Global Political Ecology Peet, Richard; Robbins, Paul; Watts, Michael
2011, 20101217, 2010-12-13, 2010-12-17, 20110101
eBook
The world is caught in the mesh of a series of environmental crises. So far attempts at resolving the deep basis of these have been superficial and disorganized. Global Political Ecology links the ...political economy of global capitalism with the political ecology of a series of environmental disasters and failed attempts at environmental policies.
This critical volume draws together contributions from twenty-five leading intellectuals in the field. It begins with an introductory chapter that introduces the readers to political ecology and summarizes the books main findings. The following seven sections cover topics on the political ecology of war and the disaster state; fuelling capitalism: energy scarcity and abundance; global governance of health, bodies, and genomics; the contradictions of global food; capital’s marginal product: effluents, waste, and garbage; water as a commodity, a human right, and power; the functions and dysfunctions of the global green economy; political ecology of the global climate, and carbon emissions.
This book contains accounts of the main currents of thought in each area that bring the topics completely up-to-date. The individual chapters contain a theoretical introduction linking in with the main themes of political ecology, as well as empirical information and case material. Global Political Ecology serves as a valuable reference for students interested in political ecology, environmental justice, and geography.
Chapter 1. Global Nature Michael Watts, Paul Robbins and Richard Peet Part I: Food, Health and the Body: Political Ecology of Sustainability Chapter 2. Excess Consumption or Over-production: US Farm Policy, Global Warming, and the Bizarre Atribution of Obesity Julie Guthman Chapter 3. Killing for Profit: Global Livestock Industries and their Socio-Ecological Implications Jody Emel and Harvey Neo Chapter 4. "Modern" Industrial Fisheries and the Crisis of Overfishing Becky Mansfield Chapter 5. When People Come First: AIDS, Technical Fixes, and Social Innovation in the Global Health Market João Biehl Part II: Capital’s Margins: The Political Ecology the Slum World Chapter 6. Global Garbage: Waste, trash trading and local garbage politics Sarah A. Moore Chapter 7. Green evictions: Environmental discourses of a "slum-free" Delhi Asher Ghertner Part III: Risk, Certification and the Audit Economy: Political Ecology of Environmental Governance Chapter 8. The Politics of Certification: Consumer Knowledge, Power and Global Governance in Ecolabelling Sally Eden Chapter 9. Climate Change and the Risk Industry: The Multiplication of Fear and Value Leigh Johnson Chapter 10. Carbon colonialism? Offsets, Greenhouse Gas Reductions and Sustainable Development A. G. Bumpus and D. M. Liverman Part IV: War, Militarism and Insurgency: Political Ecology of Security Chapter 11. The Natures of the Beast: On the New Uses of the Honey Bee Jake Kosek Chapter 12. Taking the Jungle out of the Forest: Counter-insurgency and the Making of National Natures Nancy Lee Peluso and Peter Vandergeest Chapter 13. Mutant Ecologies: Radioactive Life in Post-Cold War New Mexico Joseph Masco Part V: Fuelling Capitalism: Energy Scarcity and Abundance Chapter 14. Past Peak Oil: Political Economy of Energy Crises Gavin Bridge Chapter 15: Energy, Security, and Discourses of Empire and Terror Mazen Labban Part VI: Blue Ecology: the Political Ecology of Water Chapter 16. Commons versus Commodities: Political ecologies of water privatization Karen Bakker Chapter 17. The Social Construction of Scarcity: The Case of Water in Western India Lyla Mehta Part VII: Biopolitics and Political Ecology: Genes, Transgenes and Genomics Chapter 18. Governing Disorder: Biopolitics and the Molecularization of Life Bruce Braun Chapter 19. Transnational Transgenes: The Political Ecology of Maize in Mexico Joel Wainwright and Kristin L. Mercer
" Global Political Ecology is a critical book at a critical time. Political ecology has come of age and established global stature. A timely and important book. Read it!" Professor Piers Blaikie, University of East Anglia.
"This is an important and provocative volume that relates key themes in political ecology to the political economy of global capitalism and policy failure. It breaks new ground by addressing topics vital to understanding contemporary social and environmental crises that have hitherto not received due attention. Certain to be a landmark text in the field." Professor Raymond Bryant, King’s College London
"Global environmental problems, from climate change to the food we eat, loom heavily over us while policy makers fiddle with environmental agreements that ignore the sources of these burning issues. Global Political Ecology speaks to our anxieties by drawing attention to the political economic contexts and sites of knowledge production in which all roads seem to lead to market-based solutions. This superb text offers a conceptual and theoretical toolkit that will empower students of global environmental change to shape alternative political ecologies." Professor Thomas J. Bassett, University of Illinois.
Richard Peet is Professor of Geography at Clark University, Worcester, Massachusetts.
Paul Robbins is Professor and Director of the School of Geography and Development at the University of Arizona.
Michael J. Watts is Professor of Geography, and Co-Director of Development Studies at the University of California, Berkeley.
•Insurgencies are shaped by structural conditions of possibility.•The Nigeria insurgency is shaped by the expulsion of young men from institutions of authority.•The ordering of power within Nigeria’s ...petro-state engendered frontiers.•Frontiers emerge in a crisis of social reproduction and changing capabilities of the state.•The frontier is a social space where legitimate power and authority are objects of deep contention.
The focus of this article is two home-grown insurgencies which arose in Nigeria after the return to civilian rule in 1999: Boko Haram in the Muslim northeast, the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND) in the oil producing and Christian southeast. The two insurgencies arose, I argue, from frontier spaces in which the limits of state authority and legitimacy intersected with a profound crisis of authority and rule on the one hand, and the political economy of radical precarity on the other. Boko Haram and MEND share family resemblances—they are products of the same orderings of power—despite the obvious fact that one is draped in the language of religion and restoration (but as we shall see modernity) and the insistence that Nigeria should become transformed into a true Islamic state, while the other is secular and civic (and also modern) wishing to expand the boundaries of citizenship through a new sort of federalism. There are striking commonalities in the social composition of the armed groups and their internal dynamics; each is deposited at the nexus of the failure of local government, customary institutions, and the security forces (the police and the military task forces in particular). Each, nevertheless, is site specific; a cultural articulation of dispossession politics rooted in regional traditions of warfare, in particular systems of religiosity, and very different sorts of social structure and identity, and very different ecologies (the semi arid savannas of the north, and the creeks and forest of the Niger delta). In both cases state coercion and despotism and the ethico-moral decrepitude of the state figures centrally as does the politics of resentment that each condition generates among a large, alienated but geographically rooted group of precarious classes.
Imprint lithography is emerging as an alternative nano-patterning technology to traditional photolithography that permits the fabrication of 2D and 3D structures with <100
nm resolution, patterning ...and modification of functional materials other than photoresist and is low cost, with operational ease for use in developing bio-devices. Techniques for imprint lithography, categorized as either ‘molding and embossing’ or ‘transfer printing’, will be discussed in the context of microarrays for genomics, proteomics and tissue engineering. Specifically, fabrication by nanoimprint lithography (NIL), UV-NIL, step and flash imprint lithography (S–FIL), micromolding by elastomeric stamps and micro- and nano-contact printing will be reviewed.
We present high-performance integrated optical phased arrays along with first-of-their-kind light detection and ranging (LiDAR) and free-space data communication demonstrators. First, ...record-performance optical phased array components are shown with low-power phase shifters and high-directionality waveguide grating antennas. Then, one-dimensional (1-D) 512-element optical phased arrays are demonstrated with record low-power operation (<;1 mW total), large steering ranges, and high-speed two-dimensional (2-D) beam steering (<;30 μs phase shifter time constant). Next, by utilizing optical phased arrays, we show coherent 2-D solid-state LiDAR on diffusive targets with simultaneous velocity extraction at a range of nearly 200 m. In addition, the first demonstration of 3-D coherent LiDAR with optical phased arrays is presented with raster-scanning arrays. Finally, lens-free chip-to-chip free-space optical communication links up to 50 m are shown, including a demonstration of a steerable transmitter to multiple optical phased array receivers at a 1 Gb/s data rate. This paper shows the most advanced silicon photonics solid-state beam steering to date with relevant demonstrators in practical applications.
Large―scale nanophotonic phased array JIE SUN; TIMURDOGAN, Erman; YAACOBI, Ami ...
Nature (London),
01/2013, Letnik:
493, Številka:
7431
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Electromagnetic phased arrays at radio frequencies are well known and have enabled applications ranging from communications to radar, broadcasting and astronomy. The ability to generate arbitrary ...radiation patterns with large-scale phased arrays has long been pursued. Although it is extremely expensive and cumbersome to deploy large-scale radiofrequency phased arrays, optical phased arrays have a unique advantage in that the much shorter optical wavelength holds promise for large-scale integration. However, the short optical wavelength also imposes stringent requirements on fabrication. As a consequence, although optical phased arrays have been studied with various platforms and recently with chip-scale nanophotonics, all of the demonstrations so far are restricted to one-dimensional or small-scale two-dimensional arrays. Here we report the demonstration of a large-scale two-dimensional nanophotonic phased array (NPA), in which 64 × 64 (4,096) optical nanoantennas are densely integrated on a silicon chip within a footprint of 576 μm × 576 μm with all of the nanoantennas precisely balanced in power and aligned in phase to generate a designed, sophisticated radiation pattern in the far field. We also show that active phase tunability can be realized in the proposed NPA by demonstrating dynamic beam steering and shaping with an 8 × 8 array. This work demonstrates that a robust design, together with state-of-the-art complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor technology, allows large-scale NPAs to be implemented on compact and inexpensive nanophotonic chips. In turn, this enables arbitrary radiation pattern generation using NPAs and therefore extends the functionalities of phased arrays beyond conventional beam focusing and steering, opening up possibilities for large-scale deployment in applications such as communication, laser detection and ranging, three-dimensional holography and biomedical sciences, to name just a few.
We demonstrate a chip-scale autostereoscopic image projection system that utilizes a system of multiple integrated visible light optical phased arrays to reconstruct virtual light fields. Each phased ...array in this system serves as a micro-projector that illuminates the desired virtual object from a different angle. This recreates the virtual object in space with continuous parallax observable by the human visual system. In this work, a static virtual image with horizontal parallax and a viewing angle of 5° was generated with an array of 16 integrated silicon nitride phased arrays with a 635 nm operating wavelength. Each phased array is comprised of 32×32 optical antennas with passively encoded relative phases. The presented device demonstrates the promise of integrated visible light phased array platforms for implementing projection-based autostereoscopic displays in compact chip-scale platforms suitable for mobile devices.
Two major oil-producing regions frame this article. The first is the onshore oil world in the global South (the Niger delta in Nigeria as part of the wider Gulf of Guinea), and the second is the ...offshore world of deepwater oil and gas exploration and production in the United States (specifically, the Gulf of Mexico, and the Deepwater Horizon blowout). Both arenas can be seen as oil frontiers—frontiers of accumulation and dispossession—rooted in the operations of specific oil assemblages. I trace the relations between the deep infrastructures of the oil world—pipelines, rigs, flowstations, tankers, financiers, engineering firms, security forces, and so on—and to the regimes of life and death in the postcolonial South and the advanced capitalist North. Political, economic, and social relations are, as Timothy Mitchell notes, engineered out of the flows of energy. Opening up these sorts of oil frontiers—whether in Angolan or Brazilian deepwater, Russian Siberia, or increasingly now the frozen frontiers of the Arctic—necessitates engagements with place-specific social and political forces, none of which necessarily or easily are compatible with some presumed set of desires of corporate oil capital—political stability, surplus management, price control—or indeed of imperialist oil-consuming states. In one case the terminal point is an insurgency and combustible politics threatening the very operations of the oil industry and the petrostate itself; in the other it is the violence of a blowout—the loss of human and environmental life and livelihoods—and of the deadly consequences of substituting technical and financial over political risks.
The frequency and duration of flooding events is increasing due to land-use changes increasing run-off of precipitation, and climate change causing more intense rainfall events. Floodplain soils ...situated downstream of urban or industrial catchments, which were traditionally considered a sink of potentially toxic elements (PTEs) arriving from the river reach, may now become a source of legacy pollution to the surrounding environment, if PTEs are mobilised by unprecedented flooding events.
When a soil floods, the mobility of PTEs can increase or decrease due to the net effect of five key processes; (i) the soil redox potential decreases which can directly alter the speciation, and hence mobility, of redox sensitive PTEs (e.g. Cr, As), (ii) pH increases which usually decreases the mobility of metal cations (e.g. Cd2+, Cu2+, Ni2+, Pb2+, Zn2+), (iii) dissolved organic matter (DOM) increases, which chelates and mobilises PTEs, (iv) Fe and Mn hydroxides undergo reductive dissolution, releasing adsorbed and co-precipitated PTEs, and (v) sulphate is reduced and PTEs are immobilised due to precipitation of metal sulphides. These factors may be independent mechanisms, but they interact with one another to affect the mobility of PTEs, meaning the effect of flooding on PTE mobility is not easy to predict. Many of the processes involved in mobilising PTEs are microbially mediated, temperature dependent and the kinetics are poorly understood.
Soil mineralogy and texture are properties that change spatially and will affect how the mobility of PTEs in a specific soil may be impacted by flooding. As a result, knowledge based on one river catchment may not be particularly useful for predicting the impacts of flooding at another site. This review provides a critical discussion of the mechanisms controlling the mobility of PTEs in floodplain soils. It summarises current understanding, identifies limitations to existing knowledge, and highlights requirements for further research.
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•Floodplains may switch from being sinks to becoming sources of legacy pollution.•Flooding influences pH, DOM and the mobility of potentially toxic elements (PTEs).•Reductive dissolution of Fe and Mn oxides mobilises PTEs.•Precipitation of metal sulphides reduces PTE mobility.•Field observations are required to further advance our understanding.
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