Biosphere collapse: Causes and solutions (Earth in Transition) - Softcover

Inhaltsangabe

What can conservation accomplish when some ecological losses cannot be reversed?

In Biosphere Collapse: Causes and Responses, Garry Rogers examines the human decisions behind ecological decline and the conditions required for meaningful responses. Connecting environmental science, institutional analysis, and ethics, the book asks how societies can reduce destructive pressures without assuming control over the living world.
The discussion moves through four connected levels of change: limiting direct extraction, transforming production, addressing systemic drivers, and reconsidering beliefs concerning growth, consumption, and human primacy. Agriculture, energy, urban development, water use, and pollution appear not as separate problems, but as activities linked through infrastructure, finance, power, and ecological relationships.

Case studies trace decisions through ecological processes to observed consequences. Groundwater depletion in California’s San Joaquin Valley reveals how earlier investments can restrict later choices and leave lasting damage. Amazon forest protection illustrates the relationships among monitoring, enforcement, and finance. Studies of Cabo Pulmo’s marine reserve and Elwha River restoration examine what reducing harvesting and removing dams can achieve, while keeping the limits of recovery visible.

Rogers distinguishes ecological improvement from slower decline, and successful local action from evidence of global recovery. Conservation gains receive attention without becoming promises that every damaged system can be repaired. Proposed interventions face questions of maintenance, unintended consequences, displaced burdens, and the outcomes likely without action.

The book also considers inequality, Indigenous sovereignty, public accountability, ecological grief, and preparation for disruption. Its scenarios explore different futures rather than predict a single collapse date. Crisis is not presented as a necessary path to reform, and suffering is not treated as a source of wisdom.

An ecocentric ethic guides the analysis. Humans belong within the community of life, whose organisms, relationships, and evolutionary histories have value beyond their usefulness to people. Human needs remain part of that responsibility, without automatically overriding other life.

Written for environmental researchers, conservation practitioners, students, and readers seeking a fuller understanding of systemic change, Biosphere Collapse offers a framework for examining causes and evaluating responses. Its central concern is what can still be retained: living populations, ecological relationships, useful knowledge, and possibilities for future recovery.

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