Strategies For Small Farmer Development


Book Description

This volume provides information on what can be done to increase the well-being and productivity of the small farmer in the Third World, focusing on design and implementation of rural development projects in the Gambia, Ghana, Kenya, Lesotho, Nigeria, Bolivia, Colombia, Mexico, Paraguay and Peru.







Staying Alive


Book Description

Inspired by women’s struggles for the protection of nature as a condition for human survival, award-winning environmentalist Vandana Shiva shows how ecological destruction and the marginalization of women are not inevitable, economically or scientifically. She argues that “maldevelopment”—the violation of the integrity of organic, interconnected, and interdependent systems that sets in motion a process of exploitation, inequality, and injustice—is dragging the world down a path of self-destruction, threatening survival itself. Shiva articulates how rural Indian women experience and perceive ecological destruction and its causes, and how they have conceived and initiated processes to arrest the destruction of nature and begin its regeneration. Focusing on science and development as patriarchal projects, Staying Alive is a powerfully relevant book that positions women not solely as survivors of the crisis, but as the source of crucial insights and visions to guide our struggle. From the Trade Paperback edition.




Staying Alive


Book Description

Vandana Shiva is one of the world's most prominent radical scientists . . . in Staying Alive she defines the links between ecological crises, colonialism, and the oppression of women. It is a scholarly and polemical plea for the rediscovery of the 'feminine principle' in human interaction with the natural world, not as a gender-based quality, rather an organizing principle, a way of seeing the world. --Guardian In this pioneering work, Vandana Shiva looks at the history of development and progress, stripping away the neutral language of science to reveal third-world development policy as the global twin of the industrial revolution. As Shiva makes clear, the way this development paradigm is being implemented--through violence against nature and women--threatens survival itself. She focuses on how rural Indian women experience and perceive the causes and effects of ecological destruction, and how they conceive of and initiate processes to stop the destruction and begin regeneration. As the world continues to follow destructive paths of development, Shiva's Staying Alive is a fiercely relevant book that positions women not as mere survivors of the crisis, but as the source of crucial insights and visions to guide our struggle. A world-renowned environmental leader and thinker, Vandana Shiva is the author of many books, including Stolen Harvest, Earth Democracy, and Soil Not Oil. She is the founder of Navdanya and a leader in the International Forum on Globalization (IFG) and the Slow Food movement.







Geoecology of Landscape Dynamics


Book Description

This book provides an overview of the ecological indicators of landscape dynamics in the context of geographical landscape integration. Landscape dynamics depicts every change that occurs in the physical, biological, and cognitive assets of a landscape. To understand and interpret the complex physical, biological, and cognitive phenomena of landscapes, it is necessary to operate conceptually and practically on a broad range of spatial and temporal scales. Rapid land use changes have become a concern to environmentalists and planners because of their impacts on the natural ecosystem, which further determines socioeconomic dynamics. In this regard, the book discusses case studies that share new insights into how landscape patterns and processes impact small creatures, and how small creatures in turn influence landscape structure and composition. In turn, the relevant aspects of land use and land cover dynamics are covered, and the multi-faceted relationship between the substrata and ecological community is highlighted. The book is unique in its focus on the application of spatial informatics such as automatic building extraction from high-resolution imagery; a soil resource inventory for meeting the challenges of land degradation; hydrological modeling; the temporal variation analysis of glacier area and the identification and mapping of glacial lakes; morphometric analysis of river basins; and the monitoring and modeling of urban sprawl, among other features.




Development Trajectories of River Basins


Book Description

The development of societies is shaped to a large extent by their resources base, notably water resources. Access to and control of water depend primarily on the available technology and engineering feats, such as river-diversion structures, canals, dams and dikes. As growing human pressure on water resources brings actual water use closer to potential ceilings, supply-augmentation options get scarcer, and societies, therefore, usually respond by adopting conservation measures and by reallocating water towards more beneficial uses.




Grassroots Innovation


Book Description

A moral dilemma gripped Professor Gupta when he was invited by the Bangladeshi government to help restructure their agricultural sector in 1985. He noticed how the marginalized farmers were being paid poorly for their otherwise unmatched knowledge. The gross injustice of this constant imbalance led Professor Gupta to found what would turn into a resounding social and ethical movement—the Honey Bee Network—bringing together and elevating thousands of grassroots innovators. For over two decades, Professor Gupta has travelled through rural lands unearthing innovations by the ranks—from the famed Mitti Cool refrigerator to the footbridge of Meghalaya. He insists that to fight the largest and most persistent problems of the world we must eschew expensive research labs and instead, look towards ordinary folk. Innovation—that oft-flung around word—is stripped to its core in this book. Poignant and personal, Grassroots Innovation is an important treatise from a social crusader of our time.




Chhatrapatis of Kolhapur


Book Description