This book represents the interests and attitudes, the information, and the philosophy that define my work and career as it has evolved over the years. Not written as a substitute for any of the many textbooks on ecology, it is meant to present the simplest and most direct approach to a complex field as distilled out of my work as an applied ecologist, who deals with concrete daily problems in the real-world context of economics, politics, and logis- tics. I hope that it is useful to the reader who seeks an overview of applied ecology, including sufficient specific detail to make that reader more com- fortable with the field and more conversant with the capabilities and limits of ecologists and their tools. Each chapter is followed by a bibliography which has two functions. The first is to represent the main sources or reviews of information upon which the associated chapter is partly based. The second is to give sources for some of the examples utilized in the chapter and some of the illustrations summarizing and clarifying the text, which have been adapted, cited, or derived, from those references. In that sense, I must most sincerely thank all those fellow ecologists who have preceeded me and who have made my work far more diverse and interesting to me than might otherwise have been the case.