The Unconstructable Earth

2018 ◽  
pp. 165-178
Author(s):  
Frédéric Neyrat
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Living Organism ◽  
The United States ◽  
John Muir ◽  
The Earth ◽  
James Lovelock ◽  
Gaia Theory

In chapter 13 Neyrat summarizes a variety of conceptions of of the Earth conceived from various actors, from the early founding thinkers of the environmental and ecology movements in the United States such as Aldo Lepold and John Muir to more recent scientific conceptions of the Earth as a cybernetic living organism proposed by the celebrated scientist James Lovelock and his Gaia theory or Carolyn Merchant’s conception that each part of the ecosystem contributes to the health of the entire ecosystem as a whole. Neyrat goes on to show that what he terms minoritarian discourses refuse to consider the Earth as something that is mechanical in any way and that it is a living organism in its own right. These minoritarian discourses are in complete contrast to the variety of geo-constructivist discourses that today see the Earth as something technologically manageable.

II. The United States of Lyncherdom

Prospects ◽  
2000 ◽  
Vol 25 ◽  
pp. 139-150
Author(s):  
Mark Twain
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
The United States ◽  
The State ◽  
Single Sample ◽  
Chinese Christians ◽  
The Earth ◽  
The World ◽  
The One

And so Missouri has fallen, that great State! Certain of her children have joined the lynchers, and the smirch is upon the rest of us. That handful of her children have given us a character and labeled us with a name; and to the dwellers in the four quarters of the earth we are “lynchers,” now, and ever shall be. For the world will not stop and think – it never does, it is not its way; its way is to generalize from a single sample. It will not say “Those Missourians have been busy eighty years in building an honorable good name for themselves; these hundred lynchers down in the corner of the State are not real Missourians, they are bastards.” No, that truth will not enter its mind; it will generalize from the one or two misleading samples and say “The Missourians are lynchers.” It has no reflection, no logic, no sense of proportion. With it, figures go for nothing; to it, figures reveal nothing, it cannot reason upon them rationally; it is Brother J. J. infinitely multiplied; it would say, with him, that China is being swiftly and surely Christianized, since 9 Chinese Christians are being made every day; and it would fail, with him, to notice that the fact that 33,000 pagans are born there every day, damages the argument. It would J-J Missouri, and say “There are a hundred lynchers there, therefore the Missourians are lynchers;” the considerable fact that there are two and a half million Missourians who are not lynchers would not affect their verdict any more than it would affect Bro. J. J.'s.

The Neo/Bio/Colonial Hot Zone

1998 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 233-252 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lisa Lynch
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
The United States ◽  
African Origin ◽  
Half Century ◽  
Future Role ◽  
The Earth ◽  
Global Pandemic ◽  
Hot Zone

This article explores the proliferation of nonfiction narratives which warn of an impending global pandemic of African origin. Through a reading of four texts — Richard Preston's The Hot Zone, Laurie Garrett's The Coming Plague, Richard Kaplan's The Ends of the Earth, and Jeffrey Goldberg's ‘Our Africa Problem’ — the author argues that such pandemic narratives reflect unease about the United States' current and future role in Africa or other non-Western places, after a half-century of largely unsuccessful ‘development’. Second, plague tales reflect anxieties about environmental devastation in Africa and elsewhere. The article concludes that the most frightening aspect of these contemporary ‘plague tales' is the solutions they suggest to the ‘problem’ of a coming plague.

Proportionate Use

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mathias Risse
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Global Justice ◽  
Illegal Immigration ◽  
Civil Law ◽  
The United States ◽  
Physical Aspect ◽  
Collective Ownership ◽  
The Earth ◽  
Adverse Possession ◽  
The Relationship

This chapter examines the relationship between immigration and collective ownership of the earth, and whether the physical aspect of immigration provides constraints on immigration policy. The fact that the earth is originally collectively owned must affect how communities can regulate access to what they occupy. The chapter first considers an account of relative over- and underuse of original resources before discussing illegal immigration in the United States, using a parallel to the civil law notion of “adverse possession” to argue that, under certain conditions, illegal immigration is morally unobjectionable. It then formulates conditions under which it would be reasonable for co-owners to refrain from entering certain regions, even though they would violate no duties of justice by doing so. This proposal is part of the overall approach to global justice that pluralist internationalism develops.

John Muir and the Roots of American Environmentalism

1994 ◽  
Author(s):  
Donald Worster
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Large Degree ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Body ◽  
Snake Bite ◽  
Early America ◽  
Industrial Capitalism ◽  
John Muir ◽  
In The Wild ◽  
Almost All

In the wild garden of an early America there coiled and crawled the devil’s own plenty of poisonous vipers—cottonmouths, copperheads, coral snakes, the whole nasty family of rattlers and sidewinders. A naturalist roaming far from the settlements regularly ran the risk of a fatal snake bite. Fortunately, he was reassured by the field experts of the day, the deadly reptile always furnishes its own antidote. It conceals itself in the very plants whose roots can counteract its poison, plants like the so-called “Indian snakeroot.” As the viper sank its sharp fangs into your leg, you simply pulled up the roots of that plant, quickly chewed them down, and laughed in the viper’s face. You were instantly immune. How many backwoods naturalists and hunters died from believing that bit of advice is not known. Science, ever improving its hypotheses, now suggests carrying a snakebite kit in your pack or calling in a helicopter. But before we dismiss the old advice as completely foolish, we might ask whether it might not have had some useful, genuine logic in it. Sometimes the remedy for wounds does indeed lie near at hand among the shrubs and weeds in which the reptile lives; and sometimes dangerous forces do indeed suggest, or even contain, their own antidote. Take, for instance, the case of North America’s continuing environmental degradation. What we humans have done over the past five hundred years to maim this continent and tear apart its fabric of life is in large degree the consequence of the Judeo-Christian religious ethos and its modern secular offspring—science, industrial capitalism, and technology. I would put almost all the blame on the modern secular offspring, but I have to agree that religion too has been a deadly viper that has left its marks on the body of nature. Paradoxically, I would add what no one else seems to have noticed: an Indian snakeroot for this venom has appeared in the reptile’s own nest. The antidote for environmental destruction has been a movement called environmentalism and that movement has, in the United States, owed much of its program, temperament, and drive to the influence of Protestantism.

The continuing threat of nuclear war

2008 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joseph Cirincione
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Nuclear Weapons ◽  
The United States ◽  
Nuclear War ◽  
The North ◽  
The Earth ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
The World ◽  
Nuclear Winter

The American poet Robert Frost famously mused on whether the world will end in fire or in ice. Nuclear weapons can deliver both. The fire is obvious: modern hydrogen bombs duplicate on the surface of the earth the enormous thermonuclear energies of the Sun, with catastrophic consequences. But it might be a nuclear cold that kills the planet. A nuclear war with as few as 100 hundred weapons exploded in urban cores could blanket the Earth in smoke, ushering in a years-long nuclear winter, with global droughts and massive crop failures. The nuclear age is now entering its seventh decade. For most of these years, citizens and officials lived with the constant fear that long-range bombers and ballistic missiles would bring instant, total destruction to the United States, the Soviet Union, many other nations, and, perhaps, the entire planet. Fifty years ago, Nevil Shute’s best-selling novel, On the Beach, portrayed the terror of survivors as they awaited the radioactive clouds drifting to Australia from a northern hemisphere nuclear war. There were then some 7000 nuclear weapons in the world, with the United States outnumbering the Soviet Union 10 to 1. By the 1980s, the nuclear danger had grown to grotesque proportions. When Jonathan Schell’s chilling book, The Fate of the Earth, was published in 1982, there were then almost 60,000 nuclear weapons stockpiled with a destructive force equal to roughly 20,000 megatons (20 billion tons) of TNT, or over 1 million times the power of the Hiroshima bomb. President Ronald Reagan’s ‘Star Wars’ anti-missile system was supposed to defeat a first-wave attack of some 5000 Soviet SS-18 and SS-19 missile warheads streaking over the North Pole. ‘These bombs’, Schell wrote, ‘were built as “weapons” for “war”, but their significance greatly transcends war and all its causes and outcomes. They grew out of history, yet they threaten to end history. They were made by men, yet they threaten to annihilate man’.

Enhanced Oil-recovery and Its Environmental and Economic Implications in the United States

1981 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 5-18 ◽  
Author(s):  
Douglas Argyle Campbell
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Enhanced Oil Recovery ◽  
Oil Recovery ◽  
Oil Production ◽  
The United States ◽  
Chemical Processes ◽  
Environmental Research ◽  
Thermal Processes ◽  
Microbiological Processes ◽  
The Earth

This survey has described the foreseeable environmental and economic impacts of enhanced oil-recovery (EOR) on U.S. oil production between 1980 and 2000. It has indicated that EOR production may be expected to rise from the approximately 4% of total U.S. oil production in 1980, to the projected approximations of 10.5% in 1985, 18.5% in 1990, 23% in 1995, and perhaps 30% in 2000. These percentages are substantial, particularly as this form of oil production has been, up until recently, quite limited. Many of the processes are still in the laboratory stage of development—particularly chemical and microbiological processes. With continued laboratory experimentation and field research, it is possible that the percentages could be even greater than the above suggestions as we reach into the 21st Century.The potential for EOR is very considerable and probably great, as it could involve some two-thirds of all the oil already identified in the United States and assumed to be unrecoverable by primary or secondary means. The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) has given important incentives to the EOR industry to make such increased production worth while through raising prices to compensate for the cost of equipment, and deducting expenditure on such equipment from a new ‘Windfall Profit Tax’.Along with EOR's economic potential, there are two major ecological dangers: air pollution through thermal processes, and ground-water pollution through chemical processes. It is essential to the well-being of the United States that clean air standards be adhered to, and that the equipment necessary to purify the air (particularly in California) be available and operate to reduce emissions.A great deal more research needs to be undertaken towards developing safeguards to ensure that drinkingwater is not contaminated by dangerous chemicals which may be used in ‘chemical flooding’ of depleted oil-wells. Many of these chemicals have merely ‘come out of the laboratory’ and are sold by chemical companies without sufficient field-testing. How far these chemicals could travel underground must still be determined. It is also important to ensure that carbon dioxide, fed into a geological formation, can be recaptured and re-injected without escaping into the atmosphere, where there is the potential danger of a global ‘greenhouse effect’ upon the world's temperature. Finally, it is important to safeguard the Earth against microbes which could be injected into its geological strata without sufficient knowledge of their impact on the ecology of the Earth. Thus, much environmental research will be called for with these new methods of producing oil for Man's use.This study has reviewed the four major methods of EOR that are currently being utilized or proposed— thermal processes, miscible and semi-miscible processes, chemical processes, and microbiological processes, and found that they could all have ongoing possibilities.Given appropriate environmental safeguards, EOR should become a major force in the production of energy for the United States over the next 20 years, and it seems reasonable to expect that much the same could apply to other parts of the world. However, it is important that safeguarding the environment should guide the DOE in terms of its incentive programmes for specific processes.

Global Offshore Hazardous Materials Sites GIS

2004 ◽  
Vol 38 (3) ◽  
pp. 36-43 ◽  
Author(s):  
John A. Lindsay ◽  
Robert Aguirre
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Information System ◽  
Spatial Data ◽  
Hazardous Materials ◽  
The United States ◽  
Easy Access ◽  
Commercial Fishing ◽  
The Earth ◽  
History Of ◽  
Associated Data

Underwater dumpsites or hazardous material sites lie in every ocean on the earth. A geographic information system (GIS) project documents the locations and associated data of Global Offshore Hazardous Materials Sites (GOHMS) potentially posing threats to human health, safety, navigation, commercial fishing, and the environment. Nearly 350 sites are currently in the project. This paper discusses some of the history of hazardous materials disposal and loss at sea, primarily off the United States coast between 1945 and 1970 when few guidelines existed to geographically document an underwater site. Although not publicly distributed at present, the GOHMS GIS project is intended to add value to existing historical information by providing site investigators and responders easy access to waste stream locations and other spatial data through NOAA's Office of Response and Restoration and the National Marine Sanctuaries Program.

scholarly journals Géomorphologie : géographie globale – géographie totale – associations internationales

2005 ◽  
Vol 8 (16) ◽  
pp. 199-218 ◽  
Author(s):  
Louis-Edmond Hamelin
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Subject Matter ◽  
International Association ◽  
The United States ◽  
Physical Sciences ◽  
Geographical Union ◽  
International Geographical ◽  
The Earth ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Made In

The great advances that geomorphology has made in recent years make necessary a critical re-examination of the relationships between this science and the field of geography. Is geomorphology truly geographical ? And if not, how can it become so ? Geomorphology has its roots in geology and was, of course, not designed to meet the specific needs of geographers. Under the leadership of W. M. Davis, geographers eventually adopted the study of geomorphology but did Utile to adapt it to particular purposes of their discipline. Most geographers can never aspire to true excellence in geomorphology because of their generally inadequate training in the physical sciences. We have found that most geographers tend to fall into one of four groups : 1. Those who consider themselves to be geomorphologists (about one-fourth of all geographers) ; 2. Those who just try to be informed in geomorphology ; 3. Those who ignore the existence of geomorphology ; 4. The « complete » geographer who practices a « functional » geomorphology. It also appears that the majority of geographers do not consider land-man relations to be their principal field of interest. The definition that we as geographers give to geography tends to sanction the kind of geography that we are capable of doing. For example, the classical géographie globale, which is characterized by an explanatory description of a complex of physical and human eclectic elements, does not normally require either a « complete » or a genetic geomorphology ; also, complex techniques of geomorphological investigation are not essential. Of greater importance is a geomorphology'-which is functional to geography and which will help us to understand better man's distribution and activities on the surface of the earth. This partial or « functional » geomorphology has achieved its greatest development in France (as an integral part of géographie globale) and is practised by a large number of geographers. Géographie totale, an expression which refers more to the subject matter of this geography than to its methodology, is an ensemble of specialized yet inter-related disciplines (one of which is geomorphology). This pluralistic geography daims many more adherents than does géographie globale. Géographie totale allows us to study all aspects of what is now called geomorphology (but which may eventually be termed « cosmomorphology  »). This new geomorphology is based on geophysical laws and is strictly quantitative. It is an integral part of the physical sciences but this does not mean that it is automatically divorced from man. Scientists of both the United States and the U. S. S. R. are actively engaged in this new geomorphology. We believe that it would be mutually advantageous for both the « functional » and the « complete » geomorphologists to group themselves into a new international association. To achieve this end we urge that the structures of the international Geographical Union be modified or that an « International Association of Geomorphology » be founded.

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