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Why Elephants Cry is a fascinating frolic through the literature and evidence surrounding the use of unusual behavior of animals…
to measure and predict the environment. The role of animals, from the smallest ant to the biggest elephant, as predictors of environmental changes is framed around the climate crisis, which highlights the increasingly important part that animals will have to play in the future. Renowned biologist Professor John T. Hancock collects anecdotal stories and myths along with scientific evidence, demonstrating that observation of animals can be of tangible use. He looks at the measurement of the air temperature using ants, crickets and snakes, and goes on to assess the evidence that the observation of a wide range of animals can predict the weather or the imminent eruption of volcanoes and earthquakes. Evidence of animals being able to predict lunar and solar events, such as lunar cycles and the Northern Lights, is also considered. This is the only time that all this literature has been brought together in one place, a fascinating reference for anybody interested in animals and the environment. The book is also an ideal supplementary textbook for students studying animal behaviour.Zoo and Aquarium History: Ancient Animal Collections to Conservation Centers
Par Vernon N. Kisling Jr.. 2023
Wild animals have been housed in zoos and aquariums for 5,000 years, fascinating people living in virtually every society. Today,…
these institutions are at a new milestone in their history. This second edition of Zoo and Aquarium History takes the reader on a journey through the transition of private collections to menageries, to zoos, then zoological gardens, and more recently conservation centers and sanctuaries. Under the direction of Vernon N. Kisling, an expert in zoo history, an international team of authors has thoroughly updated the only comprehensive, global history of animal collections, menageries, zoos, and aquariums. The resulting book documents the continuum of efforts in maintaining wild animal collections from ancient civilizations through today, explaining how modern zoos have developed their mission statements around the core aims of conservation, education, research and recreation. This new edition pulls together regional information, including new chapters on zoological gardens of Canada, Latin America, China, Israel, the Middle East, and New Zealand, along with the cultural aspects of each region to provide a foundation upon which further research can be based. It presents a chronological listing of the world's zoos and aquariums and features many never-before published photographs. Sidebars present supplementary information on pertinent personalities, events, and wildlife conservation issues. The original Appendix has been expanded to include over 1,200 zoos and aquariums, providing an invaluable resource. This is an extensive, chronological introduction to the subject, highlighting the published and archival resources for those who want to know more.So Many Snakes, So Little Time: Uncovering the Secret Lives of Australia’s Serpents
Par Rick Shine. 2022
Snakes are creatures of mystery, arousing fear in many people but fascination in a few. Recent research has transformed our…
understanding of the behaviour and ecology of these animals, revealed their important roles in diverse ecosystems, and discovered new and effective ways to conserve their populations and to promote coexistence between snakes and people. One of the leading contributors to that scientific revolution has been Prof Rick Shine. Based in Australia, whose snake fauna is diverse and often dangerous, his experiences and anecdotes will inspire a new generation of serpent scientists. Spellbinding stories highlight the challenges, frustrations, and joys of discovery, and give the reader a greater appreciation of these often-slandered slithering reptiles.Key Features Documents the important role played by a preeminent herpetologist. Focuses on research conducted in Australia, especially on snakes. Summarizes highly influential conservation studies. Explores the ways in which research has deepened our understanding of snakes.Sustainable Engineering: Process Intensification, Energy Analysis, and Artificial Intelligence
Par Yasar Demirel, Marc A. Rosen. 2024
Sustainable engineering is of great importance for resilient and agile technology and society. This book balances economics, environment, and societal…
elements of sustainable engineering by integrating process intensification, energy analysis, and artificial intelligence to reduce production costs, improve the use of material and energy, product quality, safety, societal well-being, and water usage. The book provides comprehensive discussion of topics on process intensification, energy analysis, and artificial intelligence that include optimization, energy integration, green engineering, pinch analysis, exergy analysis, feasibility analysis, life cycle assessment, circular economy, bioeconomy, data processing, machine learning, expert systems, digital twins, and self-optimized plants for sustainable engineering.Limits to Privatization: How to Avoid Too Much of a Good Thing - A Report to the Club of Rome
Par Ernst Ulrich von Weizs&, Oran R. Young, Matthias Finger, Marianne Beisheim. 2005
Limits to Privatization is the first thorough audit of privatizations from around the world. It outlines the historical emergence of…
globalization and liberalization, and from analyses of over 50 case studies of best- and worst-case experiences of privatization, it provides guidance for policy and action that will restore and maintain the right balance between the powers and responsibilities of the state, the private sector and the increasingly important role of civil society. The result is a book of major importance that challenges one of the orthodoxies of our day and provides a benchmark for future debate.The classic backpacker’s handbook—revised and updated—providing expert guidelines for anyone who loves the outdoors.The Wilderness Guide brings the savvy of…
the world's most famous and respected outdoor organization to everyone—from the sixteen million backpacking Americans to the more than 265 million people, tenderfeet and trail-hardened hikers, who visit our national parks annually. It covers:-Selecting equipment—including discussions of the advantages and disadvantages of products such as the internal frame pack, lighter-weight boots, and freestanding tents-The latest “leave no trace” camping techniques-Traveling safely and sensibly—including vital information on maps, compasses, and tips on crossing difficult terrain-Backcountry cooking, with tips on building fires and tricks for making gourmet meals-Search-and-rescue techniques, including how to organize a self-sufficient search group and when to call in professional rescue teamsIllustrated throughout with instructional drawings and photos and featuring lists of equipment, the Wilderness Guide is a must-have for anyone planning to explore the great outdoors.Bold Scientists: Dispatches from the Battle for Honest Science
Par Michael Riordon. 2014
As governments and corporations scramble to pull the plug on research that proves that they are poisoning our planet and…
rush to muzzle the scientists who dare to share their disturbing data, it seems the powerful have declared a war on science. Michael Riordon asks deep questions of bold scientists who defy the status quo including: an Indigenous biologist who integrates traditional knowledge and a trickster’s wit; an engineering professor who exposes the myths and dangers of fracking; a forensic geneticist who traces children stolen by the military in El Salvador; a sociologist who investigates the lure and threat of mass surveillance; a radical psychologist who confronts psychiatry’s dangerous power; and a young marine biologist who risks her career to defend science and democracy. Who controls science and at what cost to the earth and its inhabitants? Can we change? This is unspun science for dangerous times.Testimonio: Canadian Mining in the Aftermath of Genocides in Guatemala
Par Catherine Nolin, Grahame Russell. 2021
What is land? A resource to be exploited? A commodity to be traded? A home to cherish? In Guatemala, a…
country still reeling from thirty-six years of US-backed state repression and genocides, dominant Canadian mining interests cash in on the transformation of land into “property,” while those responsible act with near-total impunity. Editors Catherine Nolin and Grahame Russell draw on over thirty years of community-based research and direct community support work in Guatemala to expose the ruthless state machinery that benefits the Canadian mining industry—a staggeringly profitable juggernaut of exploitation, sanctioned and supported every step of the way by the Canadian government. This edited collection calls on Canadians to hold our government and companies fully to account for their role in enabling and profiting from violence in Guatemala. The text stands apart in featuring a series of unflinching testimonios (testimonies) authored by Indigenous community leaders in Guatemala, as well as wide-ranging contributions from investigative journalists, scholars, lawyers, activists, and documentarians on the ground. As resources are ripped from the earth and communities and environments ripped apart, the act of standing in solidarity and bearing witness—rather than extracting knowledge—becomes more radical than ever.Fighting Dirty: How a Small Community Took on Big Trash
Par Poh-Gek Forkert. 2017
Fighting Dirty tells the story of how one small group of farmers, small-town residents, and Indigenous people fought the world’s…
largest waste disposal company to stop them from expanding a local dumpsite into a massive landfill. As one of the experts brought in to assess the impact the toxic waste would have on the community, Poh-Gek Forkert was part of the adventures and misadventures of their decades-long fight.Good Crop / Bad Crop: Seed Politics and the Future of Food in Canada
Par Devlin Kuyek. 2007
IN RECENT YEARS Canadians have become more and more concerned about the origins oftheir food and the environmental impacts of…
pesticides in agriculture. What is less well knownis that pesticide corporations such as Monsanto and Du Pont have bought their way into the seed industry and are taking control of what was once the exclusive domain of farmers.In Good Crop / Bad Crop, Devlin Kuyek deftly examines the economic and environmental background of the modern seed trade from a Canadian perspective. Historically seeds were viewed more as public goods than as commodities, and plant breeding objectives were widely shared by scientists, governments, and farmers. Now that approach is changing; seeds have become increasingly commodified, and plant breeding has become subject to corporate priorities. Farmers and citizens in Canada, Kuyek points out, need to heed the hard-won lessons from the developing world, where farmers greatly damaged by the much-heralded approaches of theGreen Revolution are now taking steps to reclaim control over seed supplies, food security, and their futures.Unearthing Justice: How to Protect Your Community from the Mining Industry
Par Joan Kuyek. 2019
The mining industry continues to be at the forefront of colonial dispossession around the world. It controls information about its…
intrinsic costs and benefits, propagates myths about its contribution to the economy, shapes government policy and regulation, and deals ruthlessly with its opponents. Brimming with case studies, anecdotes, resources, and illustrations, Unearthing Justice exposes the mining process and its externalized impacts on the environment, Indigenous Peoples, communities, workers, and governments. But, most importantly, the book shows how people are fighting back. Whether it is to stop a mine before it starts, to get an abandoned mine cleaned up, to change laws and policy, or to mount a campaign to influence investors, Unearthing Justice is an essential handbook for anyone trying to protect the places and people they love.Radical Transformation: Oligarchy, Collapse, and the Crisis of Civilization
Par Kevin MacKay. 2017
Radical Transformation is a story about industrial civilization’s impending collapse, and about the possibilities of averting this fate. Human communities…
first emerged as egalitarian, democratic groups that existed in symbiotic relationship with their environments. Increasing complexity led to the emergence of oligarchy, in which societies became captive to the logic of domination, exploitation, and ecological destruction. The challenge facing us today is to build a movement that will radically transform civilization and once more align our evolutionary trajectory in the direction of democracy, equality, and ecological sustainability.Rubbish!: Dirt On Our Hands And Crisis Ahead
Par Richard Girling. 2005
We can no longer cope with our waste. Every hour in the UK we throw away enough rubbish to fill…
the Albert hall - a statistic quoted so often that perhaps we've stopped imagining what it means. And every year the flow accelerates.This is the story of our rubbish - from the first human bowel movement to the littering of outer space. With a hankerchief to his nose, Girling picks through our fridge mountain, our crumbling sewers, trading waste, packaging waste, hazardous industrial waste... it is a mucky saga of carelessness, greed and opportunism, wasted opportunity and official bungling. But Rubbish! is also a plea for us to consider other kinds of waste: the trashing of our landscape, the unstoppable floods of junk that clog our mailboxes, litter the skies and foul the airwaves...Rubbish! may not be a conventional battle cry but this is unmistakably a call to arms - not just for the three 'R's - reduce, re-use, recycle - but for us to fight for new ideas, brave initiative rather than reliance on old systems that are crumbling before our eyes.The Queen's Green Canopy: Ancient Woodlands and Trees
Par Adrian Houston, Charles Sainsbury-Plaice. 2023
Stunning photographs of the United Kingdom's most spectacular trees - with a foreword by His Majesty the King.The Queen's Green…
Canopy is a beautiful photography book showcasing 70 ancient trees and 70 ancient woodlands dedicated by the QGC initiative in honour of Her Majesty's Platinum Jubilee.The book features extraordinary photographs of the United Kingdom's best-loved trees, many of which inspired historic figures, artists and writers through the centuries.Alongside these photographs are short written pieces from contributors including Dame Judi Dench, Alan Titchmarsh, Dame Joanna Lumley, Adam Henson, Archbishop Justin Welby and Danny Clarke, as well as conservation experts from the Woodland Trust and the Duchy of Cornwall. In these pieces they reflect on the trees that have made a mark on their lives and the importance of protecting Britain's woodlands for future generations.Selected trees include yews at a Cotswold's church which inspired JRR Tolkien; the apple tree believed to have inspired Sir Isaac Newton's theory of gravity; the Five Hundred Acre Wood in East Sussex immortalised in AA Milne's Winnie the Pooh books; and the 2,500-year-old tree where Henry VIII may have proposed to Anne Boleyn.So far 3 million trees have been planted by communities, schools and businesses across the country as part of the QGC initiative. Through incredible imagery and joyful pieces of writing, The Queen's Green Canopy celebrates Her Majesty's extraordinary life and the amazing legacy she leaves behind.Planet Earth III: Accompanies the Landmark Series Narrated by David Attenborough
Par Matt Brandon, Michael Gunton, Jonny Keeling. 2023
The official tie-in to the third instalment in the legendary Planet Earth franchiseFew places on Earth remain untouched by humans,…
creating challenges for the wildlife we share it with. We have entered a new age, and we must look at the splendour of the natural world through a different lens.From the depths of our oceans, to scorching deserts and the most remote jungles, Planet Earth III features spectacular places and surprising animal behaviours from all corners of our world. And for the first time, a human element is introduced to each landscape, highlighting how, in the age of the Anthropocene, today's planet has been forever changed by humanity and that wildlife now faces new challenges in our crowded, modern world.Featuring over 250 beautiful full-colour photographs, Planet Earth III reveals the wonders and trials of life on an increasingly fragile planet, bringing you closer than ever before to our world’s most intriguing species, unseen landscapes and natural phenomena.Planet Earth, The Future
Par Fergus Beeley, Jonathan Porritt, Rosamund Kidman Cox. 2006
Planet Earth is the most spectacular look at our planet that has ever been broadcast. It has made millions of…
viewers aware of the breathtaking beauty and variety of life on our planet, and just as importantly how fragile that life can be. The premise of Planet Earth - The Future is to identify environmental and conservation issues that surround some of the sequences in Planet Earth, and put these issues to leading commentators, including NGO's, politicians and religious leaders James Leape (WWF International), Jeffrey McNeely (World Conservation Union), and the Archbishop of Canterbury to name but a few of the 35 contributors. We are living in destructive times, and our responsibility for the planet's stewardship is something none of us can afford to ignore. Comprised of transcripts from the series interviews, thoughtfully edited and abbreviated, this compelling and insightful book serves as a timely reminder of what needs to be done and what can be done to keep Planet Earth alive.A Perfect Planet
Par Huw Cordey. 2020
There is no place like home.The conditions of Earth are not just good for life, they are perfect. Everything about…
our planet - its size, its distance from the Sun, its spin and tilt, its moon - is perfectly suited to our existence, and our planet's forces serve to nurture its spectacular biodiversity. A Perfect Planet shows in stunning detail how Earth has always been more than the sum of its parts. Unlike any other astronomical body, it is a living world.Focusing on four key natural forces - global weather systems distributing fresh water to all corners; marine currents delivering nutrients to the deepest reaches of the ocean; solar energy warming and electrifying everything it touches; and volcanic activity fertilising the earth's surface - Huw Cordey reveals to us new levels of this living world, a place populated with astonishing characters living remarkable lives. From Arctic wolves prowling moonlit landscapes or wood frogs, frozen in winter and magically thawing back to life, to flamingos flying thousands of miles to a vast volcanic lake in Africa to breed, we see time and again how animals are perfectly adapted to whatever the environment throws at them.Packed with over 250 full-colour images, and including a foreword by Alastair Fothergill and stills from the BBC series' spectacular footage, A Perfect Planet is a stunning exploration of life on Earth - life that is increasingly precious and rare.The Origin Of Plants: The People And Plants That Have Shaped Britain's Garden History
Par Maggie Campbell-Culver. 2004
A fascinating history of Britain's plant biodiversity and a unique account of how our garden landscape has been transformed over…
1000 years, from 200 species of plant in the year 1000 to the astonishing variety of plants we can all see today. Thousands of plants have been introduced into Britain since 1066 by travellers, warriors, explorers and plant hunters - plants that we now take for granted such as rhododendron from the Far East, gladiolus from Africa and exotic plants like the monkey puzzle tree from Chile.Both a plant history and a useful reference book, Maggie Campbell-Culver has researched the provenance and often strange histories of many of the thousands of plants, exploring the quirky and sometimes rude nature of the plants, giving them a personality all of their own and setting them in their social context. The text is supported by beautiful contemporary paintings and modern photographs in 2 x 8 pp colour sections.The Old Man and the Sand Eel
Par Will Millard. 2018
'A wonderfully fluent account of how the strange magic of water and the beings that inhabit it can enchant and…
intoxicate' Chris YatesGrowing up on the Cambridgeshire Fens, Will Millard never felt more at home than when he was out with his granddad on the riverbank, whiling away the day catching fish. As he grew older his competitive urge to catch more and bigger fish led him away from that natural connection between him, his grandfather and the rivers of his home. That is, until the fateful day he let a record-breaking sand eel slip through his fingers and he knew that he had lost the magic of those days down by the river, and that something had to change. The Old Man and the Sand Eel is at its heart the story of three generations of men trying to figure out what it is to be a man, a father and a fisherman. It plots Will's scaly stepping stones back to his childhood innocence, when anything was possible and the wild was everywhere.***'[Will Millard] is a master wordsmith and his first book is a joyful testament to that' Isabelle Broom, Heat'[Will Millard] writes with a genuine sense of humility (...) humour and reflection' Kevin Parr, Countryfile 'Delightful and informative (...) beautifully drawn (...)The Old Man and The Sand Eel will be enjoyed by anyone who loves the challenge and mystery of baiting a hook and plopping it into the water' Spectator'This is post-modern nature writing that embraces beauty where it finds it and marvels at nature's tenacity (...) But there's more here than just fish. This is also a book about growing up, about how to retain a connection with those who raised you while forging your own identity - what to keep and what to discard. And it's about men. The strong surges of emotion that both draw them together and keep them apart, and the shared pastimes which recognise that intimacy and meaning aren't always accompanied by words' Olivia Edward, GeographicalObject-Oriented Ontology: A New Theory of Everything (Pelican Books)
Par Graham Harman. 2018
What is reality, really?Are humans more special or important than the non-human objects we perceive?How does this change the way…
we understand the world?We humans tend to believe that things are only real in as much as we perceive them, an idea reinforced by modern philosophy, which privileges us as special, radically different in kind from all other objects. But as Graham Harman, one of the theory's leading exponents, shows, Object-Oriented Ontology rejects the idea of human specialness: the world, he states, is clearly not the world as manifest to humans. At the heart of this philosophy is the idea that objects - whether real, fictional, natural, artificial, human or non-human - are mutually autonomous. In this brilliant new introduction, Graham Harman lays out the history, ideas and impact of Object-Oriented Ontology, taking in everything from art and literature, politics and natural science along the way.Graham Harman is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at SCI-Arc, Los Angeles. A key figure in the contemporary speculative realism movement in philosophy and for his development of the field of object-oriented ontology, he was named by Art Review magazine as one of the 100 most influential figures in international art.