Gaia S Wager

Can environmentalism evolve into a powerful social movement that transforms human practices in ways that are ecologically sustainable? Gary C. Bryner contends that it is in our self-interest as a species to ensure that environmental movements coalesce in the service of sustainability. From the very first Earth Day to the setting of Agenda 21 for the new millennium, this book traces the actors, the issues, and the institutions involved in moving environmentalism from a loose collection of fuzzy groups and goals to a new global force for change. Will the next phase of environmental action resemble the WTO protests in Seattle, the UN Kyoto Protocols, or a Think Tank inside the Washington Beltway? Gaia's Wager shows that movements play an important role between political parties and interest groups on the domestic scene and the unruly forces of globalization internationally. Only social movements can catalyze a response to the global environmental threat that has a chance of both capturing imaginations and institutionalizing progress toward environmental sustainability. Above all, Gaia's Wager bets on the confluence of big ideas and social action to yield a more hopeful environmental future.

“The seminal book on global poverty and hunger . . . How rapacious speculators and complicit bureaucrats are starving a billion people” (Wenonah Hauter, executive director of Food & Water Watch and author of Foodopoly). Few people know that world hunger was very nearly eradicated in our lifetimes. In the past five years, however, widespread starvation has suddenly reappeared, and chronic hunger is a major issue on every continent. In an extensive investigation of this disturbing shift, Jean Ziegler—one of the world’s leading food experts—lays out in clear and accessible terms the complex global causes of the new hunger crisis. Ziegler’s wide-ranging and fascinating examination focuses on how the new sustainable revolution in energy production has diverted millions of acres of corn, soy, wheat, and other grain crops from food to fuel. The results, he shows, have been sudden and startling, with declining food reserves sending prices to record highs and a new global commodities market in ethanol and other biofuels gobbling up arable lands in nearly every continent on earth. Like Raj Patel’s pioneering Stuffed and Starved, Betting on Famine will enlighten the millions of Americans concerned about the politics of food at home—and about the forces that prevent us from feeding the world’s children. “In this devastating book, [Ziegler] describes the horrors of food insecurity, the callousness of ‘crusaders of neoliberalism’ who control food and land access, and the individuals and grassroots organizations fighting for subsistence farmers and the right to food.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review) “Passionate, well-researched, objective, and illuminating . . . When we close this book, indignant, we know that those who die of hunger are victims of money and power.” —L’Express

This is the first comprehensive book on the Arthurian legend in medieval and Renaissance Italy since Edmund Gardner's 1930 The Arthurian Legend in Italian Literature. Arthurian material reached all levels of Italian society, from princely courts with their luxury books and frescoed palaces, to the merchant classes and even popular audiences in the piazza, which enjoyed shorter retellings in verse and prose. Unique assemblages emerge on Italian soil, such as the Compilation of Rustichello da Pisa or the innovative Tavola Ritonda, in versions made for both Tuscany and the Po Valley. Chapters examine the transmission of the French romances across Italy; reworkings in various Italian regional dialects; the textual relations of the prose Tristan; narrative structures employed by Italian writers; later ottava rima poetic versions in the new medium of printed books; the Arthurian-themed art of the Middle Ages and Renaissance; and more. The Arthur of the Italians offers a rich corpus of new criticism by scholars who have brought the Italian Arthurian material back into critical conversation.

In this book, the editors focus on architecture and communication from various different perspectives – taking into account that the term “architecture” is used for buildings as well as in the context of computer software. Data and software also impact on our cities; raw data, however, do not convey any information – in order to generate information and communication they have to be organized and must make sense to the reader. The contributions avoid clear separation of the various communication spheres of their disciplines. Instead, they use the wide range of approaches to explore meanings – an ambitious aim that leaves the destination wide open; the reader is invited to share in this adventure.

th CICLing 2010 was the 11 Annual Conference on Intelligent Text Processing and Computational Linguistics. The CICLing conferences provide a wide-scope forum for discussion of the art and craft of natural language processing research as well as the best practices in its applications. This volume contains three invited papers and the regular papers accepted for oral presentation at the conference. The papers accepted for poster pres- tation were published in a special issue of another journal (see information on thewebsite).Since 2001,theproceedingsofCICLingconferenceshavebeen p- lished in Springer’s Lecture Notes in Computer Science series, as volumes 2004, 2276, 2588, 2945, 3406, 3878, 4394, 4919, and 5449. The volume is structured into 12 sections: – Lexical Resources – Syntax and Parsing – Word Sense Disambiguation and Named Entity Recognition – Semantics and Dialog – Humor and Emotions – Machine Translation and Multilingualism – Information Extraction – Information Retrieval – Text Categorization and Classi?cation – Plagiarism Detection – Text Summarization – Speech Generation The 2010 event received a record high number of submissions in the - year history of the CICLing series. A total of 271 papers by 565 authors from 47 countriesweresubmittedforevaluationbytheInternationalProgramCommittee (see Tables 1 and 2). This volume contains revised versions of 61 papers, by 152 authors, selected for oral presentation; the acceptance rate was 23%.

This book analyzes the hermeneutics of place, raising questions about central issues such as textuality, dialogue, and play. It discusses the central figures in the development of hermeneutics and place, and surveys disciplines and areas in which a hermeneutic approach to place has been fruitful. It covers the range of philosophical hermeneutic theory, both within philosophy itself as well as from other disciplines. In doing so, the volume reflects the state of theorization on these issues, and also looks forward to the implications and opportunities that exist. Philosophical hermeneutics has fundamentally altered philosophy’s approach to place. Issues such as how we dwell in place, how place is imagined, created, preserved, and lost, and how philosophy itself exists in place have become central. While there is much research applying hermeneutics to place, there is little which both reflects on that heritage and critically analyzes a hermeneutic approach to place. This book fills that void by offering a sustained analysis of the central elements, major figures, and disciplinary applications of hermeneutics and place.

This illustrated essay concerns sustainability. Its simple thesis is that trees do not grow to the sky. Basic facts are used to figure Earth’s human carrying capacity. Soft food and hard petroleum limits are reached within present lifetimes. Liquifying other fossil fuels and biofuels cannot make up for future petroleum shortfalls given a world population at sustainable food limits, with present GDP levels. The issue is not yet addressed by public policy, although more serious and sooner than climate change.

A fascinating new study from the originator of the Gaia Theory, “who conceived the first wholly new way of looking at life on earth since Charles Darwin” (Independent) One of the world’s leading scientific thinkers offers a vision of a future epoch in which humans and artificial intelligence unite to save the Earth. James Lovelock, creator of the Gaia hypothesis and the greatest environmental thinker of our time, has produced an astounding new theory about future of life on Earth. He argues that the Anthropocene—the age in which humans acquired planetary-scale technologies—is, after 300 years, coming to an end. A new age—the Novacene—has already begun. In the Novacene, new beings will emerge from existing artificial intelligence systems. They will think 10,000 times faster than we do and they will regard us as we now regard plants. But this will not be the cruel, violent machine takeover of the planet imagined by science fiction. These hyperintelligent beings will be as dependent on the health of the planet as we are. They will need the planetary cooling system of Gaia to defend them from the increasing heat of the sun as much as we do. And Gaia depends on organic life. We will be partners in this project. It is crucial, Lovelock argues, that the intelligence of Earth survives and prospers. He does not think there are intelligent aliens, so we are the only beings capable of understanding the cosmos. Perhaps, he speculates, the Novacene could even be the beginning of a process that will finally lead to intelligence suffusing the entire cosmos. At the age of 100, James Lovelock has produced the most important and compelling work of his life.