Squandering Eden

Beschrijving van het continent Afrika waarbij de problemen van elk land afzonderlijk aan de orde komen.

A personal exploration of the influence of northern hemisphere civilisations on eastern Africa during the last 5,000 years.

A wide-ranging journey through the history of borders and an exploration of their role in shaping our world today. Since the earliest known marker denoting the edge of one land and the beginning of the next—a stone column inscribed with Sumerian cuneiform—borders have been imagined, mapped, moved, and fought over. In The Edge of the Plain, James Crawford skillfully blends history, travel writing, and reportage to trace these borderlines throughout history and across the globe. What happens on the ground when we impose lines on a map that contradict how humans have always lived—and moved? Crawford confronts that question from bloody territorial disputes in Mesopotamia, to the Sápmi lands of Scandinavia, the shifting boundaries of the Israel-Palestine conflict, efforts to build a wall on the United States-Mexico border, and the dangerous border crossings pursued by migrants into Europe. And yet the role of borders extends beyond specific sites of conflict. On the largest scale, borders define the limits of empire—the two walls in Britain that once represented the northwestern edge of the Roman Empire; the mythological eastern gate supposedly closed off by Alexander the Great; China’s virtual “Great Firewall.” On the smallest, human scale, cell walls are the last physical barrier against disease, after lines of quarantine have failed. Finally, as The Edge of the Plain reveals, humans have not only made their mark on the landscape: the landscape itself is now changing, more and more rapidly due to climate change. Crawford introduces us to both the Alpine watershed—one such shifting, natural borderline—and the “Great Green Wall” in Africa, envisioned as an international, community-built bulwark against desertification. Borders are as old as human civilization, and focal points for today’s colliding forces of nationalism, climate change, globalization, and mass migration. The Edge of the Plain illuminates these lines of separation past and present, how we define them—and how they define us.

In Progress or Collapse, Roberto De Vogli guides us through the multiple converging global crises of economic progress. He explores the connections between the environmental crisis and the psychological, social, cultural, political and economic emergencies affecting modern societies. It is not a coincidence, the author argues, that global ecological destruction is occurring in tandem with other crises: rising mental disorders, mindless consumerism, rampant conformism, status competition, civic disengagement, startling social inequalities, global financial instability, and widespread political impasse.

The first edition of Life and Death Matters was a breakthrough text, centralizing the experiences of those on the front lines of environmental crises and forging new paradigms for understanding how crises emerge and how different groups of actors respond to them. This second edition, fully updated with both expanded and new chapters, once again provides a benchmark for the field and opens important pathways for further research. Authors reassess the state of scholarship and grassroots activism in a new century when social and environmental systems are being reconceptualised within post-9/11 security and biosecurity frameworks, when global warming and resource scarcity are not fears but realities, when global power and politics are being realigned, and when ecocide, ethnocide, and genocide are daily tragedies. This bold new edition of Life and Death Matters will be a widely used textbook and essential reading for students, scholars, and policy makers.

The African continent is home to spectacularly expressive human beings: rebellious anti-colonial and opposition leaders, eloquent novelists, political and social activists, comical geniuses, pensive and philosophical poets and intellectuals, as well as a few raving dictators. And the body of proverbial wisdom from Africa alone could fill many volumes. Despite being eminently quotable, Africa is not so readily quoted. Stewart's Quotable Africa covers the whole of Africa - north to south and east to west - and includes memorable statements from hundreds of speakers including Nelson Mandela, Doris Lessing, Chinua Achebe, Julius Nyerere, Kofi Annan among others, as well as biblical passages and proverbs. Julia Stewart has spent over a decade collecting the 5000 plus quotes found in this book, all of them either by Africans or about African subjects.

Cave Blindness Like Plato's cave-dwellers who only saw inaccurate reflections of reality on the wall, America has been blinded to dangerous realities inside and outside our borders, argues award-winning journalist Mort Rosenblum. Our ignorance is not just deplorable, it is literally killing us—and others. Rosenblum—who has reported from more than one hundred countries, many of which he has outlived—explains how we all can and must learn more about what's really happening in the Middle East, Europe, Africa, Asia, Latin America, in matters of war, peace, business, the environment, and education. This cri de coeur by one of our planet's most eloquent journalists is a must-read for anyone concerned about what they don't see in the newspaper or on TV. Escaping Plato's Cave offers both insight and practical ways for Americans to get out of the cave and see what's really going on around us.