London in the Wild

London in the Wild

Author: London Wildlife Trust

Publisher: Kyle Books

Published: 2022-10-13

Total Pages: 305

ISBN-13: 1804190713

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'London in the Wild is a timely opportunity to get out and explore all the wild spaces and natural places that exist alongside us. Both on your doorstep and on the other side of the river.' - Chris Packham A place of cars, concrete, lights, noise and pollution, London is a harsh, unyielding landscape created to meet the needs of people, not wildlife, but if you take the time to stop and look, you'll discover it is teeming with more than 15,000 species of flora, fungi and fauna, including marsh frogs, hedgehogs, short-eared owls and dragonflies. With London in the Wild as your guide, you can explore the city from your garden, local parks and community space, but also from its wetlands, woodlands and heaths. Along the way you'll discover the best places to see bluebells in springtime, the day-to-day life of a London Tube mouse and the activities of seals who make their home in the Thames.


Narrating Nature

Narrating Nature

Author: Mara Jill Goldman

Publisher: University of Arizona Press

Published: 2020-11-03

Total Pages: 305

ISBN-13: 0816539677

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The current environmental crises demand that we revisit dominant approaches for understanding nature-society relations. Narrating Nature brings together various ways of knowing nature from differently situated Maasai and conservation practitioners and scientists into lively debate. It speaks to the growing movement within the academy and beyond on decolonizing knowledge about and relationships with nature, and debates within the social sciences on how to work across epistemologies and ontologies. It also speaks to a growing need within conservation studies to find ways to manage nature with people. This book employs different storytelling practices, including a traditional Maasai oral meeting—the enkiguena—to decenter conventional scientific ways of communicating about, knowing, and managing nature. Author Mara J. Goldman draws on more than two decades of deep ethnographic and ecological engagements in the semi-arid rangelands of East Africa—in landscapes inhabited by pastoral and agropastoral Maasai people and heavily utilized by wildlife. These iconic landscapes have continuously been subjected to boundary drawing practices by outsiders, separating out places for people (villages) from places for nature (protected areas). Narrating Nature follows the resulting boundary crossings that regularly occur—of people, wildlife, and knowledge—to expose them not as transgressions but as opportunities to complicate the categories themselves and create ontological openings for knowing and being with nature otherwise. Narrating Nature opens up dialogue that counters traditional conservation narratives by providing space for local Maasai inhabitants to share their ways of knowing and being with nature. It moves beyond standard community conservation narratives that see local people as beneficiaries or contributors to conservation, to demonstrate how they are essential knowledgeable members of the conservation landscape itself.


The Book of Nature

The Book of Nature

Author:

Publisher:

Published: 1820

Total Pages: 28

ISBN-13:

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A father tells his child about the wonder of the natural world from a Christian point of view.


Nature Crime

Nature Crime

Author: Rosaleen Duffy

Publisher: Yale University Press

Published: 2010-08-31

Total Pages: 255

ISBN-13: 0300154348

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In this impressively researched, alarming book, Rosaleen Duffy investigates the world of nature conservation, arguing that the West's attitude to endangered wildlife is shallow, self-contradictory, and ultimately very damaging. Analyzing the workings of the black-market wildlife industry, Duffy points out that illegal trading is often the direct result of Western consumer desires, from coltan for cellular phones to exotic meats sold in London street markets. She looks at the role of ecotourism, showing how Western travelers contribute—often unwittingly—to the destruction of natural environments. Most strikingly, she argues that the imperatives of Western-style conservation often result in serious injustice to local people, who are branded as “problems' and subject to severe restrictions on their way of life and even extrajudicial killings.


Drawing Closer to Nature

Drawing Closer to Nature

Author: Peter London

Publisher: Shambhala Publications

Published: 2003-04-08

Total Pages: 372

ISBN-13:

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Educator and art therapist London uses stories, poetic meditations, and guided exercises to show readers how making art in nature can enhance their self-knowledge and creativity. 20 halftones.


Aesthetic Science

Aesthetic Science

Author: Alexander Wragge-Morley

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2020-04-17

Total Pages: 250

ISBN-13: 022668105X

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The scientists affiliated with the early Royal Society of London have long been regarded as forerunners of modern empiricism, rejecting the symbolic and moral goals of Renaissance natural history in favor of plainly representing the world as it really was. In Aesthetic Science, Alexander Wragge-Morley challenges this interpretation by arguing that key figures such as John Ray, Robert Boyle, Nehemiah Grew, Robert Hooke, and Thomas Willis saw the study of nature as an aesthetic project. To show how early modern naturalists conceived of the interplay between sensory experience and the production of knowledge, Aesthetic Science explores natural-historical and anatomical works of the Royal Society through the lens of the aesthetic. By underscoring the importance of subjective experience to the communication of knowledge about nature, Wragge-Morley offers a groundbreaking reconsideration of scientific representation in the early modern period and brings to light the hitherto overlooked role of aesthetic experience in the history of the empirical sciences.


Animals and Nature

Animals and Nature

Author: Rod Preece

Publisher: UBC Press

Published: 2011-11-01

Total Pages: 336

ISBN-13: 0774842202

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Western conceptions of objectivity and individuality have resulted in a readier appreciation of the worth of the animals and nature than has been recognized. This provocative book takes issue with the popular view that the Western cultural tradition, in contrast to Eastern and Aboriginal traditions, has encouraged attitudes of domination and exploitation towards nature, particularly animals. Preece argues that the Western tradition has much to commend it, and that descriptions of Aboriginal and Oriental orientations have often been misleadingly rosy, simplified and codified according to current fashionable concepts. Animals and Nature is the result of six years' intensive study into comparative religion, literature, philosophy, anthropology, mythology and animal welfare science.


Geographies of Nature

Geographies of Nature

Author: Steve Hinchliffe

Publisher: SAGE

Published: 2007-10-02

Total Pages: 226

ISBN-13: 1848607490

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"An exemplary introduction to cutting edge work on the geographies of nature. Intellectually demanding, clearly written and empirically rich, this is a book that deserves a wide readership within and beyond the geographical discipline." - Sarah J. Whatmore, Oxford University Centre for the Environment Geographies of Nature introduces readers to conventional understandings of nature - realist, environmental, constructivist - while examining alternative accounts from different disciplines where nature resists easy classification. Accessibly written, it demonstrates how recent thinking has urgent relevance and impact on the ways in which we approach environmental problems. The text: Makes concepts like ′environment′, ′conservation′, and ′sustainability′ accessible and applicable with the extensive use of case studies. Uses text boxes to introduce readers to debates and ideas. Grounds the reader and proceeds to the explanation of more complex arguments progressively. Geographies of Nature presents a new kind of environmental analysis, one that refuses to view nature as wholly separate to the human and nonhuman practices through which it is constantly made and remade.


Politics of Nature

Politics of Nature

Author: Bruno Latour

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2009-07-01

Total Pages: 320

ISBN-13: 0674039963

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A major work by one of the more innovative thinkers of our time, Politics of Nature does nothing less than establish the conceptual context for political ecology—transplanting the terms of ecology into more fertile philosophical soil than its proponents have thus far envisioned. Bruno Latour announces his project dramatically: “Political ecology has nothing whatsoever to do with nature, this jumble of Greek philosophy, French Cartesianism and American parks.” Nature, he asserts, far from being an obvious domain of reality, is a way of assembling political order without due process. Thus, his book proposes an end to the old dichotomy between nature and society—and the constitution, in its place, of a collective, a community incorporating humans and nonhumans and building on the experiences of the sciences as they are actually practiced. In a critique of the distinction between fact and value, Latour suggests a redescription of the type of political philosophy implicated in such a “commonsense” division—which here reveals itself as distinctly uncommonsensical and in fact fatal to democracy and to a healthy development of the sciences. Moving beyond the modernist institutions of “mononaturalism” and “multiculturalism,” Latour develops the idea of “multinaturalism,” a complex collectivity determined not by outside experts claiming absolute reason but by “diplomats” who are flexible and open to experimentation.


Nature Inside

Nature Inside

Author: Penny Sparke

Publisher: Yale University Press

Published: 2020-01-01

Total Pages: 226

ISBN-13: 0300244029

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The story of how plants and flowers have shaped interior design for over 200 years From ferns in 19th-century British parlors to contemporary "living walls" in commercial spaces, plants and flowers have long been incorporated into the design of public and private spaces. Spanning two centuries, Nature Inside explores the history and popularity of indoor plants, revealing the close relationship between architecture, interior design, and nature. Studying the international modern interior through the lens of plants in the human environment, author Penny Sparke attributes a degree of the interest in indoor plants to urbanization, and, more recently, the climate crisis, which serve as ongoing reminders that people must maintain a connection to, and respect for, the natural world. While architectural and interior design styles have evolved alongside the popularity of various plant species, the human need to bring nature indoors has remained constant.