In early human societies, community norms specified where and how living resources should be used within sacred groves and in exploited places. Many rulers of ancient and medieval societies issued decrees reserving game and other wild resources for royalty and limiting peasant uses. Colonial rulers criminalized Indigenous uses of wild species and privatized and commercialized landscapes. Intensive exploitation led to the depletion and extinction of many species and laid the foundation for formal conservation. Concern about deforestation in colonial India led to early forest reserves. The utilitarian disciplines of wildlife management, forestry, range management, and soil science arose in response to threats to living natural resources due to conquest, including intensive exploitation, habitat alteration, and the introduction of non-native species. These disciplines focus on the exploitation of economically valuable species to protect a long-term supply. Early forest reserves in the USA were set aside to regulate the use of forest resources.

Economic, technological, and demographic changes after World War II created new pressures on species, habitats, and human environments. Concerns about human impacts on the environment mounted. Rachel Carson, Charles Elton, Barry Commoner, and others articulated concerns about pesticides and other harmful substances in air and water, introduced species, escalating extinction rates, and the modification and fragmentation of habitats. Ecologists, economists, and philosophers like Paul Ehrlich, Garrett Hardin, John Kenneth Galbraith, Lynne White, Norman Myers, and Arne Naess attributed these problems to varied causes, including population growth, tragedies of the commons, excessive resource consumption and disparities in consumption, militarism, the misuse of science and technology, externalities, and anthropocentrism. In response to these developments and to increasing awareness of the limitations of utilitarian conservation, a preservationist approach to conservation that seeks to protect species and regardless of their economic value became prominent.

The sixth chapter focuses on a decisive common dimension in Gravity’s Rainbow, Mason & Dixon, and Against the Day, namely, their treatment of anthropocenic and planetary concerns. These related concepts have featured prominently in recent literary studies, but studies of Pynchon’s relation to the Anthropocene are still largely absent. Moreover, recent discussions in literary criticism of anthropocenic and planetary concerns are primarily centered on works published in the twenty-first century, but the chapter shows that the concerns are extensively prefigured in the early novels of Pynchon’s global trilogy. The notion of planetarity is often seen as incompatible with the idea of globalization, but the chapter shows that the anthropocenic and planetary themes in Pynchon’s novels grow naturally out of the global and world-historical issues discussed in Chapters 1–4. At the same time, it demonstrates that Pynchon’s ideas of humanity’s harmful exploitation of the planet draw on a long tradition in American literature and on the ecological ideas of the 1960s. The chapter concludes with an analysis of how Pynchon depicts language as a significant force in the Anthropocene, and with a discussion of the trilogy’s recurring portrayal of giants as ancient planetary avatars poised to reclaim the Earth.

Greenland has been peopled from the west by several different groups and only once – in the late tenth century ad – from the east, this time by Norse farmers from northern Europe. Unlike the mobile Arctic hunters, the Norse settlers were sedentary, and the society they established in southwest Greenland was based on the natural vegetation, hunting, and trade with their homelands. For almost 500 years the Norse population in Greenland thrived, and then it vanished for reasons not yet fully understood. Several explanations have been put forward: that the small Norse society failed because of inflexible social and economic strategies,1 or fell victim to a combination of unfortunate circumstances,2 or (as recently argued) suffered from organized and systematic violence by invading Inuit.

Local awareness and cultural value of threatened species are regarded as integral components of conservation programmes, but pro-environmental attitudes do not necessarily prevent negative human interactions with threatened species. The history of cultural attitudes towards gibbons in China provides an important case study about long-term conservation effectiveness of positive biodiversity values. Animals readily identifiable as gibbons are frequently recorded in Chinese culture from the Zhou Dynasty onward. Gibbons were interpreted as symbols of the supernatural and celebrated in Chinese literature and art. They were also regarded as positive moral exemplars embodying virtuous filial Confucian values, and were equated with the concept of junzi, a noble person who strives after virtue and inspires by example. However, positive cultural associations had little effect in preventing the historical loss of gibbon populations across nearly all of China. Historical records also document exploitation of gibbons for medicinal and other uses, and gibbon declines likely reflect historical conflict with economic demands for local subsistence in marginalised low-income communities. Positive cultural values may therefore be insufficient to prevent species losses if they are outweighed by economic pressures, and awareness may not contribute to positive behavioural change if it does not address drivers of negative human–wildlife interactions.

The photon signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) is defined in terms of statistical quantities, and the Poisson and Gaussian probability distribution functions are defined and described. Those distributions are applied to lidar measurements, and the effect of background light on lidar SNR is quantified. The signal-limited and background-limited SNR regimes are defined. The lidar equation is then introduced as a model of the range-dependent lidar signal, and the background model is a constant additional term. All the variables in both models are introduced and defined. They include the number of photons in each laser pulse, the optical efficiencies of the transmitter and receiver, the geometrical function, the receiver solid angle, the range bin length, the volume backscatter coefficient, the extinction coefficient, the spectral radiance of the background, the receiver field of view, the receiver optical bandpass, and the sampling interval of the data system. Finally, a lidar system known as the Eye safe Atmospheric Research Lidar (EARL) is introduced because it is used as an example throughout the rest of the book.

An overview of optical scattering in the atmosphere includes the sizes and concentration of scatterers, the mathematical formalism of scattering, and definitions of the lidar scattering and extinction coefficients. The Rayleigh, Mie, and geometric scattering regimes are defined by the scattering parameter, and implications of Rayleigh scattering on lidar measurements are elucidated for both signals and background. Molecules store energy in translational, rotational, and vibrational motions, and atoms store energy in electronic excitations. These energy storage mechanisms cause the lidar observables of Doppler shifts, molecular and Raman spectra, and atomic spectra, which, along with Rayleigh scattering, enable lidar measurements of temperatures and winds; water vapor and trace gas concentrations; and aerosol extinction coefficients at altitudes from the surface up to the mesosphere and lower thermosphere. The lidar techniques that exploit all these phenomena operate over a range of wavelengths from the long wave infrared to the ultraviolet and the reasons for the differing wavelengths of the various techniques are explained with a graphic that summarizes the chapter.

This chapter examines the ten mega-threats, how they link and why they must be solved together; why the solutions must occur at both global and personal levels; and the importance of the individual in saving humankind.

Chapter 2 considers the extinction crisis, eco-collapse, ecocide, and their consequences for humanity as well as global solutions and what individuals can do.

The radiated tortoise and Aldabra giant tortoise were used as ecological replacements for the extinct Mauritian tortoise Cylindraspis inepta. Aldabra giant tortoises were better adapted as seed dispersers and grazers, and have become the species of choice. It is intended to remove the radiated tortoises from Round Island. It is suggested there was an open grazing climax plant community maintained by tortoises with heliophilous native plants that have adaptations to avoid being grazed or browsed and respond to grazing with prostrate growth form. The Aldabra giant tortoises fed on fallen fruits and spread the seeds of hardwood trees, screw-pines and palms in their droppings that subsequently demonstrated enhanced germination and growth rates. Preliminary work was done on Ile aux Aigrettes before the release on Round Island. The tortoises have established grazed areas colonised by the native tussock grass Chrysopogon argutus that the tortoises do not graze and is benefiting from reduced competition from the fast-growing non-native grasses.

In The Descent of Man, Charles Darwin sought to erase the hard border between humans and other animals. Attempts to define a human exception within nature persist, however, among evolutionary anthropologists as well as in popular histories of the human species. Darwin proposes a cultural rather than biological perfection of “humanity” through an evolution of the moral sense or conscience, which takes the form of a deliberative expansion of the sympathetic imagination to embrace other nations and races and, eventually, all sentient life. At the same time, Darwin predicts a future widening of the extinction gap between a more highly evolved human type and “lower” races and species. Extermination, seemingly at odds with a universal sympathy, provides its historical condition. The crux informs subsequent accounts of a revolutionary rather than evolutionary stage of human emergence, in which the enhancement of Homo sapiens’ social intelligence entails the extermination of other human populations.

The interdisciplinary field of animal studies owes much to Darwin’s work, particularly in the Descent of Man, where he claims that mental and emotional capacities ranging from an ability to reason to an aesthetic sense exist in other animals besides humans. This chapter examines the significance of Darwin’s work for animal ethics, the science of animal behavior, theories of companion species, and the age of mass extinction. Activists, scientists, humanists, and environmentalists continue to find new uses for Darwin’s work as they pursue greater knowledge about the animal kingdom and more just ecological communities.

This chapter asks what it means to read Darwin in the middle of what appears to be the seventh mass extinction in Earth’s history, and the first caused by the actions of a single species, our own. Dipesh Chakrabarty argues that the Anthropocene marks the point at which “the wall between human and natural history has been breached,” thus mounting an unprecedented challenge to the foundations of humanism. However, one could make a similar claim for Darwin. On the Origin of Species arguably ruptured the divide between human and natural history by revealing that we are not, and never have been, fully separate from the web of life. Indeed, one might go so far as to say that the Anthropocene crisis has been brought about precisely by the failure to adequately internalize this central Darwinian insight. Reading Darwin in the Anthropocene means understanding both the degree to which our intellectual milieu is indebted to his work and the fact that his world was profoundly different from our own precisely because of the greater scope and power of what Carolyn Merchant calls “autonomous nature” within it. The historical distance separating us from Darwin marks not only a profound shift in the idea of nature, but in the ontological state of nature itself, which is to say the configuration of existing (and/or vanishing) species and ecosystems completely apart from our ideas of them. We need to reckon with both sides of that equation, and the relationship between them, if we are to understand Darwin’s relevance for our own efforts to forestall mass extinction in the present.