(Photo from The Atlas of Global Conservation, University of California Press, 2010)
In honor of Earth Day, the Nature Conservancy is celebrating with the release of The Atlas of Global Conservation, a new book that goes beyond the traditional atlas, providing an in-depth picture of the Earth’s animals, plants and habitats. The story is largely told through maps — you can get a preview of them here.
“This is not about extrapolating trends toward some distant doom-and-gloom scenario. This is about a complicated system of interacting species, changing climates, altered biogeochemical processes and rapidly evolving human cultures shifting toward an entirely different global reality,” PAUL EHRLICH, the Bing Professor of Population Studies and senior fellow at the Woods Institute for the Environment, writes in the book’s foreword. “It is now widely accepted that our species could be entraining an extinction event as severe as the one 65 million years ago that wiped out all of the dinosaurs except for the birds.”
Other Stanford-affiliated contributors to the atlas are GRETCHEN DAILY, the Bing Professor in Environmental Science, senior fellow at the Woods Institute for the Environment and co-director of the Natural Capital Project; MARILYN CORNELIUS, a doctoral student in the Emmett Interdisciplinary Program in Environment and Resources (E-IPER); CHARLES KATZ, a member of the board of advisers for the Woods Institute for the Environment and Stanford’s School of Earth Sciences; JON CHRISTENSEN, executive director of the Bill Lane Center for the American West; and BRIAN SHILLINGLAW, who holds a master’s degree from E-IPER and a JD from Stanford Law School.
Read more about the The Atlas of Global Conservation in The Book Haven.
—Cynthia Haven
