In 1997 the State of California Legislature created the Commission on Local Governance for the 21st Century to review current statutes &, where appropriate, recommend revisions to the laws that govern city, county, and special district boundary changes. Over a period of 16 months, the Commission held 25 days of public hearings, received over 100 recommendations, and had nearly 90,000 visits to the commission's website. Based upon this extensive input and deliberations on the information received, the Commission has issued this report, which concludes with a strategic plan for its implementation by the California Legislature. Illustrated.

How we produce and consume food has a bigger impact on Americans' well-being than any other human activity. The food industry is the largest sector of our economy; food touches everything from our health to the environment, climate change, economic inequality, and the federal budget. From the earliest developments of agriculture, a major goal has been to attain sufficient foods that provide the energy and the nutrients needed for a healthy, active life. Over time, food production, processing, marketing, and consumption have evolved and become highly complex. The challenges of improving the food system in the 21st century will require systemic approaches that take full account of social, economic, ecological, and evolutionary factors. Policy or business interventions involving a segment of the food system often have consequences beyond the original issue the intervention was meant to address. A Framework for Assessing Effects of the Food System develops an analytical framework for assessing effects associated with the ways in which food is grown, processed, distributed, marketed, retailed, and consumed in the United States. The framework will allow users to recognize effects across the full food system, consider all domains and dimensions of effects, account for systems dynamics and complexities, and choose appropriate methods for analysis. This report provides example applications of the framework based on complex questions that are currently under debate: consumption of a healthy and safe diet, food security, animal welfare, and preserving the environment and its resources. A Framework for Assessing Effects of the Food System describes the U.S. food system and provides a brief history of its evolution into the current system. This report identifies some of the real and potential implications of the current system in terms of its health, environmental, and socioeconomic effects along with a sense for the complexities of the system, potential metrics, and some of the data needs that are required to assess the effects. The overview of the food system and the framework described in this report will be an essential resource for decision makers, researchers, and others to examine the possible impacts of alternative policies or agricultural or food processing practices.

Provides a pan-African synthesis of community-based natural resource management (CBNRM), drawing on multiple authors and a wide range of documented experiences from Southern, Eastern, Western and Central Africa. This title discusses the degree to which CBNRM has met poverty alleviation, economic development and nature conservation objectives.

Steppes form one of the largest biomes. Drastic changes in steppe ecology, land use and livelihoods came with the emergence, and again with the collapse, of communist states. Excessive ploughing and vast influx of people into the steppe zone led to a strong decline in nomadic pastoralism in the Soviet Union and China and in severely degraded steppe ecosystems. In Mongolia nomadic pastoralism persisted, but steppes degraded because of strongly increased livestock loads. After the Soviet collapse steppes regenerated on huge tracts of fallow land. Presently, new, restorative steppe land management schemes are applied. On top of all these changes come strong effects of climate change in the northern part of the steppe zone. This book gives an up-to-date overview of changes in ecology, climate and use of the entire Eurasian steppe area and their effects on livelihoods of steppe people. It integrates knowledge that so far was available only in a spectrum of locally used languages.

For a principled refutation of the 9/11 propaganda myth in all its parts, Tarpley's work is indispensable. This new, fifth edition adds a significant new dimension. Tarpley's documentation of a comprehensive array of 9/11 drills may prove as revolutionary as the thesis of controlled demolition - perhaps even more so. Many people have been unable to see that 9/11 was a false flag. They may seem immune to physical facts like the free-fall speed of the towers, as they take refuge in a lack of engineering qualifications. No math skills are needed to grasp the more familiar, common-sense fact that an act that is rehearsed is also staged. Moreover, when we learn how drills are essential to conduit such operations, we can recognize many types of false flags, such as the London bombings, and not only building collapses. Finally, wider public awareness of the dangerous workings of drills could help prevent terror operations, by making them too difficult to carry out with impunity. The authoritative work on 9/11 and state-sponsored false-flag terrorism. 9/11 Synthetic Terror is the only book to present a working model for the event - a network of moles, patsies, paramilitary pros, privatized intelligence assets and corrupt media corporations. We see how this enormous provocation was successfully executed and exploited as war propaganda. This new, fifth edition reveals a whole new dimension of explosive facts for the first time: the enormous array of drills in which the US defense apparatus rehearsed every aspect of the 9/11 operation. Author Webster Tarpley presents the corpus of 9/11 research - such as the controlled demolition of the three WTC towers - from the perspective of a veteran intelligence expert and historian. The exploit is placed in the geopolitical context of oligarchy and imperialism - in the tradition of precedents such as the Gunpowder Plot, the USS Maine, the Strategy of Tension, and other historically decisive state-sponsored terror subterfuges.