San Antonio College Library

Whether fighting off a hungry predator with an explosive burst of rocket fuel, or tantalizing a potential mate with a provocative perfume, organisms utilize built-in chemistry to go about their business. Animals and plants send each other warning signals and even broadcast calls for help, as well as create protective camouflage, make glue, lay trails, and poison their enemies. Bombardier Beetles and Fever Trees unravels the mystery behind these chemical...

This new edition offers a concise but comprehensive introduction to polar ecology and has been thoroughly revised and updated throughout, providing expanded coverage of marine ecosystems and the impact of humans. It incorporates a detailed comparison of the Arctic and Antarctic systems, with a particular emphasis on the effects of climate change, and describes marine, freshwater, glacial, and terrestrial habitats. This breadth of coverage is unique...

Essays from 24 authorities in a variety of fields--biology, ecology, history, anthropology, law, economics, activism--examine the many interrelated issues surrounding tropical deforestation and offer strategies for slowing the destruction.

In The Ecology of Place, Timothy Beatley and Kristy Manning describe a world in which land is consumed sparingly, cities and towns are vibrant and green, local economies thrive, and citizens work together to create places of enduring value. They present a holistic and compelling approach to repairing and enhancing communities, introducing a vision of "sustainable places" that extends beyond traditional architecture and urban design to consider not...

"The Corporate Planet brilliantly exposes the elaborate efforts of giant corporations to "greenwash" themselves, and it demonstrates how they are using free trade agreements and World Bank loans to build a world order where they are accountable only to themselves. From Tokyo, where Mitsubishi processes rain forest logs from around the world, to a polluting Chevron oil refinery in California, to India, China, and Brazil, where global chemical companies...

Biodiversity is the whole of life on Earth - and every day it is diminished as human population growth and exploitation of land causes the extinction of animal and plant species. If the world does not act quickly and cooperatively, species numbering into the millions will be doomed. In the process, we lose opportunities in medicine, agriculture, biotechnology, and a host of other human endeavors. This is the warning sounded by some of the world's...

The photos in this book reveal one aspect of our increasingly devastated Earth: the clearcutting of the forests of North America. From Prince William Sound in Alaska to the red hills of Georgia, from Nova Scotia to the high mountains of New Mexico, the industrial, extractive logging industry, encouraged and subsidized by federal and provincial governments, has stripped ancient trees from the soil through the timber extractive process called clearcutting...