Carbon Nation

Fossil fuels don’t simply impact our ability to commute to and from work. They condition our sensory lives, our erotic experiences, and our aesthetics; they structure what we assume to be normal and healthy; and they prop up a distinctly modern bargain with nature that allows populations and economies to grow wildly beyond the older and more clearly understood limits of the organic economy. Carbon Nation ranges across film and literary studies, ecology, politics, journalism, and art history to chart the course by which prehistoric carbon calories entered into the American economy and body. It reveals how fossil fuels remade our ways of being, knowing, and sensing in the world while examining how different classes, races, sexes, and conditions learned to embrace and navigate the material manifestations and cultural potential of these new prehistoric carbons. The ecological roots of modern America are introduced in the first half of the book where the author shows how fossil fuels revolutionized the nation’s material wealth and carrying capacity. The book then demonstrates how this eager embrace of fossil fuels went hand in hand with both a deliberate and an unconscious suppression of that dependency across social, spatial, symbolic, and psychic domains. In the works of Eugene O’Neill, Upton Sinclair, Sherwood Anderson, and Stephen Crane, the author reveals how Americans’ material dependencies on prehistoric carbon were systematically buried within modernist narratives of progress, consumption, and unbridled growth; while in films like Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times and George Stevens’s Giant he uncovers cinematic expressions of our own deep-seated anxieties about living in a dizzying new world wrought by fossil fuels. Any discussion of fossil fuels must go beyond energy policy and technology. In Carbon Nation, Bob Johnson reminds us that what we take to be natural in the modern world is, in fact, historical, and that our history and culture arise from this relatively recent embrace of the coal mine, the stoke hole, and the oil derrick.

What does the transition to a Low Carbon Britain mean for the future development of cities and regions across the country? Does it reinforce existing ‘business as usual’ or create new transformational opportunities? Low Carbon Nation? takes an interdisciplinary approach to tackle this critical question, by looking across the different dimensions of technological, scientific, social and economic change within the diverse city and regional contexts of the UK. Hodson and Marvin set out how the transition to low carbon futures needs to be understood as a dual response to the wider financial and economic crisis and to critical ecological concerns about the implications of global climate change. The book develops a novel framework for understanding how the transition to low carbon is informed by historical legacies that shape the geographical, political and cultural dimensions of low carbon responses. Through a programme of research in Scotland, Wales, the North East of England, Greater London, and Greater Manchester, the authors set out different styles of low carbon urban and regional response. Through in-depth illustration of this in newly devolved nations, an old industrial region, a global city-region and in an entrepreneurial city, international lessons can be drawn about the limits and the unrealised opportunities of low carbon transition. This book is key reading for students on geography, economics, planning and social science degrees, as well as those studying sustainability in related contexts trying to understand the urban and regional politics of low carbon transition. It is also an essential resource for policymakers, public officials, elected representatives, environmentalists and business leaders concerned with shaping the direction and type of transition.

In the conversation about the food we eat and where it comes from, this bundle, consisting of Food Politics: What Everyone Needs to Know and Agricultural and Food Controversies: What Everyone Needs to Know, tackles the questions that arise from conflicting opinions. Reflecting on the latest global food landscape and the most controversial issues in agriculture, these two books provide a wealth of research and information on farming and food.

The public is more interested in agricultural and food issues than ever before, as is evident in the many agricultural controversies debated in the media. Why is it that some people embrace new agricultural technologies while others steadfastly defend traditional farming methods? Why do some prefer to buy food grown around the world while others patronize small, local farmers? In the debates about organic food, genetically modified organisms, and farm animal welfare, it is not always clear what the scientific literature actually says. To understand these controversies, the authors encourage readers to develop first an appreciation for why two equally intelligent and well-intentioned people can form radically different notions about food. Sometimes the disputes are scientific in nature, and sometimes they arise from conflicting ethical views. This book confronts the most controversial issues in agriculture by first explaining the principles of both sides of the debate, and then guiding readers through the scientific literature so that they may form their own educated opinions. Is food safe if the farm used pesticides, or are organic foods truly better for your health? Are chemical fertilizers sustainable, or are we producing cheap food today at the expense of future generations? What foods should we eat to have a smaller carbon footprint? Is genetically-modified food the key to global food security, and does it give corporations too much market power? Is the prevalence of corn throughout the food system the result of farm subsidies? Does buying local food stimulate the local economy? Why are so many farm animals raised indoors, and should antibiotics be given to livestock? These are the issues addressed in Agricultural and Food Controversies: What Everyone Needs to Know. While it doesn't claim to have all the answers, it provides a synthesis of research and popular opinions on both sides of these important issues, allowing readers to decide what they value and believe for themselves.

Infrastructural Lives is the first book to describe the everyday experience and politics of urban infrastructures. It focuses on a range of infrastructures in both the global South and North. The book examines how day-to-day experience and perception of infrastructure provides a new and powerful lens to view urban sustainability, politics, economics, cultures and ecologies. An interdisciplinary group of leading and emerging urban researchers examine critical questions about urban infrastructure in different global contexts. The chapters address water, sanitation, and waste politics in Mumbai, Kampala and Tyneside, analyse the use of infrastructure in the dispossession of Palestinian communities, explore the pacification of Rio’s favelas in the run-up to the 2014 World Cup, describe how people’s bodies and lives effectively operate as ‘infrastructure’ in many major cities, and also explores tentative experiments with low-carbon infrastructures. These diverse cases and perspectives are connected by a shared sense of infrastructure not just as a ‘thing’, a ‘system’, or an ‘output,’ but as a complex social and technological process that enables – or disables – particular kinds of action in the city. Infrastructural Lives is crucial reading for academics, researchers, students and practitioners in urban studies globally.

Aquaculture Ecosystems contains a thorough and exciting synthesis of current information on aquaculture practices and substantial discussion of the way forward in transforming the aquaculture industry by improving its sustainability. This important book includes discussion of all the current major issues relating to aquaculture practices in relation to the ecology of their situations, environmental concerns, and details of how sustainability can be improved. Efforts have been made to include chapters that go beyond the stage of debate on old topics, providing conclusions to provide leads for action plans and practices addressing modern challenges such as global climate change. Commencing with a chapter covering concerns and solutions centred around seafood security, the following chapters cover the biology and behavior of aquatic animals and their selection for use in aquaculture systems, integrated multi-trophic aquaculture, nutrient inputs and pollution, biofouling, blue carbon stocks in coastal aquaculture, climate change adaptations and knowledge management in aquaculture. Written by internationally-recognized experts in aquaculture and ecology, and edited by Saleem Mustafa, well known for his work in aquatic sciences, the book provides a great deal of use and interest to all those involved in aquaculture planning and development, environmental sciences and aquatic ecology. All libraries in universities and research establishments where biological sciences and aquaculture are studied and taught should have copies of this vital reference on their shelves.

This proceedings book is divided in 2 Volumes and 8 Parts. Part I is dedicated to Decision Support System, which is about the information system that supports business or organizational decision-making activities; Part II is on Computing Methodology, which is always used to provide the most effective algorithm for numerical solutions of various modeling problems; Part III presents Information Technology, which is the application of computers to store, study, retrieve, transmit and manipulate data, or information in the context of a business or other enterprise; Part IV is dedicated to Data Analysis, which is a process of inspecting, cleansing, transforming, and modeling data with the goal of discovering useful information, suggesting conclusions, and supporting decision-making; Part V presents papers on Operational Management, which is about the plan, organization, implementation and control of the operation process; Part VI is on Project Management, which is about the initiating, planning, executing, controlling, and closing the work of a team to achieve specific goals and meet specific success criteria at the specified time in the field of engineering; Part VII presents Green Supply Chain, which is about the management of the flow of goods and services based on the concept of “low-carbon”; Part VIII is focused on Industry Strategy Management, which refers to the decision-making and management art of an industry or organization in a long-term and long-term development direction, objectives, tasks and policies, as well as resource allocation.

This study engages with the emerging field of energy humanities to provide close readings of several early American oriental-observer tales. The popular genre of orientalism offered Americans a means to critique new ideas of identity, history, and nationality accompanying protoindustrialization and a growing consumerism. The tales thus express a complex self-reflection during a time when America’s exploitation of its energy resources and its engagement in a Franco-British world-system was transforming the daily life of its citizens. The genre of the oriental observer, this study argues, offers intriguing glimpses of a nation becoming strange in the eyes of its own inhabitants.