Биология, биофизика, биохимия
6036 кн.
When city-dwelling journalist Kiera Butler visits a county fair for the first time, she is captivated by the white-uniformed members of the 4-H club and their perfectly groomed animals. She sets off on a search for a «real» 4-H’er, a hypothetical wholesome youth whom she imagines wearing cowboy boots and living on a ranch. Along the way, she meets five teenage 4-H’ers from diverse backgrounds and gets to know them as they prepare to compete at the fair. Butler’s on-the-ground account of the...
| Автор | Kiera Butler |
International Water Scarcity and Variability considers international water management challenges created by water scarcity and environmental change. Although media coverage and some scholars tend to cast natural resource shortages as leading inexorably toward armed conflict and war, Shlomi Dinar and Ariel Dinar demonstrate that there are many examples of and mechanisms for more peaceful dispute resolution regarding natural resources, even in the face of water paucity and climate change. The...
| Автор | Shlomi Dinar |
If humans are to understand and discover ways of addressing complex social and ecological problems, we first need to find intimacy with our particular places and communities. Cultivating a relationship to place often includes a negotiating process that involves both science and sensibility. While science is one key part of an adaptive and resilient society, the cultivation of a renewed sense of place and community is essential as well.<BR /><BR /><I>Science and...
| Автор | Michael Vincent McGinnis |
The pesticide dibromochloropropane, known as DBCP, was developed by the chemical companies Dow and Shell in the 1950s to target wormlike, soil-dwelling creatures called nematodes. Despite signs that the chemical was dangerous, it was widely used in U.S. agriculture and on Chiquita and Dole banana plantations in Central America. In the late 1970s, DBCP was linked to male sterility, but an uneven regulatory process left many workers—especially on Dole’s banana farms—exposed for years after health...
| Автор | Susanna Rankin Bohme |
Our Energy Future is an introductory textbook for the study of energy production, alternative and renewable fuels, and ways to build a sustainable energy future. Jones and Mayfield explore the creation and history of fossil fuels, their impact on the environment, and how they have become critical to our society. The authors also outline how adopting sustainable biofuels will be key to the future of energy stability and discuss a number of renewable energy options and biofuel feedstocks that are...
| Автор | Carla S. Jones |
"A beautiful, absorbing, tragic book."—Larry McMurtry<br><br>In 1851, a war began in what would become Yosemite National Park, a war against the indigenous inhabitants. A century later–in 1951–and a hundred and fifty miles away, another war began when the U.S. government started setting off nuclear bombs at the Nevada Test Site. It was called a nuclear testing program, but functioned as a war against the land and people of the Great Basin.<br><br>In this foundational...
| Автор | Rebecca Solnit |
Out of War draws on Mariane C. Ferme’s three decades of ethnographic engagements to examine the physical and psychological aftereffects of the harms of Sierra Leone's civil war. Ferme analyzes the relationship between violence, trauma, and the political imagination, focusing on “war times”—the different qualities of temporality arising from war. She considers the persistence of precolonial and colonial figures of sovereignty...
| Автор | Mariane C. Ferme |
Now forty years old, the Endangered Species Act (ESA) remains a landmark act in conservation and one of the world’s most comprehensive laws designed to prevent species extinctions and support recovery efforts for imperiled species. A controversial law and often subject to political attack, the ESA is successful overall but not without difficulties. Those who enforce the ESA, for example, struggle to achieve viable recovery goals for many species.<BR /><BR /> At the forefront of...
| Автор | Группа авторов |
Flame and Fortune in the American West creatively and meticulously investigates the ongoing politics, folly, and avarice shaping the production of increasingly widespread yet dangerous suburban and exurban landscapes. The 1991 Oakland Hills Tunnel Fire is used as a starting point to better understand these complex social-environmental processes. The Tunnel Fire is the most destructive fire—in terms of structures lost—in California history. More than 3,000...
| Автор | Gregory L. Simon |
"Many of the findings in the book . . . are classics of ecology. . . . A rare and delightful insight into timely science."—Jane Lubchenco, Nature "Estes's refreshing narrative deftly weaves rigorous science with personal reflection to create an absorbing and introspective read that is equal parts memoir, ecological textbook, and motivational guidebook for young ecologists."—Science To newly minted biologist James Estes, the...
| Автор | James A. Estes |
While becoming less relevant in the United States, shopping malls are booming throughout urban Latin America. But what does this mean on the ground? Are shopping malls a sign of the region’s “coming of age”? <I>El Mall</I> is the first book to answer these questions and explore how malls and consumption are shaping the conversation about class and social inequality in Latin America.  <BR />  <BR /> Through original and...
| Автор | Arlene Dávila |
Point Reyes National Seashore has a long history as a working landscape, with dairy and beef ranching, fishing, and oyster farming; yet, since 1962 it has also been managed as a National Seashore. <I>The Paradox of Preservation </I>chronicles how national ideals about what a park “ought to be” have developed over time and what happens when these ideals are implemented by the National Park Service (NPS) in its efforts to preserve places that are also lived-in...
| Автор | Laura Alice Watt |
For nearly a century, the worldwide anthroposophical movement has been a catalyst for environmental activism, helping to bring to life many modern ecological practices such as organic farming, community-supported agriculture, and green banking. Yet the spiritual practice of anthroposophy remains unknown to most environmentalists. A historical and ethnographic study of the environmental movement, <I>Eco-Alchemy</I> uncovers for the first time the profound influences of...
| Автор | Dan McKanan |
Throughout the twentieth century, neuronal researchers knew the adult human brain to be a thoroughly fixed and immutable cellular structure, devoid of any developmental potential. <I>Plastic Reason</I> is a study of the efforts of a few Parisian neurobiologists to overturn this rigid conception of the central nervous system by showing that basic embryogenetic processes—most spectacularly the emergence of new cellular tissue in the form of new neurons, axons, dendrites, and...
| Автор | Tobias Rees |
One of the most important hotspots of herpetological biodiversity in the United States, California is home to many endemic amphibians and reptiles found nowhere else on earth. Many of these taxa have unique ecological and morphological specializations, and their management is an important conservation challenge. Increasing climate change impacts, human development, and extreme drought mean many of these species face an ever-greater risk of extinction.<BR />  <BR...
| Автор | Robert C. Thomson |
Global conservation efforts are celebrated for saving Guatemala’s Maya Forest. This book reveals that the process of protecting lands has been one of racialized dispossession for the Indigenous peoples who live there. Through careful ethnography and archival research, Megan Ybarra shows how conservation efforts have turned Q’eqchi’ Mayas into immigrants on their own land, and how this is part of a larger national effort to make Indigenous peoples into neoliberal...
| Автор | Megan Ybarra |
Alcoholism, as opposed to the safe consumption of alcohol, remains a major public health issue. In this accessible book, Robert Dudley presents an intriguing evolutionary interpretation to explain the persistence of alcohol-related problems. Providing a deep-time, interdisciplinary perspective on today’s patterns of alcohol consumption and abuse, Dudley traces the link between the fruit-eating behavior of arboreal primates and the evolution of the sensory skills required to identify ripe and...
| Автор | Robert Dudley |
The largest seaweed, giant kelp (<I>Macrocystis</I>) is the fastest growing and most prolific of all plants found on earth. Growing from the seafloor and extending along the ocean surface in lush canopies, giant kelp provides an extensive vertical habitat in a largely two-dimensional seascape. It is the foundation for one of the most species-rich, productive, and widely distributed ecological communities in the world.<BR /><BR /> Schiel and Foster’s scholarly review and...
| Автор | David R. Schiel |
This pioneering volume provides a blueprint for managing the challenges of ocean conservation using marine historical ecology—an interdisciplinary area of study that is helping society to gain a more in-depth understanding of past human-environmental interactions in coastal and marine ecosystems and of the ecological and social outcomes associated with these interactions.<BR /><BR /> Developed by groundbreaking practitioners in the field, <I>Marine Historical...
| Автор | Группа авторов |
Phylogeography of California examines the evolution of a variety of taxa—ancient and recent, native and migratory—to elucidate evolutionary events both major and minor that shaped the distribution, radiation, and speciation of the biota of California. The book also interprets evolutionary history in a geological context and reviews new and emerging phylogeographic patterns. Focusing on a region that is defined by physical and political boundaries, Kristina A. Schierenbeck provides a...
| Автор | Kristina A. Schierenbeck |
 What do we think about when we think about human evolution? With his characteristic wit and wisdom, anthropologist Jonathan Marks explores our scientific narrative of human origins—the study of evolution—and examines its cultural elements and theoretical foundations. In the process, he situates human evolution within a general anthropological framework and presents it as a special case of kinship and mythology.<BR />  <BR /><I>Tales of the...
| Автор | Jonathan Marks |
Changing Energy outlines how humanity established the current energy economy through three previous transitions, and how we now stand poised for a necessary fourth transition. Human societies around the globe have received immense benefits from uses of coal, oil, gas, and uranium sources, yet we must now rebuild our energy economies to rely on renewable sources and use them efficiently. The imperative for a fourth energy transition comes from dangers related to climate change,...
| Автор | John H. Perkins |
Japan is arguably the first postindustrial society to embrace the prospect of human-robot coexistence. Over the past decade, Japanese humanoid robots designed for use in homes, hospitals, offices, and schools have become celebrated in mass and social media throughout the world.  In <I>Robo sapiens japanicus,</I> Jennifer Robertson casts a critical eye on press releases and public relations videos that misrepresent robots as being as versatile and agile as their science...
| Автор | Jennifer Robertson |
Recent years have witnessed an upsurge in global health emergencies—from SARS to pandemic influenza to Ebola to Zika. Each of these occurrences has sparked calls for improved health preparedness. In <I>Unprepared, </I>Andrew Lakoff follows the history of health preparedness from its beginnings in 1950s Cold War civil defense to the early twenty-first century, when international health authorities carved out a global space for governing potential outbreaks. Alert systems and...
| Автор | Andrew Lakoff |