Ecology and environment

• A Quick Guide to Eco-Ideologies
• Energy Issues
• The environmental world wide web
• Modelling impacts the environment - geographers at work
• Waste Management Issues
• The EnviroWeb
• US Long-Term Ecological Research Network
• The environment and sustainable living
• Purdue weather processor
• Ecological and economic harm caused by hydroelectric and other dams, reservoirs, and diversions.
• Women, Environment and Sustainable Development
• Global Change Master Directory
• EcoNet� serves organizations and individuals working for environmental preservation and sustainability
• Man And the Biosphere
• Scripps Institution of Oceanography
• List of WWW Sites of Interest to Ecologists
• Center for Global and Regional Environmental Research
• Ecology and Community: The Bioregional Vision
• The Humboldt Nation: Bioregions and Sustainability
• Environmental Organization WebDirectory
• Some Dendrochronological Websites
• NHRI's Groundwater Research Group WWW Pages
• Connecting with Nature
• Earthwatch
• Great Lakes Expertise
• Internet Links to Bioregional Resources
• An Ancient Assemblage: the Australian Rainforests in European Conceptions of Nature
• The Virtual Earth
• The Soft Earth
• Zobler World Soil Data Set
• The World's Energy Future Belongs in Orbit
• Bioregionalism and Community: A Call to Action
• EcoFile
• Global warming debate heats up
• Probability of Sea Level Rise
• Unofficial Reuse Conference Site
• World Resources 1996-97
• Corporations as Agents of Global Change
• Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design
• EARTHDANCE: Living Systems in Evolution - an online book
• Connectivity and complexity in landscapes and ecosystems
• Eco-Links
• Biofuels: A Win-Win Strategy
• World Conservation Monitoring Centre
• Principles of Dendrochronology
• Dendrochronology / Tree-Ring Research Resources Page
• Home Page of VolcanoWorld
• The Comprehensive Weather Collection
• Interesting Weather Pages
• Natural Resources Canada
• The East River Project of the ECO-CLUB of UNIS, New York
• Modeling The Global Society-Biosphere-Climate System: Part 2: Computed Scenarios
• The New Generation of Environmental Education Focus on Democracy as Part of an Alternative Paradigm
• Internet Links to Bioregional Resources
• UIUC Cloud Catalog
• All Links: Native Americans and the Environment
• Journal of Glacial Geology and Geomorphology, Home Page
• The Ecumene Project: WWW Menu
• Project on Environment, Population and Security: Conflict, Sustainable Development
• Technology And Its Dangerous Effects On Nature And Human Life
• Community-Based Research, Monitoring And Adaptive Management
• Introduction to Land Evaluation
• Spatially Explicit Planning Tools
• Natural Resource Ecology Laboratory (Colorado State U.)
• The Fourth Wave: A Normative Forecast for the Future of "SpaceShip Earth"
• Crude Oil Transmission Study
• Environment-Related Internet Resources
• Online Guide To Meteorology
• The Green Lane Home Page (Environment Canada)
• Canadian Soil Information System (CanSIS)
• Pacific Institute of Resource Management (PIRM)
• People-Centered Development Forum -- PCDF
• The Turning Point - Towards a Science of Living Systems - Capra
• Eco-Nexus Newsletters
• Mission to Planet Earth
• QTVR Movie of Hamersley Gorge in the Pilbara Region of Western Australia
• Modeling Industrial Thresholds: Waste At The Confluence Of Social And Ecological Turbulence
• COMING SOON TO A LOCATION NEAR YOU! "Fossilgate" -- as soon as the year 2000!
• Ecological Footprint -- Revisiting Carrying Capacity: Area-Based Indicators of Sustainability
• The September 26th Earthquake (Umbria & Marche regions, Italy) - QT Virtual Reality
• Landscape Ecology And Ecological Biogeography
• European Partners for the Environment
• Brain Food Table Of Contents: Ecology, Population, Sustainability, Global Warming, Steady-State Economics
• Oceanography
• EarthWatch Weather On Demand-WeatherFlight
• U.S. Global Change Data and Information System (GCDIS)
• Virtual Geomorphology
• Geomorphology Links
• Place-Based Knowledge and Science
• Geomorphology and Glaciology Links
• OceansCanada - Your comprehensive guide to everything oceans
• Gaia
• The World Wide Web Virtual Library: Sustainable Development
• Facts in Feathers - Migration Patterns and Pollution Effects
• EarthLabs - Interactive Science Modules
• Earth Science Enterprise
• Environmental Access Project
• Wildland Urban Interface - Master's Thesis
• Facing the Future: Population Resources and References
• Outlines of Physical Geography (1856)
• Indicators Of Environmental, Economic, And Community Integrity
• INTEGRITY/CEPTUAL INSTITUTE
• Earth & Space-Sciences
• Our Changing Planet FY1996 - Chapter 1
• Informal Regulation Of Industrial Pollution In Developing Countries
• Project on Environment, Population and Security
• Gaia Brain: Integration of Human Society and the Biosphere
• Physical Geography Internet Links : Geomorphology / Geology
• Ecological Footprint -- Revisiting Carrying Capacity: Area-Based Indicators of Sustainability
• Ecological Footprints of Nations
• KAN YU - The Book Of Change Concept In Environmental And Architecture Planning
• NPG Forum: Malthus - More Relevant than Ever by William Catton
• Study: Life on Earth is killing us, ENN Daily News -- 10/2/98
• Recent Developments in Environmental Sciences - Ehrlich
• Climate Change and Its Impacts
• Arctic Rivers
• List Of Interesting Meteorological (And Related) Sites
• Geoscience Links by Subject
• Center for Earth and Planetary Studies
• Geography 111: Introduction to Physical Geography I
• The Committee for the National Institute for the Environment - CNIE
• Population Ecology Home Page
• Quantitative Population Ecology
• Earthquakes Module - Virtual Geography Department
• Internet Weather Resources
• Global Warming
• Geomorphology Resources
• Earth Science on the Internet
• Global Earth History
• UBC Library - Subjects - Physical Geography
• The Real WORLD Resources Guide
• The Commons And Its "Tragedy" As Analytical Framework: Understanding Environmental Degradation In South Asia
• Sources On Environmental Ethics
• TIDEPOOL | Today's Bioregional News
• Stromboli On-Line - Recent and ongoing activity of Stromboli and other volcanoes
• The Electronic Volcano
• Bibliography: Climate Change and Its Impact on Biodiversity
• NOAA Paleoclimatology Program - NOAA Paleoclimatology helps the World share scientific data and information related to climate system variability and predictability.
• American Rivers - Success Stories
• Global Home Page - Provides a service for those who are realizing they must find out what all this fuss is about (our planet; global warming, population issues, ozone, rain forests, etc.).
• Canadian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society
• The Gaia Hypothesis - Dr James Lovelock & Dr Lynn Margulis - The physical and chemical condition of the surface of the Earth, of the atmosphere, and of the oceans has been and is actively made fit and comfortable by the presence of life itself.
• Industrial Transformation Science Plan - Industrial Transformation is a core science project of the International Human Dimensions Programme (IHDP) on Global Environmental Change. It has resulted in a plan for coordinated research for the period 2000-2005 with the "goal of understanding the ways in which society could combine economic and social development with the reduction of pressure on the environment".
• 2000 Conference On Industrial Ecology: Engineering Global Systems - Colby-Sawyer College, New London, NH; June 11-16, 2000
• World Biomes Home Page - World Biomes is as an interactive textbook of the world's major terrestrial biomes. It is downloadable shareware.
• Global Forest Watch, a World Resources Institute initiative
• Terrestrial Impact Craters - Impact craters are geologic structures formed when a large meteoroid, asteroid or comet smashes into a planet or a satellite.
• Terrestrial Impact Craters - Impact craters are geologic structures formed when a large meteoroid, asteroid or comet smashes into a planet or a satellite.
• Oceanography from the Space Shuttle
• Environmental Sustainability Index - Access to PDF file with proposal to develop the environmental sustainability index, an environmental performance tool. Presently it ranks some 50 countries.
• Linkages - A Multimedia Resource for Environment & Development Policy Makers
• EN - LEADER - Links between Actions for the Development of the Rural Economy - service page Rural Europe
• The Last Frontier Forests: Ecosystems and Economies on the Edge
• Sustainable Development: All countries
• SwissGeoWeb - The one and only
• OceansCanada - Your comprehensive guide to everything oceans. - If you're looking for links to everything oceans in Canada - from university programs to research institutes to policies and legislation - this may be the place to start.
• Environmental Defense - Dams Around the World
• Interwad - Information on the large wetland area called Waddenzee (Dutch) in the Netherlands.
• Canadian Museum of Nature /Musèe canadien de la nature
• eMergy Evaluation - After reviewing the concepts of energy hierarchy and scale, emergy terms are defined including transformity, emergy storage, empower, mass emergy, empower density, work and emdollars. Emergy is related to spatial centers and to pulsing with time. Evaluations include macroeconomics of states and nations and the economic-environmental interface of microeconomics.
• Cooperative Research Centre for Catchment Hydrology - Aquacycle - An Urban Water Balance Model For Assessing Stormwater And Wastewater Reuse Options
• Spatial Organization Of Hydrological Processes In Small Catchments Derived From Advanced Sar Image Processing - Field Work And Preliminary Results - The presented research focusses on the use of active microwave observations to retrieve hydrologically relevant information of surface characteristics (i.e. soil moisture and surface roughness) in river catchments.
• Hydrologic Sciences - It is likely that the attempt to understand the chemical processes within the different flow paths will lead to significant improvements in scientific understanding of catchment hydrology.
• Abiotic-Biotic Links In The Sabie River (Kruger National Park): The Responses Of Riverine Biota To Changing Hydrology And Geomorphology
• Climate of 2000 - Winter - This site puts the extremes of this winter in the Northern hemisphere in perspective. The warmest winter on record in the U.S. and one of the coldest and longest in Mongolia.
• World Glacier Inventory - The world glacier inventory currently contains data from over 67,000 glaciers around the world. The data are collected and digitized by the World Glacier Monitoring Service (WGMS).
• World Forum for Acoustic-Ecology - The WFAE brings together people studying soundscapes and tries to gain recognition for sound as an integral part of ecology and fosters the preservation of locally specific sounds.
• EM-DAT: The OFDA/CRED International Disaster Database - Over 12,000 disasters from 1900 to present. The database is set up in order to aid professionals working in disaster relief and disaster preparedness programmes. It holds information on three types of disaster: natural, technological and conflicts.
• Introduction to Physical Geography
• Introduction to Geomorphology : Related Internet Links
• Geodesy for the Layman
• Centre for Economic and Social Studies on the Environment (CESSE) - The CESSE was created following the first United Nations Conference on human environment, which was held in Stockholm in 1972. It is made up of a pluri-disciplinary research team which devotes its activities to the qualitative and quantitative evaluation of economic-environmental interactions.
• Wetlands - ICU - Interesting graphical technique for displaying hierarchical dropdown menus which enables access to a large number of map-based sites.
• Water, conflict and cooperation: general, Middle East (Israel and Palestine) and Southern Africa - Modest site focusing mainly on the Israeli-Palestinian water conflict, with some minor excursions to Southern Africa. The site contains links, commentary and news clippings from various publications.
• SIAE: GIS of Russian Ramsar sites - At the State Institute for Applied Ecology site there is an ongoing project to disseminate information on Ramsar sites (wetlands of international importance) in Russia.
• Great Lakes Information Network - Large general and professional site on the Great Lakes. There are general introductory pages and five more in depth sections on the environment, economy, education, maps and GIS and tourism. With many links to external reports, documents and research projects. Access to and description of relevant datasets regarding land use, hydrology and ecology. Most content is external. By the Great Lakes Commission, Ann Arbor, MI, USA, in cooperation with many US and Canadian federal and state government institutions.
• Amazonia - Environmentally focussed Aamzonia site. The site holds information on the working group and its activities but also sections that are of interest for a larger public. There is a news service, a country-by-country listing of issues and special sections on forests, rivers, biodiversity, land issues, infrastructure, mining, Amazon peoples and international institutions. By the European Working Group on Amazonia (EWGA).
• LakeNet - Network disseminating information of and for those concerned with world lake environments. The site has lake facts, information on threats to lake environments, a lake discussion group, lake links (organisations, conventions and lake specific links) and news items.
• History of Geology and the Geosciences - One of the few sites related to geoscience history. With news, conferences, Cofrhigeo publications, a book list, web resources, a message borad and a bibliographie of (mailny French) literature. At the Paris Ecole des Mines site.
• Discover Canada's Geoscience Heritage - Découvrez le patrimoine géoscientifique du Canada - Geoscience photo-collection, featuring historic photos of the geology, mineral resources and early exploration of Canada from the Geological Survey of Canada's collection held in the Earth Sciences Information Centre, Ottawa. There are some 2,000 images. Topics include founders of Canadian geology, fossils, landscape features, geoscientists at work, human geography ('links to the past') and arctic exploration. Some pictures date back to the 1880s. All images are thumbnailed for easy browsing. By the Geological Survey of Canada.
• Why Prometheus Suffers: Technology And The Ecological Crisis - Human beings have been puzzling over the suffering which arises from technology at least since the middle of the fifth century B.C. Rather than blame technology, I believe that we should look to philosophy to determine why Prometheus suffers and what should be done to respond to the current ecological crisis.
• CMU Geography and Earth Science Websites - The links are organized around the sequence of topics typically taught in an introductory earth science or physical geography class. Links are also available for environmental science,earth science/geography education, career opportunities, and more. The sites selected are based on image quality, ease with which lesson plans can be developed, organization, authenticity, scope, and format.
• The Environmental Implications of LETSystems - I believe that LETSystems shares many of the characteristics with social ecology, regionalism, and ecocommunalism in practice. Mark Jackson, a researcher and participant in LETS highlights the emergence of LETS from these principles in his commentary Economic spatiality, social justice and sustainability: This revival of place and space as important elements in the study of social and economic relations resonates with, but rarely engages, alternative literatures and movements which emphasise the intrinsic importance of place to achieving social justice and ecological stability, the combined goal commonly being known under the rubric of sustainable development. LETS has, to some extent, arisen from, and represents an economic manifestation of, these ideologies.
• Environmental News Network - Your leading news source on the environment
• ERN European Rivers Network and RiverNet Homepage - News and information on European rivers. By ERN (European Rivers Network), a non-profit NOGO with the aim to "unite associations and organisations working on rivers and to increase communication between these organisations in order to better preserve the natural rivers in Europe". With resource pages for individual rivers.
• Biogeography
• Biogeography
• The H. J. Andrews Climatological Field Measurement Program - Research modeling in ecology and hydrology demands the collection of short time-step, spatially distributed climatic measurements. Standardized sets of measured parameters with standard collection methods are critical for comparability of measurements. Standard data archival formats, quality assurance procedures, and good mechanisms for method documentation are essential for efficient handling of large quantities of electronic data. Web access to near real-time climatological data as well as long-term archives has proven invaluable to researchers.
• Systemy geomorfologiczne / Geomorphological systems
• National Council for Science and the Environment - US organisation fostering environmental research. This site is a valuable gateway to environmental information. There are lists of online 'state of the environment reports' (US and non-US), links to hundreds of environmental journals with free online access (in some caes partial) and 'The Daily Planet' with links to environmental news services.
• World Environment Library - Full text virtual library of environment books and documents. The World Environment Library 1.0 was developed in December 1999. It contains 400 publications (45,000 pages) of ideas and solutions in the fields of Agriculture, Biodiversity, Climate Change, Environmental Impact Assessment, Energy, Health, Natural Resources, Policy, Sustainable Development, Waste Management and Water.
• Retrieving Environmental Information From Digital Libraries - Efficient access to environmental information from diverse sources over the network is critical to the success of global change studies. This paper reports our study on the development of an information browsing tool, GeoVIBE. The system consists of two types of browsing windows, GeoView and VibeView, that work in coordination for the manipulation of document space. GeoView imposes a geographical order to the document space based on the idea of multi-layered hypermaps where "icons" and "footprints" may be embedded in maps as the clickable hotspots linking to relevant documents. VibeView is a visual presentation of document similarity space defined by multiple reference points. By smooth integration of multiple browsing strategies, GeoVIBE enables users to search information using geographic clues as well as conceptual clues. Document relevance may be judged visually by inspecting spatial arrangement and relations of documents in a map view and the similarities among documents defined on a vector space model.
• The Gaia Hypothesis - Lovelock & Margulis - Introduction - Firstly this document represents a rather extensive collation of existing resource documentation surrounding the more technical (Natural Science) issues relating to the The Gaia Hypothesis. It attempts to cover the basic scientific specification of the Gaia hypothesis from a multitude of views. Firstly we examine a representative selection of writings, quotations and other references, relating to the two principal researchers and proponents of the hypothesis, Dr James Lovelock and Dr. Lynn Margulis.
  Secondly, in presenting an account of what the Gaia Hypothesis is all about, we look to provide some measure of documention concerning the history of the development of such a theory of the Natural Sciences, and in this area we cover the work and selected writings of Gregory Bateson and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin.
  Thirdly, we examine a broad range of constructive contribution and support to, and contemporary application of, this "Gaian world view" by various writers, scientists, researchers , critics and educationalists in the last few decades since the concept was introduced. In this section we have attempted to bring together therefore a wide range of existing reference information, web articles, interpretations and other commentary.
• F. Capra, The Web of Life - n the early eighties, I conceived a synthesis of these new discoveries, a new conceptual framework for the scientific understanding of life. I developed and refined my synthesis for ten years, discussed it with numerous scientists, and have recently published it in my new book, The Web of Life. The intellectual tradition of systems thinking, and the models of living systems developed during the early decades of the century, form the conceptual and historical roots of the new scientific framework that I want to present to you tonight. In fact, my synthesis of current models and theories may be seen as an outline of an emerging new theory of living systems. What is now emerging at the forefront of science is a coherent scientific theory that offers, for the first time, a unified view of mind, matter, and life.
  Since industrial society has been dominated by the Cartesian split between mind and matter and by the ensuing mechanistic paradigm for the past three hundred years, this new vision that finally overcomes the Cartesian split will have not only important scientific and philosophical consequences, but will also have tremendous practical implications. It will change the way we relate to each other and to our living natural environment, the way we deal with our health, the way we perceive our business organizations, our educational systems, and many other social and political institutions
  In particular, the new vision of life will help us build and nurture sustainable communities - the great challenge of our time - because it will help us understand how nature's communities of plants, animals, and microorganisms - the ecosystems - have organized themselves so as so maximize their ecological sustainability. We have much to learn from this wisdom of nature, and to do so we need to become ecologically literate. We need to understand the basic principles of ecology, the language of nature. The new framework I present in my book shows that these principles of ecology are also the basic principles of organization of all living systems. I believe therefore that The Web of Life provides a solid basis for ecological thought and practice.
• Organic Unity and the Limits of Conventional Justice - Organically unified systems have characteristics such as internal relations, dynamic change and properties of the whole not held by the parts. Complex natural systems within which organic unities exist also have distinctive properties such as the capacity to adapt and evolve and the ability to create more diverse and complex dynamic states. If evolutionary and ecological accounts of physical reality are to be taken seriously, then theories of justice must attempt to incorporate most, if not all, of the characteristics of organically unified systems in human social systems. Theories of justice that are based on the summation of atomistic units (happiness, rights, utility) cannot hope to match the complexity of natural systems and are likely to ensure the continued alienation of humans from their own eco-evolutionary origins. Theories of justice that take seriously the complexity and diversity of natural systems will come closer to assisting the reunification of natural and social systems and promote their mutual sustainability. The Western intellectual tradition of justice is dominated by a concern with the balancing (reaching equilibrium) of competing claims in the effort to produce social stability. This paper runs in the opposite direction in that it will present a theory of justice based on new perspectives within biology and complexity theory that give emphasis to the role of disturbance and instability (nonequilibrium) in the creation of organic unity and diversity. Ecological justice then becomes a much more complex achievement than the simple linear extension of social justice ... it requires that justice involve an ongoing dialectical and dynamic relationship between the opposing forces of stability and change, equilibrium and nonequilibrium.
• Ecocultural Critical Theory And Ecocultural Studies - Responding to recent calls for a "cultural environmental studies," "environmental cultural studies," or "green cultural theory," this paper sets out to map out a direction for this field, one which follows in the tradition of critical social theory, but complements it with recent work in environmental thought and radical ecology. Among the distinctive traits of such an ecocultural critical theory (and the ecocultural studies which ensue from it) are: (1) a simultaneous critical focus on human-nonhuman or human-environment relations, human intra-social and political relations, and the interaction between these two categories, and (2) an emphasis on the cultural dimensions of these relations. In this paper, I articulate the socio-ecological and institutional contexts for the emergence of an ecocultural critical theory, outline a set of goals and research directions for ecocultural studies, discuss some theoretical controversies, focusing especially on the debate between social-constructionism and ecological realism, and argue for the relevance and distinctive contribution of ecocultural critical theory to scholarly as well as activist work in the areas of cultural and environmental politics.
• Terrain Sciences - Geological Survey of Canada - Collection of high-quality photographs of typical landforms in the Canadian landscape. Among others there are pictures of columnar till, deformed bedrock, meandering river, buried valley, U-shaped valley, glaciers, drumlins, string bogs, trimlines, hoohoos, alluvial fans, pingos, endmoraine, kettles, deltas, eskers, gabbro, solifluction, mudboils, goosenecks, landslides and many more. They all come with a short description. Very useful for finding photographic illustrations of landforms. The photos were taken by scientists of the Geological Survey of Canada during the last 30 years. Very few of these images have been published and rarely in colour. This section is expanding from east to west. There are search and browse (by province) options and also the possibility to use an interactieve map viewer, which has to be downloaded. Part of the Natural Resources Canada website.
• Landscape As A Spatially Organized System And The Georelief As A Subsystem Of Landscape - The Influence Of Georelief On Spatial Differentiation Of Landscape Processes - This study discusses following topics: position of the georelief in the landscape and its influence on the spatial differentiation of landscape-ecological processes, landscape as aspatially organized autoregulating system and the georelief as its spatial subsystem, expression of the set of its morphometric quantities characterising georelief in its arbitrary point, geometric forms the georelief on the basis of morphometric parameters, modeling of georelief by Complex Digital Model as integral part of GIS.
• GeoClio Home Page - Webserver for the History of Geology and the Geosciences. With meetings, discussions groups and links on the history of the discipline.
• Ministry of Agriculture, Nature Management and Fisheries - Five reports on international forest management. By the Ministry of Agriculture of the Netherlands.
• Geosystems - This site is organized around the chapter structure found in the new Third Edition of this popular text by Robert Christopherson (Prentice Hall, 1997). The material for each chapte contains several major elements, as described below. To start your journey through this site, select a chapter using the choice bar and click on the "Begin" button below. You'll find that each chapter contains a variety of different types of review questions--multiple choice, true and false, essay, and critical thinking. These questions will help site users both review the content of the chapters and expand upon the materials presented in the text. Additionally, each chapter contains web destinations for further exploration of the topic at hand.
• Alfred Wegener Institut for Polar and Marine Research (AWI)
• Canadian Ice Service - Environment Canada
• Geoengineering our way out of trouble - If you dig a ditch or recycle a can, you're managing the planet, at least on a micro-level. What would macro-scale planetary engineering look like?
• The dynamic biosphere - Earth's atmosphere and biosphere exchange energy, water, carbon dioxide, and other trace substances on all space and time scales. These linked exchanges depend on, and in turn alter, the states of the atmosphere and biosphere themselves. Because the atmosphere-biosphere is thus a coupled and dynamic system, no global scientific or socioeconomic question can be usefully examined in isolation; our knowledge of the processes that maintain planetary equilibrium--and of the events that could disturb that balance--is necessarily interdisciplinary. For this reason, 21stC has assembled a wide range of topics, ideas, and perspectives in this special issue, "Biospheres," to illuminate what contemporary research tells us about these interlocking global issues.
• Climate Controls - If we treated global warming as a technical problem instead of a moral outrage, we could cool the world.
• Geoengineering: A Climate Change Manhattan Project - This Article argues that the lack of success in climate change policy stems from the exclusive focus of policymakers on various forms of preventive regulation. Because climate change regulation requires an extraordinary amount of will and coordination, and because uncertainty, cost, equity, and other factors threaten the effective implementation of a Kyoto-style program, a regulation-only approach is dangerously myopic. Not even the most austere post-Kyoto regulatory regime can avert a probable temperature rise of 2 to 3 degrees Fahrenheit during the next century, and most observers estimate that more politically feasible plans will yield a rise of between 3 and 8 degrees. Yet other than simply doing nothing and adapting to climate change when it happens--a potentially catastrophic strategy--what alternatives do we have? In the wake of Kyoto, the time has now come to expand our policy horizons to include geoengineering, the direct manipulation of the Earth's climatic feedback system, as a serious alternative to ineffective and contentious regulation. Once derided as science fiction, geoengineering has lately begun to merit serious debate in academic, scientific, and econometric literature,and has gained the tentative support of such diverse figures as Edward Teller, Wallace Broecker, William Nordhaus, and Stephen Schneider.
• Explorers Pinpoint Source of the Amazon - It begins high in the Peruvian Andes as a thin sheet of crystal water flowing down the side of a rock wall. By the time its journey ends in the Atlantic Ocean some 3,900 miles (6,275 kilometers) away, it has become the world¹s largest river by volume and possibly the longest: the mighty Amazon.
• The World's Water - Water Conflict Chronology - Introduction - Water resources have rarely, if ever, been the sole source of violent conflict or war. But this fact has led some international security "experts" to ignore or belittle the complex and real relationships between water and security. It is easy for an academic approach to draw a narrow definition of "security" in a way that excludes water (or other resources) from the debate over international security, or to require that security threats be narrow, single-issue factors. But this approach both misunderstands the connections between water and security and misleads policymakers and the public seeking ways of reducing tensions and violence. In fact, there is a long and highly informative history of conflicts and tensions over water resources, the use of water systems as weapons during war, and the targeting of water systems during conflicts caused by other factors.
• geologyone - Geology and Earth Science - Excellent link page on Australian Geology. By the Mineral Service company on their GeologyOne website.
• US National Assessment: Climate Change Impacts on the United States - The National Assessment of the Potential Consequences of Climate Variability and Change is a landmark in the major ongoing effort to understand what climate change means for the United States. The Assessment was called for by a 1990 law, and has been conducted under the US Global Change Research Program in response to a request from the President's Science Advisor. This site contains the final approved version of the report of the National Assessment Synthesis Team, which was a federal advisory committee made up of experts drawn from government, universities, industry, and non-governmental organizations. The report is provided in two parts: (1) an Overview report, and (2) a Foundation report that provides additional detail and full references. These two national-level, peer-reviewed documents synthesize results from studies conducted by regional and sector teams, and from the broader scientific literature.
• Volcano World -- The Premier Source of Volcano Info on the Web
• Fieldwork in the Geography, Earth and Environmental Sciences - This annotated bibliography is part of a project to identify the main recent English literature about fieldwork in geography and the earth and environmental sciences in higher education. A few key references to literature relating to fieldwork in schools are also included. Most of the references have been written since 1990.
• The use of historical photography in environmental studies - The time-scales over which significant environmental changes take place can vary from a few hours on highly mobile coastal sediments to tens or even hundreds of years on exposed stone surfaces. Studies of rapidly changing features can be carried out using traditional field monitoring techniques, perhaps aided by airborne or satellite imagery if the scale of change is sufficiently large. Less dynamic surfaces do not lend themselves to such methods since, over the time-scale of traditional research projects, the amount of change will be less than the known errors in the measurement techniques.
  This paper describes the use of historical aerial photographs to study changes in an inter-tidal environment, around Langstone Harbour and Chichester Harbour (U.K.), and discusses the advantages and limitations of this data source. For those interested in natural history, there are few places quite as facinating as the Galapagos. The intention of this web site is to provide information on the Galapagos Islands to both scientists and non-scientists alike. Charles Darwin was the first geologist to explore the Galapagos. He made many important observations of Galapagos geology and drew conclusions that remain valid today. Darwin was also fascinated by the remarkable and unique biota of the islands. His careful biological observations later led him to propose a theory, that of natural selection, that revolutionized the way scientists think of life. While the emphasis of this web site is on geology, we too have found Galapagos wildlife difficult to ignore, so you will find many images and observations on biology, as well as geology, on this site. We hope you enjoy your visit.
• Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change - The intergovernmental panel on climate change has a summary of the report and speeches of the Shanghai meeting.
• Manufacturing an Evolutionary Event - We are living in interesting times. Indeed, the problems facing our civilization seem so overwhelming that talking of space exploration appears frivolous or even ideologically suspect. There is a common attitude that such endeavours divert attention from mankind's 'real' problems and are a waste of valuable resources. However, as I hope to show, although problems of current concern may be all too real, they are small when looked at from a perspective appropriate to activity beyond this planet. Far from being a waste of resources, such activity is perhaps the only form of high energy consumption of long term value. Critics argue that space exploration is itself damaging to the environment, or more subtly, is inextricably bound up with a socio-political and economic system and a philosophy which are ecologically unsound. However, I will argue that concern for the environment and the space effort are in fact complementary.
• Nature and Culture in the Age of Cybernetic Systems - This essay explores the status of nature in the information age by examining the concept of the ecosystem, one of the most powerful models of nature to emerge after World War II, and one that helps illuminate the relationship among people, nature and technology in post-war U.S. culture. The ecosystem concept was a product of the convergence of ecology and cybernetics during the 1940s and 1950s. It was a model of nature deeply integrated with post-war technologies and thoroughly consistent with post-war globalization. One of its primary effects was to define a unified global space called the whole earth, or the biosphere, within which humankind could be understood as a species enmeshed within networks of ecological relations. This redefinition of humans and their place in the universe had a substantial and varied influence on how people in post-war America would come to perceive their relationship to both nature and technology.
  Here I am concerned primarily with the ecosystem concept's effect on dispositions toward technologies. Environmental crises in the post-war period, such as nuclear fallout and chemical poisoning, prompted evaluations of technologies on the basis of their impact upon natural environments. The ecosystem was a comprehensive model of nature that integrated humans into the environment and accounted for the ecological effects of technologies, a model that could be employed to evaluate the relationship among people, nature and machines.
  My thesis is that the ecosystem concept enabled critiques that distinguished between two orders of technology In the first case, critics of modern technologies used the ecosystem concept to make comprehensible, and to legitimate alarm over, the environmental threats posed by the Bomb, chemical pesticides and other technologies characterized by the physical force they exerted upon the world. It was used to position these modern technologies not as tools of progress but as agents of environmental corruption and threats to human survival. At the same time, the ecosystem concept served as a model of nature compatible with, even necessary to, the cybernetic technologies of the information age. These technologies were characterized by their ability to monitor their own internal and external states and adapt in response to changing conditions. They exhibited self-regulation through information feedback, a capability held to be fundamental to all complex self-organizing systems, natural or artificial. The ecosystem concept naturalized the features of cybernetic systemness characteristic of post-war information technologies and attributed them to nature on a macro scale.
• A Capitalism-Communism Synthesis / Ecology-Economy Integration / Marriage of green and libertarian politics - Population increases and industrialization are continually increasing the human impact on the earth. We are depleting the natural resources that support our civilization. We are degrading or destroying ecosystems that make up the diverse communities of life on earth. We cannot continue on our present path. We must find ways to counteract the economic forces that drive people to tax natural systems beyond their carrying capacity.
  When a living system made up of many interacting, interdependent parts experiences unsustainable stress, that stress is perceived and an adaptive response is produced that tends to reduce the stress and preserve the health of the organism. An overheated animal will sweat, pant or seek shade, and its body temperature will fall. A system that responds to a stressful stimuli in a way that tends to reduce the stress constitutes a system of negative feedback. Rising temperature causes a change in a physiological process or behavior which in turn causes a decrease in the stress. The earth, as a complex system made up of many interacting, interdependent parts, resembles an organism in many ways, but at present it lacks a system of negative feedback that would lead to an adjustment in the system when human economic activity starts to exert unsustainable pressures on the larger ecosystem.
• World Water Vision - Industrial and private water demands have grown to exceed natural supplies in many parts of the world. Without dramatic changes in water management, this local scarcity will soon extend to regional or global proportion. Water Vision is designed to build a consensus among professionals and stakeholders to design management plans that avert further water crises. We believe that a sustainable water future begins with a Vision. Our Vision includes a world where all people have access to enough safe water to meet their needs‹including agricultural needs - within management plans that maintain the integrity of freshwater ecosystems.
• The World in a Machine (book project) - At Rio de Janeiro in 1992, most of the world's nations signed a Framework Convention on Climate Change (FCCC). The treaty commits them to limit or prevent human-induced changes to the world's climate. Since the principal cause of such change is carbon dioxide, an inevitable combustion by-product of almost all fuels, this agreement could lead to extremely far-reaching and costly socio-economic change. Yet the threats posed by a possible rapid global warming may be even more profound, including droughts, floods, large-scale changes in agricultural productivity, sea-level rise, and many other potentially catastrophic effects.
  This global climate politics -- apparently so recent -- is in fact the outcome of a long history. Over the last fifty years, a relatively small group of researchers at a handful of institutions developed extremely complex computer models that simulate global climate, or the average state of Earth's atmosphere over long periods. Without these models, the causes and extent of climate change probably would not be known, and the political issue of global warming would not exist.
  The models could not have been developed without computers, and they could not be calibrated or validated without global data. At the same time, such data would never have been gathered had not computer models become available. Without the models, detailed global weather data could not have been processed or understood. Near-term, human-induced ("anthropogenic") climate change could not have been tracked.
  Political contexts affected these developments -- and were affected by them -- differently in different periods. 1950s weather models were constructed in hopes of Cold War military advantage, including weather and climate control as possible weapons of war. In the 1960s, international collaborations for data collection served as part of a trust-building agenda propagated by "scientific internationalists." With the rise of the environmental movement in the early 1970s, global climate change began to achieve recognition as a policy issue, but remained primarily a scientific research problem. In the early 1980s, politicized global atmospheric issues such as nuclear winter and ozone depletion received widespread attention. These paved the way for anthropogenic global warming to become an important public policy issue beginning in 1988. Since then, global climate change has been among the most hotly debated science-based policy issues in the international arena.
• Fundamentals of Physical Geography - Fundamentals of Physical Geography is a work in progress. The pages that you can currently view are the result of several years of work. In the spring of 1996, I began creating a variety of web pages as learning supplements for two introductory Physical Geography courses I teach at Okanagan University College. From the fall of 1996 to spring of 1997, I repackaged these materials into online lecture notes for Distance Education. During 1997 and 1998, I made numerous revisions and additions to the online notes. I began working on the Fundamentals of Physical Geography online textbook in January of 1999. At the end of July 1999, the Fundamentals of Physical Geography website was officially put online. As of July 31st, 2000 (12 months later), over 70,000 distinct computer clients (users) have accessed the website and more than 700,000 page visits have occurred.
• Geosciences Resources on the Web - I conducted an experiment in a course in Physical Geology that I taught in the fall semester of 1995. What started out to be a few exercises on the Web (an introduction to search engines and visits to Volcano World) soon evolved to more than I had expected (Physical Geology).
  Although I tell myself that I have not produced a course that could be distributed or delivered asynchronously, I have thought a lot about how Web materials can impact higher education and continuing education. Mechanically, it is relatively easy to. Deciding how to take advantage of the Web and avoid a "broadcasting" or formal lecture style, however, proved harder than I originally thought. Part of the dilemma seemed to be tied up in the question of why should I bother to use the Web.
• Visible Earth: Most Recent Images - a searchable directory of images, visualizations, and animations about the Earth.
• Craighead Environmental Research Institute - To conserve intact ecosystems in modern society, with its growing human population and the increasing fragmentation of wildlife habitat, involves field research, laboratory research, teaching, publication, media presentations, and habitat protection. We are apolitical. Our constituency is found in wilderness. We strive to maintain working relationships with a broad spectrum of academic institutions and colleagues, government bureaucratic agencies and managers, and grassroots conservation organizations. Local communities and businesses also have a vested interest in preserving natural communities and ecosystem health.
• After sustainability: mega-nature and infra-nature - "Sustainability" is used to refer to the future. However, that does not mean the word itself will last for ever. People who think "sustainability" is now a fundamental cultural value, have short memories. Before sustainability, there was "green", and before green was "eco", and before that "conservationism". So what comes after sustainability? One possibility is "nature development" or "infra-nature" or something similar (mega-nature). This guess is based on recent trends in the Netherlands - trends away for the use of "sustainable" in environmental issues. The environmental lobby is more likely to speak of nieuwe natuur, "new nature". A trend is not a law, and this is no more than a guess, at this stage. However the Netherlands is usually a good indicator of trends, in this area.
• Permafrost Research at the Geological Survey of Canada - General Canadian permafrost site at the Geological Survey of Canada website. Permaforst is a layer of soil that is frozen the year round. There are pages on permafrost monitoring, the relation to climatic change, slope stability, interaction with pipelines and more. The site is very instructive and has nice pictures and graphs.
• Rhine-Meuse delta studies - The palaeogeography of the Rhine-Meuse delta has been studied at the Department of Physical Geography (Utrecht University) since 1959. Undergraduate students take part in a 6-week field mapping course in the Rhine-Meuse delta, while graduate students and Ph.D. students concentrate on more specific subjects. Since 1973 these studies are supervised by Dr. H.J.A. Berendsen. This site contains information on (results of) recent Ph.D. studies, ongoing research and new research projects on Delta evolution.
• AC Propulsion Home - Dedicated to creating electric vehicles that people want to drive.
• The truth about the environment - Environmentalists tend to believe that, ecologically speaking, things are getting worse and worse. Bjorn Lomborg, once deep green himself, argues that they are wrong in almost every particular.
  

  ECOLOGY and economics should push in the same direction. After all, the "eco" part of each word derives from the Greek word for "home", and the protagonists of both claim to have humanity's welfare as their goal. Yet environmentalists and economists are often at loggerheads. For economists, the world seems to be getting better. For many environmentalists, it seems to be getting worse. These environmentalists, led by such veterans as Paul Ehrlich of Stanford University, and Lester Brown of the Worldwatch Institute, have developed a sort of "litany" of four big environmental fears:

  • Natural resources are running out.
  • The population is ever growing, leaving less and less to eat.
  • Species are becoming extinct in vast numbers: forests are disappearing and fish stocks are collapsing.
  • The planet's air and water are becoming ever more polluted.

  Human activity is thus defiling the earth, and humanity may end up killing itself in the process.
  The trouble is, the evidence does not back up this litany.

• Ecological Risks: Perspectives from Poland and the United States - The purpose of this joint publication by the Polish Academy of Sciences (PAN) and the National Academy of Sciences of the United States (NAS) is to help our two countries learn more about the assessment and management of ecological risk. The interest of our two Academies to collaborate in this endeavor is an outgrowth of concern about the current state of our natural heritage.
• Fundamentals of Physical Geography - The main objective of this online textbook is to introduce students to the field of knowledge known as Physical Geography. Physical Geography is a discipline that is part of a much larger area of understanding called Geography. Most individuals define Geography as a field of study that deals with maps. This definition is only partially correct. A better definition of Geography may be the study natural and human constructed phenomena relative to a spatial dimension.
• The Center for Climate Change and Environmental Forecasting
• US Global Change Research Information Office (global warming) - The US Global Change Research Information Office (GCRIO) provides access to data and information on climate change research, adaptation/mitigation strategies and technologies, and global change related educational resources on behalf of the US Global Change Research Program (USGCRP) and its participating Federal Agencies and Organizations. GCRIO is implemented by The Center for International Earth Science Information Network (CIESIN) at Columbia University.
• Environmental Systems Forecasting - This page should prove useful to a variety of users from scientists to river users. It is in general related to ecosystem data that could be or is being used to model or forecast environmental systems and contains links to a variety of tools including real time data, various types of static databases, GIS, and remote sensing sources. Please keep in mind that this is a class project and will continue to change in the coming weeks.
• National Expansion and Natural Degradation: An Environmental Extension of Lateral Pressure Theory - Within international political economy, there is little mention of how economic development affects the global environment. Yet, natural degradation can be one of the most pervasive and longest lasting consequences of development. Too often these consequences are simply catalogued without sufficient consideration given to their social -- i.e., political and economic -- causes.
  To better understand such causes, this study uses lateral pressure theory to account for politics within and among nations. However, whereas lateral pressure has traditionally sought to explain the onset of war, this study extends the theory's initial application to the environment by specifying additional connections between the social and natural environments.
  Global deforestation, this study's litmus of environmental lateral pressure, is tested against domestic GNP, population growth, and a new variable, trade connected GNP, which accounts for the trade effects among nations. This model specifically addresses the ongoing debate between economists and evironmentalists over the costs and benefits of free trade. Economists defend free trade citing evidence that domestic GNP increases, spurred on by the gains from trade, reduce environmental degradation because rich countries can better afford to address such concerns. This study replicates these results, but then it tests trade effects directly and finds that they add to rather than detract from global deforestation. Moreover, these trade effects are consistently more significant, stable, and influential than the countervailing domestic GNP effects.
• Water Quality in the Credit River - The quality of surface waters has been an area of extensive research and concern over the past three decades. This paper examines time series water quality data for trends at three different sampling stations on the Credit River, Ontario. One station is located above a potentially major point source of organic waste, a sewage treatment plant (STP). The second station is located approximately two and a half kilometres below the STP, and the third located even further downstream. The water quality at the three stations should vary to reflect the inputs of pollutants at the STP and other point and non-point sources as well as the effect of diffusion, dilution and oxygenation. Parametric statistical methods such as linear regression, t-tests, and ANOVA (analysis of variance) are used for data analysis. Nonparametric methods including the Mann-Whitney U test and Spearman¹s rank correlation coefficient are also applied. The ultimate goal of the study is to draw inferences on the differences in the water quality of this portion of the Credit over time, as well as the effects of an expanding but much improved sewage treatment plant.
  From these analyses, it was found that the station below the STP showed degraded water quality such as higher levels of bacteria, lower dissolved oxygen, higher biological oxygen demand (BOD) and higher levels of total phosphorus than the station above the STP. The third station, located approximately eleven kilometers downstream from the STP did not exhibit the expected improvements in some of the selected parameters when compared to station two due to the existence of several non-point sources of organic contamination. Trends over time for the three stations are described for bacteria, dissolved oxygen, BOD, and total phosphorus. Additional water quality studies involving diurnal dissolved oxygen surveys and the collection and analysis of benthic macroinvertebrates are recommended to complement the data currently gathered on the Credit River by the Provincial Water Quality Monitoring Network (PWQMN).
• Emerging Environmental Issues in Ontario - A Workshop on Emerging Environmental Issues in Ontario was held on May 14th, 1999 at the University of Toronto, co-sponsored by the Ontario Ministry of the Environment (MOE). The objective of the workshop was to provide an overview of the opinions of scientific experts on emerging environmental issues in Ontario. Principals for IES are Ted Munn, Anne Whyte and Peter Timmerman. Contacts for the MOE are Stephen Carty, Assistant Director, Land Use Policy Branch and Deborah Brooker of the same Branch. The MOE's interest in the workshop is centred in its emerging environmental issues project, designed to strengthen MOE's capacity for environmental protection. As part of this project, the MOE has identified the need to have a better understanding of the likely sets of environmental issues which will face Ontario over the next few decades and the methods by which to identify such problems.
• Climate Prediction Center: Climate Outlooks, El Nino/La Nina Advisories, and Ozone - We serve the public by assessing and forecasting the impacts of short-term climate variability, emphasizing enhanced risks of weather-related extreme events, for use in mitigating losses and maximizing economic gains.
• Welcome to EarthRISE - Growing database of photos of the Earth from space.
• Global Population Concerns - Home Page - We are a group of about 45 residents of the Ottawa area. Our membership consists of people of all walks of life who realize that environmental degradation is made worse by ever increasing numbers of human beings and would like to prevent catastrophic overpopulation in Canada and elsewhere. We meet every month and distribute the Minutes and copies of relevant newspaper and magazine articles to the membership.
• Physical Geography - This course examines the main elements of the physical environment (climate, soil, landforms, oceans, vegetation), the processes that shape them, and the relationship between the environment and human beings. Students will apply a wide range of geographic tools and methods to explore the distribution and ongoing evolution of the elements of the physical environment on a variety of scales, from local to global.
• Centre for Ecology & Hydrology Homepage - The Centre for Ecology and Hydrology (CEH) is the leading body in the UK for research, survey, and monitoring in terrestrial and freshwater environments. CEH Web provides information about our science, products and data.
• About Climate Change - The climate of the Earth has never been stable. Early in our history the planet was uninhabitable to modern forms of life. The atmosphere was composed mostly of methane, and oxygen was a trace element. Later, as life began to evolve, the Earth was so cold that only a narrow strip around the equator remained unfrozen.
  By the time of the dinosaurs, the earth was much warmer again. During their reign on earth the earth warmed even further as a result of massive amounts of carbon dioxide and methane that were pumped into the air by volcanic activity. This natural 'greenhouse' effect warmed the world and was a major factor in the extinction of the dinosaurs and many of their contemporary species. Fifteen million years after the dinosaurs, scientists believe that there were no ice caps whatsoever and most of the world resembled a vast tropical swamp.
  By the time humans evolved the planet was in a cycle of glacial (ice age) and interglacial (non ice age) periods. We are still in this cycle, currently in an interglacial phase.
• Online courses in Earth and Environmental Sciences
• Terra Preta Homepage, Dark earths, Red Indian black earth - Terra Preta (do indio) is a black earth-like anthropogenic soil with enhanced fertility due to high levels of soil organic matter (SOM) and nutrients such as nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium, and calcium embedded in a landscape of infertile soils. Terra Preta soils occur in small patches averaging 20 ha, but 350 ha sites have also been reported. These partly over 2000 years old man made soils occur in the Brazilian Amazon basin and other regions of South America such as Ecuador and Peru but also in Western Africa (Benin, Liberia) and in the savannas of South Africa. Terra Preta soils are very popular with the local farmers and are used especially to produce cash crops such as papaya and mango, which grow about three times as rapid as on surrounding infertile soils.
• The Canadian Geomorphology Research Group - The CGRG was established in 1993 at the International Association of Geomorphology Congress in Hamilton, Ontario. The CGRG presently has a membership of about 150, with representation in all parts of Canada and scattered outposts in the U.S. and elsewhere. It provides a strong voice for geomorphology in Canada.
• Geomorphology, Glaciology & Quaternary Web Links
• Canadian Landscapes - This collection of photos of Canadian Landscapes and landforms is presented as a public service to illustrate the great diversity of Canadian scenery.
• RealClimate - RealClimate is a commentary site on climate science by working climate scientists for the interested public and journalists. We aim to provide a quick response to developing stories and provide the context sometimes missing in mainstream commentary. The discussion here is restricted to scientific topics and will not get involved in any political or economic implications of the science.
• Fundamentals of Physical Geography - PhysicalGeography.net contains five main components: Fundamentals (of Physical Geography) Online Textbook, Glossary of Terms, Internet Weblinks, and Search Site.
  The Fundamentals of Physical Geography (2nd Edition) online textbook describes an area of knowledge within Geography known as Physical Geography. The overall purpose of this work is to teach the connected world about my favorite topic of conversation Physical Geography. The Fundamentals of Physical Geography online textbook contains over three hundred pages of information and more than four hundred 2-D illustrations, photographs, and animated graphics organized into ten chapters. Important key terms in the text are linked to an interactive glossary of terms. Nested within the pages of this online textbook are links to study guide pages and additional reading pages for each chapter. Please note that the pages found in this work are always in a state of being improved.
• Ultimate Tree-Ring Web Pages - Welcome and thank you for visiting the Ultimate Tree-Ring web pages, designed to be the ULTIMATE source for information on the science of Dendrochronology. I've designed these pages to be easily understood by people at all levels of education, from elementary school students to high school students, from first grade teachers to college professors. You won't find anything fancy here - I want these pages to be readable, enjoyable, and (most of all) educational.
• Strahler Geography Student Companion - Links to Geography Information on the Internet, especially Physical Geography.

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