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Books > Earth & environment > Geography
This two-volume set examines the process of integration of rural
society and the establishment of the modern state in China. It
attempts to transcend general policy claims by analysing China's
rural governance within the state's integration of rural society
over the course of the twentieth century. Drawing on contemporary
examples of state integration while observing the particular
background of the Chinese context, this set systematically examines
the entire process of the rural reconstruction of China over the
course of the 100 years since the period of the late Qing Dynasty,
while analysing the special characteristics of each period as well
as current societal trends in the Chinese countryside. The first
volume explores state penetration of the countryside and the
transformation of the rural population from the point of view of
politics, labour and resources, administration, and institutional
integration. The second volume examines contemporary state
integration via the economic activities of traditional rural
societies, alongside fiscal, cultural, social, and technological
integration. The conclusion summarizes three characteristics that
are evident in the process of rural integration and the
establishment of the modern state in China. The two volume set will
be essential reading for scholars and students in Chinese Studies,
Political Science, Rural Studies, and those who are interested in
the rural reconstruction of China in general.
An annual collection of studies of individuals who have made major
contributions to the development of geography and geographical
thought. Subjects are drawn from all periods and from all parts of
the world, and include famous names as well as those less well
known: explorers, independent thinkers and scholars. Each paper
describes the geographer's education, life and work and discusses
their influence and spread of academic ideas. Each study includes a
select bibliography and brief chronology. The work includes a
general index and a cumulative index of geographers listed in
volumes published to date.
A journey through time and water, to the bottom of the ocean and
the future of our planet. We do not see the ocean when we look at
the water that blankets more than two thirds of our planet. We only
see the entrance to it. Beyond that entrance is a world hostile to
humans, yet critical to our survival. The first divers to enter
that world held their breath and splashed beneath the surface,
often clutching rocks to pull them down. Over centuries, they
invented wooden diving bells, clumsy diving suits, and unwieldy
contraptions in attempts to go deeper and stay longer. But each
advance was fraught with danger, as the intruders had to survive
the crushing weight of water, or the deadly physiological effects
of breathing compressed air. The vertical odyssey continued when
explorers squeezed into heavy steel balls dangling on cables, or
slung beneath floats filled with flammable gasoline. Plunging into
the narrow trenches between the tectonic plates of the Earth's
crust, they eventually reached the bottom of the ocean in the same
decade that men first walked on the moon. Today, as nations
scramble to exploit the resources of the ocean floor, The Frontier
Below recalls a story of human endeavour that took 2,000 years to
travel seven miles, then investigates how we will explore the ocean
in the future. Meticulously researched and drawing extensively on
unpublished sources and personal interviews, The Frontier Below is
the untold story of the pioneers who had the right stuff, but were
forgotten because they went in the wrong direction.
This book explores ancient efforts to explain the scientific,
philosophical, and spiritual aspects of water. From the ancient
point of view, we investigate many questions including: How does
water help shape the world? What is the nature of the ocean? What
causes watery weather, including superstorms and snow? How does
water affect health, as a vector of disease or of healing? What is
the nature of deep-sea-creatures (including sea monsters)? What
spiritual forces can protect those who must travel on water? This
first complete study of water in the ancient imagination makes a
major contribution to classics, geography, hydrology and the
history of science alike. Water is an essential resource that
affects every aspect of human life, and its metamorphic properties
gave license to the ancient imagination to perceive watery
phenomena as the product of visible and invisible forces. As such,
it was a source of great curiosity for the Greeks and Romans who
sought to control the natural world by understanding it, and who,
despite technological limitations, asked interesting questions
about the origins and characteristics of water and its influences
on land, weather, and living creatures, both real and imagined.
The plan was to explore the country between the Mississippi and the
Rocky Mountains. vol. 3 of 4
At age eight Marilyn Harlin already knew she wanted to be a
scientist. Throughout the peaks and valleys in her life-including
widowhood when her husband fell off a mountain in Switzerland, and
the challenges of raising two children on her own--she kept her
eyes on her goal and eventually joined the faculty at the
University of Rhode Island as its only female botany professor.
Marilyn's mission in her career and into retirement has been to
inspire youth, especially girls, to venture into the sciences.
Making Waves is a memoir of a progressive life lived with passion.
This book argues that, paradoxically, at their moment of triumph
and fastest growth, cities need nature more than ever. Only if our
urban world is full of biophilic cities will the coming urban
century truly succeed. Cities are quintessentially human, the
perfect forum for interaction, and we are entering what could
justly be called the urban century, the fastest period of urban
growth in human history. Yet a growing body of scientific
literature shows that the constant interaction, the
hyper-connectedness, of cities leads to an urban psychological
penalty. Nature in cities can be solution to this dilemma, allowing
us to have all the benefits of our urban, connected world yet also
have that urban home be a place where humanity can thrive. This
book presents best practices and case studies from biophilic
design, showing how cities around the world are beginning to
incorporate nature into their urban fabric. It will be a valuable
resource for scholars and professionals working in the area of
sustainable cities.
This book presents a comprehensive and innovative understanding of
the role of shallow coastal ecosystems in carbon cycling,
particularly marine carbon sequestration. Incorporating a series of
forward-looking chapters, the book combines thorough reviews of the
global literature and regional assessments-mainly around the
Indo-Pacific region and Japan-with global perspectives to provide a
thorough assessment of carbon cycling in shallow coastal systems.
It advocates the expansion of blue-carbon ecosystems (mangroves,
seagrass meadows, and salt marshes) into macroalgal beds, tidal
flats, coral reefs, and urbanized shallow waters, demonstrating the
potential of these ecosystems as new carbon sinks. Moreover, it
discusses not only topics that are currently the focus of
blue-carbon studies, i.e., sedimentary carbon stock and
accumulation rate, but also CO2 gas exchange between the atmosphere
and shallow coastal ecosystems, carbon storage in the water column
as refractory organic carbon, and off-site carbon storage.
Including highly original contributions, this comprehensive work
inspires research beyond the specific regions covered by the
chapters. The suite of new concepts and approaches is refreshing
and demonstrates that blue-carbon research is indeed a vibrant new
field of research, providing deep insights into neglected aspects
of carbon cycling in the marine environment. At the same time the
book provides guidance for policy makers to deliver benefits to
society, for example the inclusion of blue carbon as a carbon
offset scheme or the Nationally Determined Contribution (NDC) in
the Paris Agreement, and also for building resilience in coastal
socio-ecosystems through better management. This book is intended
for all those interested in the science and management of coastal
ecosystems.
This book outlines a geographically-informed method of evaluating
the emotional impact of museum exhibits. The authors have
personally developed the method they describe over several years of
working with the Museo Laboratorio della Mente in Rome and the
Melbourne Museum in Australia. Informed by non-representational
theories in cultural geography, this book offers solutions to
museum staff for how they might evaluate aspects of visitor
experience, such as emotions and embodied experience, which can be
very difficult to assess using conventional approaches.
'Being mobile has become an ubiquitous modus operandi as the highly
educated seek to advance, and take advantage of their human
capital. Corcoran and Faggian's edited volume helps us to
understand the causes and consequences of university graduates'
choices to migrate or stay put. The selected contributions -
situated in ten OECD countries - cover a wide spectrum of issues,
from overeducation and wages to life-course linkages and impacts of
the Great Recession. It is an insightful and timely account of the
intellectual elite's sorting and redistribution in developed
countries.' - Brigitte Waldorf, Purdue University, US 'Graduates
are key resources to economic development. ''Enlighted'' policy
makers around the world spend effort and resources to attract and
retain them. However, our understanding of the drivers and impacts
of graduate mobility remains limited. This book offers invaluable
insights into this debate by combining cutting-edge academic
knowledge with a truly global coverage of examples and case
studies.' - Riccardo Crescenzi, London School of Economics, UK This
book aims to integrate and augment current state-of-the-art
knowledge on graduate migration and its role in local economic
development. Offering an international perspective, it is the first
focused book of its kind on graduate migration, a recognised and
critical component of the global pool of labour. Written by the key
scholars working in the field, it draws together an international
series of case studies. Each chapter describes empirically founded
approaches to examining the role and characteristics of graduate
migration in differing situational contexts, highlighting issues
concerning government policy, data and methods. Crucially, it
assesses the role highly educated individuals play in regional
economic development and the determinants of graduate mobility,
revealing the characteristics that attract and retain graduates.
This unique book is an essential volume for scholars and
researchers of geography, regional studies, labour and migration
seeking an in-depth, international understanding of human-capital
attraction and retention. Contributors include: R. Comunian, J.
Corcoran, C. Detang-Dessendre, A. Faggian, R.S. Franklin, M.
Haapanen, S. Iammarino, S. Jewell, H. Karhunen, N. Maldonado, E.
Marinelli, K.B. Newbold, V. Piguet, R. Ramos, F. Rowe, V. Royuela,
V.A. Venhorst, A. Zhi Rou Tang
This book engages the reader in exploring the relationships between
digital social innovation initiatives and the city. It delivers a
fresh, accessible and case-based discussion on the emergence of
digitally-enabled social innovation practices in Europe that are
redesigning the urban space and challenging the consolidated urban
governance processes. By adopting a critical geography perspective,
this ground-breaking analysis of digital social innovation provides
the reader with an accessible overview of the way in which urban
reproductive processes mobilise the physical and the virtual
dimensions of the city and generate distinctive spatial
configurations. Together with novel urban narratives and
socio-technical imaginaries, these support the existing geometries
of power or construct new ones. The author clearly describes
contemporary cities as the new battlegrounds for controlling the
digital sphere, shaped by the interplay between digital capitalism
and resistance movements. In light of grassroots initiatives
advanced by cyber-activists, e-makers and hackers, the book unveils
the socio-political and cultural underpinnings of the revolution
produced by the digital social innovations in the city and the
socio-technological regimes supporting them. This author
successfully sheds new critical light on traditional innovation
studies exploring the debate on digital innovation through the lens
of social and cultural geography providing an invaluable reference
for those working in this field.
This book presents the fundamentals of data assimilation and
reviews the application of satellite remote sensing in hydrological
data assimilation. Although hydrological models are valuable tools
to monitor and understand global and regional water cycles, they
are subject to various sources of errors. Satellite remote sensing
data provides a great opportunity to improve the performance of
models through data assimilation.
The plan was to explore the country between the Mississippi and the
Rocky Mountains. vol. 2 of 4
This book explores how Pacific Island communities are responding to
the challenges wrought by climate change-most notably fresh water
accessibility, the growing threat of disease, and crop failure. The
Pacific Island nations are not alone in facing these challenges,
but their responses are unique in that they arise from traditional
and community-based understandings of climate and disaster.
Knowledge sharing, community education, and widespread
participation in decision-making have promoted social resilience to
such challenges across the Pacific. In this exploration of the
Pacific Island countries, Bryant-Tokalau demonstrates that by
understanding the inter-relatedness of local expertise, customary
resource management, traditional knowledge and practice, as well as
the roles of leaders and institutions, local
"knowledge-practice-belief systems" can be used to inform
adaptation to disasters wherever they occur.
This book presents the spatial and temporal dynamics of land use
and land cover in the central Tibetan Plateau during the last two
decades, based on various types of satellite data, long-term field
investigation and GIS techniques. Further, it demonstrates how
remote sensing can be used to map and characterize land use, land
cover and their dynamic processes in mountainous regions, and to
monitor and model relevant biophysical parameters. The Tibetan
Plateau, the highest and largest plateau on the Earth and well
known as "the roof of the world," is a huge mountainous area on the
Eurasian continent and covers millions of square kilometers, with
an average elevation of over 4000 m. After providing an overview of
the background and an introduction to land use and land cover
change, the book analyzes the current land use status, dynamic
changes and spatial distribution patterns of different land-use
types in the study area, using various types of remotely sensed
data, digital elevation models and GIS spatial analysis methods to
do so. In turn, it discusses the main driving forces, based on the
main physical environment variables and socioeconomic data, and
provides a future scenario analysis of land use change using a
Markov chain model. Given its scope, it provides a valuable
reference guide for researchers, scientists and graduate students
working on environmental change in mountainous regions around the
globe, and for practitioners working at government and
non-government agencies.
The book embarks on the tasks to systematically analyze the macro
background of the spatial patterns of China's urban development,
the theoretical foundations and framework, and its changing
trajectory. From a quantitative perspective, we attempt to evaluate
the rationale behind the spatial patterns of China's urban
development and systematically simulate the various scenarios. From
the simulation results, we propose the optimizing goals,
priorities, models, and strategies for the spatial patterns of
China's urban development. The work in this book attempts to
provide constructive suggestions and potential strategies to
support the effort to optimize the spatial patterns of China's
urban development. It would be a valuable reference for planning
departments, development and reform committees, and science and
technology administrative departments at various governmental
levels. It could also be a valuable addition to graduate students
of urban planning, urban development, urban geography and relevant
disciplines.
Volume 33 of Geographers Biobibliographical Studies adds
significantly to the corpus of scholarship on geography's multiple
histories and biographies with eight essays on individuals who have
made major contributions to the development of geography in the
twentieth century. This volume focuses on European geographers,
including essays on individuals from Britain, France and Hungary.
These are individuals who have made important and distinctive
contributions to a diverse range of fields, including cartography,
physical geography, oceanography and urban theory. As with previous
volumes, these biographical essays demonstrate the importance of
geographers' lives in terms of the lived experience of geography in
practise.
An annual collection of studies of individuals who have made major
contributions to the development of geography and geographical
thought. Subjects are drawn from all periods and from all parts of
the world, and include famous names as well as those less well
known: explorers, independent thinkers and scholars. Each paper
describes the geographer's education, life and work and discusses
their influence and spread of academic ideas. Each study includes a
select bibliography and brief chronology. The work includes a
general index and a cumulative index of geographers listed in
volumes published to date.
Providing an indispensable resource for students, educators,
businessmen, and officials investigating the transformative
experience of modern China, this book provides a comprehensive
summary of the culture, institutions, traditions, and international
relations that have shaped today's China. In Modern China, author
Xiaobing Li offers a resource far beyond a conventional
encyclopedia, providing not only comprehensive coverage of Chinese
civilization and traditions, but also addressing the values,
issues, and critical views of China. As a result, readers will
better understand the transformative experience of the most
populous country in the world, and will grasp the complexity of the
progress and problems behind the rise of China to a world
superpower in less than 30 years. Written by an author who lived in
China for three decades, this encyclopedia addresses 16 key topics
regarding China, such as its geography, government, social classes
and ethnicities, gender-based identities, arts, media, and food,
each followed by roughly 250 short entries related to each topic.
All the entries are placed within a broad sociopolitical and
socioeconomic contextual framework. The format and writing
consistency through the book reflects a Chinese perspective, and
allows students to compare Chinese with Western and American views.
Covers contemporary Chinese politics, economy, geography, law,
education, culture, and history, providing readers with a breadth
of insights into modern China and its people Addresses a variety of
current issues such as pollution, corruption, human trafficking,
human rights, civil liberties, and the one-child policy Contains
accessible information ideal for high school and college-level
students, grade school teachers, and any readers interested in the
general topics of Asia and China
This Handbook is the first volume to comprehensively analyse and
problem-solve how to manage the decline of fossil fuels as the
world tackles climate change and shifts towards a low-carbon energy
transition. The overall findings are straight-forward and
unsurprising: although fossil fuels have powered the
industrialisation of many nations and improved the lives of
hundreds of millions of people, another century dominated by fossil
fuels would be disastrous. Fossil fuels and associated greenhouse
gas emissions must be reduced to a level that avoids rising
temperatures and rising risks in support of a just and sustainable
energy transition. Divided into four sections and 25 contributions
from global leading experts, the chapters span a wide range of
energy technologies and sources including fossil fuels, carbon
mitigation options, renewables, low carbon energy, energy storage,
electric vehicles and energy sectors (electricity, heat and
transport). They cover varied legal jurisdictions and multiple
governance approaches encompassing multi- and inter-disciplinary
technological, environmental, social, economic, political, legal
and policy perspectives with timely case studies from Africa, Asia,
Australia, Europe, North America, South America and the Pacific.
Providing an insightful contribution to the literature and a
much-needed synthesis of the field as a whole, this book will have
great appeal to decision makers, practitioners, students and
scholars in the field of energy transition studies seeking a
comprehensive understanding of the opportunities and challenges in
managing the decline of fossil fuels.
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