Twentieth Century Population Thinking

Twentieth Century Population Thinking

Author: The Population Knowledge Network

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2015-09-16

Total Pages: 257

ISBN-13: 1317479629

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This reader on the history of demography and historical perspectives on "population" in the twentieth century features a unique collection of primary sources from around the globe, written by scholars, politicians, journalists, and activists. Many of the sources are available in English for the first time. Background information is provided on each source. Together, the sources mirror the circumstances under which scientific knowledge about "population" was produced, how demography evolved as a discipline, and how demographic developments were interpreted and discussed in different political and cultural settings. Readers thereby gain insight into the historical precedents on debates on race, migration, reproduction, natural resources, development and urbanization, the role of statistics in the making of the nation state, and family structures and gender roles, among others. The reader is designed for undergraduate and graduate students as well as scholars in the fields of demography and population studies as well as to anyone interested in the history of science and knowledge.


Treatise on Geomorphology

Treatise on Geomorphology

Author:

Publisher: Academic Press

Published: 2013-02-27

Total Pages: 6392

ISBN-13: 0080885225

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

The changing focus and approach of geomorphic research suggests that the time is opportune for a summary of the state of discipline. The number of peer-reviewed papers published in geomorphic journals has grown steadily for more than two decades and, more importantly, the diversity of authors with respect to geographic location and disciplinary background (geography, geology, ecology, civil engineering, computer science, geographic information science, and others) has expanded dramatically. As more good minds are drawn to geomorphology, and the breadth of the peer-reviewed literature grows, an effective summary of contemporary geomorphic knowledge becomes increasingly difficult. The fourteen volumes of this Treatise on Geomorphology will provide an important reference for users from undergraduate students looking for term paper topics, to graduate students starting a literature review for their thesis work, and professionals seeking a concise summary of a particular topic. Information on the historical development of diverse topics within geomorphology provides context for ongoing research; discussion of research strategies, equipment, and field methods, laboratory experiments, and numerical simulations reflect the multiple approaches to understanding Earth’s surfaces; and summaries of outstanding research questions highlight future challenges and suggest productive new avenues for research. Our future ability to adapt to geomorphic changes in the critical zone very much hinges upon how well landform scientists comprehend the dynamics of Earth’s diverse surfaces. This Treatise on Geomorphology provides a useful synthesis of the state of the discipline, as well as highlighting productive research directions, that Educators and students/researchers will find useful. Geomorphology has advanced greatly in the last 10 years to become a very interdisciplinary field. Undergraduate students looking for term paper topics, to graduate students starting a literature review for their thesis work, and professionals seeking a concise summary of a particular topic will find the answers they need in this broad reference work which has been designed and written to accommodate their diverse backgrounds and levels of understanding Editor-in-Chief, Prof. J. F. Shroder of the University of Nebraska at Omaha, is past president of the QG&G section of the Geological Society of America and present Trustee of the GSA Foundation, while being well respected in the geomorphology research community and having won numerous awards in the field. A host of noted international geomorphologists have contributed state-of-the-art chapters to the work. Readers can be guaranteed that every chapter in this extensive work has been critically reviewed for consistency and accuracy by the World expert Volume Editors and by the Editor-in-Chief himself No other reference work exists in the area of Geomorphology that offers the breadth and depth of information contained in this 14-volume masterpiece. From the foundations and history of geomorphology through to geomorphological innovations and computer modelling, and the past and future states of landform science, no "stone" has been left unturned!


Ian McHarg and the Search for Ideal Order

Ian McHarg and the Search for Ideal Order

Author: Kathleen John-Alder

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2019-09-17

Total Pages: 326

ISBN-13: 1134811322

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Ian McHarg and the Search for Ideal Order looks at the well-known and studied landscape architect, Ian McHarg, in a new light. The author explores McHarg’s formative years, and investigates how his ideas developed in both their complexity and scale. As a precursor to McHarg’s approach in his influential book Design with Nature, this book offers new interpretations into his search for environmental order and outlines how his struggle to understand humanity’s relationship to the environment in an era of rapid social and technological change reflects an ongoing challenge that landscape design has yet to fully resolve. This book will be of great interest to academics and researchers in landscape architectural history.


Reinventing Eden

Reinventing Eden

Author: Carolyn Merchant

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2013-03-12

Total Pages: 306

ISBN-13: 1136161244

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This revised edition of Carolyn Merchant’s classic Reinventing Eden has been updated with a new foreword and afterword. Visionary quests to return to the Garden of Eden have shaped Western Culture. This book traces the idea of rebuilding the primeval garden from its origins to its latest incarnations and offers a bold new way to think about the earth.


To Pass On a Good Earth

To Pass On a Good Earth

Author: Michael Williams

Publisher: University of Virginia Press

Published: 2014-06-24

Total Pages: 288

ISBN-13: 0813935776

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

To Pass On a Good Earth is the candid and compelling new biography of one of the twentieth century’s most distinctive and influential scholars. The legendary "Great God beyond the Sierras," Carl Ortwin Sauer is America’s most famed geographer, an inspiration to both academics and poets, yet no book-length biography of him has existed until now. This Missouri-born son of German immigrants contributed to many fields, with a versatility rare in his time and virtually unknown today. Sauer explored plant and animal domestication, the entry of Native Americans into the continent, their transformation of the land into prairies and cultivated fields, and subsequent European enterprise that fueled prosperity but also triggered environmental degradation and the loss of cultural diversity. Providing profound and invaluable insights into the human occupance, cultivation--and often ruination--of the earth, Sauer revolutionized our understanding of the impact of European conquest of the New World. Author and fellow geographer Michael Williams had access to Sauer’s voluminous correspondence in the Bancroft Library at Berkeley and in family collections. Enlivened by these intimate letters to family and colleagues, To Pass On a Good Earth reveals the rare qualities of mind and heart that made Sauer one of America’s most treasured--as well as troubled--intellectual pioneers. He brought both historical rigor and humanistic understanding to the burgeoning environmental movement and ceaselessly championed an ecumenical approach in an age of increasing specialization.


Domesticating the Invisible

Domesticating the Invisible

Author: Melissa S. Ragain

Publisher: University of California Press

Published: 2021-01-12

Total Pages: 264

ISBN-13: 0520343824

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Domesticating the Invisible examines how postwar notions of form developed in response to newly perceived environmental threats, in turn inspiring artists to model plastic composition on natural systems often invisible to the human eye. Melissa S. Ragain focuses on the history of art education in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to understand how an environmental approach to form inspired new art programs at Harvard and MIT. As they embraced scientistic theories of composition, these institutions also cultivated young artists as environmental agents who could influence urban design and contribute to an ecologically sensitive public sphere. Ragain combines institutional and intellectual histories to map how the emergency of environmental crisis altered foundational modernist assumptions about form, transforming questions about aesthetic judgment into questions about an ethical relationship to the environment.


The Pyrocene

The Pyrocene

Author: Stephen J. Pyne

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2022-08-02

Total Pages: 191

ISBN-13: 0520391632

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

A provocative rethinking of how humans and fire have evolved together over time—and our responsibility to reorient this relationship before it's too late.​ The Pyrocene tells the story of what happened when a fire-wielding species, humanity, met an especially fire-receptive time in Earth's history. Since terrestrial life first appeared, flames have flourished. Over the past two million years, however, one genus gained the ability to manipulate fire, swiftly remaking both itself and eventually the world. We developed small guts and big heads by cooking food; we climbed the food chain by cooking landscapes; and now we have become a geologic force by cooking the planet. Some fire uses have been direct: fire applied to convert living landscapes into hunting grounds, forage fields, farms, and pastures. Others have been indirect, through pyrotechnologies that expanded humanity's reach beyond flame's grasp. Still, preindustrial and Indigenous societies largely operated within broad ecological constraints that determined how, and when, living landscapes could be burned. These ancient relationships between humans and fire broke down when people began to burn fossil biomass—lithic landscapes—and humanity's firepower became unbounded. Fire-catalyzed climate change globalized the impacts into a new geologic epoch. The Pleistocene yielded to the Pyrocene. Around fires, across millennia, we have told stories that explained the world and negotiated our place within it. The Pyrocene continues that tradition, describing how we have remade the Earth and how we might recover our responsibilities as keepers of the planetary flame.