Gravel Roads


Book Description

The purpose of this manual is to provide clear and helpful information for maintaining gravel roads. Very little technical help is available to small agencies that are responsible for managing these roads. Gravel road maintenance has traditionally been "more of an art than a science" and very few formal standards exist. This manual contains guidelines to help answer the questions that arise concerning gravel road maintenance such as: What is enough surface crown? What is too much? What causes corrugation? The information is as nontechnical as possible without sacrificing clear guidelines and instructions on how to do the job right.




Land for Love and Money


Book Description

"Instructional, humorous, and intriguing anecdotes on land and real estate purchase, sale, conservation and management. Chilling warnings of International, Federal, State and local grabs for your real estate and property rights; Agenda 21, Smart-Growth, Regionalism, the EPA and FDIC-not the friends of land and real estate owners. This is an absolutely unique, highly controversial digest of secrets shared by an expert with a forty-two year, 1.5 billion dollar plus career in land. You will laugh, you will frown and you will shake your head in disbelief. These real-life stories, about successes and failures, are packed with essential truths and valuable instruction. Spiritual and financial lessons gleaned from all facets of land, and land-based real estate transactions, regardless of size, use, or location-from one-third of an acre to thousands. Today's uncertain climate and unstable economic times make these professional secrets invaluable-purchase, sale, value, tax benefit, banking systems, and even the darker facets of federal and state attempts at control-everything is covered here-affording you the opportunity to use the tempest to your advantage. Are you an owner of land or real estate of any size, type or location? A wanna-be owner searching for an inflation safeguard? A haven? Lifestyle change? Security? Nostalgic for the rural roots of your youth? Tax Advantage? Spiritual connection? Family legacy? Forced to sell? These volumes will instruct, entertain, and open your eyes to the joys, and the dangers. The book studies many previously taboo, or ignored subjects you need to know-all critical to your enjoyment of, and profit from, your land and real estate: Agenda 21-The global grab for all private property rights.Mammoth guaranteed real estate profits to banks-all from YOUR pocket and your real estate values. Why your banker says no-what's really happening behind the vault doors. This ain't your mama's appraisal-the rules have changed. When it's time for the seller to sign the dotted line-forget price-let's talk net. Looking under the rocks-due diligence and the "PPPPP Rule" can save a wreck. The government is not here to help you-and it might be on purpose. Buying and selling smart-the silver lining in an age of upheaval. Conservation Easements-get paid to do the right thing-but be careful! Based on the experience and insider knowledge of a fourth-generation land and cattleman, realtor and #1 bestselling, multiple award winning author, Reid Lance Rosenthal's career spans multiple states, three countries and two continents. Reid's first non-fiction work is drawn from over five thousand transactions and laced with true anecdotes of the good, bad and ugly with no-holds-barred, real time, hard-hitting facts-and must know warnings-critical to your heart, your wallet and the future of your property rights. The associated CD/DVD workbook, Green for Green, coming in 2014, will be loaded with graphs, charts, checklists, unique contract provisions, and actual, highly unusual, but proven deal structures­ (many developed by the author). Land for Love and Money tells all-the good, bad and ugly-of land and land related residential and other improvements and operations. Balm for your heart, enhancement of your wallet, protection of your future, land and real estate-the foundations of freedom-for soul, for security, for you."




Of Land, Bones, and Money


Book Description

The South African literature of iimbongi, the oral poets of the amaXhosa people, has long shaped understandings of landscape and history and offered a forum for grappling with change. Of Land, Bones, and Money examines the shifting role of these poets in South African society and the ways in which they have helped inform responses to segregation, apartheid, the injustices of extractive capitalism, and contemporary politics in South Africa. Emily McGiffin first discusses the history of the amaXhosa people and the environment of their homelands before moving on to the arrival of the British, who began a relentless campaign annexing land and resources in the region. Drawing on scholarship in the fields of human geography, political ecology, and postcolonial ecocriticism, she considers isiXhosa poetry in translation within its cultural, historical, and environmental contexts, investigating how these poems struggle with the arrival and expansion of the exploitation of natural resources in South Africa and the entrenchment of profoundly racist politics that the process entailed. In contemporary South Africa, iimbongi remain a respected source of knowledge and cultural identity. Their ongoing practice of producing complex, spiritually rich literature continues to have a profound social effect, contributing directly to the healing and well-being of their audiences, to political transformation, and to environmental justice.







Land of Milk and Money


Book Description

In Land of Milk and Money, Alan I Marcus examines the establishment of the dairy industry in the United States South during the 1920s. Looking specifically at the internal history of the Borden Company—the world’s largest dairy firm—as well as small-town efforts to lure industry and manufacturing south, Marcus suggests that the rise of the modern dairy business resulted from debates and redefinitions that occurred in both the northern industrial sector and southern towns. Condensed milk production in Starkville, Mississippi, the location of Borden’s and the South’s first condensery, so exceeded expectations that it emerged as a touchstone for success. Starkville’s vigorous self-promotion acted as a public relations campaign that inspired towns in Tennessee, Alabama, Louisiana, and Texas to entice northern milk concerns looking to relocate. Local officials throughout the South urged farmers, including Black sharecroppers and tenants, to add dairying to their operations to make their locales more attractive to northern interests. Many did so only after small-town commercial elites convinced them of dairying’s potential profitability. Land of Milk and Money focuses on small-town businessmen rather than scientists and the federal government, two groups that pushed for agricultural diversification in the South for nearly four decades with little to no success. As many towns in rural America faced extinction due to migration, northern manufacturers’ creation of regional facilities proved a potent means to boost profits and remain relevant during uncertain economic times. While scholars have long emphasized northern efforts to decentralize production during this period, Marcus’s study examines the ramifications of those efforts for the South through the singular success of the southern dairy business. The presence of local dairying operations afforded small towns a measure of independence and stability, allowing them to diversify their economies and better weather the economic turmoil of the Great Depression.




Act. V.


Book Description




The Longest Line on the Map


Book Description

From the award-winning author of American Canopy, a dazzling account of the world’s longest road, the Pan-American Highway, and the epic quest to link North and South America, a dramatic story of commerce, technology, politics, and the divergent fates of the Americas in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The Pan-American Highway, monument to a century’s worth of diplomacy and investment, education and engineering, scandal and sweat, is the longest road in the world, passable everywhere save the mythic Darien Gap that straddles Panama and Colombia. The highway’s history, however, has long remained a mystery, a story scattered among government archives, private papers, and fading memories. In contrast to the Panama Canal and its vast literature, the Pan-American Highway—the United States’ other great twentieth-century hemispheric infrastructure project—has become an orphan of the past, effectively erased from the story of the “American Century.” The Longest Line on the Map uncovers this incredible tale for the first time and weaves it into a tapestry that fascinates, informs, and delights. Rutkow’s narrative forces the reader to take seriously the question: Why couldn’t the Americas have become a single region that “is” and not two near irreconcilable halves that “are”? Whether you’re fascinated by the history of the Americas, or you’ve dreamed of driving around the globe, or you simply love world records and the stories behind them, The Longest Line on the Map is a riveting narrative, a lost epic of hemispheric scale.




The Road Ahead


Book Description

In this clear-eyed, candid, and ultimately reassuring







Ill Fares the Land


Book Description

Something is profoundly wrong with the way we think about how we should live today. In Ill Fares The Land, Tony Judt, one of our leading historians and thinkers, reveals how we have arrived at our present dangerously confused moment. Judt masterfully crystallizes what we've all been feeling into a way to think our way into, and thus out of, our great collective dis-ease about the current state of things. As the economic collapse of 2008 made clear, the social contract that defined postwar life in Europe and America - the guarantee of a basal level of security, stability and fairness -- is no longer guaranteed; in fact, it's no longer part of the common discourse. Judt offers the language we need to address our common needs, rejecting the nihilistic individualism of the far right and the debunked socialism of the past. To find a way forward, we must look to our not so distant past and to social democracy in action: to re-enshrining fairness over mere efficiency. Distinctly absent from our national dialogue, social democrats believe that the state can play an enhanced role in our lives without threatening our liberties. Instead of placing blind faith in the market-as we have to our detriment for the past thirty years-social democrats entrust their fellow citizens and the state itself. Ill Fares the Land challenges us to confront our societal ills and to shoulder responsibility for the world we live in. For hope remains. In reintroducing alternatives to the status quo, Judt reinvigorates our political conversation, providing the tools necessary to imagine a new form of governance, a new way of life.