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Our Plundered Planet
''Our Plundered Planet'' is a book published in 1948 by Fairfield Osborn about environmental destruction by humankind. With a focus on soil, the book is a critique of humankind's poor stewardship of Earth. It typifies the earliest apocalyptic environmental literature, in which human beings are seen as destroyers of the natural world. ''Our Plundered Planet'', along with William Vogt's ''Road to Survival'', also published in 1948, launched a Malthusian revival in the post-WWII era, and would inspire Anne Howland Ehrlich and her colleague and husband Paul R. Ehrlich, authors of ''The Population Bomb'', ''The Dominant Animal'' and more than 30 other books on overpopulation and ecology. Influences In writing this book, Osborn was influenced by Guy I. Burch and Elmer Pendell's overpopulation tract ''Population Roads to Peace or War'' (1945) and Paul Sears' analysis of dust bowls in ''Deserts on the March'' (1935). He had also been influenced by various "New Deal" initiatives in the ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Little, Brown And Company
Little, Brown and Company is an American publishing company founded in 1837 by Charles Coffin Little and James Brown in Boston. For close to two centuries it has published fiction and nonfiction by American authors. Early lists featured Emily Dickinson's poetry and ''Bartlett's Familiar Quotations''. Since 2006 Little, Brown and Company is a division of the Hachette Book Group. 19th century Little, Brown and Company had its roots in the book selling trade. It was founded in 1837 in Boston by Charles Little and James Brown. They formed the partnership "for the purpose of Publishing, Importing, and Selling Books". It can trace its roots before that to 1784 to a bookshop owned by Ebenezer Battelle on Marlborough Street. They published works of Benjamin Franklin and George Washington and they were specialized in legal publishing and importing titles. For many years, it was the most extensive law publisher in the United States, and also the largest importer of standard English law a ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Ecology
Ecology () is the study of the relationships between living organisms, including humans, and their physical environment. Ecology considers organisms at the individual, population, community, ecosystem, and biosphere level. Ecology overlaps with the closely related sciences of biogeography, evolutionary biology, genetics, ethology, and natural history. Ecology is a branch of biology, and it is not synonymous with environmentalism. Among other things, ecology is the study of: * The abundance, biomass, and distribution of organisms in the context of the environment * Life processes, antifragility, interactions, and adaptations * The movement of materials and energy through living communities * The successional development of ecosystems * Cooperation, competition, and predation within and between species * Patterns of biodiversity and its effect on ecosystem processes Ecology has practical applications in conservation biology, wetland management, natural resource managemen ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
1948 Non-fiction Books
Events January * January 1 ** The General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) is inaugurated. ** The Constitution of New Jersey (later subject to amendment) goes into effect. ** The railways of Britain are nationalized, to form British Railways. * January 4 – Burma gains its independence from the United Kingdom, becoming an independent republic, named the ''Union of Burma'', with Sao Shwe Thaik as its first President, and U Nu its first Prime Minister. * January 5 ** Warner Brothers shows the first color newsreel (''Tournament of Roses Parade'' and the ''Rose Bowl Game''). ** The first Kinsey Reports, Kinsey Report, ''Sexual Behavior in the Human Male'', is published in the United States. * January 7 – Mantell UFO incident: Kentucky Air National Guard pilot Thomas Mantell crashes while in pursuit of an unidentified flying object. * January 12 – Mahatma Gandhi begins his fast-unto-death in Delhi, to stop communal violence during the Partition of India. * ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Environmental Non-fiction Books
A biophysical environment is a biotic and abiotic surrounding of an organism or population, and consequently includes the factors that have an influence in their survival, development, and evolution. A biophysical environment can vary in scale from microscopic to global in extent. It can also be subdivided according to its attributes. Examples include the marine environment, the atmospheric environment and the terrestrial environment. The number of biophysical environments is countless, given that each living organism has its own environment. The term ''environment'' can refer to a singular global environment in relation to humanity, or a local biophysical environment, e.g. the UK's Environment Agency. Life-environment interaction All life that has survived must have adapted to the conditions of its environment. Temperature, light, humidity, soil nutrients, etc., all influence the species within an environment. However, life in turn modifies, in various forms, its conditions. S ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Faber And Faber
Faber and Faber Limited, usually abbreviated to Faber, is an independent publishing house in London. Published authors and poets include T. S. Eliot (an early Faber editor and director), W. H. Auden, Margaret Storey, William Golding, Samuel Beckett, Philip Larkin, Ted Hughes, Seamus Heaney, Paul Muldoon, Milan Kundera, and Kazuo Ishiguro. Founded in 1929, in 2006 the company was named the KPMG Publisher of the Year. Faber and Faber Inc., formerly the American branch of the London company, was sold in 1998 to the Holtzbrinck company Farrar, Straus and Giroux (FSG). Faber and Faber ended the partnership with FSG in 2015 and began distributing its books directly in the United States. History Faber and Faber began as a firm in 1929, but originates in the Scientific Press, owned by Sir Maurice and Lady Gwyer. The Scientific Press derived much of its income from the weekly magazine ''The Nursing Mirror.'' The Gwyers' desire to expand into trade publishing led them to Geoffrey Fab ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Eugenics
Eugenics ( ; ) is a fringe set of beliefs and practices that aim to improve the genetic quality of a human population. Historically, eugenicists have attempted to alter human gene pools by excluding people and groups judged to be inferior or promoting those judged to be superior. In recent years, the term has seen a revival in bioethical discussions on the usage of new technologies such as CRISPR and genetic screening, with a heated debate on whether these technologies should be called eugenics or not. The concept predates the term; Plato suggested applying the principles of selective breeding to humans around 400 BC. Early advocates of eugenics in the 19th century regarded it as a way of improving groups of people. In contemporary usage, the term ''eugenics'' is closely associated with scientific racism. Modern bioethicists who advocate new eugenics characterize it as a way of enhancing individual traits, regardless of group membership. While eugenic principles have be ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Henry Fairfield Osborn
Henry Fairfield Osborn, Sr. (August 8, 1857 – November 6, 1935) was an American paleontologist, geologist and eugenics advocate. He was the president of the American Museum of Natural History for 25 years and a cofounder of the American Eugenics Society. Early life and education Family Henry Fairfield Osborn was born in Fairfield, Connecticut on August 8, 1857 in a family of distinction. He was the eldest son of shipping magnate and railroad tycoon William Henry Osborn and Virginia Reed ( née Sturges) Osborn. His maternal grandparents were Jonathan Sturges, a prominent New York businessman and arts patron who was a direct descendant of Jonathan Sturges, a U.S. Representative from Connecticut, and Mary Pemberton Cady, a direct descendant of prominent educator Ebenezer Pemberton. His maternal aunt Amelia Sturges, was the first wife of J. P. Morgan, but died of tuberculosis soon after their wedding. His younger brother was William Church Osborn, who served as presiden ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Dust Bowl
The Dust Bowl was a period of severe dust storms that greatly damaged the ecology and agriculture of the American and Canadian prairies during the 1930s. The phenomenon was caused by a combination of both natural factors (severe drought) and manmade factors (a failure to apply dryland farming methods to prevent aeolian processes, wind erosion, most notably the destruction of the natural topsoil by settlers in the region). The drought came in three waves: 1934–35 North American drought, 1934, 1936, and 1939–1940, but some regions of the High Plains (United States), High Plains experienced drought conditions for as many as eight years. The Dust Bowl has been the subject of many cultural works, notably the novel ''The Grapes of Wrath'' (1939) by John Steinbeck, the folk music of Woody Guthrie, and photographs depicting the conditions of migrants by Dorothea Lange, particularly the ''Migrant Mother'', taken in 1936. Geographic characteristics and early history With insuffic ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Civilian Conservation Corps
The Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) was a voluntary government work relief program that ran from 1933 to 1942 in the United States for unemployed, unmarried men ages 18–25 and eventually expanded to ages 17–28. The CCC was a major part of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal that supplied manual labor jobs related to the conservation and development of natural resources in rural lands owned by federal, state, and local governments. The CCC was designed to supply jobs for young men and to relieve families who had difficulty finding jobs during the Great Depression in the United States Robert Fechner was the first director of this agency, succeeded by James McEntee following Fechner's death. The largest enrollment at any one time was 300,000. Through the course of its nine years in operation, three million young men took part in the CCC, which provided them with shelter, clothing, and food, together with a wage of $30 (equivalent to $1000 in 2021) per month ($25 of ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Tennessee Valley Authority
The Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) is a federally owned electric utility corporation in the United States. TVA's service area covers all of Tennessee, portions of Alabama, Mississippi, and Kentucky, and small areas of Georgia, North Carolina, and Virginia. While owned by the federal government, TVA receives no taxpayer funding and operates similarly to a private for-profit company. It is headquartered in Knoxville, Tennessee, and is the sixth largest power supplier and largest public utility in the country. The TVA was created by Congress in 1933 as part of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal. Its initial purpose was to provide navigation, flood control, electricity generation, fertilizer manufacturing, regional planning, and economic development to the Tennessee Valley, a region that had suffered from lack of infrastructure and poverty during the Great Depression, relative to the rest of the nation. TVA was envisioned both as a power supplier and a regional economi ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
New Deal
The New Deal was a series of programs, public work projects, financial reforms, and regulations enacted by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in the United States between 1933 and 1939. Major federal programs agencies included the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), the Works Progress Administration (WPA), the Civil Works Administration (CWA), the Farm Security Administration (FSA), the National Industrial Recovery Act of 1933 (NIRA) and the Social Security Administration (SSA). They provided support for farmers, the unemployed, youth, and the elderly. The New Deal included new constraints and safeguards on the banking industry and efforts to re-inflate the economy after prices had fallen sharply. New Deal programs included both laws passed by Congress as well as presidential executive orders during the first term of the presidency of Franklin D. Roosevelt. The programs focused on what historians refer to as the "3 R's": relief for the unemployed and for the poor, recovery of ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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