Natural diversity has been extensively used to understand plant biology and improve crops. However, studies were commonly based on visual phenotypes or on a few measurable parameters. Nowadays, a large number of parameters can be measured thanks to next generation sequencing, metabolomics, proteomics, and transcriptomics thus providing an unprecedented resolution in the detection of natural diversity. This enhanced resolution offers new possibilities in terms of understanding plant biology. Technology advances also contribute to a better assessment of the biodiversity loss currently taking place. Hence, the topic presents an overview on efforts for maintaining biological diversity in crops, on possibilities offered by recent technologies in the assessment of natural variation, and ends with examples of the diversity found even at the cellular level.

Natural diversity has been extensively used to understand plant biology and improve crops. However, studies were commonly based on visual phenotypes or on a few measurable parameters. Nowadays, a large number of parameters can be measured thanks to next generation sequencing, metabolomics, proteomics, and transcriptomics thus providing an unprecedented resolution in the detection of natural diversity. This enhanced resolution offers new possibilities in terms of understanding plant biology. Technology advances also contribute to a better assessment of the biodiversity loss currently taking place. Hence, the topic presents an overview on efforts for maintaining biological diversity in crops, on possibilities offered by recent technologies in the assessment of natural variation, and ends with examples of the diversity found even at the cellular level

Early in this volume, David Ehrenfeld describes what prophecy really is. Referring to the biblical prophets, he says they were not the "holy fortunetellers that the word prophet has come to signify....The business of prophecy is not simply foretelling the future; rather it is describing the present with exceptional truthfulness and accuracy." Once this is done, then it can be seen that broad aspects of the future have suddenly become apparent. The twentieth century is drawing to a chaotic close amidst portents of unprecedented change and upheaval. The unravelling of societies and civilizations and the destruction of nature march together--linked--a fact whose enormous significance is often lost. In Beginning Again, David Ehrenfeld has undertaken the difficult task of describing the present clearly enough to reveal the future. Out of his broad vision emerges a glimpse of a new millennium: a vision at once frightening and comforting, a scene of great devastation and great rebuilding. Ehrenfeld ranges far and wide to present a coherent vision of our relationship with Nature--its many aspects and implications--as our century opens into the next millennium. Whether he is writing about the problem of loyalty to organizations, rights versus obligations, our over-managed society, the vanishing of established knowledge, the failure of experts, the triumph of dandelions, Dr. Seuss, Edward Teller, or the future of farming, he is always concerned with the intricate interaction between technology and nature. As in his classic book, The Arrogance of Humanism, Ehrenfeld never loses sight of our fatal love affair with the fantasy of control. We now have no choice, he argues, but to transform the dream of control, of progress, from one of overweening hubris, love of consumption, and the idiot's goal of perpetual growth, to one based on "the inventive imitation of nature," with its honesty, beauty, resilience, and durability. Few American writers and even fewer scientists can describe these timeless, transcendent qualities of nature so well. In "Places," the opening chapter, David Ehrenfeld tells about nightly vigils he spent alone on the moonlit beach of Tortuguero, watching giant sea turtles emerging from the sea to lay their eggs in the black sand where they were born. "I could watch the perfect white spheres falling," he writes. "Falling as they have fallen for a hundred million years, with the same slow cadence, always shielded from the rain or stars by the same massive bulk with the beaked head and the same large, myopic eyes rimmed with crusts of sand washed out by tears. Minutes and hours, days and months dissolve into eons. I am on an Oligocene beach, an Eocene beach, a Cretaceous beach--the scene is the same. It is night, the turtles are coming back, always back; I hear a deep hiss of breath and catch a glint of wet shell as the continents slide and crash, the oceans form and grow."

Robert L. Humphrey was an Iwo Jima veteran, Harvard graduate, and cross cultural conflict resolution specialist during the Cold War. He proposed the "Dual Life Value Theory" of Human Nature. From the experiences of childhood in the Great Depression, trips as a teenager in the Panamanian Merchant Marines, national-class boxing, the awe-inspiring sights of selfless sacrifice on Iwo Jima, and finally, fifteen years in overseas ideological warfare, Humphrey observed that universal values exist and, ultimately control human behavior. Humphrey is a graduate of Wisconsin University, Harvard Law School, and the Fletcher School of Diplomacy. At the beginning of the Cold War, he left a teaching position at MIT to help lead the struggle against Communism. Finding that U.S. education was contributing to, rather than reducing, American overseas problems, he developed a new leadership approach that overcame Ugly American syndrome among hundreds of thousands in crucial Third World areas. More recently, his methodology won commendations for educating the alleged uneducable: Mexican-American street-gang youths in southern California, and Canadian Native teenage dropouts. Until Communism's fall, Humphrey kept his new methods confidential. Those methods are significant: (1) From his experiences with young infantrymen in heavy combat, and with the peasants in many villages of the world, he perceived humankind's basic goodness that philosophers have missed or under-rated. (2) In place of compartmentalized, primarily mental education, Humphrey has developed a human-nature-guided (moral, physical, artistic, mental) approach.

The vast majority of people in the industrialized world consider themselves environmentalists. Yet environmental problems continue to worsen. While the environmental movement is winning the battle for the hearts and minds of citizens in the United States and across the globe, it may be losing the war to preserve the health of the planet and its biological diversity. The reasons become clear in this book. Leslie Paul Thiele provides a much needed analysis of the driving forces within the environmental movement and the key challenges that it faces. He begins with a concise history of the movement in the United States, where he identifies four successive waves of environmental thought and action. The first wave, conservation, emerged in the mid 1800s and focused on the responsible use of natural resources and the preservation of isolated tracts of wilderness. By the 1960s, the general public had become aware of the widespread impact of environmental problems on human health and welfare. A concern for the containment of industrial society's environmental degradation emerged. This second wave was followed by a period of co optation beginning in the 1980s, as a now popular social movement made a significant impact on public policy and witnessed the dilution of its goals. Thiele largely focuses on the fourth and current wave of coevolution. Coevolutionary thought and action is grounded in the interdependence of humans and nature in a global context. With the goal of sustainable development in mind, contemporary environmentalists argue that human livelihoods must be integrated into complex and evolving ecological systems. This affirmation of coevolutionary interdependence has brought coherence to an inherently diverse social movement. Through extensive interviews and a critical study of environmental publications and scholarly research, the author provides an inside look at the environmental movement. His analysis illuminates the social, economic, political and cultural forces that shape the environmental movement today and set its trajectory for the 21st century. Anyone interested the future of environmentalism will find this book an invaluable guide.