Many suburban and urban residents spend little time contemplating where their food and energy come from. This chapter begins with the author’s introduction to West Virginia – coal country – in all its complexity. That complexity includes regional domination by fossil fuel interests, environmental and economic degradation, and political conflict, intermingled with the region’s uniquely appealing cultural traditions, natural amenities, and local efforts to fight for a better future, including through labor uprisings, law clinics, and savvy politics. West Virginia serves as an entry point for the book’s broader analysis of the half-truths often told about rural communities generally to justify extraction of rural natural resources for urban consumption. The analytical lens of law and political economy is introduced as the book’s tool to debunk myths about rural communities. Centrally, rural America is not, as we are often told, a product of benign markets operating organically. Rural America is a creature of public creation. The book illustrates how US laws, institutions, and policymakers have created, perpetuated, and justified rural disadvantage. By highlighting the human role in geographic inequality, this search for accountability can help inform a more prosperous, equitable, and resilient future for all, especially in the face of climate change.

In early human societies, community norms specified where and how living resources should be used within sacred groves and in exploited places. Many rulers of ancient and medieval societies issued decrees reserving game and other wild resources for royalty and limiting peasant uses. Colonial rulers criminalized Indigenous uses of wild species and privatized and commercialized landscapes. Intensive exploitation led to the depletion and extinction of many species and laid the foundation for formal conservation. Concern about deforestation in colonial India led to early forest reserves. The utilitarian disciplines of wildlife management, forestry, range management, and soil science arose in response to threats to living natural resources due to conquest, including intensive exploitation, habitat alteration, and the introduction of non-native species. These disciplines focus on the exploitation of economically valuable species to protect a long-term supply. Early forest reserves in the USA were set aside to regulate the use of forest resources.

The introduction explores why there is so much scholarly interest in global environmental negotiations and how the conceptualization and study of these has changed over time. It unpacks how to study global environmental negotiations and related sites as agreement-making defined as the multiple actors, sites, and processes through which environmental agreements are made, and the new sets and arrangements of actors, sites, and processes that are created by any specific agreement, which have the potential to reinforce or reorient the global political order. This approach is offered as a way to organize, spatialize, situate, and connect diverse forms of scholarship into, around, and related to negotiation sites and their products. The introduction provides an overview of the book chapters, which provide the methodological building blocks for conducting this research. As such, the book is relevant for many other nonenvironmental issue areas where collective action is at the core, such as global health, nuclear nonproliferation, security, and trade.

Ever since living beings arose from non-living organic compounds on a primordial planet, more than 3.5 billion years ago, a multitude of organisms has unceasingly flourished by means of the reproduction of pre-existing organisms. Through reproduction, living beings generate other material systems that to some extent are of the same kind as themselves. The succession of generations through reproduction is an essential element of the continuity of life. Not surprisingly, the ability to reproduce is acknowledged as one of the most important properties to characterize living systems. But let’s step back and put reproduction in a wider context, the endurance of material systems.

We assault the living world from every angle, and all at the same time. As we remember this onslaught, we grieve. Reminiscing is a powerful act. In grieving, we consider the state of our natural environment and take the necessary actions to rectify our abuse of the living planet.

Climate change and other global processes shape and are shaped by local process such as land use change. Does the idea of sustainability help us take account of both human well-being and the environment at the local and global level? To answer, we have to unpack what is involved in decision-making and what sustainability means. Decisions are made in multiple roles: consumer, citizen, role model for others, organizational participant, investor, and resource manager. In all of these roles, context, including inequalities, shapes opportunities and constraints and thus decisions. Context often reflects a long history of previous decisions, including discrimination. Thus context and choice are two views of the same process.

The Introduction discusses the relevance of federalism to different aspects of climate governance. Drawing on the existing literature, we review the key advantages and disadvantages that federalism may offer for the adoption of ambitious climate policies.

The chapter provides an overview of the aims and scope of the book (including the European countries covered), its structure and standard topics covered in each country. Includes the general objectives of the Birds and Habitats Directives, and the standard categories used to report on the status of habitats and species. Protected areas and their categories are defined. Key data sources are identified, including for the status of habitats and species; protected area coverage; and nature conservation costs and funding. The taxonomy and sources of species names are listed.

This chapter serves as an introduction to the book. It discusses the origin of Planet Earth and its Moon, their dependence on the Sun for energy, and the evolution of life on Earth. The evolution of the first living cell seems to have been a single event and all life on Earth is directly derived from this individual primary organism. The first life forms were anaerobic bacteria, but these later gave rise to photosynthesising cyanobacteria, which produced oxygen. The presence of oxygen eventually led to the emergence of aerobic animals and plants. The chapter then details the emergence of the oceans and supercontinents Pangea and Gondwanaland, the eventual break-up of the supercontinents and the development of the varied ecosystems which characterise Planet Earth at the present time.

Our food systems have performed well in the past, but they are failing us in the face of climate change and other challenges. There is a broad consensus that transformation of food systems is required to make them sustainable and equitable for all. Transformation occurs via agents of change: individual behaviour, policies and institutions, research and innovation, and partnerships and alliances. Outcome-oriented agricultural research for development can help bring about directed transformation that maximises benefits and minimises trade-offs.

The May 2019 IPBES emphasised the scale of the current biodiversity crisis and the need for transformative change, but highlighted that the tools exist to enable this change. Conservation translocation is an increasingly used tool that involves people deliberately moving and releasing organisms where the primary goal is conservation – it includes species reintroductions, reinforcements, assisted colonisations and ecological replacements. It can be complex, expensive, time consuming, and sometimes controversial, but when best practice guidelines are followed it can be a very effective conservation method and a way of exciting and engaging people in environmental issues. Conservation translocations have an important role to play not only in improving the conservation status of individual species but also in ecological restoration and rewilding by moving keystone and other influential species. As the climate continues to change, species with poor dispersal abilities or opportunities will be at particular risk. Assisted colonisation, which involves moving species outside their indigenous range, is likely to become an increasingly used method. It is also a tool that may become increasingly used to avoid threats from the transmission of pathogens. Other more radical forms of conservation translocation, such as ecological replacements, multi-species conservation translocations, and the use of de-extinction and genetic interventions, are also likely to be given stronger consideration within the wider framework of ecological restoration. There have been significant advances in the science of reintroduction biology over the last three decades. However new ways of transferring and sharing such information are needed to enable a wider spectrum of practitioners to have easier access to knowledge and guidance. In the past the biological considerations of conservation translocations have often heavily outweighed the people considerations. However it is increasingly important that socio-economic factors are also built into projects and relevant experts involved to reduce conflict and improve the chances of success. Some level of biological and socio-economic risk will be present for most conservation translocations, but these can often be managed through the use of sensitivity, professionalism, and the application of tried and tested best practice. The role of species reintroduction and other forms of conservation translocations will be an increasingly important tool if we are to restore, and make more resilient, our damaged ecosystems.

Four planet-level dangers loom over humankind in the coming hundred years, requiring solutions that can only be achieved through planet-level strategies and instruments. Reversing climate change requires a concerted effort among all the world’s peoples to decarbonize their economies and energy systems as swiftly as possible, while ramping up new technologies for removing accumulated carbon dioxide. Nuclear weapons will continue to pose an existential threat as long as nations vie with each other in a zero-sum competition for power and dominance. Naturally occurring or bioengineered pandemics threaten human well-being, and can only be mitigated via a comprehensive system of global regulation. Artificial intelligence proffers many tantalizing benefits, but will also create extreme risks unless humankind finds ways to control the development of these powerful machines. The historical track record suggests that these challenges, while daunting, can realistically be surmounted by concerted action.

Forensic DNA typing was developed to improve our ability to conclusively identify an individual and distinguish that person from all others. Current DNA profiling techniques yield incredibly rare types, but definitive identification of one and only one individual using a DNA profile remains impossible. This fact may surprise you, as there is a popular misconception that a DNA profile is unique to an individual, with the exception of identical twins. You may be the only person in the world with your DNA profile, but we cannot know this short of typing everyone. What we can do is calculate probabilities. The result of a DNA profile translates into the probability that a person selected at random will have that same profile. In most cases, this probability is astonishingly tiny. Unfortunately, this probability is easily misinterpreted, a situation we will see and discuss many times in the coming chapters.

Between 1967 and 1970, NASA funded four annual conferences, organized through the New York Academy of Sciences, on the Origins of Life. Their format was conversational, reflecting the eminence of the central attendees, including Frank Fremont-Smith, Norman Horowitz, William McElroy, Philip Abelson, Sidney W. Fox, Leslie Orgel, and Stanley Miller.1 A number of those present were already professional mentors or colleagues of Lynn Margulis, or would soon become so – Cyril Ponnamperuma, Elso Barghoorn, J. William Schopf, Joan Oró, and Philip Morrison. Margulis participated in all four meetings and was tasked to edit their transcripts into volumes (published between 1970 and 1973). The co-chair of these gatherings, Norman Horowitz, also happened to be Lovelock’s colleague as the director of the biology section at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). This relationship likely had some role in Lovelock’s invitation to the second Origins of Life meeting in May 1968. His attendance brought about his first encounter with Margulis: “Margulis, as the youngest member present, had the job of rapporteur. … Perhaps the task of reporting everything we said was onerous and she had no time or opportunity to think about it. Certainly, I had no contact or discussion with her at the meeting. My fruitful collaboration with Lynn was not to begin until some time later” (Lovelock 2000: 254).

Brief overview of the importance and peculiarities of granular materials.

The notion that our planet and its inhabitants have not remained exactly as the Creator was supposed to have made them was in the air long before 1859, when the English natural historian Charles Darwin collected and published his evolutionary ideas in his great work On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection. By that time geologists had long known that the 6,000 years allowed by the Bible since the Creation was vastly inadequate for the sculpting of the current landscape by any natural mechanism; and the biologists who were just beginning to study the history of life via the fossil record were not far behind them. Around the turn of the nineteenth century, the French zoologist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck began to argue that fossil molluscan lineages from the Paris Basin had undergone structural change over time, and that the species concerned were consequently not fixed. Importantly, he implicated adaptation to the environment as the cause of change, although the means he suggested – subsequently infamous as “the inheritance of acquired characteristics” – brought later opprobrium.

Like every one of the many millions of other organisms with which we share our planet, the species Homo sapiens is the product of a long evolutionary history. The first very simple cellular organisms spontaneously arose on Earth close to four billion years ago, and their descendants have since diversified to give us forms as different as streptococci, roses, sponges, anteaters, and ourselves.

While it isn’t necessary to do so, it’s often good to start a book by saying something that is clearly true. So, let’s do that. Science has had (and continues to have) a significant impact upon our lives. This fact is undeniable. Science has revealed to us how different species arise, the causes of our world’s changing climate, many of the microphysical particles that constitute all matter, among many other things. Science has made possible technology that has put computing power that was almost unimaginable a few decades ago literally in the palms of our hands. A common smartphone today has more computing power than the computers that NASA used to put astronauts on the Moon in 1969! There are, of course, many additional ways in which science has solved various problems and penetrated previously mysterious phenomena. A natural question to ask at this point is: why discuss this? While we all (or at least the vast majority of us!) appreciate science and what it has accomplished for modern society, there remain – especially among portions of the general public – confusions about science, how it works and what it aims to achieve. The primary goal of this book is to help address some specific confusions about one key aspect of science: how it explains the world.

Metaphor has traditionally been considered antithetical to science. Metaphorical speech, which is commonly associated with the creative wordplay of poetry and fiction, would seem after all to be at cross-purpose to scientists’ efforts to articulate clear, rigorously precise, and objective statements of fact about reality. Aside from a tendency toward obscurity, the greater problem is that metaphorical expressions are typically false, literally speaking. Shakespeare’s Juliet is not literally the sun, time does not literally flow, and the genome is not a literal blueprint, book, or program. It is principally for this reason that scientists and philosophers of science have been, until rather recently, very critical of the suggestion that metaphor might play a legitimate role in the scientific process. In the early modern period, philosophers like Francis Bacon, Thomas Hobbes, and John Locke, who were enthusiastic advocates of the new scientific approach to understanding the world so brilliantly illustrated by the likes of Hooke, Boyle, and Newton, made withering criticism of metaphor as productive of nothing but falsehood and misdirection.