On Extinction

On Extinction PDF Author: Melanie Challenger
Publisher: Catapult
ISBN: 1640094636
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 359

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Book Description
Realizing the link between her own estrangement from nature and the cultural shifts that led to a dramatic rise in extinctions, award–winning writer Melanie Challenger travels in search of the stories behind these losses. From an exploration of an abandoned mine in England to an Antarctic sea voyage to South Georgia's old whaling stations, from a sojourn in South America to a stay among an Inuit community in Canada, she uncovers species, cultures, and industries touched by extinction. Accompanying her on this journey are the thoughts of anthropologists, biologists, and philosophers who have come before her. Drawing on their words as well as firsthand witness and ancestral memory, Challenger traces the mindset that led to our destructiveness and proposes a path of redemption rooted in our emotional responses. This sobering yet illuminating book looks beyond natural devastation to examine "why" and "what's next."

On Extinction

On Extinction PDF Author: Melanie Challenger
Publisher: Catapult
ISBN: 1640094636
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 359

Get Book

Book Description
Realizing the link between her own estrangement from nature and the cultural shifts that led to a dramatic rise in extinctions, award–winning writer Melanie Challenger travels in search of the stories behind these losses. From an exploration of an abandoned mine in England to an Antarctic sea voyage to South Georgia's old whaling stations, from a sojourn in South America to a stay among an Inuit community in Canada, she uncovers species, cultures, and industries touched by extinction. Accompanying her on this journey are the thoughts of anthropologists, biologists, and philosophers who have come before her. Drawing on their words as well as firsthand witness and ancestral memory, Challenger traces the mindset that led to our destructiveness and proposes a path of redemption rooted in our emotional responses. This sobering yet illuminating book looks beyond natural devastation to examine "why" and "what's next."

Extinction

Extinction PDF Author: Ashley Dawson
Publisher: OR Books
ISBN: 1682190412
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 132

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Book Description
Some thousands of years ago, the world was home to an immense variety of large mammals. From wooly mammoths and saber-toothed tigers to giant ground sloths and armadillos the size of automobiles, these spectacular creatures roamed freely. Then human beings arrived. Devouring their way down the food chain as they spread across the planet, they began a process of voracious extinction that has continued to the present. Headlines today are made by the existential threat confronting remaining large animals such as rhinos and pandas. But the devastation summoned by humans extends to humbler realms of creatures including beetles, bats and butterflies. Researchers generally agree that the current extinction rate is nothing short of catastrophic. Currently the earth is losing about a hundred species every day. This relentless extinction, Ashley Dawson contends in a primer that combines vast scope with elegant precision, is the product of a global attack on the commons, the great trove of air, water, plants and creatures, as well as collectively created cultural forms such as language, that have been regarded traditionally as the inheritance of humanity as a whole. This attack has its genesis in the need for capital to expand relentlessly into all spheres of life. Extinction, Dawson argues, cannot be understood in isolation from a critique of our economic system. To achieve this we need to transgress the boundaries between science, environmentalism and radical politics. Extinction: A Radical History performs this task with both brio and brilliance.

The Quiet Extinction

The Quiet Extinction PDF Author: Kara Rogers
Publisher: University of Arizona Press
ISBN: 0816531064
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 248

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Book Description
The Quiet Extinction explores the reasons many of our native plants are disappearing, noting their significance to the continent's natural heritage. Kara Rogers captures the excitement of their discovery, the tragedy that has come to define their existence, and the remarkable efforts underway to save them.

Extinction

Extinction PDF Author: Douglas H. Erwin
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691165653
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 314

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Book Description
Some 250 million years ago, the earth suffered the greatest biological crisis in its history. Around 95 percent of all living species died out—a global catastrophe far greater than the dinosaurs' demise 185 million years later. How this happened remains a mystery. But there are many competing theories. Some blame huge volcanic eruptions that covered an area as large as the continental United States; others argue for sudden changes in ocean levels and chemistry, including burps of methane gas; and still others cite the impact of an extraterrestrial object, similar to what caused the dinosaurs' extinction. Extinction is a paleontological mystery story. Here, the world's foremost authority on the subject provides a fascinating overview of the evidence for and against a whole host of hypotheses concerning this cataclysmic event that unfolded at the end of the Permian. After setting the scene, Erwin introduces the suite of possible perpetrators and the types of evidence paleontologists seek. He then unveils the actual evidence--moving from China, where much of the best evidence is found; to a look at extinction in the oceans; to the extraordinary fossil animals of the Karoo Desert of South Africa. Erwin reviews the evidence for each of the hypotheses before presenting his own view of what happened. Although full recovery took tens of millions of years, this most massive of mass extinctions was a powerful creative force, setting the stage for the development of the world as we know it today. In a new preface, Douglas Erwin assesses developments in the field since the book's initial publication.

Extinction Horizon

Extinction Horizon PDF Author: Nicholas Sansbury Smith
Publisher: Orbit
ISBN: 0316557986
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 368

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Book Description
USA Today bestseller Nicholas Sansbury Smith's first book in his thrilling post-apocalyptic series about one man's mission to save the world. Master Sergeant Reed Beckham has led his Delta Force Team, codenamed Ghost, through every kind of hell imaginable and never lost a man. When a top secret Medical Corps research facility goes dark, Team Ghost is called in to face their deadliest enemy yet--a variant strain of Ebola that turns men into monsters. After barely escaping with his life, Beckham returns to Fort Bragg in the midst of a new type of war. As cities fall, Team Ghost is ordered to keep CDC virologist Dr. Kate Lovato alive long enough to find a cure. What she uncovers will change everything. Total extinction is just on the horizon, but will the cure be worse than the virus? Extinction is just on the horizon... Start reading the book that D. J. Molles said "delivers unrelenting unmerciful action" before it's too late! The Extinction Cycle: Book 1: Extinction HorizonBook 2: Extinction EdgeBook 3: Extinction AgeBook 4: Extinction EvolutionBook 5: Extinction EndBook 6: Extinction Aftermath Book 7: Extinction War

Extinction Studies

Extinction Studies PDF Author: Deborah Bird Rose
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231544545
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 233

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Book Description
Extinction Studies focuses on the entangled ecological and social dimensions of extinction, exploring the ways in which extinction catastrophically interrupts life-giving processes of time, death, and generations. The volume opens up important philosophical questions about our place in, and obligations to, a more-than-human world. Drawing on fieldwork, philosophy, literature, history, and a range of other perspectives, each of the chapters in this book tells a unique extinction story that explores what extinction is, what it means, why it matters—and to whom.

Flames of Extinction

Flames of Extinction PDF Author: John Pickrell
Publisher: Island Press
ISBN: 1642832022
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 298

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Book Description
Over Australia's 2019-20 Black Summer bushfire season, scientists estimate that more than three billion native animals were killed or displaced. Many species - koalas, the regent honeyeater, glossy black cockatoo, the platypus - are inching towards extinction at the hands of mega-blazes and the changing climate behind them. In Flames of Extinction, award-winning science writer John Pickrell investigates the effects of the 2019-2020 bushfires on Australian wildlife and ecosystems. Journeying across the firegrounds, Pickrell explores the stories of creatures that escaped the flames, the wildlife workers who rescued them, and the conservationists, land managers, Aboriginal rangers, ecologists and firefighters on the front line of the climate catastrophe. He also reveals the radical new conservation methods being trialled to save as many species as possible from the very precipice of extinction.

On Extinction

On Extinction PDF Author: Ben Ware
Publisher: Verso Books
ISBN: 1839760680
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 193

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Book Description
"This path-breaking book by one of the sharpest minds in contemporary philosophy will live on for a very long time." —Dany Nobus, author of Critique of Psychoanalytic Reason Philosophy at the end of the world On Extinction takes us on a breathtaking philosophical journey through desperate territory. As we face ‘the end of all things’, Ben Ware argues we must face our apocalyptic future without flinching. In fact, extinction is the very lens through which we should examine our current reality. Radical politics today should not be concerned with merely averting the worst but rather with beginning again at the end. To think about the future in this way is itself a form of liberation that might incubate the necessary radical solutions we need. Combining lessons from Kant, Hegel, Adorno, and Lacan, as well as drawing on popular culture and ecology, Ware recasts the most urgent issue of our times and resolves that we can only consider our collective end by treating it as a starting point.

Imagining Extinction

Imagining Extinction PDF Author: Ursula K. Heise
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022635816X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 299

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Book Description
As the extinction of species accelerates and more species become endangered, activists, filmmakers, writers, and artists have responded to bring this global crisis to the attention of the public. Until now, there has been no study of the frameworks that shape these narratives and images, or of the symbolic meanings that the death of species carries in different cultural communities. Ursula Heise makes the case that understanding how and why endangered species come to matter culturally is indispensable for any effective advocacy on their behalf. Heise begins by showing that the tools of conservation science and law need to be viewed as cultural artifacts: biodiversity databases and laws for the protection of threatened species use rhetorical and cultural resources that open up different approaches to the problem of understanding global wildlife. The second half of her book explores ways of envisioning alternative futures for biodiversity. The narrative of nature s decline or even imminent disappearance has been a successful rallying trope for those skeptical of modernization and ideologies of progress. But environmentalists nostalgia for the past and pessimistic outlook on the future have also alienated parts of the public. Heise tells the story of environmental activists, writers, and scientists who are creating new stories to guide the environmental imagination."

Animals, Plants and Afterimages

Animals, Plants and Afterimages PDF Author: Valérie Bienvenue
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 1800734263
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 460

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Book Description
The sixth mass extinction or Anthropocene extinction is one of the most pervasive issues of our time. Animals, Plants and Afterimages brings together leading scholars in the humanities and life sciences to explore how extinct species are represented in art and visual culture, with a special emphasis on museums. Engaging with celebrated cases of vanished species such as the quagga and the thylacine as well as less well-known examples of animals and plants, these essays explore how representations of recent and ancient extinctions help advance scientific understanding and speak to contemporary ecological and environmental concerns.