The issue of biofuels has already been much debated, but the focus to date has largely been on Latin America and deforestation - this highly original work breaks fresh ground in looking at the African perspective. Most African governments see biofuels as having the potential to increase agricultural productivity and export incomes and thus strengthen their national economies, improving energy balances and rural employment. At the same time climate change may be addressed through reduction ...

Loved Goodbye Christopher Robin? Learn more about the real place that inspired the beloved stories.Delve into the home of the world’s most beloved bear! The Natural World of Winnie-the-Pooh explores the magical landscapes where Pooh, Christopher Robin, and their friends live and play. The Hundred Acre Wood—the setting for Winnie-the-Pooh’s adventures—was inspired by Ashdown Forest, a wildlife haven that spans more than 6,000 acres in southeast Eng...

The exploding global consumption of meat is implicated in momentous but greatly underappreciated problems, and industrial livestock production is the driving force behind soaring demand.Following his previous ground-breaking book The Global Food Economy, Tony Weis explains clearly why the growth and industrialization of livestock production is a central part of the accelerating biophysical contradictions of industrial capitalist agriculture.The Ecological Hoofprint provides...

People of European descent form the bulk of the population in most of the temperate zones of the world - North America, Australia and New Zealand. The military successes of European imperialism are easy to explain; in many cases they were a matter of firearms against spears. But, as Alfred Crosby maintains in this highly original and fascinating book, the Europeans' displacement and replacement of the native peoples in the temperate zones was more a matter of biology than of military conqu...

The Energy Evolution, the final volume in the revolutionary Eco-Technology series, contains radical environmentalist Viktor Schauberger's groundbreaking writings on methods for energy generation that harness the enormous potential of Nature. Nature produces energy by slow, cool, implosive means – by a centripetal inward motion, while our present culture uses explosive centrifugal (outwards) movement, which is wasteful and many times less powerful and effective. It also uses up the Earth's ...

Whilst the world's poor are clearly hit hardest by climate change impacts, so too do they hold many of the solutions for how best to cope with its impacts, and at times reduce greenhouse gas emissions to zero.In this wide-ranging book, Hannah Reid offers a rich compendium of real life scenarios and brings home the realities of how poor people are suffering from and coping with climate change impacts today.Drawing on case studies gathered by the UP in Smoke group - a powerfu...

This volume examines how far agribusiness corporations are responding to the opportunities and pressures resulting from emerging environmental awareness. In particular, in what ways are they changing their R & D and business practices in order to develop new environmentally oriented products, services and methods of production? And what can they change of their own volition, and where is external direction a necessary condition of environmentally friendly innovation? These questions are ex...

Beset with persistent problems of self-interest, corruption, ideological incoherence, and narrow electoral majorities, political parties are the weakest link in many democratic transitions around the world. A large and ever-growing number of U.S., European, and multilateral assistance programs seek to help parties become effective pro-democratic actors. But given the depth of the problems, is success possible? C onfronting the Weakest Link is a pathbreaking study of international ...

The local and global environmental impacts of transport are more apparent than ever before. Moving People provides an attention-grabbing introduction to the problems of transport and the development of sustainable alternatives, focusing on the often misunderstood issue of personal mobility, as opposed to freight. Re-assessing the value and importance of non-motorized transport the author raises questions about mobility in the face of climate change and energy security, particularly for the...

The mineral-rich mountains of Tibet so far have been largely untouched by China's growing economy. Nor has Beijing been able to settle Tibet with politically reliable peasant Chinese. That is all about to change as China's 12th Five-Year Plan, from 2011 to 2015, calls for massive investment in copper, gold, silver, chromium and lithium mining in the region, with devastating environmental and social outcomes.Despite great interest in Tibet worldwide, Spoiling Tibet is the first book...

Development’s current focus – poverty reduction and good governance – signals a turn away from the older neoliberal preoccupation with structural adjustment, privatization and downsizing the state. For some, the new emphases on empowering and securing the poor through basic service delivery, local partnership, decentralization and institution building constitute a decisive break with the past and a whole set of new development possibilities beyond neoliberalism.Taking a wider histo...

The dawn of the twenty-first century has been accompanied by an upsurge of anti-capitalist campaigning, challenging the very basis of the New World Economic order. Dramatic events such as the protests from Seattle to Genoa, have captured media headlines. But media headlines leave key questions unanswered, questions about the ultimate significance of the challenges posed by global social movements and the development of civil society, both South and North.This book sets out to explo...