Management Of Land & Natural Resources

Roland Ennos' The Wood Age is a love-letter to the world's most vital and yet most threatened material. It is the story of how wood has shaped our human experience from the earliest foragers to the modern four poster bed. 'A stunning book on the incalculable debt humanity owes wo...od...' John Carey, The Sunday Times
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People talk a lot about the problems with intensive farming. But the problem isn't the adjective. It's the noun. Around the world, farming has been wiping out vast habitats, depleting freshwater, polluting oceans, and accelerating global heating, while leaving millions undernouri...shed and unfed. Increasingly, there are signs that the system itself is beginning to flicker. But, as George Monbiot shows us in this brilliant, bracingly original new book, there is another way. Regenesis is an exhilarating journey into a new possible future for food, people and the planet. Drawing on the revelatory, rapidly advancing science of soil ecology, Monbiot shows how the hidden biological universe beneath our feet could transform what we eat and how we grow it. He travels to meet the people who are unlocking these methods, from the fruit and vegetable growers who cultivate pests as well as potatoes; through producers of perennial grains who are liberating their fields from ploughs; to the scientists pioneering new forms of protein and fat that can be cooked into rich golden pancakes and much, much more. We start to see how the tiniest life forms in the soil might help us save the living world, allowing us to produce abundant, cheap, healthy food while returning vast swathes of land to the wild. Here, for the first time, is a profoundly hopeful, appetising and exciting vision of food- of revolutionary cultivation and cuisine that could nourish us all and restore our world of wonders.
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A fascinating deep dive into the colonial roots of the global wine industry.Imperial Wine is a bold, rigorous history of Britain's surprising role in creating the wine industries of Australia, South Africa, and New Zealand. Here, historian Jennifer Regan-Lefebvre bridges the genr...es of global commodity history and imperial history, presenting provocative new research in an accessible narrative. This is the first book to argue that today's global wine industry exists as a result of settler colonialism and that imperialism was central, not incidental, to viticulture in the British colonies. Wineries were established almost immediately after the colonization of South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand as part of a civilizing mission: tidy vines, heavy with fruit, were symbolic of Britain's subordination of foreign lands. Economically and culturally, nineteenth-century settler winemakers saw the British market as paramount. However, British drinkers were apathetic towards what they pejoratively called "colonial wine." The tables only began to turn after the First World War, when colonial wines were marketed as cheap and patriotic and started to find their niche among middle- and working-class British drinkers. This trend, combined with social and cultural shifts after the Second World War, laid the foundation for the New World revolution in the 1980s, making Britain into a confirmed country of wine-drinkers and a massive market for New World wines. These New World producers may have only received critical acclaim in the late twentieth century, but Imperial Wine shows that they had spent centuries wooing, and indeed manufacturing, a British market for inexpensive colonial wines. This book is sure to satisfy any curious reader who savors the complex stories behind this commodity chain.
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"China is transforming our natural world at an alarming rate. It is the world's largest market for endangered wildlife, poached from India and Africa. It is the top importer of tropical timber, harvested illegally in Indonesia. In Brazil, farmers clear large swaths of the Amazon ...rainforest to meet Chinese demand for soybean oil and beef. In the U.S., toxic levels of mercury originating from Chinese power plants have polluted a third of American lakes and nearly a quarter of its rivers. Craig Simons' new book, "The devouring dragon", looks at how China, in its ascendance, has become the world's worst polluting superpower, creating a devastating environmental impact worldwide. Simons argues that China's most significant impacts over the twenty-first century will be not only on jobs, corporate profits and political alliances, but also on our natural world. "The devouring dragon" combines in-depth reporting with wide-ranging interviews, scientific research, and travel to some of the most beautiful places on earth. It amply demonstrates the urgency of the issue and also hope for the future. With the Obama administration placing China among its top three foreign policy priorities, Craig Simons argues eloquently for ways in which the United States and China can forge a new era of cooperation, support emerging environmental groups within China, and begin to ensure a sustainable future for the planet." --Publisher description.
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How will we eat a decade from now, or a century? Will we be eating meat?