Skip navigation
Home Textbooks

Disciplines

Nature

Beyond Consensus

Improving Collaborative Planning and Management
By Richard D. Margerum

Collaborative approaches are increasingly common across a range of governance and policy areas. Single-issue, single-organization solutions often prove ineffective for complex, contentious, and diffuse problems. Collaborative efforts allow cross-jurisdictional governance and policy, involving groups that may operate on different decision-making levels. In Beyond Consensus, Richard Margerum examines the full range of collaborative enterprises in natural resource management, urban planning, and environmental policy.

The Computational Beauty of Nature

Computer Explorations of Fractals, Chaos, Complex Systems, and Adaptation
By Gary William Flake

In this book Gary William Flake develops in depth the simple idea that recurrent rules can produce rich and complicated behaviors.

Nature's Purposes

Analyses of Function and Design in Biology
Edited by Colin Allen, Marc Bekoff and George Lauder

Within the natural sciences, only biologists take seriously teleological statements about design, purpose, and adaptive function. Some biologists claim that to understand the complex morphological and behavioral traits of organisms we must say what they are for, which is to give a teleological explanation of why organisms have them. Others argue that the theory of natural selection, in providing statistical explanations for the same phenomena, obviates any need for teleological thinking.

Environmental Values in American Culture

By Willett M. Kempton, James S. Boster and Jennifer A. Hartley


How do Americans view environmental issues? From EarthFirst! members to sawmill workers, this study by a team of cognitive anthropologists offers both good and bad news for those addressing environmental issues in the public arena. On the one hand it reveals surprising similarities in the way different groups of Americans view long-term global environmental change, and on the other it shows that Americans have serious misunderstandings about these issues, which skews public support for policies.