The Political Ecology of Drylands PDF Download
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Author: Sören Köpke
Publisher: LIT Verlag Münster
ISBN: 3643910894
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 434
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Book Description
As climate change is becoming more severe, drought is threatening to disrupt agrarian societies. This book investigates the connections between drought and social conflict over land and water. It is a comparative study of eight dryland regions in Sub-saharan Africa, South and East Asia and South America. Sören Köpke looks at different agricultural production systems and analyses environmental conflicts linked to drought. Through the political ecology approach, the author highlights the power imbalances underpinning these conflicts. A central finding: Development strategies decide if a conflict escalates or not. The book contributes to the on-going debate on the link between climate change and conflict.
Author: Sören Köpke
Publisher: LIT Verlag Münster
ISBN: 3643910894
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 434
Get Book Here
Book Description
As climate change is becoming more severe, drought is threatening to disrupt agrarian societies. This book investigates the connections between drought and social conflict over land and water. It is a comparative study of eight dryland regions in Sub-saharan Africa, South and East Asia and South America. Sören Köpke looks at different agricultural production systems and analyses environmental conflicts linked to drought. Through the political ecology approach, the author highlights the power imbalances underpinning these conflicts. A central finding: Development strategies decide if a conflict escalates or not. The book contributes to the on-going debate on the link between climate change and conflict.
Author: Diana K. Davis
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262034522
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 302
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Book Description
An argument that the perception of arid lands as wastelands is politically motivated and that these landscapes are variable, biodiverse ecosystems, whose inhabitants must be empowered. Deserts are commonly imagined as barren, defiled, worthless places, wastelands in need of development. This understanding has fueled extensive anti-desertification efforts—a multimillion-dollar global campaign driven by perceptions of a looming crisis. In this book, Diana Davis argues that estimates of desertification have been significantly exaggerated and that deserts and drylands—which constitute about 41% of the earth's landmass—are actually resilient and biodiverse environments in which a great many indigenous people have long lived sustainably. Meanwhile, contemporary arid lands development programs and anti-desertification efforts have met with little success. As Davis explains, these environments are not governed by the equilibrium ecological dynamics that apply in most other regions. Davis shows that our notion of the arid lands as wastelands derives largely from politically motivated Anglo-European colonial assumptions that these regions had been laid waste by “traditional” uses of the land. Unfortunately, such assumptions still frequently inform policy. Drawing on political ecology and environmental history, Davis traces changes in our understanding of deserts, from the benign views of the classical era to Christian associations of the desert with sinful activities to later (neo)colonial assumptions of destruction. She further explains how our thinking about deserts is problematically related to our conceptions of forests and desiccation. Davis concludes that a new understanding of the arid lands as healthy, natural, but variable ecosystems that do not necessarily need improvement or development will facilitate a more sustainable future for the world's magnificent drylands.
Author: Roy H. Behnke
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 364216014X
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 556
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Book Description
The question in the title of this book draws attention to the shortcomings of a concept that has become a political tool of global importance even as the scientific basis for its use grows weaker. The concept of desertification, it can be argued, has ceased to be analytically useful and distorts our understanding of social-environmental systems and their resiliency, particularly in poor countries with variable rainfall and persistent poverty. For better policy and governance, we need to reconsider the scientific justification for international attempts to combat desertification. Our exploration of these issues begins in the Sahel of West Africa, where a series of severe droughts at the end of the 20th century led to the global institutionalization of the idea of desertification. It now seems incontrovertible that these droughts were not caused primarily by local land use mismanagement, effectively terminating a long-standing policy and scientific debate. There is now an opportunity to treat this episode as an object lesson in the relationship between science, the formation of public opinion and international policy-making. Looking beyond the Sahel, the chapters in this book provide case studies from around the world that examine the use and relevance of the desertification concept. Despite an increasingly sophisticated understanding of dryland environments and societies, the uses now being made of the desertification concept in parts of Asia exhibit many of the shortcomings of earlier work done in Africa. It took scientists more than three decades to transform a perceived desertification crisis in the Sahel into a non-event. This book is an effort to critically examine that experience and accelerate the learning process in other parts of the world.
Author: Thea Astley
Publisher: Text Publishing
ISBN: 192562661X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 259
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Book Description
This will be a book for the world’s last reader, she decided, chewing pen-end over an open exercise book. In the dying town of Drylands, Janet Deakin sells papers to lonely locals. At night, in her flat above the newsagency, she attempts to write a novel for a world in which no one reads—‘full of people, she envisaged, glaring at a screen that glared glassily back.’ Drylands is the story of the townsfolk’s harsh, violent lives. Trenchant and brilliant, Thea Astley’s final novel is a dark portrait of outback Australia in decline. Thea Astley was born in Brisbane in 1925. Her first novel, Girl with a Monkey, was published in 1958 and her third, The Well Dressed Explorer (1962), won the Miles Franklin Literary Award. Many notable books followed, among them the groundbreaking A Kindness Cup (1974), which addressed frontier massacres of Indigenous Australians, and It’s Raining in Mango (1987). Her last novel was Drylands (1999), her fourth Miles Franklin winner. Her fiction is distinguished by vivid imagery and metaphor; a complex, ironic style; and a desire to highlight oppression and social injustice. One of the most distinctive and influential Australian novelists of the twentieth century, Astley died in 2004. ‘It is impossible to put this book down. It seethes with energy and passion.’ Herald Sun 'Wonderful.' Australian
Author: SOREN KOPKE.
Publisher:
ISBN: 9783643960894
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :
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Book Description
Author: Jeremy Lind
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
ISBN: 1847012523
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 224
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Book Description
Examines the new challenges facing Africa's pastoral drylands from large-scale investments and how this might affect the economic and political landscape for the regions affected and their peoples.
Author: Joseph Alcamo
Publisher: Millennium Ecosystem Assessmen
ISBN:
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 272
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Book Description
Ecosystems and Human Well-Being is the first product of the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, a four-year international work program designed to meet the needs of decisionmakers for scientific information on the links between ecosystem change and human well-being. The book offers an overview of the project, describing the conceptual framework that is being used, defining its scope, and providing a baseline of understanding that all participants need to move forward. The Millennium Assessment focuses on how humans have altered ecosystems, and how changes in ecosystem services have affected human well-being, how ecosystem changes may affect people in future decades, and what types of responses can be adopted at local, national, or global scales to improve ecosystem management and thereby contribute to human well-being and poverty alleviation. The program was launched by United National Secretary-General Kofi Annan in June 2001, and the primary assessment reports will be released by Island Press in 2005. Leading scientists from more than 100 nations are conducting the assessment, which can aid countries, regions, or companies by: providing a clear, scientific picture of the current sta
Author: Timothy Forsyth
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134665806
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 342
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Book Description
Critical Political Ecology brings political debate to the science of ecology. As political controversies multiply over the science underlying environmental debates, there is an increasing need to understand the relationship between environmental science and politics. In this timely and wide-ranging volume, Tim Forsyth uses an innovative approach to apply political analysis to ecology, and demonstrates how more politicised approaches to science can be used in environmental decision-making. Critical Political Ecology examines: *how social and political factors frame environmental science, and how science in turn shapes politics *how new thinking in philosophy and sociology of science can provide fresh insights into the biophysical causes and impacts of environmental problems *how policy and decision-makers can acknowledge the political influences on science and achieve more effective public participation and governance.
Author: Ariell Ahearn
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781874267980
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 222
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Book Description
Pastoralist Livelihoods in Asian Drylands brings together the work of scholars from across Asia to discuss the transforming boundaries, agencies and risks involved in pastoralist livelihoods. The authors, whose research sites range from Oman to Mongolia, Syria to Pakistan, share methodological commitment to long-term field research, participant observation and engagement with local communities. There is a focus on pastoralist engagements with governance institutions and the essays collectively argue that risk, which is often imagined in environmental terms for pastoralist peoples, often stems from government policies and political circumstances. The authors challenge common ecological approaches to understanding social change amongst pastoralist groups by focusing on the politics of resource distribution and control. Papers in the volume support an indigenous perspective on pastoralists and present academic perceptions and assessments of key issues in their local context.
Author: Michael Mortimore
Publisher: World Conservation Union
ISBN:
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 100
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Book Description
Drylands cover 41 percent of the earth' s terrestrial surface. The urgency of and international response to climate change have given a new place to drylands in terms both of their vulnerability to predicted climate change impacts and their potential contribution to climate change mitigation. This book aims to apply the new scientific insights on complex dryland systems to practical options for development. A new dryland paradigm is built on the resources and capacities of dryland peoples, on new and emergent economic opportunities, on inward investment, and on the best support that dryland science can offer.
