From Tropicality to Biodiversity

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Megan Raby
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Natural Resource ◽  
Scientific Concepts ◽  
New Paradigm ◽  
Tropical Biodiversity ◽  
American Tropics ◽  
National Forum ◽  
The Tropics ◽  
Biological Differences

Consciousness of tropical biodiversity exploded onto the scene in the 1980s following the 1986 National Forum on BioDiversity. Biodiversity was not a new concept to biologists, however. U.S. scientists’ engagement with life in the tropics already stretched back a century. During this time, scientists had struggled with questions of the biological differences of the tropics—especially its richness in species—and at the same time entangled themselves in U.S. corporate and government efforts to exploit tropical resources. American Tropics argues that both the key scientific concepts and the values embedded in the modern biodiversity discourse had significant precedents in biologists’ involvement in U.S. encounters with the tropical world over the course of the twentieth century, centered on the circum­Caribbean region. This book argues that the ideas, attitudes, and institutions forged at field sites in the colonies and neocolonies of the circum­Caribbean are crucial for understanding the emergence of this new paradigm in biology and conservation at the end of the century. Long before the BioDiversity Forum extended such ideas to the globe, U.S. biologists had begun both to articulate fundamental biological questions raised by the diversity of tropical life and to argue for its potential as a natural resource.

scholarly journals Aerological observations in the Tropics in the Early Twentieth Century

2013 ◽  
Vol 22 (3) ◽  
pp. 349-358 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stefan Brönnimann ◽  
Alexander Stickler
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
The Tropics

Improvisations of a Tropical Cartesianism

2011 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Fred Coelho
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Latin America ◽  
Third World ◽  
Reflection Index ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
Negative Dialectics ◽  
Fundamental Reflection ◽  
The Tropics

This article presents the contrasting views and theories formulated by European intellectuals such as Claude Lévis-Strauss and Max Bense on the situation of Brazil and Latin America in relation to the main centers of twentieth century criticism. It analyzes improvisation as a fundamental reflection index on the possibilities that third world countries have for negotiating the European Cartesian paradigm. If for some thinkers improvisation and its corollaries are proof that these countries and their people would live forever on the margins or in negative dialectics within the heritage of Enlightenment reason, for others it is precisely there--in the possibility of reinventing reason from hybridisms, strategic appropriations, and re-readings--that the creative and autonomous potentials in the post-colonial world lie. This article is situated precisely in the conflict between reason and the tropics, and looks to bring the debate up to date.

3. Why are some countries rich and others poor?

2018 ◽  
pp. 31-45
Author(s):  
Ian Goldin
Keyword(s):  
Economic Growth ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
South Korea ◽  
Natural Resource ◽  
First Century ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
The World ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Almost All ◽  
Development Trajectories

‘Why are some countries rich and others poor?’ considers various theories of economic growth, including Robert Solow’s widely used 1956 model, and charts the uneven development of countries around the world from the late nineteenth century, through the twentieth century, and into the twenty-first century. Some countries, such as Japan and South Korea, have seen miraculous economic growth, whereas countries such as Argentina and Uruguay have not experienced expected levels of growth. The factors that affect development trajectories include natural resource endowments, geography, history, institutions, politics, and power. While overall levels of poverty have declined, levels of inequality are rising in almost all countries.

Jean Sibelius's Violin Concerto

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tina K. Ramnarine
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
New Paradigm ◽  
Recording Technology ◽  
Violin Concerto ◽  
And Gender ◽  
The Russian Empire ◽  
Violin Playing ◽  
Political Figure ◽  
Early Training

This book highlights the unique insights that Jean Sibelius’s Violin Concerto in D Minor (op. 47) offers into the composer’s musical imagination, violin virtuosity, and connections between violin-playing traditions. It discusses the concerto’s cultural contexts, performers who are connected with its early history, and recordings of the work. Beginning with Sibelius’s early training as a violinist and his aspirations to be a virtuoso player, the book traces the composition of the concerto at a dramatic political moment in Finnish history. This concerto was composed when Finland, as an autonomous Grand Duchy within the Russian Empire, was going through a period of intense struggle for self-determination and protest against Russian imperial policies. Taking the concerto’s historical context into consideration leads to a new paradigm of the twentieth-century virtuoso as a political figure, which replaces nineteenth-century representations of the virtuoso as a magical figure. The book explores this paradigm by analyzing twentieth-century violin virtuosity in terms of labor, recording technology, and gender politics, especially the new possibilities for women aiming to develop musical careers. Ultimately, the book moves away from the compositional context of the concerto and a reading of the virtuoso as a political figure to reveal how Sibelius’s musical imagination prompts thinking about the long ecological histories of musical transmission and virtuosity.

scholarly journals Past and future decline of tropical pelagic biodiversity

2020 ◽  
Vol 117 (23) ◽  
pp. 12891-12896 ◽  
Author(s):  
Moriaki Yasuhara ◽  
Chih-Lin Wei ◽  
Michal Kucera ◽  
Mark J. Costello ◽  
Derek P. Tittensor ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Environmental Control ◽  
Research Question ◽  
Ocean Warming ◽  
Ice Age ◽  
Deep Time ◽  
Tropical Biodiversity ◽  
Diversity Gradient ◽  
Tropical Diversity ◽  
Distribution Shifts ◽  
The Tropics

A major research question concerning global pelagic biodiversity remains unanswered: when did the apparent tropical biodiversity depression (i.e., bimodality of latitudinal diversity gradient [LDG]) begin? The bimodal LDG may be a consequence of recent ocean warming or of deep-time evolutionary speciation and extinction processes. Using rich fossil datasets of planktonic foraminifers, we show here that a unimodal (or only weakly bimodal) diversity gradient, with a plateau in the tropics, occurred during the last ice age and has since then developed into a bimodal gradient through species distribution shifts driven by postglacial ocean warming. The bimodal LDG likely emerged before the Anthropocene and industrialization, and perhaps ∼15,000 y ago, indicating a strong environmental control of tropical diversity even before the start of anthropogenic warming. However, our model projections suggest that future anthropogenic warming further diminishes tropical pelagic diversity to a level not seen in millions of years.

The Engine or the Caboose? Resource Industries and Twentieth-Century Canadian Economic Performance

2007 ◽  
Vol 67 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-32 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ian Keay
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Empirical Evidence ◽  
Natural Resource ◽  
Economic Performance ◽  
Positive Impact ◽  
Rate Of Change ◽  
Domestic Economy ◽  
Intensive Production ◽  
Resource Endowment ◽  
Per Capita

The Canadian economy, already wealthy, diverse, and relatively industrial at the dawn of the twentieth century, had not yet outgrown its reliance on resource-intensive production. Empirical evidence indicates that the exploitation of Canada's natural resource endowment made direct and indirect contributions to the size and efficiency of the twentieth-century domestic economy. I conclude that the concentration of capital and labor in resource industries did not constrain the rate of change of Canadian real GNP per capita between 1900 and 1999, and it appears to have had a substantial positive impact on the level of real GNP per capita.

The Northern Ireland Conflict: New Wine in Old Bottles?

2000 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 307-322
Author(s):  
Sabine Wichert
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Social Identity ◽  
Northern Ireland ◽  
Internal Conflict ◽  
New Paradigm ◽  
Cambridge University ◽  
The Troubles ◽  
Northern Ireland Conflict ◽  
History Of

James Loughlin, The Ulster Question since 1945 (London: Macmillan, 1998), 151 pp., £10.99 (pb), ISBN 0–333–60616–7.David Harkness, Ireland in the Twentieth Century. Divided Island (London: Macmillan, 1996), 190 pp., £9.99 (pb), ISBN 0–333–56796–X.Thomas Hennessey, A History of Northern Ireland, 1920–1996 (London: Macmillan, 1997), 347 pp., £12.99 (pb), £40.00 (hb), ISBN 0–333–73162–X.Brian A. Follis, A State Under Siege. The Establishment of Northern Ireland, 1920–1925 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1995), 250 pp., £35.00 (hb), ISBN 0–198–20305–5.Dermot Keogh and Michael H. Haltzel, eds., Northern Ireland and the Politics of reconciliation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 256 pp., £35.00 (hb), ISBN 0–521–44430–6.William Crotty and David Schmitt, eds., Ireland and the Politics of Change (London/New York: Longman, 1999), 264 pp., £17.99 (pb), ISBN 0–582–32894–2.David Miller, ed., Rethinking Northern Ireland. Culture, Ideology and Colonialism. (London/New York: Longman, 1999), 344 pp., £17.99 (pb), ISBN 0–582–30287–0.Anthony D. Buckley and Mary Catherine Kenney, Negotiating Identity: Rhetoric, Metaphor, and Social Identity in Northern Ireland (Washington: Smithonian Institution Press, 1996), 270 pp., £34.75 (hb), ISBN 1–560–98520–8.John D. Brewer, with Gareth I. Higgins, Anti-Catholicism in Northern Ireland, 1600–1998: the mote and the beam (London: Macmillan, 1998), 248 pp., £16.99 (pb), ISBN 0–333–74635–X.During the last three decades, and accompanying the ‘troubles’, the literature on Northern Ireland has mushroomed. Within the last ten years two surveys have attempted to summarise and categorise the major interpretations. John Whyte's Interpreting Northern Ireland covered the 1970s and 1980s and came to the conclusion that traditional Unionist and nationalist interpretations, with their emphasis on external, that is British and Irish, forces as the cause for the problem, had begun to lose out to ‘internal conflict’ interpretations. He felt, however, that this approach, too, was coming to the end of its usefulness, and he expected the emergence of a new paradigm shortly.

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