ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book discusses the background public culture of the nineteenth and first part of the twentieth century leading to the rise of the science of ecology and environmental law. It discusses how landscape ecology is being applied to large-scale environmental management problems as the Florida Everglades and the Chesapeake Bay. The book then reviews how the study of the most basic processes of population ecology, the growth of a single population, was borrowed from the work of early human demography. It also explores how the environmental restoration of Mono Lake was carried out, after decades of failed management, through the application of ecosystem ecology. The book discusses the foundations of conservation biology, and the international approach to species protection. It then focuses on the use of ecology in the management of national forests in the United States.
