Download or read book How Forests Think written by Eduardo Kohn and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2013-08-10 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Can forests think? Do dogs dream? In this astonishing book, Eduardo Kohn challenges the very foundations of anthropology, calling into question our central assumptions about what it means to be humanÑand thus distinct from all other life forms. Based on four years of fieldwork among the Runa of EcuadorÕs Upper Amazon, Eduardo Kohn draws on his rich ethnography to explore how Amazonians interact with the many creatures that inhabit one of the worldÕs most complex ecosystems. Whether or not we recognize it, our anthropological tools hinge on those capacities that make us distinctly human. However, when we turn our ethnographic attention to how we relate to other kinds of beings, these tools (which have the effect of divorcing us from the rest of the world) break down. How Forests Think seizes on this breakdown as an opportunity. Avoiding reductionistic solutions, and without losing sight of how our lives and those of others are caught up in the moral webs we humans spin, this book skillfully fashions new kinds of conceptual tools from the strange and unexpected properties of the living world itself. In this groundbreaking work, Kohn takes anthropology in a new and exciting directionÐone that offers a more capacious way to think about the world we share with other kinds of beings.
Download or read book Forests Trees and Human Health written by Kjell Nilsson and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2010-10-10 with total page 428 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The link between modern lifestyles and increasing levels of chronic heart disease, obesity, stress and poor mental health is a concern across the world. The cost of dealing with these conditions places a large burden on national public health budgets so that policymakers are increasingly looking at prevention as a cost-effective alternative to medical treatment. Attention is turning towards interactions between the environment and lifestyles. Exploring the relationships between health, natural environments in general, and forests in particular, this groundbreaking book is the outcome of the European Union’s COST Action E39 ‘Forests, Trees and Human Health and Wellbeing’, and draws together work carried out over four years by scientists from 25 countries working in the fields of forestry, health, environment and social sciences. While the focus is primarily on health priorities defined within Europe, this volume explicitly draws also on research from North America.
Download or read book Forests and Human Health written by Carol J. Pierce Colfer and published by CIFOR. This book was released on 2006-01-01 with total page 121 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study has two central concerns: the state of human health in forests, and the causal links between forests and human health. Within this framework, we consider four issues related to tropical forests and human health. First, we discuss forest foods, emphasizing the forest as a food-producing habitat, human dependence on forest foods, the nutritional contributions of such foods, and nutrition-related problems that affect forest peoples. Our second topic is disease and other health problems. In addition to the major problems—HIV/AIDS, malaria, Ebola and mercury poisoning—we address some 20 other tropical diseases and health problems related to forests. The third topic is medicinal products. We review the biophysical properties of medicinal species and consider related indigenous knowledge, human uses of medicinal forest products, the serious threats to forest sustainability, and the roles of traditional healers, with a discussion of the benefits of forest medicines and conflicts over their distribution. Our fourth and final topic is the cultural interpretations of human health found among forest peoples, including holistic world views that impinge on health and indigenous knowledge. The Occasional Paper concludes with some observations about the current state of our knowledge, its utility and shortcomings, and our suggestions for future research.
Download or read book The Human Dimensions of Forest and Tree Health written by Julie Urquhart and published by Springer. This book was released on 2018-05-24 with total page 521 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores the specifically human dimensions of the problem posed by a new generation of invasive pests and pathogens to tree health worldwide. The growth in global trade and transportation in recent decades, along with climate change, is allowing invasive pests and pathogens to establish in new environments, with profound consequences for the ecosystem services provided by trees and forests, and impacts on human wellbeing. The central theme of the book is to consider the role that social science can play in better understanding the social, economic and environmental impacts of such tree disease and pest outbreaks. Contributions include explorations of how pest outbreaks are socially constructed, drawing on the historical, cultural, social and situated contexts of outbreaks; the governance and economics of tree health for informing policy and decision-making; stakeholder engagement and communication tools; along with more philosophical approaches that draw on environmental ethics to consider ‘non-human’ perspectives. Taken together the book makes theoretical, methodological and applied contributions to our understanding of this important subject area and encourages researchers from across the social sciences and humanities to bring their own disciplinary perspectives and expertise to address the complexity that is the human dimensions of forest and tree health. Chapters 5 and 11 are open access under a CC BY 4.0 license via link.springer.com.
Download or read book Human Forest written by Flora Goldberg and published by . This book was released on 2013-06 with total page 84 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Presentation of the wood sculpture exhibition HUMAN FOREST of Flora Goldberg.
Download or read book Changing Forests written by Catherine M. Tucker and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2008-03-13 with total page 267 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drawing on ethnographic and archival research, this book explores how the indigenous Lenca community of La Campa, Honduras, has conserved and transformed their communal forests through the experiences of colonialism, opposition to state-controlled logging, and the recent adoption of export-oriented coffee production. The book merges political ecology, collective-action theories, and institutional analysis to study how the people and forests have changed through various transitions.
Download or read book We are Forests written by Jean-Baptiste Vidalou and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2023-06-06 with total page 174 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the Sivens forest in France to the Hambach forest in Germany, from the Broadback forest in Canada to the rainforests of Borneo, something has shifted in these wild spaces over the last decade or two. People have begun to inhabit the forests, oppose the loggers and use their bodies as shields, motivated by the determination to resist the lethal ecosystem of commercial exploitation. Forests have become a battleground in the struggle between groups with fundamentally divergent aims and objectives. Forests are made up of insurgents. Jean-Baptiste Vidalou went to see some of these forests and meet those who are defending them: he discovered a completely different way of understanding the world, sharply opposed to the mentality of planners who see forests as just one more territory to be managed. Here he recounts this encounter, relays what these forest peoples and struggles convey, not to offer any recipes or ready-made solutions to the crises of our times but to be the forest, like a force that grows, stem by stem, leaf by leaf, slowly becoming ungovernable.
Download or read book Forest Phoenix written by David Lindenmayer and published by CSIRO PUBLISHING. This book was released on 2010-09-02 with total page 129 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book tells the story of ecological forest recovery in the wet forests of Victoria following major wildfires in February 2009. It also focuses on the science of ecological recovery – a major body of information that is not well known or understood by the vast majority of Australians and the vast majority of environmental policy makers. Forest Phoenix presents this important story via short engaging text and truly spectacular images, which are accompanied by highly informative captions. If you've ever wanted to better understand how forests and forest biodiversity recover after wildfire, then this book is a must-read. 2011 Whitley Award Commendation for Ecological Zoology.
Download or read book People Managing Forests written by Carol J. Pierce Colfer and published by Resources for the Future. This book was released on 2001 with total page 470 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An international team of 26 investigators focuses on the communities in and around managed forests, examining how efforts to preserve ecological integrity can also address the cultural and physical needs of human residents. Issues covered include the identification and roles of stakeholders, security of access to forest resources, and rights and responsibilities to manage forests cooperatively and equitably. Chapters include data and case studies from Indonesia, Cameroon, Trinidad, Gabon, Brazil, and North America. The contributors are experts in anthropology, natural resource management, social science, forestry, botany, and other disciplines. c. Book News Inc.
Download or read book Two Trees Make a Forest written by Jessica J. Lee and published by Catapult. This book was released on 2020-08-04 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This "stunning journey through a country that is home to exhilarating natural wonders, and a scarring colonial past . . . makes breathtakingly clear the connection between nature and humanity, and offers a singular portrait of the complexities inherent to our ideas of identity, family, and love" (Refinery29). A chance discovery of letters written by her immigrant grandfather leads Jessica J. Lee to her ancestral homeland, Taiwan. There, she seeks his story while growing closer to the land he knew. Lee hikes mountains home to Formosan flamecrests, birds found nowhere else on earth, and swims in a lake of drowned cedars. She bikes flatlands where spoonbills alight by fish farms, and learns about a tree whose fruit can float in the ocean for years, awaiting landfall. Throughout, Lee unearths surprising parallels between the natural and human stories that have shaped her family and their beloved island. Joyously attentive to the natural world, Lee also turns a critical gaze upon colonialist explorers who mapped the land and named plants, relying on and often effacing the labor and knowledge of local communities. Two Trees Make a Forest is a genre–shattering book encompassing history, travel, nature, and memoir, an extraordinary narrative showing how geographical forces are interlaced with our family stories.
Download or read book People Forests and Change written by Deanna H. Olson and published by Island Press. This book was released on 2017-04-20 with total page 362 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Forests throughout the world are undergoing rapid, far-reaching change as a result of natural and anthropogenic disturbances. The challenge is to manage these forests in ways that avoid formulaic approaches to complex issues. This book takes on the challenge of balancing local economies, wood products, and biodiversity by proposing diverse new approaches to forest management using new research from the moist coniferous forests of the Pacific Northwest. --
Download or read book Hierarchy in the Forest written by Christopher BOEHM and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2009-06-30 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Are humans by nature hierarchical or egalitarian? Hierarchy in the Forest addresses this question by examining the evolutionary origins of social and political behavior. Christopher Boehm, an anthropologist whose fieldwork has focused on the political arrangements of human and nonhuman primate groups, postulates that egalitarianism is in effect a hierarchy in which the weak combine forces to dominate the strong. The political flexibility of our species is formidable: we can be quite egalitarian, we can be quite despotic. Hierarchy in the Forest traces the roots of these contradictory traits in chimpanzee, bonobo, gorilla, and early human societies. Boehm looks at the loose group structures of hunter-gatherers, then at tribal segmentation, and finally at present-day governments to see how these conflicting tendencies are reflected. Hierarchy in the Forest claims new territory for biological anthropology and evolutionary biology by extending the domain of these sciences into a crucial aspect of human political and social behavior. This book will be a key document in the study of the evolutionary basis of genuine altruism. Table of Contents: The Question of Egalitarian Society Hierarchy and Equality Putting Down Aggressors Equality and Its Causes A Wider View of Egalitarianism The Hominoid Political Spectrum Ancestral Politics The Evolution of Egalitarian Society Paleolithic Politics and Natural Selection Ambivalence and Compromise in Human Nature References Index Reviews of this book: This well-written book, geared toward an audience with background in the behavioral and evolutionary sciences but accessible to a broad readership, raises two general questions: 'What is an egalitarian society?' and 'How have these societies evolved?'...[Christopher Boehm] takes the reader on a journey from the Arctic to the Americas, from Australia to Africa, in search of hunter-gatherer and tribal societies that emanate the egalitarian ethos--one that promotes generosity, altruism and sharing but forbids upstartism, aggression and egoism. Throughout this journey, Boehm tantalizes the reader with vivid anthropological accounts of ridicule, criticism, ostracism and even execution--prevalent tactics used by subordinates in egalitarian societies to level the social playing field...Hierarchy in the Forest is an interesting and thought-provoking book that is surely an important contribution to perspectives on human sociality and politics. --Ryan Earley, American Scientist Reviews of this book: Combing an exhaustive ethnographic survey of human societies from groups of hunter-gatherers to contemporary residents of the Balkans with a detailed analysis of the behavioral attributes of non-human primates (chimpanzees, gorillas, bonobos), Boehm focuses on whether humans are hierarchical or egalitarian by nature...[Boehm's hypotheses] are invariably intriguing and well documented...He raises topics of wide interest and his book should get attention. --Publishers Weekly Boehm has been the first to look at egalitarianism with a cold, unromantic eye. He sees it as a victory over hierarchical tendencies, which are equally marked in our species. I would predict that his insightful examination will reverberate within anthropology and the social sciences as well as among biologists interested in the evolution of social systems. --Frans de Waal, Emory University Hierarchy in the Forest is an original and stimulating contribution to thinking about the origins of egalitarianism. I personally find Boehm's ideas convincing, but whether one agrees with him or not, he has formulated his hypotheses in such a way that this book is likely to set the terms of the discussion for the forseeable future. --Barbara Smuts, University of Michigan The most unique and interesting feature of this clear, well written book is the way Boehm links the study of nonhuman primates (particularly chimpanzees) to traditional concepts of political anthropology. As a political scientist, I was intrigued by Boehm's suggestion that democracy, both ancient and modern, could be understood as the expression of the same natural dispositions that support the egalitarianism of nomadic bands and sedentary tribes. I expect that many scholars in biology, anthropology, and the social sciences would learn from this stimulating book. Even those who disagree with Boehm's arguments are likely to be provoked in instructive ways. --Larry Arnhart, Northern Illinois University Chris Boehm boldly and cogently attacks a whole orthodoxy in anthropology which sees hunter-gatherer 'egalitarianism' as somehow the basic form of human society. No praise can be too high for Boehm's brilliant and courageous book. --Robin Fox, Rutgers University
Download or read book The Dark Forest written by Cixin Liu and published by Tor Books. This book was released on 2015-08-11 with total page 513 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The inspiration for the Netflix series 3 Body Problem! Over 1 million copies of the Three-Body Problem series sold in North America PRAISE FOR THE THREE-BODY PROBLEM SERIES: “A mind-bending epic.”—The New York Times • “War of the Worlds for the 21st century.”—The Wall Street Journal • “Fascinating.”—TIME • “Extraordinary.”—The New Yorker • “Wildly imaginative.”—Barack Obama • “Provocative.”—Slate • “A breakthrough book.”—George R. R. Martin • “Impossible to put down.”—GQ • “Absolutely mind-unfolding.”—NPR • “You should be reading Liu Cixin.”—The Washington Post The Dark Forest is the second novel in the groundbreaking, Hugo Award-winning series from China's most beloved science fiction author, Cixin Liu. In The Dark Forest, Earth is reeling from the revelation of a coming alien invasion-in just four centuries' time. The aliens' human collaborators may have been defeated, but the presence of the sophons, the subatomic particles that allow Trisolaris instant access to all human information, means that Earth's defense plans are totally exposed to the enemy. Only the human mind remains a secret. This is the motivation for the Wallfacer Project, a daring plan that grants four men enormous resources to design secret strategies, hidden through deceit and misdirection from Earth and Trisolaris alike. Three of the Wallfacers are influential statesmen and scientists, but the fourth is a total unknown. Luo Ji, an unambitious Chinese astronomer and sociologist, is baffled by his new status. All he knows is that he's the one Wallfacer that Trisolaris wants dead. The Three-Body Problem Series The Three-Body Problem The Dark Forest Death's End Other Books by Cixin Liu Ball Lightning Supernova Era To Hold Up the Sky The Wandering Earth A View from the Stars At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.
Download or read book Quarterstars Awakening written by David L. McDaniel and published by Black Rose Writing. This book was released on 2019-11-07 with total page 245 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Lavish and complete world-building, made grand and epic by the range of fascinating creatures, [McDaniel] takes elements of classic fantasy and does unexpected things with them." –Authors Reading War stirs in the hearts of the elves and humans. Jaerick, king of the elves, and Traelyn, Great Mother of the humans, have a storied and tragic past, but neither can recall anything but the hate between them for actions in a past that has been wiped from memory. The Quarterstar Prophecy, however, stirs within the realm, with a will of its own, and it calls to both Jaerick and Traelyn. At the center of it all lies the Quarterstar Talisman and the only known Quarterstar Shard to have ever been found – kept separate due to the power of the Shard if combined with the Talisman. Traelyn should have died generations ago. Her father, Dar Drannon, must come back in order to fulfill the prophecy. Yet, it is the king’s advisor, Naemyn, who may thwart the balance of power as the Quarterstar Prophecy unfolds.
Download or read book Forest Ecology written by Daniel M. Kashian and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2023-01-16 with total page 788 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: FOREST ECOLOGY Authoritative resource covering traditional plant ecology topics and contemporary components such as climate change, invasive species, ecosystem services, and more Forest Ecology provides comprehensive coverage of the field, focusing on traditional plant ecology topics of tree structure and growth, regeneration, effects of light and temperature on tree physiology, forest communities, succession, and diversity. The work also reviews abiotic factors of light, temperature, physiography (landforms and topography), soil, and disturbance (especially fire), and provides coverage of ecosystem-level topics including carbon storage and balance, nutrient cycling, and forest ecosystem productivity. The 5th edition of Forest Ecology retains the readability and accessibility of the previous editions and includes important additional topical material that has surfaced in the field. All topics are approached with a landscape ecosystem or geo-ecological view, which places biota (organisms and communities) in context as integral parts of whole ecosystems that also include air (atmosphere and climate), topography, soil, and water. As such, the book fills a niche utilized by no other forest ecology text on the market, helping students and researchers consider whole ecosystems at multiple scales. Sample topics covered in Forest Ecology include: Contemporary components of forest ecology, including climate change, invasive species, diversity, ecological forestry, landscape ecology, and ecosystem services. Characteristics of physiography important for forest ecosystems, including its effects on microclimate, disturbance, soil, and vegetation. Genetic diversity of woody plants and genecological differentiation of tree species, including the importance of hybridization, polyploidy, and epigenetics. Site quality estimation using tree height and ground flora, and multiple-factor approaches to forest site and ecosystem classification and mapping. Forest Ecology is a highly accessible text for students, but it also serves as an excellent reference for academics. In addition, practitioners of forest ecology can also harness the information within to gain better insight into the field for practical application of concepts.
Download or read book Living with the Adirondack Forest written by Catherine Henshaw Knott and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 1998 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the land-use controversy, some voices have still not been heard. Catherine Henshaw Knott interviewed residents of the Adirondacks on the complex issues of conservation. Knott concludes that the participation of local people in decision making is the only process that can shift an increasingly hostile cycle toward resolution. 19 photos.
Download or read book General Technical Report PSW written by and published by . This book was released on 1978 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
