During geologic spans of time, Earth's shifting tectonic plates, atmosphere, freezing water, thawing ice, flowing rivers, and evolving life have shaped Earth's surface features. The resulting hills, mountains, valleys, and plains shelter ecosystems that interact with all life and provide a record of Earth surface processes that extend back through Earth's history. Despite rapidly growing scientific knowledge of Earth surface interactions, and the increasing availability of new monitoring technologies, there is still little understanding of how these processes generate and degrade landscapes. Landscapes on the Edge identifies nine grand challenges in this emerging field of study and proposes four high-priority research initiatives. The book poses questions about how our planet's past can tell us about its future, how landscapes record climate and tectonics, and how Earth surface science can contribute to developing a sustainable living surface for future generations.

This lavishly photographed book, written and curated by internationally respected gardening author Christine Reid and shot by renowned photographer Simon Griffiths, focuses on 18 stunning gardens from around Australia situated on a natural 'frontier'-rainforest, desert, bushland, saltbush plains, a volcanic crater, the ocean's edge, a harbour. The featured gardens have been created or restored in locations where the surrounding natural landscape is as significant as the cultivated and designed elements. In its images and stories Gardens on the Edge is much about the diversity and character of the Australian continent as it about the gardens. The accompanying stories not only explore the establishment of the garden, but also reference Australian history and geography, and cover issues ranging from dealing with droughts and climate change to restoring a long-neglected kitchen garden.

"The first in-depth presentation of the Nordic landscapes to be published in nearly twenty years. “Norden” -- the region along the northern edge of Europe bordered by Russia and the Baltic nations to the east and by North America to the west -- is a particularly fruitful site for the examination of the ever-evolving meaning of landscape and region as place. Contributors to this work reveal how Norden’s regions and people have been defined by and against the dominant culture of Europe while at the same time their landscapes and cultures have shaped and inspired Europe’s ways of life. Together, the essays provide a much-needed picture of this culturally rich and geographically varied part of the world."--pub. desc.

"During geologic spans of time, Earth's shifting tectonic plates, atmosphere, freezing water, thawing ice, flowing rivers, and evolving life have shaped Earth's surface features. The resulting hills, mountains, valleys, and plains shelter ecosystems that interact with all life and provide a record of Earth surface processes that extend back through Earth's history. Despite rapidly growing scientific knowledge of Earth surface interactions, and the increasing availability of new monitoring technologies, there is still little understanding of how these processes generate and degrade landscapes. Landscapes on the Edge identifies nine grand challenges in this emerging field of study and proposes four high-priority research initiatives. The book poses questions about how our planet's past can tell us about its future, how landscapes record climate and tectonics, and how Earth surface science can contribute to developing a sustainable living surface for future generations."--Publisher's description.

Publisher Description

In The Edge of Extinction, Jules Pretty explores life and change in a dozen environments and cultures across the world, taking us on a series of remarkable journeys through deserts, coasts, mountains, steppes, snowscapes, marshes, and farms to show that there are many different ways to live in cooperation with nature. From these accounts of people living close to the land and close to the edge emerge a larger story about sustainability and the future of the planet. Pretty addresses not only current threats to natural and cultural diversity but also the unsustainability of modern lifestyles typical of industrialized countries. In a very real sense, Pretty discovers, what we manage to preserve now may well save us later.Jules Pretty's travels take him among the Maori people along the coasts of the Pacific, into the mountains of China, and across petroglyph-rich deserts of Australia. He treks with nomads over the continent-wide steppes of Tuva in southern Siberia, walks and boats in the wildlife-rich inland swamps of southern Africa, and experiences the Arctic with ice fishermen in Finland. He explores the coasts and inland marshes of eastern England and Northern Ireland and accompanies Innu people across the taiga’s snowy forests and the lakes of the Labrador interior. Pretty concludes his global journey immersed in the discrete cultures and landscapes embedded within the American landscape: the small farms of the Amish, the swamps of the Cajuns in the deep South, and the deserts of California.The diverse people Pretty meets in The Edge of Extinction display deep pride in their relationships with the land and are only willing to join with the modern world on their own terms. By the examples they set, they offer valuable lessons for anyone seeking to find harmony in a world cracking under the pressures of apparently insatiable consumption patterns of the affluent.