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Does the diagnosis of irreversible destruction of both forests and their biodiversity actually mask a wide range of patterns? Based on the results of natural and social scientists, this book attempts to answer fundamental questions such as: what is deforestation and how do we mesure it? What changes result from deforestation and how do human societies manage these changes? It explores the many and varied aspects of deforestation, a process whose effects are not always as negative as perceived.
"Commodities provide a lens through which local and global histories can be understood and written. The study of commodities history follows these goods as they make their way from land and water through processing and trade to eventual consumption. It is a fast-developing field with collaborative, comparative, and interdisciplinary research, with new information technologies becoming increasingly important. Although many individual researchers continue to focus on particular commodities and regions, they often do so in partnership with others working on different areas and employing a range of theoretical and methodological approaches, placing commodities history at the forefront of local a...
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The success of rural development schemes in Africa, particularly those involving land, is heavily dependent on understanding the local ecology. Any farmer knows this, yet rarely has development project design catered adequately for the vicissitudes of the African environment. Although environmental unpredictability was recognized in the temperate zone by the mid-nineteenth century, the ecological theory which was subsequently developed and most widely accepted, was based on concepts of norms and equilibria. History has shown that the application of such ecological assumptions to African environments is wholly inappropriate. This book argues that many methods used by West African smallholder farmers and pastoralists are properly adapted to the region's unpredictable physical environment. Field examples from the semi-arid and humid zones demonstrate the nature of environmental variability, and the skill of indigenous farmers and pastoralists in exploiting this. It is thus argued that development planners should, where possible, model development schemes on the more successful, ecologically sound methods of indigenous land management.
The first edition of Life and Death Matters was a breakthrough text, centralizing the experiences of those on the front lines of environmental crises and forging new paradigms for understanding how crises emerge and how different groups of actors respond to them. This second edition, fully updated with both expanded and new chapters, once again provides a benchmark for the field and opens important pathways for further research. Authors reassess the state of scholarship and grassroots activism in a new century when social and environmental systems are being reconceptualised within post-9/11 security and biosecurity frameworks, when global warming and resource scarcity are not fears but realities, when global power and politics are being realigned, and when ecocide, ethnocide, and genocide are daily tragedies. This bold new edition of Life and Death Matters will be a widely used textbook and essential reading for students, scholars, and policy makers.
The text comprehensively focusses on the use of artificial intelligence and optimization techniques for creating smart information systems. • Focuses on extracting information from blockchain repository using artificial intelligence and machine learning algorithms. • Presents deep learning models to identify and locate objects within images and videos, making it possible for machines to perform tasks such as self-driving cars, surveillance, and robotics. • Discusses artificial intelligence and optimization techniques for geographic information system (GIS) generation such as spatial data processing. • Covers artificial intelligence algorithms such as dimensionality, distance metrics, clustering, error calculation, hill climbing, and linear regression. • Illustrates topics such as image recognition, natural language processing, fraud detection, information system security, and intrusion detection system
Cocoa and Chocolate,1765-1914 focuses on the period from the Seven Years War, to the First World War, when a surge of economic liberalism and globalisation should have helped cocoa producers to overcome rural poverty, just as wool transformed the economy of Australia, and tea that of Japan. The addition of new forms of chocolate to Western diets in the late nineteenth century led to a great cocoa boom, and yet economic development remained elusive, despite cocoa producers having certain advantages in the commodity lottery faced by exporters of raw materials. The commodity chain, from sowing a cocoa bean to enjoying a cup of hot chocolate, is examined in Cocoa and Chocolate, 1765-1914 under the broad rubrics of chocolate consumption, the taxation of cocoa beans, the manufacture of chocolate, private marketing channels, land distribution, ecological impact on tropical forests, and the coercion of labour. Cocoa and Chocolate, 1765-1914 concludes that cocoa failed to act as a dynamo for development.
The “Hikayat Banjar,” a native court chronicle from Borneo, characterizes the irresistibility of natural resource wealth to outsiders as “the banana tree at the gate.” Michael R. Dove employs this phrase as a root metaphor to frame the history of resource relations between the indigenous peoples of Borneo and the world system. In analyzing production and trade in forest products, pepper, and especially natural rubber, Dove shows that the involvement of Borneo’s native peoples in commodity production for global markets is ancient and highly successful and that processes of globalization began millennia ago. Dove’s analysis replaces the image of the isolated tropical forest community that needs to be helped into the global system with the reality of communities that have been so successful and competitive that they have had to fight political elites to keep from being forced out.
This Element examines the current crisis of capitalism's legitimacy and concludes that it derives principally from business pursuing an aberration of capitalism known as shareholder capitalism, in which firms sought to maximize shareholder value as reflected in the current share price, at the expense of all other stakeholders and society. Shareholder capitalism began in the 1970s and was renounced by the Business Roundtable in 2019, but continues behind a façade of stakeholder capitalism. Stakeholder capitalism is the most widely cited form of capitalism today, but it is incoherent as a practical guide to action for an entire firm. This Element concludes that a recent evolution of capitalism--customer capitalism--which gives primacy to co-creating value for customers and users, enables firms to master the challenges of the digital age, shower benefits on society, and meet the needs of all the stakeholders.
The research studies included in this Special Issue highlight the fundamental contribution of the knowledge of environmental history to conscious and efficient environment conservation and management. The long-term perspective of the dynamics that govern the human–climate ecosystem is becoming one of the main focuses of interest in biological and earth system sciences. Multidisciplinary bio-geo-archaeo investigations into the underlying processes of human impact on the landscape are crucial to envisage possible future scenarios of biosphere responses to global warming and biodiversity losses. This Special Issue seeks to engage an interdisciplinary dialog on the dynamic interactions between nature and society, focusing on long-term environmental data as an essential tool for better-informed landscape management decisions to achieve an equilibrium between conservation and sustainable resource exploitation.