Author In Progress


Book Description

Empower Your Writing Through Craft and Community! Writing can be a lonely profession plagued by blind stumbles, writer's block, and despair--but it doesn't have to be. Written by members of the popular Writer Unboxed website, Author in Progress is filled with practical, candid essays to help you reach the next rung on the publishing ladder. By tracking your creative journey from first draft to completion and beyond, you can improve your craft, find your community, and overcome the mental barriers that stand in the way of success. Author in Progress is the perfect no-nonsense guide for excelling at every step of the novel-writing process, from setting goals, researching, and drafting to giving and receiving critiques, polishing prose, and seeking publication. You'll love Author in Progress if... • You're an aspiring novelist working on your first book. • You're an experienced veteran looking for ways to enhance your career and connect with your writing community. • You've finished your first draft and want to know the next steps. • You're seeking clear, effective advice about publication-from professionals who are "down in the trenches" every day. What's Inside Author in Progress features: • More than 50 essays from best-selling authors, editors, and industry leaders on a variety of writing and publishing topics. • Advice on writing first drafts, conducting research, building and fostering community, seeking critique, revising, and getting published. • An encouraging approach to the writing and publishing process, from authors who've walked this path.




A Restless Art


Book Description

From the contents:00I. Participatory art now01. The normalisation of participatory art 0II. What is participatory art?02. Concepts03. Defnitions04. The intentions of participatory art 05. The art of participatory art 06. The ethics of participatory art 0III. Where does participatory art come from?07. Making history 08. Deep roots 09. Community art and the cultural revolution (1968 to 1988) 010. Participatory art and appropriation (1988 to 2008).




From Fallow


Book Description

From Fallow is a curated collection of 100 ideas for abandoned property. Through drawing and text each idea is elaborated and each entry serves both as documentation and speculation. The intention, here, is to think differently about pre-existing conditions and to be particular about them. I offer examples of different spatial characteristics around abandonment in North American legacy cities. The variations are mesmerizingly complicated and varied. A vacant lot is never one thing. Terrains have different scales, elevations, adjacencies, uses, climates and cultures. And just as no one territory is the same, so no one idea is sufficient. The goal, in considering these disparate ideas, is not to imagine any singular solution but to understand the many possibilities. Ideas can be tested, substituted and combined.




Shifting Cultivation and Environmental Change


Book Description

Shifting cultivation is one of the oldest forms of subsistence agriculture and is still practised by millions of poor people in the tropics. Typically it involves clearing land (often forest) for the growing of crops for a few years, and then moving on to new sites, leaving the earlier ground fallow to regain its soil fertility. This book brings together the best of science and farmer experimentation, vividly illustrating the enormous diversity of shifting cultivation systems as well as the power of human ingenuity. Some critics have tended to disparage shifting cultivation (sometimes called 'swidden cultivation' or 'slash-and-burn agriculture') as unsustainable due to its supposed role in deforestation and land degradation. However, the book shows that such indigenous practices, as they have evolved over time, can be highly adaptive to land and ecology. In contrast, 'scientific' agricultural solutions imposed from outside can be far more damaging to the environment and local communities. The book focuses on successful agricultural strategies of upland farmers, particularly in south and south-east Asia, and presents over 50 contributions by scholars from around the world and from various disciplines, including agricultural economics, ecology and anthropology. It is a sequel to the much praised "Voices from the Forest: Integrating Indigenous Knowledge into Sustainable Upland Farming" (RFF Press, 2007), but all chapters are completely new and there is a greater emphasis on the contemporary challenges of climate change and biodiversity conservation.




Forest Resources Resilience and Conflicts


Book Description

Forest Resources Resilience and Conflicts presents modern remote sensing and GIS techniques for Sustainable Livelihood. It provides an up-to-date critical analysis of the discourse surrounding forest resources and society, illustrating the relationship between forest resources and the livelihood of local people. The book is organized into four parts consisting of 31 chapters. Each chapter then reviews current understanding, present research, and future implications. Utilizing case studies and novel advances in geospatial technologies, Forest Resources Resilience and Conflicts provides a timely synthesis of a rapidly growing field and stimulates ideas for future work, especially considering sustainable development goals.In addition, the book presents the effective contribution of the forestry sector to populations' livelihoods through improved collection of forestry statistics that foster the understanding and integration of the forestry sector in poverty reduction processes and the national economy to enhance its integration in national planning. It is a valuable resource for researchers and students in environmental science, especially those interested in forestry, geography, and remote sensing. - Demonstrates tools and techniques for measurement, monitoring, mapping, and modeling of forest resources - Explores state-of-the-art techniques using open source software, statistical programming, and GIS, focusing on recent trends in data mining and machine learning - Addresses a wide range of issues with both environmental and societal implications - Provides a global review of the multiple roles of forest resources utilizing case studies to illustrate management strategies and techniques




Soil Management


Book Description

Degradation of soils continues at a pace that will eventually create a local, regional, or even global crisis when diminished soil resources collide with increasing climate variation. It's not too late to restore our soils to a more productive state by rediscovering the value of soil management, building on our well-established and ever-expanding scientific understanding of soils. Soil management concepts have been in place since the cultivation of crops, but we need to rediscover the principles that are linked together in effective soil management. This book is unique because of its treatment of soil management based on principles—the physical, chemical, and biological processes and how together they form the foundation for soil management processes that range from tillage to nutrient management. Whether new to soil science or needing a concise reference, readers will benefit from this book's ability to integrate the science of soils with management issues and long-term conservation efforts.







Farmers in the Forest


Book Description

Farmers in the Forest, while using examples chiefly from northern Thailand, is concerned with complex problems found in all tropical countries. In these areas rapid population growth, increasing demands for food, and burgeoning international markets for forest products and other raw materials are associated with active competition for land and natural resources in upland areas. This book brings together studies by administrators, agronomists, anthropologists, forest ecologists, geographers and jurists, who describe a variety of swidden systems and their effect on soil, forest, society, and economy. They point to conflicts between traditional farming systems and modern legal and administrative constraints now being imposed, and they describe special and technological conditions that contribute to a marginal, stagnant upland economy, increasing socio-economic disparities with the lowlands, and the serious ecological consequences of these conditions. Several possible solutions are suggested to solve these problems.




Enzymology of Disturbed Soils


Book Description

The disturbance of soils, like other phenomena of environmental pollution, encountered in so many areas all over the world, has become a subject of extensive concern and has led to a vast amount of literature in the field of enzymology, too.The book is the first comprehensive and updated review of the enzymological literature on three great categories of disturbed soils, including their remediation. The volume consists of three sections: I. Enzymology of oil-contaminated soils; II. Enzymology of soils affected by industrial emissions; and III, enzymology of technogenic soils. Within each section the reviewed studies are grouped by country.The volume will be of great value to soil scientists, environmental scientists, conservationists, and many other scientists in these and related fields.




The Fallow Land


Book Description