A SCHOLARLY BOOK REPOSITORY249 start with G start with G
In The Great Paleolithic War, David J. Meltzer tells the story of a scientific quest that set off one of the longest-running feuds in the history of American anthropology, one so vicious at times that anthropologists were deliberately frightened away from investigating potential sites. Through his book, we come to understand how and why this controversy developed and stubbornly persisted for as long as it did; and how, in the process, it revolutionized American archaeology.
On the night of October 8, 1871, a whirlwind of fire swept through northeastern Wisconsin, destroying the bustling frontier town of Peshtigo. Trees, buildings, and people burst into flames. Metal melted. Sand turned into glass. People thought the end of the world had come. When the “tornado of fire” was over, 2,500 people were dead, and Peshtigo was nothing but a smoking ruin. It was the deadliest wildfire in U.S. history.
The Great Peshtigo Fire: Stories and Science from America’s Deadliest Firestorm explores the history, science, and legacy of the 1871 Peshtigo Fire at a fourth-grade reading level. Readers will learn about the history of settlement, agriculture, and forestry in 19th-century Wisconsin. This illuminating text covers a diverse range of topics that will enrich the reader’s understanding of the Peshtigo Fire, including the building and land-use practices of the time that made the area ripe for such a fire, the weather patterns that fostered widespread fires throughout the upper Midwest in the summer and fall of 1871, and exciting first-person accounts that vividly bring the `victims’ stories to life. Connections made between the Peshtigo Fire and the history of fire prevention in the United States encourage critical thinking about issues that remain controversial to this day, such as planned burns and housing development restrictions near forested areas. The Great Peshtigo Fire: Stories and Science from America’s Deadliest Firestorm will inform and captivate its readers as it journeys through the horrifying history of the Peshtigo Fire.
Early descriptions of the Great Plains often focus on a vast, grassy expanse that was either burnt or burning. The scene continued to burn until the land was plowed under or grazed away and broken by innumerable roads and towns. Yet, where the original landscape has persisted, so has fire, and where people have sought to restore something of that original setting, they have had to reinstate fire. This has required the persistence or creation of a fire culture, which in turn inspired schools of science and art that make the Great Plains today a regional hearth for American fire.
Volume 5 of To the Last Smoke introduces a region that once lay at the geographic heart of American fire, and today promises to reclaim something of that heritage. After all these years, the Great Plains continue to bear witness to how fires can shape contemporary life, and vice versa. In this collection of essays, Stephen J. Pyne explores how this once most regularly and widely burned province of North America, composed of various subregions and peoples, has been shaped by the flames contained within it and what fire, both tame and feral, might mean for the future of its landscapes.
Included in this volume:
- How wildland and rural fire have changed from the 19th century to the 21st century
- How fire is managed in the nation’s historic tallgrass prairies, from Texas to South Dakota, from Illinois to Nebraska
- How fire connects with other themes of Great Plains life and culture
- How and why Texas has returned to the national narrative of landscape fire
The Great Plains were once among the greatest grasslands on the planet. But as the United States and Canada grew westward, the Plains were plowed up, fenced in, overgrazed, and otherwise degraded. Today, this fragmented landscape is the most endangered and least protected ecosystem in North America. But all is not lost on the prairie. Through lyrical photographs, essays, historical images, and maps, this beautifully illustrated book gets beneath the surface of the Plains, revealing the lingering wild that still survives and whose diverse natural communities, native creatures, migratory traditions, and natural systems together create one vast and extraordinary whole.
Three broad geographic regions in Great Plains are covered in detail, evoked in the unforgettable and often haunting images taken by Michael Forsberg. Between the fall of 2005 and the winter of 2008, Forsberg traveled roughly 100,000 miles across 12 states and three provinces, from southern Canada to northern Mexico, to complete the photographic fieldwork for this project, underwritten by The Nature Conservancy. Complementing Forsberg’s images and firsthand accounts are essays by Great Plains scholar David Wishart and acclaimed writer Dan O’Brien. Each section of the book begins with a thorough overview by Wishart, while O’Brien—a wildlife biologist and rancher as well as a writer—uses his powerful literary voice to put the Great Plains into a human context, connecting their natural history with man’s uses and abuses.
The Great Plains are a dynamic but often forgotten landscape—overlooked, undervalued, misunderstood, and in desperate need of conservation. This book helps lead the way forward, informing and inspiring readers to recognize the wild spirit and splendor of this irreplaceable part of the planet.
The Great Plains states are already experiencing the impacts of a changing climate, and will likely continue to experience warming temperatures, more extreme precipitation events, reduced snow and ice cover, and rising relative sea levels. The book presents a review of the historic, current, and projected future climate of the region; describes interactions with important sectors of the Northeast and examines cross-sectoral issues, namely climate change mitigation, adaptation, and education and outreach.
Rich in science and case studies, it examines the latest climate change impacts, scenarios, vulnerabilities, and adaptive capacity and offers decision makers and stakeholders a substantial basis from which to make informed choices that will affect the well-being of the region's inhabitants in the decades to come.
In their search for truth, contemporary religious believers and modern scientific investigators hold many values in common. But in their approaches, they express two fundamentally different conceptions of how to understand and represent the world. Michael E. Hobart looks for the origin of this difference in the work of Renaissance thinkers who invented a revolutionary mathematical system—relational numeracy. By creating meaning through numbers and abstract symbols rather than words, relational numeracy allowed inquisitive minds to vault beyond the constraints of language and explore the natural world with a fresh interpretive vision.
The Great Rift is the first book to examine the religion-science divide through the history of information technology. Hobart follows numeracy as it emerged from the practical counting systems of merchants, the abstract notations of musicians, the linear perspective of artists, and the calendars and clocks of astronomers. As the technology of the alphabet and of mere counting gave way to abstract symbols, the earlier “thing-mathematics” metamorphosed into the relational mathematics of modern scientific investigation. Using these new information symbols, Galileo and his contemporaries mathematized motion and matter, separating the demonstrations of science from the linguistic logic of religious narration.
Hobart locates the great rift between science and religion not in ideological disagreement but in advances in mathematics and symbolic representation that opened new windows onto nature. In so doing, he connects the cognitive breakthroughs of the past with intellectual debates ongoing in the twenty-first century.
This book gathers a diverse team of renowned scientists to capture the excitement of these new discoveries in a collection that is both accessible to students and an important contribution to the future of its field. Marshaling a range of disciplines—from paleobiology to phylogenetics, developmental biology, ecology, and evolutionary biology—the contributors attack particular transformations in the head and neck, trunk, appendages such as fins and limbs, and the whole body, as well as offer synthetic perspectives. Illustrated throughout, Great Transformations in Vertebrate Evolution not only reveals the true origins of whales with legs, fish with elbows, wrists, and necks, and feathered dinosaurs, but also the relevance to our lives today of these extraordinary narratives of change.
The space race was perhaps the greatest technological contest of the twentieth century. It was a thrilling era of innovation, discovery, and exploration, as astronauts and cosmonauts were launched on space missions of increasing length, complexity, and danger. The Greatest Adventure traces the events of this extraordinary period, describing the initial string of Soviet achievements: the first satellite in orbit; the first animal, man, and woman in space; the first spacewalk; as well as the ultimate US victory in the race to land on the moon. The book then takes the reader on a journey through the following decades of space exploration to the present time, detailing the many successes, tragedies, risks, and rewards of space exploration.
This inaugural volume in the Ohio University Press Series in Ecology and History is the paperback edition of Conrad Totman’s widely acclaimed study of Japan’s environmental policies over the centuries.
Professor Totman raises the critical question of how Japan’s steeply mountainous woodland has remained biologically healthy despite centuries of intensive exploitation by a dense human population that has always been dependent on wood and other forest products. Mindful that in global terms this has been a rare outcome, and one that bears directly on Japan’s recent experience as an affluent, industrial society, Totman examines the causes, forms, and effects of forest use and management in Japan during the millennium to 1870. He focuses mainly on the centuries after 1600 when the Japanese found themselves driven by their own excesses into programs of woodland protection and regenerative forestry.
Green Growth That Works is the first practical guide to bring together pragmatic finance and policy tools that can make investment in natural capital both attractive and commonplace. The authors present six mechanisms that demonstrate a range of approaches used around the globe to conserve and restore earth’s myriad ecosystems, including:
- Government subsidies
- Regulatory-driven mitigation
- Voluntary conservation
- Water funds
- Market-based transactions
- Bilateral and multilateral payments
Pioneered by leading scholars from the Natural Capital Project, this valuable compendium of proven techniques can guide agencies and organizations eager to make green growth work anywhere in the world.
In 1918, South Africa’s climate seemed to be drying up. White farmers claimed that rainfall was dwindling, while nineteenth-century missionaries and explorers had found riverbeds, seashells, and other evidence of a verdant past deep in the Kalahari Desert. Government experts insisted, however, that the rains weren’t disappearing; the land, long susceptible to periodic drought, had been further degraded by settler farmers’ agricultural practices—an explanation that white South Africans rejected. So when the geologist Ernest Schwarz blamed the land itself, the farmers listened. Schwarz held that erosion and topography had created arid conditions, that rainfall was declining, and that agriculture was not to blame. As a solution, he proposed diverting two rivers to the Kalahari’s basins, creating a lush country where white South Africans could thrive. This plan, which became known as the Kalahari Thirstland Redemption Scheme, was rejected by most scientists. But it found support among white South Africans who worried that struggling farmers undermined an image of racial superiority.
Green Lands for White Men explores how white agriculturalists in southern Africa grappled with a parched and changing terrain as they sought to consolidate control over a Black population. Meredith McKittrick’s timely history of the Redemption Scheme reveals the environment to have been central to South African understandings of race. While Schwarz’s plan was never implemented, it enjoyed sufficient support to prompt government research into its feasibility, and years of debate. McKittrick shows how white farmers rallied around a plan that represented their interests over those of the South African state and delves into the reasons behind this schism between expert opinion and public perception. This backlash against the predominant scientific view, McKittrick argues, displayed the depth of popular mistrust in an expanding scientific elite.
A detailed look at the intersection of a settler society, climate change, white nationalism, and expert credibility, Green Lands for White Men examines the reverberations of a scheme that ultimately failed but influenced ideas about race and the environment in South Africa for decades to come.
Plants are not just a pretty part of the landscape; they keep the entire planet, with all of its human and nonhuman inhabitants, alive. Stanley Rice documents the many ways in which plants do this by making oxygen, regulating the greenhouse effect, controlling floods, and producing all the food in the world. Plants also create natural habitats for all organisms in the world. With illustrations and clear writing for non-specialists, Green Planet helps general readers realize that if we are to rescue the Earth from environmental disaster, we must protect wild plants.
Beginning with an overview of how human civilization has altered the face of the Earth, particularly by the destruction of forests, the book details the startling consequences of these actions. Rice provides compelling reasons for government officials, economic leaders, and the public to support efforts to save threatened and endangered plants. Global campaigns to solve environmental problems with plants, such as the development of green roofs and the Green Belt Movementùa women's organization in Kenya that empowers communities worldwide to protect the environmentùshow readers that efforts to save wild plants can be successful and beneficial to the economic well-being of nations.
Through current scientific evidence, readers see that plants are vital to the ecological health of our planet and understand what can be done to lead to a betterùand greenerùfuture
Benefits of plants:
- Help modulate greenhouse gases
- Produce almost all oxygen in the air
- Create cool shade that reduces energy costs
- Prevent floods, droughts, and soil erosion
- Produce all of the food in the world
- Create and preserve soil
- Create natural habitats
- Heal the landscape after natural and human disasters
The Green Revolution was devised to increase agricultural production worldwide, particularly in the developing world. Agriculturalists employed anhydrous ammonia and other fertilizing agents, mechanical tilling, hybridized seeds, pesticides, herbicides, and a multitude of other techniques to increase yields and feed a mushrooming human population that would otherwise suffer starvation as the world’s food supply dwindled.
In The Green Revolution in the Global South: Science, Politics, and Unintended Consequences, R. Douglas Hurt demonstrates that the Green Revolution did not turn out as neatly as scientists predicted. When its methods and products were imported to places like Indonesia and Nigeria, or even replicated indigenously, the result was a tumultuous impact on a society’s functioning. A range of factors—including cultural practices, ethnic and religious barriers, cost and availability of new technologies, climate, rainfall and aridity, soil quality, the scale of landholdings, political policies and opportunism, the rise of industrial farms, civil unrest, indigenous diseases, and corruption—entered into the Green Revolution calculus, producing a series of unintended consequences that varied from place to place. As the Green Revolution played out over time, these consequences rippled throughout societies, affecting environments, economies, political structures, and countless human lives.
Analyzing change over time, almost decade by decade, Hurt shows that the Green Revolution was driven by the state as well as science. Rather than acknowledge the vast problems with the Green Revolution or explore other models, Hurt argues, scientists and political leaders doubled down and repeated the same missteps in the name of humanity and food security. In tracing the permutations of modern science’s impact on international agricultural systems, Hurt documents how, beyond increasing yields, the Green Revolution affected social orders, politics, and lifestyles in every place its methods were applied—usually far more than once.
While the state of California remains one of the most striking and varied landscapes in the world, it has experienced monumental changes since European settlers first set foot there. The past two centuries have witnessed an ongoing struggle between environment and economy, nature and humanity that has left an indelible mark on the region.
Green Versus Gold provides a compelling look at California's environmental history from its Native American past to conflicts and movements of recent decades. Acclaimed environmental historian Carolyn Merchant has brought together a vast storehouse of primary sources and interpretive essays to create a comprehensive picture of the history of ecological and human interactions in one of the nation's most diverse and resource-rich states.
For each chapter, Merchant has selected original documents that give readers an eyewitness account of specific environments and periods, along with essays from leading historians, geographers, scientists, and other experts that provide context and analysis for the documents. In addition, she presents a list of further readings of both primary and secondary sources. Among other topics, chapters examine:
California's natural environment and Native American lands the Spanish and Russian frontiers environmental impacts of the gold rush the transformation of forests and rangelands agriculture and irrigation cities and urban issues the rise of environmental science and contemporary environmental movement.
Merchant's informed and well-chosen selections present a unique view of decades of environmental change and controversy. Historians, educators, environmentalists, writers, students, scientists, policy makers, and others will find the book an enlightening and important contribution to the debate over our nation's environmental history.
At the center of their social experiment was the charismatic art critic and political economist John Ruskin. Albritton and Albritton Jonsson show how Ruskin’s followers turned his theory into practice in a series of ambitious local projects ranging from hand spinning and woodworking to gardening, archaeology, and pedagogy. This is a lively yet unsettling story, for there was a dark side to Ruskin’s community as well—racist thinking, paternalism, and technophobia. Richly illustrated, Green Victorians breaks new ground, connecting the ideas and practices of Ruskin’s utopian community with the problems of ethical consumption then and now.
The authors present a multilevel analysis encompassing institutions and individuals within the government—at national, state, and local levels—as well as the activists, interest groups, and nongovernmental organizations that operate outside formal political channels. They emphasize the importance of networks linking committed actors in the government bureaucracy with activists in civil society. Portraying a gradual process marked by periods of rapid advance, Hochstetler and Keck show how political opportunities have arisen from major political transformations such as the transition to democracy and from critical events, including the well-publicized murders of environmental activists in 1988 and 2004. Rather than view foreign governments and organizations as the instigators of environmental policy change in Brazil, the authors point to their importance at key moments as sources of leverage and support.
Drawing on previously unseen documents from NATO’s own archives, Simone Turchetti reveals how its investments were rooted in the alliance’s defense and surveillance needs, needs that led it to establish a program prioritizing environmental studies. A long-overlooked and effective diplomacy exercise, NATO’s “greening” at one point constituted the organization’s chief conduit for negotiating problematic relations between allies. But while Greening the Alliance explores this surprising coevolution of environmental monitoring and surveillance, tales of science advisers issuing instructions to bomb oil spills with napalm or Dr. Strangelove–like experts eager to divert the path of hurricanes with atomic weapons make it clear: the coexistence of these forces has not always been harmonious. Reflecting on this rich, complicated legacy in light of contemporary global challenges like climate change, Turchetti offers both an eye-opening history of international politics and environmental studies and a thoughtful assessment of NATO’s future.
What a big brain we have for all the small talk we make. It's an evolutionary riddle that at long last makes sense in this intriguing book about what gossip has done for our talkative species. Psychologist Robin Dunbar looks at gossip as an instrument of social order and cohesion--much like the endless grooming with which our primate cousins tend to their social relationships.
Apes and monkeys, humanity's closest kin, differ from other animals in the intensity of these relationships. All their grooming is not so much about hygiene as it is about cementing bonds, making friends, and influencing fellow primates. But for early humans, grooming as a way to social success posed a problem: given their large social groups of 150 or so, our earliest ancestors would have had to spend almost half their time grooming one another--an impossible burden. What Dunbar suggests--and his research, whether in the realm of primatology or in that of gossip, confirms--is that humans developed language to serve the same purpose, but far more efficiently. It seems there is nothing idle about chatter, which holds together a diverse, dynamic group--whether of hunter-gatherers, soldiers, or workmates.
Anthropologists have long assumed that language developed in relationships among males during activities such as hunting. Dunbar's original and extremely interesting studies suggest otherwise: that language in fact evolved in response to our need to keep up to date with friends and family. We needed conversation to stay in touch, and we still need it in ways that will not be satisfied by teleconferencing, email, or any other communication technology. As Dunbar shows, the impersonal world of cyberspace will not fulfill our primordial need for face-to-face contact.
From the nit-picking of chimpanzees to our chats at coffee break, from neuroscience to paleoanthropology, Grooming, Gossip, and the Evolution of Language offers a provocative view of what makes us human, what holds us together, and what sets us apart.
Such a view is far too simple, ignoring the diverse ways in which the era’s countercultures expressed enthusiasm for and involved themselves in science—of a certain type. Rejecting hulking, militarized technical projects like Cold War missiles and mainframes, Boomers and hippies sought a science that was both small-scale and big-picture, as exemplified by the annual workshops on quantum physics at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, or Timothy Leary’s championing of space exploration as the ultimate “high.” Groovy Science explores the experimentation and eclecticism that marked countercultural science and technology during one of the most colorful periods of American history.
We know that the Earth’s climate is changing, and that the magnitude of this change is colossal. At the same time, the world outside is still a natural world, and one we can experience on a granular level every day. Ground Truth is a guide to living in this condition of changing nature, to paying attention instead of turning away, and to gathering facts from which a fuller understanding of the natural world can emerge over time.
Featuring detailed guidance for keeping records of the plants, invertebrates, amphibians, birds, and mammals in your neighborhood, this book also ponders the value of everyday observations, probes the connections between seasons and climate change, and traces the history of phenology—the study and timing of natural events—and the uses to which it can be put. An expansive yet accessible book, Ground Truth invites readers to help lay the groundwork for a better understanding of the nature of change itself.
In recent years scholars from a variety of branches of mathematics have made several significant developments in the theory of group actions. Groups of Circle Diffeomorphisms systematically explores group actions on the simplest closed manifold, the circle. As the group of circle diffeomorphisms is an important subject in modern mathematics, this book will be of interest to those doing research in group theory, dynamical systems, low dimensional geometry and topology, and foliation theory. The book is mostly self-contained and also includes numerous complementary exercises, making it an excellent textbook for undergraduate and graduate students.
Gilbert knew most of geology's grand figures--including John Wesley Powell, Clarence Dutton, and Clarence King--and Pyne's chronicle of the imperturbable, quietly unconventional Gilbert is couterpointed with sketches of these prominent scientists. The man who wrote that "happiness is sitting under a tent with walls uplifted, just after a brief shower,", created answers to the larger questions of the earth in ways that have become classics of his science.
Although synthetic rubber emerged from World War II as one solution, the issue of ever-diminishing natural resources and the question of how to meet twenty-first-century consumer, military, and business demands lingers today.
Although synthetic rubber emerged from World War II as one solution, the issue of ever-diminishing natural resources and the question of how to meet twenty-first-century consumer, military, and business demands lingers today.
Written by leading historians and philosophers of science, these essays examine the range of subjects, people, and goals involved in changing the character of scientific analysis over the last several decades. They highlight the alternatives that fields as diverse as string theory, fuzzy logic, artificial life, and immunology bring to the forms of explanation that have traditionally defined scientific modernity. A number of the essays deal with the mathematical and physical sciences, addressing concerns with hybridity and the materials of the everyday world. Other essays focus on the life sciences, where questions such as “What is life?” and “What is an organism?” are undergoing radical re-evaluation. Together these essays mark the contours of an ongoing revolution in scientific explanation.
Contributors. David Aubin, Amy Dahan Dalmedico, Richard Doyle, Claus Emmeche, Peter Galison, Stefan Helmreich, Ann Johnson, Evelyn Fox Keller, Ilana Löwy, Claude Rosental, Alfred Tauber
". . . Easterlin is both an economic historian and a demographer, and it is the combination of these two disciplines and the fine balance between theory and experience that make this well-written, refreshingly optimistic book excellent reading." --Population and Development Review
"In this masterful synthesis, Richard Easterlin draws on the disciplines of economic history, demography, sociology, political science, psychology, and the history of science to present an integrated explation of the origins of modern economic growth and of the mortality revolution. . . . His book should be easily accessible to non-specialists and will give them a sense of why economic history can inform our understanding of the future." --Dora L. Costa, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, EH.Net and H-Net
"Growth Triumphant is, simply, a fascinating book. Easterlin has woven together a history of economic growth, economic development, human mortality and morbidity, the connections each has with the others, and the implications of this nexus of forces on the future. . . . This book deserves a wide audience." --Choice
"In what must surely be the most fair-minded, well-balanced, and scrupulously reasoned and researched book on the sensational subjects implied in its title--the Industrial Revolution, the mortality and fertility revolutions, and the prospects for future happiness for the human race--Professor Easterlin has set in place the capstone of his research career." --Journal of Economic History
Richard A. Easterlin is Professor of Economics, University of Southern California.
From the celebrated author of Quantum Mechanics and Experience comes an original and exhilarating attempt at making sense of the strange laws of quantum mechanics.
A century ago, a brilliant circle of physicists around Niels Bohr argued that the search for an objective, realistic, and mechanical picture of the inner workings of the atom—the kind of picture that had previously been an ideal of classical physics—was doomed to fail. Today, there is widespread agreement among philosophers and physicists that those arguments were wrong. However, the question of what that picture might look like, and how it might fit into a comprehensive picture of physical reality, remains unsettled.
In A Guess at the Riddle, philosopher David Z Albert argues that the distinctively strange features of quantum mechanics begin to make sense once we conceive of the wave function, vibrating and evolving in high-dimensional space, as the concrete, fundamental physical “stuff” of the universe. Starting with simple mechanical models, Albert methodically constructs the defining features of quantum mechanics from scratch. He shows how the entire history of our familiar, three-dimensional universe can be discerned in the wave function’s intricate pattern of ripples and whorls. A major new work in the foundations of physics, A Guess at the Riddle is poised to transform our understanding of the basic architecture of the universe.
Dryland degradation and desertification now affect almost a billion people around the world. Tragically, the biological resources and productivity of millions of acres of land are lost to desertification each year because people remain unaware of strategies and techniques that could improve yields, reduce risk, and begin healing the world's deserts. A Guide for Desert and Dryland Restoration is the first book to offer practical, field-tested solutions to this critical problem.
Author David Bainbridge has spent more than 25 years actively involved in restoring lands across the American Southwest. A Guide for Desert and Dryland Restoration presents the results of his years of fieldwork, as well as research and experience from scientists and practitioners around the globe.
The book discusses the ecology of desert plants, explores the causes of desertification and land abuse, and outlines the processes and procedures needed to evaluate, plan, implement, and monitor desert restoration projects. It sets forth economical and practical field-tested solutions for understanding site characteristics, selecting and growing plants, and ensuring that they survive with a minimal amount of water and care. Each chapter represents a guide to a critical topic for environmental restoration; extensive photographs, diagrams and drawings give detailed information for immediate application, and additional resources are included in appendixes.
A Guide for Desert and Dryland Restoration is the first comprehensive book focused on restoring arid regions, and clearly demonstrates that arid lands can be successfully rehabilitated. In addition to restorationists, the book will be an invaluable resource for anyone working in arid lands, including farmers, ranchers, gardeners, landscapers, outdoor recreation professionals, and activists.
Community development -- the economic, physical, and social revitalization of a community, led by the people who live in that community -- offers a wide range of exciting and rewarding employment options. But until now, there has been no "road map" for professionals, volunteers, students, or anyone wishing to become involved in the field.
A Guide to Careers in Community Development describes the many different kinds of community development jobs available, ranging from community organizing, to financing housing and new businesses, to redeveloping brownfields. It offers advice on how to break into the field along with guidance for career advancement and lateral movement.
Following an introductory chapter that offers an overview and definition of community development and its history, the authors describe:
- different institutions in the field and how they fit together
- pros and cons of community development careers, with a self-assessment quiz for readers to use in analyzing their suitability for the field
- the work and skills involved in different kinds of positions
- how to prepare for and move up in a career
- how to land that first job
A Guide to Careers in Community Development is an essential reference for anyone interested in working in the community development field, including graduate and undergraduate students, volunteers, and mid-career professionals seeking a more fulfilling line of work.
The guide combines formal, objective entries with critical commentaries that emphasize different opinions and controversies. With succinct explanations of more than a thousand terms, thoughtful interpretations by international experts, and helpful cross-referencing, this resource is designed to serve as a roadmap for understanding the issues and debates in the overlapping fields of environment and development. Intended for use by activists, journalists, policymakers, students, scholars, and interested citizens, the Guide to Sustainable Development and Environmental Policy will be a helpful tool for anyone trying to get a comprehensive look at the many environmental organizations, schools of thought, development programs, international environmental treaties, conventions, and strategies that have proliferated in the past few decades.
Since the publication of the first edition of Guide to the Flowers of Western China in 2011, there have been great strides in knowledge of the flora of China through international collaboration. Many plants included in the first edition have been revisited in the wild, while areas hitherto inaccessible have opened up, if sometimes only temporarily. Great advances in systematic botany have occurred since the publication of the first edition, particularly with the widespread availability of rapid DNA analysis. The result of this has been an influx of new photographs and data, and the need for a second edition of Guide to the Flowers of Western China.
Unrivaled in the temperate latitudes of the world, China’s rich flora comprises 30,000 species of plants, and nowhere is this floral richness more evident than in western China. With its lush forests, meandering rivers, and majestic mountains, the west of China has been a center of plant exploration for over two centuries, giving rise to many well-known species of trees, shrubs, perennials, and bulbs that populate our parks and botanical institutes, including rhododendron, orchids, peonies, and roses.
Guide to the Flowers of Western China describes and illustrates more than two thousand species, from the common to the endemic to the extremely rare. Plant families are arranged following the latest DNA-based classification, making this pictorial guide— the largest and most comprehensive on western China ever published—essential for gardeners and plant scientists.
Celebrating the wealth of western China’s vast flora, this magnificent volume will enable the horticulturally inclined traveler (or armchair traveler) to identify many of the plants encountered in the wild.
The book is organized by plant types, which are divided into gymnosperms and angiosperms. For each species treated, the authors include both scientific and common names, a brief description, information on flowering and fruiting seasons, and distribution patterns. Photographs illustrate more than ninety five percent of species, and the text is fully indexed by families and genera, scientific names, and common names. A glossary is keyed to photographs in the text to illustrate definitions.
In their introduction, Wofford and Chester provide an overview of the Tennessee flora and their characteristics, outline Tennessee’s physiographic regions, and survey the history of botanical research in the state. The authors also address the historical and environmental influences on plant distribution and describe comparative diversity of taxa within the regions.
Guide to Trees, Shrubs, and Woody Vines of Tennessee will be a valuable resource and identification guide for professional and lay readers alike, including students, botanists, foresters, gardeners, environmentalists, and conservationists interested in the flora of Tennessee.
Are you in the mood for a trip to the Titan Missile Museum in Tucson? Want to spend some time at the Fermi National Accelerator Center near Chicago? Perhaps quench your thirst for knowledge and discovery at the Anheuser-Busch Brewery in St. Louis, where brewers are chemists at heart? Set your own pace. As an active participant or living room traveler, you'll be mesmerized as Nickell leads you on a tour of physics and chemistry sites.
Written in an easy-to-read and accessible style, this comprehensive guide is a practical and fun way to promote scientific literacy. You'll meet some of the world's great physicists, engineers, and chemists as you turn pages filled with more than fifty photographs. Organized into chapters on individuals, places, and sites--from universities of science to national laboratories, particle accelerators to energy labs and beyond--Nickell illuminates the history of each topic and paints a panorama of stunning achievements in physics and chemistry.
Whether you're traveling in California or Maine, or taking to the road in Texas or Illinois, Nickell helps complete your trip with a state-by-state list of monumental sites and resources. From the east coast to the west, north by northwest, or south in search of the Florida Solar Power Energy Center, you'll enjoy all your scientific travels with Visiting Physics and Chemistry Sites across America.
"Endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved," Darwin famously concluded The Origin of Species, and for confirmation we look to...the guinea pig? How this curious creature and others as humble (and as fast-breeding) have helped unlock the mystery of inheritance is the unlikely story Jim Endersby tells in this book.
Biology today promises everything from better foods or cures for common diseases to the alarming prospect of redesigning life itself. Looking at the organisms that have made all this possible gives us a new way of understanding how we got here--and perhaps of thinking about where we're going. Instead of a history of which great scientists had which great ideas, this story of passionflowers and hawkweeds, of zebra fish and viruses, offers a bird's (or rodent's) eye view of the work that makes science possible.
Mixing the celebrities of genetics, like the fruit fly, with forgotten players such as the evening primrose, the book follows the unfolding history of biological inheritance from Aristotle's search for the "universal, absolute truth of fishiness" to the apparently absurd speculations of eighteenth-century natural philosophers to the spectacular findings of our day--which may prove to be the absurdities of tomorrow.
The result is a quirky, enlightening, and thoroughly engaging perspective on the history of heredity and genetics, tracing the slow, uncertain path--complete with entertaining diversions and dead ends--that led us from the ancient world's understanding of inheritance to modern genetics.
Guitars inspire cult-like devotion: an aficionado can tell you precisely when and where their favorite instrument was made, the wood it is made from, and that wood’s unique effect on the instrument’s sound. In The Guitar, Chris Gibson and Andrew Warren follow that fascination around the globe as they trace guitars all the way back to the tree. The authors take us to guitar factories, port cities, log booms, remote sawmills, Indigenous lands, and distant rainforests, on a quest for behind-the-scenes stories and insights into how guitars are made, where the much-cherished guitar timbers ultimately come from, and the people and skills that craft those timbers along the way.
Gibson and Warren interview hundreds of people to give us a first-hand account of the ins and outs of production methods, timber milling, and forest custodianship in diverse corners of the world, including the Pacific Northwest, Madagascar, Spain, Brazil, Germany, Japan, China, Hawaii, and Australia. They unlock surprising insights into longer arcs of world history: on the human exploitation of nature, colonialism, industrial capitalism, cultural tensions, and seismic upheavals. But the authors also strike a hopeful note, offering a parable of wider resonance—of the incredible but underappreciated skill and care that goes into growing forests and felling trees, milling timber, and making enchanting musical instruments, set against the human tendency to reform our use (and abuse) of natural resources only when it may be too late. The Guitar promises to resonate with anyone who has ever fallen in love with a guitar.
Few places in the world can claim such a diversity of species as the Gulf of California (Sea of Cortez), with its 6,000 recorded animal species estimated to be half the number actually living in its waters. So rich are the Gulf's water that over a half-million tons of seafood are taken from them annually—and this figure does not count the wasted by-catch, which would triple or quadruple that tonnage. This timely book provides a benchmark for understanding the Gulf's extraordinary diversity, how it is threatened, and in what ways it is—or should be—protected.
In spite of its dazzling richness, most of the Gulf's coastline now harbors but a pale shadow of the diversity that existed just a half-century ago. Recommendations based on sound, careful science must guide Mexico in moving forward to protect the Gulf of California.
This edited volume contains contributions by twenty-four Gulf of California experts, from both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border. From the origins of the Gulf to its physical and chemical characteristics, from urgently needed conservation alternatives for fisheries and the entire Gulf ecosystem to information about its invertebrates, fishes, cetaceans, and sea turtles, this thought-provoking book provides new insights and clear paths to achieve sustainable use solidly based on robust science. The interdisciplinary, international cooperation involved in creating this much-needed collection provides a model for achieving success in answering critically important questions about a precious but rapidly disappearing ecological treasure.
A fascinating ethnography of microbes that opens up new spaces for anthropological inquiry
The trillions of microbes in and on our bodies are determined by not only biology but also our social connections. Gut Anthro tells the fascinating story of how a sociocultural anthropologist developed a collaborative “anthropology of microbes” with a human microbial ecologist to address global health crises across disciplines. It asks: what would it mean for anthropology to act with science? Based partly at a preeminent U.S. lab studying the human microbiome, the Center for Genome Sciences at Washington University, and partly at a field site in Bangladesh studying infant malnutrition, it examines how microbes travel between human guts in the “field” and in microbiome laboratories, influencing definitions of health and disease, and how the microbiome can change our views on evolution, agency, and life.
As lab scientists studied the interrelationships between gut microbes and malnutrition in resource-poor countries, Amber Benezra explored ways to reconcile the scale and speed differences between the lab, the intimate biosocial practices of Bangladeshi mothers and their children, and the looming structural violence of poverty. In vital ways, Gut Anthro is about what it means to collaborate—with mothers, local field researchers in Bangladesh, massive philanthropic global health organizations, with the microbiome scientists, and, of course, with microbes. It follows microbes through various enactments in scientific research—microbes as kin, as data, and as race. Revealing how racial categories are used in microbiome research, Benezra argues that microbial differences need transdisciplinary collaboration to address racial health disparities without reifying race as a straightforward biological or social designation.
Gut Anthro is a tour de force of science studies and medical anthropology as well as an intensely personal and deeply theoretical accounting of what it means to do anthropology today.
Cover alt text:
Black background overlaid with a pink organic path suggestive of a human digestive system. Title appears within the guts as if being processed.
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