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An argument that the perception of arid lands as wastelands is politically motivated and that these landscapes are variable, biodiverse ecosystems, whose inhabitants must be empowered. Deserts are commonly imagined as barren, defiled, worthless places, wastelands in need of development. This understanding has fueled extensive anti-desertification efforts—a multimillion-dollar global campaign driven by perceptions of a looming crisis. In this book, Diana Davis argues that estimates of desertification have been significantly exaggerated and that deserts and drylands—which constitute about 41% of the earth's landmass—are actually resilient and biodiverse environments in which a great many indigenous people have long lived sustainably. Meanwhile, contemporary arid lands development programs and anti-desertification efforts have met with little success. As Davis explains, these environments are not governed by the equilibrium ecological dynamics that apply in most other regions. Davis shows that our notion of the arid lands as wastelands derives largely from politically motivated Anglo-European colonial assumptions that these regions had been laid waste by “traditional” uses of the land. Unfortunately, such assumptions still frequently inform policy. Drawing on political ecology and environmental history, Davis traces changes in our understanding of deserts, from the benign views of the classical era to Christian associations of the desert with sinful activities to later (neo)colonial assumptions of destruction. She further explains how our thinking about deserts is problematically related to our conceptions of forests and desiccation. Davis concludes that a new understanding of the arid lands as healthy, natural, but variable ecosystems that do not necessarily need improvement or development will facilitate a more sustainable future for the world's magnificent drylands.
In the wake of the Second World War, internationalists identified science as both the cause of and the solution to world crisis. Unless civilization learned to control the unprecedented powers science had unleashed, global catastrophe was imminent. But the internationalists found hope in the idea of world government. In The Postwar Origins of the Global Environment, Perrin Selcer argues that the metaphor of “Spaceship Earth”—the idea of the planet as a single interconnected system—exemplifies this moment, when a mix of anxiety and hope inspired visions of world community and the proliferation of international institutions. Selcer tells the story of how the United Nations built the international knowledge infrastructure that made the global-scale environment visible. Experts affiliated with UN agencies helped make the “global”—as in global population, global climate, and global economy—an object in need of governance. Selcer traces how UN programs such as UNESCO’s Arid Lands Project, the production of a soil map of the world, and plans for a global environmental-monitoring system fell short of utopian ambitions to cultivate world citizens but did produce an international community of experts with influential connections to national governments. He shows how events and personalities, cultures and ecologies, bureaucracies and ideologies, decolonization and the Cold War interacted to make global knowledge. A major contribution to global history, environmental history, and the history of development, this book relocates the origins of planetary environmentalism in the postwar politics of scale.
First published in 1995. This title presents the proceedings of The Second International Conference on Range Management in the Arabian Gulf, 1990. The objectives of the Conference were to: evaluate progress made following the First Conference; exchange information on range management development; review advances in applicable technologies; discuss potential strategies for range enhancement and assemble pertinent recommendations for enactment. As such, these proceedings will serve as a reference base for researchers, professors, lecturers, and students alike, both at advanced undergraduate and graduate levels.
Water supply: rainwater harvesting, runoff agriculture, irrigation with saline water, reuse of water, wells, other sources of water; Water conservation: Reducing evaporation from water surfaces, reducing seepage losses, reducing evaporation from soil surfaces, trickle irrigation, other innovative irrigation methods, reducing cropland percolation losses, reducing transpiration, selecting and managing crops to use water more efficiently, controlled-environment agriculture; other promising water-conservation technoiques.
The international conference Arid Lands: Today and Tomorrow drew more than 400 participants from over 3 S countries to Tucson, Arizona, for one week in October of 19 8 S. The diversity of presenters, disciplines and subject matters addressed contributed to an interesting and informative conference. The papers presented in this volume represent the efforts of scientists and other individuals who, through their various disciplines, are addressing the problems of and opportunities presented by the arid lands of the world. A committee of five scientists reviewed for substance. relevance and their contribution to the conference the 284 abstracts that were submitted. They selected 146 for presentation at the conference and of those papers presented, 128 were received for inclusion in the proceedings.