Ecology and Enclosure

Ecology and Enclosure

Author: Shirley Wittering

Publisher: Windgather Press

Published: 2013-02-07

Total Pages: 249

ISBN-13: 190968600X

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South Cambridgeshire has some of the richest arable land in England and has been cultivated for millennia. By the turn of the nineteenth century industrialisation and massive population growth had resulted in an enormous increase in the demand for food, which in turn led to enclosure. But this desire to plough every available piece of land resulted in the destruction of many valuable and distinctive habitats that had existed for centuries. The Ecology of Enclosure breaks new ground in comparing the effect of Parliamentary Enclosure with the findings of the enthusiastic 'Botanisers' from Cambridge; this reveals not only the effect of enclosure on the ecology of the land but also on the people whose link with the land was broken. The first section presents a study of social and agricultural life before enclosure, describing geology and climate; the fold-course open field system of farming and the strict stinting rules which governed how land could be used for grazing and stock movement; and the crop rotation systems employed. The second part describes the process of enclosure, including opposition to it; the changes that occurred to the landscape and within village communities as work in industry gradually replaced rural occupations; the effects of fencing on movement; and of the loss of common land to the plough. The third section is an analysis of the new study of Botany which the University of Cambridge was enjoying in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries based on their own records and a review of some of the specific effects on the flora and fauna of the area.


The Immersive Enclosure

The Immersive Enclosure

Author: Paul Roquet

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 2022-05-24

Total Pages: 368

ISBN-13: 0231555962

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Winner, 2023 Lewis Mumford Award for Outstanding Scholarship in the Ecology of Technics, Media Ecology Association Although virtual reality promises to immerse a person in another world, its true power lies in its ability to sever a person’s spatial situatedness in this one. This is especially clear in Japan, where the VR headset has been embraced as a way to block off existing social environments and reroute perception into more malleable virtual platforms. Is immersion just another name for enclosure? In this groundbreaking analysis of virtual reality, Paul Roquet uncovers how the technology is reshaping the politics of labor, gender, home, and nation. He examines how VR in Japan diverged from American militarism and techno-utopian visions and became a tool for renegotiating personal space. Individuals turned to the VR headset to immerse themselves in three-dimensional worlds drawn from manga, video games, and genre literature. The Japanese government promised VR-operated robots would enable a new era of remote work, targeting those who could not otherwise leave home. Middle-aged men and corporate brands used VR to reimagine themselves through the virtual bodies of anime-styled teenage girls. At a time when digital platforms continue to encroach on everyday life, The Immersive Enclosure takes a critical look at these attempts to jettison existing social realities and offers a bold new approach for understanding the media environments to come.


Nature of Enclosure

Nature of Enclosure

Author: Jeffrey S. Nesbit

Publisher: Actar

Published: 2022-09

Total Pages: 160

ISBN-13: 9781638409731

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Nature of Enclosure interrogates the role of architecture and urbanization in a post-pandemic society, to discuss topics from closed forms of capital to the exclusive boundaries of environment and politics. From Crystal Palace in 1851 to Buckminster Fuller's Spaceship Earth in 1969, nature became enclosed. Claimed to be a reaction of Norbert Wiener's cybernetics, Fuller's geodesic domes became symbols of American counterculture. Yet, from Fuller's description of Spaceship Earth "sea masters," the dome seems to prioritize an environment of occupation inside the dome, over those residing outside--a world of civilized control on its interior and wilderness, war, and wasteland on the other side. Overlapped by cultural consumption and politics, planetary imagination stimulates a useful framework for interrogating the human impact on environmental limitations over a technological foreground. The blurry lines between the engineered logic and cultural imagination are continually embedded and influenced by intuition in the cultural practices of capital enclosure. Theories, design practices, and the forms of imagination, including science fiction, open up critical questions on the status of our environment here on Earth. Nature of Enclosure is a series of conversations to gather experts from a range of disciplines, including architects, landscape architects, architectural historians, design theory scholars, geographers, historians of science and technology, and professionals at the intersection of architecture and the environment. Organized in three parts, (1) Nature of the Synthetic Environment, (2) Air, Capital and the Planetary Imaginary, and (3) Enclosed Boundaries of Political Geographies, this book continues the conversation with a collection of essays as both reflections from the provocative discussions and expanding the discourse of enclosed environments in architecture and design fields. With Contributions of Daisy Ames, Rachel Armstrong, Daniel Barber, Neeraj Bhatia, Jordan Bimm, Marcella Del Signore, Mishuana Goeman, Mariano Gomez Luque, Aleksandra Jaeschke, Lydia Kallipoliti, Ersela Kripa, Mae-ling Lokko, Denise Luna, Ana Miljacki, Stephen Mueller, Joshua Nason, Antoine Picon, Shawn Rickenbacker, David Salomon, Alex Santander, Fred Scharmen, Julia Smachylo, Geoffrey Thün, Joël Vacheron, and Kathy Velikov


Marine Mesocosms

Marine Mesocosms

Author: G.D. Grice

Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media

Published: 2012-12-06

Total Pages: 426

ISBN-13: 1461256453

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Techniques developed for enclosing viable natural planktonic ecosystems pro vided the opportunity for prolonged and detailed investigation of dynamic events within the pelagic system of a known water body. Recent investigations into plankton ecology, using enclosure systems in dif ferent marine environments, are discussed in relation to the data obtained from the Nanaimo, British Columbia, Canada, plastic-sphere experiments of 1960 and 1962. Three types of modern enclosure experiments are recognized: floating systems within nutrient levels maintained or running down, and benthic attached systems. The review largely discusses results from the two kinds of floating systems. Processes at several trophic levels have been investigated in enclosures. This review attempts to draw together details from all experimental systems to emphasize the enclosures' contribution to our understanding of planktonic systems. Enclosures made it possible to examine primary production processes, particularly in relation to inorganic nutrient availability and water-column sta bility. Recent experiments have used the understanding of these processes as a management technique in maintaining different planktonic systems. Relation ships between primary and secondary trophic levels are not always easy to inter pret, since the growth of primary carnivore populations can often determine the survival of zooplankton populations. Nevertheless, the development of co horts of herbivorous zooplankton has been followed in several enclosures, yield ing useful information on development times and production rates. In enclosed systems it is thus possible to directly relate tertiary level production to inorganic nutrient input, and to calculate production rates and exchange efficiencies at several trophic levels.


Blue Ridge Commons

Blue Ridge Commons

Author: Kathryn Newfont

Publisher: University of Georgia Press

Published: 2012

Total Pages: 416

ISBN-13: 0820341258

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"In the late twentieth century, residents of the Blue Ridge mountains in western North Carolina fiercely resisted certain environmental efforts, even while launching aggressive initiatives of their own. Kathryn Newfont provides context for those events by examining the environmental history of this region over the course of three hundred years, identifying what she calls commons environmentalism--a cultural strain of conservation in American history that has gone largely unexplored. Efforts in the 1970s to expand federal wilderness areas in the Pisgah and Nantahala national forests generated strong opposition. For many mountain residents the idea of unspoiled wilderness seemed economically unsound, historically dishonest, and elitist. Newfont shows that local people's sense of commons environmentalism required access to the forests that they viewed as semipublic places for hunting, fishing, and working. Policies that removed large tracts from use were perceived as 'enclosure' and resisted. Incorporating deep archival work and years of interviews and conversations with Appalachian residents, Blue Ridge Commons reveals a tradition of people building robust forest protection movements on their own terms."--p. [4] of cover.


Global Seagrass Research Methods

Global Seagrass Research Methods

Author: F.T. Short

Publisher: Elsevier

Published: 2001-11-06

Total Pages: 506

ISBN-13: 008052561X

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This thorough and informative volume presents a set of detailed, globally applicable techniques for seagrass research.The book provides methods for all aspects of seagrass science from basic plant collection to statistical approaches and investigations of plant-animal interaction. The emphasis is on methods that are applicable in both developing and developed countries. The importance of seagrasses in coastal and near shore environments, and ultimately their contribution to the productivity of the world's oceans, has become increasingly recognised over the last 40 years.Seagrasses provide food for sea turtles, nearly 100 fish species, waterfowl and for the marine mammals the manatee and dugong. Seagrasses also support complex food webs by virtue of their physical structure and primary production and are well known for their role as breeding grounds and nurseries for important crustacean, finfish and shell fish populations. Seagrasses are the basis of an important detrital food chain. The plants filter nutrients and contaminants from the water, stabilise sediments and act as dampeners to wave action. Seagrasses rank with coral reefs and mangroves as some of the world's most productive coastal habitat and strong linkages among these habitats make the loss of seagrasses a contributing factor in the degradation of the world's oceans.Contributors from around the world provide up-to-date methods for comparable collection of ecological information from both temperate and tropical seagrass ecosystems.


Enclosed

Enclosed

Author: Liza Grandia

Publisher: University of Washington Press

Published: 2012-03-15

Total Pages: 310

ISBN-13: 0295804173

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This impassioned and rigorous analysis of the territorial plight of the Q'eqchi Maya of Guatemala highlights an urgent problem for indigenous communities around the world - repeated displacement from their lands. Liza Grandia uses the tools of ethnography, history, cartography, and ecology to explore the recurring enclosures of Guatemala's second largest indigenous group, who number a million strong. Having lost most of their highland territory to foreign coffee planters at the end of the 19th century, Q'eqchi' people began migrating into the lowland forests of northern Guatemala and southern Belize. Then, pushed deeper into the frontier by cattle ranchers, lowland Q'eqchi' found themselves in conflict with biodiversity conservationists who established protected areas across this region during the 1990s. The lowland, maize-growing Q'eqchi' of the 21st century face even more problems as they are swept into global markets through the Dominican Republic-Central America Free Trade Agreement (DR-CAFTA) and the Puebla to Panama Plan (PPP). The waves of dispossession imposed upon them, driven by encroaching coffee plantations, cattle ranches, and protected areas, have unsettled these agrarian people. Enclosed describes how they have faced and survived their challenges and, in doing so, helps to explain what is happening in other contemporary enclosures of public "common" space. A Capell Family Book Watch the book trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pTLvmg3mHE8


Ecology and the Literature of the British Left

Ecology and the Literature of the British Left

Author: H. Gustav Klaus

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-04-29

Total Pages: 316

ISBN-13: 131714631X

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Premised on the belief that a social and an ecological agenda are compatible, this collection offers readings in the ecology of left and radical writing from the Romantic period to the present. While early ecocriticism tended to elide the bitter divisions within and between societies, recent practitioners of ecofeminism, environmental justice, and social ecology have argued that the social, the economic and the environmental have to be seen as part of the same process. Taking up this challenge, the contributors trace the origins of an environmental sensibility and of the modern left to their roots in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, charting the ways in which the literary imagination responds to the political, industrial and agrarian revolutions. Topics include Samuel Taylor Coleridge's credentials as a green writer, the interaction between John Ruskin's religious and political ideas and his changing view of nature, William Morris and the Garden City movement, H. G. Wells and the Fabians, the devastated landscapes in the poetry and fiction of the First World War, and the leftist pastoral poetry of the 1930s. In historicizing and connecting environmentally sensitive literature with socialist thought, these essays explore the interactive vision of nature and society in the work of writers ranging from William Wordsworth and John Clare to John Berger and John Burnside.