Special Issue: Resilience and Collapse on African Savannahs - read free eBook in online reader or directly download on the web page. Select files or add your book in reader. Download and read online ebook Special Issue: Resilience and Collapse on African Savannahs write by . This book was released on 2016. Special Issue: Resilience and Collapse on African Savannahs available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle.
Resilience and Collapse in African Savannahs
Resilience and Collapse in African Savannahs - read free eBook in online reader or directly download on the web page. Select files or add your book in reader. Download and read online ebook Resilience and Collapse in African Savannahs write by Michael Bollig. This book was released on 2018-10-11. Resilience and Collapse in African Savannahs available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. This book assesses the causes and consequences of environmental change in East Africa, asking whether local African communities are sufficiently resilient to cope with the ecological and social challenges that confront them. It focuses on the savannahs of the Baringo-Bogoria basin, and the surrounding highlands of Kenya’s northern Rift Valley that form the social-ecological system of the specialised cattle pastoralists and niche agricultural farmers who occupy these semi-arid lands. Historical studies of resilience spanning the past two centuries are linked with analysis of current environmental challenges, and the ecological, social, economic and political responses mounted by local communities. The authors question whether the most recent challenges confronting the peoples of eastern Africa’s savannahs – intensified conflicts, mounting poverty driven by demographic pressures, and dramatic ecological changes brought by invasive species – might soon led to a collapse in essential elements of the specialised cattle pastoralism that dominates the region, requiring a re-orientation of the social-ecological system. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Eastern African Studies.
Shaping the African Savannah
Shaping the African Savannah - read free eBook in online reader or directly download on the web page. Select files or add your book in reader. Download and read online ebook Shaping the African Savannah write by Michael Bollig. This book was released on 2020-07-02. Shaping the African Savannah available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. The southern African savannah landscape has been framed as an 'Arid Eden' in recent literature, as one of Africa's most sought after exotic tourism destinations by twenty-first century travellers, as a 'last frontier' by early twentieth-century travellers and as an ancient ancestral land by Namibia's Herero communities. In this 150-year history of the region, Michael Bollig looks at how this 'Arid Eden' came into being, how this 'last frontier' was construed, and how local pastoralists relate to the landscape. Putting the intricate and changing relations between humans, arid savannah grasslands and its co-evolving animal inhabitants at the centre of his analysis, this history of material relations, of power struggles between commercial hunters and wildlife, between wealthy cattle patrons and foraging clients, between established homesteads and recent migrants, conservationists and pastoralists. Finally, Bollig highlights how futures are being aspired to and planned for between the increasing challenges of climate change, global demands for cheap ores and quests for biodiversity conservation.
Things Fall Apart
Things Fall Apart - read free eBook in online reader or directly download on the web page. Select files or add your book in reader. Download and read online ebook Things Fall Apart write by Chinua Achebe. This book was released on 2009. Things Fall Apart available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. A Chronology of Achebe's life and work and a Selected Bibliography are also included."--Pub. desc.
Beyond Reductionism
Beyond Reductionism - read free eBook in online reader or directly download on the web page. Select files or add your book in reader. Download and read online ebook Beyond Reductionism write by Katharine Farrell. This book was released on 2013-05-07. Beyond Reductionism available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. This is a book about the work of scientists in the era of the Anthropocene: where human beings appear to have become a driving force in the evolution of the planet. It is a diverse collection of empirical, methodological and theoretical chapters concerned with the practice of interdisciplinary social-ecological systems research. The aim of the contributors is to give the reader an appreciation for the range and complexity of the challenges faced by researchers, research institutions and wider communities trying to make sense of the causes and consequences of the this new era of global environmental change. The tragedy of the Anthropocene, of the large scale anthropogenic habitat destruction and planet-wide impacts of anthropogenic climate change, is not that science has failed humanity but rather that it has served humanity all too well, making possible in just a few hundred years volumes and scales of human activity far exceeding anything ever seen before. Coming to terms with that success was the aim of the 1969 Alpbach Symposium, from which this book draws its name, where contributors including Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Bertalanffy, asked themselves: what theory, practices and standards are required to move beyond reductionism? Like those from 1969, the answers presented in this collection are hugely diverse, ranging from PhD students concerned with research methods and institutional obstacles, to mid-career scholars presenting their innovative ‘beyond-reductionism’ research methods, to emeritus professors looking back over what has been achieved in the past 30 years and suggesting where things might go from here. All the contributors begin from the premise that the challenges of the Anthropocene can only be successfully met if interdisciplinary research effectively brings together social and natural sciences, the humanities, stakeholders and decision makers. They conclude, in unison, that both the institutional and the methodological foundations needed to do this work are still sorely lacking. While this may seem a dismal position, the book is full of success stories, such as: the integrative approach of MuSIASEM (Multi-Scale Integrative Assessment of Social-Ecological Metabolism) developed by Mario Giampietro’s group in Barcelona, Spain; the alternative perspectives of what Ariel Salleh calls the ‘meta-industrial’ discourse in Ecofeminism; or the innovative trans-departmental status of the Stockholm Resilience Centre in Sweden. Putting both the theoretical and methodological challenges of moving beyond reductionism on the table for discussion, this text aims to help a growing community of passionate thinkers and actors better understand themselves and their work.
