DAVIS -- A new book co-edited by a UC Davis professor of environmental science and policy looks at the world's dying glaciers from all sides -- scientific, social and economic.

Darkening Peaks: Glacier Retreat, Science, and Society brings together researchers from five continents to discuss how scientists study glaciers, how climate change is altering glaciers' size and distribution, and what effects those alterations have on human life.

"Glacier retreat is already reducing the availability of water for irrigation, hydropower and human consumption, and these shortfalls are projected to grow in coming decades," said the book's UC Davis editor, anthropologist Ben Orlove. "Glacier retreat destabilizes mountain landscapes, creating floods and landslides. And as glaciers disappear, the white peaks that are treasured icons of nature's beauty turn to dark masses of rock, a change that is mourned in many areas."

Orlove has studied the relations of people to places, plants and animals in Latin America, Africa and Australia. His current research focuses on climate, particularly the human dimensions of year-to-year climate variability, such as how people cope with El Nino events. He studies traditional forms of forecasting among peasant and indigenous people; the use of forecasts in modern societies; and the influence of globalization on current responses to climate variability.

In addition to his faculty appointment at UC Davis, Orlove is an adjunct senior research scientist at the International Research Institute for Climate and Society at Columbia University.

Orlove's co-editors are Ellen Wiegandt, a lecturer at the Graduate Institute for International Studies in Geneva, Switzerland, and Brian Luckman, a professor of geography at the University of Western Ontario, in London, Canada.

Darkening Peaks is published by the University of California Press, with financial support from the Ralph and Shirley Shapiro Endowment Fund in Environmental Studies of the University of California Press Foundation.