Island Press began with a simple idea: knowledge is power—the power to imagine a better future and find ways for getting us there. Founded in 1984, Island Press’ mission is to provide the best ideas and information to those seeking to understand and protect the environment and create solutions to its complex problems.
We elevate voices of change, shine a spotlight on crucial issues, and focus attention on sustainable solutions.
Our network of authors includes E.O. Wilson, Paul Ehrlich, Sylvia Earle, Gretchen Daily, Jan Gehl, Daniel Pauly, and many others. By working closely with experts like these, Island Press has developed a comprehensive and growing body of knowledge—vital resources for all those working to protect the environment and create healthy communities.
Written by two leading conservation biologists, Saving Nature's Legacy is a thorough and readable introduction to issues of land management and conservation biology. It presents a broad, land-based approach to biodiversity conservation in the United States, with the authors succinctly translating principles, techniques, and findings of the ......
Entering the Watershed is the product of a two-year project established by the Pacific Rivers Council to develop new federal riverine protection and restoration policy alternatives. It recommends a comprehensive new approach to river protection based on principles of watershed dynamics, ecosystem function, and conservation biology -- a nationwide, ......
To the uninitiated, water policy seems a complicated, hypertechnical, and incomprehensible subject: a tangle of engineering jargon and legalese surrounding a complex, delicate, and interrelated structure. Decisions concerning the public's waters involve scant public participation, and in such a context, reform seems risky at ......
This volume explores the issues associated with the complex subject of water quality protection in an assessment of the successes and failures of the Clean Water Act over the past twenty years. In addition to examining traditional indicators of water quality, the authors consider how health concerns of the public have been addressed, and ......
A Strategy For Building Conservation Into Decision Making
Global Marine Biological Diversity presents the most up-to-date information and view on the challenge of conserving the living sea and how that challenge can be met.
In Crossing the Next Meridian, Charles F. Wilkinson, an expert on federal public lands, Native American issues, and the West's arcane water laws explains some of the core problems facing the American West now and in the years to come. He examines the outmoded ideas that pervade land use and resource allocation and argues that significant reform of ......
As world population grows, and more people move to cities and suburbs, they place greater stress on the operating system of our whole planet. But urbanization and increasing densities also present our best opportunity for improving sustainability, by transforming urban development into desirable, lower-carbon, compact and walkable communities ......
Energy and the Ecological Economics of Sustainability examines the roots of the present environmental crisis in the neoclassical economics upon which modern industrial society is based. The author explains that only when we view ourselves in the larger context of the global ecosystem and accept the physical limits to what is possible can ......
Statewide Wetlands Strategies offers comprehensive strategies that draw upon all levels of government and the private sector to focus and coordinate efforts to work toward the goal of no-net-loss of wetlands.