The World Atlas of Desertification summarises the state of scientific knowledge on the drylands of the globe. Representing in graphic form the current stage of our understanding of desertification, as well as its extent and possible solutions, it contains an extraordinary amount of information of value to students and experts alike. The Atlas clearly shows that desertification is one of the world's most pressing environmental problems, and that it is a truly global issue. Since the publication of the first edition in 1992, over 100 countries have ratified the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification. This 2nd edition reflects major advances in our understanding of desertification over the past few years and has been thoroughly revised and expanded to almost twice its original size. Because combating desertification involves all aspects of environmental issues, this edition covers a broader range of topics, including concerns surrounding poverty, biodiversity, climate change and the availability of water. Social and economic conditions also have a major impact on the progress and control of desertification and this edition contains the latest information on population movements which result from, and lead to desertification. Desertification directly affects the livelihoods of more than one billion people who are directly dependent on the land for their survival. Using the latest updated digitised maps of desertification and fully referenced throughout, this Atlas is essential reading for everyone concerned with the drylands and their people.

Land degradation from soil erosion has been considered by many to be a problem of significant proportion, affecting some 30-50% of the earth's land surface. At the time of the first publication of this book in 1993, estimates indicated that 10-15 million hectares of land were being lost each year through erosion and salinisation from irrigation and that at such a rate of loss, topsoil reserves on most sloping lands would be depleted within two hundred years. Since humankind's dependency on the land for food is almost total, soil erosion represents a real threat to the security of our food supply. The need for the immediate conservation of the world's soil resources is therefore clear. As part of the response to this need, the International Union for the Conservation of Nature's Commission on Ecology convened a special working group to consider the problem of world soil erosion and to propose practical solutions for soil conservation. This important book presents the outcome of their work.

Desertification includes land degradation due to both climatic and anthropogenic causes, where land includes water, soil, and the biosphere. This book presents the most recent findings from the European Community's MEDALUS project, which was formed to understand and manage semi-arid environments that are undergoing great change. * Covers climate and land use processes and responses in the Mediterranean * First book to provide guidelines for the management of land degradation in Mediterranean environments * Based on first-hand experience of the problems by those responsible for solving them

This book is the first major ecocritical study of the relationship between British Romanticism and climate change. It analyses a wide range of texts – by authors including Lord Byron, William Cobbett, Sir Stamford Raffles, Mary Shelley, and Percy Shelley – in relation to the global crisis produced by the eruption of Mount Tambora in 1815. By connecting these texts to current debates in the environmental humanities, it reveals the value of a historicized approach to the Anthropocene. British Romanticism, Climate Change, and the Anthropocene examines how Romantic texts affirm the human capacity to shape and make sense of a world with which we are profoundly entangled and at the same time represent our humiliation by powerful elemental forces that we do not fully comprehend. It will appeal not only to scholars of British Romanticism, but to anyone interested in the relationship between culture and climate change.

Alongside his monumental Notebooks and the poems collected in Canti, which make him one of Italy's greatest and best-loved poets, Giacomo Leopardi penned a number of fictional pieces, mostly in the form of gently humorous dialogues, in which he dealt with philosophical ideas and many of the metaphysical questions that preoccupied his restless spirit.First published in 1827 and here presented in a new translation by J.G. Nichols along with Thoughts, Leopardi's own selected pearls of wisdom and gems of social observation, this volume will enchant both those who are familiar with and those who are new to the works of Italy's last great polymath.

The concept of fabulation makes a late appearance in Deleuze's career and in only limited detail, but by tracing its connections to other concepts and situating them within Deleuze's general aesthetics, Ronald Bogue develops a theory of fabulation which he proposes as the guiding principle of a Deleuzian approach to literary narrative.Fabulation, he argues, entails becoming-other, experimenting on the real, legending, and inventing a people to come, as well as an understanding of time informed by Deleuze's Chronos/Aion distinction and his theory of the three passive syntheses of time. In close readings of contemporary novels by Zakes Mda, Arundhati Roy, Roberto Bolano, Assia Djebar and Richard Flanagan, he demonstrates the usefulness of fabulation as a critical tool, while exploring the problematic relationship between history and story-telling which all five novelists adopt as a central thematic concern.This is an original and exciting project by a highly respected specialist in the field.

Antonio Negri, one of Italy's most influential and controversial contemporary philosophers, offers in this book a radical new interpretation of the nineteenth-century Italian poet Giacomo Leopardi. For Negri, Leopardi is not the bitter, idealistic individualist of conventional literary history, but rather a profoundly materialist thinker who sees human solidarity as the only possible solution to the catastrophes of history and politics. Negri traces Leopardi's resistance to the transcendental idealism of Kant and Hegel, with its emphasis on reason's power to resolve real antagonisms into abstract syntheses, and his gradual development of a sophisticated poetic materialism focused on the constructive power of the imagination and its "true illusions." Like Nietzsche (who admired him), Leopardi provides an alternative to modernity within modernity, expressing a force of rupture and recomposition—a uniquely Italian one—that is as relevant now as it was in the nineteenth century, and which connects to the theory of Empire as the political constitution of the present that Negri has elaborated in collaboration with Michael Hardt.