Nature

This book addresses one of the key issues of our time, the process of sustainable transition in modern, industrial societies, by looking at the dynamics associated with this objective at the decentralised local level in South Korea.

Improvement of Desert Ranges in Soviet Central Asia (1985) examines the progress made in the Soviet Union's attempts to increase desert vegetation without using irrigation or fertilizers. Prominent Soviet scientists analyse the use of ecological resources in desert ranges to produce more productive grazing land.

The Soviet Union (1989) examines the state of the Soviet Union at the end of the 1980s. It claimed to offer a new social, economic and political order and this book looks at the extent of its success. It surveys the major components of Soviet society and examines the principal issues and debates that surround its assessment.

The Soviet Secret Police (1957) depicts the main aspects of the development, structure and functions of the secret police of the Soviet Union forms a full and objective study of the secret police and its role in the Soviet system.

Gorbachev at the Helm (1987) analyses the policy decisions taken at the 27th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in February-March 1986, declared at the time by the Soviet government as a major turning point in Soviet history.

No sector can escape the challenge of the climate crisis. This book brings together a team of academic experts to urgently examine the intersection of sustainability and the Cultural and Creative Industries (CCIs).

The order of Catfishes (Siluriformes) is one of the largest in number of families, genera, and species. The group is found in most freshwaters and shallow saltwater bodies around the world.

This book focuses on upland agricultural systems and applies a multiple capitals approach to explain what they can provide at a time when many are struggling to survive. It will be of interest to students and scholars of agriculture, natural resource management, ecosystem services and rural development.

Eva Roefs' AMSTERDAM is a visual study of young people living in the Dutch capital, approached in the streets and portrayed by the artist in her studio in the Red Light District. However, the close-up, analytical photographs estrange the participants from the urban environment, resulting in a solid, black and white series whose focal point is the human experience. With this collection of characters gazing back at the camera, Roefs creates a portrait of the city without its landscape - it is the expressiveness of her subjects that defines Amsterdam, by standing against a stark white background and engaging with the medium and the artist. Each portrait feels carefully crafted, with the photographic process shining through the darkroom, delivering images that stand out for their rich tones and depth obtained through hand printing.

This book explores energy transitions in India, Germany and Australia, drawing on ethnography and political economy to provide best-practice for future energy transitions around the world. It will appeal to students, researchers, and policy makers from anthropology, sociology, politics and political economy, sustainability studies, and geography.

Our buildings are making us sick. Our homes, offices, factories, and dormitories are, in some sense, fresh parasites on the sacred Earth, Nahasdzn. In search of a better way, author Jim Kristofic journeys across the Southwest to apprentice with architects and builders who know how to make buildings that will take care of us. This is where he meets the House Gods who are building to the sun so that we can live on Earth. Forever.In House Gods, Kristofic pursues the techniques of sustainable building and the philosophies of its practitioners. What emerges is a strange and haunting quest through adobe mud and mayhem, encounters with shamans and stray dogs, solar panels, tragedy, and true believers. It is a story about doing something meaningful, and about the kinds of things that grow out of deep pain. One of these things is compassion-from which may come solace. We build our buildings, we make our lives-we are the House Gods.

In this lyrical, radically expansive self-portrait, celebrated poet, author, and lecturer Sophie Strand explores-with searing insight and honesty-the intersecting spaces of her own chronic illness, the complex ecology of a changing world, and the very nature of the stories we tell ourselves. At age sixteen Sophie Strand-bright, agile, fearless-is suddenly beset by unexplained, debilitating illness while on a family trip abroad. Her once vibrant life becomes a tangled miasma of medication, specialists, anaphylaxis, and seemingly never-ending attempts to explain what has gone so terribly wrong. And, for many years thereafter, Sophie's life becomes subsumed with ideas not of "health," but of explanation, and the narrative of how and why she became sick. But slowly, through both profound fatigue with the medical industrial complex and a deeply entwined relationship with the natural world, she comes to another, more fundamental understanding of what has happened to her body. What if sickness is not a separation from the body? What if health is not quite so easy to see? What if physical pain leaves us no choice but to return to our bodies, the pinpricks and lightning of illness stitching us back into a physical presence our society has taught us to ignore? In a work both expansively tender and shockingly frank, Sophie Strand offers readers a window onto her own winding journey through the maze of chronic illness-a web not unlike those created by the mycorrizhal fungi whose networks she begins to see as a metaphor for the profound connections between all species and the earth. Grounded deeply in the mountains of the Hudson Valley, each moment of this far-reaching narrative snakes its way through the multi-layered ecology of the land around us, from the stunningly powerful pollen of a phlox plant to the unexpected beauty and wisdom of the woodchuck. The Body Is a Doorway dives into the murky waters of sickness and trauma, as well as the resonant challenges and joys of friendship, young adulthood, first love, and fertility. Throughout, in precise, sparkling language, it explores questions both personal and universal: Is there healing beyond the human? Beyond the hope for a cure or a happy ending? Is there something wilder and more symbiotic beyond narrow ideas of well-being?