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.
We elevate voices of change, shine a spotlight on crucial issues, and focus attention on sustainable solutions.
Our network of authors includes E.O. Wilson, Paul Ehrlich, Sylvia Earle, Gretchen Daily, Jan Gehl, Daniel Pauly, and many others. By working closely with experts like these, Island Press has developed a comprehensive and growing body of knowledge—vital resources for all those working to protect the environment and create healthy communities.
Traditional toxicology textbooks tend to be doorstops: tomes filled with important but seemingly abstract chemistry and biology. Meanwhile, magazine and journal articles introduce students to timely topics such as BPA and endocrine disruption or the carcinogenic effects of pesticides, but don't provide the fundamentals needed to understand ......
In 2006, Julianne Lutz Warren (née Newton) asked readers to rediscover one of history's most renowned conservationists. Aldo Leopold's Odyssey was hailed by The New York Times as a biography of ideas,a making us feel the loss of what might have followed A Sand County Almanac by showing us in authoritative ......
Cities are the world's future. Today, more than half of the global population'3.7 billion people'are urban dwellers, and that number is expected to double by 2050. There is no question that cities are growing; the only debate is over how they will grow. Will we invest in the physical and social infrastructure necessary for livable, equitable, ......
Transit and cities grow together. As cities work to become more compact, sustainable, and healthy, their work is paying dividends: in 2014, Americans took 10.8 billion trips on public transit, the highest since the dawn of the highway era. But most of these trips are on streets that were designed to move private cars, with transit as an ......
There exists a category of American cities in which the line between suburban and urban is almost impossible to locate. These suburban cities arose in the last half of twentieth-century America, based largely on the success of the single-family home, shopping centers, and the automobile. The low-density, auto-centric development of suburban ......
Gonorrhea. Bed bugs. Weeds. Salamanders. People. All are evolving, some surprisingly rapidly, in response to our chemical age. In Unnatural Selection, Emily Monosson shows how our drugs, pesticides, and pollution are exerting intense selection pressure on all manner of species. And we humans might not like the ......
Can nature'in all its unruly wildness'be an integral part of creative landscape design? In her beautifully illustrated book, Wild by Design, award-winning designer Margie Ruddick urges designers to look beyond the rules often imposed by both landscaping convention and sustainability checklists. Instead, she offers a set of principles ......
During his three terms as mayor of Curitiba, Brazil in the 1970s and '80s, architect and urbanist Jaime Lerner transformed his city into a global model of the sustainable and livable community. From the pioneering Bus Rapid Transit system to parks designed to catch runoff and reduce flooding, and the creation of pedestrian-only zones, Lerner ......
Humans have always been influenced by natural landscapes, and always will be'even as we create ever-larger cities and our developments fundamentally change the nature of the earth around us. In Human Ecology, noted city planner and landscape architect Frederick Steiner encourages us to consider how human cultures have been shaped by ......
