Unnatural Landscapes

Unnatural Landscapes PDF Author: Ceiridwen Terrill
Publisher: University of Arizona Press
ISBN: 9780816525232
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 244

Book Description
In Unnatural Landscapes, Ceiridwen Terrill combines lucid science writing with first-person tales of adventure to provide an introduction to invasion ecology and restoration management.

The Language of Landscape

The Language of Landscape PDF Author: Anne Whiston Spirn
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 9780300082944
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 342

Book Description
This eloquent and powerful book combines poetry and pragmatism to teach the language of landscape. Anne Whiston Spirn, author of the award-winning The Granite Garden: Urban Nature and Human Design, argues that the language of landscape exists with its own syntax, grammar, and metaphors, and that we imperil ourselves by failing to learn to read and speak this language. To understand the meanings of landscape, our habitat, is to see the world differently and to enable ourselves to avoid profound aesthetic and environmental mistakes. Offering examples that range across thousands of years and five continents, Spirn examines urban, rural, and natural landscapes. She discusses the thought of renowned landscape authors--Thomas Jefferson, Frank Lloyd Wright, Frederick Law Olmsted, Lawrence Halprin--and of less well known pioneers, including Australian architect Glenn Murcutt and Danish landscape artist C. Th. Sørensen. She discusses instances of great landscape designers using landscape fluently, masterfully, and sometimes cynically. And, in a probing analysis of the many meanings of landscape, Spirn shows how one person's ideal landscape may be another's nightmare, how Utopian landscapes can be dark. There is danger when we lose the connection between a place and our understanding of it, Spirn warns, and she calls for change in the way we shape our environment, based on the notions of nature as a set of ideas and landscape as the expression of action and ideas in place.

Nature, Environment and Culture in East Asia

Nature, Environment and Culture in East Asia PDF Author:
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004253041
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 466

Book Description
Since in the current global environmental and climate crisis East Asia will play a major role in negotiating solutions, it is vital to understand East Asian cultural variations in approaching and solving environmental challenges in the past, present, and future. The interdisciplinary volume Nature, Environment and Culture in East Asia. The Challenge of Climate Change, edited by Carmen Meinert, explores how cultural patterns and ideas have shaped a specific understanding of nature, how local and regional cultures develop(ed) coping strategies to adapt to environmental and climatic changes in the past and in the present and how various institutions and representatives might introduce their ideas and agendas in future environmental and climate policies on national levels and in international negotiating systems.

Restoring Disturbed Landscapes

Restoring Disturbed Landscapes PDF Author: David J Tongway
Publisher: Island Press
ISBN: 1597265802
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 231

Book Description
Restoring Disturbed Landscapes is a hands-on guide for individuals and groups seeking to improve the functional capacity of landscapes. Abundantly illustrated with photos and figures, Restoring Disturbed Landscapes is an engaging and accessible work designed specifically for restoration practitioners with limited training or experience in the field. It uses a five-step adaptive procedure to tell restorationists where to start, what information they need to acquire, and how to apply this information to their specific situations. Cosponsored by the Society for Ecological Restoration International and Island Press, this series offers a foundation of practical knowledge and scientific insight that will help ecological restoration become the powerful reparative and healing tool that the world needs

Anthropology of Landscape

Anthropology of Landscape PDF Author: Christopher Tilley
Publisher: UCL Press
ISBN: 1911307452
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 349

Book Description
An Anthropology of Landscape tells the fascinating story of a heathland landscape in south-west England and the way different individuals and groups engage with it. Based on a long-term anthropological study, the book emphasises four individual themes: embodied identities, the landscape as a sensuous material form that is acted upon and in turn acts on people, the landscape as contested, and its relation to emotion. The landscape is discussed in relation to these themes as both ‘taskscape’ and ‘leisurescape’, and from the perspective of different user groups. First, those who manage the landscape and use it for work: conservationists, environmentalists, archaeologists, the Royal Marines, and quarrying interests. Second, those who use it in their leisure time: cyclists and horse riders, model aircraft flyers, walkers, people who fish there, and artists who are inspired by it. The book makes an innovative contribution to landscape studies and will appeal to all those interested in nature conservation, historic preservation, the politics of nature, the politics of identity, and an anthropology of Britain.

Against the Tides

Against the Tides PDF Author: Ronald Rudin
Publisher: UBC Press
ISBN: 0774866780
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 316

Book Description
For four centuries, dykes turned salt marsh into arable land in the Bay of Fundy region of New Brunswick and Nova Scotia. But by the 1940s, the aging dykes were in poor repair. Against the Tides is the never-before-told story of the Maritime Marshland Rehabilitation Administration, a federal agency created in 1948 to reshape the landscape. Agency engineers sometimes borrowed from long-standing dykeland practices, but they also disregarded local conditions in building tidal dams that compromised some of the region’s rivers. This vivid account of a distinctive landscape and its occupants reveals the push–pull of local and expert knowledge and the role of the postwar state.

Grounding Urban Natures

Grounding Urban Natures PDF Author: Henrik Ernstson
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262537141
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 441

Book Description
Case studies from cities on five continents demonstrate the advantages of thinking comparatively about urban environments. The global discourse around urban ecology tends to homogenize and universalize, relying on such terms as “smart cities,” “eco-cities,” and “resilience,” and proposing a “science of cities” based largely on information from the Global North. Grounding Urban Natures makes the case for the importance of place and time in understanding urban environments. Rather than imposing a unified framework on the ecology of cities, the contributors use a variety of approaches across a range of of locales and timespans to examine how urban natures are part of—and are shaped by—cities and urbanization. Grounding Urban Natures offers case studies from cities on five continents that demonstrate the advantages of thinking comparatively about urban environments. The contributors consider the diversity of urban natures, analyzing urban ecologies that range from the coastal delta of New Orleans to real estate practices of the urban poor in Lagos. They examine the effect of popular movements on the meanings of urban nature in cities including San Francisco, Delhi, and Berlin. Finally, they explore abstract urban planning models and their global mobility, examining real-world applications in such cities as Cape Town, Baltimore, and the Chinese “eco-city” Yixing. Contributors Martín Ávila, Amita Baviskar, Jia-Ching Chen, Henrik Ernstson, James Evans, Lisa M. Hoffman, Jens Lachmund, Joshua Lewis, Lindsay Sawyer, Sverker Sörlin, Anne Whiston Spirn, Lance van Sittert, Richard A. Walker

Lewis Carroll's "Alice" and Cognitive Narratology

Lewis Carroll's Author: Francesca Arnavas
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110689308
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 240

Book Description
We live in an age that is witnessing a growing interest in narrative studies, cognitive neuroscientific tools, mind studies and artificial intelligence hypotheses. This book therefore aims to expand the exegesis of Carroll's "Alice" books, aligning them with the current intellectual environment. The theoretical force of this volume lies in the successful encounter between a great book (and all its polysemous ramifications) and a new interpretative point of view, powerful enough to provide a new original contribution, but well grounded enough not to distort the text itself. Moreover, this book is one of the first to offer a complete, thorough analysis of one single text through the theoretical lens of cognitive narratology, and not just as a series of brief examples embedded within a more general discussion. It emphasises in a more direct, effective way the actual novelty and usefulness of the dialogue established between narrative theory and the cognitive sciences. It links specific concepts elaborated in the theory of cognitive narratology with the analysis of the "Alice" books, helping in this way to discuss, question and extend the concepts themselves, opening up new interpretations and practical methods.

Principles and Methods in Landscape Ecology

Principles and Methods in Landscape Ecology PDF Author: Almo Farina
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030966119
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 457

Book Description
This third, thoroughly updated edition of a well received book, presents the most complete collection of theories, paradigms and methods utilized by the landscape sciences. With the introduction of new ecosemiotic concepts and innovative managing procedures, it offers a broad list of ecological, ecosemiotical and cultural tools to investigate, interpret and manage the environmental complexity according to a species-specific individual-based approach. Readers will discover the importance of a landscape perspective to create strategic bridges between science and humanities favored by the holistic sight of sensorial (visual, acoustic, olfactory, tactile, and thermal) “scapes”. Distributed in 10 chapters, the content covers many aspects of the landscape sciences ranging from the description of fundamental theories, principles and models originated by ecological approaches like source-sink models, island biogeography, hierarchical theory and scale. The ecosemiotical approaches like the eco-field model, the ecoscape paradigm, and the general theory of resources are widely described and discussed. A cultural approach to landscape is utilized to focus on the heritage values of territories and their environmental identity. This book, written in an accessible and didactic style, is particularly dedicated to undergraduate and graduate students but also scholars in ecology, agroforestry, urban planning, nature design, conservation and remediation. Land practitioners, farmers and policymakers can use this book as an authoritative guide to better understand the function and role of environmental systems according to a social-economic integrated perspective.

Walking Nature Home

Walking Nature Home PDF Author: Susan J. Tweit
Publisher: University of Texas Press
ISBN: 0292773722
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 193

Book Description
“Offers the reader a constellation of healing stories . . . Powerful articulations of the human heart . . . Overlaid with the stories of the natural world” (Denise Chávez, author of A Taco Testimony: Meditations on Family, Food, and Culture). Without a map, navigate by the stars. Susan Tweit began learning this lesson as a young woman diagnosed with an autoimmune disease that was predicted to take her life in two to five years. Offered no clear direction for getting well through conventional medicine, Tweit turned to the natural world that was both her solace and her field of study as a plant ecologist. Drawing intuitive connections between the natural processes and cycles she observed and the functions of her body, Tweit not only learned healthier ways of living but also discovered a great truth—love can heal. In this beautifully written, moving memoir, she describes how love of the natural world, of her husband and family, and of life itself literally transformed and saved her own life. In tracing the arc of her life from young womanhood to middle age, Tweit tells stories about what silence and sagebrush, bird bones and sheep dogs, comets, death, and one crazy Englishman have to teach us about living. She celebrates making healthy choices, the inner voices she learned to hear on days alone in the wilderness, the joys of growing and eating an organic kitchen garden, and the surprising redemption in restoring a once-blighted neighborhood creek. Linking her life lessons to the stories she learned in childhood about the constellations, Tweit shows how qualities such as courage, compassion, and inspiration draw us together and bind us into the community of the land and of all living things.