San Antonio College Library

Weaving together history, science, and personal experience, ranging from Adam Smith and The Wealth of Nations to Leontief analysis and wilderness zoning, The Economy of Nature offers a blueprint for a greener and more prosperous world. It states quite bluntly that in the debate over wilderness preservation versus economic growth, both sides are wrong, and that a third path is not only possible but necessary. This third path is not a compromise between...

While small communities in Third World countries usually seem at the mercy of central governments and foreign capitalists, local activists can help exploited peoples correct environmental abuses and social injustices and seize control of their own destinies. Kicking Off the Bootstraps is a powerful case history of such an effort. It describes a grassroots activist movement that emerged in the Puerto Rican community of Salinas to counter the poverty...

In a book often shocking, always passionate and inevitably controversial, Raymond Bonner brings desperately needed illumination to one of the most important and emotional issues of our time: the threat to Africa's wildlife, and especially to the elephant. In cutting through prevailing misinformation to documented truth, he makes abundantly clear that unless we address the needs of Africans in their poverty and despair - instead of attempting to impose...

"Global warming. Acid rain. Expanding deserts. Dwindling forests. Depletion of the ozone layer. Freshwater scarcity. The problems are all too familiar, and the lengthening list adds up to a crisis that threatens to overwhelm us unless an unprecedented level of international cooperation can be reached." "But all countries have not contributed equally to these problems, and all are not in equal positions to solve them. Shridath Ramphal, former secretary-general...

A critical dilemma for the modern economy is that growth is required to prevent the pain of unemployment. As growth continues, the environment declines, but if growth slows, unemployment rises. We seem trapped in a spiraling predicament like that of the addict. Explores whether getting "unhooked" from growth to meet the needs of the environment is possible. [publisher web site].

"Wolfgang Sachs has become known as one of the most thoughtful and appealing intellectuals to interrogate the world which the West has created in the latter half of the 20th century. He confronts the way in which it undermines both nature and social justice. And in order to protect the biosphere and achieve equity between human beings, he demands civilizational changes from the global consumer classes. Here for the first time, his most seminal writings,...

"Over the last thirty years, even as China's economy has grown by leaps and bounds, the environmental quality of its urban centers has precipitously declined due to heavy industrial output and coal consumption. The country is currently the world's largest greenhouse-gas emitter and several of the most polluted cities in the world are in China. Yet, millions of people continue moving to its cities seeking opportunities. Blue Skies over Beijing investigates...

Discusses the technical, environmental, social and legal issues surrounding extraction in tropical forests, and argues for better conservation practices and selective usage.