Climate Change and US National Security is the latest report from Strategic Foresight Initiative Senior Fellow Dr. Peter Engelke and Scowcroft Center Deputy Director Dr. Daniel Y. Chiu. It is a part of the Transatlantic Partnership for the Global Future, an initiative that brings together experts from government, business, academia, and the science and technology communities to address critical global challenges and assess their effects on the future of transatlantic relations. The Partnership is a collaboration between the Strategic Foresight Initiative and the Government of Sweden"--Publisher's description.
The Earth has entered a new age—the Anthropocene—in which humans are the most powerful influence on global ecology. Since the mid-twentieth century, the accelerating pace of energy use, greenhouse gas emissions, and population growth has thrust the planet into a massive uncontrolled experiment. The Great Acceleration explains its causes and consequences, highlighting the role of energy systems, as well as trends in climate change, urbanization, and environmentalism. More than any other factor, human dependence on fossil fuels inaugurated the Anthropocene. Before 1700, people used little in the way of fossil fuels, but over the next two hundred years coal became the most important energy source. When oil entered the picture, coal and oil soon accounted for seventy-five percent of human energy use. This allowed far more economic activity and produced a higher standard of living than people had ever known—but it created far more ecological disruption. We are now living in the Anthropocene. The period from 1945 to the present represents the most anomalous period in the history of humanity’s relationship with the biosphere. Three-quarters of the carbon dioxide humans have contributed to the atmosphere has accumulated since World War II ended, and the number of people on Earth has nearly tripled. So far, humans have dramatically altered the planet’s biogeochemical systems without consciously managing them. If we try to control these systems through geoengineering, we will inaugurate another stage of the Anthropocene. Where it might lead, no one can say for sure.
This report argues that the environmental security field has yet to incorporate global urbanization, the 21st century's central demographic trend, fully into its purview. Environmental security, which focuses mainly on conflict arising from resource scarcity, control over natural resources, and environmental degradation, historically has focused much attention on the rural poor in the developing world. Yet the rural poor are neither the primary cause of rising global demand for natural resources nor of environmental degradation, the report finds. Instead, the report says the culprits are people who live in cities. The study concludes that the collective behavior of billions of urbanites is the main reason why fossil fuels are mined from the ground, coastal mangroves are turned into fish farms and the Earth's atmosphere is changing. The author contends that because the environmental security field historically has treated cities as little more than an afterthought, their significance has been both poorly understood and badly transmitted to policymakers. The report's central conclusion is that overcoming the 21st century's sustainability challenges will require placing cities at the center rather than the periphery of both our understanding and our policymaking. It says that only by doing so can we avoid the worst-case security implications of global ecosystem decline.
The Earth has entered a new age—the Anthropocene—in which humans are the most powerful influence on global ecology. Since the mid-twentieth century, the accelerating pace of energy use, greenhouse gas emissions, and population growth has thrust the planet into a massive uncontrolled experiment. The Great Acceleration explains its causes and consequences, highlighting the role of energy systems, as well as trends in climate change, urbanization, and environmentalism. More than any other factor, human dependence on fossil fuels inaugurated the Anthropocene. Before 1700, people used little in the way of fossil fuels, but over the next two hundred years coal became the most important energy source. When oil entered the picture, coal and oil soon accounted for seventy-five percent of human energy use. This allowed far more economic activity and produced a higher standard of living than people had ever known—but it created far more ecological disruption. We are now living in the Anthropocene. The period from 1945 to the present represents the most anomalous period in the history of humanity’s relationship with the biosphere. Three-quarters of the carbon dioxide humans have contributed to the atmosphere has accumulated since World War II ended, and the number of people on Earth has nearly tripled. So far, humans have dramatically altered the planet’s biogeochemical systems without consciously managing them. If we try to control these systems through geoengineering, we will inaugurate another stage of the Anthropocene. Where it might lead, no one can say for sure.
One of the most popular novelists of the twentieth century, winner of a Pulitzer and Nobel Prize for Literature and an active social and political campaigner, particularly in the field of women's issues and Asian-American relations, Pearl Buck has, until now, remained 'hidden in public view'. Best known, perhaps, as the prolific author of The Good Earth, Buck led a career which extended well beyond her eighty works of fiction and non-fiction and deep into the public sphere. In this critically acclaimed biography, Peter Conn retrieves Pearl Buck from the footnotes of literary and cultural history and reinstates her as a figure of compelling and uncommon significance in twentieth-century literary, cultural and political history.
To what extent is religion inherently textual? What might the term 'textual' mean in relation to religious faith and practice? These are the two key questions addressed by the eleven thought-provoking essays collected in this volume. Accounts of the content and structure of sacred texts are commonplace. The rather more adventurous aim of this book is to disclose (within the context of religion) the various ways in which meaning can be read of more or less obviously sacred writing and from discourses such as the body, the built and natural environment, drama and ritual.
The numerical analysis of stochastic differential equations (SDEs) differs significantly from that of ordinary differential equations. This book provides an easily accessible introduction to SDEs, their applications and the numerical methods to solve such equations. From the reviews: "The authors draw upon their own research and experiences in obviously many disciplines... considerable time has obviously been spent writing this in the simplest language possible." --ZAMP
They Lie, We Lie is an attempt by an experienced fieldworker to engage recent critiques in ethnography, that is the writing of culture, made both from within anthropology and from such disciplines as cultural studies and post-colonial theory. This is necessary because there has been a polarization within anthropology between those who react dismissively to what Marshall Sahlins calls 'afterology' and those who find the critiques so crippling as to make it hard to get on with anthropology at all. Metcalf bridges this divide by analyzing the contradictions of fieldwork in connection with a particular 'informant', a formidable old lady who tried for twenty years to control what he would and would not learn. At each stage, the author draws out the general implications of his predicament by making comparisions to the most famous of all fieldwork relationships, that between Victor Turner and Muchona. The result is an account that is accessible to those unfamiliar with the current critiques of ethnography, and helpful to those who are only too familiar to them. His discussion shows, not how to evade the critiques, but how in fact anthropologists have coped with the existential dilemmas of fieldwork.
Peter C. Smith presents us here with the second release in his visually splendid Cruise Ships series. Whilst his first book concerned itself with the large-scale ships currently cruising through our seas (those weighing 40,000 GT and more) this volume focusses on the other end of the market; the ships that weigh in at less than 40,000 GT, but which are often much more stylish and aesthetically pleasing than their larger-scale counterparts. The elegant interiors and luxurious features on display in today's vast fleet of cruise liners remain unrecorded in all but holiday brochures. This book carries on in the tradition of Peter's last release, giving a complete overview of the best of these ships, the cream of the crop, so to speak.??Each colour profile includes external and interior views of the featured ship. Details of the design, building and service history of each vessel are provided with vital statistics of the ship and its facilities.??This is a book of reference for maritime enthusiasts, would-be holiday cruisers and those who have been passengers. It serves as an impressive visual tribute to the best of the smaller scale fleet currently cruising globally.??As seen in the Bedford Times & Citizen.
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