundred years, endangering both the land and the people, leaving dying towns as well as a devastated ecosystem. Weaving vivid portraits of the place and its inhabitants—animal, plant, and human—with the story of his own lo ...
"Erik Reece is obviously a writer to be reckoned with." —Bill McKibben, author of The End of Nature In Erik Reece's stunning collection of essays, ideas are the main characters. Written over a period of ten years, and revealing Reece's continued obsession with religion, family, and the natural world, in many ways these essays represent a sequel to his stirring memoir, An American Gospel . In that book, Reece intimitately desc ...
