Suchergebnisse

The Aral Sea is well known for its devastating regression over the second half of the twentieth century, and for its recent partial restoration. Environment and Post-Soviet Transformation in Kazakhstan's Aral Sea Region is the first book to explore what these monumental changes have meant to those living on the sea's shores. Following the fluctuating fortunes of the pre-Soviet, Soviet and post-Soviet fisheries, the book shows how the vast environmental changes the region has undergone cannot be disentangled from the transformations of Soviet socialism and postsocialism. This ethnographic perspective prompts a critical rethinking of the category of environmental disaster through which the region is predominantly known. Tracing how the sea's retreat and partial return have been apprehended by diverse local actors in the former port of Aral'sk and surrounding fishing villages, as well as by scientists, bureaucrats and international development workers, William Wheeler draws out the multiple meanings environmental change acquires within different contexts. This study of how people make their lives amidst overlapping ecological and political-economic upheavals is rich in ethnographic detail that is both rooted in Soviet legacies and alive to the new transnational connections that are reshaping the region. Offering a rigorous political ecology of Soviet socialism and after, the book is a major contribution to the nascent environmental anthropology of Central Asia. It will be of interest to environmental anthropologists, environmental historians, and scholars of all disciplines working on Central Asia and the former USSR.

"Born in Los Angeles, the gang MS-13 was founded in the 1980s by Salvadoran refugees who had been hardened in a civil war stoked by American foreign policy. But the gang found its way home a decade later, as the U.S. began deporting thousands of convicts each year back to the Northern Triangle-El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala. Today, those countries share the world's highest murder rates, and account for 70 percent of the migrants arriving at the U.S. southern border. Foreign correspondent William Wheeler tracks MS-13 from L.A., where he meets a co-founder of the gang, to El Salvador, where three generations of Salvadorans have been drawn into an escalating cycle of conflict. State of War tells the tragic story of a brutal civil war that has never ended"--

Nick Gill and Anthony Good (eds), Asylum Determination in Europe: Ethnographic Perspectives (London: Palgrave Macmillan)

Wittfogel's Oriental Despotism is not only a scholarly exposition of the 'hydraulic hypothesis' but also a political polemic about Soviet 'totalitarianism'. Wittfogel does not mention that these two themes are connected: the USSR itself may be construed as a hydraulic state, especially in the Central Asian periphery, where expansion of irrigation depended on and cemented the power of the apparatus. The environmental consequences famously include the regression of the Aral Sea. This article first explores irrigation in Soviet Central Asia: while there was a connection between the centralizing tendency of Soviet bureaucracy and water's susceptibility to political control, environmental problems were exacerbated by relatively weak control from the centre and by material qualities of water which escaped control. I then draw on my ethnographic research in Aral'sk, Kazakhstan, to examine the role of hydraulic infrastructure in imagining the strong, centralized state. I take Wittfogel's particular constellation of connections between water, infrastructure and power as a Cold War artefact, which I compare with accounts of Soviet hydraulic projects from inhabitants of the Aral region today. Finally, I examine post-Soviet projections of statehood through a recent dam which has restored part of the Aral and mixed local reactions to it. Hydraulic infrastructure may project centralized authority, but I show that readings of the relationship between the two depend on contextual factors.

Apppendix II: Books and reports relating to the Fenland; Appendix III: Titles and dates of acts of Parliament relating to the Fenland; Appendix IV: Glossary of words used in the Fenland. ; Eight appendices and index, each paged separately. ; Maps and diagrams partly folded. ; Mode of access: Internet.

1. Introduction and Weathering -- 2. Dimensions of Global Mining Waste Generation and Water Use -- 3. Toward a Sustainable Metals Extraction Technology -- 4. Waste Management: A brief history and the present state -- 5. Constructed wetlands and the ecology of extreme ecosystems -- 6. Ecological Engineering Tools in Extreme Ecosystems -- 7. Biological Polishing Tool: Element Removal in the Water Column -- 8. The biofilm generation tool and sulphate oxidation -- 9. R&D Field Applications -- 10. The Way forward.

The water quality index (WQI) has emerged as a central way to convey water quality information to policy makers and the general public and is regularly used in US EPA regulatory impact analysis. It is a compound indicator that aggregates information from several water quality parameters. Several recent studies have criticized the aggregation function of the EPA WQI, arguing that it suffers from "eclipsing" and other problems. Although past papers have compared various aggregation functions in the WQI (usually looking at correlation), this is the first paper to examine these functions in the context of benefit-cost analysis. Using data from the 2003 EPA CAFO rule, the present paper examines four aggregation functions and their impact on estimated benefits. Results indicate that the aggregation method can have a profound effect on benefits, with total benefit estimates varying from $82 million to $504 million dollars. The net benefits of the rule vary from negative to positive over this range of estimates. Furthermore, a sensitivity analysis does not find convincing evidence to substitute the current aggregation function, although several changes to the underlying WQI methodology may be warranted.

Cancer is an important cause of morbidity in the elderly, and many medical conditions and treatments influence cancer risk. The Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results (SEER)-Medicare database can be used to conduct population-based case-control studies that elucidate the etiology of cancer among the US elderly. SEER-Medicare links data on malignancies ascertained through SEER cancer registries to claims from Medicare, the US government insurance program for people over age 65 years. Under one approach described herein, elderly cancer cases are ascertained from SEER data (1987–2005). Matched controls are selected from a 5% random sample of Medicare beneficiaries. Risk factors of interest, including medical conditions and procedures, are identified by using linked Medicare claims. Strengths of this design include the ready availability of data, representative sampling from the US elderly population, and large sample size (e.g., under one scenario: 1,176,950 cases, including 221,389 prostate cancers, 185,853 lung cancers, 138,041 breast cancers, and 124,442 colorectal cancers; and 100,000 control subjects). Limitations reflect challenges in exposure assessment related to Medicare claims: restricted range of evaluable risk factors, short time before diagnosis/selection for ascertainment, and inaccuracies in claims. With awareness of limitations, investigators have in SEER-Medicare data a valuable resource for epidemiologic research on cancer etiology.