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The Earth's biological, chemical, and physical systems are increasingly shaped by the activities of one species-ours. In our decisions about everything from manufacturing technologies to restaurant menus, the health of the planet has become a product of human choice. Environmentalism, however, has largely failed to adapt to this new reality. Reconstructing Earth offers seven essays that explore ways of developing a new, more sophisticated approach to the environment that replaces the fantasy of recovering pristine landscapes with a more grounded viewpoint that can foster a better relationship between humans and the planet. Braden Allenby, a lawyer with degrees in both engineering and environmental studies, explains the importance of technological choice, and how that factor is far more significant in shaping our environment (in ways both desirable and not) than environmental controls. Drawing on his varied background and experience in both academia and the corporate world, he describes the emerging field of "earth systems engineering and management," which offers an integrated approach to understanding and managing complex human/natural systems that can serve as a basis for crafting better, more lasting solutions to widespread environmental problems. Reconstructing Earth not only critiques dysfunctional elements of current environmentalism but establishes a foundation for future environmental management and progress, one built on an understanding of technological evolution and the cultural systems that support modern technologies. Taken together, the essays offer an important means of developing an environmentalism that is robust and realistic enough to address the urgent realities of our planet. Reconstructing Earth is a thought-provoking new work for anyone concerned with the past or future of environmental thought, including students and teachers of environmental studies, environmental policy, technology policy, technological evolution, or sustainability.
Reconstructing Earth’s Climate History There has never been a more critical time for students to understand the record of Earth’s climate history, as well as the relevance of that history to understanding Earth’s present and likely future climate. There also has never been a more critical time for students, as well as the public-at-large, to understand how we know, as much as what we know, in science. This book addresses these needs by placing you, the student, at the center of learning. In this book, you will actively use inquiry-based explorations of authentic scientific data to develop skills that are essential in all disciplines: making observations, developing and testing hypotheses, reaching conclusions based on the available data, recognizing and acknowledging uncertainty in scientific data and scientific conclusions, and communicating your results to others. The context for understanding global climate change today lies in the records of Earth’s past, as preserved in archives such as sediments and sedimentary rocks on land and on the seafloor, as well as glacial ice, corals, speleothems, and tree rings. These archives have been studied for decades by geoscientists and paleoclimatologists. Much like detectives, these researchers work to reconstruct what happened in the past, as well as when and how it happened, based on the often-incomplete and indirect records of those events preserved in these archives. This book uses guided-inquiry to build your knowledge of foundational concepts needed to interpret such archives. Foundational concepts include: interpreting the environmental meaning of sediment composition, determining ages of geologic materials and events (supported by a new section on radiometric dating), and understanding the role of CO2 in Earth’s climate system, among others. Next, this book provides the opportunity for you to apply your foundational knowledge to a collection of paleoclimate case studies. The case studies consider: long-term climate trends, climate cycles, major and/or abrupt episodes of global climate change, and polar paleoclimates. New sections on sea level change in the past and future, climate change and life, and climate change and civilization expand the book’s examination of the causes and effects of Earth’s climate history. In using this book, we hope you gain new knowledge, new skills, and greater confidence in making sense of the causes and consequences of climate change. Our goal is that science becomes more accessible to you. Enjoy the challenge and the reward of working with scientific data and results! Reconstructing Earth’s Climate History, Second Edition, is an essential purchase for geoscience students at a variety of levels studying paleoclimatology, paleoceanography, oceanography, historical geology, global change, Quaternary science and Earth-system science.
The context for understanding global climate change today lies in the records of Earth’s past. This is demonstrated by decades of paleoclimate research by scientists in organizations such as the Integrated Ocean Drilling Program (IODP), the Antarctic Geological Drilling Program (ANDRILL), and many others. The purpose of this full colour textbook is to put key data and published case studies of past climate change at your fingertips, so that you can experience the nature of paleoclimate reconstruction. Using foundational geologic concepts, students explore a wide variety of topics, including: marine sediments, age determination, stable isotope paleoclimate proxies, Cenozoic climate change, climate cycles, polar climates, and abrupt warming and cooling events, students are invited to evaluate published scientific data, practice developing and testing hypotheses, and infer the broader implications of scientific results. It is our philosophy that addressing how we know is as important as addressing what we know about past climate change. Making climate change science accessible is the goal of this book. This book is intended for earth science students at a variety of levels studying paleoclimatology, oceanography, Quaternary science, or earth-system science. Additional resources for this book can be found at: http://www.wiley.com/go/stjohn/climatehistory.
In the present ecological crisis, it is imperative that human beings reconsider their place within nature and find new, more responsible and sustainable ways of living. Assumptions about the nature of God, the world, and the human being, shape our thinking and, consequently, our acting. Some have charged that the Christian tradition has been more a hindrance than a help because its theology of nature has unwittingly legitimated the exploitation of nature. This book takes the current criticism of Christian tradition to heart and invites a reconsideration of the problematic elements: its desacralization of nature; its preoccupation with the human being to the neglect of the rest of nature; its dualisms and elevation of the spiritual over material reality, and its habit of ignoring or resisting scientific understandings of the natural world. Anna Case-Winters argues that Christian tradition has a more viable theology of nature to offer. She takes a look at some particulars in Christian tradition as a way to illustrate the undeniable problems and to uncover the untapped possibilities. In the process, she engages conversation partners that have been sharply critical and particularly insightful (feminist theology, process thought, and the religion and science dialogue). The criticisms and insights of these partners help to shape a proposal for a reconstructed theology of nature that can more effectively fund our struggle for the fate of the earth.
This book, first published in the U.K. by T&T Clark, expands on the authors' prestigious Glasgow Gifford Lectures of 1995-6. Brooke and Cantor herein examine the many different ways in which the relationship between science and religion has been presented throughout history. They contend that, in fact, neither science nor religion is reducible to some timeless "essence"--and they deftly criticize the various master-narratives that have been put forward in support of such "essentialist" theses. Along the way, they repeatedly demolish the clichés so typical of popular histories of the science and religion debate, demonstrating the impossibility of reducing these debates to a single narrative, or of narrowing this relationship to a paradigm of conflict.
How would you go about rebuilding a technological society from scratch? If our technological society collapsed tomorrow what would be the one book you would want to press into the hands of the postapocalyptic survivors? What crucial knowledge would they need to survive in the immediate aftermath and to rebuild civilization as quickly as possible? Human knowledge is collective, distributed across the population. It has built on itself for centuries, becoming vast and increasingly specialized. Most of us are ignorant about the fundamental principles of the civilization that supports us, happily utilizing the latest—or even the most basic—technology without having the slightest idea of why it works or how it came to be. If you had to go back to absolute basics, like some sort of postcataclysmic Robinson Crusoe, would you know how to re-create an internal combustion engine, put together a microscope, get metals out of rock, or even how to produce food for yourself? Lewis Dartnell proposes that the key to preserving civilization in an apocalyptic scenario is to provide a quickstart guide, adapted to cataclysmic circumstances. The Knowledge describes many of the modern technologies we employ, but first it explains the fundamentals upon which they are built. Every piece of technology rests on an enormous support network of other technologies, all interlinked and mutually dependent. You can’t hope to build a radio, for example, without understanding how to acquire the raw materials it requires, as well as generate the electricity needed to run it. But Dartnell doesn’t just provide specific information for starting over; he also reveals the greatest invention of them all—the phenomenal knowledge-generating machine that is the scientific method itself. The Knowledge is a brilliantly original guide to the fundamentals of science and how it built our modern world.
This book provides a complete Phanerozoic story of palaeogeography, using new and detailed full-colour maps, to link surface and deep-Earth processes.
Winner, Grand Prize, French Voices Award for Excellence in Publication and Translation The Space Age is over? Not at all! A new planet has appeared: Earth. In the age of the Anthropocene, the Earth is a post-natural planet that can be remade at will, controlled and managed thanks to the prowess of geoengineering. This new imaginary is also accompanied by a new kind of power—geopower—that takes the entire Earth, in its social, biological and geophysical dimensions, as an object of knowledge, intervention, and governmentality. In short, our rising awareness that we have destroyed our planet has simultaneously provided us not with remorse or resolve but with a new fantasy: that the Anthropocene delivers an opportunity to remake our terrestrial environment thanks to the power of technology. Such is the position we find ourselves in, when proposals for reengineering the earth’s ecosystems and geosystems are taken as the only politically feasible answer to ecological catastrophe. Yet far from being merely the fruit of geo-capitalism, this new grand narrative of geopower has also been activated by theorists of the constructivist turn—ecomodernist, postenvironmentalist, accelerationist—who have likewise called into question the great divide between nature and culture. With the collapse of this divide, a cyborg, hybrid, flexible nature has been built, an impoverished nature that does not exist without being performed by technologies that proliferate within the space of human needs and capitalist imperatives. Underneath this performative vision resides a hidden anaturalism denying all otherness to nature and the Earth, no longer by externalizing it as a thing to be dominated, but by radically internalizing it as something to be digested. Constructivist ecology thus finds itself in no position to confront the geoconstructivist project, with its claim that there is no nature and its aim to replace Earth with Earth 2.0. Against both positions, Neyrat stakes out the importance of the unconstructable Earth. Against the fusional myth of technology over nature, but without returning to the division between nature and culture, he proposes an “ecology of separation” that acknowledges the wild, subtractive capacity of nature. Against the capitalist, technocratic delusion of earth as a constructible object, but equally against an organicism marked by unacknowledged traces of racism and sexism, Neyrat shows what it means to appreciate Earth as an unsubstitutable becoming: a traject that cannot be replicated in a laboratory. Underway for billions of years, withdrawing into the most distant past and the most inaccessible future, Earth escapes the hubris of all who would remake and master it. This remarkable book, which will be of interest to those across the humanities, natural sciences, and social sciences, from theorists to shapers of policy, recasts the earth as a singular trajectory that invites humans to turn political ecology into a geopolitics.
Planet Earth and the other bodies of the Solar System are 4.5 billion years old. They reside in a galaxy (the Milky Way Galaxy) that is 12-14 billion years old, and are part of a universe that is 13-15 billion years old. In Ancient Earth, Ancient Skies, G. Brent Dalrymple, a geologist and widely recognized expert on the age of Earth, reviews the evidence that has led scientists to these conclusions and describes the methods by which this evidence has been gathered.
With astute attention to Zephaniah's intertextual relationships with other biblical texts, Nicholas R. Werse explores the implications of Zephaniah as a book in perpetual conversation with other biblical cosmologies and conceptions of the human place in relationship with creation. Werse guides readers to critically examine Zephaniah's ancient worldview and subsequent legacy in dialog with the world's modern ecological crises. Werse argues that Zephaniah begins and ends with the land. It begins with the removal of all life from the land and ends with a proclamation returning the exiles to their ancestral home. Along this journey, all three chapters of Zephaniah systematically reverse language and imagery from Gen 1-11 and draw deeply from the language of earlier prophets to depict the 6th century BCE destruction of Jerusalem as nothing short of the unravelling of creation. While remaining suspicious of Zephaniah's distinctively androcentric worldview, Werse traces Zephaniah's rhetorical journey from the deconstruction of creation and the nations, to its proclamations of hope for the future.