1st Edition
Social-Environmental Planning The Design Interface Between Everyforest and Everycity
With the environment, climate change, and global warming taking center stage in the national debate, the issues seem insurmountable and certainly unsolvable at the local level. Written by Chris Maser, international consultant on forest ecology, sustainable forestry practices, and sustainable development, Social-Environmental Planning: The Design Interface Between Everyforest and Everycity focuses on community based solutions, emphasizing how the heavy lifting of sustainability will always be done inside existing cities and communities. Based on the author’s forty years of experience, the book covers the sustainability of the planet and its population when dealing with climate change.
The book provides an in-depth understanding of the commonalities of pattern between Everyforest and Everycity. Maser suggests that before changes can be made, society must adapt to the circumstances of global climate change as they already are, and then determine what we can do to stabilize global climate as effectively and quickly as possible. He explores the reciprocal interface between communities and the landscape and how, when this interface is recognized and understood, it can create solutions that work. With this comprehension, people can adapt to the present and begin determining what they can do now to leave the planet a little better for each generation.
The Human Dimension of Social-Environmental Planning. How We Think. Language and Communication. Nature’s Rules of Engagement in Social-Environmental Planning. The Law of Cosmic Unification. Basic Components of Design. Habitat, the Language of Boundaries. Patterns Across the Landscape. Infrastructure. Shared Relationships between Everyforest and Everycity. Cumulative Effects, Lag Periods, and Thresholds. Age as an Archive of History. Ecology and Economy. A Century for Healing. Toward Social-Environmental Equality in a Diverse World. Social-Environmental Planning in Space and Time. Challenges for Social-Environmental Planning. Where Leaders Dare to Go. Glossary. Appendix: Common and Scientific Names of Plants and Animals.
Biography
Chris Maser
"Using a charismatic discourse and witty convictions, Chris Maser argues that the functionality of nature’s design can be and has been used as a guiding framework to build human communities. ... Maser’s ability to bridge scientific theory with social psychology is compelling. ... Not since Jones and Cloke’s Tree cultures: The place of trees and trees in their place (2002), and Konijnendijk’s The forest and the city: The cultural landscape of urban woodland (2008), has there been a text so comprehensively bridging urban nature, human culture, and structural process. ... Through practical logic, scientific explanation, and unparalleled social insight and intuition, Maser breaks down stereotypical absolutisms in environmental management planning. ... the book offers excellent insight into the relationships, functions, and parallels of forests and cities; human behaviour; and also management planning strategies. Set against the backdrop of global climate change, this book reinforces the idea that thinking about green nature in relation to urbanization processes is integral to developing sustainable communities in the interest of human health and quality of living."
—Adrina Bardekjian, York University, The Canadian Geographer, 2012, 56(3)"… provides an important and unique perspective on the strong relationships and parallels between human-made systems and structures and other natural systems and structures. The convergence of the social and physical sciences; of science and spirituality; of art and science and of other previously isolated fields of endeavor and belief will be, I believe, the hallmark of this century. Chris's book elegantly weaves together two such realms of thought and understanding. … I believe this book will make a significant contribution …"
—Jane Silberstein, Bainbridge Island, Washington"Maser makes a compe
