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An argument that the perception of arid lands as wastelands is politically motivated and that these landscapes are variable, biodiverse ecosystems, whose inhabitants must be empowered. Deserts are commonly imagined as barren, defiled, worthless places, wastelands in need of development. This understanding has fueled extensive anti-desertification efforts—a multimillion-dollar global campaign driven by perceptions of a looming crisis. In this book, Diana Davis argues that estimates of desertification have been significantly exaggerated and that deserts and drylands—which constitute about 41% of the earth's landmass—are actually resilient and biodiverse environments in which a great many...
The landscapes of the Middle East have captured our imaginations throughout history. Images of endless golden dunes, camel caravans, isolated desert oases, and rivers lined with palm trees have often framed written and visual representations of the region. Embedded in these portrayals is the common belief that the environment, in most places, has been deforested and desertified by centuries of misuse. It is precisely such orientalist environmental imaginaries, increasingly undermined by contemporary ecological data, that the eleven authors in this volume question. This is the first volume to critically examine culturally constructed views of the environmental history of the Middle East and suggest that they have often benefitted elites at the expense of the ecologies and the peoples of the region. The contributors expose many of the questionable policies and practices born of these environmental imaginaries and related histories that have been utilized in the region since the colonial period. They further reveal how power, in the form of development programs, notions of nationalism, and hydrological maps, for instance, relates to environmental knowledge production.
An argument that the perception of arid lands as wastelands is politically motivated and that these landscapes are variable, biodiverse ecosystems, whose inhabitants must be empowered. Deserts are commonly imagined as barren, defiled, worthless places, wastelands in need of development. This understanding has fueled extensive anti-desertification efforts—a multimillion-dollar global campaign driven by perceptions of a looming crisis. In this book, Diana Davis argues that estimates of desertification have been significantly exaggerated and that deserts and drylands—which constitute about 41% of the earth's landmass—are actually resilient and biodiverse environments in which a great many...
A gentleman’s daughter. A marquess’s son. Hate at first sight. Cassandra Crofton was raised a gentleman’s daughter. When her father dies, however, she is forced to join her uncle in the American colonies. To add to her humiliation, on the journey to Pennsylvania, a snobbish popinjay refuses to treat her with the respect she deserves. Lord David Beaufort is the youngest son of the Marquess of Dorset, but no one in all of Dorsetshire would care he was leaving. He wants to find his own place and purpose in Philadelphia—and ignore this impertinent country gentleman’s daughter who shows him nothing but contempt. When Cassandra’s uncle becomes Lord David’s landlord and mentor, she cannot escape him. But as Lord David becomes deathly ill, Cassandra is thrown into the role of nurse. The more time she spends taking care of him, against all odds, the more Lord David finds himself caring for her. Can he convince her to give him a chance?
This book is for anyone who wishes to illustrate their mathematical ideas, which in our experience means everyone. It is organized by material, rather than by subject area, and purposefully emphasizes the process of creating things, including discussions of failures that occurred along the way. As a result, the reader can learn from the experiences of those who came before, and will be inspired to create their own illustrations. Topics illustrated within include prime numbers, fractals, the Klein bottle, Borromean rings, tilings, space-filling curves, knot theory, billiards, complex dynamics, algebraic surfaces, groups and prime ideals, the Riemann zeta function, quadratic fields, hyperbolic space, and hyperbolic 3-manifolds. Everyone who opens this book should find a type of mathematics with which they identify. Each contributor explains the mathematics behind their illustration at an accessible level, so that all readers can appreciate the beauty of both the object itself and the mathematics behind it.
The desert and desertification are concepts with unstable, unfixed definitions that haunt current politics and aesthetics. Manual for a future desert proposes a full-spectrum scanning of the desert and its multiple implications across cultural, technological, political, and ecological concerns. Emerging from an artistic research program conducted in the Chihuahuan Desert on western Texas, this book is a time-space capsule; it collects routes, tools, and understandings on the desert in order to address and act upon issues that shape present and future realities. It is a manual for tapping into the exigency of the desert; it determines the coordinates for finding a future desert without deserting the future --
This handbook is recognition of the need to better integrate physical and human geography. It combines a collection of work and research within the new field of Critical Physical Geography, which gives critical attention to relations of social power with deep knowledge of a particular field of biophysical science. Critical Physical Geography research accords careful attention to biophysical landscapes and the power relations that have increasingly come to shape them, and to the politics of environmental science and the role of biophysical inquiry in promoting social and environmental justice. The Palgrave Handbook of Critical Physical Geography lays out the scope and guiding principles of Critical Physical Geography research. It presents a carefully selected set of empirical work, demonstrating the range and intellectual strength of existing integrative work in geography research. This handbook is the first of its kind to cover this emerging discipline and will be of significant interest to students and academics across the fields of geography, the environment and sustainability.
The ongoing conflict in Syria has made clear just how limited the general knowledge of Syrian society and history is in the West. For those watching the headlines and wondering what led the nation to this point, and what might come next, this book is a perfect place to start developing a deeper understanding. Based on decades of living and working in Syria, My House in Damascus offers an inside view of Syria’s cultural and complex religious and ethnic communities. Diana Darke, a fluent Arabic speaker who moved to Damascus in 2004 after decades of regular visits, details the ways that the Assad regime, and its relationship to the people, differs from the regimes in Egypt, Tunisia, and Libya—and why it was thus always less likely to collapse quickly, even in the face of widespread unrest and violence. Through the author’s firsthand experiences of buying and restoring a house in the old city of Damascus, which she later offered as a sanctuary to friends, Darke presents a clear picture of the realities of life on the ground and what hope there is for Syria’s future.
New Media and American Politics is the first book to examine the effect on modern politics of the new media, which include talk radio, tabloid journalism, television talk shows, entertainment media, and computer networks. Davis and Owen discuss the new media's cultural environment, audience, and content, before going on to evaluate its impact on everything from elections to policy making to the old media itself.