The Falling Sky is a remarkable first-person account of the life story and cosmo-ecological thought of Davi Kopenawa, shaman and spokesman for the Yanomami of the Brazilian Amazon. Representing a people whose very existence is in jeopardy, Davi Kopenawa paints an unforgettable picture of Yanomami culture, past and present, in the heart of the rainforest--a world where ancient indigenous knowledge and shamanic traditions cope with the global geopolitics of an insatiable natural resources extraction industry.
In richly evocative language, Kopenawa recounts his initiation and experience as a shaman, as well as his first encounters with outsiders: government officials, missionaries, road workers, cattle ranchers, and gold prospectors. He vividly describes the ensuing cultural repression, environmental devastation, and deaths resulting from epidemics and violence. To counter these threats, Davi Kopenawa became a global ambassador for his endangered people. The Falling Sky follows him from his native village in the Northern Amazon to Brazilian cities and finally on transatlantic flights bound for European and American capitals. These travels constitute a shamanic critique of Western industrial society, whose endless material greed, mass violence, and ecological blindness contrast sharply with Yanomami cultural values.
Bruce Albert, a close friend since the 1970s, superbly captures Kopenawa's intense, poetic voice. This collaborative work provides a unique reading experience that is at the same time a coming-of-age story, a historical account, and a shamanic philosophy, but most of all an impassioned plea to respect native rights and preserve the Amazon rainforest.
˜Farming in Nature's Image provides, for the first time, a detailed look into the pioneering work of The Land Institute, the leading educational and research organization for sustainable agriculture.
The authors draw on case studies, hands-on experience, and research results to explain the applications of a new system of agriculture based on one unifying concept: that farms should mimic the ecosystems in which they exist. They present both theoretical and practical information, including:
Written in clear, non-technical language, this book will be of great interest to soil and agricultural scientists, academics, policymakers, environmentalists, and other concerned with finding long-range solutions to agricultural problems.
Fatal Misconception is the disturbing story of our quest to remake humanity by policing national borders and breeding better people. As the population of the world doubled once, and then again, well-meaning people concluded that only population control could preserve the “quality of life.” This movement eventually spanned the globe and carried out a series of astonishing experiments, from banning Asian immigration to paying poor people to be sterilized.
Supported by affluent countries, foundations, and non-governmental organizations, the population control movement experimented with ways to limit population growth. But it had to contend with the Catholic Church’s ban on contraception and nationalist leaders who warned of “race suicide.” The ensuing struggle caused untold suffering for those caught in the middle—particularly women and children. It culminated in the horrors of sterilization camps in India and the one-child policy in China.
Matthew Connelly offers the first global history of a movement that changed how people regard their children and ultimately the face of humankind. It was the most ambitious social engineering project of the twentieth century, one that continues to alarm the global community. Though promoted as a way to lift people out of poverty—perhaps even to save the earth—family planning became a means to plan other people‘s families.
With its transnational scope and exhaustive research into such archives as Planned Parenthood and the newly opened Vatican Secret Archives, Connelly’s withering critique uncovers the cost inflicted by a humanitarian movement gone terribly awry and urges renewed commitment to the reproductive rights of all people.
The Fats of Life delineates the importance of essential fatty acids, with a focus on distinctions between omega-3 and omega-6 fatty acid variants. The chemical and biochemical characteristics of these fatty acids and their metabolism to a vast array of potent bioactive messengers are described in the context of their potential effects on general health and impact on various diseases and neurological disorders. Glen D. Lawrence addresses in detail the capacity for polyunsaturated fatty acids to influence asthma, atherosclerosis, heart disease, inflammation, cancer, and immunity. Lawrence makes clear that our understanding of the biochemical and physiological effects of dietary fats has advanced tremendously as a result of careful research, but he also stresses that this knowledge has not easily translated into sound dietary recommendations.
Among the environmental challenges facing us is alleviating the damage to marine ecosystems caused by pollution and overfishing. Coming to grips with contemporary problems, this book argues, depends on understanding how people have historically generated, perceived, and responded to environmental change. This work explores interactions between society and environment in China’s most important marine fishery, the Zhoushan Archipelago off the coast of Zhejiang and Jiangsu, from its nineteenth-century expansion to the exhaustion of the most important fish species in the 1970s.
This history of Zhoushan’s fisheries illuminates long-term environmental processes and analyzes the intersections of local, regional, and transnational ecological trends and the array of private and state interests that shaped struggles for the control of these common-pool natural resources. What institutions did private and state actors use to regulate the use of the fishery? How did relationships between social organizations and the state change over time? What types of problems could these arrangements solve and which not? What does the fate of these institutions tell us about environmental change in late imperial and modern China? Answering these questions will give us a better understanding of the relationship between past ecological changes and present environmental challenges.
Joseph considers New York's relation to the water that surrounds and defines it. Her reflections reach back to the city's heyday as a world-class port—a past embodied in a Dutch East India Company cannon recently unearthed from the rubble at the World Trade Center site—and they encompass the devastation caused by Hurricane Sandy in 2012. They suggest that New York's future lies in the reclamation of its great water resources—for artistic creativity, civic engagement, and ecological sustainability.
Aldo Leopold's classic work A Sand County Almanac is widely regarded as one of the most influential conservation books of all time. In it, Leopold sets forth an eloquent plea for the development of a "land ethic" -- a belief that humans have a duty to interact with the soils, waters, plants, and animals that collectively comprise "the land" in ways that ensure their well-being and survival.
For the Health of the Land, a new collection of rare and previously unpublished essays by Leopold, builds on that vision of ethical land use and develops the concept of "land health" and the practical measures landowners can take to sustain it. The writings are vintage Leopold -- clear, sensible, and provocative, sometimes humorous, often lyrical, and always inspiring. Joining them together are a wisdom and a passion that transcend the time and place of the author's life.
The book offers a series of forty short pieces, arranged in seasonal "almanac" form, along with longer essays, arranged chronologically, which show the development of Leopold's approach to managing private lands for conservation ends. The final essay is a never before published work, left in pencil draft at his death, which proposes the concept of land health as an organizing principle for conservation. Also featured is an introduction by noted Leopold scholars J. Baird Callicott and Eric T. Freyfogle that provides a brief biography of Leopold and places the essays in the context of his life and work, and an afterword by conservation biologist Stanley A. Temple that comments on Leopold's ideas from the perspective of modern wildlife management.
The book's conservation message and practical ideas are as relevant today as they were when first written over fifty years ago. For the Health of the Land represents a stunning new addition to the literary legacy of Aldo Leopold.
In 1645 the Japanese samurai Musashi Miamoto wrote A Book of Five Rings, which described the attitudes necessary for individual success. Though he was a swordsman, his book was not limited to combat but addressed the much broader question of how to achieve excellence in life through study, discipline, and planning. It is still avidly read in Japan today. Arthur Kornberg’s book is a modern-day Book of Five Rings that replaces the medium of swordsmanship with that of biochemistry, particularly enzymology. As Kornberg describes his successive research problems, the challenges they presented, and the ultimate accomplishments that resulted, he provides us with a primer in the strategies needed to do scientific work of great significance. Moreover, these strategies are played out in the context of solving some of the great biochemical problems of the twentieth century.
The ability to manipulate and alter DNA fired a revolution that forever changed the nature of biology. Arthur Kornberg is a primary architect of that revolution, arguably one of the two or three most important biologists of this time. Prior to Kornberg, genetic information and later DNA were imbued by biologists with an almost vitalistic aura. Kornberg demonstrated that DNA is a molecule synthesized by enzymes, like all other chemical constituents of the cell. More important, he trained a school of scientists who focused on and discovered many of the enzymatic activities that act on DNA. It is these enzymes in particular that allow modern “genetic engineering.”
For the Love of Enzymes does not describe a single lucky or hard-won accomplishment. Rather, it is the story of thirty years of decisive campaigns, nearly all of which led to insights of major significance. In relating his story, Kornberg never avoids the difficult question of “why”: why he felt classical nutritional studies had reached a plateau, why he turned to enzymology as a discipline in which the important answers would be found, and why he believes the study of enzymes will grow ever more important as we face the new scientific frontier of brain function.
This book will challenge students of biology and chemistry at all levels who want to do important work rather than simply follow popular trends. It will also delight and inform readers who wish to understand how “real” science is done, and to learn of the values that guide one of our greatest researchers.
Forest Conservation in the Anthropocene provides thought-provoking insight into the ongoing environmental crises that climate change is generating and raises critical questions about how public and private land managers in North America will adapt to the climatological disruptions that are already transforming the ecological structures of these forests.
In this pathbreaking anthology, a team of leading environmental researchers probes the central dilemmas that ecologists, forest land managers, state and federal agencies, and grassroots organizations are confronting—and will continue to confront—in the coming century. Each chapter examines strategies that are currently being tested across the country as scientists, citizen-scientists, policy makers, academics, and activists work to grasp their options and opportunities for a future that will be shaped by ongoing environmental upheaval.
Successful adaptation to the challenges of climate change requires a transdisciplinary perspective. Forest Conservation in the Anthropocene provides a compelling set of arguments and case studies that underscores the need for innovative policies and energetic actions.
Climate change poses a huge threat to the West. The current mountain pine beetle epidemic with over 50 million acres of dying trees in western North America has created a powerful “teachable moment” across the region.
A primary goal of the Forests At Risk symposium was to reframe the nation’s climate change dialogue by making the issue both personal and real to many who may not appreciate its connection to the immediate world around them. While some may have difficulty relating to rising sea levels, falling water tables, imperiled polar bears and melting glaciers in far-off places, they are still shocked by the sight of vast dying forests around their homes. The Forests At Risk symposium explored the statement by Andy Jacobson, a carbon cycle scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in Boulder, that “this is the kind of feedback we're all very worried about in the carbon cycle ... a warming planet leading to, in this case, an insect outbreak that increases carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, which can increase warming.”
The overwhelming scientific consensus holds that climate change is one of the most serious threats facing humankind today. We have a soberingly short time in which to reduce atmospheric greenhouse gases if we are to preserve our quality of life and environment. In addition to the global urgency, the American West is deeply dependent on the health of its forests, mountains and streams for both its quality of life and its economy. Put simply, if global warming shortens our winters, diminishes our recreation, and unleashes wildfires, diseases and insect epidemics that devastate our forests, the regional damage would be incalculable.
NOW is the perfect time to learn more in this ebook. The Forests At Risk symposium represented the first substantial public forum focused directly on the connection between climate change and forest health in the American West. In the wake of millions of acres of pine beetle devastation across our continent, this is the ideal moment to highlight the climate change connection and focus on the question of what happens when our forests transform from carbon sinks into carbon sources.
Consider this: Without interaction between animals and flowering plants, the seeds and fruits that make up nearly eighty percent of the human diet would not exist.
In The Forgotten Pollinators, Stephen L. Buchmann, one of the world's leading authorities on bees and pollination, and Gary Paul Nabhan, award-winning writer and renowned crop ecologist, explore the vital but little-appreciated relationship between plants and the animals they depend on for reproduction -- bees, beetles, butterflies, hummingbirds, moths, bats, and countless other animals, some widely recognized and other almost unknown.
Scenes from around the globe -- examining island flora and fauna on the Galapagos, counting bees in the Panamanian rain forest, witnessing an ancient honey-hunting ritual in Malaysia -- bring to life the hidden relationships between plants and animals, and demonstrate the ways in which human society affects and is affected by those relationships. Buchmann and Nabhan combine vignettes from the field with expository discussions of ecology, botany, and crop science to present a lively and fascinating account of the ecological and cultural context of plant-pollinator relationships.
More than any other natural process, plant-pollinator relationships offer vivid examples of the connections between endangered species and threatened habitats. The authors explain how human-induced changes in pollinator populations -- caused by overuse of chemical pesticides, unbridled development, and conversion of natural areas into monocultural cropland-can have a ripple effect on disparate species, ultimately leading to a "cascade of linked extinctions."
As part of a global effort to identify those areas where conservation measures are needed most urgently, World Wildlife Fund has assembled teams of scientists to conduct ecological assessments of all seven continents. Freshwater Ecoregions of Africa and Madagascar is the latest contribution, presenting in a single volume the first in-depth analysis of the state of freshwater biodiversity across Africa, Madagascar, and the islands of the region. Looking at biodiversity and threats in terms of biological units rather than political units, the book offers a comprehensive examination of the entire range of aquatic systems.
In addition to its six main chapters, the book includes nineteen essays by regional experts that provide more depth on key issues, as well as six detailed appendixes that present summary data used in the analyses, specific analytical methodologies, and a thorough text description for each of Africa's ninety-three freshwater ecoregions.
Freshwater Ecoregions of Africa and Madagascar provides a blueprint for conservation action and represents an unparalleled guide for investments and activities of conservation agencies and donor organizations.
"Sue Hubbell's From Here to There and Back Again is stylish and thought-provoking. As her brother I have long admired her mince pies and her ability to knit her own thermal underwear."
---Bil Gilbert
"The real masterwork that Sue Hubbell has created is her life."
---New York Times Book Review
"A latter-day Henry Thoreau with a sense of the absurd."
---Chicago Sun-Times
"Sue Hubbell writes splendidly."
---William Least Heat-Moon
"Prose as clear, languorous and beautiful as honey poured from a jar."
---People
From Here to There and Back Again is the much-anticipated collection of essays on an array of offbeat and engrossing subjects by magazine essayist and nature writer Sue Hubbell, author of A Country Year, Shrinking the Cat, and Waiting for Aphrodite.
Reading Sue Hubbell is like embarking on a journey of discovery with a close friend. Her writing is witty, learned yet unassuming, intensely personal, and pointedly honest as she ranges far and wide on such topics as after-hours truck stops, the country's best pie restaurants, bowling shoes, Costa Rica's blue morpho butterfly, earthquakes, and the honey trade. Several of her pieces take place in Michigan locales as well, including Elvis sightings in Vicksburg and the magicians' convention in Colon. In the end you'll return from these travels refreshed, enlightened-and wiser.
Blending ethnography with a fascinating personal story, A Future for Amazonia is an account of a political movement that arose in the early 1990s in response to decades of attacks on the lands and peoples of eastern Ecuador, one of the world’s most culturally and biologically diverse places. After generations of ruin at the hands of colonizing farmers, transnational oil companies, and Colombian armed factions, the indigenous Cofán people and their rain forest territory faced imminent jeopardy. In a surprising turn of events, the Cofán chose Randy Borman, a man of Euro-American descent, to lead their efforts to overcome the crisis that confronted them.
Drawing on three years of ethnographic research, A Future for Amazonia begins by tracing the contours of Cofán society and Borman’s place within it. Borman, a blue-eyed, white-skinned child of North American missionary-linguists, was raised in a Cofán community and gradually came to share the identity of his adoptive nation. He became a global media phenomenon and forged creative partnerships between Cofán communities, conservationist organizations, Western scientists, and the Ecuadorian state. The result was a collective mobilization that transformed the Cofán nation in unprecedented ways, providing them with political power, scientific expertise, and a new role as ambitious caretakers of more than one million acres of forest. Challenging simplistic notions of identity, indigeneity, and inevitable ecological destruction, A Future for Amazonia charts an inspiring course for environmental politics in the twenty-first century.
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