Desert Oracle

Desert Oracle
Author: Ken Layne
Publisher: MCD
Total Pages: 193
Release: 2020-12-08
Genre: Nature
ISBN: 0374722382

The cult-y pocket-size field guide to the strange and intriguing secrets of the Mojave—its myths and legends, outcasts and oddballs, flora, fauna, and UFOs—becomes the definitive, oracular book of the desert For the past five years, Desert Oracle has existed as a quasi-mythical, quarterly periodical available to the very determined only by subscription or at the odd desert-town gas station or the occasional hipster boutique, its canary-yellow-covered, forty-four-page issues handed from one curious desert zealot to the next, word spreading faster than the printers could keep up with. It became a radio show, a podcast, a live performance. Now, for the first time—and including both classic and new, never-before-seen revelations—Desert Oracle has been bound between two hard covers and is available to you. Straight out of Joshua Tree, California, Desert Oracle is “The Voice of the Desert”: a field guide to the strange tales, singing sand dunes, sagebrush trails, artists and aliens, authors and oddballs, ghost towns and modern legends, musicians and mystics, scorpions and saguaros, out there in the sand. Desert Oracle is your companion at a roadside diner, around a campfire, in your tent or cabin (or high-rise apartment or suburban living room) as the wind and the coyotes howl outside at night. From journal entries of long-deceased adventurers to stray railroad ad copy, and musings on everything from desert flora, rumored cryptid sightings, and other paranormal phenomena, Ken Layne's Desert Oracle collects the weird and the wonderful of the American Southwest into a single, essential volume.

Fundamentals of Microgrids

Fundamentals of Microgrids
Author: Stephen A. Roosa
Publisher: CRC Press
Total Pages: 231
Release: 2020-09-03
Genre: Technology & Engineering
ISBN: 1000168654

Microgrids provide opportunities to develop new electrical networks targeted for the needs of communities. The fourth industrial revolution is associated with the global trend toward decentralizing energy grids. Within this context, microgrids are seen as a solution to how renewable electricity can be supplied to local areas. The Fundamentals of Microgrids: Development and Implementation provides an in-depth examination of microgrid energy sources, applications, technologies, and policies. This book considers the fundamental configurations and applications for microgrids and examines their use as a means of meeting international sustainability goals. It focuses on questions and issues associated with microgrid topologies, development, implementation and regulatory issues. Distributed energy resources are defined, stand-a-lone generation systems are described and examples of typical microgrid configurations are provided. The key components of developing a business model for microgrid development are also considered. Features: Describes what microgrids are and details the basics of how they work while considering benefits of microgrids and their disadvantages. Provides answers to the fundamental questions energy managers and other professionals want to know about the basics of microgrids. Details the applications for microgrids and demystifies the types of microgrid architectures that are successful. Includes real-world examples of functioning microgrids which provide models for the development of microgrids in the future. Discusses the key considerations that must be addressed to develop a business case for microgrid development.

The Green New Deal and the Future of Work

The Green New Deal and the Future of Work
Author: Craig Calhoun
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Total Pages: 237
Release: 2022-08-30
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0231556063

Catastrophic climate change overshadows the present and the future. Wrenching economic transformations have devastated workers and hollowed out communities. However, those fighting for jobs and those fighting for the planet have often been at odds. Does the world face two separate crises, environmental and economic? The promise of the Green New Deal is to tackle the threat of climate change through the empowerment of working people and the strengthening of democracy. In this view, the crisis of nature and the crisis of work must be addressed together—or they will not be addressed at all. This book brings together leading experts to explore the possibilities of the Green New Deal, emphasizing the future of work. Together, they examine transformations that are already underway and put forth bold new proposals that can provide jobs while reducing carbon consumption—building a world that is sustainable both economically and ecologically. Contributors also debate urgent questions: What is the value of a federal jobs program, or even a jobs guarantee? How do we alleviate the miseries and precarity of work? In key economic sectors, including energy, transportation, housing, agriculture, and care work, what kind of work is needed today? How does the New Deal provide guidance in addressing these questions, and how can a Green New Deal revive democracy? Above all, this book shows, the Green New Deal offers hope for a better tomorrow—but only if it accounts for work’s past transformations and shapes its future.

Like Wildfire

Like Wildfire
Author: Sean Patrick O'Rourke
Publisher: Univ of South Carolina Press
Total Pages: 401
Release: 2020-06-02
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 1643360833

The sit-ins of the American civil rights movement were extraordinary acts of dissent in an age marked by protest. By sitting in at "whites only" lunch counters, libraries, beaches, swimming pools, skating rinks, and churches, young African Americans and their allies put their lives on the line, fully aware that their actions would almost inevitably incite hateful, violent responses from entrenched and increasingly desperate white segregationists. And yet they did so in great numbers: most estimates suggest that in 1960 alone more than seventy thousand young people participated in sit-ins across the American South and more than three thousand were arrested. The simplicity and purity of the act of sitting in, coupled with the dignity and grace exhibited by participants, lent to the sit-in movement's sanctity and peaceful power. In Like Wildfire, editors Sean Patrick O'Rourke and Lesli K. Pace seek to clarify and analyze the power of civil rights sit-ins as rhetorical acts—persuasive campaigns designed to alter perceptions of apartheid social structures and to change the attitudes, laws, and policies that supported those structures. These cohesive essays from leading scholars offer a new appraisal of the origins, growth, and legacy of the sit-ins, which has gone largely ignored in scholarly literature. The authors examine different forms of sitting-in and the evolution of the rhetorical dynamics of sit-in protests, detailing the organizational strategies they employed and connecting them to later protests. By focusing on the persuasive power of demanding space, the contributors articulate the ways in which the protestors' battle for basic civil rights shaped social practices, laws, and the national dialogue. O'Rourke and Pace maintain that the legacies of the civil rights sit-ins have been many, complicated, and at times undervalued.

At Home on an Unruly Planet

At Home on an Unruly Planet
Author: Madeline Ostrander
Publisher: Henry Holt and Company
Total Pages: 271
Release: 2022-08-02
Genre: Science
ISBN: 125062052X

One of Kirkus Reviews' 100 Best Nonfiction Books of 2022 A gold Nautilus Book Award winner, Ecology & Environment From rural Alaska to coastal Florida, a vivid account of Americans working to protect the places they call home in an era of climate crisis How do we find a sense of home and rootedness in a time of unprecedented upheaval? What happens when the seasons and rhythms in which we have built our lives go off-kilter? Once a distant forecast, climate change is now reaching into the familiar, threatening our basic safety and forcing us to reexamine who we are and how we live. In At Home on an Unruly Planet, science journalist Madeline Ostrander reflects on this crisis not as an abstract scientific or political problem but as a palpable force that is now affecting all of us at home. She offers vivid accounts of people fighting to protect places they love from increasingly dangerous circumstances. A firefighter works to rebuild her town after catastrophic western wildfires. A Florida preservationist strives to protect one of North America's most historic cities from rising seas. An urban farmer struggles to transform a California city plagued by fossil fuel disasters. An Alaskan community heads for higher ground as its land erodes. Ostrander pairs deeply reported stories of hard-won optimism with lyrical essays on the strengths we need in an era of crisis. The book is required reading for anyone who wants to make a home in the twenty-first century.

Grazing in Future Multi-scapes: From Thoughtscapes to Landscapes, Creating Health from the Ground Up

Grazing in Future Multi-scapes: From Thoughtscapes to Landscapes, Creating Health from the Ground Up
Author: Pablo Gregorini
Publisher: Frontiers Media SA
Total Pages: 649
Release: 2022-09-27
Genre: Technology & Engineering
ISBN: 288976463X

This Research Topic is hosted in partnership with the "Grazing in Future Multi-Scapes" international workshop. The workshop will be held online, 30th May - 5th June 2021. Throughout different landscapes of the world, “grazing” herbivores fulfill essential roles in ecology, agriculture, economies and cultures including: families, farms, and communities. Not only do livestock provide food and wealth, they also deliver ecosystem services through the roles they play in environmental composition, structure and dynamics. Grazing, as a descriptive adjective, locates herbivores within a spatial and temporal pastoral context where they naturally graze or are grazed by farmers, ranchers, shepherds etc. In many cases, however, pastoralism with the single objective of maximizing animal production and/or profit has transformed landscapes, diminishing biodiversity, reducing water and air quality, accelerating loss of soil and plant biomass, and displacing indigenous animals and people. These degenerative landscape transformations have jeopardized present and future ecosystem and societal services, breaking the natural integration of land, water, air, health, society and culture. Land-users, policy makers and societies are calling for alternative approaches to pastoral systems; a call for diversified-adaptive and integrative agro-ecological and food-pastoral-systems designs that operate across multiple scales and ‘scapes’ (e.g. thought-, social-, land-, food-, health-, wild-scapes), simultaneously. There needs to be a paradigm shift in pastoral production systems and how grazing herbivores are managed –grazed- within them, derived initially from a change in perception of how they provide wealth. The thoughtscapes will include paradigm shifts where grazers move away from the actual archetype of pastoralism, future landscapes are re-imagined, and regenerative and sustainable management paradigms are put in place to achieve these visions. From this will come a change in collective thinking of how communities and cultures (socialscapes) perceive their relationships with pastoral lands. The landscapes are the biotic and abiotic four-dimensional domains or environments in need of nurture. Landscapes are the tables where humans and herbivores gain their nourishment, i.e. foodscapes. Foodscapes and dietary perceptions, dictate actions and reactions that are changing as developed countries grapple with diseases related to obesity, and people starve in developing countries. Societies are demanding healthscapes and nutraceutical foodscapes, and paradoxically, some are moving away from animal products. While indigenous species of animals, including humans (wildscapes), have been displaced from many of their lands by monotonic pastoralism, multifunctional pastoral systems can be designed in view of dynamic multi-scapes of the future. The purpose of this Research Topic is to influence future mental and practical models of pastoralism in continually evolving multi-scapes. We seek a collection of papers that will cultivate such a shift in thinking towards future models of sustainable multipurpose pastoralism. The contributions will be synthesized to establish how multifunctional pastoral systems can be re-imagined and then designed in view of the integrative dynamics of sustainable future multi-scapes.

Backpacker

Backpacker
Author:
Publisher:
Total Pages: 140
Release: 2007-09
Genre:
ISBN:

Backpacker brings the outdoors straight to the reader's doorstep, inspiring and enabling them to go more places and enjoy nature more often. The authority on active adventure, Backpacker is the world's first GPS-enabled magazine, and the only magazine whose editors personally test the hiking trails, camping gear, and survival tips they publish. Backpacker's Editors' Choice Awards, an industry honor recognizing design, feature and product innovation, has become the gold standard against which all other outdoor-industry awards are measured.

A Touch of Jen

A Touch of Jen
Author: Beth Morgan
Publisher: Little, Brown
Total Pages: 290
Release: 2021-07-13
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0316704253

A young couple's toxic Instagram crush spins out of control and unleashes a sinister creature in this twisted, viciously funny, "bananas good" story (Carmen Maria Machado). "Um, holy shit...This novel will be the most fun you'll have this summer." —Emily Temple, Literary Hub Remy and Alicia, a couple of insecure service workers, are not particularly happy together. But they are bound by a shared obsession with Jen, a beautiful former co-worker of Remy’s who now seems to be following her bliss as a globe-trotting jewelry designer. In and outside the bedroom, Remy and Alicia's entire relationship revolves around fantasies of Jen, whose every Instagram caption, outfit, and new age mantra they know by heart. Imagine their confused excitement when they run into Jen, in the flesh, and she invites them on a surfing trip to the Hamptons with her wealthy boyfriend and their group. Once there, Remy and Alicia try (a little too hard) to fit into Jen’s exalted social circle, but violent desire and class resentment bubble beneath the surface of this beachside paradise, threatening to erupt. As small disturbances escalate into outright horror, we find ourselves tumbling with Remy and Alicia into an uncanny alternate reality, one shaped by their most unspeakable, deviant, and intoxicating fantasies. Is this what “self-actualization” looks like? Part millennial social comedy, part psychedelic horror, and all wildly entertaining, A Touch of Jen is a sly, unflinching examination of the hidden drives that lurk just outside the frame of our carefully curated selves.

Picture Ecology

Picture Ecology
Author: Alan C. Braddock
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 304
Release: 2021-10-26
Genre: ART
ISBN: 0691236011

Seeking a broad reexamination of visual culture through the lenses of ecocriticism, environmental justice, and animal studies, this compendium offers a diverse range of art-historical criticism formulated within an ecological context. Picture Ecology brings together scholars whose contributions extend chronologically and geographically from 11th-century Chinese painting to contemporary photography of California wildfires. The book's 17 interdisciplinary essays provide a dynamic, cross-cultural approach to an increasingly vital area of study, emphasizing the environmental dimensions inherent in the content and materials of aesthetic objects. Picture Ecology provides valuable new approaches for considering works of art, in ways that are timely, intellectually stimulating, and universally significant.