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Summary: This book is a "big history" of the evidence regarding how we came to be. It briefly explores philosophical thought and how our past might affect our future. The text summarizes different perspectives, including the strengths and weaknesses of each. The genesis of our planet is explored, especially the circumstances that must exist for complex life to arise. This brief journey highlights the history of life, the emergence of simple lifeforms, and the evolution of complex creatures, including humans. The book concludes with a discussion of why other humanoids went extinct while our species achieved dominance. The author speculates on potentialities awaiting humankind and our planet.

Summary: This book examines the value of Adaptive Collaborative Management for facilitating learning and collaboration with local communities and beyond, utilising detailed studies of forest landscapes and communities. Many forest management proposals are based on top-down strategies, such as the Million Tree Initiatives, Forest Landscape Restoration (FLR) and REDD+, often neglecting local communities. In the context of the climate crisis, it is imperative that local peoples and communities are an integral part of all decisions relating to resource management. Rather than being seen as beneficiaries or people to be safeguarded, they should be seen as full partners, and Adaptive Collaborative Management is an approach which priorities the rights and roles of communities alongside the need to address the environmental crisis. The volume presents detailed case studies and real life examples from across the globe, promoting and prioritizing the voices of women and scholars and practitioners from the Global South who are often under-represented. Providing concrete examples of ways that a bottom-up approach can function to enhance development sustainably, via its practitioners and far beyond the locale in which they initially worked, this volume demonstrates the lasting utility of approaches like Adaptive Collaborative Management that emphasize local control, inclusiveness and local creativity in management. This book will be of great interest to students, scholars and practitioners working in the fields of conservation, forest management, community development and natural resource management and development studies more broadly.

Summary: This edited volume examines the changes that arise from the entanglement of global interests and narratives with the local struggles that have always existed in the drylands of Africa, the Middle East, and Central Asia/Inner Asia. Changes in drylands are happening in an overwhelming manner. Climate change, growing political instability, and increasing enclosures of large expanses of often common land are some of the changes with far-reaching consequences for those who make their living in the drylands. At the same time, powerful narratives about the drylands as 'wastelands' and their 'backward' inhabitants continue to hold sway, legitimizing interventions for development, security, and conservation, informing re-emerging frontiers of investment (for agriculture, extraction, infrastructure), and shaping new dryland identities. The chapters in this volume discuss the politics of change triggered by forces as diverse as the global land and resource rush, the expansion of new Information and Communication Technologies, urbanization, the COVID-19 pandemic, and the spread of violent extremism. While recognizing that changes are co-produced by differently positioned actors from within and outside the drylands, this volume presents the dryland's point of view. It therefore takes the views, experiences, and agencies of dryland dwellers as the point of departure to not only understand the changes that are transforming their lives, livelihoods, and future aspirations, but also to highlight the unexpected spaces of contestation and innovation that have hitherto remained understudied. This edited volume will be of much interest to students, researchers, and scholars of natural resource management, land and resource grabbing, political ecology, sustainable development, and drylands in general. The Open Access version of this book, available at www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.

Summary: This book explores the emergence and development of the legal concept of fair and equitable benefit-sharing, and its application in agriculture. Drawing on a range of case studies the book examines the emergence of benefit-sharing in international environmental law.

Summary: The call for a One Health approach that transcends species and disciplinary boundaries assumes that human and veterinary medicine are discrete, distinctive domains whose separation must be overcome to achieve health benefits for all. This paper will problematize this assumption by demonstrating that until relatively recently, their boundaries were extremely fluid. Referring to specific examples over the period 1790-1900, it demonstrates that human medicine was once deeply zoological, and encompassed a host of species, practices and social relations that overlapped with those of veterinary medicine. While One Health today focusses selectively on animals as transmitters of zoonotic diseases or as experimental models of human disease, past animal participants in medicine were far more than that. As victims of naturally occurring diseases, they enabled doctors to think generically and comparatively about medical and biological problems, while as disease subjects they encouraged clinical interventions. Their investigation and management could prompt collaboration between doctors and vets. However, veterinary ambitions also encouraged competition. In time, this led to the hardening of boundaries between the professions and their subjects, and subsequent efforts to transcend them under the banner of One Health.

Summary: The Routledge Handbook of Gender and Agriculture covers major theoretical issues as well as critical empirical shifts in gender and agriculture. Gender relations in agriculture are shifting in most regions of the world with changes in the structure of agriculture, the organization of production, international restructuring of value chains, climate change, the global pandemic, and national and multinational policy changes. This book provides a cutting-edge assessment of the field of gender and agriculture, with contributions from both leading scholars and up-and-coming academics as well as policymakers and practitioners. The handbook is organized into four parts: part 1, institutions, markets, and policies; part 2, land, labor, and agrarian transformations; part 3, knowledge, methods, and access to information; and part 4, farming people and identities. The last chapter is an epilogue from many of the contributors focusing on gender, agriculture, and shifting food systems during the coronavirus pandemic. The chapters address both historical subjects as well as ground-breaking work on gender and agriculture, which will help to chart the future of the field. The handbook has an international focus with contributions examining issues at both the global and local levels with contributors from across the world. With contributions from leading academics, policymakers, and practitioners, and with a global outlook, the Routledge Handbook of Gender and Agriculture is an essential reference volume for scholars, students, and practitioners interested in gender and agriculture.

Summary: This book initiates multipolar climate/clime studies of the world's altitudinal and latitudinal highlands with terrestrial, experiential, and affective approaches. Framed in the environmental humanities, it is an interdisciplinary, comparative study of the mutually-embodied relations of climate, nature, culture, and place in the Himalaya, Andes, and Arctic. Innovation-driven, the book offers multipolar clime case studies through the contributors' historical findings, ethnographic documentations, and diverse conceptualizations and applications of clime, an overlooked but returning notion of place embodied with climate history, pattern, and changes. The multipolar clime case studies in the book are geared toward deeper, lively explorations and demonstrations of the translatability, interchangeability, and complementarity between the notions of clime and climate. "Multipolar" or "multipolarity" in this book connotes not only the two polar regions and the tectonically shaped highlands of the earth but also diversely debated perspectives of climate studies in the broadest sense. Contributors across the twelve chapters come from diverse fields of social and natural sciences and humanities, and geographically specialize respectively in the Himalayan, Andean, and Arctic regions. The first comparative study of climate change in altitudinal and latitudinal highlands, this will be an important read for students, academics and researchers in environmental humanities, anthropology, climate science, indigenous studies and ecology.

Summary: This book brings together diverse perspectives concerning uncertainty and climate change in India. Uncertainty is a key factor shaping climate and environmental policy at international, national and local levels. Climate change and events such as cyclones, floods, droughts and changing rainfall patterns create uncertainties that planners, resource managers and local populations are regularly confronted with. In this context, uncertainty has emerged as a "wicked problem" for scientists and policymakers, resulting in highly debated and disputed decision-making. The book focuses on India, one of the most climatically vulnerable countries in the world, where there are stark socio-economic inequalities in addition to diverse geographic and climatic settings. Based on empirical research, it covers case studies from coastal Mumbai to dryland Kutch and the Sundarbans delta in West Bengal. These localities offer ecological contrasts, rural-urban diversity, varied exposure to different climate events, and diverse state and official responses. The book unpacks the diverse discourses, practices and politics of uncertainty and demonstrates profound differences through which the "above", "middle" and "below" understand and experience climate change and uncertainty. It also makes a case for bringing together diverse knowledges and approaches to understand and embrace climate-related uncertainties in order to facilitate transformative change. Appealing to a broad professional and student audience, the book draws on wide-ranging theoretical and conceptual approaches from climate science, historical analysis, science, technology and society studies, development studies and environmental studies. By looking at the intersection between local and diverse understandings of climate change and uncertainty with politics, culture, history and ecology, the book argues for plural and socially just ways to tackle climate change in India and beyond.