This Book Is Located Within The Contemporary Discourse Of Human Geography, Ecology ,And The Cultural Landscape. These Essays Amend Earlier Anthropocentric Perspectives On The Conquest Of Nature, By Placing People In Symbiosis With Their Environment. And, In Doing So, They Seek To Ensure A Secure Common Future For Both.

Deborah Sutton recounts the failed British attempt to settle, transform and govern the cooler uplands of South India. It is a fascinating story bringing together strands from agrarian, environmental, administrative and cultural history.

Landscapes and the Law is situated at the crossroads of environmental, colonial, and legal history. It examines the role of law in consolidating early colonial rule from the perspective of people’s access to nature in forests and hill tracts. This major interdisciplinary study is thus concerned with the social history of legal processes and the making of law, being as relevant today as it was when first published a decade ago. The book is focused equally on the multitude of colliding claims for access to land and resources, and the complex ways in which customary rights are redefined and codified for the purpose of securing and legitimizing colonial sovereign rule. Basing her archival and field work on the Nilgiri Hills in South India, Gunnel Cederlöf explores conflicting perceptions of nature and political visions that are projected onto landscapes and people. She traces debates on property and land rights, and how the empirical sciences merge with the legal claims justifying land acquisition. Popular resistance strategies to such exploitation are analysed, and a cross-cultural comparison made between early legal processes and social history in India, New Zealand, and North America.

This work is a large, powerfully illustrated interdisciplinary natural sciences volume, the first of its kind to examine the critically important nature of ecological paradox, through an abundance of lenses: the biological sciences, taxonomy, archaeology, geopolitical history, comparative ethics, literature, philosophy, the history of science, human geography, population ecology, epistemology, anthropology, demographics, and futurism. The ecological paradox suggests that the human biological–and from an insular perspective, successful–struggle to exist has come at the price of isolating H. sapiens from life-sustaining ecosystem services, and far too much of the biodiversity with which we find ourselves at crisis-level odds. It is a paradox dating back thousands of years, implicating millennia of human machinations that have been utterly ruinous to biological baselines. Those metrics are examined from numerous multidisciplinary approaches in this thoroughly original work, which aids readers, particularly natural history students, who aspire to grasp the far-reaching dimensions of the Anthropocene, as it affects every facet of human experience, past, present and future, and the rest of planetary sentience. With a Preface by Dr. Gerald Wayne Clough, former Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution and President Emeritus of the Georgia Institute of Technology. Foreword by Robert Gillespie, President of the non-profit, Population Communication.

This is a book about the physical processes in reacting complex molecules, particularly biomolecules. In the past decade scientists from different fields such as medicine, biology, chemistry and physics have collected a huge amount of data about the structure, dynamics and functioning of biomolecules. Great progress has been achieved in exploring the structure of complex molecules. However, there is still a lack of understanding of the dynamics and functioning of biological macromolecules. In particular this refers to enzymes, which are the basic molecular machines working in living systems. This book contributes to the exploration of the physical mechanisms of these processes, focusing on critical aspects such as the role of nonlinear excitations and of stochastic effects. An extensive range of original results has been obtained in the last few years by the authors, and these results are presented together with a comprehensive survey of the state of the art in the field.