Author: K.M. MensvoortPublisher: Actarbirkhauser
ISBN: 9788492861538
Category : Design
Languages : en
Pages : 461
Book Description
ING_17 Flap copy
Next Nature
Author: K.M. MensvoortPublisher: Actarbirkhauser
ISBN: 9788492861538
Category : Design
Languages : en
Pages : 461
Book Description
ING_17 Flap copy
Nature Next Door
Author: Ellen StroudPublisher: University of Washington Press
ISBN: 0295804459
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 232
Book Description
The once denuded northeastern United States is now a region of trees. Nature Next Door argues that the growth of cities, the construction of parks, the transformation of farming, the boom in tourism, and changes in the timber industry have together brought about a return of northeastern forests. Although historians and historical actors alike have seen urban and rural areas as distinct, they are in fact intertwined, and the dichotomies of farm and forest, agriculture and industry, and nature and culture break down when the focus is on the history of Northeastern woods. Cities, trees, mills, rivers, houses, and farms are all part of a single transformed regional landscape. In an examination of the cities and forests of the northeastern United States-with particular attention to the woods of Maine, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, and Vermont-Ellen Stroud shows how urbanization processes there fostered a period of recovery for forests, with cities not merely consumers of nature but creators as well. Interactions between city and hinterland in the twentieth century Northeast created a new wildness of metropolitan nature: a reforested landscape intricately entangled with the region's cities and towns.
NEXT NATURE
Author: Koert van MensvoortPublisher: Next Nature Network
ISBN: 9493213080
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 224
Book Description
Think of nature and you’re likely to picture a forest, not a freeway. But how natural is nature really? We live in a world of constructed wildlife reserves, rainbow tulips, designer babies and cultured meat. We control a tomato’s biology so precisely, you can hardly call it natural anymore. Meanwhile, our grip on the Internet and the financial markets has grown so slight that they’re coming to resemble forces of nature. Using countless well-known examples and scientific insights, Koert van Mensvoort shows how a technosphere is evolving on top of a biosphere billions of years old. He’ll take you on an epic journey full of businesses that breathe, woods that smell like shampoo, and creatures that live on plastic. Along the way, a totally new view of the natural world will unfurl – one that’s not only more realistic but infinitely more creative, exciting and beautiful. To cope with the immense challenges facing the world today, we need to go forward, not back, to nature.
Next to Nature
Author: Ronald BlythePublisher: John Murray
ISBN: 1399804677
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 633
Book Description
'All the charm, wonder, eccentricity and vigour of country life is here in these pages, and told with such engaging directness, detail and colour . . . Bliss' STEPHEN FRY 'A capacious work that contains multitudes . . . a work to amble through, seasonally, relishing the vivid dashes of colour and the precision and delicacy of the descriptions' THE SPECTATOR 'My favourite read of the year . . . warm, funny and moving' SUNDAY TIMES 'A writer whose pages you turn and then turn back immediately to re-read, relish and get by heart' SUSAN HILL, SUNDAY TELEGRAPH Ronald Blythe lived at the end of an overgrown farm track deep in the rolling countryside of the Stour Valley, on the border between Suffolk and Essex. His home was Bottengoms Farm, a sturdy yeoman's house once owned by the artist John Nash. From here, Blythe spent almost half a century observing the slow turn of the agricultural year, the church year and village life in a series of rich, lyrical rural diaries. Beginning with the arrival of snow on New Year's Day and ending with Christmas carols sung in the village church, Next to Nature invites us to witness a simple life richly lived. With gentle wit and keen observation Blythe meditates on his life and faith, on literature, art and history, and on our place in the landscape. It is a celebration of one of our greatest nature writers, and an unforgettable ode to the English countryside.
Back to Nature
Author: Chris PackhamPublisher: Two Roads
ISBN: 1529350417
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 340
Book Description
'Rousing, polemical and heartfelt' - Gardens Illustrated 'An invitation to take action' - The Observer One thing has become clear this year - we need nature more than ever. And it needs us too. From our balconies and gardens to our woodlands, national parks and beyond, Back to Nature captures the essence of how we feel about the wildlife outside our windows. Through personal stories, conservation breakthroughs and scientific discoveries, it explores the wonder and the solace of nature, and the ways in which we can connect with it - and protect it.
Next to Nature, Art
Author: Penelope LivelyPublisher: Penguin UK
ISBN: 0241960274
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 197
Book Description
Next to Nature, Art is the fourth novel by Booker Prize winning author Penelope Lively. Run by Toby and Paula, the centre offers ordinary people a chance to learn from professional artists skilled in poetry, sculpture, ceramics, and the like. Artists like Greg, the New England poet, whose works are strangely absent; or Bob the lascivious potter who sells his Toby jugs to department stores. As the latest group of students arrives, tensions begin to run high and artistic temperaments are much on display. In fact much more is learnt about expressing oneself than was ever suggested on the prospectus. 'Delightful . . . complex and exquisite. Penelope Lively's prose is beautiful and spare and she is a master of understatement' Daily Telegraph 'Her economy and wit are apparent on every page . . . it all leads to a splendid climax . . . wonderful, sensible, funny Penelope Lively' Evening Standard Penelope Lively is the author of many prize-winning novels and short-story collections for both adults and children. She has twice been shortlisted for the Booker Prize: once in 1977 for her first novel, The Road to Lichfield, and again in 1984 for According to Mark. She later won the 1987 Booker Prize for her highly acclaimed novel Moon Tiger. Her other books include Going Back; Judgement Day; Next to Nature, Art; Perfect Happiness; Passing On; City of the Mind; Cleopatra's Sister; Heat Wave; Beyond the Blue Mountains, a collection of short stories; Oleander, Jacaranda, a memoir of her childhood days in Egypt; Spiderweb; her autobiographical work, A House Unlocked; The Photograph; Making It Up; Consequences; Family Album, which was shortlisted for the 2009 Costa Novel Award, and How It All Began. She is a popular writer for children and has won both the Carnegie Medal and the Whitbread Award. She was appointed CBE in the 2001 New Year's Honours List, and DBE in 2012. Penelope Lively lives in London.
The Control of Nature
Author: John McPheePublisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 0374708495
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 272
Book Description
While John McPhee was working on his previous book, Rising from the Plains, he happened to walk by the engineering building at the University of Wyoming, where words etched in limestone said: "Strive on--the control of Nature is won, not given." In the morning sunlight, that central phrase--"the control of nature"--seemed to sparkle with unintended ambiguity. Bilateral, symmetrical, it could with equal speed travel in opposite directions. For some years, he had been planning a book about places in the world where people have been engaged in all-out battles with nature, about (in the words of the book itself) "any struggle against natural forces--heroic or venal, rash or well advised--when human beings conscript themselves to fight against the earth, to take what is not given, to rout the destroying enemy, to surround the base of Mt. Olympus demanding and expecting the surrender of the gods." His interest had first been sparked when he went into the Atchafalaya--the largest river swamp in North America--and had learned that virtually all of its waters were metered and rationed by a U.S. Army Corps of Engineers' project called Old River Control. In the natural cycles of the Mississippi's deltaic plain, the time had come for the Mississippi to change course, to shift its mouth more than a hundred miles and go down the Atchafalaya, one of its distributary branches. The United States could not afford that--for New Orleans, Baton Rouge, and all the industries that lie between would be cut off from river commerce with the rest of the nation. At a place called Old River, the Corps therefore had built a great fortress--part dam, part valve--to restrain the flow of the Atchafalaya and compel the Mississippi to stay where it is. In Iceland, in 1973, an island split open without warning and huge volumes of lava began moving in the direction of a harbor scarcely half a mile away. It was not only Iceland's premier fishing port (accounting for a large percentage of Iceland's export economy) but it was also the only harbor along the nation's southern coast. As the lava threatened to fill the harbor and wipe it out, a physicist named Thorbjorn Sigurgeirsson suggested a way to fight against the flowing red rock--initiating an all-out endeavor unique in human history. On the big island of Hawaii, one of the world's two must eruptive hot spots, people are not unmindful of the Icelandic example. McPhee went to Hawaii to talk with them and to walk beside the edges of a molten lake and incandescent rivers. Some of the more expensive real estate in Los Angeles is up against mountains that are rising and disintegrating as rapidly as any in the world. After a complex coincidence of natural events, boulders will flow out of these mountains like fish eggs, mixed with mud, sand, and smaller rocks in a cascading mass known as debris flow. Plucking up trees and cars, bursting through doors and windows, filling up houses to their eaves, debris flows threaten the lives of people living in and near Los Angeles' famous canyons. At extraordinary expense the city has built a hundred and fifty stadium-like basins in a daring effort to catch the debris. Taking us deep into these contested territories, McPhee details the strategies and tactics through which people attempt to control nature. Most striking in his vivid depiction of the main contestants: nature in complex and awesome guises, and those who would attempt to wrest control from her--stubborn, often ingenious, and always arresting characters.
Black to Nature
Author: Stefanie K. DunningPublisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN: 1496832957
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 208
Book Description
In Black to Nature: Pastoral Return and African American Culture, author Stefanie K. Dunning considers both popular and literary texts that range from Beyoncé’s Lemonade to Jesmyn Ward’s Salvage the Bones. These key works restage Black women in relation to nature. Dunning argues that depictions of protagonists who return to pastoral settings contest the violent and racist history that incentivized Black disavowal of the natural world. Dunning offers an original theoretical paradigm for thinking through race and nature by showing that diverse constructions of nature in these texts are deployed as a means of rescrambling the teleology of the Western progress narrative. In a series of fascinating close readings of contemporary Black texts, she reveals how a range of artists evoke nature to suggest that interbeing with nature signals a call for what Jared Sexton calls “the dream of Black Studies”—abolition. Black to Nature thus offers nuanced readings that advance an emerging body of critical and creative work at the nexus of Blackness, gender, and nature. Written in a clear, approachable, and multilayered style that aims to be as poignant as nature itself, the volume offers a unique combination of theoretical breadth, narrative beauty, and broader perspective that suggests it will be a foundational text in a new critical turn towards framing nature within a cultural studies context.
Child Guidance
Author: Ellen G. WhitePublisher: Review and Herald Pub Assoc
ISBN: 9781904685074
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 626
Book Description
Wilderburbs
Author: Lincoln BramwellPublisher: University of Washington Press
ISBN: 0295805587
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 338
Book Description
Since the 1950s, the housing developments in the West that historian Lincoln Bramwell calls “wilderburbs” have offered residents both the pleasures of living in nature and the creature comforts of the suburbs. Remote from cities but still within commuting distance, nestled next to lakes and rivers or in forests and deserts, and often featuring spectacular views of public lands, wilderburbs celebrate the natural beauty of the American West and pose a vital threat to it. Wilderburbs tells the story of how roads and houses and water development have transformed the rural landscape in the West. Bramwell introduces readers to developers, homeowners, and government regulators, all of whom have faced unexpected environmental problems in designing and building wilderburb communities, including unpredictable water supplies, threats from wildfires, and encounters with wildlife. By looking at wilderburbs in the West, especially those in Utah, Colorado, and New Mexico, Bramwell uncovers the profound environmental consequences of Americans’ desire to live in the wilderness.