When Nature Goes Public: The Making and Unmaking of Bioprospecting in Mexico (In-formation)

Book Description

Bioprospecting--the exchange of plants for corporate promises of royalties or community development assistance--has been lauded as a way to develop new medicines while offering southern nations and indigenous communities an incentive to preserve their rich biodiversity. But can pharmaceutical profits really advance conservation and indigenous rights? How much should companies pay and to whom? Who stands to gain and lose? The first anthropological study of the practices mobilized in the name and in the shadow of bioprospecting, this book takes us into the unexpected sites where Mexican scientists and American companies venture looking for medicinal plants and local knowledge.

Cori Hayden tracks bioprospecting's contentious new promise--and the contradictory activities generated in its name. Focusing on a contract involving Mexico's National Autonomous University, Hayden examines the practices through which researchers, plant vendors, rural collectors, indigenous cooperatives, and other actors put prospecting to work. By paying unique attention to scientific research, she provides a key to understanding which people and plants are included in the promise of "selling biodiversity to save it"--and which are not. And she considers the consequences of linking scientific research and rural "enfranchisement" to the logics of intellectual property.

Roving across UN protocols, botanical collecting histories, Mexican nationalist agendas, neoliberal property regimes, and North-South relations, When Nature Goes Public charts the myriad, emergent publics that drive and contest the global market in biodiversity and its futures.

Customer Reviews:

Ships Very Quickly!.......2006-02-28

When I ordered this book it was shipped really quickly to me and the book was used, but in perfect condition. I ordered the book on Friday and recieved it early Tuesday. I will definetly order more products from this user in the future! Thanks for being so attentive!

Book Description

Use, eat, craft with plants Indians, pioneers used. Great modern expert identifies, explains. "Secure a copy of this very enlightening book. In fact, if you travel, it should be a constant companion."—St. Petersburg (FL) Independent. 94 illustrations.

Edible and Useful Wild Plants of the United States and Canada

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Edible and Useful Wild Plants of the United States and Canada
Charles Francis Saunders
Manufacturer: Dover Publications
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
ASIN: B000V9Z83O

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Useful wild plants of the United States and Canada
Charles Francis Saunders
Manufacturer: R.M. McBride & Co
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Unknown Binding

Book Description

The book and disk that work together! The Interfact series offers a unique range of integrated illustrated books and multimedia CD-ROMS. Kids will learn and enjoy from this fact-filled book containing amazing facts, dazzling photographs, and a full glossary and index. In addition, the disk has seven interactive features with up to 15 hours of inter-linked activities, games and on-screen adventures related to Aztecs.

Book Description

The degree to which human conditions and the natural environment are vulnerable to the potential effects of climate change is a key concern for governments and the environmental science community worldwide. This book from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) provides the best available base of scientific information for policymakers and public use. The Regional Impacts of Climate Change: An Assessment of Vulnerability reviews state-of-the-art information on potential impacts of climate change for ecological systems, water supply, food production, coastal infrastructure, human health, and other resources for ten global regions. It also illustrates that the increasing costs of climate and climate variability, in terms of loss of human life and capital due to floods, storms, and droughts, are a result of the lack of adjustment and response in society's policies and use of resources. This book points to management options that would make many sectors more resilient to current variability in climate and thus help these sectors adapt to future changes in climate. This book will become the primary source of information on regional aspects of climate change for policymakers, the scientific community, and students.

Book Description

The dynamics of realistic Hamiltonian systems has unusual microscopic features that are direct consequences of its fractional space-time structure and its phase space topology. The book deals with the fractality of the chaotic dynamics and kinetics, and also includes material on non-ergodic and non-well-mixing Hamiltonian dynamics. The book does not follow the traditional scheme of most of today's literature on chaos. The intention of the author has been to put together some of the most complex and yet open problems on the general theory of chaotic systems. The importance of the discussed issues and an understanding of their origin should inspire students and researchers to touch upon some of the deepest aspects of nonlinear dynamics. The book considers the basic principles of the Hamiltonian theory of chaos and some applications including for example, the cooling of particles and signals, control and erasing of chaos, polynomial complexity, Maxwell's Demon, and others. It presents a new and realistic image of the origin of dynamical chaos and randomness. An understanding of the origin of randomness in dynamical systems, which cannot be of the same origin as chaos, provides new insights in the diverse fields of physics, biology, chemistry, and engineering.

Hamiltonian Chaos And Fractional Dynamics

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Hamiltonian Chaos And Fractional Dynamics
George M. Zaslavsky
Manufacturer: Oxford University Press, USA
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
ASIN: B000OKTLYM

Book Description

A wildly original fin-de-siècle novel, Against Nature follows its sole character, Des Esseintes, a decadent, ailing aristocrat who retreats to an isolated villa where he indulges his taste for luxury and excess. Veering between nervous excitability and debilitating ennui, he gluts his aesthetic appetites with classical literature and art, exotic jewels (with which he fatally encrusts the shell of his tortoise), rich perfumes, and a kaleidoscope of sensual experiences. The original handbook of decadence, Against Nature exploded “like a grenade” (in the words of its author) and has enjoyed a cult readership from its publication to the present day.

Customer Reviews:

The Novel of Dorian Grey!.......2007-01-25

"Against Nature" was Wilde's influence for "The Picture of Dorian Grey". It appears in that text as the mysterious "yellow book" that serves as young Dorian's map to the Dissolution and the Underworld. You should take Wilde's advice and let this novel soak into your subconscious like a fine liquor into your bloodstream; the passages describing Des Essientes' feelings on the poetry of Charles Baudelaire are alone worth the cost of a paperback edition.

Dorian's Daddy Despairs Dandyism for Deity.......2006-06-01

Des Esseintes goes marchin' in, his chateau away from a society from which he has drunk too deeply. Retreating in a world of solitary sensuality, he finally suffers terminal ennui and at the end, finds the cross instead of a pistol. (Dorian had more guts). Now, one of the coolest things in this book, besides his introducing the street urchin to the pleasures of professional ladies, is Des Esseintes' realization that faux is good, faux works just as well as real, so long as it is a well conceived faux. Actually the simulated reality is often better, because we are never disillusioned by the diminished returns of the actual. When you are done reading this book, get thee to La Bas.

Interesting book in poor translation.......2006-04-07

Years ago someone brought this book to my attention, because of the words that the writer/critic Barbey d'Aureville devoted to it "after writing a book like this a writer has two options: the barrel of a gun or the foot of the cross". After ordering the French version from the French Amazon site, the author's unusual vocabulary and twisted sense of grammar left me little choice but getting this translation. While reading the book "in stereo" was an arduous process, the experience is endlessly richer than just relying on this poor translation.

Oscar Wilde has remarked of "A rebours" (against the grain) that reading it made you feel like incense came off the pages. A correct assessment indeed! While formal narrative is missing throughout, the book which can be best described as a series of vignettes rich in colors, textures and smells, still is very engaging.

Most interesting though is this book's status as a work at the very end of the pre-Freudian world. The impotent des Esseintes tries to get his kicks through all the other senses and through the sublimated media of art and religion. While some of the chapters seem like long litanies on the roman language literature, forgotten painters and the like, Huysmans shows quite some creativity in them. I checked out all of the plants that des Esseintes purchased by going on the web, where many of them can be found with pictures. Everyone doing this will get a good sense of the writer's imagination.

This imagination is expressed in a language that is peculiar in both its vocabulary and grammar. Huysmans devotes a whole chapter to the evolution of writing styles to express a variety of concepts. To depict the hypersensitive, neurotic and twisted personality of des Esseintes the original French is most peculiar when it describes the protagonists, his actions, thoughts and emotions. Yet, when for example the physician appears at the end of the book, the style changes suddenly and radically. As such, this is definitively James Joyce avant la lettre. Indeed, combing through some of the most obscure sentences with both the translation and a large dictionary revealed the depth of all the writer's allusions and entendres. Unfortunately, the great majority of all these "atmospherics" get lost in translation. As such this translation gives the reader about 25% of the impact of the original.

Too bad, time for a new version!

An Exotic Flower of Decadent Prose.......2006-03-17

First published in 1884, this story is a wonderful celebration of late 19th century French intellectual and esthetic dandyism. Huysmans' protagonist - the young aristocrat, Des Esseintes, scion of a decayed and ancient family right out of Edgar Alan Poe - is recognized as being a thinly disguised portrait of the author. Des Esseintes' disgust with the modern bourgeois world he sees burgeoning all around him propels his withdrawal into the various exquisite antechambers of his priviledged taste and precious, expensive education. The story procedes by set pieces, wonderfully descriptive passages describing in depth: art (painting), gastronomy (liqueurs), color and architecture (interior decoration), jewelry (precious stones), sex (heterosexual and homosexual), botony (exotic flowers) and literature (the Latin masters). Huysmans' descriptions are delivered in wonderful rhythmic cadences, the adjectives used as much for the way they roll luxuriously off the mind's tongue as for their descriptive accuracy. This kind of intellectual dandyism, backed up by very real intellectual 'chops' is almost extinct in contemporary letters. Some of our writers could come close in describing the plastic arts and physical sensation, but as for the Latin authors celebrated or eviscerated by Esseintes - that scholarship is extinct. Especially wonderful are Des Esseints' description of Gustave Moreau's Salome and the depiction of English and American restaurant diners encountered during the protagonist's abortive trip to England. -In contemporary times I suppose Bret Ellis's AMERICAN PSYCHO, could be considered a pale, distopic pastiche of this book.

The Decadent Novel.......2006-02-21

Duc Jean Floressas des Esseintes is a scion of a long line of inbreeding French nobility, his ill-ridden and mentally challenged constitution the product of such. Misanthropic and eccentric to the point of psychotherapy, his disillusion with the society he was reared in compels him to retreat into a world of artifice and fancy, a retreat that he believes would be the therapy and answer to his alarmingly ailing self.

"Against Nature" ( A Rebours ) is the fascinating and unique account of one of the most oddest figures in literature. In opulent and colorful prose, J.-K. Huysmans vividly paints scene by scene the unusual actvities of this paradigm of decadence. Moving to the country with a few faithful servants and adhering to the decadent ideal of "artifice over reality", des Esseintes fulfills his fantasies. Beverages would be categorized under a musical instrument as each particular drink would remind this effete aesthete of a specific one. His elderly housemaid would be made to dress as a nun so when he sees her ascending by his window he would feel as if he were in church. A turtle would be decorated with sparkling gems on it's shell, to the ocular delight of the dandy. Numerous flowers of exotic nature would be fetched from flower shops and offbeat places for it's novelty's sake. Printing places would be commissioned to design the favorite books of our hero in such a way that he believes would best "compliment" and "represent" them. London is recreated in an English stopover in Paris.

There is also a nearly bibliographical enumeration of the main character's favorite authors, painters, and their works. Naturally, theire all outsiders. Baudelaire, Verlaine, and Barbey d'Aurevilly get the nod over sacred cows like Hugo. The paintings of Gustave Moreau are venerated to the exclusion of almost everyone else.

Inevitably, the novelty of his privileged social experiment loses it's vitality. As days pass and our hero runs out of ideas to sustain his bleakening status, Des Esseintes is forced to concede the painful fact that the only way a man of his background and stature could tolerate his existence is by making the most in the world of the much despised "society". With this ending Huysmans makes through the mind of his protagonist a stinging and pointed critique on the vulgarity of the masses.

Greeted with mixed reception at the time of it's publication, "Against Nature" was a surprising success that baffled and on the other hand inspired contemporary critics and readers with it's bizarre leading character and unorthodox style. Definitely, few novels can compare to the way author and work are similar and inseparable to each other. Though long-winded at times, this is the definitive decadent novel by one of the most representative individuals of the genre.

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Against Nature (A Rebours)
J K Huysmans
Manufacturer: Penguin
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
ASIN: B000K3Y0Z8

Average customer rating:

Against Nature (A Rebours)
J. K. Translated By Robert Baldick Huysmans
Manufacturer: Penguin
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
ASIN: B000KF6ID8

Against Nature: (A Rebours) (Oxford World's Classics)

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Against Nature: (A Rebours) (Oxford World's Classics)
Margaret Mauldon, Nicholas White, J. K. Huysmans J._K Huysmans
Manufacturer: Oxford University Press, USA
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
ASIN: B000OKKMDG

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