Coexisting on Earth Homo sapiens Quagmire


Book Description

This book examines Homo sapiens lost connection with nature and the aftermath, Homo sapiens excessive footprint on the Earth itself, the depredations done to Earth by Homo sapiens, the denial of global warming and other environmental issues, Frankenstein science and those attempting to play God, the conservation of Earth, what the future may perhaps entail, and going back to nature and coexisting on Earth. The book contains many statistical facts on the subject matter being discussed with more than 715 references within the bibliography and more than 120 graphs, satellite images, and other photographs. Some of the subtopics covered in this book include: Agriculture and the Origins of Modern Civilization, Meat, Dairy, and Egg Consumption, Current Medical Epidemics, Prescription Drug Epidemic, Mental Health and Drug Addiction, Government and Corporate Influence, Poverty, Money, Greed, and Corporate Responsibility, Warmongers, An Incarcerated and Policed Society Living with Unwarranted Fear, Guns, Religion, Suppression of History and Knowledge, Education and The Monetary Value of History and Knowledge, The Slaughter, Slavery, and Forced Assimilation of Indigenous Homo sapiens, Contemporary Slavery, Children, Women, Family and Individualism, The Mainstream News Media, World Population, Mass Consumption, A Surplus of Senseless Waste, Fashion, Cities, Water Consumption, Desertification, Surface Water, and Groundwater Depletion, Wastewater and Sewage Sludge, Watercraft, Mineral Extraction, Fossil Fuels, Nuclear Weapons and Power, Toxic Unnatural Chemicals, Fertilizers and the Nitrogen and Phosphorus Cycle, Pesticides, Atmospheric Pollution, Ozone Hole, Light and Sound Pollution, Hazardous Waste and Superfund Sites, Synthetic Plastic, Cannabis, Ocean Garbage Patches and Beach Trash, Lakes, Rivers, Wetlands, and Oceans, Coral Reefs, Fish, Whaling, Dolphin Driving, Military Dolphins, and Sonar, Shark Finning and other Ancient Pseudo Medicines, Zoos, Pets, Fauna Experimentation, Illegal and Legal Trade of Florae and Faunae, Hunting, Extinct Species, Endangered and Threatened Species, Invasive Florae and Faunae, Forests, Soils, Intentional Industrial Related Environmental Depredations, Oils Spills, Acid Rain, Homo sapiens Clash with Nature, Coexisting with Science and Technology, Environmental Legislation, Grassroots Efforts, Simple Individual Changes, Eco-Generation, Globalization and World Government, Homo sapiens Pseudo Connection with Nature, Homo sapiens Misconception of Nature, Unwarranted Fear of Nature, Lost Connection with Nature, and many other social and environmental issues past and present. What readers have to say: "Be forewarned, if you read this book and understand it fully, you will most likely not see the world the same way ever again and will contemplate much more about the world around you, society itself, and even yourself and the lifestyle you are living." "This book will make you think more about the Earth and how truly impactful and self-destructive we are." "This book is very insightful about the impacts we are having on Earth and how we are destroying not only ourselves but the entire Earth we inhabit." "Excellent book. Very sad, but very true." "I always knew we were destroying the Earth, but never at this magnitude." "This book contains so much useful information it's like an encyclopedia of the destruction of Earth." "A must read for any conservationist, environmentalist, or anyone interested in helping to save Earth." "If you don't believe in global warming or that we are destroying not only ourselves but the entire Earth around us, read this book and you will." "The most accurate and up to date statistics on the environmental and social issues currently facing humans." “A story which urgently needs to be told. I admire both the depth of the research and the passion with which the author brings it to life. I wish I could find more things to disagree with the author about.”




Sino–Russian Policies in the Center and Periphery


Book Description

This book is a comparative study of Chinese and Russian policies in their respective inner peripheries. As the inner peripheries of the two states are rather vast, a selected number of regions have been chosen from the two geographical expanses. These regions are not only rich in hydrocarbons and minerals but also serve as conduits of the same. Moreover, the geographical position of the Caucasus provides Russia with an ingress into the Transcaucasia; a region that has often presented Moscow with serious challenges in international politics. Similarly, Xinjiang and Tibet serve as supply bases of hydrocarbon and mineral, and as conduits of the same to the Chinese regime. In addition to this, while Tibet serves as China’s anchorage in Himalayas and a buffer zone against the Indian threat, Xinjiang is China’s gateway to the resource rich Central Asian market. With both Russia and China on the path of changing the post-Soviet unipolar order; insights on Sino-Russian ties and the various challenges and opportunities available to the two states are inevitable for any reader trying to understand the complexity of international politics in general and of Chinese and Russian politics in particular of the twenty-first century.




Going to War?


Book Description

Going to War? investigates the reasons why countries enter conflicts by considering the depth and complexity of issues surrounding military deployments. Showing how such conditions affect future decisions about the use of force, contributors to this volume study recent experiences with military interventions – such as regional flash points, the global financial crisis, and public weariness – to outline the crucial factors that influence wartime decision-making. Through detailed discussion of threats, capabilities, trends, and the implications of Canada’s and NATO’s military experiences abroad, Going to War? determines that the reasons for warfare have as much to do with domestic concerns as they do with international threats. With essays by defence scientists, established and emerging scholars, and senior military officers from Germany, the United States, and Canada, this volume includes debates on whether the number of military fatalities is being reduced, war’s changing character, and the ways in which the improvised explosive device has and will continue to challenge modern, advanced militaries deployed abroad, especially in Afghanistan and Iraq. A sophisticated exercise in foreign and defence policy analysis, Going to War? provides clear and vivid ideas on how to optimize future Western military interventions.




Iran's Foreign Policy in the South Caucasus


Book Description

Iran’s role as a regional power is more significant than many in the West may realise. The country lies between Central Asia/the Caucasus and the Gulf region on the one hand, and, on the other, between the Mediterranean/Levant region and South Asia. Many of these areas are of increasing strategic importance. This book explores Iran’s role as a regional power, focusing on relations with South Caucasus countries - Azerbaijan and Armenia. It outlines the historical context, including Persia’s rule of these countries before the nineteenth century, and discusses Iran’s approach to foreign and regional policy and how both internal and international factors shape these policies. The book assesses Iran–Azerbaijan and Iran–Armenia bilateral relations to demonstrate how those policies translate in Iran's regional and bilateral relations. The book concludes by considering how Iran's relations in the region are likely to develop in the future.




Global Rogues and Regional Orders


Book Description

Global Rogues and Regional Orders examines the relationship between nuclear proliferation and regional order in East Asia and the Middle East, looking at what factors shape the perceptions and responses of relevant regional actors to North Korea and Iran, why some of these regional actors cooperate with the United States while others do not, and the consequences of shifting relations among these countries.




Cascades of Violence


Book Description

As in the cascading of water, violence and nonviolence can cascade down from commanding heights of power (as in waterfalls), up from powerless peripheries, and can undulate to spread horizontally (flowing from one space to another). As with containing water, conflict cannot be contained without asking crucial questions about which variables might cause it to cascade from the top-down, bottom up and from the middle-out. The book shows how violence cascades from state to state. Empirical research has shown that nations with a neighbor at war are more likely to have a civil war themselves (Sambanis 2001). More importantly in the analysis of this book, war cascades from hot spot to hot spot within and between states (Autesserre 2010, 2014). The key to understanding cascades of hot spots is in the interaction between local and macro cleavages and alliances (Kalyvas 2006). The analysis exposes the folly of asking single-level policy questions like do the benefits and costs of a regime change in Iraq justify an invasion? We must also ask what other violence might cascade from an invasion of Iraq? The cascades concept is widespread in the physical and biological sciences with cascades in geology, particle physics and the globalization of contagion. The past two decades has seen prominent and powerful applications of the cascades idea to the social sciences (Sunstein 1997; Gladwell 2000; Sikkink 2011). In his discussion of ethnic violence, James Rosenau (1990) stressed that the image of turbulence developed by mathematicians and physicists could provide an important basis for understanding the idea of bifurcation and related ideas of complexity, chaos, and turbulence in complex systems. He classified the bifurcated systems in contemporary world politics as the multicentric system and the statecentric system. Each of these affects the others in multiple ways, at multiple levels, and in ways that make events enormously hard to predict (Rosenau 1990, 2006). He replaced the idea of events with cascades to describe the event structures that 'gather momentum, stall, reverse course, and resume anew as their repercussions spread among whole systems and subsystems' (1990: 299). Through a detailed analysis of case studies in South Asia, that built on John Braithwaite's twenty-five year project Peacebuilding Compared, and coding of conflicts in different parts of the globe, we expand Rosenau's concept of global turbulence and images of cascades. In the cascades of violence in South Asia, we demonstrate how micro-events such as localized riots, land-grabbing, pervasive militarization and attempts to assassinate political leaders are linked to large scale macro-events of global politics. We argue in order to prevent future conflicts there is a need to understand the relationships between history, structures and agency; interest, values and politics; global and local factors and alliances.




Politics of Oil and Nuclear Technology in Iran


Book Description

This book focuses on oil politics and the development of nuclear technology in Iran, providing a broader historical context to understand Iran’s foreign relations and nuclear policy. The author assesses Iran's encounters with the West in light of major confrontations both in terms of open conflict as well as controversies surrounding treaties with foreign powers. In seeking to understand the geopolitics of oil in direct parallel to the geopolitics of nuclear technology, the book concentrates on Iran’s struggles to nationalize its oil, neo-colonialism, the formation of the oil consortium, and the more recent US backtracking on the nuclear deal with Iran.




The New Authoritarianism


Book Description

This two-volume book considers from a risk perspective the current phenomenon of the new Alt-Right authoritarianism and whether it represents ‘real’ democracy or an unacceptable hegemony potentially resulting in elected dictatorships and abuses as well as dysfunctional government. Contributing authors represent an eclectic range of disciplines, including cognitive, organizational and political psychology, sociology, history, political science, international relations, linguistics and discourse analysis, and risk analysis. The Alt-Right threats and risk exposures, whether to democracy, human rights, law and order, social welfare, racial harmony, the economy, national security, the environment, and international relations, are identified and analysed across a number of selected countries. While Vol. 1 focusses on the US, Vol. 2 (ISBN 978-3-8382-1263-0) illuminates the phenomenon in the UK, Austria, France, Germany, Netherlands, Norway, Italy, Hungary, and Russia. Potential strategies to limit the Alt-Right threat are proposed.




Regional and International Powers in the Gulf Security


Book Description

This book discusses the threats and challenges facing the Persian Gulf and the future security in the region, providing an overview of the major regional and extra-regional actors in Gulf security. It argues that except for Iran, no regional or extra-regional actors, including the United States, China, India and Russia, have developed a strategy for Persian Gulf security, and only Turkey has expressed a willingness to provide security for the region. Importantly, the major threats to Persian Gulf security are nonconventional, rather than external, threats to Iranian hegemony or the balance of power. In conclusion, it predicts that the power struggle in the Persian Gulf in the coming decades will be between Iran and Turkey, and not between Iran and Saudi Arabia. This book is of interest to diplomats, journalists, international affairs specialists, strategists and scholars of Gulf politics and security and defence studies.




West Asia and the Region


Book Description

Contributed articles presented at the National Conference on "West Asia and the Region: Defining India's Role" held at the Centre for West Asian Studies on Aug. 21-22, 2006.