A Citizen's Guide to Ecology
Lawrence B. Slobodkin
Language: English
Pages: 256
ISBN: 0195162870
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
The earth is continuously changing and evolving yet it is unclear how environmental changes will affect us in years to come. What changes are inevitable? What changes, if any, are beneficial? And what can we do as citizens of this planet to protect it and our future generations?
Larry Slobodkin, one of the leading pioneers of modern ecology, offers compelling answers to these questions in A Citizen's Guide to Ecology. He provides many insights into ecology and the processes that keep the world functioning. This important guide introduces observations that underlie arguments about all aspects of the natural environment--including both global and local issues. To clarify difficult concepts, Slobodkin uses lake, ocean, and terrestrial ecosystems to explain ecological energy flows and relationships on a global scale.
The book presents a clear and current understanding of the ecological world, and how individual citizens can participate in practical decisions on ecological issues. It tackles such issues as global warming, ecology and health, organic farming, species extinction and adaptation, and endangered species.
An excellent introduction and overview, A Citizen's Guide to Ecology helps us to understand what steps we as humans can take to keep our planet habitable for generations to come.
"This beautifully written book brings together careful observation, personal reflection, and theoretical understanding to explain the major environmental problems that confront us. Dr. Slobodkin's superb and sweeping work invites us to contemplate a great many facts and a few large values to motivate a clear and compelling response to losses of biodiversity, the problem of invasive species, global warming, and other environmental concerns."--Mark Sagoff, School of Public Affairs, University of Maryland
population feeding on them was in fact kept low by predators. From the fact that there was no more than three years of leaf fall on the ground, we could infer that the detritovores—the fungi, worms, wood lice, and so on—were finishing up all their potential food and were therefore not prevented by predators from growing up to their food supply. Observations similar to these are extremely common, implying that there are discernible regularities in ecological systems in nature. More specifically,
ourselves building our conclusions as much as possible on analysis of data rather than on intuition. We will find that often the chief limit to understanding is finding the right questions. Occasionally intuition is still our best method, and also occasionally it is a serious source of fallacies. Ecology enhances appreciation of organisms in the way that knowing how to read a score enhances music appreciation. Deeper knowledge helps our appreciation of a drop of water or a pinch of mud or a cow
only until it reaches 4°C. Continued cooling from 4° to 0° causes water to solidify into ice, but as it freezes it expands. That is why ice cubes float in iced tea or whiskey. Freezing a bottle full of water breaks the bottle. More important, when a lake freezes, the ice layer floats on top, insulating the water beneath the ice. This is why lakes and oceans do not freeze all the way to the bottom. If ice sank, they would freeze solid to the bottom, killing almost all of their organisms. Many
abundant, decomposition of dead leaves by bacteria and fungi starts immediately. In many slightly drier woodlands the ground will have a top layer of dry brown leaves that are not decomposing and which act as a roof, preventing excessive drying of the layers underneath. These dry leaves may wait a year until new dead leaves cover them and they become damp enough to decompose. By late fall a Long Island woodlot will have around four layers of leaves on the ground. The first signs of decomposition
died. Surveys of soil microfauna that actually attempt to enumerate the number of kinds of organisms in the samples are enormously labor-intensive, and not many are undertaken, although the general method of extracting the organisms has been known for a hundred years. The Big Picture 87 07489615-E590-4818-BC90-6291485A6F9B In a study of the microfauna of an old field in Michigan surrounded by forest, the forest soil organisms were very different from those of field soil, but a single tree