Future Nature
A Vision for Conservation
W.M. Adams
The countryside is changing faster than ever. Fifty years of conservation achievements in the UK are now being confronted by a new complexion of economic forces that are driving change in the countryside. At the same time new ideas in conservation are altering the role that conservation is being asked to play in negotiating the transition from past to future.
This revised edition of Bill Adams classic work Future Nature tackles the new challenges in the countryside and wildlife conservation head-on through a new Introduction and Postscript with updated arguments about naturalness and our social engagement with nature, and complemented by a new Foreword by Adrian Phillips.
Concepts such as biodiversity and sustainability, and changes in our understanding, appreciation and concern for nature, offer unprecedented opportunities. Bill Adams explores the scientific, cultural and economic significance of conservation. He argues that conservation must move beyond the boundaries of parks and reserves to embrace the whole countryside.
The importance of conservation for the future is enormous. It holds the potential to create new spaces for nature, both in the landscape and in our lives and imaginations. This factual, beautifully written and thought-provoking book offers a fundamental reassessment of conservation, its importance, and how to achieve it.
Reviews
'This is a book in the genre of Wordsworth - emotion recollected in tranquillity... I thoroughly recommend Future Nature to all those involved in taking conservation into the next millennium'
PROF. MICHAEL WINTER, Director of the Centre for Rural Research and head of the School of Geography, Archaeology and Earth Resources, Exeter University
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Bill Adams is Reader in Conservation and Development at the University of Cambridge, an editor of Decolonizing Nature: strategies for conservation in a post-colonial era (Earthscan, 2002) and the author of Green Development: environment and sustainability in the Third World.
Foreword: Future Nature Revisited * Introduction to the Revised Edition * Finding Nature * Constructing Conservation * Nature Lost * Conservation and the Global Village * Culture and the Countryside * Making Nature * Nature and the Wild * the Conservation Landscape * Nature, Landscapes, Lives * Releasing the Wild * Postscript * Notes and References * Further Reading * List of Abbreviations * Index