Book Description
Every year, many thousands of acres of woodlands, deserts, meadowlands, and coastal scrub are turned into home or commercial sites. Ironically, by the time these structures are complete, bulldozers have scraped the land clean of its natural vegetation and character, much of which attracted buyers in the first place. In Building Inside Nature's Envelope, Andy Wasowski introduces a new and exciting technique for salvaging the natural land upon which we build new homes, new offices, or even new shopping centers. Wasowski argues that the unnatural landscapes so common in America literally exist on artificial life support. A natural landscape, on the other hand, is filled with native flora and can exist on rainfall alone. It is, as one builder said, akin to stepping lightly on the earth. To help builders and prospective home owners achieve this "light step," the author introduces the idea of the Envelope, an approach to construction that is cost effective, simple, and environmentally responsible. A structure built within nature's envelope looks as if it has been gently set down into a mature and established landscape--which is the easiest kind of landscape to maintain. He illustrates this new concept in construction through profiles of sites in California, Arizona, South Carolina, Minnesota, and other locales in North America. He also highlights useful techniques for revegetation, discusses the importance of soils, and argues for the preservation and maintenance of natural habitats. Attractively illustrated with 88 pictures--including 41 full-color images--Building Inside Nature's Envelope offers a practical blueprint for creating a community where both wildlife and human life thrive in a harmonious relationship.
Customer Reviews:
Excellent Resource.......2002-03-24
I recently finished this book and was delighted with the ideas set forth. As many Americans, I had never heard of this technique before. I am currently attending school for a degree in Architecture and am very environmentally oriented. The author provided an easy to understand framework for the process and even better examples. This building technique of minimal impact on the land is a great idea and I am glad that I found this book. These principles have definitely furthered my understanding of how such simple things can make such a difference. I am truly influenced by the nature's envelope technique.
Great Building/Development Resource.......2002-02-28
Finally something on the most neglected part of so many construction projects: the landscape interface between a building and it's site.
Not only does this book cover a huge geographic area for the subject of environmentally-sensitive building placement and landscape salvage/retention/revegetation, but it does it accurately. The techincal "how-to" steps are for professionals and homeowners alike, and all in the Wasowski's easy-to-read language.
Hopefully EVERY developer will study and apply all the principles found in this book. Too bad it isn't the law for the development and home buyer to comply with the principles found herein!
Book Description
From Anchor Hocking's Manhattan pattern to Carder and Teague designs for Steuben, all of the major American companies who made Art Deco glass during the Depression Era-Cambridge, Consolidated, Duncan, Fostoria, Heisey, Libbey, Morgantown, Tiffin, and many others-are presented in this long-awaited book. With more than 350 color photos of both popular and rare examples, informative captions with values, plus patent drawings, company information, a bibliography, and a detailed index, this book will delight anyone interested in this highly collectible American glassware or in the Art Deco style.
Book Description
Whether placed in a window, beside the bed, or illuminating the dining table as an elegant centerpiece, glass candle holders provoke a rich symbolism of home, comfort, and welcome. Today, these beautiful candle holders capture the eye of many a collector. With over 500 photographs of single, double, and triple candle holders, all listed alphabetically by manufacturer, this book proves the ideal guide to identification, dating, and valuation of your prized candle holders. The book blends style and origin, providing a comprehensive survey of candle holders by major manufacturers such as Beaumont, Cambridge, Fenton, Duncan & Miller, Jeannette Glass, Morgantown, New Martinsville, and Portieux of France with Art Nouveau, Art Deco, Depression era, and modern examples.
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Reconstructing Conservation: Finding Common Ground
Robert E. Manning
Manufacturer: Island Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
 Sustainable Development
| Economics
| Business & Investing
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Natural Resources
| Economics
| Business & Investing
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General
| Business & Investing
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Public Policy
| Government
| Nonfiction
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Public Policy
| Political Science
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General
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Conservation
| Environment
| Outdoors & Nature
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General
| Conservation
| Outdoors & Nature
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General
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ASIN: 1559633557 |
Book Description
In the 1990s, influenced by the deconstructionist movement in literary theory and trends toward revisionist history, a cadre of academics and historians led by William Cronon began raising provocative questions about ideas of wilderness and the commitments and strategies of the contemporary environmental movement. While these critiques challenged some cherished and widely held beliefs -- and raised the hackles of many in the environmental community -- they also stimulated an important and potentially transformative debate about the conceptual foundations of environmentalism.
Reconstructing Conservation makes a vital contribution to that debate, bringing together 23 leading scholars and practitioners -- including J. Baird Callicott, Susan Flader, Richard Judd, Curt Meine, Bryan Norton, and Paul B. Thompson -- to examine the classical conservation tradition and its value to contemporary environmentalism. Focusing not just on the tensions that have marked the deconstructivist debate over wilderness and environmentalism, the book represents a larger and ultimately more constructive and hopeful discussion over the proper course of future conservation scholarship and action.
Essays provide a fresh look at conservation icons such as George Perkins Marsh and Aldo Leopold, as well as the contributions of lesser-known figures including Lewis Mumford, Benton MacKaye, and Scott Nearing. Represented are a wealth of diverse perspectives, addressing such topics as wilderness and protected areas, cultural landscapes, rural/agrarian landscapes, urban/built environments, and multiple points on the geographic map. Contributors offer enthusiastic endorsements of pluralism in conservation values and goals along with cautionary tales about the dangers of fragmentation and atomism. The final chapter brings together the major insights, arguments, and proposals contained in the individual contributions, synthesizing them into a dozen broad-ranging principles designed to guide the study and practice of conservation.
Reconstructing Conservation assesses the meaning and relevance of our conservation inheritance in the 21st century, and represents a conceptually integrated vision for reconsidering conservation thought and practice to meet the needs and circumstances of a new, post-deconstructivist era.
Book Description
As the Internet revolution continues to unfold and transform telecommunications, pressure is building for faster, less expensive, and more widely accessible broadband service. Such a development would facilitate improved and less expensive traditional applications such as voice telephony and web browsing. It would also enable new and useful applications such as Internet-based television, videoconferencing, and software distribution. Broadband has great potential to improve efficiency and productivity, even to improve national security in some cases. Broadband service and affordability, however, have consistently lagged well behind demand and progress in information technology, with damaging results. The Internet revolution remains incomplete and threatens to stagnate if the situation continues.
In The Broadband Problem, economist and technology entrepreneur Charles H. Ferguson explains the causes and ramifications of this damaging bottleneck, and he offers suggestions on improving the current state of affairs. He asserts that current telecommunications law and policy have not provided sufficient levels of new entry, competition, and innovation in the local telecom market. The continuing dominance of ILECs (incumbent local exchange carriers) in that market impedes the healthy, and much-needed, development of an efficient broadband market. The result of these policy and market failures is inadequate technological progress, innovation, and productivity in advanced Internet services and telecommunication services generally.
The broadband problem is holding us back, and thus must be addressed and solved. With this important volume, Charles Ferguson has contributed mightily to that mission.
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Violence: Diverse Populations and Communities
Diane De Anda , and
Rosina M. Becerra
Manufacturer: Haworth Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
General
| Sociology
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Violence in Society
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General
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ASIN: 0789011638 |
Customer Reviews:
Brilliant analysis of US nuclear and military strategy.......2006-07-08
Some books don't date even when times change. This well-researched, clearly written, extremely scary analysis of US nuclear and military strategy was published in the 1980s, when there was a Red Menace, but its main points remain as valid and alarming today as when it was written.
Putting US nuclear strategy and weapons systems decisions in historical context, Axelrod and Kaku (both physics professors, one at Michigan, the other at CCNY) show how US nuclear policy fits into a global warfighting policy aimed at establishing absolute unilateral US dominance in any military conflict. Unlike many military and strategic analyses, the book puts the issues into a larger political and economic context, explaining US military policy as part of a general plan to establish economic control over both poorer third world nations with valuable natural resources and potential wealthy European or Japanese competitors for economic mastery.
The book establishes beyond a reasonable doubt, based on careful historical research and declassified government documents, that the US was never satisfied with the nuclear standoff in which nuclear weapons were never to be used because that would lead to global annihilation. Rather, US nuclear policy was a "warfighting" strategy based on the hope that nuclear weapons could be integrated into an "escalation ladder" of credible threats backed by the potential of actual nuclear warfare involving only "acceptable" casualties.
The idea of the US strategic planners and the Pentagon, Kaku and Axelrod show, was that conventional and counterinsurgency warfare would be backed by the capacity to use small "tactical" nuclear weapons either if US forces were endangered or to make a terrifying demonstration of US might. The then-Soviet Union would be kept out of such conflicts by the credible treat of a first strike on its missile silos with highly accurate ICBM warheads ("silo-busters") and effective anti-nuclear submarine warfare; some of the residual Soviet nuclear weapons could hopefully be neutralized by ballistic massile defense ("star wars"). Axelrod and Kaku show by case studies how the United States actually threatedned to use nuclear weapons in more than a score of cases that bear out this theory.
The alarming thing today is how little has changed. Although the USSR is no more, US policy still plainly seeks to dominate the third world and its economic resources by military might, and to maintain superiority over its allies and potential competitors by essentially the same means, as is shown by the Gulf War of 1990-91 and the current war in Iraq.
Work on tactical nuclear weapons, bunker-busters (talked of as possible weapons to be used against Iran in 2003-2006) more accurate ICBMs, and Star Wars -- now supposedly directed at the hypothetical threat from North Korea(!) -- continues at a very expensive pace. Axelrod and Kaku's book remaind essential reading for understanding both the Cold War and current American foreign and military policy.
A book everyone should own!.......2006-06-27
In a world where information was freely exchanged where the media existed to inform the public on the most important things, this book would be promoted as an essential for any person who claims to be informed. Instead, it is a secret, passed around by the knowledgeable, those not going along with the program, fighters for humanity.
From World War Two until the days of the Reagan Star Wars project when this book was written, THE UNITED STATES GOVERNMENT'S CENTRAL PLAN WAS TO BE ABLE TO LAUNCH A NUCLEAR WAR AGAINST THE SOVIET UNION AND PERHAPS CHINA.
This is proved in this book by documentation from United States government documents released through the Freedom of Information Act. In 1947, when the Berlin Crisis broke out, Truman sent the atomic bombers to England to launch war with the Soviet Union, but could not wage war because their were not enough atomic bombs (a chronic problem because until the early 1950s, atomic bombs made by the US only lasted a month). In the 1950s, when Truman recalled McArthur to Wake Island, it was to tell him that there were not enough atomic bombs for wars with both China and the USSR. McArthur could not launch war with China, because the USSR was the priority.
It is more widely known that the US offered to rescue the French colonialists from their defeat at Dien Bien Phu with a nuclear attack, but less known that in both the 1967 and 1973 wars, it was Washington's nuclear threats that guaranteed Israeli victories.
Those who claim the antiwar movement had no effect will be corrected by this book's coverage of Vietnam. Those of us who heard Nixon claim he had a secret plan to end the war, poh poh it at the time. But he did. He was planning to launch a nuclear attack on the borders of North Vietnam and China and North Vietnam at the end of 1969. He threatened this to the Vietnamese who refused to retreat in their continued struggle for national liberation. In the fall of 1969, Nixon met with his generals and J Edgar Hoover. They told him that the antiwar activity was so strong that his nuclear campaign could not be launched. If it was done, they told him, they would need to bring troops home from Vietnam to fight the opponents of the war here.
With the United States bruiting about the world challenging countries it has savaged like Korea and Iran for daring to defend themselves with nuclear weapons, it can never be forgotten that Washington has tried to hold the world through nuclear blackmail since World War II, and that only mechanical failures and political pressures against the advice of Washington has prevented nuclear war. It can never be forgotten that Washington still has enough nuclear weapons to incinerate the planet.
One of the most despicable persons on the planet, David Greenglass who aided the government frameup of his own sister and beloved brother-in-law Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, as atomic bomb spies, who claimed he aided Soviet espionage was once asked what he was most ashamed of. Despite his cold war credentials, Greenglass answered, "working on the Manhattan project (the US-British wartime effort to build the first a-bomb.)" Asked why, Greenglass replied, "the Russians didnt drop a bomb on anyone. Only the USA dropped an atomic bomb on people."
Even Greenglass knows
A great read.......2006-01-13
I am not reading this book right now, but my significant other is and he can't get enough of it! I recommend this book to anyone who is interested in how the U.S. got itself in and out of the situations it has over the last several decades.
The War to End All Wars?.......2003-04-22
Every time one thinks that the level of evil to which the military-industrial-corporate media can stoop has been reached, along comes more information to tell us we haven't yet reached that level.
Authors Kaku and Axelrod have produced a book written in the style I enjoy the most--using the government's own primary source documents to impeach them.
They document the insanity of our fathers using their own words to pitch them upon their own pitards.
The volume contains quotes from hitherto secret NSC and Joint Chiefs of Staff documents outlining the insantiy, the ends of destruction to which cold war warriors could go to "win" a war with the Soviet Union, or anyone else who dared to stand in the way of American imperialism.
Fast forward to the "first strike" of Bush against Iraq. In reading this volume, one can easily find that cold war warriors of the past developed the "first strike" and that Bush and Company have taken advantage of them to establish a Pax Americana by force ofarms to make the Middle East safe for both Israel and American oil and multi-national corporate interests.
The authors trace the development of American foreign policy clearly demonstrating to the reader how "crisis" utilized the twin principles of cold war policy development--escalation dominance and first strike--to achieve the goals of American foreign policy--making the world safe for their brand of "freedom."
The book traces the evolution of how, in at least a dozen episodes, foreign policy planners used the threat of America's nuclear monopoly to achieve its ends. In contrast to the official party line spewed forth by the corporate media, a series of plans were developed all predicated on the insane notion of "winnig" a nuclear war.
"To Win A Nuclear War" is the kind of book to keep at your side when some lard ass flag waver talks about using nuclear weapons for any purpose. If we learn nothing else from history, we should learn that no war is really winnable. Americans are all too eager to inflict this sort of damage as long as it is NIMBY.
The Perestroika Deception.......2002-08-22
In 1961, KGB defector Anitoliy Golitsyn told of a 40 year strategic deception plan to disarm the West in preparation for the final conquest of Communism. According to the plan, after an arms race, insurgent operatives would orchestrate mass peace movements while at the same time the USSR and ilk would engage in a final orgy of overt arms build up. Reagan served this all very well and when he "won" the Cold War, it must have been beyond the late Khrushchev's wildest dreams. Then came the "great fall" of 1989 - 1991, predicted by Golitsyn well prior (all according to plan.) Now the West are at their weakest and a restive Russia talks of restoration of the USSR whilst feigning cooperation in the "War on Terror." I sincerely hope the Pentagon has a plan for winning a nuclear war because today the odds are against us. We must start rearming immediately!
Book Description
The fully updated and revised edition of A Birder's Guide to Minnesota (ISBN 0964143704), formerly carried and still listed by Amazon.com. The 4th edition is a county-by-county guide to over 1,000 birding locations, including references and resources, an annotated list of 427 Minnesota birds, selected identification hints, and over 200 maps.
Customer Reviews:
Superb maps!.......2007-07-23
This guidebook for Minnesota was certainly a great addition to my birding library. It is definitely a fine sourcebook for the serious birder. The detailed maps for finding specific species are a tremendous aid. My husband and I found both the elusive Three-toed Woodpecker and the Black-backed Woodpecker in the areas indicated. I would recommend this book highly for the serious birder who is in the process of adding new species to their life list.
Books:
- Building Type Basics for Museums (Building Type Basics)
- Building Underground: The Design and Construction Handbook for Earth-Sheltered Houses
- Buildings of the Cotswolds
- California Crazy and Beyond: Roadside Vernacular Architecture
- California Interiors: Interieurs Californiens (Jumbo)
- CINCINNATI OBSERVED: ARCITECTURE AND HISTORY (URBAN LIFE & URBAN LANDSCAPE)
- City Center to Regional Mall: Architecture, the Automobile, and Retailing in Los Angeles, 1920-1950
- Complete Book Of Cordwood Masonry Housebuilding: The Earthwood Method
- Conserving Buildings: Guide to Techniques and Materials, Revised Edition
- Construction Graphics: A Practical Guide to Interpreting Working Drawings
Books Index
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