Managed Annihilation

The Newfoundland and Labrador cod fishery was once the most successful commercial fishery in the world. When it collapsed in 1992, many pointed to failures in management, such as uncontrolled harvesting, as likely culprits. Managed Annihilation makes the case that the idea of natural resource management itself was the problem. The collapse occurred when the fisheries were state-managed and still, two decades later, there is no recovery in sight. Although the collapse raised doubts among policy-makers about their ability to understand and control nature, their ultimate goal of control through management has not wavered and has been transferred from wild fish to fishermen and farmed cod.

Throughout history most people have associated northern North America with wilderness, abundant fish and game, snow-capped mountains, and endless forest and prairie. Canada's contemporary picture gallery, however, contains more disturbing images � deforested mountains, empty fisheries, and melting ice caps. Adopting both a chronological and a thematic approach, Laurel MacDowell examines human interactions with the land, and the origins of our current environmental crisis, from First Peoples to the Kyoto Protocol. This richly illustrated exploration of the past from an environmental perspective will change the way Canadians and others around the world think about � and look at � Canada.

"Sustainable development is, for government and industry at least, primarily a way of turning trees into lumber, tar into oil, and critique into consent; a way to defend the status quo of growth at any cost." --from the Introduction In Unsustainable Oil: Facts, Counterfacts and Fictions, Jon Gordon makes the case for re-evaluating the theoretical, political, and environmental issues around petroleum extraction. Doing so, he argues, will reinvigorate our understanding of the culture and the ethics of energy production in Canada. Rather than looking for better facts or better interpretations of the facts, Gordon challenges us to embrace the future after oil. Reading fiction can help us understand the cultural-ecological crisis that we inhabit. In Unsustainable Oil, using the lens of Alberta's bituminous sands, he asks us to consider literature's potential to open space for creative alternatives.

This book examines an extremely topical phenomenon, the massive industrial exploitation of animals, from a previously neglected perspective. It explores the history and development of animal industries in Nordic countries from their establishment in the late nineteenth century to the present day. These countries are often considered to be progressive and advanced in animal protection, but consumption practices in this area are actually excessive in relation to planetary resources and are among the most unsustainable on a global scale. If we want to understand current problems, it is essential to be aware of long-term changes and continuities, as well as the diversity of animals that have been exploited. The purpose of this book is to explain these changes and provide new knowledge for scholars in human-animal studies, decisionmakers and the general public.

"Antarctica is a deeply contested place. It is not an unchanging wilderness or quiet and passive continent at the bottom of the earth. Today, a community of scientists, institutions, industries, activists, private citizens and nation-states are deeply connected to the region. These actors pursue a variety of projects and hold an array of visions for the region: scientists want a pristine laboratory, nation-states want peace and order, fishermen want to exploit fisheries, environmentalists want total protection and conservation, tourists want a wild landscape, and miners dream of a future when they can dig and drill. Amidst a fray of ideas, one vision of the region has come to dominate: Antarctica is a fragile and pristine environment demanding international protection and management. The Greening of Antarctica offers the first sustained historical analysis of how a community of states and scientists envisioned and created an international system of management in the 1960s and 1970s. These were the first two decades of an international regime beginning with the Antarctic Treaty of 1959 and culminating in 1980 with the signature of the Convention on the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources, when the fundamental elements of this international system were in place. Using a wide range of archival sources from four national archives and other institutional repositories, many newly opened, this book fills a significant gap in our understanding of Antarctic history and uncovers the foundations of contemporary Antarctica"--

This volume examines all aspects of using agent or individual-based simulation. This approach represents systems as individual elements having their own set of differing states and internal processes. The interactions between elements in the simulation represent interactions in the target systems. What makes this "social" is that it can represent an observed society. Social systems include all those systems where the components have individual agency but also interact with each other. This includes human societies and groups, but also increasingly socio-technical systems where the internet-based devices form the substrate for interaction. These systems are central to our lives, but are among the most complex known. This poses particular problems for those who wish to understand them. The complexity often makes analytic approaches infeasible but, on the other hand, natural language approaches are also inadequate for relating intricate cause and effect. This is why individual and agent-based computational approaches hold out the possibility of new and deeper understanding of such systems. This handbook marks the maturation of this new field. It brings together summaries of the best thinking and practices in this area from leading researchers in the field and constitutes a reference point for standards against which future methodological advances can be judged. This second edition adds new chapters on different modelling purposes and applying software engineering methods to simulation development. Revised existing content will keep the book up-to-date with recent developments. This volume will help those new to the field avoid "reinventing the wheel" each time, and give them a solid and wide grounding in the essential issues. It will also help those already in the field by providing accessible overviews of current thought. The material is divided into four sections: Introduction, Methodology, Mechanisms, and Applications. Each chapter starts with a very brief section called ‘Why read this chapter?’ followed by an abstract, which summarizes the content of the chapter. Each chapter also ends with a section on ‘Further Reading’. Whilst sometimes covering technical aspects, this second edition of Simulating Social Complexity is designed to be accessible to a wide range of researchers, including both those from the social sciences as well as those with a more formal background. It will be of use as a standard reference text in the field and also be suitable for graduate level courses.

As climate change, resource overexploitation, and pollution leave ever more visible marks, ocean ecosystems, economies, and people are all affected. With coasts on the Atlantic, Pacific, and Arctic, Canada faces a formidable challenge in building resilient, sustainable oceans and supporting the communities that rely on them. Sea Change reports on the OceanCanada Partnership, a multidisciplinary project to take stock of what we know about Canada’s oceans, construct possible scenarios for coastal regions, and create a national dialogue and vision. Three themes emerge from this impressive synthesis of social, cultural, economic, and environmental research: ocean change, access to ocean resources, and ocean governance. Indigenous and non-Indigenous scholars and practitioners focus on finding solutions to rapid environmental and social transformation, outlining the implications for legislation and offering policy recommendations. Increasingly, civil society will have to advocate for oceans, and Sea Change will empower the voices of those who take up that task.

A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE FROM ALEX GARLAND, STARRING NATALIE PORTMAN AND OSCAR ISAAC The Southern Reach Trilogy begins with Annihilation, the Nebula Award-winning novel that "reads as if Verne or Wellsian adventurers exploring a mysterious island had warped through into a Kafkaesque nightmare world" (Kim Stanley Robinson). Area X has been cut off from the rest of the continent for decades. Nature has reclaimed the last vestiges of human civilization. The first expedition returned with reports of a pristine, Edenic landscape; the second expedition ended in mass suicide; the third expedition in a hail of gunfire as its members turned on one another. The members of the eleventh expedition returned as shadows of their former selves, and within weeks, all had died of cancer. In Annihilation, the first volume of Jeff VanderMeer's Southern Reach trilogy, we join the twelfth expedition. The group is made up of four women: an anthropologist; a surveyor; a psychologist, the de facto leader; and our narrator, a biologist. Their mission is to map the terrain, record all observations of their surroundings and of one another, and, above all, avoid being contaminated by Area X itself. They arrive expecting the unexpected, and Area X delivers—they discover a massive topographic anomaly and life forms that surpass understanding—but it's the surprises that came across the border with them and the secrets the expedition members are keeping from one another that change everything.