While our world faces many urgent problems, environmental issues are high on the list of topics that social as well as natural scientists, engineers, and others have much to contribute to in the deepening of understanding, development of policy options, and taking of action to address, if not resolve.1 Over the last couple of years, global warming and its anthropogenic causes and mitigations have deservedly received a great deal of public attention, in no small part due to former Vice President Al Gore's award-winning documentary, An Inconvenient Truth. At the same time, the rapid destruction of tropical forests is having an immediate effect on livelihoods, indeed even on the survival of traditional lifestyles, cultures, and communities in some of the world's least developed countries in Africa, Asia, and Latin America.
展开▼
