Natur

How only violence and catastrophes have consistently reduced inequality throughout world historyAre mass violence and catastrophes the only forces that can seriously decrease economic inequality? To judge by thousands of years of history, the answer is yes. Tracing the global history of inequality from the Stone Age to today, Walter Scheidel shows that inequality never dies peacefully. Inequality declines when carnage and disaster strike and increases when peace and stability return. The Great Leveler is the first book to chart the crucial role of violent shocks in reducing inequality over the full sweep of human history around the world.Ever since humans began to farm, herd livestock, and pass on their assets to future generations, economic inequality has been a defining feature of civilization. Over thousands of years, only violent events have significantly lessened inequality. The "e;Four Horsemen"e; of leveling-mass-mobilization warfare, transformative revolutions, state collapse, and catastrophic plagues-have repeatedly destroyed the fortunes of the rich. Scheidel identifies and examines these processes, from the crises of the earliest civilizations to the cataclysmic world wars and communist revolutions of the twentieth century. Today, the violence that reduced inequality in the past seems to have diminished, and that is a good thing. But it casts serious doubt on the prospects for a more equal future.An essential contribution to the debate about inequality, The Great Leveler provides important new insights about why inequality is so persistent-and why it is unlikely to decline anytime soon.

A timely new critique of capitalism's persistent failure to value natureCapitalism is typically treated as a force for relentless commodification. Yet it consistently fails to place value on vital aspects of the nonhuman world, whether carbon emissions or entire ecosystems. In Free Gifts, Alyssa Battistoni explores capitalism's persistent failure to value nature, arguing that the key question is not the moral issuue of why some kinds of nature shouldn't be commodified, but the economic puzzle of why they haven't been. To understand contemporary ecological problems from biodiversity collapse to climate change, she contends, we have to understand how some things come to have value under capitalism-and how others do not. To help us do so, Battistoni recovers and reinterprets the idea of the free gift of nature used by classical economic thinkers to describe what we gratuitously obtain from the natural world, and builds on Karl Marx's critique of political economy to show how capitalism fundamentally treats nature as free for the taking. This novel theory of capitalism's relationship to nature not only helps us understand contemporary ecological breakdown, but also casts capitalism's own core dynamics in a new light. Battistoni addresses four different instances of the free gift in political economic thought, each in a specific domain: natural agents in industry, pollution in the environment, reproductive labor in the household, and natural capital in the biosphere. In so doing, she offers new readings of major twenieth-century thinkers, including Friedrich Hayek, Simone de Beauvoir, Garrett Hardin, Silvia Federici, and Ronald Coase. Ultimately, she offers a novel account of freedom for our ecologically troubled present, developing a materialist existentialism to argue that capitalism limits our ability to be responsible for our relationships to the natural world, and imagining how we might live freely while valuing nature's gifts.

This book examines Delhi in the politically and culturally dynamic nineteenth century. By bringing together the city's past and its present as well as addressing its future, the book can count among its readers not just scholars but also those interested in cities and their evolving landscapes.

Eco-Rational Education proposes an educational response to climate change, environmental degradation, and human relations to ecology through the delivery of critical land-responsive environmental education.

Many chapters attempt to reconstruct past climatic changes in deserts and their margins at a variety of scales in space and time in the expectation that such information might assist in preparing us for future global warming and drying.

The Routledge Companion to the American Landscape provides a comprehensive overview of the American landscape in a way fit for the twenty-first century, not only in its topical and regional scope but also in its methodological and disciplinary diversity.

To avoid any misunderstandings: this book is not about spiders as pets, but about those spiders that live in our houses and apartments as lodgers. Mostly ignored and sometimes (wrongly) feared, there is hardly a building in the world that does not harbour some species of spider. What is fascinating is that we always find the same species. These spiders must have special adaptations, because the humidity in our homes is far too low, they are too clean, and the food supply is usually scarce. However, those spiders that have made the leap into our four walls are rewarded with a worldwide right to stay. This, in turn, is due to people's eagerness to trade and migrate worldwide: Humans tirelessly transport their belongings and an endless stream of goods around the world in sacks, parcels and containers. And our domestic spiders, as stowaways, travel just as tirelessly and unrecognized. It is therefore possible to present domestic spiders found throughout the world in a single book, as they are essentially the same everywhere. The 50 or so most important species and species groups are presented here in a generally understandable way, with a detailed profile, photos and distribution maps.The authors of this book are experts who work at museums, universities and in administration in Europe and North America. They are not only recognized scientists, but have also been avowed spider fans for decades.

Terroir is everything in modern wine appreciation. Geologist and professor, Alex Maltman looks at the rocks that make up key wine regions and what difference they make.

In this beautifully illustrated book that's Song of Achilles meets Secret Life of Trees, readers will discover the plants cultivated by the Greek Gods–many of which can still be experimented with today–for a myriad of uses.  In Greek mythology, plants were used for tools, intoxication, warfare, food, medicine, magic, and rituals. When Prometheus stole fire from the Olympian gods and gave it to mankind, he hid it in a stalk of giant fennel. Ancient Greeks waiting to question the oracles were given cannabis as part of their cleansing rituals. A quince fruit started the Trojan war. The goddess Demeter was so distraught when Hades kidnapped her daughter that she caused winter to blanket the earth, killing all plants. Mythic Plants focuses on how the ancient Greeks used plants in their lives and loves and conquests—some of which we can still use. Includes tips throughout for bringing these ancient plants into your garden.

This book discusses how important nanotechnology is for increasing agricultural production through better management of the soil and water.

This book studies the various dimensions of gender inequality that persist in higher education and employment in India.

While the atonement is a central component of Christianity, there is little agreement in the tradition about how it should be understood. This book develops and defends a novel relational theory of atonement inspired by African relational ethics.

Agriculture, a cornerstone of human survival, is undergoing a transformative era where intelligence, innovation, and sustainability converge. "Intelligent Designs, Innovations and Sustainability in Agriculture 4.0" guides readers through this revolution, exploring technologies like AI and IoT that are reshaping farming.

This book demonstrates how the largely neglected and multifaceted concept of distance can be used as a primary lens to expand and enrich our understandings of what older people say about their lives, needs, and wishes in diverse surroundings in the Northern periphery and beyond.

This timely book presents the latest scholarly research on the integration of Information Communications Technology (ICT) for enhanced STEM education at African schools and universities.

This book provides a complete overview of subpixel image processing methods, basic principles, and different subpixel mapping techniques based on single or multi-shift remote sensing images. Real-life applications are a great resource for understanding how and where to use subpixel mapping with different remote sensing imaging data.

This handbook provides the most comprehensive examination of Asian cities - developed and developing, large and small - and their urban development.

This book brings together new perspectives on India's foreign policy in the light of a constantly shifting world order. It will also be of use to foreign policy and diplomacy practitioners, career bureaucrats, and government think tanks.

Forced Mobility of EU Citizens is a critical evaluation from an empirical perspective of existing practices of the use of transnational criminal justice instruments within the European Union.

This book engenders a discourse on how urban planning as a discipline is being made attractive to children and youth as they consider their career preferences. It also provides a discourse around the diversity challenges facing the institutions for training urban planning professionals.

This completely updated third edition of Biological Oceanography offers students a firm grounding in the fundamentals of biological oceanography, continuing the work of the first and second edition author team, Carol Lalli and Timothy Parsons. Additionally, it provides an enhanced learning experience with numerous illustrations, thorough chapter summaries, and questions with answers and comments at the back of the book. The updated material now focuses on communicating the importance of the ocean for Earth's habitability and as such, new chapters that present humanity's dependence on the ocean are included. This comprehensive textbook is an invaluable resource for second year and higher undergraduate students studying oceanography and marine science.