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Preface | |
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List of Figures | |
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Human Agency and the State of the Earth | |
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Introduction | |
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Can one conceive of ecosystems without human agents? | |
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Human agency: individuals making a difference | |
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Overwhelming evidence for concern with the condition of the earth system | |
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Looking back and looking forward | |
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A Reminder: How Things Were | |
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The study of human ecological relations | |
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The contemporary study of environmental issues | |
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The evolution of human-environment interactions | |
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Hunter-gatherers: Setting our preferences | |
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How did we decide to become farmers? | |
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Herding and farming: An uneasy relationship | |
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More food for the masses | |
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The Great Forgetting | |
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Earth Transformations in prehistory | |
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The archeology of environmental change | |
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The urban-industrial revolution and the unleashing of Prometheus | |
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The contemporary situation: Human-dominated ecosystems | |
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The Web of Life: Are We in It? | |
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The web of life and trophic relations: Thinking ecologically | |
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Ecosystem productivity and net primary production | |
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Land Use and long-term disturbance | |
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What Makes People Want to Change the Environment? | |
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Learning, Adaptation, and Information | |
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Mitigation and the Cautionary Principle | |
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Transforming the face of the earth through making better decisions | |
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Population and the Environment | |
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Rebuilding Communities and Institutions | |
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Community in human evolution | |
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What is sacred in human evolution? | |
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Tragedies of the commons | |
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Institutions and self-organization | |
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Bioregionalism, deep ecology and embedding people in nature | |
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Can We Learn When We Have Enough? | |
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Material boys and material girls | |
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Patterns of consumption in developed countries | |
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Patterns of consumption in developing countries | |
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A feeding frenzy and a crisis in public health | |
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Burning fossils fuels instead of calories | |
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Do we have enough material goods now? | |
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Quality of Life: When Less Is More | |
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Resource abundance vs resource scarcity | |
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When less is more | |
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The scale of the problem and the scale of the solutions | |
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Restoring Our Balance: Valuing community, and trust, rather than more "stuff" | |
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Are we happier when we have more? | |
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References | |
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Index | |