Rice paddies are artificial wetlands that supply people with food and provide wildlife with habitats, breeding areas, shelters, feeding grounds and other services, and rice paddies play an important part in agricultural ecological systems. However, modern agricultural practices with large-scale intensive farming have significantly accelerated the homogenization of the paddy field ecosystem. Mod...

BACKGROUND Community health interventions are increasingly employing partnerships combined with multilevel intervention models to achieve their objectives. Resources and methods for project evaluation are often limited to changes in population health status or health behaviors, while broader contextual questions that may illuminate mechanisms for change across ecological levels and project sust...

Spate irrigation is increasingly recognized as contributing to potential of accessible water-resource use, local food production, and resource sustainability. This study constructs an approach to spate irrigation as a landscape technology by selectively fusing concepts of resilience ecology, political ecology, and actor-network theory. It is applied to a case study of the Calicanto area (Cochab...

and the Urban Environment, DOI 10.1007/978-1-4614-3188-6_3, © Springer Science+Business Media New York 2012 Abstract The global life-support system for humans is in peril but no alternative to achieving sustainability is desirable. In response to this challenge, sustainability science has emerged in recent decades. In this chapter, I argue that to advance sustainability science a landscape appr...

This study analyzes and evaluates the status and long-term trend of regional economic sustainability in eastern Anhui Province, China. Based on the triangle model and the definition of economic sustainable development, this study evaluates the interrelationship among regional economic development, resource-energy consumption, environmental pollution, and ecological performance. The sustainable ...

Although the current literature includes discussions relating to the sustainability of the built human community, planning professions have focused their attention on continued technological solutions to environmental problems. These interventions attempt to stabilize the problem at hand through further technological infusion increasing the gap between the origination of the problem and ecologi...

We propose a biodiversity credit system for trading endangered species habitat designed to minimize and reverse the negative effects of habitat loss and fragmentation, the leading cause of species endangerment in the United States. Given the increasing demand for land, approaches that explicitly balance economic goals against conservation goals are required. The Endangered Species Act balances ...

a r t i c l e i n f o The ecological economic concern with environmental sustainability embodies the normative orientations of the field. This concern is foremost a matter of distributive justice, the definition of which determines the relevance of the appropriate scale and efficient allocation criteria. Yet it would appear that the discipline lacks a shared, internally consistent set of ethica...

the principles and practice of sustainability have gained momentum in the last 15 years and now form a central part of conversations around social praxis and the future. it has been proposed that the theories driving sustainability science are embedded in indigenous history, and it has been shown that many ancient traditions always concerned themselves with sustainable and ethical living. among...

Most rural development projects include ecological considerations, and most conservation projects include some reference to sustainable development. However, conservation projects frequently fail because they do not incorporate local communities' perceptions and needs. Many development projects are also unsuccessful because they are not based on adequate ecological assessment. We focus here on ...