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History ![[WWW]](http://wikispot.org/wiki/eggheadbeta/img/sycamore-www.png){kind=small}
Breaking The Circle Here is the first great fault in the life of man in the ecosphere. We have broken out of the circle of life, converting its endless cycles into man-made, linear events: oil is taken from the ground, distilled into fuel, burned in an engine, converted thereby into noxious fumes, which are emitted into the air. At the end of the line is smog. Other man-made breaks in the ecosphere's cycle spew out toxic chemicals, sewage, heaps of rubbish—the testimony to our power to tear the ecological fabric that has, for millions of years, sustained the planet's life.
1491 Before it became the New World, the Western Hemisphere was vastly more populous and sophisticated than has been thought—an altogether more salubrious place to live at the time than, say, Europe. New evidence of both the extent of the population and its agricultural advancement leads to a remarkable conjecture: the Amazon rain forest may be largely a human artifact. by Charles C. Mann
Theory What Is Deep Ecology? Deep Ecology Site Index The central idea of Deep Ecology is that we are part of the earth, rather than apart and separate from it. This idea is in contrast to the dominant individualism of our culture, where seeing ourselves as separate from our world makes it easier not to be bothered by what's happening in it. This century, two key ideas have emerged out of scientific thinking that support the view of ourselves as part of the earth. The first idea comes from Systems Theory and the second idea is called The Gaia Hypothesis.
Science National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis Scientists at NCEAS use existing information to address important questions in ecology and allied disciplines. Hundreds of scholars, including Postdoctoral Associates, Sabbatical Fellows, and visitors in Working Groups collaborate each year at the Center on scores of projects.
Biomimicry The core idea is that nature, imaginative by necessity, has already solved many of the problems we are grappling with. Animals, plants, and microbes are the consummate engineers. They have found what works, what is appropriate, and most important, what lasts here on Earth. This is the real news of biomimicry: After 3.8 billion years of research and development, failures are fossils, and what surrounds us is the secret to survival.
Psychology Ecotherapy
Justice Self Ownership Is it possible for an Ecosystem to be declared a Legal Person? We have For Profit Corporations, Not For Profit Corporations, Municipalities, (More?) which are not living things but are treated like them. We also have dogs and possibly horses with military rank (urban legend?). What would a personified ecosystem be called? Ecuador Gives Nature Constitutional Rights The new constitution specifies that nature "has the right to exist, persist, maintain and regenerate its vital cycles, structure, functions and its processes in evolution" and tasks the government to take "precaution and restriction measures in all the activities that can lead to the extinction of species, the destruction of the ecosystems or the permanent alteration of the natural cycles."
Economics The International Society for Ecological Economics Ecological economics exists because a hundred years of disciplinary specialization in scientific inquiry has left us unable to understand or to manage the interactions between the human and environmental components of our world. While none would dispute the insights that disciplinary specialization has brought, many now recognize that it has also turned out to be our Achilles heel. In an interconnected evolving world, reductionist science has pushed out the envelope of knowledge in many different directions, but it has left us bereft of ideas as to how to formulate and solve problems that stem from the interactions between humans and the natural world. How is human behaviour connected to changes in hydrological, nutrient or carbon cycles? What are the feedbacks between the social and natural systems, and how do these influence the services we get from ecosystems? Ecological economics as a field attempts to answer questions such as these.
Religion Sacred Sites of the United States An Alert Unlike Any Other “No culture has ever tried, self-consciously and scientifically, to design a symbol that would last 10,000 years and still be intelligible,” said David B. Givens, an anthropologist who helped plan the nuclear-site warnings. “And even if we succeed, would the message be believed?”
Sound American Society for Acoustic Ecology The American Society for Acoustic Ecology (ASAE) is a membership organization dedicated to exploring the role of sound in natural habitats and human societies, and promoting public dialogue concerning the identification, preservation, and restoration of natural and cultural sound environments.
Future Svalbard Global Seed Vault The Girl who Silenced the U.N. for Five Minutes “If you don’t know how to fix it, stop breaking it,” she pleads. Have Humans Created a New Epoch in the Planet's History? No one can realistically argue that humans haven’t dramatically transformed the face of the planet. But now scientists propose that humankind has so altered the Earth that that we have brought about an end to one epoch and entered a new age.
