A discerning analysis of the future effects of climate change on Russia, the major power most dependent on the fossil fuel economy.
Russia will be one of the countries most affected by climate change. No major power is more economically dependent on the export of hydrocarbons; at the same time, two-thirds of Russia’s territory lies in the arctic north, where melting permafrost is already imposing growing damage. Climate change also brings drought and floods to Russia’s south, threatening the country’s agricultural exports.
Thane Gustafson predicts that, over the next thirty years, climate change will leave a dramatic imprint on Russia. The decline of fossil fuel use is already underway, and restrictions on hydrocarbons will only tighten, cutting fuel prices and slashing Russia’s export revenues. Yet Russia has no substitutes for oil and gas revenues. The country is unprepared for the worldwide transition to renewable energy, as Russian leaders continue to invest the national wealth in oil and gas while dismissing the promise of post-carbon technologies. Nor has the state made efforts to offset the direct damage that climate change will do inside the country. Optimists point to new opportunities—higher temperatures could increase agricultural yields, the melting of arctic ice may open year-round shipping lanes in the far north, and Russia could become a global nuclear-energy supplier. But the eventual post-Putin generation of Russian leaders will nonetheless face enormous handicaps, as their country finds itself weaker than at any time in the preceding century.
Lucid and thought-provoking, Klimat shows how climate change is poised to alter the global order, potentially toppling even great powers from their perches.
After the eruption, Krakatau provided a unique opportunity to study the colonization of a sterile area by plants and animals across a sea barrier and the gradual incorporation of the newcomers into the developing ecosystem. Krakatau is a comprehensive account of the reassembly of a tropical forest ecosystem over the past century. Ian Thornton tackles the many questions and controversies surrounding the eruption and its aftermath. He writes, “The natural healing process has followed the most extreme form of ecological destruction possible, total biological extirpation. Yet the islands surviving the 1883 eruption are covered in secondary forest, and over 200 species of plants, 70 species of vertebrates, and thousands of invertebrate species now inhabit these forests.”
Krakatau will be essential reading for anyone who wishes to understand not just the rebirth of Krakatau but also the resilient nature of life everywhere.
Kruger National Park in South Africa has one of the most extensive sets of records of any protected area in the world, and throughout its history has supported connections between science and management. In recognition of that long-standing tradition comes The Kruger Experience, the first book to synthesize/summarize a century of ecological research and management in two million hectares of African savanna.
The Kruger Experience places the scientific and management experience in Kruger within the framework of modern ecological theory and its practical applications. The book uses a cross-cutting theme of ecological heterogeneity -- the idea that ecological systems function across a full hierarchy of physical and biological components, processes, and scales, in a dynamic space-time mosaic. Contributors, who include many esteemed ecologists who have worked in Kruger in recent years, examine a range of topics covering broad taxonomic groupings and ecological processes. The book's four sections explore:
In addition to the editors, contributors include William J. Bond, Jane Lubchenco, David Mabunda, Michael G.L. ("Gus") Mills, Robert J. Naiman, Norman Owen-Smith, Steward T.A. Pickett, Stuart L. Pimm, and Rober J. Scholes.
The book is an invaluable new resource for scientists and managers involved with large, conserved ecosystems as well as for conservation practitioners and others with interests in adaptive management, the societal context of conservation, links between research and management in parks, and parks/academic partnerships.
The new field of evolutionary developmental biology is one of the most exciting areas of contemporary biology. The fundamental principle of evolutionary developmental biology ("evo-devo") is that evolution acts through inherited changes in the development of the organism. "Evo-devo" is not merely a fusion of the fields of developmental and evolutionary biology, the grafting of a developmental perspective onto evolutionary biology, or the incorporation of an evolutionary perspective into developmental biology. Evo-devo strives for a unification of genomic, developmental, organismal, population, and natural selection approaches to evolutionary change. It draws from development, evolution, paleontology, ecology, and molecular and systematic biology, but has its own set of questions, approaches, and methods.
Keywords and Concepts in Evolutionary Developmental Biology is the first comprehensive reference work for this expanding field. Covering more than fifty central terms and concepts in entries written by leading experts, Keywords offers an overview of all that is embraced by this new subdiscipline of biology, providing the core insights and ideas that show how embryonic development relates to life-history evolution, adaptation, and responses to and integration with environmental factors.
Within southern New Jersey lies the largest expanse of undeveloped land in the megalopolis between Boston and Washington, D.C. This is the Pine Barrens, our nation’s first National Reserve, where visitors are struck by how much the vegetation varies from surrounding areas. Because the sandy soil is only marginally suitable for most agriculture and because the location amounts to a peninsula, settlement has been limited and the current ecology is relatively untouched. However, as New Jersey’s population increases, people are looking to the Pine Barrens with a new interest.
A Key to the Woody Plants of the New Jersey Pine Barrens is a hand-illustrated, user-friendly guide for both the interested student and weekend naturalist. The key lists all of the woody plants of the Pine Barrens except for a few rare, non-native species. In several keys and more than fifty highly detailed drawings, Michael D. Geller describes the basic features of woody plants and explains how to identify plants both in summer and winter.
Along with his set of workable identification keys, the author provides an enjoyable introduction to the geology, ecology, and history of the region, and relates each to the unique flora of the Pine Barrens. The book provides readers with an effective means of identifying the plants that are hallmarks of one of the state’s last wild areas.
At a time when the world is seeing its species rapidly go extinct, the Kirtland's warbler is not just a survivor, it's a rock star. The Kirtland's warbler is the rarest warbler species in North America and will always be rare because of its persnickety nesting preferences. But when the total population fell below 400 birds in the 1970s and 1980s---driven largely by a loss of habitat and the introduction of a parasite---a small group of dedicated biologists, researchers, and volunteers vowed to save the Kirtland's warbler despite long odds. This is the story of the warbler's survival and gradual recovery, the people and policies that kept it from extinction, and the ongoing challenges that may again jeopardize the bird's future.
In The Kirtland's Warbler, William Rapai explores the bird's fascinating natural history as well as the complex and evolving relationships between the warbler, its environment, its human protectors, and state and federal policies that today threaten to eradicate decades of work done on the species' behalf. Beginning with an account of the warbler's discovery in the mid-nineteenth century and ornithologists' desperate hunt for information on the elusive new species, the book goes on to examine the dramatic events that quickly led to the warbler's precarious status and its eventual emergence as a lightning rod for controversy.
The Kirtland's warbler is often described as a "bird of fire" for its preference for nesting in areas cleared by wildfire. But it also warrants the name for the passion it ignites in humans. Both tragic and uplifting, the story of this intriguing bird is a stirring example of how strong leadership, vision, commitment, sustained effort, and cooperation can come together to protect our natural world.
Since Darwin, people have speculated about the evolutionary relationships among dissimilar species, including our connections to the diverse life forms known as microbes. In the 1970s biologists discovered a way to establish these kinships. This new era of exploration began with Linus Pauling’s finding that every protein in every cell contains a huge reservoir of evolutionary history. His discovery opened a research path that has changed the way biologists and others think about the living world. In Kin John L. Ingraham tells the story of these remarkable breakthroughs. His original, accessible history explains how we came to understand our microbe inheritance and the relatedness of all organisms on Earth.
Among the most revolutionary scientific achievements was Carl Woese’s discovery that a large group of organisms previously lumped together with bacteria were in fact a totally distinct form of life, now called the archaea. But the crowning accomplishment has been to construct the Tree of Life—an evolutionary project Darwin dreamed about over a century ago. Today, we know that the Tree’s three main stems are dominated by microbes. The nonmicrobes—plants and animals, including humans—constitute only a small upper branch in one stem.
Knowing the Tree’s structure has given biologists the ability to characterize the complex array of microbial populations that live in us and on us, and investigate how they contribute to health and disease. This knowledge also moves us closer to answering the tantalizing question of how the Tree of Life began, over 3.5 billion years ago.
Winner of the 2015 Margaret Mead Award from the American Anthropological Association and the Society for Applied Anthropology
After Haiti’s 2010 earthquake, over half of U.S. households donated to thousands of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) in that country. Yet we continue to hear stories of misery from Haiti. Why have NGOs failed at their mission?
Set in Haiti during the 2004 coup and aftermath and enhanced by research conducted after the 2010 earthquake, Killing with Kindness analyzes the impact of official development aid on recipient NGOs and their relationships with local communities. Written like a detective story, the book offers rich ethnographic comparisons of two Haitian women’s NGOs working in HIV/AIDS prevention, one with public funding (including USAID), the other with private European NGO partners. Mark Schuller looks at participation and autonomy, analyzing donor policies that inhibit these goals. He focuses on NGOs’ roles as intermediaries in “gluing” the contemporary world system together and shows how power works within the aid system as these intermediaries impose interpretations of unclear mandates down the chain—a process Schuller calls “trickle-down imperialism.”
In the past decade, obesity has emerged as a major public health concern in the United States and abroad. At the federal, state, and local level, policy makers have begun drafting a range of policies to fight a war against fat, including body-mass index (BMI) report cards, “snack taxes,” and laws to control how fast food companies market to children. As an epidemic, obesity threatens to weaken the health, economy, and might of the most powerful nation in the world.
In Killer Fat, Natalie Boero examines how and why obesity emerged as a major public health concern and national obsession in recent years. Using primary sources and in-depth interviews, Boero enters the world of bariatric surgeries, Weight Watchers, and Overeaters Anonymous to show how common expectations of what bodies are supposed to look like help to determine what sorts of interventions and policies are considered urgent in containing this new kind of disease.
Boero argues that obesity, like the traditional epidemics of biological contagion and mass death, now incites panic, a doomsday scenario that must be confronted in a struggle for social stability. The “war” on obesity, she concludes, is a form of social control. Killer Fat ultimately offers an alternate framing of the nation’s obesity problem based on the insights of the “Health at Every Size” movement.
If most Americans accept the notion that the market is the most efficient means to distribute resources, why should body parts be excluded?
Each year thousands of people die waiting for organ transplants. Many of these deaths could have been prevented were it not for the almost universal moral hand-wringing over the concept of selling human organs. Kidney for Sale by Owner, now with a new preface, boldly deconstructs the roadblocks that are standing in the way of restoring health to thousands of people. Author and bioethicist Mark Cherry reasserts the case that health care could be improved and lives saved by introducing a regulated transplant organs market rather than by well-meant, but misguided, prohibitions.
Water has long been the object of political ambition and conflict. Recent history is full of leaders who tried to harness water to realize national dreams. Yet the people who most need water-farmers, rural villages, impoverished communities-are too often left, paradoxically, with desiccated fields, unfulfilled promises, and refugee status.
It doesn't have to be this way, according to Fred Pearce. A veteran science news correspondent, Pearce has for over fifteen years chronicled the development of large-scale water projects like China's vast Three Gorges dam and India's Sardar Sarovar. But, as he and numerous other authors have pointed out, far from solving our water problems, these industrial scale projects, and others now in the planning, are bringing us to the brink of a global water crisis.
Pearce decided there had to be a better way.
To find it, he traveled the globe in search of alternatives to mega-engineering projects. In Keepers of the Spring, he brings back intriguing stories from people like Yannis Mitsis, an ethnic Greek Cypriot, who is the last in his line to know the ways and whereabouts of a network of underground tunnels that have for centuries delivered to farming communities the water they need to survive on an arid landscape. He recounts the inspiring experiences of small-scale water stewards like Kenyan Jane Ngei, who reclaimed for her people a land abandoned by her government as a wasteland. And he tells of many others who are developing new techniques and rediscovering ancient ones to capture water for themselves.
In so doing, Pearce documents that these "keepers" are not merely isolated examples, but collectively constitute an entire alternative tradition of working with natural flows rather than trying to reengineer nature to provide water for human needs.
The solution to our water problems, he finds, may not lie in new technologies-though they will play a role-but in recovering ancient traditions, using water more efficiently, and better understanding local hydrology. Are these approaches adequate to serve the world's growing populations? The answer remains unclear. But we ignore them at our own peril.
The 1950 espionage case of Klaus Fuchs, who betrayed British and American atomic secrets to the Soviet Union, touched off a witch hunt in the United States that led to the capture of the Rosenbergs and many other alleged spies. The case fueled the fires of national concern over communism, Soviet espionage, internal subversion, and security in the nuclear age. Robert C. Williams has tenaciously retraced Fuchs's trail from Nazi Germany to Britain, Canada, Los Alamos, and finally to Dresden, where Fuchs now lives the life of a successful retired nuclear physicist. In his search Williams has not only uncovered Fuchs's personal story but has also established that his espionage was part of a much larger Soviet effort to penetrate and control British intelligence.
Klaus Fuchs had access to the most highly classified secrets of the wartime Manhattan Project. Cleared eight times by British security, and consequently accepted without investigation by the Americans, Fuchs worked in a hermetic world of security through secrecy—a world whose rules he publicly defended and privately betrayed. He played his role carefully for almost a decade, passing classified information to Soviet intelligence through a German communist espionage ring that operated under the very nose of the British government during and after the war. As part of the secret Anglo-American bomb project, he brought to Britain—and gave to Russia—technological know-how that helped both countries develop their own A-bombs.
This first full-length portrait of Klaus Fuchs and his case, based in part on newly available American and British archives on the subject, is an exciting find for general readers in the history of science, espionage, World War II, and the Cold War. It will also be of high professional interest to historians and physicists.
The famous library of Alexandria, founded around 295 BCE by Ptolemaios I, housed the greatest collection of texts in the ancient world and was a fertile site of Hellenistic scholarship. Rudolf Blum’s landmark study, originally published in German in 1977, argues that Kallimachos of Kyrene was not only the second director of the Alexandrian library but also the inventor of two essential scholarly tools still in use to this day: the library catalog and the “biobibliographical” reference work. Kallimachos expanded the library’s inventory lists into volumes called the Pinakes, which extensively described and categorized each work and became in effect a Greek national bibliography and the source and paradigm for most later bibliographic lists of Greek literature. Though the Pinakes have not survived, Blum attempts a detailed reconstruction of Kallimachos’s inventories and catalogs based on a careful analysis of surviving sources, which are presented here in full translation.
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