Showing 1 - 4 of 4 Items

Stolen Future, Broken Present: The Human Significance of Climate Change

Date: 2014-01-01

Creator: David A Collings

Access: Open access

This book argues that climate change has a devastating effect on how we think about the future. Once several positive feedback loops in Earth’s dynamic systems, such as the melting of the Arctic icecap or the drying of the Amazon, cross the point of no return, the biosphere is likely to undergo severe and irreversible warming. Nearly everything we do is premised on the assumption that the world we know will endure into the future and provide a sustaining context for our activities. But today the future of a viable biosphere, and thus the purpose of our present activities, is put into question. A disappearing future leads to a broken present, a strange incoherence in the feel of everyday life. We thus face the unprecedented challenge of salvaging a basis for our lives today. That basis, this book argues, may be found in our capacity to assume an infinite responsibility for ecological disaster and, like the biblical Job, to respond with awe to the alien voice that speaks from the whirlwind. By owning disaster and accepting our small place within the inhuman forces of the biosphere, we may discover how to live with responsibility and serenity whatever may come. (Publisher's Description) Freely available online at https://quod.lib.umich.edu/o/ohp/12832550.0001.001.


Urban Pastures: A Computational Approach to Identify the Barriers of Segregation

Date: 2022-01-01

Creator: Noah Gans

Access: Open access

Urban Sociology is concerned with identifying the relationship between the built environment and the organization of residents. In recent years, computational methods have offered new techniques to measure segregation, including using road networks to measure marginalized communities' institutional and social isolation. This paper contributes to existing computational and urban inequality scholarship by exploring how the ease of mobility along city roads determines community barriers in Atlanta, GA. I use graph partitioning to separate Atlanta’s road network into isolated chunks of intersections and residential roads, which I call urban pastures. Urban pastures are social communities contained to residential road networks because movement outside of a pasture requires the need to use larger roads. Urban pastures fences citizens into homogenous communities. The urban pastures of atlanta have little (


Monteverde: Ecology and Conservation of a Tropical Cloud Forest

Date: 2000-01-01

Creator: Nalini M. Nadkarni, Nathaniel T. Wheelwright

Access: Open access

The Monteverde Cloud Forest Reserve has captured the worldwide attention of biologists, conservationists, and ecologists and has been the setting for extensive investigation over the past 40 years. Roughly 40,000 ecotourists visit the Cloud Forest each year, and it is often considered the archetypal high-altitude rain forest. Featuring synthetic chapters and specific accounts written by more than 100 biologists and local residents, the 573-page book documents in a single volume everything known about the biological diversity of Monteverde, Costa Rica, and how to protect it. New short chapters which update and expand the research presented in the 2000 Oxford publication were written in 2014 and are now available.


Monteverde: Ecology and Conservation of a Tropical Cloud Forest - Chapter Updates (English)

Date: 2014-01-01

Creator: Nalini M Nadkarni, Nathaniel T Wheelwright

Access: Open access

The Monteverde Cloud Forest Reserve has captured the worldwide attention of biologists, conservationists, and ecologists and has been the setting for extensive investigation over the past 40 years. Roughly 40,000 ecotourists visit the Cloud Forest each year, and it is often considered the archetypal high-altitude rain forest. “Monteverde: Ecology and Conservation of a Tropical Cloud Forest”, edited by Nalini Nadkarni and Nathaniel T. Wheelwright (Oxford University Press, 2000 and Bowdoin’s Scholar’s Bookshelf. Book 1 ), features synthetic chapters and specific accounts written by more than 100 biologist and local residents, presenting in a single volume everything known in 2000 about the biological diversity of Monteverde, Costa Rica, and how to protect it. The new short chapters written in 2014 by original contributors, and presented here update and expand that knowledge through 2014.