by Jules Pretty (2005)
Our agricultural and food systems are not meeting everyone's needs, and despite great progress in increasing productivity over the past century, hundreds of millions of people remain hungry and malnourished. This book describes a different form of agriculture: one founded more on ecological principles and which is also more harmonious with people, their societies and cultures. Edited by the world's leading expert on sustainable agriculture, this volume brings together the most influential scholarship in the field. The book maps out the complex subject area of sustainable agriculture and introduces and explains key and hard-to-find literature. It covers theoretical developments and critical appraisals of evidence, addressing what is not sustainable about current or past agricultural and food systems, as well as studies of transitions towards agricultural and rural sustainability at farm, community, regional, national and international levels, and through food supply chains. This highly accessible one-of-a-kind collection is the essential student and practitioner reference text in sustainable agriculture.
Douglas R. Weiner
Models of Nature studies the early and turbulent years of the Soviet conservation movement from the October Revolution to the mid-1930s - Lenin's rule to the rise of Stalin. This new edition includes an afterword by the author that reflects upon the study's impact and discusses advances in the field since the book was first published.
Janet Staiger and Sabine Hake
"Convergence Media History explores the ways that digital convergence has radically changed the field of media history. Writing media history is no longer a matter of charting the historical development of an individual medium such as film or television. Instead, now that various media from blockbuster films to everyday computer use intersect regularly via convergence, scholars must find new ways to write media history across multiple media formats. This collection of eighteen new essays by leading media historians and scholars examines the issues today in writing media history and histories. Each essay addresses a single medium -- including film, television, advertising, sound recording, new media, and more -- and connects that specific medium's history to larger issues for the field in writing multi-media or convergent histories. Among the volume's topics are new media technologies and their impact on traditional approaches to media history; alternative accounts of film production and exhibition, with a special emphasis on film across multiple media platforms; the changing relationships between audiences, fans, and consumers within media culture; and the globalization of our media culture."--Book cover.
Mario Giampietro and Kozo Mayumi
"Faced with the twin threats of peak oil and climate change, many governments have turned for an answer to the apparent panacea of biofuels. Yet, increasingly, the progressive implementation of this solution demonstrates that the promise of biofuels as a replacement to fossil fuels is in fact a mirage that, if followed, risks leaving us short of power, short of food and doing as much damage to the climate as ever - let alone the consequent impact on biodiversity due to additional loss of habitat for agricultural production and on rural development due to the additional stress on traditional farming systems. Worse still, these risks are being ignored. In this definitive exposé, Mario Giampietro and Kozo Mayumi present a theoretical framework and exhaustive evidence for the case against large scale biofuel production from agricultural crops. This book will be vital, sobering reading for anyone concerned with energy or agricultural policy, or bioenergy as a complex system."--Publisher's description.
Savannah Shange
"Savannah Shange's PROGRESSIVE DYSTOPIA is an activist ethnography of Robeson Justice Academy, a progressive Black and Brown school in San Francisco, which despite its commitments to social justice ends up replicating anti-Blackness. Black students are more likely to be punished, and progressive 'wins' at the school can come at a cost to Black San Francisco residents. Shange worked at the school for seven years. Moving through different registers-- Black English, neighborhood dialects, academic prose, and ethnography-- the book attends to the tensions between coalition, anti-blackness, and the state, theorizing events at the school in the context of the long afterlives of slavery"--