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The chapter explains the concept, measurement and utility of bio-diversity as a resource and its intricate relationship with forest. It discusses the issues of economics of choice and economic valuation of biodiversity at conceptual level. It describes also the empirical situation in respect of biodiversity outlining both the global and the Indian scenario. In this context it explains the extent, causes and impact of the biodiversity loss in India due to the limit of eco-capacity. It further discusses the biodiversity conservation policy of India including India’s heritage of biodiversity conservation and traditional knowledge system associated with the bio-diversity resource of forest. Finally, the chapter ends with a discussion on how the anthropogenic stress on ecosystem is captured by the loss of bio-diversity which is represented by indicators like living planet index among other measures.

By looking at nature through a social science lens, we can begin to see the natural world as an asset critical to our well-being and from that learn to appreciate its value. This appreciation can inspire more of us to protect nature as we pursue our own self-interests. Pairing anthropology with economics encourages people to see the connection between sound environmental stewardship and the flow of benefits we receive from that stewardship, ultimately challenging cultural attitudes towards biodiversity, ecotourism, and our natural heritage. To make these connections, this book relies on five North American animals to demonstrate how, by assessing their role as keystone species and assigning nature a value, people can change their own relationships with our natural world.

By failing to assign nature value in our current Anthropocene, the opportunity costs of diminishing biodiversity are not recognized in the marketplace, leading to significant negative consequences for both nature and humanity. Polluting water, destroying habitats, or exterminating species should each lessen nature’s value, but if nature has never been assigned a value, that loss is not recognized and development becomes the default. The words “wild capital” remind us that nature should be viewed as an asset like any other, and that in doing so we are better equipped to appreciate its long-term worth. Since the ecosystem services model (ES) ties together the ecological, social, and economic needs of human well-being, it is well situated to assign nature value and from that make a case for nature as natural capital. To assist in policy decisions, ES has offered a path based on the language of economics, making it appealing to economists, while to conservationists, it has turned an argument about the negative effects of development on wildlife into a more fruitful dialogue about how beneficial conservation is for human well-being. ES is also compatible with efforts at sustainability and the goals of the Endangered Species Act (ESA) and 2005 Millennium Ecosystem Assessment.

Despite major environmental degradation, Newark Bay--a corner of New York Harbor—is brimming with life. The Harbor's high biodiversity has been noted since the earliest European explorers. This diversity includes odd tropical fishes that arrive via the Gulf Stream and local residents of high historical or contemporary importance for food and sport such as oysters, sturgeon, eels, and striped bass. There also has been a strong recovery of wading birds such as herons, egrets, and ibis.

Along the Colorado Plateau’s high-standing Mogollon Rim in northern Arizona’s Coconino National Forest stands a small patch of big trees that matured well before Europeans came to North America. Massive ponderosa pines, and even pinyon pines and western junipers, tower above the forest floor, shutting out all but the most shade-tolerant competitors. Few places like this one still exist anywhere in the United States, even on national forest lands. A tourist hoping to see all the diversity that earliest European arrivals found commonplace in the western landscape must seek out a wide scattering of isolated enclaves across the region. Western forests no longer contain the grand glades and lush thickets that our forerunners encountered because most woodlands, especially those owned by the public, largely serve a wide variety of human purposes, as campsites or home sites, board-feet of lumber, potential jobs, recreational playgrounds, and even temples of the spirit. We also rely on forests to maintain habitat for endangered species and seed banks for restoring depleted biodiversity—and to provide us with clean air and water, stable hillside soils, and flood control in wet years. Forests must perform these roles while being consumed, fragmented by roads, and heavily eroded. But there is no guarantee that these most beloved and iconic of natural resources can sustain such a burden. Federal, state, and local government agencies oversee and regulate western U.S. forest lands and their uses, trying to manage the complex and only partly understood biological interactions of forest ecology to serve public needs. But after nine decades of variable goals, and five decades of encroaching development, western woodlands are far from healthy. Urban pollution and exotic tree diseases, some brought by humans, are killing pines, firs, and oaks. Loggers have more than decimated the oldest mountainside forests—most valuable for habitat and lumber alike—with clearcutting practices that induce severe soil erosion. Illegal clearings for marijuana farms are increasing.

“Home on the Range” evokes a western landscape “where the deer and the antelope play.” But even at the song’s debut in the 1870s, deer and antelope were declining in numbers and cattle grazing was degrading rangelands across the American west. In their natural state, arid North American lands are robust and productive, but they recover exceedingly slowly from heavy grazing. By 1860, more than 3.5 million domesticated grazing animals were trampling arid western soils, causing severe erosion and lowering both water quality and water supplies in a water-poor region. The early start and persistence of grazing over such a long period of time invaded every nook and cranny of the public lands, making livestock grazing the most pervasively damaging human land use across all western ecosystems. Today, grazing affects approximately 260 million acres of publicly owned forest and rangelands, mostly in the 11 western states—about equivalent to the combined area of California, Arizona, and Colorado. Those acres include Pacific Northwest - r and ponderosa forests; Great Basin big sagebrush lands; the richly H oral Sonoran Desert; magni- cent high-desert Joshua tree forests; varied shrub associations in the low-elevation Mojave, Great Basin, Chihuahuan, and other southwestern deserts; and extensive Colorado Plateau pinyon–juniper forests stretching from northern Arizona and New Mexico to southern Colorado and Utah and decorating the arid inland plateaus of Washington, Oregon, and northeastern California. Proponents of public lands grazing argue that cattle have not changed anything. They just replace the immense herds of hooved native herbivores—bison, deer, antelope, and elk—that once dominated western ranges. But in pre-European settlement times, natural forces, including unlimited predators and limited fodder, effectively controlled the native animal populations. Unlike cattle, the herds of deer, antelope, and elk wintered in generally snow-free lowland areas and used much less than their full range each year. And those animals were easier on the land, especially the rivers. Immense bison herds ranged over vast areas, never staying very long on any range. Bison rarely visited the sites of today’s major livestock grazing problems in Great Basin and southwestern deserts, however. On northern ranges, bison obtained winter moisture from eating snow and did not cling to creeks and streams the way cattle do.

This chapter focuses on the risks posed by genetically modified crops. It argues that many of the risks which are likely to materialize fall comfortably within traditional heads of damage such as personal injury or damage to property. There is also, however, a risk of environmental damage per se, which legal systems may find more problematic. In particular, the notion of damage to ‘biological diversity’ requires careful consideration, especially in light of the definition in the Biodiversity Convention. In the same context, while compensable damage should include the costs of preventive measures and reasonable measures of reinstatement, it should not be so limited, since it may well no longer be feasible to recall the GMO in question.

The United States is more wedded to vehicles than is any other nation, and “freedom” to many Americans seemingly means driving their individual vehicles anywhere they choose. Opinion polls commonly show high proportions of U.S. citizens more concerned about gas prices, potholed highways, or restrictions on vehicle access to backcountry washes and dirt roads than about government scandals, stolen elections, or environmental damage. Unfortunately, vehicles and roads exact a huge toll on lives and health and threaten our future well-being. Driving wheeled vehicles, and constructing roads to support them, comes close to topping the list of humankind’s most environmentally damaging activities. On most soils, even foot traffic creates tracks, trails, and roads. After ancient people invented wheeled vehicles to carry their burdens and themselves, they found that running water quickly rutted and potholed the cart tracks, and gully erosion chopped them up on slopes. Rainstorms eroded the tracks, flooding the dislodged sediment into streams and creeks and burying downslope croplands. Rutted tracks prevented Roman chariots from driving as fast as they were designed to go, so the talented Roman engineers quite naturally invented paved roads—some with better staying power than asphalt highways. But Roman paving did not solve the erosion problems that roads created, and in some ways made it worse. Today, some parts of the United States contain more motorized vehicles than people. The varied vehicle uses, including military training, have vastly proliferated roads and roadlike corridors—especially numerous utility routes—across every type of American landscape. Erosional forces and their effects have not changed since Roman times, but modern engineers still fail to choose transportation routes or build roads to minimize environmental damages. The roads spread severe erosional effects everywhere, along with pervasive pollution. On top of it all, television images encourage Americans to take recreational cars, trucks, motorcycles, and all-terrain vehicles anywhere we wish. The naked ruts they create are an insidious form of road building.

“Recreation” connotes revitalization, the re-creation of spirit. In an increasingly urbanized culture, people recreate in natural settings to lift their spirits and revitalize their outlook and motivation. Public lands in the western United States, which embrace much of the nation’s remaining natural and wild areas, are especially attractive—and most are open for recreation. We authors certainly have found solace from camping, hiking, climbing, and skiing in backcountry areas. But latetwentieth- century American affluence has created a massive and unprecedented invasion of these lands, and particularly an invasion of motorized recreation. All human uses of natural areas can, and generally do, degrade soils, kill plants, and increase erosion rates, with resultant water pollution and ecosystem damage. In small numbers, and spread out widely, recreational disturbances can be minor, but millions of people regularly play on western public lands in mass gatherings that have large cumulative impacts. More now drive vehicles across forested or desert areas than pursue the less-damaging activities of hiking and small-group camping. The Bureau of Land Management (BLM) and U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Forest Service (USFS) oversee the largest amount of western land available for recreation. By law, the agencies must manage public lands for multiple uses and “sustained yield.” Instead, federal land-management agencies are partitioning them to separate incompatible pursuits, including many that consume land. For example, as logging, mining, and grazing pressures ease, recreational pressures are exploding in Colorado’s White River National Forest, a short 50 miles west of Denver on Interstate Highway 70. Along with Denver’s increasing population, snowmobile registrations jumped 70% in Colorado since 1985. Off-road vehicles (ORVs) are everywhere, and mountain bike use has jumped more than 200%. Between 1990 and 2004, all ORV registrations in Colorado increased more than 650%. Ski facilities also burgeoned, along with hiker and equestrian demands for greater backcountry access. The USFS’s efforts to bring the conflicting uses under control is losing ground rapidly.

Coevolution is reciprocal evolutionary change in interacting species driven by natural selection. It is a pervasive evolutionary process that has shaped many of the major events in the history of life, including the origin of the eukaryotic cell, the origin of plants, the evolution of coral reefs, and the formation of lichens, mycorrhizae, and rhizobia, all of which are crucial in the development of terrestrial communities. Just as important, evidence is increasing that Coevolution is an important ongoing ecological process, continually shaping and reshaping interactions among species, sometimes over time spans of only a few decades. This chapter is an evaluation of coevolution as an ongoing process shaped by the geographic structure of interactions among species. It is an analysis of what we have learned recently as we have taken a broader geographic view of how coevolution continually remolds the relationships among taxa. The first mathematical models of geographically structured coevolution were developed only in the past few years, and there are still fewer than a dozen empirical studies that have analyzed any aspects of coevolutionary structure and dynamics across geographic landscapes. Nevertheless, these theoretical and empirical studies have together suggested that coevolution is very likely a much more dynamic process than suggested by the previous several decades of study in evolutionary ecology. Coevolution is a hierarchical process. Local populations of species interact with one another and sometimes coevolve. These local populations are in turn connected through gene flow to populations in other communities, and this geographic structuring adds another level to the coevolutionary process. Local geographic clusters of populations may show metapopulation dynamics, and yet broader geographic groupings of populations may show considerable genetic differentiation in the traits of interacting species. Only a subset of locally or regionally coevolving traits will eventually sweep through all populations. Hence, coevolution as seen in comparisons of interacting phylogenetic lineages will show only a small fraction of the Coevolutionary dynamics found at the population, metapopulation, and broader geographic scales. Within this hierarchical structure of coevolution, many of the dynamics may occur above the level of local populations and below the level of the fixed traits of species for three reasons: Many species are collections of genetically differentiated populations, the outcomes of species interactions commonly differ among communities, and interacting species often do not have identical geographic ranges.

The movement of humans around the earth has been associated with an amazing redistribution of a variety of organisms to new continents and exotic islands. The natural biodiversity of native communities is threatened by new invasive species, and many of the most serious insect and weed pests are exotics. Classical biological control is one approach to dealing with nonindigenous species. If introduced species that lack natural enemies are competitively superior in exotic habitats, introducing some of their predators (herbivores), diseases, or parasitoids may reduce their population densities. Thus, the introduction of more exotic species may be necessary to reduce the competitive superiority of nonindigenous pests. The intentional introduction of insects as biological control agents provides an experimental arena in which adaptations and interactions among species may be tested. We can use biological control programs to explore such evolutionary questions as: What characteristics make a natural enemy a successful biological control agent? Does coevolution of herbivores and hosts or predators (parasitoids) and prey result in few species of natural enemies having the potential to be successful biological control agents? Do introduced natural enemies make unexpected host range shifts in new environments? Do exotic species lose their defense against specialized natural enemies after living for many generations without them? If coevolution is a common force in nature, we expect biological control interactions to demonstrate a dynamic interplay between hosts and their natural enemies. In this chapter, I consider biological control introductions to be experiments that might yield evidence on how adaptation molds the interactions between species and their natural enemies. I argue that the best biological control agents will be those to which the target hosts have not evolved resistance. Classical biological control is the movement of natural enemies from a native habitat to an exotic habitat where their host has become a pest. This approach to exotic pests has been practiced since the late 1800s, when Albert Koebele explored the native habitat of the cottony cushion scale, Icrya purchasi, in Australia and introduced Vadalia cardinalis beetles (see below) to control the cottony cushion scale on citrus in California. This control has continued to be a success.

This chapter presents the legal frame for environmental and biodiversity protection in Costa Rica. It discusses some of the most important environmental laws produced by Costa Rica's Legislative Assembly: the Organic Environmental Law, Forestry Law, Biodiversity Law, Wild Life Protection Law, and Water Law.

Chapter 3 begins by exploring the making of Hong Kong’s present cultural landscape and then works back through its earlier forms, firstly into the age of rice farming where the long-term sustainable management of that particular socio-economic lifeway created highly distinctive cultural landscapes stretching back from the Qing dynasty to as early as the Northern Song in some areas. Then from the Tang dynasty moving backwards, we enter an era where, on the face of it, human impacts beyond the intensively industrialised backbeach areas seem to have been relatively slight. That said, the coastal focus seemingly exhibited by early historical populations was even more intensively expressed in prehistory when, once sea-levels had stabilised at more or less their present position, the resource-rich landscape of the New Territories and Pearl River estuary coastline and offshore archipelagos then took shape.