Earth Environments
Rating: David Huddart and Tim Stott. 2010. Earth Environments: Past, Present and Future. Wiley-Blackwell. ISBN 978 0 471 48532 2. Right at the very beginning of this book, there’s a crucial point: “…never has there been a greater need for an understanding of modern Earth processes…”. That was written at a time of storms and flooding and one might argue that an understanding of historical processes is as important as modern ones but the point is well made. If we […]
The Planning Imagination
Rating: Mark Tewdyr-Jones, Nicholas A Phelps and Robert Freestone. (eds). 2014. The Planning Imagination: Peter Hall and the study of urban and regional planning. Routledge. ISBN 978 0 415 50608 3 Perhaps it’s best to start with an admission, much in the way the editors have! Peter Hall was one of my Doctoral supervisors. He tested every limit of my thinking and ability to research and there’s not a day I don’t use some of his wisdom! His way of […]
Urban Ecology: Science of Cities
Rating: Richard TT Forman. 2014. Urban Ecology: Science of Cities. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978 0 521 18824 1 Urban ecology has a reasonably long history, if almost 100 years can be considered long, tracing its roots back into the sociology of the 1920s. Here it was seen as a way of describing the distribution of people and probably owed little to our popular conception of ecology. Urban ecology has developed from those times and now looks at the way […]
An Environmental History of Wildlife in England 1650-1950
Rating: Tom Williamson. 2013. An Environmental History of Wildlife in England 1650-1950. Bloomsbury. ISBN978 1 4411 2486 9. It is probably fair to say that I was brought up to consider the English countryside as natural; as something that had always been there. Wildlife were the plants and animals that lived outside of towns and farms. All very simple really. And almost certainly completely wrong! I didn’t get it immediately. It took me some years to finally get to teach […]
Coastal Wetlands of the World
Rating: David B Scott, Jennifer Frail-Gauthier and Petra J Mudies. 2014. Coastal Wetlands of the World: Geology, Ecology, Distribution and Applications. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978 1 107 62825 0 Coastal wetlands (read – salt marshes and mangroves) have been neglected, or worse, for decades. They are seen as something stopping a clear view of the sea or making it difficult to dredge a harbour or any number of other excuses rather than see them for the value they possess. […]
Climate: A Very Short Introduction
Rating: Mark Maslin. 2013. Climate – A Very Short Introduction. Oxford University Press. ISBN 978 0 19 964113 0. This is one of a very large series of brief guides to specific topics covering most areas of learning. As such, they have considerable potential to engage students who might need a shorter overview of a topic than the conventional textbook. Here, Maslin (who has also written a short introduction to global warming) outlines the key aspects of climate needed to […]
Valuing Assessment in Science Education
Rating: Deborah Corrigan, Richard Gunstone and Alister Jones. 2013. Valuing assessment in Science Education: pedagogy, curriculum, policy. Springer. ISBN 978 94 007 6667 9 “change in education is easy to propose, hard to implement and extraordinarily difficult to sustain: (p101). One of the more pressing issues in modern education is the development of some form of assessment. The whole term has become laden with alternative meanings of which, the initial and simplest, is to explore the student’s understanding of […]
Good Cities, Better Lives
Rating: Peter Hall. 2013. Good Cities, Better Lives. Routledge. ISBN 978 0 415 84022 4 Sir Peter Hall has been writing about urban areas for over 50 years and is rightly regarded as one of the finest academics in this area. Any new book by him is going to create a wave of interest as have many of the earlier works. They seem (like London 2000 and The Containment of Urban England) to be milestones in the discussion about urban […]
Multiple Stable States in Natural Ecosystems
Rating: Peter Petraitis. 2013. Multiple Stable States in Natural Ecosystems. Oxford University Press. ISBN 978 0 19 956934 2 One of the more pressing issues we face when considering wicked problems like global climate change is the likely fate of ecosystems. Common amongst the general comments are the ideas of “tipping points” – a set of conditions “beyond” which there will be a change of ecosystem state that cannot be reversed. This might seem “reasonable” but it depends on your […]
An Introduction to Human-Environment Geography
Rating: William G Moseley, Eric Perramond, Holly M Hapke and Paul Laris. 2014. An Introduction to Human-Environment Geography. Wiley Blackwell. ISBN 978 1 4051 8931 6. Part of the problem with both environmental science and geography is that the problems they investigate can seem increasingly complex. This might encourage some to study to greater depth. At the other end of the spectrum, issues, especially in mainstream media, are often presented as simple, almost shallow in their treatment. The aim is […]
