The Beaver Manifesto

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The Beaver Manifesto

Author : Glynnis Hood
Publisher : Rocky Mountain Books Ltd
ISBN 13 : 1926855582
Total Pages : 146 pages
Book Rating : 4.9/5 (268 download)

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Book Synopsis The Beaver Manifesto by : Glynnis Hood

Download or read book The Beaver Manifesto written by Glynnis Hood and published by Rocky Mountain Books Ltd. This book was released on 2011 with total page 146 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Beavers are the great comeback story--a keystone species that survived ice ages, major droughts, the fur trade, urbanization and near extinction. Their ability to create and maintain aquatic habitats has endeared them to conservationists, but puts the beavers at odds with urban and industrial expansion. These conflicts reflect a dichotomy within our national identity. We place environment and our concept of wilderness as a key touchstone for promotion and celebration, while devoting significant financial and personal resources to combating "the beaver problem." We need to rethink our approach to environmental conflict in general, and our approach to species-specific conflicts in particular. Our history often celebrates our integration of environment into our identity, but our actions often reveal an exploitation of environment and celebration of its subjugation. Why the conflict with the beaver? It is one of the few species that refuses to play by our rules and continues to modify environments to meet its own needs and the betterment of so many other species, while at the same time showing humans that complete dominion over nature is not necessarily achievable.

The Beaver Manifesto

Author : Glynnis Hood
Publisher : Rocky Mountain Books Ltd
ISBN 13 : 1926855590
Total Pages : 144 pages
Book Rating : 4.9/5 (268 download)

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Book Synopsis The Beaver Manifesto by : Glynnis Hood

Download or read book The Beaver Manifesto written by Glynnis Hood and published by Rocky Mountain Books Ltd. This book was released on 2011-07-26 with total page 144 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Provocative, passionate and populist, RMB Manifestos are short and concise non-fiction books of literary, critical, and cultural studies. Beavers are the great comeback story—a keystone species that survived ice ages, major droughts, the fur trade, urbanization and near extinction. Their ability to create and maintain aquatic habitats has endeared them to conservationists, but puts the beavers at odds with urban and industrial expansion. These conflicts reflect a dichotomy within our national identity. We place environment and our concept of wilderness as a key touchstone for promotion and celebration, while devoting significant financial and personal resources to combating “the beaver problem.” We need to rethink our approach to environmental conflict in general, and our approach to species-specific conflicts in particular. Our history often celebrates our integration of environment into our identity, but our actions often reveal an exploitation of environment and celebration of its subjugation. Why the conflict with the beaver? It is one of the few species that refuses to play by our rules and continues to modify environments to meet its own needs and the betterment of so many other species, while at the same time showing humans that complete dominion over nature is not necessarily achievable.

Bringing Back the Beaver

Author : Derek Gow
Publisher : Chelsea Green Publishing
ISBN 13 : 1603589961
Total Pages : 210 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (35 download)

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Book Synopsis Bringing Back the Beaver by : Derek Gow

Download or read book Bringing Back the Beaver written by Derek Gow and published by Chelsea Green Publishing. This book was released on 2020 with total page 210 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A bold new voice in nature writing, from the front lines of Britain's rewilding movement Bringing Back the Beaver is farmer-turned-ecologist Derek Gow's inspirational and often riotously funny firsthand account of how the movement to rewild the British landscape with beavers has become the single most dramatic and subversive nature conservation act of the modern era. Since the early 1990s - in the face of outright opposition from government, landowning elites and even some conservation professionals - Gow has imported, quarantined and assisted the reestablishment of beavers in waterways across England and Scotland. In addition to detailing the ups and downs of rewilding beavers, Bringing Back the Beaver makes a passionate case as to why the return of one of nature's great problem solvers will be critical as part of a sustainable fix for flooding and future drought, whilst ensuring the creation of essential lifescapes that enable the broadest possible spectrum of Britain's wildlife to thrive"--

Semi-aquatic Mammals

Author : Glynnis A. Hood
Publisher : JHU Press
ISBN 13 : 142143881X
Total Pages : 453 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (214 download)

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Book Synopsis Semi-aquatic Mammals by : Glynnis A. Hood

Download or read book Semi-aquatic Mammals written by Glynnis A. Hood and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2020-10-13 with total page 453 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A groundbreaking review of the seldom-studied semi-aquatic freshwater mammals, covering biology, behavior, and conservation. Semi-aquatic mammals are some of the rarest and most endangered mammals on earth. What binds them together in the minds of biologists, despite their diverse taxa and body forms, are evolutionary traits that allow them to succeed in two worlds—spending some time on land and some in the water. Semi-aquatic Mammals fills a crucial void in the literature by highlighting the important ecological roles and curious biology of these remarkable animals. In this unique book, wildlife ecologist Glynnis A. Hood presents the first comprehensive examination of a global suite of 140 freshwater semi-aquatic mammals. Each one has overcome the distinct ecological challenges of thriving in both aquatic and terrestrial habitats as part of everyday life. Covering millions of years, Hood's exploration begins with the extinct otter-like Buxolestes and extends to consider the geographical, physical, behavioral, and reproductive traits of its present-day counterparts. Hood explains how semi-aquatic mammals are able to navigate a viscous environment with almost no resistance to heat loss, reveals how they maintain the physical skills necessary to avoid predation and counter a more thermally changeable environment, and describes the array of adaptations that facilitate success in their multifaceted habitats. She also addresses specific conservation challenges faced by these mammals. Her analysis takes readers to the haunts of intriguing semi-aquatic mammals from around the world, • introducing the "paradoxical platypus," an Australian egg-laying monotreme that detects prey through electroreception • venturing into the swamps and mangroves of Southeast Asia, where fishing cats wave their paws above the water's surface to lure prey • trawling the streams and lakes of South America, where the female water opossum uses its backward-facing pouch to keep her babies warm during deep dives • spending time with species that engineer freshwater habitats into more productive and complex systems, including North American beavers and Africa's common hippopotamus Featuring award-winning artist Meaghan Brierley's stunning illustrations throughout, Semi-aquatic Mammals is an unparalleled reference on some of the world's most tenacious and fascinating mammals.

A Hacker Manifesto

Author : McKenzie Wark
Publisher : Harvard University Press
ISBN 13 : 0674044843
Total Pages : 209 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (74 download)

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Book Synopsis A Hacker Manifesto by : McKenzie Wark

Download or read book A Hacker Manifesto written by McKenzie Wark and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2009-06-30 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A double is haunting the world--the double of abstraction, the virtual reality of information, programming or poetry, math or music, curves or colorings upon which the fortunes of states and armies, companies and communities now depend. The bold aim of this book is to make manifest the origins, purpose, and interests of the emerging class responsible for making this new world--for producing the new concepts, new perceptions, and new sensations out of the stuff of raw data. "A Hacker Manifesto" deftly defines the fraught territory between the ever more strident demands by drug and media companies for protection of their patents and copyrights and the pervasive popular culture of file sharing and pirating. This vexed ground, the realm of so-called "intellectual property," gives rise to a whole new kind of class conflict, one that pits the creators of information--the hacker class of researchers and authors, artists and biologists, chemists and musicians, philosophers and programmers--against a possessing class who would monopolize what the hacker produces. Drawing in equal measure on Guy Debord and Gilles Deleuze, "A Hacker Manifesto" offers a systematic restatement of Marxist thought for the age of cyberspace and globalization. In the widespread revolt against commodified information, McKenzie Wark sees a utopian promise, beyond the property form, and a new progressive class, the hacker class, who voice a shared interest in a new information commons.

The Earth Manifesto

Author : David Tracey
Publisher : Rocky Mountain Books Ltd
ISBN 13 : 1927330890
Total Pages : 134 pages
Book Rating : 4.9/5 (273 download)

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Book Synopsis The Earth Manifesto by : David Tracey

Download or read book The Earth Manifesto written by David Tracey and published by Rocky Mountain Books Ltd. This book was released on 2013 with total page 134 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: We live in critical times. Choices we make daily will affect the future of life itself. Years from now children will study our era on the brink and ask their elders "When the planet was burning, what did you do?" Problems as big as the world are daunting, but solutions are at hand, within each of us. The Earth Manifesto: Saving Nature with Engaged Ecology offers an approach to regain control of our environmental destiny by rediscovering our affinity for nature and then acting to preserve it. David Tracey's first RMB Manifesto is rooted in common sense and revolves around the author's "Six Laws of Engaged Ecology", which moves us from theory, in concepts such as interdependence and the wilderness found inour minds, to practice with explanations of ground-truthing and the ways in which we can all work toward creating sustainable communities through shared environmental principles.

Beaver

Author : Rachel Poliquin
Publisher : Reaktion Books
ISBN 13 : 1780234562
Total Pages : 224 pages
Book Rating : 4.7/5 (82 download)

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Book Synopsis Beaver by : Rachel Poliquin

Download or read book Beaver written by Rachel Poliquin and published by Reaktion Books. This book was released on 2015-05-15 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With unique fish-like tails, chainsaw teeth, a pungent musk, and astonishing building skills, beavers are unlike any other creature in the world. Not surprisingly, the extraordinary beaver has played a fascinating role in human history and has inspired a rich cultural tradition for millennia. In Beaver, Rachel Poliquin explores four exceptional beaver features: beaver musk, beaver fur, beaver architecture, and beaver ecology, tracing the long evolutionary history of the two living species and revealing them to be survivors capable of withstanding ice ages, major droughts, and all predators, except one: humans. Widely hunted for their fur, beavers were a driving force behind the colonization of North America and remain, today, Canada’s national symbol. Poliquin examines depictions of beavers in Aesop’s Fables, American mythology, contemporary art, and environmental politics, and she explores the fact and fictions of beaver chain gangs, beaver-flavored ice cream, and South America’s ever-growing beaver population. And yes, she even examines the history of the sexual euphemism. Poliquin delights in the strange tales and improbable history of the beaver. Written in an accessible style for a broad readership, this beautifully illustrated book will appeal to anyone who enjoys long-forgotten animal lore and extraordinary animal biology.

The Feminine Mystique

Author : Betty Friedan
Publisher : W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN 13 : 0393322572
Total Pages : 587 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (933 download)

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Book Synopsis The Feminine Mystique by : Betty Friedan

Download or read book The Feminine Mystique written by Betty Friedan and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2001-09-17 with total page 587 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The book that changed the consciousness of a country—and the world. Landmark, groundbreaking, classic—these adjectives barely describe the earthshaking and long-lasting effects of Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique. This is the book that defined "the problem that has no name," that launched the Second Wave of the feminist movement, and has been awakening women and men with its insights into social relations, which still remain fresh, ever since. A national bestseller, with over 1 million copies sold.

Beaverland

Author : Leila Philip
Publisher : Twelve
ISBN 13 : 9781538755204
Total Pages : 0 pages
Book Rating : 4.7/5 (552 download)

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Book Synopsis Beaverland by : Leila Philip

Download or read book Beaverland written by Leila Philip and published by Twelve. This book was released on 2024-01-02 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The New York Times Editors' Choice NPR Science Friday Book Club Selection An intimate and revelatory dive into the world of the beaver--the wonderfully weird rodent that has surprisingly shaped American history and may save its ecological future. From award-winning writer Leila Philip, BEAVERLAND is a masterful work of narrative science writing, a book that highlights, though history and contemporary storytelling, how this weird rodent plays an oversized role in American history and its future. She follows fur trappers who lead her through waist high water, fur traders and fur auctioneers, as well as wildlife managers, PETA activists, Native American environmental vigilantes, scientists, engineers, and the colorful group of activists known as beaver believers. Beginning with the early trans-Atlantic trade in North America, Leila Philip traces the beaver's profound influence on our nation's early economy and feverish western expansion, its first corporations and multi-millionaires. In her pursuit of this weird and wonderful animal, she introduces us to people whose lives are devoted to the beaver, including a Harvard scientist from the Blackfeet Reservation in Montana, who uses drones to create 3-dimensional images of beaver dams; and an environmental restoration consultant in the Chesapeake whose nickname is the "beaver whisperer". What emerges is a poignant personal narrative, a startling portrait of the secretive world of the contemporary fur trade, and an engrossing ecological and historical investigation of these heroic animals who, once trapped to the point of extinction, have returned to the landscape as one of the greatest conservation stories of the 20th century. Beautifully written and impeccably researched, BEAVERLAND reveals the profound ways in which one odd creature and the trade surrounding it has shaped history, culture, and our environment.

The Beaver

Author : Dietland Müller-Schwarze
Publisher : Cornell University Press
ISBN 13 : 9780801440984
Total Pages : 228 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (49 download)

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Book Synopsis The Beaver by : Dietland Müller-Schwarze

Download or read book The Beaver written by Dietland Müller-Schwarze and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2003 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Beavers can and do dramatically change the landscape. The beaver is a keystone species their skills as foresters and engineers create and maintain ponds and wetlands that increase biodiversity, purify water, and prevent large-scale flooding. Biologists have long studied their daily and seasonal routines, family structures, and dispersal patterns. As human development encroaches into formerly wild areas, property owners and government authorities need new, nonlethal strategies for dealing with so-called nuisance beavers. At the same time, the complex behavior of beavers intrigues visitors at parks and other wildlife viewing sites because it is relatively easy to observe.In an up-to-date, exhaustively illustrated, and comprehensive book on beaver biology and management, Dietland Muller-Schwarze and Lixing Sun gather a wealth of scientific knowledge about both the North American and Eurasian beaver species. The Beaver is designed to satisfy the curiosity and answer the questions of anyone with an interest in these animals, from students who enjoy watching beaver ponds at nature centers to homeowners who hope to protect their landscaping. Photographs taken by the authors document every aspect of beaver behavior and biology, the variety of their constructions, and the habitats that depend on their presence. Beaver facts: Just as individual beavers shape their immediate surroundings, so did the distribution of beavers across North America influence the paths of English and French explorers and traders. As a result of the fur trade, beavers were wiped out across large areas of the United States. Reintroduction efforts led to the widespread establishment of these resilient animals, and now they are found throughout North America, Europe, and parts of the southern hemisphere. Beaver meadows provided early settlers with level, fertile pastures and hayfields. Based on the fossil record, the smallest extinct beaver species were the size of a muskrat, and the largest may have reached the size of a black bear (five to six times as large as today's North American beavers). Beaver-gnawed wood has been found alongside the skeleton of a mastodon. Some beavers remain in the home lodge for an extra year to assist their parents in raising younger siblings. They feed, groom, and guard the newborn kits. In 1600, beaver ponds covered eleven percent of the upper Mississippi and Missouri Rivers' watershed above Thebes, Illinois. Restoring only 3 percent of the original wetlands might suffice to prevent catastrophic floods such as those in the early 1990s."

Eager

Author : Ben Goldfarb
Publisher : Chelsea Green Publishing
ISBN 13 : 160358739X
Total Pages : 314 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (35 download)

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Book Synopsis Eager by : Ben Goldfarb

Download or read book Eager written by Ben Goldfarb and published by Chelsea Green Publishing. This book was released on 2018 with total page 314 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Our modern idea of what a healthy landscape looks like and how it functions is distorted by the fur trade that once trapped out millions of beavers from North America's lakes and rivers. Goldfarb shares the powerful story about one of the world's most influential species. He explains how North America was colonized, how our landscapes have changed over the centuries, and how beavers can help us fight drought, flooding, wildfire, extinction, and the ravages of climate change. -- adapted from jacket

Give Us Liberty

Author : Dick Armey
Publisher : Harper Collins
ISBN 13 : 0062045458
Total Pages : 290 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (62 download)

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Book Synopsis Give Us Liberty by : Dick Armey

Download or read book Give Us Liberty written by Dick Armey and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2011-08-30 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Give Us Liberty is written for every American who is ready to stand up to the federal government’s unprecedented power, spending, and intrusion on personal freedom. As millions are realizing, our country’s future has been dangerously compromised as the national debt spirals out of sight to pay for a litany of irresponsible federal policies: “Obamacare,” Wall Street sweetheart deals, liberals’ pet social programs, Congressional pork, foreign aid, and new military adventures. Dick Armey and Matt Kibbe–economists and influential supporters of Tea Party activists and candidates across the country–explain what’s at stake, why limited government is the answer to our crisis, and how we can renew American prosperity by studying the lessons of the revolutionary era. This paperback edition also features a new foreword by Glenn Beck.

Burning the Books

Author : Richard Ovenden
Publisher : Harvard University Press
ISBN 13 : 0674241207
Total Pages : 321 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (742 download)

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Book Synopsis Burning the Books by : Richard Ovenden

Download or read book Burning the Books written by Richard Ovenden and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2020-10-13 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The director of the famed Bodleian Libraries at Oxford narrates the global history of the willful destruction—and surprising survival—of recorded knowledge over the past three millennia. Libraries and archives have been attacked since ancient times but have been especially threatened in the modern era. Today the knowledge they safeguard faces purposeful destruction and willful neglect; deprived of funding, libraries are fighting for their very existence. Burning the Books recounts the history that brought us to this point. Richard Ovenden describes the deliberate destruction of knowledge held in libraries and archives from ancient Alexandria to contemporary Sarajevo, from smashed Assyrian tablets in Iraq to the destroyed immigration documents of the UK Windrush generation. He examines both the motivations for these acts—political, religious, and cultural—and the broader themes that shape this history. He also looks at attempts to prevent and mitigate attacks on knowledge, exploring the efforts of librarians and archivists to preserve information, often risking their own lives in the process. More than simply repositories for knowledge, libraries and archives inspire and inform citizens. In preserving notions of statehood recorded in such historical documents as the Declaration of Independence, libraries support the state itself. By preserving records of citizenship and records of the rights of citizens as enshrined in legal documents such as the Magna Carta and the decisions of the US Supreme Court, they support the rule of law. In Burning the Books, Ovenden takes a polemical stance on the social and political importance of the conservation and protection of knowledge, challenging governments in particular, but also society as a whole, to improve public policy and funding for these essential institutions.

The Revolt of The Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium

Author : Martin Gurri
Publisher : Stripe Press
ISBN 13 : 1953953344
Total Pages : 465 pages
Book Rating : 4.9/5 (539 download)

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Book Synopsis The Revolt of The Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium by : Martin Gurri

Download or read book The Revolt of The Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium written by Martin Gurri and published by Stripe Press. This book was released on 2018-12-04 with total page 465 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How insurgencies—enabled by digital devices and a vast information sphere—have mobilized millions of ordinary people around the world. In the words of economist and scholar Arnold Kling, Martin Gurri saw it coming. Technology has categorically reversed the information balance of power between the public and the elites who manage the great hierarchical institutions of the industrial age: government, political parties, the media. The Revolt of the Public tells the story of how insurgencies, enabled by digital devices and a vast information sphere, have mobilized millions of ordinary people around the world. Originally published in 2014, The Revolt of the Public is now available in an updated edition, which includes an extensive analysis of Donald Trump’s improbable rise to the presidency and the electoral triumphs of Brexit. The book concludes with a speculative look forward, pondering whether the current elite class can bring about a reformation of the democratic process and whether new organizing principles, adapted to a digital world, can arise out of the present political turbulence.

Beaverland

Author : Leila Philip
Publisher : Twelve
ISBN 13 : 1538755211
Total Pages : 393 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (387 download)

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Book Synopsis Beaverland by : Leila Philip

Download or read book Beaverland written by Leila Philip and published by Twelve. This book was released on 2022-12-06 with total page 393 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An intimate and revelatory dive into the world of the beaver—the wonderfully weird rodent that has surprisingly shaped American history and may save its ecological future. From award-winning writer Leila Philip, Beaverland is a masterful work of narrative science writing, a book that highlights, though history and contemporary storytelling, how this weird rodent plays an oversized role in American history and its future. She follows fur trappers who lead her through waist high water, fur traders and fur auctioneers, as well as wildlife managers, PETA activists, Native American environmental vigilantes, scientists, engineers, and the colorful group of activists known as beaver believers. Beginning with the early trans-Atlantic trade in North America, Leila Philip traces the beaver’s profound influence on our nation’s early economy and feverish western expansion, its first corporations and multi-millionaires. In her pursuit of this weird and wonderful animal, she introduces us to people whose lives are devoted to the beaver, including a Harvard scientist from the Blackfeet Reservation in Montana, who uses drones to create 3-dimensional images of beaver dams; and an environmental restoration consultant in the Chesapeake whose nickname is the “beaver whisperer”. What emerges is a poignant personal narrative, a startling portrait of the secretive world of the contemporary fur trade, and an engrossing ecological and historical investigation of these heroic animals who, once trapped to the point of extinction, have returned to the landscape as one of the greatest conservation stories of the 20th century. Beautifully written and impeccably researched, Beaverland reveals the profound ways in which one odd creature and the trade surrounding it has shaped history, culture, and our environment. The New York Times Editors' Choice NPR Science Friday Book Club Selection

In Praise of Copying

Author : Marcus Boon
Publisher : Harvard University Press
ISBN 13 : 0674047834
Total Pages : 294 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (74 download)

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Book Synopsis In Praise of Copying by : Marcus Boon

Download or read book In Praise of Copying written by Marcus Boon and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2010 with total page 294 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is devoted to a deceptively simple but original argument: that copying is an essential part of being human, that the ability to copy is worthy of celebration, and that, without recognizing how integral copying is to being human, we cannot understand ourselves or the world we live in. In spite of the laws, stigmas, and anxieties attached to it, the word “copying” permeates contemporary culture, shaping discourse on issues from hip hop to digitization to gender reassignment, and is particularly crucial in legal debates concerning intellectual property and copyright. Yet as a philosophical concept, copying remains poorly understood. Working comparatively across cultures and times, Marcus Boon undertakes an examination of what this word means—historically, culturally, philosophically—and why it fills us with fear and fascination. He argues that the dominant legal-political structures that define copying today obscure much broader processes of imitation that have constituted human communities for ages and continue to shape various subcultures today. Drawing on contemporary art, music and film, the history of aesthetics, critical theory, and Buddhist philosophy and practice, In Praise of Copying seeks to show how and why copying works, what the sources of its power are, and the political stakes of renegotiating the way we value copying in the age of globalization.

Virtual Menageries

Author : Jody Berland
Publisher : MIT Press
ISBN 13 : 026235201X
Total Pages : 325 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (623 download)

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Book Synopsis Virtual Menageries by : Jody Berland

Download or read book Virtual Menageries written by Jody Berland and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2019-04-16 with total page 325 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The close interdependency of animal emissaries and new media from early European colonial encounters with the exotic to today's proliferation of animals in digital networks. From cat videos to corporate logos, digital screens and spaces are crowded with animal bodies. In Virtual Menageries, Jody Berland examines the role of animals in the spread of global communications. Her richly illustrated study links the contemporary proliferation of animals on social media to the collection of exotic animals in the formative years of transcontinental exploration and expansion. By tracing previously unseen parallels across the history of exotic and digital menageries, Berland shows how and why animals came to bridge peoples, territories, and technologies in the expansion of colonial and capitalist cultures. Berland's genealogy of the virtual menagerie begins in 1414 when a ruler in Bengal sent a Kenyan giraffe to join a Chinese emperor's menagerie. It maps the beaver's role in the colonial conquest of Canada and examines the appearances of animals in early moving pictures. The menagerie is reinvented for the digital age when image and sound designers use parts or images of animals to ensure the affective promise and commercial spread of an emergent digital infrastructure. These animal images are emissaries that enliven and domesticate the ever-expanding field of mediation. Virtual Menageries offers a unique account of animals and animal images as mediators that encourage complicated emotional, economic, and aesthetic investment in changing practices of connection.