Preface

Environmental management is a term that is very broad in scope and has many definitions. This volume regards management (recognition, analysis, assessments, and actions) taken in response to adverse circumstances with consequences for humans and the things we value. The environmental manager may be any layperson who is negatively affected by environmental degradation or disturbance, or may be the professional scientist, decisionmaker, or agent tasked with solving environmental problems for communities or societies at large. The geographical scale of environmental problems and their management may range from local to regional to global. The temporal nature of the problems may be immediate or long term, or they may be matters that will be of great importance in the future (as are the projected consequences of global warming, such as changing climates; rising seas; reorganized terrestrial, oceanic, and atmospheric circulations; disturbed, degraded, and dying ecosystems; and new patterns of hazards). So, broadly speaking, everyone is an environmental manager at some point in their lives and environmental management is usually an intentional action motivated by self-preservation or personal and collective gains.

The chapters in this book cover an array of contemporary environmental issues. They have been organized in somewhat general categories based on the foci of the issues: pollution, habitat, ecology, and sustainability. The chapters in the "Pollution" section regard studies and discussions of air pollution monitoring and assessment, groundwater pollution caused by sanitation problems with sewage and landfills, and ocean contamination due to mismanagement of plastic waste. The three chapters included in the "Habitat" section concern challenges posed to habitats of several types of organisms: people (housing comfort based on atmospheric conditions), viruses (mutation in response to habitat stresses), and monkeys (habitat loss due to hunting and deforestation). The chapters grouped under "Ecology" apply ecological analyses to several challenges: sustainable management in a national park, restoration of mining-degraded landscapes, discernment and mapping of soil types, and the economics of cultural ecosystem services. The "Sustainability" section includes chapters that pose questions about sustainability and, ultimately, survival in the contexts of complex landscapes, social systems, and extensive regions: water management for wetlands, flood mitigation, and agriculture in an arable catchment; improvement of the sustainability of water supplies by resurrecting traditional approaches; the implications of plantation agriculture on ecosystem sustainability; and recognition of the roles of environment, society, and governance in the need for countering global warming and investing in mitigation of climate change impacts.

While the chapters contained in this volume touch on only a few of the pressing matters that are important to environmental managers, they individually provide interesting insights into the problems experienced in diverse settings. From tropical to temperate regions, forests to deserts, wilderness to urbanized landscapes,

and Europe (Montenegro and Scotland) and the Mediterranean Sea to Africa (Cameroon, Morocco, and Niger) and Asia (India and Indonesia), this assortment provides glimpses into topics that are the focus of scholars from these regions.

> **John P. Tiefenbacher** Department of Geography and Environmental Studies, Texas State University, San Marcos, Texas, USA

Section 1 Pollution
