Author: Mark Martin File Type: epub The size and severity of the global climate crisis is such that even the most committed environmentalists are liable to live in a state of denial. The award-winning writers collected here have made it their task to shake off this nagging disbelief, bringing the incomprehensible within our grasp and shaping an emotional response to the deterioration of our global habitat. From T. C. Boyles account of early eco-activists, to Nathaniel Richs vision of a near future where oil sells for $800 a barrelthese ten provocative, occasionally chilling, sometimes satirical stories bring a human reality to disasters of inhuman proportions.Royalties from Im With the Bears will go to 350.org, an international grassroots movement working to reduce the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

Author: Laura White File Type: pdf Though popular opinion would have us see Alices Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There as whimsical, nonsensical, and thoroughly enjoyable stories told mostly for children contemporary research has shown us there is a vastly greater depth to the stories than would been seen at first glance. Building on the now popular idea amongst Alice enthusiasts, that the Alice books -at heart -were intended for adults as well as children, Laura White takes current research in a new, fascinating direction. During the Victorian era of the books original publication, ideas about nature and our relation to nature were changing drastically. The Alice Books and the Contested Ground of the Natural World argues that Lewis Carroll used the books charm, wit, and often puzzling conclusions to counter the emerging tendencies of the timewhich favored Darwinism and theories of evolution and challenged the then-conventional thinking of the relationship between mankind and nature. Though a scientist and ardent student of nature himself, Carroll used his famously playful language, fantastic worlds and brilliant, often impossible characters to support more the traditional, Christian ideology of the time in which mankind holds absolute sovereignty over animals and nature. **

Author: Jaroslav Tir File Type: pdf Civil wars are among the most difficult problems in world politics. While mediation, intervention, and peacekeeping have produced some positive results in helping to end civil wars, they fall short in preventing them in the first place. In Incentivizing Peace, Jaroslav Tir and Johannes Karreth show that considering civil wars from a developmental perspective presents opportunities to prevent the escalation of nascent armed conflicts into full-scale civil wars. The authors demonstrate that highly-structured intergovernmental organizations (IGOs such as the World Bank, IMF, or regional development banks) are particularly well-positioned to engage in civil war prevention. When such IGOs have been actively engaged in nations on the edge, their potent economic tools have helped to steer rebel-government interactions away from escalation and toward peaceful settlement. Incentivizing Peace provides enlightening case evidence that IGO participation is a key to better predicting, and thus preventing, the outbreak of civil war. **About the Author Jaroslav Tir is Professor of Political Science at the University of Colorado Boulder and author of over two dozen scholarly studies on domestic and international armed conflicts, conflict management, territorial disputes, environmental security and cooperation, and rally around the flag dynamics. He is also a recipient of National Science Foundation and Fulbright grants. Johannes Karreth is Assistant Professor of Politics and International Relations at Ursinus College in Collegeville, Pennsylvania. His research focuses on international organizations, military interventions, and political violence. Additional scholarly work includes analyses of how voters respond to changes in the landscape of political parties and immigration.

Author: Michael F. Land File Type: pdf Vision is the sense by which we and other animals obtain most of our information about the world around us. Darwin appreciated that at first sight it seems absurd that the human eye could have evolved by natural selection. But we now know far more about vision, the many times it has independently evolved in nature, and the astonishing variety of ways to see. The human eye, with a lens forming an image on a sensitive retina, represents just one. Scallops, shrimps, and lobsters all use mirrors in different ways. Jumping spiders scan with their front-facing eyes to check whether the object in front is an insect to eat, another spider to mate with, or a predator to avoid. Mantis shrimps can even measure the polarization of light. Animal eyes are amazing structures, often involving precision optics and impressive information processing, mainly using wet protein - not the substance an engineer would choose for such tasks. In Eyes to See, Michael Land, one of the leading world experts on vision, explores the varied ways in which sight has evolved and is used in the natural world, and describes some of the ingenious experiments researchers have used to uncover its secrets. He also discusses human vision, including his experiments on how our eye movements help us to do everyday tasks, as well as skilled ones such as sight-reading music or driving. He ends by considering the fascinating problem of how the constantly shifting images from our eyes are converted in the brain into the steady and integrated conscious view of the world we experience. **