The Unconstructable Earth

The Unconstructable Earth PDF Author: Frédéric Neyrat
Publisher: Fordham Univ Press
ISBN: 0823282597
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 243

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Book Description
Winner, Grand Prize, French Voices Award for Excellence in Publication and Translation The Space Age is over? Not at all! A new planet has appeared: Earth. In the age of the Anthropocene, the Earth is a post-natural planet that can be remade at will, controlled and managed thanks to the prowess of geoengineering. This new imaginary is also accompanied by a new kind of power—geopower—that takes the entire Earth, in its social, biological and geophysical dimensions, as an object of knowledge, intervention, and governmentality. In short, our rising awareness that we have destroyed our planet has simultaneously provided us not with remorse or resolve but with a new fantasy: that the Anthropocene delivers an opportunity to remake our terrestrial environment thanks to the power of technology. Such is the position we find ourselves in, when proposals for reengineering the earth’s ecosystems and geosystems are taken as the only politically feasible answer to ecological catastrophe. Yet far from being merely the fruit of geo-capitalism, this new grand narrative of geopower has also been activated by theorists of the constructivist turn—ecomodernist, postenvironmentalist, accelerationist—who have likewise called into question the great divide between nature and culture. With the collapse of this divide, a cyborg, hybrid, flexible nature has been built, an impoverished nature that does not exist without being performed by technologies that proliferate within the space of human needs and capitalist imperatives. Underneath this performative vision resides a hidden anaturalism denying all otherness to nature and the Earth, no longer by externalizing it as a thing to be dominated, but by radically internalizing it as something to be digested. Constructivist ecology thus finds itself in no position to confront the geoconstructivist project, with its claim that there is no nature and its aim to replace Earth with Earth 2.0. Against both positions, Neyrat stakes out the importance of the unconstructable Earth. Against the fusional myth of technology over nature, but without returning to the division between nature and culture, he proposes an “ecology of separation” that acknowledges the wild, subtractive capacity of nature. Against the capitalist, technocratic delusion of earth as a constructible object, but equally against an organicism marked by unacknowledged traces of racism and sexism, Neyrat shows what it means to appreciate Earth as an unsubstitutable becoming: a traject that cannot be replicated in a laboratory. Underway for billions of years, withdrawing into the most distant past and the most inaccessible future, Earth escapes the hubris of all who would remake and master it. This remarkable book, which will be of interest to those across the humanities, natural sciences, and social sciences, from theorists to shapers of policy, recasts the earth as a singular trajectory that invites humans to turn political ecology into a geopolitics.

Rare Earth

Rare Earth PDF Author: Peter D. Ward
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0387218483
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 359

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Book Description
What determines whether complex life will arise on a planet, or even any life at all? Questions such as these are investigated in this groundbreaking book. In doing so, the authors synthesize information from astronomy, biology, and paleontology, and apply it to what we know about the rise of life on Earth and to what could possibly happen elsewhere in the universe. Everyone who has been thrilled by the recent discoveries of extrasolar planets and the indications of life on Mars and the Jovian moon Europa will be fascinated by Rare Earth, and its implications for those who look to the heavens for companionship.

Improbable Planet

Improbable Planet PDF Author: Hugh Ross
Publisher: Baker Books
ISBN: 149340539X
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 358

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Book Description
The Latest Scientific Discoveries Point to an Intentional Creator Most of us remember the basics from science classes about how Earth came to be the only known planet that sustains complex life. But what most people don't know is that the more thoroughly researchers investigate the history of our planet, the more astonishing the story of our existence becomes. The number and complexity of the astronomical, geological, chemical, and biological features recognized as essential to human existence have expanded explosively within the past decade. An understanding of what is required to make possible a large human population and advanced civilizations has raised profound questions about life, our purpose, and our destiny. Are we really just the result of innumerable coincidences? Or is there a more reasonable explanation? This fascinating book helps nonscientists understand the countless miracles that undergird the exquisitely fine-tuned planet we call home--as if Someone had us in mind all along.

Rare Earth Frontiers

Rare Earth Frontiers PDF Author: Julie M. Klinger
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501714619
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 340

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Book Description
"Rare Earth Frontiers is a timely text. As Klinger notes, rare earths are neither rare nor technically earths, but they are still widely believed to be both. Although her approach focuses on the human, or cultural, geography of rare earths mining, she does not ignore the geological occurrence of these mineral types, both on Earth and on the moon.... This volume is excellently organized, insightfully written, and extensively sourced."―Choice Drawing on ethnographic, archival, and interview data gathered in local languages and offering possible solutions to the problems it documents, this book examines the production of the rare earth frontier as a place, a concept, and a zone of contestation, sacrifice, and transformation. Rare Earth Frontiers is a work of human geography that serves to demystify the powerful elements that make possible the miniaturization of electronics, green energy and medical technologies, and essential telecommunications and defense systems. Julie Michelle Klinger draws attention to the fact that the rare earths we rely on most are as common as copper or lead, and this means the implications of their extraction are global. Klinger excavates the rich historical origins and ongoing ramifications of the quest to mine rare earths in ever more impossible places. Klinger writes about the devastating damage to lives and the environment caused by the exploitation of rare earths. She demonstrates in human terms how scarcity myths have been conscripted into diverse geopolitical campaigns that use rare earth mining as a pretext to capture spaces that have historically fallen beyond the grasp of centralized power. These include legally and logistically forbidding locations in the Amazon, Greenland, and Afghanistan, and on the Moon.

The Second Kind of Impossible

The Second Kind of Impossible PDF Author: Paul Steinhardt
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
ISBN: 147672993X
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 400

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Book Description
*Shortlisted for the 2019 Royal Society Insight Investment Science Book Prize* One of the most fascinating scientific detective stories of the last fifty years, an exciting quest for a new form of matter. “A riveting tale of derring-do” (Nature), this book reads like James Gleick’s Chaos combined with an Indiana Jones adventure. When leading Princeton physicist Paul Steinhardt began working in the 1980s, scientists thought they knew all the conceivable forms of matter. The Second Kind of Impossible is the story of Steinhardt’s thirty-five-year-long quest to challenge conventional wisdom. It begins with a curious geometric pattern that inspires two theoretical physicists to propose a radically new type of matter—one that raises the possibility of new materials with never before seen properties, but that violates laws set in stone for centuries. Steinhardt dubs this new form of matter “quasicrystal.” The rest of the scientific community calls it simply impossible. The Second Kind of Impossible captures Steinhardt’s scientific odyssey as it unfolds over decades, first to prove viability, and then to pursue his wildest conjecture—that nature made quasicrystals long before humans discovered them. Along the way, his team encounters clandestine collectors, corrupt scientists, secret diaries, international smugglers, and KGB agents. Their quest culminates in a daring expedition to a distant corner of the Earth, in pursuit of tiny fragments of a meteorite forged at the birth of the solar system. Steinhardt’s discoveries chart a new direction in science. They not only change our ideas about patterns and matter, but also reveal new truths about the processes that shaped our solar system. The underlying science is important, simple, and beautiful—and Steinhardt’s firsthand account is “packed with discovery, disappointment, exhilaration, and persistence...This book is a front-row seat to history as it is made” (Nature).

The Unconstructable Earth

The Unconstructable Earth PDF Author: Frédéric Neyrat
Publisher: Fordham Univ Press
ISBN: 0823282597
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 243

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Book Description
Winner, Grand Prize, French Voices Award for Excellence in Publication and Translation The Space Age is over? Not at all! A new planet has appeared: Earth. In the age of the Anthropocene, the Earth is a post-natural planet that can be remade at will, controlled and managed thanks to the prowess of geoengineering. This new imaginary is also accompanied by a new kind of power—geopower—that takes the entire Earth, in its social, biological and geophysical dimensions, as an object of knowledge, intervention, and governmentality. In short, our rising awareness that we have destroyed our planet has simultaneously provided us not with remorse or resolve but with a new fantasy: that the Anthropocene delivers an opportunity to remake our terrestrial environment thanks to the power of technology. Such is the position we find ourselves in, when proposals for reengineering the earth’s ecosystems and geosystems are taken as the only politically feasible answer to ecological catastrophe. Yet far from being merely the fruit of geo-capitalism, this new grand narrative of geopower has also been activated by theorists of the constructivist turn—ecomodernist, postenvironmentalist, accelerationist—who have likewise called into question the great divide between nature and culture. With the collapse of this divide, a cyborg, hybrid, flexible nature has been built, an impoverished nature that does not exist without being performed by technologies that proliferate within the space of human needs and capitalist imperatives. Underneath this performative vision resides a hidden anaturalism denying all otherness to nature and the Earth, no longer by externalizing it as a thing to be dominated, but by radically internalizing it as something to be digested. Constructivist ecology thus finds itself in no position to confront the geoconstructivist project, with its claim that there is no nature and its aim to replace Earth with Earth 2.0. Against both positions, Neyrat stakes out the importance of the unconstructable Earth. Against the fusional myth of technology over nature, but without returning to the division between nature and culture, he proposes an “ecology of separation” that acknowledges the wild, subtractive capacity of nature. Against the capitalist, technocratic delusion of earth as a constructible object, but equally against an organicism marked by unacknowledged traces of racism and sexism, Neyrat shows what it means to appreciate Earth as an unsubstitutable becoming: a traject that cannot be replicated in a laboratory. Underway for billions of years, withdrawing into the most distant past and the most inaccessible future, Earth escapes the hubris of all who would remake and master it. This remarkable book, which will be of interest to those across the humanities, natural sciences, and social sciences, from theorists to shapers of policy, recasts the earth as a singular trajectory that invites humans to turn political ecology into a geopolitics.

Earth Beings

Earth Beings PDF Author: Marisol de la Cadena
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822375265
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 200

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Book Description
Earth Beings is the fruit of Marisol de la Cadena's decade-long conversations with Mariano and Nazario Turpo, father and son, runakuna or Quechua people. Concerned with the mutual entanglements of indigenous and nonindigenous worlds, and the partial connections between them, de la Cadena presents how the Turpos' indigenous ways of knowing and being include and exceed modern and nonmodern practices. Her discussion of indigenous political strategies—a realm that need not abide by binary logics—reconfigures how to think about and question modern politics, while pushing her readers to think beyond "hybridity" and toward translation, communication that accepts incommensurability, and mutual difference as conditions for ethnography to work.

Plenishment in the Earth

Plenishment in the Earth PDF Author: Stephen David Ross
Publisher: SUNY Press
ISBN: 9780791423103
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 444

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Book Description
This book is an ethic of inclusion leading from gender and sexual difference through the social world of race and culture to the natural world.

The Quiet Earth

The Quiet Earth PDF Author: Craig Harrison
Publisher: Text Publishing
ISBN: 192214813X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 277

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Book Description
John Hobson, a geneticist, wakes one morning to find his watch stopped at 6.12. The streets are deserted, there are no signs of life or death anywhere, and every clock he finds has stopped: at 6.12. Is Hobson the last person left on the planet? Inventive and suspenseful, The Quiet Earth is a confronting journey into the future, and a dark past. This new edition of Craig Harrison's highly sought-after 1981 novel, which was later made into a cult film starring Bruno Lawrence, Pete Smith and Alison Routledge, comes with an introduction by Bernard Beckett. Craig Harrison was born in Leeds in 1942. He left for New Zealand in 1966 after being appointed a lecturer at Massey University. There he devised a course in art history, which he taught until his retirement in 2000. His award-winning play Tomorrow Will Be a Lovely Day (1974) was performed for a quarter of a century, including in the Soviet Union. He is the author of five other plays, including Ground Level (1974), which led to a television series, Joe & Koro. Craig's most recent book, the young-adult comedy The Dumpster Saga, was a finalist in the 2008 New Zealand Post Book Awards. He lives in Palmerston North. 'Cuts to the heart of our most basic fears...compelling...a classic.' Bernard Beckett 'Excellent...The inevitability of the horror has a Hitchcock quality.' Listener

Strangers on the Earth

Strangers on the Earth PDF Author: James W. Thompson
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
ISBN: 1532684010
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 201

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Book Description
Contrary to what we might imagine from its title, the Epistle to the Hebrews is immersed in Hellenistic thought. Its author demonstrates an acquaintance with Greco-Roman rhetoric, and often supports his arguments with the assumptions of Hellenistic philosophy. While he shares the apocalyptic worldview of other Jews in this period, he recasts it with the language of Middle Platonism.

The Liberation of the Earth

The Liberation of the Earth PDF Author: Dwight Dunbar
Publisher: Christian Faith Publishing, Inc.
ISBN:
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 147

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Book Description
The liberation of the earth... There is a righteous one-world government on earth right now. After His resurrection from the dead, Jesus said, "All authority has been given to Me in heaven and on earth." The light of God has continued to increase on earth since that day. This is the greatest time for the church of Jesus Christ. All creation is eagerly waiting for the revealing of the sons of God. Death came to all the earth as a result of Adam and Eve's sin. Since man had dominion over all living things on the earth, everything under his authority began to die as well. Jesus has won the victory over the devil and death in the eternal realm. He is victorious forever. The spirit of Jesus now dwells in His believers. Now His body on earth will secure the victory in the temporary realm through His power. Death will be swallowed by victory. Mortality will be swallowed by life. Arise, shine--your light has come. The earth will be filled with the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea.