Coral Whisperers

Coral Whisperers PDF Author: Irus Braverman
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520970837
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 385

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Book Description
In recent years, a catastrophic global bleaching event devastated many of the world’s precious coral reefs. Working on the front lines of ruin, today’s coral scientists are struggling to save these important coral reef ecosystems from the imminent threats of rapidly warming, acidifying, and polluted oceans. Coral Whisperers captures a critical moment in the history of coral reef science. Gleaning insights from over one hundred interviews with leading scientists and conservation managers, Irus Braverman documents a community caught in an existential crisis and alternating between despair and hope. In this important new book, corals emerge not only as signs and measures of environmental catastrophe, but also as catalysts for action.

Coral Whisperers

Coral Whisperers PDF Author: Irus Braverman
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520970837
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 385

Get Book Here

Book Description
In recent years, a catastrophic global bleaching event devastated many of the world’s precious coral reefs. Working on the front lines of ruin, today’s coral scientists are struggling to save these important coral reef ecosystems from the imminent threats of rapidly warming, acidifying, and polluted oceans. Coral Whisperers captures a critical moment in the history of coral reef science. Gleaning insights from over one hundred interviews with leading scientists and conservation managers, Irus Braverman documents a community caught in an existential crisis and alternating between despair and hope. In this important new book, corals emerge not only as signs and measures of environmental catastrophe, but also as catalysts for action.

At Every Depth

At Every Depth PDF Author: Tessa Hill
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231553250
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 432

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Book Description
The world’s oceans are changing at a drastic pace. Beneath the waves and along the coasts, climate change and environmental degradation have spurred the most radical transformations in human history. In response, the people who know the ocean most intimately are taking action for the sake of our shared future. Community scientists track species in California tidepools. Researchers dive into the waters around Sydney to replant kelp forests. Scientists and First Nations communities collaborate to restore clam gardens in the Pacific Northwest. In At Every Depth, the oceanographer Tessa Hill and the science journalist Eric Simons profile these and other efforts to understand and protect marine environments, taking readers to habitats from shallow tidepools to the deep sea. They delve into the many human connections to the ocean—how people live with and make their living from the waters—journeying to places as far-flung as coral reefs, the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, and the Arctic and Antarctic poles. At Every Depth shares the stories of people from all walks of life, including scientists, coastal community members, Indigenous people, shellfish farmers, and fisheries workers. It brings together varied viewpoints, showing how scientists’ research and local and Indigenous knowledge can complement each other to inform a more sustainable future. Poignantly written and grounded in science, this book offers a narrative perspective on the changing oceans, letting us see how our relationships to the oceans are changing too.

Coral Lives

Coral Lives PDF Author: Michele Currie Navakas
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691240094
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 232

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Book Description
"In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, coral specimens featured prominently in cabinets of curiosity, and in literary work by writers from Herman Melville to Lydia Huntley Sigourney. Children sang of coral in popular songs. Women, both free and enslaved, wore coral beads. Reef samples drew crowds to galleries and museums. And coral's unique qualities as animal, vegetable, and mineral inspired countless Americans to praise the "coral insect" for creating what one author called "the most wonder-provoking of all natural objects." In this account of coral's history as material and metaphor, Michele Navakas argues that coral shaped the nation's thinking and became deeply entwined with the histories of slavery, wage labor, and women's reproductive and domestic work. European slave traders used red coral to purchase persons along the coast of West Africa from the fifteenth through the eighteenth centuries, while enslaved people performed the labor that brought raw coral from Caribbean, Mediterranean, and Pacific waters to European naturalists and coral traders. In the nineteenth-century U.S., Black and white women frequently compared their bodies to reef-building polyps that silently and continually produced new beings and forged intergenerational bonds. The book traces the global flows of labor, production, manufacture, and trade that brought coral into the daily lives of nineteenth-century Americans, and discusses the cultural traditions surrounding coral in four major geographic regions-Africa, the Pacific, the Caribbean, and Europe-that shaped early American understandings of coral. It then examines works of literature and of natural history by a cross-section of U.S. authors who used the analogy of coral to describe a system in which the labors of each individual enrich all, but also as a body that grows only by silently entombing the living bodies of its most essential workers. A coda addresses the value of historically oriented environmental humanities scholarship at a time of climate crisis"--

Planted Flags

Planted Flags PDF Author: Irus Braverman
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521760027
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
Planted Flags tells an extraordinary story about the mundane uses of law and landscape in the war between Israelis and Palestinians. The book is structured around the two dominant tree landscapes in Israel/Palestine: pine forests and olive groves. The pine tree, which is usually associated with the Zionist project of afforesting the Promised Land, is contrasted with the olive tree, which Palestinians identify as a symbol of their steadfast connection to the land. What is it that makes these seemingly innocuous, even natural, acts of planting, cultivating, and uprooting trees into acts of war? How is this war reflected, mediated, and, above all, reinforced through the polarization of the natural landscape into two juxtaposed landscapes? And what is the role of law in this story? Planted Flags explores these questions through an ethnographic study. By telling the story of trees through the narratives of military and government officials, architects, lawyers, Palestinian and Israeli farmers, and Jewish settlers, the seemingly static and mute landscape assumes life, expressing the cultural, economic, and legal dynamics that constantly shape and reshape it.

The California Deserts

The California Deserts PDF Author: Bruce M Pavlik
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 9780520940789
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 386

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Book Description
This highly readable, spectacularly illustrated compendium is an ecological journey into a wondrous land of extremes. The California Deserts explores the remarkable diversity of life in this harsh yet fragile quarter of the Golden State. In a rich narrative, it illuminates how that diversity, created by drought and heat, has evolved with climate change since the Ice Ages. Along the way, we find there is much to learn from each desert species-- whether it is a cactus, pupfish, tortoise, or bighorn sheep--about adaptation to a warming, arid world. The book tells of human adaptation as well, and is underscored by a deep appreciation for the intimate knowledge acquired by native people during their 12,000-year desert experience. In this sense, the book is a journey of rediscovery, as it reflects on the ways that knowledge has been reclaimed and amplified by new discoveries. The book also takes the measure of the ecological condition of these deserts today, presenting issues of conservation, management, and restoration. With its many sidebars, photographs, and featured topics, The California Deserts provides a unique introduction to places of remarkable and often unexpected beauty.

Curious Species

Curious Species PDF Author: Whitney Barlow Robles
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300266189
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 324

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Book Description
A compelling and innovative exploration of how animals shaped the field of natural history and its ecological afterlives Can corals build worlds? Do rattlesnakes enchant? What is a raccoon, and what might it know? Animals and the questions they raised thwarted human efforts to master nature during the so-called Enlightenment--a historical moment when rigid classification pervaded the study of natural history, people traded in people, and imperial avarice wrapped its tentacles around the globe. Whitney Barlow Robles makes animals the unruly protagonists of eighteenth-century science through journeys to four spaces and ecological zones: the ocean, the underground, the curiosity cabinet, and the field. Her forays reveal a forgotten lineage of empirical inquiry, one that forced researchers to embrace uncertainty. This tumultuous era in the history of human-animal encounters still haunts modern biologists and ecologists as they struggle to fathom animals today. In an eclectic fusion of history and nature writing, Robles alternates between careful historical investigations and probing personal narratives. These excavations of the past and present of distinct nonhuman creatures reveal the animal foundations of human knowledge and show why tackling our current environmental crisis first requires looking back in time.

Coral Browne

Coral Browne PDF Author: Rose Collis
Publisher: Oberon Books
ISBN: 9781840027648
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description
Described by Alan Bates as ‘mischievous, alarming, unpredictable and outrageous’, and by Tyrone Guthrie as ‘the most degenerate woman I ever met in my life’, the indomitable Coral Browne towered over the British and American stages for nearly half a century. Remarkable for her mesmerising character performances, her glamour, her liberated attitude to sex and the quickness of her often-savage wit, Coral, a 21-year old from Australia, arrived in the UK in 1934, armed with an eccentric personality, and ‘a mouth like a docker.’ Over the next forty years Coral would forge a reputation as a great wit and a brilliant actress on both sides of the Atlantic, starring in the premiere of Joe Orton’s notorious What The Butler Saw in her Balmain underwear, and making a series of iconic performances in films such as The Killing of Sister George, Auntie Mame and The Ruling Class. Her unashamed appetite for men (and women) led her into countless affairs; her famous lovers included Maurice Chevalier, Paul Robeson, Cecil Beaton, and Douglas Fairbanks Jr. She was also renowned for her commitment to her friends, who included Alec Guinness, John Schlesinger, Barry Humphries, Alan Bennett, and Vivien Leigh. Famously, she even befriended the exiled spy Guy Burgess whilst on tour in Russia, berating him for his treachery whilst undertaking to send pyjamas from his Jermyn Street tailor. This episode would later provide the basis for Alan Bennett’s drama An Englishman Abroad, for which Coral won the BAFTA for Best Actress. Later in life she would meet and marry the horror film star, Vincent Price, and together they would become the most celebrated and least probable Hollywood celebrity couple of the day. This Effing Lady draws upon interviews with friends and family of Coral Browne, and a wealth of previously unpublished correspondence between Coral and Alec Guinness, Vincent Price, Guy Burgess, John Schlesinger, Alan Bates, Alan Bennett and many others, to produce an immaculately researched and correspondingly witty account of the life of a remarkable and truly original star.

Microbium: The Neglected Lives of Micro-matter

Microbium: The Neglected Lives of Micro-matter PDF Author: Joela Jacobs
Publisher: punctum books
ISBN: 1685711707
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 149

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Book Description
Microbium: The Neglected Lives of Micro-matter tells the story of small matter such as bacteria, coral, fungi, lichen, pollen, protozoa, and viruses. With short entries that are organized like a herbarium or similar specimen collection, the book is a "microbium"-both the term for a single microbe and a play on "microbiome." As such, Microbium makes visible the often overseen but huge impact of miniscule matter on human culture and the environment. Each entry is a "microscopic reading" that describes the natural history and scientific discovery of a particular form of micro-matter, while also telling a story about the cultural and artistic roles it has played over the centuries. From the poetry of Emily Dickinson to the "coralness" of coral reefs to contemporary literature about the COVID-19 pandemic, this book places micro-matter under a cultural microscope and translates the significance of the invisible interspecies social realm to the human scale, magnifying the many ways in which micro-matter matters. Ultimately, Microbium shows the potential of micro-matter to teach us how to revitalize our political and cultural systems, habits of thought, and aesthetic or representational modes.

Unmaking the Bomb

Unmaking the Bomb PDF Author: Shannon Cram
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520395123
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 221

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Book Description
"Unmaking the Bomb investigates the politics of waste, exposure, and cleanup at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation, a former weapons complex in Washington State. Once the heart of American plutonium production, Hanford is now engaged in the nation's largest environmental remediation effort, managing toxic materials that will long outlast their regulatory containers. This book blends ethnographic research with personal narrative to examine cleanup's administrative frames and the stories that exceed them. It describes how the body-at-risk became a waste management tool, and how reckoning with contamination informs the very definitions of health and hazard in the United States"--

Citizenship, Law and Literature

Citizenship, Law and Literature PDF Author: Caroline Koegler
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110749912
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 154

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Book Description
This edited volume is the first to focus on how concepts of citizenship diversify and stimulate the long-standing field of law and literature, and vice versa. Building on existing research in law and literature as well as literature and citizenship studies, the collection approaches the triangular relationship between citizenship, law and literature from a variety of disciplinary, conceptual and political perspectives, with particular emphasis on the performative aspect inherent in any type of social expression and cultural artefact. The sixteen chapters in this volume present literature as carrying multifarious, at times opposing energies and impulses in relation to citizenship. These range from providing discursive arenas for consolidating, challenging and re-negotiating citizenship to directly interfering with or inspiring processes of law-making and governance. The volume opens up new possibilities for the scholarly understanding of citizenship along two axes: Citizenship-as-Literature: Enacting Citizenship and Citizenship-in-Literature: Conceptualising Citizenship.