New PDF release: Our Dying Planet: An Ecologist's View of the Crisis We Face

By Peter Sale

ISBN-10: 0520267567

ISBN-13: 9780520267565

Coral reefs are on target to develop into the 1st environment really eradicated from the planet. So says major ecologist Peter F. Sale during this crash direction at the country of the planet. Sale attracts from his personal wide paintings on coral reefs, and from contemporary study by means of different ecologists, to discover the various methods we're altering the earth and to provide an explanation for why it issues. Weaving into the narrative his personal firsthand box stories all over the world, Sale brings ecology alive whereas giving a fantastic figuring out of the technological know-how at paintings at the back of today's urgent environmental concerns. He delves into subject matters together with overfishing, deforestation, biodiversity loss, use of fossil fuels, inhabitants development, and weather switch whereas discussing the genuine effects of our transforming into ecological footprint. most crucial, this passionately written e-book emphasizes gloom-and-doom state of affairs isn't really inevitable, and as Sale explores substitute paths, he considers the ways that technology may also help us detect a greater destiny.

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Extra info for Our Dying Planet: An Ecologist's View of the Crisis We Face

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Only one of these is fishing, which principally kills older fish. From the perspective of the fish, fishing is just one more form of predation—one more challenge in its struggle to survive and repro­ duce. When fishing commences on a previously unfished population, it increases the chance of mortality, with the result that fish live, on average, less long before they die. In addition, fishing is a size-selective form of predation that tends to have the greatest impacts on the larger and older members of the population.

Again using the FAO data­ base, they reported that the mean trophic level of species taken by the world’s fisheries had declined between 1950 and 1994. ” To understand this concept, we must first appreciate the modern quantitative method for measuring an organism’s trophic level. When he first introduced the concept in 1927, the Oxford ecologist Charles Elton described the trophic level of an organism quite simply: organ­ isms exist at differing levels in a food chain, with primary producers at level 1, herbivores at level 2, carnivores that eat herbivores at level 3, and so on up as high as level 4 or 5.

Total world capture fishery yield from 1950 to 2006 as reported by FAO, with the catch by China shown separately. A slight negative trend in yield is evi­ dent beginning in the mid-1980s. Figure redrawn from figure 1, page 4, State of World Fisheries and Aquaculture 2008, published by the Fisheries and Aquaculture Department of the Fisheries and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. 8 The underlying trend is downward. Over-reporting of catches is an unusual bias. ) It happens when there is political pressure on the industry to meet high catch targets.

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Our Dying Planet: An Ecologist's View of the Crisis We Face by Peter Sale


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