Nature's Due
Author: Brian C. Goodwin
Publisher:
Published: 2007
Total Pages: 196
ISBN-13:
DOWNLOAD EBOOKChallenges modern ideas on the interaction of science, nature and human culture, with far-reaching consequences for how we govern our world.
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The Nature of Fear
Author: Daniel T. Blumstein
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Published: 2020-09-08
Total Pages: 257
ISBN-13: 0674916484
DOWNLOAD EBOOKAn Open Letters Review Best Book of the Year A leading expert in animal behavior takes us into the wild to better understand and manage our fears. Fear, honed by millions of years of natural selection, kept our ancestors alive. Whether by slithering away, curling up in a ball, or standing still in the presence of a predator, humans and other animals have evolved complex behaviors in order to survive the hazards the world presents. But, despite our evolutionary endurance, we still have much to learn about how to manage our response to danger. For more than thirty years, Daniel Blumstein has been studying animals’ fear responses. His observations lead to a firm conclusion: fear preserves security, but at great cost. A foraging flock of birds expends valuable energy by quickly taking flight when a raptor appears. And though the birds might successfully escape, they leave their food source behind. Giant clams protect their valuable tissue by retracting their mantles and closing their shells when a shadow passes overhead, but then they are unable to photosynthesize, losing the capacity to grow. Among humans, fear is often an understandable and justifiable response to sources of threat, but it can exact a high toll on health and productivity. Delving into the evolutionary origins and ecological contexts of fear across species, The Nature of Fear considers what we can learn from our fellow animals—from successes and failures. By observing how animals leverage alarm to their advantage, we can develop new strategies for facing risks without panic.
A New Ecological Order
Author: Ştefan Dorondel
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
Published: 2022-05-03
Total Pages: 464
ISBN-13: 0822988844
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThe rise of industrial capitalism in the nineteenth century forged a new ecological order in North American and Western European states, radically transforming the environment through science and technology in the name of human progress. Far less known are the dramatic environmental changes experienced by Eastern Europe, in many ways a terra incognita for environmental historians and anthropologists. A New Ecological Order explores, from a historical and ethnographic perspective, the role of state planners, bureaucrats, and experts—engineers, agricultural engineers, geographers, biologists, foresters, and architects—as agents of change in the natural world of Eastern Europe from 1870 to the early twenty-first century. Contributors consider territories engulfed by empires, from the Habsburg to the Ottoman to tsarist Russia; territories belonging to disintegrating empires; and countries in the Balkan Peninsula, Central and Eastern Europe, and Eurasia. Together, they follow a rhetoric of “correcting nature,” a desire to exploit the natural environment and put its resources to work for the sake of developing the economies and infrastructures of modern states. They reveal an eagerness among newly established nation-states, after centuries of imperial economic and political impositions, to import scientific knowledge and new technologies from Western Europe that would aid in their economic development, and how those imports and ideas about nature ultimately shaped local projects and policies.
Last Child in the Woods
Author: Richard Louv
Publisher: Algonquin Books
Published: 2008-04-22
Total Pages: 414
ISBN-13: 156512586X
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThe Book That Launched an International Movement Fans of The Anxious Generation will adore Last Child in the Woods, Richard Louv's groundbreaking New York Times bestseller. “An absolute must-read for parents.” —The Boston Globe “It rivals Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring.” —The Cincinnati Enquirer “I like to play indoors better ’cause that’s where all the electrical outlets are,” reports a fourth grader. But it’s not only computers, television, and video games that are keeping kids inside. It’s also their parents’ fears of traffic, strangers, Lyme disease, and West Nile virus; their schools’ emphasis on more and more homework; their structured schedules; and their lack of access to natural areas. Local governments, neighborhood associations, and even organizations devoted to the outdoors are placing legal and regulatory constraints on many wild spaces, sometimes making natural play a crime. As children’s connections to nature diminish and the social, psychological, and spiritual implications become apparent, new research shows that nature can offer powerful therapy for such maladies as depression, obesity, and attention deficit disorder. Environment-based education dramatically improves standardized test scores and grade-point averages and develops skills in problem solving, critical thinking, and decision making. Anecdotal evidence strongly suggests that childhood experiences in nature stimulate creativity. In Last Child in the Woods, Louv talks with parents, children, teachers, scientists, religious leaders, child-development researchers, and environmentalists who recognize the threat and offer solutions. Louv shows us an alternative future, one in which parents help their kids experience the natural world more deeply—and find the joy of family connectedness in the process. Included in this edition: A Field Guide with 100 Practical Actions We Can Take Discussion Points for Book Groups, Classrooms, and Communities Additional Notes by the Author New and Updated Research from the U.S. and Abroad
This Radical Land
Author: Daegan Miller
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2018-03-22
Total Pages: 329
ISBN-13: 022633631X
DOWNLOAD EBOOK“The American people sees itself advance across the wilderness, draining swamps, straightening rivers, peopling the solitude, and subduing nature,” wrote Alexis de Tocqueville in 1835. That’s largely how we still think of nineteenth-century America today: a country expanding unstoppably, bending the continent’s natural bounty to the national will, heedless of consequence. A country of slavery and of Indian wars. There’s much truth in that vision. But if you know where to look, you can uncover a different history, one of vibrant resistance, one that’s been mostly forgotten. This Radical Land recovers that story. Daegan Miller is our guide on a beautifully written, revelatory trip across the continent during which we encounter radical thinkers, settlers, and artists who grounded their ideas of freedom, justice, and progress in the very landscapes around them, even as the runaway engine of capitalism sought to steamroll everything in its path. Here we meet Thoreau, the expert surveyor, drawing anticapitalist property maps. We visit a black antislavery community in the Adirondack wilderness of upstate New York. We discover how seemingly commercial photographs of the transcontinental railroad secretly sent subversive messages, and how a band of utopian anarchists among California’s sequoias imagined a greener, freer future. At every turn, everyday radicals looked to landscape for the language of their dissent—drawing crucial early links between the environment and social justice, links we’re still struggling to strengthen today. Working in a tradition that stretches from Thoreau to Rebecca Solnit, Miller offers nothing less than a new way of seeing the American past—and of understanding what it can offer us for the present . . . and the future.
The Future of Nature
Author: Libby Robin
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2013-10-22
Total Pages: 585
ISBN-13: 0300188471
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThis anthology provides an historical overview of the scientific ideas behind environmental prediction and how, as predictions about environmental change have been taken more seriously and widely, they have affected politics, policy, and public perception. Through an array of texts and commentaries that examine the themes of progress, population, environment, biodiversity and sustainability from a global perspective, it explores the meaning of the future in the twenty-first century. Providing access and reference points to the origins and development of key disciplines and methods, it will encourage policy makers, professionals, and students to reflect on the roots of their own theories and practices.
Swimming and Flying in Nature
Author: Theodore Wu
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
Published: 2013-04-17
Total Pages: 582
ISBN-13: 1475713266
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThe Symposium on Swimming and Flying in Nature which was held at the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, California from July 8-12, 1974 was conceived with the objective of providing an interdisciplinary forum for the discussion of funda mental biological and fluid mechanical aspects of these forms of natura110comotion. It was the earnest hope of all concerned in the organization of the Symposium that the exchange of knowledge and interaction of ideas from the disciplines involved would stimu late new research in this developing field. If the liveliness of the discussion generated among the 250 or so participants is any measure, then this objective was fulfilled to a significant degree. These two companion volumes contain the manuscripts of the papers presented during the Symposium. It is hoped that this permanent record will serve to perpetuate the enthusiasm and active thought generated during those days in Pasadena. The first volume contains the proceedings of the first two days of the confer ence (Sessions I to IV) which concentrated on the locomotion of micro-organisms. The second volume (Sessions V to VIII) deals with the propulsion of larger fish, insects and birds. Professor Sir James Lighthill's Special Invited Lecture which opened the Symposium is contained in the second volume, rather than the first, since it deals with natural flight.
Observations concerning the Nature and due Method of treating the Gout ... together with an account of the nature and qualities of the Bath waters
Author: George Cheyne
Publisher:
Published: 1720
Total Pages: 114
ISBN-13:
DOWNLOAD EBOOKManaging Natural Catastrophies
Author: Anja Christina Reissberg
Publisher: Campus Verlag
Published: 2012-07
Total Pages: 289
ISBN-13: 3593396211
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThis book will assess the O'ahu disaster management system's current ability to manage a high-impact low-probability (HILP) event, a Category 4 or 5 hurricane striking the Hawai'ian island of O'ahu. It will investigate through one of the core diagnostic tool of management cybernetics, the Viable System Model (VSM), deficiencies of the existing disaster management system used across the United States and offers suggestions to improve its effectiveness. Further, this book represents a general assessment of the application of management cybernetics to disaster management systems worldwide.
Natural Resources of the United States
Author: Jacob Harris Patton
Publisher:
Published: 1894
Total Pages: 560
ISBN-13:
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