Island Press is a
nonprofit
A nonprofit organization (NPO) or non-profit organisation, also known as a non-business entity, not-for-profit organization, or nonprofit institution, is a legal entity organized and operated for a collective, public or social benefit, in co ...
, environmental
publisher
Publishing is the activity of making information, literature, music, software and other content available to the public for sale or for free. Traditionally, the term refers to the creation and distribution of printed works, such as books, newsp ...
based in
Washington, D.C.
)
, image_skyline =
, image_caption = Clockwise from top left: the Washington Monument and Lincoln Memorial on the National Mall, United States Capitol, Logan Circle, Jefferson Memorial, White House, Adams Morgan, ...
, United States, that specializes in natural history,
ecology
Ecology () is the study of the relationships between living organisms, including humans, and their physical environment. Ecology considers organisms at the individual, population, community, ecosystem, and biosphere level. Ecology overlaps wi ...
,
conservation
Conservation is the preservation or efficient use of resources, or the conservation of various quantities under physical laws.
Conservation may also refer to:
Environment and natural resources
* Nature conservation, the protection and managem ...
, and the
built environment
The term built environment refers to human-made conditions and is often used in architecture, landscape architecture, urban planning, public health, sociology, and anthropology, among others. These curated spaces provide the setting for human ac ...
. Established in 1984, Island Press generates about half of its revenue through sales and half through donations by organizations and individuals.
History
Island Press originated in northern
California
California is a U.S. state, state in the Western United States, located along the West Coast of the United States, Pacific Coast. With nearly 39.2million residents across a total area of approximately , it is the List of states and territori ...
in 1978 as a publisher of books on the human relationship to the natural world. In 1984, the press re-organized to focus exclusively on books for people working on solutions to environmental problems, defined broadly to include the protection of
biodiversity
Biodiversity or biological diversity is the variety and variability of life on Earth. Biodiversity is a measure of variation at the genetic (''genetic variability''), species (''species diversity''), and ecosystem (''ecosystem diversity'') l ...
, land use planning, environmental issues related to international trade, and other topics. As part of this refocusing, Island Press moved its main office to Washington, D.C., where it remains today. The founders in 1984 were
Catherine Conover, Walter Sedgwick, Barbara Dean and Charles Savitt. Savitt stepped down as president on April 30, 2016. David Miller was named the new president.
Beginning with just a handful of titles per year and only three employees, Island Press has grown into a 30-person organization, governed by a 16-member Board of Directors comprising representatives from the scientific, philanthropic, academic, and conservation communities. Since 1984, Island Press has sold over 3 million books.
Publishing
Today, Island Press publishes around 40 titles a year and has over 800 titles in its library covering topics that range from
ecosystem services
Ecosystem services are the many and varied benefits to humans provided by the natural environment and healthy ecosystems. Such ecosystems include, for example, agroecosystems, forest ecosystem, grassland ecosystems, and aquatic ecosystems. Th ...
to
ecological restoration
Restoration ecology is the scientific study supporting the practice of ecological restoration, which is the practice of renewing and restoring degraded, damaged, or destroyed ecosystems and habitats in the environment by active human interrupt ...
to
climate change adaptation
Climate change adaptation is the process of adjusting to current or expected effects of climate change.IPCC, 2022Annex II: Glossary öller, V., R. van Diemen, J.B.R. Matthews, C. Méndez, S. Semenov, J.S. Fuglestvedt, A. Reisinger (eds.) InClimat ...
to conservation and the built environment. Its books are published around the world in over 15 languages including Chinese, Spanish, Korean, Japanese, Italian, and Macedonian.
Throughout the 1980s, Island Press's title list focused primarily on books for environmental professionals and academics, with much of its focus on
ecosystem-based management
Ecosystem-based management is an environmental management approach that recognizes the full array of interactions within an ecosystem, including humans, rather than considering single issues, species, or ecosystem services in isolation. It can be ...
and ecosystem services movements. By the start of the 1990s, the press started to think seriously about how to reach a broader audience. The result was the creation of the imprint Shearwater Books in 1992. From its inception, Shearwater was intended as a forum for books that explore the interrelationships of
nature
Nature, in the broadest sense, is the physics, physical world or universe. "Nature" can refer to the phenomenon, phenomena of the physical world, and also to life in general. The study of nature is a large, if not the only, part of science. ...
,
science
Science is a systematic endeavor that builds and organizes knowledge in the form of testable explanations and predictions about the universe.
Science may be as old as the human species, and some of the earliest archeological evidence for ...
, and human culture through literary non-fiction, biography, and
cultural anthropology
Cultural anthropology is a branch of anthropology focused on the study of cultural variation among humans. It is in contrast to social anthropology, which perceives cultural variation as a subset of a posited anthropological constant. The portma ...
. In 1994, Island Press and Shearwater published ''The Naturalist'', the book from Pulitzer Prize-winner
E.O. Wilson, which the Los Angeles Times called, “…one of the finest scientific memoirs ever written, by one of the finest scientists writing today”.
Over the years, Island Press has expanded its interest areas by offering books on
old-growth forests
An old-growth forestalso termed primary forest, virgin forest, late seral forest, primeval forest, or first-growth forestis a forest that has attained great age without significant disturbance, and thereby exhibits unique ecological featur ...
,
renewable energy
Renewable energy is energy that is collected from renewable resources that are naturally replenished on a human timescale. It includes sources such as sunlight, wind, the movement of water, and geothermal heat. Although most renewable energy ...
, the built environment, and
marine conservation
Marine conservation, also known as ocean conservation, is the protection and preservation of ecosystems in oceans and seas through planned management in order to prevent the over-exploitation of these marine resources. Marine conservation is in ...
. In addition to E.O. Wilson, Island Press has worked with a wide array of scientists, policymakers, and conservationists including
Paul R. Ehrlich
Paul Ralph Ehrlich (born May 29, 1932) is an American biologist known for his warnings about the consequences of population growth and limited resources. He is the Bing Professor Emeritus of Population Studies of the Department of Biology of St ...
,
Donald Kennedy
Donald Kennedy (August 18, 1931 – April 21, 2020) was an American scientist, public administrator, and academic. He served as Commissioner of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (1977–1979), President of Stanford University (1980– ...
,
Joseph J. Romm,
Jay Inslee
Jay Robert Inslee (; born February 9, 1951) is an American politician, lawyer, and economist who has served as the 23rd governor of Washington since 2013. A member of the Democratic Party, he served as a member of the U.S. House of Representat ...
,
Peter Gleick
Peter H. Gleick (; born 1956) is an American scientist working on issues related to the environment. He works at the Pacific Institute in Oakland, California, which he co-founded in 1987. In 2003 he was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship for his work ...
,
Jan Gehl
Jan Gehl Hon. FAIA (born 17 September 1936, Copenhagen) is a Danish architect and urban design consultant based in Copenhagen whose career has focused on improving the quality of urban life by re-orienting city design towards the pedestrian and ...
,
Peter Calthorpe
Peter Calthorpe (born 1949) is a San Francisco-based architect, urban designer and urban planner. He is a founding member of the Congress for New Urbanism, a Chicago-based advocacy group formed in 1992 that promotes sustainable building practice ...
,
Bill McKibben,
Allen Hershkowitz
Allen Hershkowitz is an American environmental scientist who worked as a senior scientist at Natural Resources Defense Council from 1988 to 2014 and then at the Green Sports Alliance until 2016, when he left to become a Founding Director and Chai ...
and Robert Glennon.
Programs
Around the mid-1990s, thanks in part to foundation grants made to the organization, as well as emerging interest in the environmental field, Island Press was able to expand its impact by incorporating several programmatic elements to complement topic areas explored in its print publications. Supported by this influx of both funding and public attention to the field, Island Press began organizing a series of technical assistance and training courses designed to help organizations and professionals strengthen their communication and achieve their goals. Currently, Island Press has a number of ongoing programs geared towards specific fields and titles, the most recent include:
CAKE: Climate Adaptation Knowledge Exchange
Island Press, with their partner EcoAdapt, launched the
Climate Adaptation Knowledge Exchange (CAKE) website on July 4, 2010. CAKE is an online community for adaptation practitioners containing a database of case studies, adaptation literature, and professionals working on climate adaptation.
http://www.cakex.org
/ref> It is geared toward people actively working to manage the natural environment
The natural environment or natural world encompasses all life, living and non-living things occurring nature, naturally, meaning in this case not Artificiality, artificial. The term is most often applied to the Earth or some parts of Earth. Th ...
in the face of climate change
In common usage, climate change describes global warming—the ongoing increase in global average temperature—and its effects on Earth's climate system. Climate change in a broader sense also includes previous long-term changes to E ...
, as well as people wanting to learn more about adaptation in general. CAKE's growing community of practitioners includes conservation biologists, fish and wildlife managers, restoration ecologists, resource and land managers, planners, professors and researchers, policy analysts, and environmental advocates. By providing a forum to share information across sectors and disciplines, its ultimate goal is to encourage the development of policies, science, and management approaches that will reduce the vulnerability of both natural systems and human communities to climate change. CAKE's user-generated content
User-generated content (UGC), alternatively known as user-created content (UCC), is any form of content, such as images, videos, text, testimonials, and audio, that has been posted by users on online platforms such as social media, discussion f ...
includes a calendar of events as well as an opportunities board with listings from around the world. In addition, CAKE's resources are georeference Georeferencing means that the internal coordinate system of a map or aerial photo image can be related to a geographic coordinate system. The relevant coordinate transforms are typically stored within the image file ( GeoPDF and GeoTIFF are exam ...
d and connect case studies, virtual library documents, and expert adaptation-planning advice with tools and an international directory of professionals and organizations practicing climate change adaptation.
Conservation Finance Boot Camp
In June 2007, the Yale Center for Business and the Environment held the first Conservation Finance Boot Camp, and has held one each year since. Island Press published three of the textbooks for this course, and in 2010 sponsored the first Western Conservation Finance Boot Camp at Stanford University
Stanford University, officially Leland Stanford Junior University, is a private research university in Stanford, California. The campus occupies , among the largest in the United States, and enrolls over 17,000 students. Stanford is consider ...
. These week-long training camps provide the most up-to-date innovative and successful tools and financing techniques available for conservationists. Each camp also has specific focus areas, such as energy and mitigation funding, conservation development
Conservation development, also known as conservation design, is a controlled-growth land use development that adopts the principle for allowing limited sustainable development while protecting the area's natural environmental features in perpetu ...
, or finding new sources of funding for land conservation during a recession.
Local Initiatives
In 2010, Island Press launched a local event series in Seattle
Seattle ( ) is a seaport city on the West Coast of the United States. It is the seat of King County, Washington. With a 2020 population of 737,015, it is the largest city in both the state of Washington and the Pacific Northwest regio ...
and the Bay Area
The San Francisco Bay Area, often referred to as simply the Bay Area, is a populous region surrounding the San Francisco, San Pablo, and Suisun Bay estuaries in Northern California. The Bay Area is defined by the Association of Bay Area Gov ...
to get experts and their messages in front of a broad network of constituents. For Seattle, it partnered with Town Hall Seattle
Town Hall Seattle, or Town Hall locally, is a cultural center and performance hall located on Seattle, Washington, USA's First Hill at 1119 8th Ave. Built as Fourth Church of Christ, Scientist, Seattle, a Church of Christ, Scientist church, from ...
for the Soundings from Island Press Series, which in 2010 included eight author speaking events and one panel focusing on "Our Future: Walkable Urbanism." Island Press also launched the Bay Area program with a speaking event for Peter Gleick and his book Bottled and Sold at the California Academy of Sciences
The California Academy of Sciences is a research institute and natural history museum in San Francisco, California, that is among the largest museums of natural history in the world, housing over 46 million specimens. The Academy began in 1853 ...
in September 2010. In 2011, Island Press brought both Peter Calthorpe and Tim Beatley to speak at the California Academy of Sciences. These initiatives aim to improve understanding and awareness of environmental issues in each location. They are anchored on cultivating partnerships with major venues, academic institutions, corporations, and media outlets, as well as on outreach to leaders in policy, business, and planning. To bring together local business and civic leadership, media, and citizenry to engage in issues, activities include public speaking engagements, editorial board visits, presentations, and panel discussions. In the near future, Island Press plans to expand these local initiatives to include New York, Chicago, and Boston.
References
External links
*
{{Authority control
Publishing companies established in 1984
Book publishing companies based in Washington (state)
Non-profit publishers
Companies based in Washington, D.C.
Environmental publishers