This guide to the National Wildlife Refuge system describes over 530 U.S. wildlife reserves, and contains detailed explanations of each refuge's habitat and wildlife, as well as refuge amenities.

Discusses the origin and evolution of life on Earth, the effects of pollution and its relation to climate change, the importance of biodiversity, and the need to save endangered and threatened species.

The natural world is marked by an ever-increasing loss of varied habitats, a growing number of species extinctions, and a full range of new kinds of dilemmas posed by global warming.

Now forty years old, the Endangered Species Act (ESA) remains a landmark act in conservation and one of the world's most comprehensive laws designed to prevent species extinctions and support recovery efforts for imperiled species. A controversial law and often subject to political attack, the ESA is successful overall but not without difficulties. Those who enforce the ESA, for example, struggle to achieve viable recovery goals for many species. At the forefront of challenges is a reactive framework that sometimes leads to perverse incentives and legal battles that strain support and resources. Further, few species have been delisted.

In 1903 Theodore Roosevelt signed a proclamation that created the first of what, a century later, would become a system of 538 wildlife refuges spread across all fifty of the United States. Stretching from the cypress swamps of Okefenokee to the remote wilderness of Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, the refuges now occupy 95 million acres of the American landscape.

As humanity presses down inexorably on the natural world, people debate the extent to which we can save the Earth's millions of different species without sacrificing human economic welfare.

This authoritative guide explains the Endangered Species Act, its implementation, and the issues facing the protection of endangered wildlife and its habitat. Beginning with the act's processes for listing species and designating critical habitat, chapters address key aspects of its application: the duty to consult and avoid jeopardy and the take prohibitions. Other topics include the jeopardy/critical habitats modification prohibition; Native American rights; threatened and endangered plants; international trade restrictions; citizen suits; landowner incentives; nanotechnology; and global warming.

A companion volume to The Endangered Species Act at Thirty: Renewing the Conservation Promise, this book examines the key policy tools available for protecting biodiversity in the United States by revisiting some basic questions in conservation: What are we trying to protect and why? What are the limits of species-based conservation? Can we develop new conservation strategies that are more ecologically and economically viable than past approaches?

The first listed species to make headlines after the Endangered Species Act was passed in 1973 was the snail darter, a three-inch fish that stood in the way of a massive dam on the Little Tennessee River. When the Supreme Court sided with the darter, Congress changed the rules. The dam was built, the river stopped flowing, and the snail darter went extinct on the Little Tennessee, though it survived in other waterways.