For four years, Diane Hessan has been in weekly conversation with voters across the United States. What she has learned will surprise you, enlighten you, give you hope, and change the way you think about your fellow Americans. Our inability to hear each other, our suspicion, and our impatience is stressing us out and tearing us apart. It's a sickness that permeates the American culture, erodes our collective mental health, and makes us hate each other. To gain insight into how we can move forward, Hessan undertook a massive listening project, conducting an ongoing series of weekly interviews with 500 voters from every state, of every age and ethnicity, and along different points of the political spectrum. The topics ranged from race to guns, from character to party politics, from masks to rallies, from the Supreme Court to the pandemic to immigration and climate change. After more than a million individual communications, two things became clear: We have more common ground than we realize. And we are, sadly, failing at understanding each other. On issue after issue, our "divided" nation isn't nearly as polarized as we imagine. An overwhelming majority of voters believe in commonsense gun licensing and regulation. They are pro-immigration. They believe climate change is real and the coronavirus is deadly. They care deeply about their families and are willing to work hard to make ends meet. And, they believe that Washington is slow, bureaucratic, and not working in their best interests. In dozens of columns on these topics published in The Boston Globe, Hessan has upended common political wisdom. Presented together for the first time as part of this book, they reveal a unique perspective on how Americans actually think, what they value, and how we can move forward. The path to healing our divided nation is both simple and profound. We must turn down the heat. We must begin to listen, to stop presuming, to try to understand, to treat each other with dignity, and to know that most Americans are not crazy radicals. We truly share common ground. If we can pull together, we can have a much better America.

An outspoken centrist, Senator Snowe stunned Washington in February 2012 when she announced she would not seek a fourth term and offered a sharp rebuke to the Senate, citing the dispiriting gridlock and polarization. After serving in the legislative branch at the state and federal levels for 40 years, including 18 years in the U.S. Senate, she explained that Washington wasn’t solving the big problems anymore.In this timely call to action, she explores the roots of her belief in principled policy-making and bipartisan compromise. A leading moderate with a reputation for crossing the aisle, Senator Snowe will propose solutions for bridging the partisan divide in Washington, most notably through a citizens’ movement to hold elected officials accountable. Senator Snowe recounts how the tragedies and triumphs of her personal story helped shape her political approach. Born in Augusta, Maine, Senator Snowe was orphaned at nine, and raised by an aunt and uncle. When she was twenty-six, her husband, a Maine state representative, was killed in an auto accident. Already dedicated to public service, she ran for and won her husband’s seat.The book will include anecdotes from throughout her career, and address her working relationships with Presidents Reagan through Obama, Senator Ted Kennedy, Majority Leader Bob Dole, and many others. As a senior member of the powerful Senate Finance Committee, the high-profile Commerce and Intelligence Committees, and the Senate Small Business Committee, Senator Snowe has been directly involved with the most talked-about legislative challenges of recent decades: the country’s response to 9/11; the 2008 financial crisis; the Affordable Healthcare Act; the debt ceiling debacle, and much more.Her new book will draw on the lessons she's learned as a policymaker, and the frustration she shares with the American people about the government’s dwindling productivity. Senator Snowe passionately argues that the government has now lost its way, shows how this happened, and proposes ways for the world’s greatest deliberative body to, once again, fulfill its mission.

Today, humanity faces a serious challenge. Much of the Earth¿s biodiversity -- the richness of its many species of flora and fauna -- is at risk. The areas that are home to the greatest numbers of at-risk species are also home to large numbers of rural people, many of them desperately poor. Local agriculture must expand to meet rapidly growing world demand. Yet agriculture, as currently practiced, is a chief cause of the destruction of valuable habitats, pushing species towards extinction. If agricultural policies are not changed, large numbers of endangered species of all types will be lost. This report explores strategies for ways in which ecoagriculture can meet this challenge and help feed the world¿s people and protect biodiversity. Illustrations.

Resentment and the Right: French Intellectual Identity Reimagined, 1898-2000 examines a century-long struggle between cultural spokesmen on the extreme right and left to dominate and define the concept of “the intellectual.” This struggle began with the introduction of the “intellectual” during the Dreyfus Affair of 1898 and continues even today among the intellectuals of the Nouvelle Droite. This struggle to monopolize the public perception of intellectual identity, and the status of moral and political guide the title conferred, consumed the intellectual leaders of the extreme right and left and saturated their engagement in political affairs. Because the left was the first to claim the title of intellectual in 1898, they defined the concept according to their own values and experiences. Hereafter, when intellectuals of the extreme right felt called to engage in public affairs, they portrayed their struggle for recognition as one of an oppressed and ostracized minority against a hegemonic left. Their resentment of this perceived repression became integral to their linguistic tropes, professional trajectories, cultural practices, and their self-conceptualization as intellectuals. The book is organized around the argument that at each perceived national crisis throughout the century, when intellectuals felt called to engage, the right-wing struggle to define true intellectual identity for the public followed a similar cycle: self-identification as intellectuals, perception of exclusion by the intellectual left, resentment of this ostracism and development of linguistic tropes of left-wing hegemony and right-wing repression, differentiation, revaluation, and reappropriation of cultural values, self-imposed segregation of social networks and professional trajectories, internalization and revaluation of their perceived role as intellectual pariahs, and eventual isolation, alienation, and radicalization from the mainstream intellectual and political world. All together this has resulted in a very different experience of intellectual life and a distinctive understanding of what it means to be an intellectual over the century.

A powerful critique of urban development in greater Johannesburg since the end of apartheid in 1994.

This book is a pioneering investigation of the tourism practices in the world's other, cold water, islands. Located in extreme latitudes and subject to extreme weather conditions, these islands have been developing their tourism appeal in manners that appear sustainable. They present themselves in images that speak to the pristine, unique and superlative aspects of their natural environment, history and culture. Limited seasonality, difficulty of access, restricted infrastructure, harsh climates and water too cold to swim in, are integral features of the tourism industry, often welcomed as appropriate filters to the slide to the mass market. The collection contains 13 island case studies. A set of seven hail from Northern latitudes: Baffin (Nunavut, Canada), Banks (Northwest Territories, Canada), Greenland/ Kaalaalit Nunaat, Iceland, Luleå (Sweden), Nunivak (Alaska), Solovetsky (Russia) and Svalbard (Norway). A second set of four cover the Southerly islands of Chatham (New Zealand), Falklands, Macquarie (Australia) and Stewart (New Zealand). Two other chapters discuss islands from the particular vantage points of cruise ship tourism, one for the Arctic region and one for the Antarctic. Additionally, five conceptual chapters provide insights into key tourism management issues, as they apply to cold water island experiences:(a) human resources; (b) environment; (c) promotion; (d) seasonality; and (e) access.

In this time of unwillingness, the right kinds of global solutions are needed now more than ever. Climate change is here and intensifying. Anxieties over economic globalization grip many in the fear of change. While these fearful have turned inward into unwillingness, the world's willing are working harder than ever for international and other cooperative solutions. James Bacchus explains why most of the solutions we need must be found in local and regional partnerships of the willing that can be scaled up and linked up worldwide. This can only be achieved within new and enhanced enabling frameworks of global and other international rules that are upheld through the international rule of law. To succeed, these rules and frameworks must for the first time see and treat economy and environment as one. The Willing World explains how best we can build the right legal structure to attain our global goals - and summon and inspire the willingness needed to do it.