Democracy S Mountain

At 14,259 feet, Longs Peak towers over Colorado’s northern Front Range. A prized location for mountaineering since the 1870s, Longs has been a place of astonishing climbing feats—and, unsurprisingly, of significant risk and harm. Careless and unlucky climbers have experienced serious injury and death on the peak, while their activities, equipment, and trash have damaged fragile alpine resources. As a site of outdoor adventure attracting mostly white people, Longs has mirrored the United States’ tenacious racial divides, even into the twenty-first century. In telling the history of Longs Peak and its climbers, Ruth M. Alexander shows how Rocky Mountain National Park, like the National Park Service (NPS), has struggled to contend with three fundamental obligations—to facilitate visitor enjoyment, protect natural resources, and manage the park as a site of democracy. Too often, it has treated these obligations as competing rather than complementary commitments, reflecting national discord over their meaning and value. Yet the history of Longs also shows us how, over time, climbers, the park, and the NPS have attempted to align these obligations in policy and practice. By putting mountain climbers and their relationship to Longs Peak and its rangers at the center of the story of Rocky Mountain National Park, Alexander exposes the significant role outdoor recreationists have had—as both citizens and privileged adventurers—in shaping the peak’s meaning, use, and management. Since 2000, the park has promoted climber enjoyment and safety, helped preserve the environment, facilitated tribal connections to the park, and attracted a more diverse group of visitors and climbers. Yet, Alexander argues, more work needs to be done. Alexander’s nuanced account of Longs Peak reveals the dangers of undermining national parks’ fundamental obligations and presents a powerful appeal to meet them fairly and fully.

While popular movements in South Korea rightly grab the headlines for forcing political change and holding leaders to account, those movements are only part of the story of the construction and practice of democracy. In Top-Down Democracy in South Korea, Erik Mobrand documents another part – the elite-led design and management of electoral and party institutions. Even as the country left authoritarian rule behind, elites have responded to freer and fairer elections by entrenching rather than abandoning exclusionary practices and forms of party organization. Exploring South Korea’s political development from 1945 through the end of dictatorship in the 1980s and into the twenty-first century, Mobrand challenges the view that the origins of the postauthoritarian political system lie in a series of popular movements that eventually undid repression. He argues that we should think about democratization not as the establishment of an entirely new system, but as the subtle blending of new formal rules with earlier authority structures, political institutions, and legitimizing norms.

At 14,259 feet, Longs Peak towers over Colorado’s northern Front Range. A prized location for mountaineering since the 1870s, Longs has been a place of astonishing climbing feats—and, unsurprisingly, of significant risk and harm. Careless and unlucky climbers have experienced serious injury and death on the peak, while their activities, equipment, and trash have damaged fragile alpine resources. As a site of outdoor adventure attracting mostly white people, Longs has mirrored the United States’ tenacious racial divides, even into the twenty-first century. In telling the history of Longs Peak and its climbers, Ruth M. Alexander shows how Rocky Mountain National Park, like the National Park Service (NPS), has struggled to contend with three fundamental obligations—to facilitate visitor enjoyment, protect natural resources, and manage the park as a site of democracy. Too often, it has treated these obligations as competing rather than complementary commitments, reflecting national discord over their meaning and value. Yet the history of Longs also shows us how, over time, climbers, the park, and the NPS have attempted to align these obligations in policy and practice. By putting mountain climbers and their relationship to Longs Peak and its rangers at the center of the story of Rocky Mountain National Park, Alexander exposes the significant role outdoor recreationists have had—as both citizens and privileged adventurers—in shaping the peak’s meaning, use, and management. Since 2000, the park has promoted climber enjoyment and safety, helped preserve the environment, facilitated tribal connections to the park, and attracted a more diverse group of visitors and climbers. Yet, Alexander argues, more work needs to be done. Alexander’s nuanced account of Longs Peak reveals the dangers of undermining national parks’ fundamental obligations and presents a powerful appeal to meet them fairly and fully.

This title explores the remarkable religious renaissance that has reformed, revitalized and renewed the practices of Buddhism and Daoism in Taiwan. Madsen connects these developments to Taiwan's transition to democracy and the burgeoning needs of its new middle classes.

Can anything bring a greater sense of awe than viewing a chain of mountains from afar? Observing a long line of craggy peaks spread across the horizon and rising upward into an azure skyline gives a special perspectives to what a mountain really is. Such sites provide memorable experiences that last a lifetime.. Hiking that same mountain chain provides another perspective to the mountains. The rough terrain, winding and hazardous paths, and sheer drop-off cliffs provide a totally different, if equally memorable perspective. There are dangers in walking in the midst of mountains. Mountains can be hazardous. So it is with politics. Democracy, too, is a beautiful thing. This nation embodies a near-perfect set of rules and guidelines devised by men that we call our founding fathers and embodied in a document we call a constitution. Our constitution, too, creates a sense of awe. Today, watching the daily machinations of politics; the, the process of voting, campaigning, maneuvering, the political intrigue and the oversized egos of so many of our politicians throughout the nation makes us wonder. Politics, too, has its craggy paths and steep cliffs that so many of us disdain. It, too has its precarious nature.. At no time since the civil war has the fractured nature of the nation been more obvious than in the current political scene. Democracy is under attack, in danger of being replaced by an autocratic form of government. The author of this book has lived through the presidency of 15 chief executives—that’s 84 years of presidency. Born in the mid-west into a Republican family of long-standing, McGill spent his early years cementing that early belief through family conversations and school classes listening to history and civic teachers. He developed the engrained belief that, somehow, the Republicans best served the needs of the American people. It was sometime during his college years that the author began the long shift from Republican to Democrat. McGill shares that transition even as he warns about the current political dangers threatening the future of the nation. There is an urgency to the book—a concern for the future the children of today. A recurring question in the book asks about the world the children and grandchild will inherit.

An international manifesto on democracy traces its evolution and the ways in which women and minorities have historically fought to win democratic rights, in an account that describes successful implementations of democracy in formerly oppressed regions, clarifies common misconceptions, and warns of the dangers of widening economic gaps. Simultaneous.