Download or read book Fire and Ice Soot Solidarity and Survival on the Roof of the World written by Jonathan Mingle and published by St. Martin's Press. This book was released on 2015-03-24 with total page 463 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: High in the Himalayan valley of Zanskar in northwest India sits a village as isolated as the legendary Shangri-La. Long fed by runoff from glaciers and lofty snowfields, Kumik—a settlement of thirty nine mud brick homes—has survived and thrived in one of the world's most challenging settings for a thousand years. But now its people confront an existential threat: chronic, crippling drought, which leaves the village canal dry and threatens to end their ancient culture of farming and animal husbandry. Fire and Ice weaves together the story of Kumik's inspiring response to this calamity with the story of black carbon. Black carbon from inefficient fires - the particulate residue that makes soot dark - is the second largest contributor to global warming after carbon dioxide. It's also a key ingredient of the air pollution that public health experts regard as humanity's greatest environmental health risk worldwide: soot-laden smoke from household hearth fires and outdoor sources combine to kill over seven million people around the world every year. Jonathan Mingle describes the joys and struggles of daily life in the Zanskar Valley, where villagers are buffeted by powerful environmental and economic forces, while also tracing black carbon's dark fingerprints outward from Kumik and around the world. Mingle investigates its impacts on snow, ice, and water from Mt. Everest to California, and the silent health epidemic it fuels from New York to New Delhi. Combining cultural history, detailed reportage, climate and energy science and dramatic storytelling, Fire and Ice is a profound examination of the global challenges of averting climate chaos and lifting billions out of energy poverty and water scarcity. Can Kumik's people come together to reinvent fire, harness what remains of their life-sustaining ice, and reinvigorate their traditions of solidarity, in time to save themselves? Can the rest of us rise to the same challenge? Fire and Ice connects these questions with the work of enterprising scientists, engineers, entrepreneurs and activists around the world, in a narrative that combines mythology, reason, humor, persistence, and hope in a race against a global clock.
Download or read book Fire and Ice Soot Solidarity and Survival on the Roof of the World written by Jonathan Mingle and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2015-03-24 with total page 463 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A thousand years ago in a Himalayan valley, the village of Kumik was founded. For generations, Kumik villagers survived by learning to cultivate their mountain terrain, drawing from the waters of the glacier and snows above the village. But now the glacier is almost gone, and Kumik is dying. Why? As Fire and Ice reveals, the culprit is black carbon, the most dangerous pollutant in the world and the least understood. Black carbon absorbs more heat per unit of mass in the atmosphere than greenhouse gases, and contributes as much to melting the glaciers of the Himalaya as carbon dioxide. It's also a major component of the household air pollution that causes 4.3 million deaths each year from respiratory and cardiovascular illnesses, and 3 million more from outdoor pollutants such as industrial exhaust. Black carbon threatens to overwhelm Kumik, unless the village can change the way it cooks, heats, farms and lives. In Fire and Ice, Jonathan Mingle weaves a dramatic narrative of one village's inspiring efforts to adapt to a rapidly changing environment, and a scientific detective tale about the impact of fire on every nation. Ranging from the Tibetan Plateau to New York and Washington, D.C., from Delhi and Kathmandu and China to northern California, Fire and Ice is a heroic exploration of our race to change the fate of our planet"--
Download or read book Extreme Conservation written by Joel Berger and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2018-08-02 with total page 415 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Extraordinary. . . . Berger is a hero of biology who deserves the highest honors that science can bestow."—Tim Flannery, New York Review of Books On the Tibetan Plateau, there are wild yaks with blood cells thinner than those of horses’ by half, enabling the endangered yaks to survive at 40 below zero and in the lowest oxygen levels of the mountaintops. But climate change is causing the snow patterns here to shift, and with the snows, the entire ecosystem. Food and water are vaporizing in this warming environment, and these beasts of ice and thin air are extraordinarily ill-equipped for the change. A journey into some of the most forbidding landscapes on earth, Joel Berger’s Extreme Conservation is an eye-opening, steely look at what it takes for animals like these to live at the edges of existence. But more than this, it is a revealing exploration of how climate change and people are affecting even the most far-flung niches of our planet. Berger’s quest to understand these creatures’ struggles takes him to some of the most remote corners and peaks of the globe: across Arctic tundra and the frozen Chukchi Sea to study muskoxen, into the Bhutanese Himalayas to follow the rarely sighted takin, and through the Gobi Desert to track the proboscis-swinging saiga. Known as much for his rigorous, scientific methods of developing solutions to conservation challenges as for his penchant for donning moose and polar bear costumes to understand the mindsets of his subjects more closely, Berger is a guide par excellence. He is a scientist and storyteller who has made his life working with desert nomads, in zones that typically require Sherpas and oxygen canisters. Recounting animals as charismatic as their landscapes are extreme, Berger’s unforgettable tale carries us with humor and expertise to the ends of the earth and back. But as his adventures show, the more adapted a species has become to its particular ecological niche, the more devastating climate change can be. Life at the extremes is more challenging than ever, and the need for action, for solutions, has never been greater.
Download or read book Climate Change Religion and our Bodily Future written by Todd LeVasseur and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2021-07-13 with total page 217 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores the interface of bodies and religion by investigating the impacts human-induced global warming will have on the embodied and performed practices of religion in ecologies of place. By utilizing analytical insights from religion and nature theory, posthumanism, queer ecologies, ecological animisms, indigenous knowledges, material feminisms, and performance studies the book advocates for a need to update how religious studies theorizes bodies and religion. It does so by in the first half of the book advocating for religious studies as a field, and the academy as a whole, to take the ongoing and deleterious future impacts of climate change seriously--to re-member that those laboring as scholars in religious studies, and the communities they study, have always been bodies in material bio-ecological places--and to let this inform the questions religious studies scholars ask. The book argues that this will lead to very different forms of engaged, liberatory scholarship that demands a different type of scholarship and public advocacy for resilience in the face of climate change. The second half of the book offers case study examples of how scholars may better engage religious bodies within petrocultures, while attending to new, emerging materialist posthuman assemblages of religious bodies. This book will be of interest to those in religious studies, the environmental humanities, and those working at the interface of the body and the natural world.
Download or read book Principles of Glacier Mechanics written by Roger LeB. Hooke and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2019-12-05 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The third edition of this successful textbook will supply advanced undergraduate and graduate students with the tools they need to understand modern glaciological research. Practicing glacial geologists and glaciologists will also find the volume useful as a reference book. Since the second edition, three-quarters of the chapters have been updated, and two new chapters have been added. Included in this edition are noteworthy new contributions to our understanding of important concepts, with over 170 references to papers published since the second edition went to press. The book develops concepts from the bottom up: a working knowledge of calculus is assumed, but beyond that, the important physical concepts are developed from elementary principles. Emphasis is placed on connections between modern research in glaciology and the origin of features of glacial landscapes. Student exercises are included.
Download or read book Blue Sky Kingdom written by Bruce Kirkby and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2020-10-06 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A warm and unforgettable portrait of a family letting go of the known world to encounter an unfamiliar one filled with rich possibilities and new understandings. Bruce Kirkby had fallen into a pattern of looking mindlessly at his phone for hours, flipping between emails and social media, ignoring his children and wife and everything alive in his world, when a thought struck him. This wasn't living; this wasn't him. This moment of clarity started a chain reaction which ended with a grand plan: he was going to take his wife and two young sons, jump on a freighter and head for the Himalaya. In Blue Sky Kingdom, we follow Bruce and his family's remarkable three months journey, where they would end up living amongst the Lamas of Zanskar Valley, a forgotten appendage of the ancient Tibetan empire, and one of the last places on earth where Himalayan Buddhism is still practiced freely in its original setting. Richly evocative, Blue Sky Kingdom explores the themes of modern distraction and the loss of ancient wisdom coupled with Bruce coming to terms with his elder son's diagnosis on the Autism Spectrum. Despite the natural wonders all around them at times, Bruce's experience will strike a chord with any parent—from rushing to catch a train with the whole family to the wonderment and beauty that comes with experience the world anew with your children.
Download or read book Climate Adaptive Design in High Mountain Villages written by Carey Clouse and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-10-15 with total page 302 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drawing from the unique context and climate of the Himalaya, this book highlights several innovative design interventions, shaped by a myriad of social, cultural, environmental, and political factors that have been employed in villages to combat climate change. Climate-Adaptive Design in High Mountain Villages focuses on Ladakh, an outpost on the front lines of climate change, and the region’s creative responses to the pressing issues of food security, water management, energy efficiency, design aid, and material resources in the Anthropocene. These strategies – from artificial glaciers to tree armor – showcase the breadth of creative solutions already underway. In doing so, the research addresses the broader concept of climate-adaptive design and how it informs the disciplines of architecture, landscape architecture, and urban planning. An ideal read for academics, researchers, and students in these fields, this book presents a focused investigation into climate-adaptive strategies that could provide transferable solutions for the rest of the world.
Download or read book The Bloomsbury Handbook of Religion and Nature written by Laura Hobgood and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2018-05-17 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Divided into four parts-Earth, Air, Fire, and Water-this book takes an elemental approach to the study of religion and ecology. It reflects recent theoretical and methodological developments in this field which seek to understand the ways that ideas and matter, minds and bodies exist together within an immanent frame of reference. The Bloomsbury Handbook of Religion and Nature focuses on how these matters materialize in the world around us, thereby addressing key topics in this area of study. The editors provide an extensive introduction to the book, as well as useful introductions to each of its parts. The volume's international contributors are drawn from the USA, South Africa, Netherlands, Norway, Indonesia, and South Korea, and offer a variety of perspectives, voices, cultural settings, and geographical locales. This handbook shows that human concern and engagement with material existence is present in all sectors of the global community, regardless of religious tradition. It challenges the traditional methodological approach of comparative religion, and argues that globalization renders a comparative religious approach to the environment insufficient.
Download or read book Reducing Emissions of Short Lived Climate Pollutants written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2023-12-11 with total page 440 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Short-lived climate pollutants (SLCPs), including methane, black carbon, hydrofluorocarbons, and tropospheric ozone, have become part of climate policy debates. Discussion has revolved around the potential of their mitigation to slow down global warming in the short term and bring about co-benefits, for instance, for air quality and public health. This book provides the first comprehensive analysis of global SLCP law and governance. A diverse array of contributors delves into the science and evolution of the concept of SLCPs, analyses the legal and governance responses developed under various international and transnational arenas, and discusses selected sectoral case studies.
Download or read book New Wilderness Voices written by Christine Woodside and published by University Press of New England. This book was released on 2017-07-04 with total page 219 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Guy and Laura Waterman spent a lifetime reflecting on and writing about the mountains of the Northeast. The Waterman Fund seeks to further their legacy of stewardship through an annual essay contest that celebrates and explores issues of wilderness, wildness, and humanity. Since 2008, the Waterman Fund has partnered with the journal Appalachia in seeking out new and emerging voices on these subjects, and in publishing the winning essay in the journal. Part of the contest's mission is to find and support such emerging writers, and a number of them have gone on to publish other work in Appalachia or their own books. The contest has succeeded admirably in fulfilling its mission: new writers have brought fresh perspectives to these timeless issues of wilderness and wildness. In New Wilderness Voices these winning essays are collected for the first time, along with the best runners-up. Together, they make up an important and celebratory addition to the growing body of environmental literature, and shed new light on our wild spaces.
Download or read book Economic Modeling Analysis and Policy for Sustainability written by Goswami, Anandajit and published by IGI Global. This book was released on 2016-04-19 with total page 388 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As the global economy continues to grow and change, issues concerning sustainability practices have become more prevalent. The implementation of efficient sustainability procedures offers significant assistance in the development of modern economies. Economic Modeling, Analysis, and Policy for Sustainability focuses on interdisciplinary perspectives concerning the social, environmental, and economic spheres of sustainability science. Emphasizing economic models, as well as mitigation policies and practices from various regions of the world, this book is a pivotal reference source for researchers, policy makers, government officials, and corporate leaders.
Download or read book Gaslight written by Jonathan Mingle and published by Island Press. This book was released on 2024-05-16 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Imagine one day you receive a letter in the mail that informs you that a large energy company is planning to build a massive pipeline through your property. That surveyors will be coming out soon. That they have the legal right to do so, whether you like it or not, because this project is in the “public interest”—because the pipeline will be carrying natural gas, the so-called “bridge fuel” that politicians on both sides of the aisle have been peddling for decades as the path to a clean, green energy future. This was the gist of the letter that Dominion Energy sent to thousands of residents living along the path of its proposed Atlantic Coast Pipeline in 2014, setting off an epic, six-year battle that eventually led all the way to the Supreme Court. That struggle’s epicenter was in the mountains of Virginia, where communities stretching from the Blue Ridge foothills to the Shenandoah Valley and the Allegheny highlands became Dominion’s staunchest foes. On one side was an archetypal Goliath: a power company that commands billions of dollars, the votes of politicians, and the decisions of the federal government. On the other, an army of Davids: lawyers and farmers, conservationists and conservatives, scientists and nurses, innkeepers and lobbyists, families who farmed their land since before the Revolutionary War and those who were not allowed to until after the Civil War. At stake was not only the future of the communities that lay in the pipeline’s path but the future of American energy. Would the public be swayed by the industry’s decades-long public relations campaign to frame natural gas – a fossil fuel and itself a potent greenhouse gas – as a “solution” to climate change? Or would we recognize it as a methane bomb, capable of not only imperiling local property and upending people’s lives, but of pushing the planet further down the road towards climate chaos? Vivid and suspenseful, gut-wrenching and insightful, Gaslight is more than the chronicle of a turning point in American history. It is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand the dark, overlooked story of America’s “favorite fossil fuel,” and the immense future stakes of the energy choices we face today.
Download or read book The Routledge Companion to Architecture and Social Engagement written by Farhan Karim and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-05-11 with total page 581 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Socially engaged architecture is a broad and emerging architectural genre that promises to redefine architecture from a market-driven profession to a mix of social business, altruism, and activism that intends to eradicate poverty, resolve social exclusion, and construct an egalitarian global society. The Routledge Companion to Architecture and Social Engagement offers a critical enquiry of socially engaged architecture’s current context characterized by socio-economic inequity, climate change, war, increasing global poverty, microfinance, the evolving notion of professionalism, the changing conception of public, and finally the growing academic interest in re-visioning the social role of architecture. Organized around case studies from the United States, Brazil, Venezuela, the United Kingdom, South Africa, Rwanda, Burkina Faso, Nigeria, Nepal, Pakistan, Iran, Thailand, Germany, Australia, Taiwan, and Japan the book documents the most important recent developments in the field. By examining diverse working methods and philosophies of socially engaged architecture, the handbook shows how socially engaged architecture is entangled in the global politics of poverty, reconstruction of the public sphere, changing role of the state, charity, and neoliberal urbanism. The book presents debates around the issue of whether architecture actually empowers the participators and alleviates socio-economic exclusion or if it instead indirectly sustains an exploitive capitalism. Bringing together a range of theories and case studies, this companion offers a platform to facilitate future lines of inquiry in education, research, and practice.
Download or read book Understanding Climate Change through Religious Lifeworlds written by David L. Haberman and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2021-05-04 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How can religion help to understand and contend with the challenges of climate change? Understanding Climate Change through Religious Lifeworld,edited by David Haberman, presents a unique collection of essays that detail how the effects of human-related climate change are actively reshaping religious ideas and practices, even as religious groups and communities endeavor to bring their traditions to bear on mounting climate challenges. People of faith from the low-lying islands of the South Pacific to the glacial regions of the Himalayas are influencing how their communities understand earthly problems and develop meaningful responses to them. This collection focuses on a variety of different aspects of this critical interaction, including the role of religion in ongoing debates about climate change, religious sources of environmental knowledge and how this knowledge informs community responses to climate change, and the ways that climate change is in turn driving religious change. Understanding Climate Change through Religious Lifeworlds offers a transnational view of how religion reconciles the concepts of the global and the local and influences the challenges of climate change.
Download or read book Breakthroughs written by and published by . This book was released on 2012 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Sophie s World written by Jostein Gaarder and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2007-03-20 with total page 544 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One day Sophie comes home from school to find two questions in her mail: "Who are you?" and "Where does the world come from?" Before she knows it she is enrolled in a correspondence course with a mysterious philosopher. Thus begins Jostein Gaarder's unique novel, which is not only a mystery, but also a complete and entertaining history of philosophy.
Download or read book The Uninhabitable Earth written by David Wallace-Wells and published by Tim Duggan Books. This book was released on 2019-02-19 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • “The Uninhabitable Earth hits you like a comet, with an overflow of insanely lyrical prose about our pending Armageddon.”—Andrew Solomon, author of The Noonday Demon NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The New Yorker • The New York Times Book Review • Time • NPR • The Economist • The Paris Review • Toronto Star • GQ • The Times Literary Supplement • The New York Public Library • Kirkus Reviews It is worse, much worse, than you think. If your anxiety about global warming is dominated by fears of sea-level rise, you are barely scratching the surface of what terrors are possible—food shortages, refugee emergencies, climate wars and economic devastation. An “epoch-defining book” (The Guardian) and “this generation’s Silent Spring” (The Washington Post), The Uninhabitable Earth is both a travelogue of the near future and a meditation on how that future will look to those living through it—the ways that warming promises to transform global politics, the meaning of technology and nature in the modern world, the sustainability of capitalism and the trajectory of human progress. The Uninhabitable Earth is also an impassioned call to action. For just as the world was brought to the brink of catastrophe within the span of a lifetime, the responsibility to avoid it now belongs to a single generation—today’s. LONGLISTED FOR THE PEN/E.O. WILSON LITERARY SCIENCE WRITING AWARD “The Uninhabitable Earth is the most terrifying book I have ever read. Its subject is climate change, and its method is scientific, but its mode is Old Testament. The book is a meticulously documented, white-knuckled tour through the cascading catastrophes that will soon engulf our warming planet.”—Farhad Manjoo, The New York Times “Riveting. . . . Some readers will find Mr. Wallace-Wells’s outline of possible futures alarmist. He is indeed alarmed. You should be, too.”—The Economist “Potent and evocative. . . . Wallace-Wells has resolved to offer something other than the standard narrative of climate change. . . . He avoids the ‘eerily banal language of climatology’ in favor of lush, rolling prose.”—Jennifer Szalai, The New York Times “The book has potential to be this generation’s Silent Spring.”—The Washington Post “The Uninhabitable Earth, which has become a best seller, taps into the underlying emotion of the day: fear. . . . I encourage people to read this book.”—Alan Weisman, The New York Review of Books
