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Before the Fall of Imperial Rome, priests cast the internal organs of sacrificial animals on temple floors, claiming to be able to divine the future from these entrails. By probing the remains of Alberta's past sacrifices -- reading her entrails -- Norman Conrad believes that we might dimly see at apparition of Alberta's future. This controversial book vividly portrays the history of land and life in Alberta, from the Ice Ages to the present. Making no apology for his criticism of government, regulators and large corporations, Norman Conrad makes a strident plea for Alberta's dangerously imperiled environment and presents a model that can be applied anywhere.
Agrarian Landscapes in Transition researches human interaction with the earth. With hundreds of acres of agricultural land going out of production every day, the introduction, spread, and abandonment of agriculture represents the most pervasive alteration of the Earth's environment for several thousand years. What happens when humans impose their spatial and temporal signatures on ecological regimes, and how does this manipulation affect the earth and nature's desire for equilibrium? Studies were conducted at six Long Term Ecological Research sites within the US, including New England, the Appalachian Mountains, Colorado, Michigan, Kansas, and Arizona. While each site has its own unique agri...
North America contains an incredibly diverse array of naturalenvironments, each supporting unique systems of plant and animallife. These systems, the largest of which are biomes, formintricate webs of life that have taken millennia to evolve. Thisrichly illustrated book introduces readers to this extraordinaryarray of natural communities and their subtle biological andgeological interactions. Completely revised and updated throughout, the second edition ofthis successful text takes a qualitative, intuitive approach to thesubject, beginning with an overview of essential ecological termsand concepts, such as competitive exclusion, taxa, niches, andsuccession. It then goes on to describe the ma...
Grazing lands represent the largest and most diverse land resource-taking up over half the earth's land surface. The large area grazing land occupies, its diversity of climates and soils, and the potential to improve its use and productivity all contribute to its importance for sequestering C and mitigating the greenhouse effect and other condition
The Canadian prairies are often envisioned as dry, windswept fields; however, much of southern Manitoba is not arid plain but wet prairie, poorly drained land subject to frequent flooding. Shannon Stunden Bower brings to light the complexities of surface-water management in Manitoba, from early artificial drainage efforts to late-twentieth-century attempts at watershed management. She engages scholarship on the state, liberalism, and bioregionalism in order to probe the connections between human and environmental change in the wet prairie. This account of an overlooked aspect of the region’s environmental history reveals how the biophysical nature of southern Manitoba has been an important factor in the formation of Manitoba society and the provincial state.
In this volume, Andrew Sluyter demonstrates that Africans played significant creative roles in establishing open-range cattle ranching in the Americas. In so doing, he provides a new way of looking at and studying the history of land, labour, property and commerce in the Atlantic world.
"The process by which two neighborhood butchers turned themselves into landed industrialists depended to an extraordinary degree on the acquisition, manipulation, and exploitation of natural resources. Igler examines the broader impact of western industrialism - as exemplified by Miller & Lux - on landscapes and waterscapes, bringing to the forefront the important issues of land reclamation, water politics, San Francisco's unique business environment, and the city's relation to its surrounding hinterlands. He provides a rich discussion of the social relations engineered by Miller & Lux, from the dispossession of Californio rancheros to the ethnic segmentation of the firm's massive labor force."--Jacket.
Elegantly assembles the environmental, social, cultural, political, and economic history of the Great Plains in the 19th century.