front cover of Nature's Portraits
Nature's Portraits
A Coloring Book of Scales, Tails, Furs, and Wings
Peggy Macnamara
University of Chicago Press, 2016
When it comes to color, nothing can surpass the vast palette found in nature, from a bright green leaf in a sun-dappled forest to the rich red feathers of a cardinal and the muted greens, ambers, and browns that make up the shell of a tortoise. Wildlife artist Peggy Macnamara has been recreating the natural world through her drawings and paintings for decades, and, with Nature’s Portraits, she invites the rest of the world to join her.

Nature’s Portraits offers sixty of Macnamara’s detailed drawings that can be brought brilliantly to life with nothing more than a few colored pencils or crayons and a sense of wonder about the world around us. Many of the drawings depict animals as they might appear in their natural habitats—like a tree frog, a dashing, playful fox, a snowy owl poised for flight, a sauntering jaguar, and a watchful herd of giraffe. These wild furry and feathered friends are joined by animals found in museums, including Sue, the Field Museum’s resident Tyrannosaurus rex. Each illustration is captioned with a brief scientific description of the species pictured.

Combining inspiration from natural history with a calming, creative activity, Nature’s Portraits encourages us to take a closer look at what we miss when we don’t take the time to stop and look with deep appreciation at the bounty of the natural world around us.
 
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front cover of Political Ecology Across Spaces, Scales, and Social Groups
Political Ecology Across Spaces, Scales, and Social Groups
Paulson, Susan
Rutgers University Press, 2004

Environmental issues have become increasingly prominent in local struggles, national debates, and international policies. In response, scholars are paying more attention to conventional politics and to more broadly defined relations of power and difference in the interactions between human groups and their biophysical environments. Such issues are at the heart of the relatively new interdisciplinary field of political ecology, forged at the intersection of political economy and cultural ecology.

This volume provides a toolkit of vital concepts and a set of research models and analytic frameworks for researchers at all levels. The two opening chapters trace rich traditions of thought and practice that inform current approaches to political ecology. They point to the entangled relationship between humans, politics, economies, and environments at the dawn of the twenty-first century and address challenges that scholars face in navigating the blurring boundaries among relevant fields of enquiry.  The twelve case studies that follow demonstrate ways that culture and politics serve to mediate human-environmental relationships in specific ecological and geographical contexts. Taken together, they describe uses of and conflicts over resources including land, water, soil, trees, biodiversity, money, knowledge, and information; they exemplify wide-ranging ecological settings including deserts, coasts, rainforests, high mountains, and modern cities; and they explore sites located around the world, from Canada to Tonga and cyberspace.

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front cover of Scales of Captivity
Scales of Captivity
Racial Capitalism and the Latinx Child
Mary Pat Brady
Duke University Press, 2022
In Scales of Captivity, Mary Pat Brady traces the figure of the captive or cast-off child in Latinx and Chicanx literature and art between chattel slavery’s final years and the mass deportations of the twenty-first century. She shows how Latinx expressive practices expose how every rescaling of economic and military power requires new modalities of capture, new ways to bracket and hedge life. Through readings of novels by Helena María Viramontes, Oscar Casares, Lorraine López, Maceo Montoya, Reyna Grande, Daniel Peña, and others, Brady illustrates how submerged captivities reveal the way mechanisms of constraint such as deportability ground institutional forms of carceral modernity and how such practices scale relations by naturalizing the logic of scalar hierarchies underpinning racial capitalism. By showing how representations of the captive child critique the entrenched logic undergirding colonial power, Brady challenges racialized modes of citizenship while offering visions for living beyond borders.
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front cover of Scales of Resistance
Scales of Resistance
Indigenous Women’s Transborder Activism
Maylei Blackwell
Duke University Press, 2022
In Scales of Resistance Maylei Blackwell narrates how Indigenous women’s activism in Mexico and its diaspora weaves in and between local, national, continental, and transborder scales. Drawing on more than seventy testimonials and twenty years of fieldwork spent accompanying Indigenous women activists, Blackwell focuses on how these activists navigate the blockages to their participation and transform exclusionary spaces into scales of resistance. Blackwell shows how activists in Mexico and those in the migrant stream that runs from Oaxaca into California redefined women’s roles in community decision-making. They did so by scaling down Indigenous autonomy to their own bodies, homes, and communities; grounding their political claims within Indigenous epistemologies and the gendered nature of social organization; and scaling up to regional, national, and continental contexts. This allowed them to place themselves at the heart of Indigenous resistance and autonomy, decolonizing gender hierarchies and creating new scales of participation. Blackwell reveals the importance of moving across different types of scale and contrasting colonial divisions of scale itself with Indigenous conceptions of scale, space, solidarity, and connection.
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