Welcome to our book review site go-pdf.online!
You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
Money Logging
Money Logging investigates what Gordon Brown has called "probably the biggest environmental crime of our times"--the massive destruction of the Borneo rainforest by Malaysian loggers. Historian and campaigner Lukas Straumann goes in search not only of the lost forests and the people who used to call them home, but also the network of criminals who have earned billions through illegal timber sales and corruption. Straumann singles out Abdul Taib Mahmud, current governor of the Malaysian state of Sarawak, as the kingpin of this Asian timber mafia. Taib's family--with the complicity of global financial institutions--have profited to the tune of 15 billion US dollars. Money Logging is a story of a people who have lost their ancient paradise to a wasteland of oil palm plantations, pollution, and corruption--and how they hope to take it back.
The Wasting of Borneo
Acclaimed naturalist Alex Shoumatoff issues a worldwide call to protect the drastically endangered rainforests of Borneo In his eleventh book, but his first in almost two decades, seasoned travel writer Alex Shoumatoff takes readers on a journey from the woods of rural New York to the rain forests of the Amazon and Borneo, documenting both the abundance of life and the threats to these vanishing Edens in a wide-ranging narrative. Alex and his best friend, Davie, spent their formative years in the forest of Bedford, New York. As adults they grew apart, but bonded by the “imaginary jungle” of their childhood, Alex and Davie reunited fifty years later for a trip to a real jungle, in the hea...
Alive
Leben hat viele Formen und ist vielfältig verflochten. Das Buch macht die Koexistenz verschiedener Wesen und Welten anhand von Dingen, Geschichten und Kunstwerken sichtbar. Es zeigt, dass die Mitwelt in vielen Regionen der Erde lebendig und aktiv erfahren wird: Berge und Flüsse sind nicht nur Ressource oder Kulisse, sondern wirkmächtige Quellen des Lebens; Pflanzen und Tiere sind nicht allein Nahrung, sondern Gefährten; Ahnen und Geistwesen beeinflussen den lebendigen Alltag. So verstanden, vermitteln lokale Perspektiven und alternative Formen des Miteinanders Wege in gemeinsame Zukünfte. Eine Vielfalt internationaler Autor*innen erzählt hier Geschichten von Geflechten des Lebendigen, die empathisch und informiert dazu einladen, unsere Beziehungen zur Mitwelt zu überdenken und neu zu knüpfen.
Silencing a Whistleblower
This book examines how insufficient policies can lead to the alleged abuse of power in organisations. When independent ethical structures and processes are missing or weak, practices of abuse, misconduct and cover-ups can easily arise at the leadership level. Even organisations that specialise in good governance are no exception, as illustrated by this case study on arguably the world’s most influential anti-corruption NGO, Transparency International (TI). Written by the former Managing Director of Transparency International, this book chronicles its ethical breakdown over a 5-year period starting in 2015. By comparing TI’s whistleblower policies with its internal whistleblower practices...
Managing the Unknown
Information is crucial when it comes to the management of resources. But what if knowledge is incomplete, or biased, or otherwise deficient? How did people define patterns of proper use in the absence of cognitive certainty? Discussing this challenge for a diverse set of resources from fish to rubber, these essays show that deficient knowledge is a far more pervasive challenge in resource history than conventional readings suggest. Furthermore, environmental ignorance does not inevitably shrink with the march of scientific progress: these essays suggest more of a dialectical relationship between knowledge and ignorance that has different shapes and trajectories. With its combination of empirical case studies and theoretical reflection, the essays make a significant contribution to the interdisciplinary debate on the production and resilience of ignorance. At the same time, this volume combines insights from different continents as well as the seas in between and thus sketches outlines of an emerging global resource history.
God and Gaia
God and Gaia explores the overlap between traditional religious cosmologies and the scientific Gaia theory of James Lovelock. It argues that a Gaian approach to the ecological crisis involves rebalancing human and more-than-human influences on Earth by reviving the ecological agency of local and indigenous human communities, and of nonhuman beings. Present-day human ecological influences on Earth have been growing at pace since the Scientific and Industrial Revolutions, when modern humans adopted a machine cosmology in which humans are the sole intelligent agency. The resultant imbalance between human and Earthly agencies is degrading the species diversity of ecosystems, causing local climat...
The Vortex
Environmental challenges are defining the twenty-first century. To fully understand ongoing debates about our current crises—climate change, loss of biological diversity, pollution, extinction, resource woes—means revisiting their origins, in all their complexity. With this ambitious, highly original contribution to the environmental history of global modernity, Frank Uekötter considers the many ways humans have had an impact on their physical environment throughout history. Ours is not a one-way trajectory to sudden collapse, he argues, but rather death by a thousand cuts. The many paths we’ve forged to arrive in our current predicament, from agriculture to industry to infrastructure...
Bystanders to the Holocaust
Using accessible archival sources, a team of historians reveal how much the USA, Britain, Switzerland and Sweden knew about the Nazi attempt to murder all the Jews of Europe during World War II.
Robbery and Restitution
The robbery and restitution of Jewish property are two inextricably linked social processes. It is not possible to understand the lawsuits and international agreements on the restoration of Jewish property of the late 1990s without examining what was robbed and by whom. In this volume distinguished historians first outline the mechanisms and scope of the European-wide program of plunder and then assess the effectiveness and historical implications of post-war restitution efforts. Everywhere the solution of legal and material problems was intertwined with changing national myths about the war and conflicting interpretations of justice. Even those countries that pursued extensive restitution programs using rigorous legal means were unable to compensate or fully comprehend the scale of Jewish loss. Especially in Eastern Europe, it was not until the collapse of communism that the concept of restoring some Jewish property rights even became a viable option. Integrating the abundance of new research on the material effects of the Holocaust and its aftermath, this comparative perspective examines the developments in Germany, Poland, Italy, France, Belgium, Hungary and the Czech Republic.
Rainforest Hero
In 1984 Swiss shepherd Bruno Manser trekked through the virgin rainforests of Borneo to live among the jungle's last nomads. In six years among the Penan people, Manser witnessed the wholesale destruction of one of the world's most diverse ecosystems through rapid deforestation. He swore to do everything he could to stop it. Manser's globetrotting campaign brought the world's attention to tropical deforestation. It also made him an enemy of Asia's timber barons. In 2000 he disappeared without a trace. Ruedi Suter's engrossing biography - the first in English - charts Manser's extraordinary journey form a young man am who sought to escape civilization for the peace of the jungle to a campaigner who would stand up to oligarchs, lead protests around the globe, and, ultimately, give his life for the forests that he loved.
