Misreading the African Landscape

Misreading the African Landscape PDF Author: James Fairhead
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521564991
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 392

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Book Description
An intriguing 1996 study showing how Africans enrich their land, while scientists believe they damage it.

Misreading the African Landscape

Misreading the African Landscape PDF Author: James Fairhead
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521564991
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 392

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Book Description
An intriguing 1996 study showing how Africans enrich their land, while scientists believe they damage it.

Misreading the African Landscape

Misreading the African Landscape PDF Author: James Fairhead
Publisher: CUP Archive
ISBN: 9780521563536
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 400

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Book Description
An intriguing 1996 study showing how Africans enrich their land, while scientists believe they damage it.

Misreading the African Landscape

Misreading the African Landscape PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 354

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Book Description


The Lie of the Land

The Lie of the Land PDF Author: Melissa Leach
Publisher: James Currey Publishers
ISBN: 9780852554098
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 260

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Book Description
Questions the reasoning behind Western images of the environmental destruction taking place in Africa. This book addresses the issue of how environmental orthodoxies become established, and what the alternative and appropriate approaches for policy-making are. It shows that many of the established orthodoxies are ill-conceived or represent the interests of certain powerful groups. The editors draw together material from 11 key case studies across the continent which use first hand research in different ecological zones. Melissa Leach & RobinMearns are Fellows at the Institute of Development Studies (IDS), University of Sussex Published in association with the International African Institute

The Ends of the Earth

The Ends of the Earth PDF Author: Donald Worster
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521348461
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 354

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Book Description
A unifying discussion of our increasingly integrated global economy, higher population levels and greater resource demands.

Imperial Gullies

Imperial Gullies PDF Author: Kate Barger Showers
Publisher: Ohio University Press
ISBN: 0821416138
Category : Soil conservation
Languages : en
Pages : 377

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Book Description
Once the grain basket for South Africa, much of Lesotho has become a scarred and treeless wasteland. The nation's spectacular gullying has concerned environmentalists and conservationists for more than half a century, In Imperial Gullies: Soil Erosion and Conservation in Lesotho, Kate B. Showers documents the truth behind this devastation. Showers reconstructs the history of the landscape, beginning with a history of the soil. She concludes that Lesotho's distinctive erosion chasms, called dongas, often cited as an example of destructive land-use practices by African farmers, actually were caused by colonial and postcolonial practices. The residents of Lesotho emerge as victims of a failed technology. Their efforts to mitigate or resist implementation of destructive soil conservation engineering works were thwarted, and they were blamed for the consequences of policies promoted by international soil conservationists since the 1930s. Imperial Gullies calls for an observational, experimental and, most importantly, a fully consultative and participatory approach to address Lesotho's serious contemporary problems of soil erosion. The first book to bring to center stage the historical practice of colonial soil science and a cautionary tale of western science in unfamiliar terrain it will interest a broad, interdisciplinary audience in African and environmental studies, social sciences, and history. "Showers shows how local people understood that colonial contour conservation methods and road building actually stimulated gully erosion, something colonial scientists failed to realize. Overall it is undoubtedly one of the most important books written to date on any part of the environmental history of Africa. Moreover it stands out in the discipline of environmental history in general as an unusually sophisticated work of great insight and explanatory power."---Richard H. Grove, author of Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island Edens and the Origins of Environmentalism, 1600-1860 Kate B. Showers is a visiting research fellow and senior research associate at the Centre for World Environmental History, University of Sussex, England. She has lived in rural Lesotho and has served as head of research, Institute of Southern African Studies, National University of Lesotho.

Science, Society and Power

Science, Society and Power PDF Author: James Fairhead
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521535663
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 292

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Book Description
In this book, James Fairhead and Melissa Leach bring science to the heart of debates about globalisation, exploring transformations in global science and contrasting effects in Guinea, one of the world's poorest countries, and Trinidad, a more prosperous, industrialised and urbanised island. The book focuses on environment, forestry and conservation sciences that are central to these countries and involve resources that many depend upon for their livelihoods. It examines the relationships between policies, bureaucracies and particular types of scientific enquiry and explores how ordinary people, the media and educational practices engage with this. In particular it shows how science becomes part of struggles over power, resources and legitimacy. The authors take a unique ethnographic perspective, linking approaches in anthropology, development and science studies. They address critically prominent debates in each, and explore opportunities for new forms of participation, public engagement and transformation in the social relations of science.

African Environmental Crisis

African Environmental Crisis PDF Author: Gufu Oba
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 9781032173085
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 260

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Book Description
African Environmental Crisis explores how and why the idea of the African environmental crisis developed and persisted through colonial and post-colonial periods, and why it has been so influential in development discourse.

Isle of Fire

Isle of Fire PDF Author: Christian A. Kull
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226461416
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 339

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Book Description
Long considered both best friend and worst enemy to humankind, fire is at once creative and destructive. On the endangered tropical island of Madagascar, these two faces of fire have fueled a century-long conflict between rural farmers and island leaders. Based on detailed fieldwork in Malagasy villages and a thorough archival investigation, Isle of Fire offers a detailed analysis of why Madagascar has always been aflame, why it always will be aflame, and ultimately, as Christian Kull argues, why it should remain aflame.

The Shattered Gourd

The Shattered Gourd PDF Author: Okediji
Publisher: University of Washington Press
ISBN: 9780295802503
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 216

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Book Description
The Shattered Gourd uses the lens of visual art to examine connections between the United States and the Yoruba region of western Nigeria. In Yoruba legend, the sacred Calabash of Being contained the Water of Life; when the gourd was shattered, its fragments were scattered over the ground, death invaded the world, and imperfection crept into human affairs. In more modern times, the shattered gourd has symbolized the warfare and enslavement that culminated in the black diasporas. The "re-membering" of the gourd is represented by the survival of people of African origin all over the Americas, and, in this volume, by their rediscovery of African art forms on the diaspora soil of the United States. Twentieth-century African American artists employing Yoruba images in their work have gone from protest art to the exploration and celebration of the self and the community. But because the social, economic, and political context of African art forms differs markedly from that of American culture, critical contradictions between form and meaning often appear in African American works that use African forms. In this book -- the first to treat Yoruba forms while transcending the conventional emphasis on them as folk art, focusing instead on the high art tradition -- Moyo Okediji uses nearly four dozen works to illustrate a broad thematic treatment combined with a detailed approach to individual African and African American artists. Incorporating works by such artists as Meta Warrick Fuller, Hale Woodruff, Aaron Douglas, Elizabeth Catlett, Ademola Olugebefola, Paul Keene, Jeff Donaldson, Howardena Pindell, Muneer Bahauddeen, Michelle Turner, Michael Harris, Winnie Owens-Hart, and John Biggers, the author invites the reader to envision what he describes as "the immense possibilities of the future, as the twenty-first century embraces the twentieth in a primal dance of the diasporas," a future that heralds the advent of the global as a distinct movement in art, beyond postmodernism.