Our world is made up of interconnected systems. When one element changes, the entire system is affected, and nature must absorb the changes or be thrown out of balance. People often cause these environmental chain reactions through negative actions such as dumping chemical waste. But sometimes they are caused by a good ideas. It might start with a plan to get rid of disease causing insects or to fertilize soil to grow more crops. An environmental chain reaction can affect an area as small as a pond in a city park or as big as the whole planet. Nature requires a delicate balance, and it often takes just one small action to have far reaching effects.

The central Gujarat region of western India is home to the entrepreneurial landowning Patel caste who have leveraged their rural dominance to become a powerful global diaspora of merchants, industrialists, and professionals. Investigating the Patels’ intriguing ascent, Vinay Gidwani analyzes its broad implications for the nature of labor and capital worldwide. With the Patels as his central case, Gidwani interrogates established concepts of value, development, and the relationship between capital and history. Capitalism, he argues, is not a frame of economic organization based on the smooth, consistent operation of a series of laws, but rather an assemblage of contingent and interrupted logics stitched together into the appearance of a deus ex machina. Following this line of thinking, Gidwani points to ways in which political economy might be freed of its lingering Eurocentrism, raises questions about the adequacy of postcolonial studies’ critique of Marx and capitalism, and opens the possibility of situating capitalism as a geographically uneven social formation in which different normative or value-creating practices are imperfectly sutured together in ways that can equally impair and enable profit and accumulation. Both theoretically astute and empirically informed, Capital, Interrupted unsettles encrusted understandings of staple concepts within the human sciences such as hegemony, governmentality, caste, and agency and, ultimately, does nothing less than rethink the very constitution of capitalism. Vinay Gidwani is associate professor of geography and global studies at the University of Minnesota.

Shakespeare / Nature sets new agendas for the study of nature in Shakespeare's work. Offering a rich exploration of the intersections between the human and non-human worlds, the chapters focus on the contested and persuasive language of nature, both as organic matter and cultural conditioning. Rooted in close textual analysis and historical acuity, this collection addresses Shakespeare's works through the many ways in which 'nature' performs, as a cultural category, a moral marker and a set of essential conditions through which the human may pass, as well as affect. Addressing the complex conditions of the play worlds, the chapters explore the assorted forms through which Shakespeare's nature makes sense of its narratives and supports, upholds or contests its story-telling. Over the course of the collection, the contributors examine plays including Macbeth, Julius Caesar, The Tempest, The Taming of the Shrew, Othello, Love's Labour's Lost, Hamlet, Timon of Athens and many more. They discuss them through the various lenses of philosophy, historicism, psychoanalysis, gender studies, cosmography, geography, sexuality, linguistics, environmentalism, feminism and robotics, to provide new and nuanced readings of the intersectional terms of both meaning and matter. Approaching 'nature' in all its multiplicity, this collection sets out to examine the divergent and complex ways in which the human and non-human worlds intersect and the development of a language of symbiosis that attempts to both control and create the terms of human authority. It offers an entirely new approach to the subject of nature, bringing together disparate methods that have previously been pursued independently to offer a shared investment in the intersections between the human and non-human worlds and how these discourses shape and condition the emotional, organic, cultural and psychological landscapes of Shakespeare's play worlds.

Published in 1999, this text offers a comprehensive treatment of the Philosophy of Religion. Its overall conclusions are that, though there is no reason to suppose there is a God, doing something that is not quite believing in god, who, as some mystics think - neither exists nor does not exist, may be valuable for some people.

Explores the human propensity for owning and having.

Fiction-FantasyI walk down the topsy turvy path in the forest I used to call my kingdom. It's dirty, but I love it. I spot many beautiful wildflowers and precious clovers. I've walked this path for many years. It's like a memory path. I keep walking and I finally see two small red hands. When mybrother and I were born, we painted our hands and printed them on a tree.It reminds us of all the picnics we've had under it. I keep walking and I spotour backyard. It doesn't have a fence, and willow trees are all around.Dandelions cover the ground like a layer of paint. I finally make my wayover to our little cottage. I arrive.