It is widely known that such Western institutions as the museum, the university, and the penitentiary shaped Japan’s emergence as a modern nation-state. Less commonly recognized is the role played by ...the distinctly hybrid institution—at once museum, laboratory, and prison—of the zoological garden. In this eye-opening study of Japan’s first modern zoo, Tokyo’s Ueno Imperial Zoological Gardens, opened in 1882, Ian Jared Miller offers a refreshingly unconventional narrative of Japan’s rapid modernization and changing relationship with the natural world. As the first zoological garden in the world not built under the sway of a Western imperial regime, the Ueno Zoo served not only as a staple attraction in the nation’s capital—an institutional marker of national accomplishment—but also as a site for the propagation of a new “natural” order that was scientifically verifiable and evolutionarily foreordained. As the Japanese empire grew, Ueno became one of the primary sites of imperialist spectacle, a microcosm of the empire that could be traveled in the course of a single day. The meaning of the zoo would change over the course of Imperial Japan’s unraveling and subsequent Allied occupation. Today it remains one of Japan’s most frequently visited places. But instead of empire in its classic political sense, it now bespeaks the ambivalent dominion of the human species over the natural environment, harkening back to its imperial roots even as it asks us to question our exploitation of the planet’s resources.
Earth, agriculture, fishing, hunting and gathering—— the ways of acquiring food and also the factors dominating the settlements’ landscape pattern in the primitive society, has been gradually ...replaced by manufacturing, financial industry and service industry through thousands of years of urbanization. Nowadays, ‘food’ is no longer the overriding factor for urban planning while urban pattern still has its profound leverage on the long-term development of catering.
Under the COVID-19 epidemic, the common problem faced by different countries and regions —— food shortage, inspired us to reflect on the place of food in urban life. Through our investigation on Chengdu, Xi’an, Wuhan and Shanghai, the four cities that featured by different and distinctive food culture and exploration of the distribution pattern and potential of grain origin, delivery chain, processing chain and retailers in these cities, we intend to take urban green space as carrier to improve efficiency of food production, absorption and processing, drive the efficient use of urban space base on landscape, promote efficient circulation of food and efficient spread of culture, alleviate food problems under social crisis and improve the city’s ability to respond to social emergency via ‘foodscape’.
Nature crime Duffy, Rosaleen
2010, 20100831, 2010-08-31
eBook, Book
In this impressively researched, alarming book, Rosaleen Duffy investigates the world of nature conservation, arguing that the West's attitude to endangered wildlife is shallow, self-contradictory, ...and ultimately very damaging. Analyzing the workings of the black-market wildlife industry, Duffy points out that illegal trading is often the direct result of Western consumer desires, from coltan for cellular phones to exotic meats sold in London street markets. She looks at the role of ecotourism, showing how Western travelers contribute-often unwittingly-to the destruction of natural environments. Most strikingly, she argues that the imperatives of Western-style conservation often result in serious injustice to local people, who are branded as "problems" and subject to severe restrictions on their way of life and even extrajudicial killings.
Protecting endangered species of animals and plants is a goal that almost everyone supports in principle—but in practice private landowners have often opposed the regulations of the Endangered ...Species Act, which, they argue, unfairly limits their right to profit from their property. To encourage private landowners to cooperate voluntarily in species conservation and to mitigate the economic burden of doing so, the government and nonprofit land trusts have created a number of incentive programs, including conservation easements, leases, habitat banking, habitat conservation planning, safe harbors, candidate conservation agreements, and the “no surprise” policy. In this book, lawyers, economists, political scientists, historians, and zoologists come together to assess the challenges and opportunities for using economic incentives as compensation for protecting species at risk on private property. They examine current programs to see how well they are working and also offer ideas for how these programs could be more successful. Their ultimate goal is to better understand how economic incentive schemes can be made both more cost-effective and more socially acceptable, while respecting a wide range of views regarding opportunity costs, legal standing, biological effectiveness, moral appropriateness, and social context.
In An Unreal Estate, Lucinda Carspecken takes an in-depth look at Lothlorien, a Southern Indiana nature sanctuary, sustainable camping ground, festival site, collective residence, and experiment in ...ecological building, stewardship, and organization. Carspecken notes the way fiction and reality intertwine on this piece of land and argues that examples such as Lothlorien have the power to be a force for social change. Lothlorien's organization and social norms are in sharp contrast with its surrounding communities. As a unique enclave within a larger society, it offers to the latter both an implicit critique and a cluster of alternative values and lifestyles. In addition, it has created a niche where some participants change, grow, and find empowerment in an environment that is accepting of difference-particularly in areas of religion and sexual orientation.
Bringing together a multidisciplinary conversation about the entanglement of nature and society in the Korean peninsula, Forces of Nature aims to define and develop the field of the Korean ...environmental humanities. At its core, the volume works to foreground non-human agents that have long been marginalized in Korean studies, placing flora, fauna, mineral deposits, and climatic conditions that have hitherto been confined to footnotes front and center. In the process, the authors blaze new trails through Korea's social and physical landscapes. What emerges is a deeper appreciation of the environmental conflicts that have animated life in Korea. The authors show how natural processes have continually shaped the course of events on the peninsula—how floods, droughts, famines, fires, and pests have inexorably impinged on human affairs—and how different forces have been mobilized by the state to variously, control, extract, modernize, and showcase the Korean landscape. Forces of Nature suggestively reveals Korea's physical landscape to be not so much a passive context to Korea's history, but an active agent in its transformation and reinvention across centuries.
Beyond the lens of conservation Keller, Eva
Studies in environmental anthropology and ethnobiology ; v. 20,
2015, 2015., 20150115, 2015-03-03, Letnik:
20
eBook, Book
The global agenda of Nature conservation has led to the creation of the Masoala National Park in Madagascar and to an exhibit in its support at a Swiss zoo, the centerpiece of which is a ...mini-rainforest replica. Does such a cooperation also trigger a connection between ordinary people in these two far-flung places? The study investigates how the Malagasy farmers living at the edge of the park perceive the conservation enterprise and what people in Switzerland see when looking towards Madagascar through the lens of the zoo exhibit. It crystallizes that the stories told in either place have almost nothing in common: one focuses on power and history, the other on morality and progress. Thus, instead of building a bridge, Nature conservation widens the gap between people in the North and the South.
Divining Nature Cuille, Tili Boon
2021, 2020, 2020-12-15
eBook
Odprti dostop
The Enlightenment remains widely associated with the rise of scientific progress and the loss of religious faith, a dual tendency that is thought to have contributed to the disenchantment of the ...world. In her wide-ranging and richly illustrated book, Tili Boon Cuillé questions the accuracy of this narrative by investigating the fate of the marvelous in the age of reason. Exploring the affinities between the natural sciences and the fine arts, Cuillé examines the representation of natural phenomena—whether harmonious or discordant—in natural history, painting, opera, and the novel from Buffon and Rameau to Ossian and Staël. She demonstrates that philosophical, artistic, and emotional responses to the ""spectacle of nature"" in eighteenth-century France included wonder, enthusiasm, melancholy, and the ""sentiment of divinity."" These ""passions of the soul,"" traditionally associated with religion and considered antithetical to enlightenment, were linked to the faculties of reason, imagination, and memory that structured Diderot's Encyclopédie and to contemporary theorizations of the sublime. As Cuillé reveals, the marvelous was not eradicated but instead preserved through the establishment and reform of major French cultural institutions dedicated to science, art, religion, and folklore that were designed to inform, enchant, and persuade. This book has been made possible in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities: Exploring the human endeavor.
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