Island Press began with a simple idea: knowledge is power—the power to imagine a better future and find ways for getting us there. Founded in 1984, Island Press’ mission is to provide the best ideas and information to those seeking to understand and protect the environment and create solutions to its complex problems.
A Blueprint for Coastal Adaptation
Uniting Design, Economics, and Policy
Getting to the Heart of Science Communication
A Guide to Effective Engagement
In Getting to the Heart of Science Communication, Faith Kearns has penned a succinct guide for navigating the human relationships critical to the success of practice-based science. This meticulously researched volume takes science communication to the next level, helping scientists to see the value of listening as well as talking, understanding power dynamics in relationships, and addressing the roles of trauma, loss, grief, and healing.
Building Community Food Webs
Network-building takes a variety of forms and arises out of multiple activities. Farmers and researchers may convene to improve farming practices collaboratively. Food banks engage their clients to challenge the root causes of poverty. Municipalities invest large sums to protect farmland from development.
Building Community Food Webs captures the essence of these efforts, and offers pragmatic insights for community food leaders anywhere.
Flames of Extinction
The Race to Save Australia's Threatened Wildlife
Rewilding Agricultural Landscapes
A California Study in Rebalancing the Needs of People and Nature
This accessibly written, groundbreaking contributed volume is the first to examine in detail what it would take to retire eligible farmland and restore functioning natural ecosystems. The lessons in Rewilding Agricultural Landscapes will be useful to conservation leaders, policymakers, groundwater agencies, and water managers looking for inspiration and practical advice for solving the complicated issues of agricultural sustainability and water management.
Reinventing Food Banks and Pantries
New Tools to End Hunger
The Monsanto Papers
Deadly Secrets, Corporate Corruption, and One Man’s Search for Justice
Gray to Green Communities
A Call to Action on the Housing and Climate Crises
Bourland draws from her experience leading the Green Communities Program at Enterprise Community Partners, which resulted in the first standard for green affordable housing.
The book opens with the potential of green affordable housing, followed by the problems that it is helping to solve, challenges in the approach that need to be overcome, and recommendations for the future of green affordable housing. Gray to Green Communities brings together stories from the people and projects of the Green Communities’ program.
Gray to Green Communities will empower and inspire anyone interested in the future of housing and our planet.
Revolutionary Power
An Activist's Guide to the Energy Transition
Baker provides a playbook for the energy transformation complete with a step-by-step analysis of the key energy policy areas that are ripe for intervention. She tells the stories of those who are working to be architects of a more just system and draws from her own experience as an energy-justice advocate, a lawyer, and a queer woman of color.
Revolutionary Power is the guide to a just energy transformation.
Leadership for Sustainability
Strategies for Tackling Wicked Problems
Leadership for Sustainability gives readers perspective and skills for promoting creative and collaborative solutions. Blending systems thinking approaches with leadership techniques, it offers dozens of strategies and specific practices, illustrated by inspiring case studies. Readers will come away with a holistic understanding of how to lead from where they are by applying leadership principles and practices to a wide range of wicked situations.
The Bird-Friendly City
Creating Safe Urban Habitats
Naturalist
A Graphic Adaptation
E.O. Wilson’s bestselling memoir comes to life in a beautifully illustrated graphic adaptation.
Diversifying Power
Why We Need Antiracist, Feminist Leadership on Climate and Energy
Stephens examines climate and energy leadership related to job creation and economic justice, health and nutrition, and housing and transportation. She explains why we need to reclaim and restructure climate and energy systems so policies are explicitly linked to social, economic, and racial justices.
Diversifying Power shows that anyone working on issues related to energy or climate (directly or indirectly) can leverage the power of collective action. The work to shift away from an extractive, oppressive energy system has already begun. By highlighting the creative individuals and organizations making change happen, Diversifying Power provides inspiration and encourages action on climate and energy justice.
The Affordable City
Strategies for Putting Housing Within Reach (and Keeping it There)
Phillips offers more than 50 policy recommendations addressing what he refers to as the “Three S’s” of Supply, Stability, and Subsidy. He makes a moral and economic case for why each is essential and recommendations for making them work together. He ends with a policy blueprint and concise implementation plan for each policy, including whether it should be pursued as an immediate, medium-term, or long-term priority.
The Affordable City is an essential tool for professional city planners, policymakers, public officials, and advocates working to improve affordability and increase community resilience through local action.
Right of Way
Race, Class, and the Silent Epidemic of Pedestrian Deaths in America
Schmitt examines the increase in pedestrian deaths in the US as well as programs and movements that are beginning to respond to the epidemic. Right of Way is a call to reframe the problem, acknowledge the role of racism and classism in the public response to these deaths, and energize advocacy around road safety.
Right of Way unveils a crisis that is rooted in both inequality and the undeterred reign of the automobile in our cities. It challenges us to imagine and demand safer and more equitable cities, where no one is expendable.
The Cougar Conundrum
Sharing the World with a Successful Predator
The Cougar Conundrum delivers a clear-eyed assessment of a modern wildlife challenge, offering practical advice for wildlife managers, conservationists, hunters, and those who share their habitat with large predators.
Planetary Health
Protecting Nature to Protect Ourselves
Interdisciplinary in nature, Planetary Health explores how accelerating environmental change affects each dimension of human health. It then turns to the rich terrain of solutions, reimagining our cities, our food systems, our energy sector, the chemicals we use, even our economics and our ethics. The result is a comprehensive and optimistic introduction to a field that is being adopted by researchers and universities around the world.
Parks and Recreation System Planning
A New Approach for Creating Sustainable, Resilient Communities
Missing Middle Housing
Thinking Big and Building Small to Respond to Today’s Housing Crisis
Parolek proves that density is too blunt of an instrument to effectively regulate for twenty-first-century housing needs. Whether you are a planner, architect, builder, or city leader, Missing Middle Housing will help you think differently about how to address housing needs for today’s communities.
Blueprint for Greening Affordable Housing, Revised Edition
Every affordable housing project can achieve the fundamentals of good green building design. The Blueprint gives project teams what they need to push for excellence.
Beyond Polarization
Public Process and the Unlikely Story of California's Marine Protected Areas
Beyond Polarization offers an optimistic message about the public policy process in a time of civic division: that policymakers, scientists, and local citizens can successfully collaborate to protect natural resources we all have a stake in.
DIY City
The Collective Power of Small Actions
In DIY City, Dittmar explains why individual initiative, small-scale business, and small development matter, with lively stories from his own experience and examples from recent history.
Dittmar’s timely response to the challenges many cities face today is to make Do-It-Yourself the norm rather than the exception by removing the barriers to small-scale building and local business. The message of DIY City can offer hope to anyone who cares about cities.
Precision Community Health
Four Innovations for Well-being
In Precision Community Health, Choucair shows how those successes can be replicated and expanded around the country. The key is to use advanced technologies to identify which populations are most at risk for specific health threats and avert crises before they begin. Using this strategy can make a wholesale change in the way public health is practiced and in the well-being of all our communities.
Valuing Nature
A Handbook for Impact Investing
William Ginn provides a roadmap for conservation professionals, nonprofit managers, and impact investors to improve the management of natural systems.
Unnatural Companions
Rethinking Our Love of Pets in an Age of Wildlife Extinction
We love our pets. But there is a dark side to our domestic connection with animal life. The pet industry is contributing to a global conservation crisis for wildlife—often without the knowledge of pet owners. In Unnatural Companions, journalist Peter Christie argues that to reverse the alarming trend of wildlife decline, pet owners must acknowledge the pets-versus-conservation dilemma. Our well-fed and sheltered cats too often prey on small backyard wildlife, seemingly harmless reptiles released into the wild might be the next destructive invasive species, and the popular trend of designer pet food may have deleterious effects on the environment.
Christie's book is a cautionary tale to responsible pet owners, but he concludes with the positive message that the small changes we make at home can foster better practices within the pet industry that will ultimately benefit our pets’ wild brethren.
Designing Streets for Kids
Building on the success of their Global Street Design Guide, the National Association of City Transportation Officials (NACTO)-Global Designing Cities Initiative (GDCI) Streets for Kids program has developed child-focused design guidance to inspire leaders, inform practitioners, and empower communities around the world to consider their city from the eyes of a child.
Designing the Megaregion
Meeting Urban Challenges at a New Scale
There is an urgent need to begin designing megaregions, and Barnett offers a hopeful way forward using systems that are already in place.
Replenish
The Virtuous Cycle of Water and Prosperity
"Remarkable." —New York Times Book Review
"Clear-eyed treatise...Postel makes her case eloquently." —Booklist, starred review
"An informative, purposeful argument." —Kirkus
We spend billions of dollars on irrigation, dams, sanitation plants, and other feats of engineering to control water for our own prosperity. What if the answer was not control, but replenishment? Sandra Postel takes readers around the world to explore water projects that work with, rather than against, nature’s rhythms. Forest rehabilitation is safeguarding drinking water, farmers are planting cover crops to reduce polluted runoff, and “sponge cities” are capturing rainwater to curb urban flooding. Postel argues that efforts like these will be essential as we adjust to a hotter, wilder climate. Will we continue to fight the water cycle, endangering ourselves and the planet, or recognize our place in it and take advantage of the inherent services nature offers?
Primer of Ecological Restoration
This timely primer summarizes recent trends in the field suitable for introductory ecological restoration classes or for practitioners seeking constructive guidance for real-world projects.
Strategic Corporate Conservation Planning
A Guide to Meaningful Engagement
Five Rules for Tomorrow's Cities
Design in an Age of Urban Migration, Demographic Change, and a Disappearing Middle Class
Five Rules for Tomorrow’s Cities provides grounded and financially feasible design examples for tomorrow’s sustainable cities, and the design tools needed to achieve them.
A New Coast
Strategies for Responding to Devastating Storms and Rising Seas
More severe storms and rising seas will inexorably push the American coastline inland with profound impact on communities, infrastructure, and natural systems. In A New Coast, Jeffrey Peterson presents the science behind predictions for coastal impacts and explains how current policies fall short of what’s needed to prepare for these changes. He outlines a framework of bold, new national policies and funding to support local and state governments. Peterson calls for engagement of citizens, the private sector, as well as local and national leaders in a “campaign for a new coast.” This is a forward-looking volume offering new insights for policymakers, planners, business leaders preparing for the changes coming to America’s coast.
The Power of Existing Buildings
Save Money, Improve Health, and Reduce Environmental Impacts
The insights and practical experience of Sroufe, Stevenson, and Eckenrode, along with the project case study examples, provide new insights on investing in existing buildings for building owners, engineers, occupants, architects, and real estate and construction professionals.
Wildlife Law, Second Edition
A Primer
This revised and expanded second edition retains basic legal concepts from the first edition while offering new chapters that cover new controversial topics such as private wildlife reserves, game ranches, and nuisance species. It also includes expanded coverage of the Endangered Species Act. This is a groundbreaking reference for students in wildlife programs, land owners, and wildlife professionals.
Better Buses, Better Cities
How to Plan, Run, and Win the Fight for Effective Transit
"The ultimate roadmap for how to make the bus great again in your city." — Spacing
"The definitive volume on how to make [the] bus frequent, fast, reliable, welcoming, and respected..." —Streetsblog
Imagine a bus system that is fast, frequent, and reliable—what would that change about your city?
Buses can and should be the cornerstone of urban transportation. They offer affordable mobility and can connect citizens with every aspect of their lives. But in the US, they have long been an afterthought in budgeting and planning.
Transit expert Steven Higashide uses real-world stories of reform to show us what a successful bus system looks like. Higashide explains how to marshal the public in support of better buses and argues that better bus systems will create better cities for all citizens.
With a compelling narrative and actionable steps, Better Buses, Better Cities describes how decision-makers, philanthropists, activists, and public agency leaders can work together to make the bus a win in any city.
Food Town, USA
Seven Unlikely Cities That are Changing the Way We Eat
What sparked this revolution? To find out, Mark Winne traveled to seven cities not usually considered revolutionary. He broke bread with brew masters and city council members, farmers and philanthropists, toured start-up incubators and homeless shelters. What he discovered was remarkable, even inspiring. The cities of Food Town, USA remind us that innovation is ripening all across the country, especially in the most unlikely places.
Rainforest
Dispatches from Earth's Most Vital Frontlines
In Rainforest, Tony Juniper draws upon decades of work in rainforest conservation, bringing readers along on his journeys, from Costa Rica to Indonesia. Rainforest provides a detailed and wide-ranging look at the health of these vital ecosystems. Throughout this evocative book, Juniper argues that in saving rainforests, we save ourselves, too.
Green Growth That Works
Natural Capital Policy and Finance Mechanisms Around the World
Green Growth That Works is the first practical guide to bring together pragmatic finance and policy tools that can make investment in natural capital both attractive and commonplace. Pioneered by leading scholars from the Natural Capital Project, this valuable compendium of proven techniques can guide agencies and organizations eager to make green growth work anywhere in the world.