Author: Mohamed Amer Meziane
Publisher: Verso Books
ISBN: 1804291773
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 305
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Book Description
"An extraordinary book. Mohamed Amer Meziane's breathtaking analysis of the making of fossil states opens to a new genre of history writing where the very layers of earth's riches are at its center." —Ann Laura Stoler, author of Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power, Along the Archival Grain How the disenchantment of empire led to climate change While industrial states competed to colonize Asia and Africa in the nineteenth century, conversion to Christianity was replaced by a civilizing mission. This new secular impetus strode hand in hand with racial capitalism in the age of empires: a terrestrial paradise was to be achieved through accumulation and the ravaging of nature. Far from a defence of religion, The States of the Earth argues that phenomena such as evangelism and political Islam are best understood as products of empire and secularization. In a world where material technology was considered divine, religious and secular forces both tried to achieve Heaven on Earth by destroying Earth itself.
Author: James Lovelock
Publisher:
ISBN: 9783836551113
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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Book Description
Scientist, inventor, and pioneering environmentalist James Lovelock brings together a richly illustrated collection of essays on earth and human science from 12 of today's leading thinkers. From stars to cells, quantum theory to capitalism, ancient fossils to Artificial Intelligence, this book delivers a holistic understanding of our planet and...
Author: Don L. Anderson
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139462083
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 400
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Book Description
Theory of the Earth is an interdisciplinary advanced textbook on the origin, composition, and evolution of the Earth's interior: geophysics, geochemistry, dynamics, convection, mineralogy, volcanism, energetics and thermal history. This is the only book on the whole landscape of deep Earth processes which ties together all the strands of the subdisciplines. It is a complete update of Anderson's Theory of the Earth (1989). It includes many new sections and dozens of new figures and tables. As with the original book, this new edition will prove to be a stimulating textbook on advanced courses in geophysics, geochemistry, and planetary science, and supplementary textbook on a wide range of other advanced Earth science courses. It will also be an essential reference and resource for all researchers in the solid Earth sciences.
Author: Jon Stewart
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
ISBN: 9780446199438
Category : Humor
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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Book Description
Where do we come from? Who created us? Why are we here? These questions have puzzled us since the dawn of time, but when it became apparent to Jon Stewart and the writers of The Daily Show that the world was about to end, they embarked on a massive mission to write a book that summed up the human race: What we looked like; what we accomplished; our achievements in society, government, religion, science and culture -- all in a tome of 238 pages with lots of color photos, graphs and charts. After two weeks of hard work, they had their book. EARTH (The Book) is the definitive guide to our species. With their trademark wit, irreverence, and intelligence, Stewart and his team posthumously answer all of life's most hard-hitting questions, completely unburdened by objectivity, journalistic integrity, or even accuracy.
Author: Paul F. Steinberg
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199896623
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 349
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Book Description
Worldwide, half a million people die from air pollution each year-more than perish in all wars combined. One in every five mammal species on the planet is threatened with extinction. Our climate is warming, our forests are in decline, and every day we hear news of the latest ecological crisis. What will it really take to move society onto a more sustainable path? Many of us are already doing the "little things" to help the earth, like recycling or buying organic produce. These are important steps-but they're not enough. In Who Rules the Earth?, Paul Steinberg, a leading scholar of environmental politics, shows that the shift toward a sustainable world requires modifying the very rules that guide human behavior and shape the ways we interact with the earth. We know these rules by familiar names like city codes, product design standards, business contracts, public policies, cultural norms, and national constitutions. Though these rules are largely invisible, their impact across the planet has been dramatic. By changing the rules, Ontario, Canada has cut the levels of pesticides in its waterways in half. The city of Copenhagen has adopted new planning codes that will reduce its carbon footprint to zero by 2025. In the United States, a handful of industry mavericks designed new rules to promote greener buildings, and transformed the world's largest industry into a more sustainable enterprise. Steinberg takes the reader on a series of journeys, from a familiar walk on the beach to a remote village deep in the jungles of Peru, helping the reader to "see" the social rules that pattern our physical reality and showing why these are the big levers that will ultimately determine the health of our planet. By unveiling the influence of social rules at all levels of society-from private property to government policy, and from the rules governing our oceans to the dynamics of innovation and change within corporations and communities-Who Rules the Earth? is essential reading for anyone who understands that sustainability is not just a personal choice, but a political struggle.
Author: Paul K. Conkin
Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
ISBN: 0813171520
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 321
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Book Description
The pace of human progress accelerated profoundly in the twentieth century, spawning revolutionary advances in medicine, agriculture, and industry. Between 1900 and 2000, the world's population quadrupled, and production and consumption of goods increased by a factor of twelve. In The State of the Earth, award-winning historian Paul K. Conkin offers a balanced, nuanced, and ultimately hopeful assessment of the major environmental challenges that must be met after a century of torrid growth and development. Unlike many recent polemics that reduce serious environmental debates to partisan political arguments, The State of the Earth provides a thorough and scientifically informed introduction to current environmental concerns. Conkin demonstrates how the explosion in population, production, and consumption has begun to deplete critical resources such as soil nutrients and fresh water, leading to potentially widespread shortages in the world's poorest regions. Fossil fuel emissions have assured a rapid increase in greenhouse gases and contributed to rising surface and ocean temperatures, a warming that is almost certain to continue throughout the twenty-first century. Conkin explains how the complex interactions between pollution, warming, and resource depletion may threaten the planet's biodiversity and endanger innumerable species. The State of the Earth, however, is much more than a summary statement of potential catastrophes. Conkin details the long history of global conservation and environmental protection movements and places their efforts in accessible historical, theoretical, and scientific contexts. He anchors his analysis with the awareness that environmental concerns are simultaneously hotly debated political issues, variables in economic decision making, and matters of extraordinary social and cultural significance. Conkin's mission is neither to proclaim certain doom nor to suggest blithely that technological innovation and other free-market solutions will soon repair the damage already done. Rather, The State of the Earth explains the realities and consequences of ecological disruption, unsustainable growth, and environmental degradation. Conkin provides a sober and comprehensive introduction to the science and history of the environmental challenges facing humans in the new century, highlighting the need to act now on a global scale to reverse these troubling trends.
Author: John P. Snyder
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226767477
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 384
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Book Description
Cartographers have long grappled with the impossibility of portraying the earth in two dimensions. To solve this problem, mapmakers have created map projections. This work discusses and illustrates the known map projections from before 500BC to the present, with facts on their origins and use.
Author: Newt Gingrich
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 0801891655
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 256
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Book Description
The foundation of the book—a ten-point Contract with the Earth—promotes ingenuity over rhetoric as the way forward.
Author: Glenn A. Albrecht
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501715240
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 257
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Book Description
As climate change and development pressures overwhelm the environment, our emotional relationships with Earth are also in crisis. Pessimism and distress are overwhelming people the world over. In this maelstrom of emotion, solastalgia, the homesickness you have when you are still at home, has become, writes Glenn A. Albrecht, one of the defining emotions of the twenty-first century. Earth Emotions examines our positive and negative Earth emotions. It explains the author's concept of solastalgia and other well-known eco-emotions such as biophilia and topophilia. Albrecht introduces us to the many new words needed to describe the full range of our emotional responses to the emergent state of the world. We need this creation of a hopeful vocabulary of positive emotions, argues Albrecht, so that we can extract ourselves out of environmental desolation and reignite our millennia-old biophilia—love of life—for our home planet. To do so, he proposes a dramatic change from the current human-dominated Anthropocene era to one that will be founded, materially, ethically, politically, and spiritually on the revolution in thinking being delivered by contemporary symbiotic science. Albrecht names this period the Symbiocene. With the current and coming generations, "Generation Symbiocene," Albrecht sees reason for optimism. The battle between the forces of destruction and the forces of creation will be won by Generation Symbiocene, and Earth Emotions presents an ethical and emotional odyssey for that victory.
Author: Andro Linklater
Publisher: A&C Black
ISBN: 1408815745
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 497
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Book Description
Barely two centuries ago, most of the world's productive land still belonged either communally to traditional societies or to the higher powers of monarch or church. But that pattern, and the ways of life that went with it, were consigned to history as a result of the most creative - and, at the same time, destructive - cultural force in the modern era: the idea of individual, exclusive ownership of land. This notion laid waste to traditional communal civilisations, displacing entire peoples from their homelands, and brought into being a unique concept of individual freedom and a distinct form of representative government and democratic institutions. Other great civilizations, in Russia, China, and the Islamic world, evolved very different structures of land ownership, and thus very different forms of government and social responsibility.The seventeenth-century English surveyor William Petty was the first man to recognise the connection between private property and free-market capitalism; the American radical Wolf Ladejinsky redistributed land in Japan, Taiwan and South Korea after the Second World War to make possible the emergence of Asian tiger economies. Through the eyes of these remarkable individuals and many more, including Chinese emperors and German peasants, Andro Linklater here presents the evolution of land ownership to offer a radically new view of mankind's place on the planet.
