bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
The Stimulus of Prohibition: A Critical History of the Global Narcotics Trade
Authors: McCoy Alfred W.
Published: November 2020

The current war on drugs being waged by the United States and United Nations rests upon a fundamental misunderstanding of the global nar­cotics traffic. In 1998, for example, the White House issued a National Drug Con­trol Strategy, proclaiming a 10-year program “to reduce illegal drug use and avail­ability 50 percent by the year 2007,” thereby achieving “the lowest recorded drug-use rate in American history.” To this end, the U.S. program plans to reduce foreign drug cultivation, shipments from source countries like Colombia, and smuggling in key transit zones. Although this strategy promises a balanced attack on both supply and demand, its ultimate success hinges upon the complete eradi­cation of the international supply of illicit drugs. “Eliminating the cultivation of il­licit coca and opium,” the document says in a revealing passage, “is the best ap­proach to combating cocaine and heroin availability in the U.S.” (U.S. Office of National Drug Control Policy 1998: 1, 23, 28). Similarly, in 1997 the new head of the United Nations Drug Control Program, Dr. Pino Arlacchi, announced a 10-year program to eradicate all illicit opium and coca cultivation, starting in Afghanistan. Three years later, in the United Nation’s World Drug Report 2000, he defended prohibition’s feasibility by citing China as a case where “comprehensive narcotics control strategies . . . succeeded in eradicat­ing opium between 1949 and 1954”— ignoring the communist coercion that al­lowed such success. Arlacchi also called for an “end to the psychology of despair” that questions drug prohibition, and insisted that this policy can indeed produce “the eradication of coca and opium poppy production.” Turning the page, however, the reader will find a chart showing a sharp rise in world opium production from 500 tons in 1981 to 6,000 tons in 2000— a juxtaposition that seems to challenge Ar-lacchi’s faith in prohibition (Bonner 1997; Wren 1998a, 1998b; United Nations 2000d, 1–2, 24). Examined closely, the United States and United Nations are pur­suing a drug control strategy whose success requires not just the reduction but also the total eradication of illicit narcotics cultivation from the face of the globe. Like the White House, the United Nations Drug Control Program (UNDCP) re­mains deeply, almost theologically committed to the untested proposition that the prohibition of cultivation is an effective response to the problem of illicit drugs.
Opium and the People of Laos
Authors: Westermeyer Joseph
Published: November 2020

This chapter reflects several different studies conducted over 3 decades. The work in Laos was conducted over a single decade, 1965–1975. These studies began with data collection on opium production in Laos, proceeded to opium usage and its functions, then to an epidemiological study of opium addiction, and finally to clinical studies of opium addiction, its treatment, and course (Westermeyer 1982). During the period 1965–1975 (Westermeyer 1971) I spent a total of 3 years in Laos. The first 2 years involved work as a general physician (with the Public Health Division of USAID) and as a graduate student in anthropology. The final 12 months were spent over the period 1971–1975, with several visits of approximately 2 months each. These last visits were funded by grants from the University of Minnesota and consultations to the Ministries of Health and Social Welfare in Laos. Subsequently, I served as a consultant to the World Health Organization from 1977 to 1997. This role involved about 20 visits to Asia as a research consultant, curriculum developer, and speaker during a time when several countries of Asia were developing their own epidemiological studies and later treatment and prevention programs. During this time, I also had the opportunity to care for and study refugees from Southeast Asia who became addicted (or readdicted) to opium in the United States (Westermeyer, Lyfoung et al. 1989, 1991; Westermeyer and Chitasombat 1995). In Laos, minorities made up about half the population. To an extent greater than the ethnic Lao themselves, many minority groups were involved in opium production and commerce. Mountaineer minorities grew poppy: Akha, Hmong, Iu Mien, Khamu, Lisu, and the Tai tribes. Expatriate Asians and Europeans, living in towns along the Mekong River, conducted opium commerce; they included ethnic Chinese, Vietnamese, Thai, Cambodians, and French (usually referred to as Corsicans by other French people). Those groups straddling the borders of two or three different countries were in a unique position to smuggle opium, along with legitimate trade in raw products and manufactured goods. For example, the Iu Mien moved opium from Burma and Laos down into Thailand.
Desert Traffic: The Dynamics of the Drug Trade in Northwestern Mexico
Authors: Perramond Eric P.
Published: November 2020

The semiarid expanses of northern Mexico have long been a haven for drug trafficking and shipment into the southwestern United States. During the past 3 decades, a more specialized and dedicated drug industry has used the long U.S.-Mexican border to move illicit narcotics. Northern Mexico is not a heavily indigenous zone, and yet some native populations have been adversely affected by this recent industry, and not just a few have taken a role in it. Two states in northern Mexico that still have indigenous peoples are Sonora and Chihuahua. Both of these semiarid states are more sparsely populated than the rest of Mexico, yet both share a long, expansive border with the United States. Thus, neither state has escaped the activities of the drug industry, and some of the major drug cartels are located in this region (figure 8.1), the largest in urban areas such as Ciudad Juarez in the state of Chihuahua and Culiacán in the state of Sinaloa. Although these urban areas are the economic and logistical centers of two large cartels, an aspect frequently ignored in the literature, and certainly in policy circles, is the variety of scales of production in this industry. Aside from these giant cartels, drug cultivation, production, and transportation are also common at lesser scales, and the difficulties and dangers associated with drug production and trafficking extend to these small farmers. Small plots of marijuana (Cannabis sativa) and poppies (Papaver somniferum) dot the northern Mexican landscape, especially in the foothills and high peaks of the Sierra Madre. Most of the poppy production lies further south, in the states of Michoacan, Guerrero, and Oaxaca. Marijuana (Cannabis) is by far the more common of the two illicit crops grown in Mexico, partly because of its longer history of cultivation in the country’s mountainous regions and partly because of its greater ease of integration into agriculture. Poppy fields are a lot harder to hide, both from neighbors and from more interested authorities. Marijuana is also more easily intercropped with more common agricultural crops. Intercropping is the practice of growing two or more crops in the same field or parcel of land, and it is common when farmers need to maximize total output per unit of area (Wilken 1987: 248). I have seen marijuana integrated with corn, bean, squash, sunflower, and tomato plants.
Cannabis in Colonial India: Production, State Intervention, and Resistance in the Late Nineteenth-Century Bengali Landscape
Authors: Mills James H.
Published: November 2020

When approaching the subject of rural producers and their environments in nineteenth-century India, it is necessary to be mindful of the range of studies during the last 30 years or so that have emphasised the importance of resistance to colonial projects. These studies, most notably those published in the Subaltern Studies project (Guha 1982), have focused on the strategies and agendas of peasants in South Asia and have emphasized their importance in shaping rural developments and relationships during the period of British rule. This work has shown how these agendas and strategies often led to conflicts of interest with the colonial state. Importantly, however, these studies have insisted that resistance to colonial designs was not always expressed in confrontation and rebellion. Resistance could often be subtle, difficult to detect, localized, and small scale, coming in forms such as “foot dragging, dissimulation, false compliance, pilfering, feigned ignorance, slander, arson, sabotage and so forth,” which have been called “the weapons of the weak” (Scott 1985: 29). Such perspectives are important in this study as it focuses on the ways in which Indian rural producers of hemp (Cannabis sativa) narcotics transformed their environments in the process of producing the drugs for the domestic market in the nineteenth century. Definitions of the various preparations of hemp varied from place to place, and indeed different officials and administrators would give differing accounts. The preparations that are mentioned might broadly be understood as follows: Ganja is the dried flower head of the Cannabis sativa variation of the hemp plant, which is mixed with tobacco and smoked, often in a chillum (clay pipe). Bhang is the ground leaves and stalks of the Cannabis sativa, mixed into a paste and drunk with milk and sugar or taken neat with black pepper. Charas is the dried, sticky exudation of the sativa, smoked with tobacco in a chillum. Majum is a green sweetmeat made with the ground leaves of the plant and mixed with butter, milk, and sugar and baked. Muddat is a preparation of hemp and opium. After a brief introduction to the hemp narcotics market in India during this period, the chapter will consider the modes of production in the rural areas of the main hemp products.
Providing a Broad Spectrum of Agents in Spatially Explicit Simulation Models: The Gensim Approach
Authors: Anderson John
Published: November 2020

Research in natural resource management may be characterized as a search for an understanding of patterns and processes relating to a particular resource. Modeling is a crucial tool to these efforts: resource scientists use such models to help them conceptualize, understand, test, predict, or assess various aspects of the resource being studied. One central function, however, underlies all of these uses: a model simulates the way in which a real system would behave under conditions of interest to the user, and illustrates changes over time. Such a model may be used to determine the consequences of particular situations, leaving judgment of the attractiveness of those consequences to the user. Particularly in the case of complex ecosystems, such a model may also serve to clarify interactions and contribute to a deeper understanding of ecological phenomena. In recent years, computer-based models have become the most significant tool of resource managers, for two reasons. First, any model must accurately portray the real system it represents if research based on the model is to have any reliability. The use of computer technology has greatly increased the extent and the detail to which ecosystems can be modeled, and thus the accuracy of these models. The other reason for the extensive use of computer models is the flexibility that the computer as a tool brings to the modeling process. Many ecosystems are poorly understood, and complex models for such poorly understood systems are almost never completed. Rather, modeling such a system is an iterative process, with a partial understanding generating new hypotheses, which in turn generate changes to the model based on further research. Computer technology brings flexibility and ease of modification to the modeling process, naturally supporting this iterative development. In addition, as the alternatives available in resolving resource management problems become increasingly expensive, and the resources themselves become increasingly scarce and valuable, such models become vital tools not only in the direct management of resources, but in the control of expenses associated with resource management as well.
Management Application of an Agent-Based Model: Control of Cowbirds at the Landscape Scale
Authors: Harper Steven J. , Westervelt James D.
Published: November 2020

Brood parasitism by brown-headed cowbirds (Molothrus ater) has negative impacts on a large number of songbird species. Cowbirds are obligate brood parasites, meaning that females lay their eggs in the nests of other species and do not provide care to their offspring. Parasitism by cowbirds often results in reduced reproductive success for the host, sometimes to the exclusion of fledging any of their own young. Clearly parasitism by cowbirds can have a substantial impact on the population dynamics of the host species. Over 200 species of birds are known to be parasitized by cowbirds. Cowbirds breed in shrublands and forests, and especially parasitize host nests located near ecotones, or borders between habitat types. Human land use in general may promote the success of cowbirds; landscapes with forest openings, clearcuts, small tracts of forests, and large amounts of habitat edge have higher parasitism rates than do landscapes with contiguous forest tracts. Cowbirds readily forage in feedlots, overgrazed pastures, and grasslands, and the expansion of agricultural land use over the past century has provided abundant feeding habitat for cowbirds. Large increases in the numbers of cowbirds have been documented and this increase has been implicated as one factor responsible for the decline of a large number of passerines. Compounding their impact is the fact that cowbirds can affect host populations over broad spatial scales. Because they do not protect their young or a nest, they can range large distances in search of suitable feeding areas; researchers have reported maximum daily movements from 7 to 13 km for cowbirds (Rothstein et al., Cook et al., respectively). At Fort Hood, a U.S. Army military installation located in central Texas, cowbirds parasitize the nests of numerous songbird species, including those of the black-capped vireo ( Vireo atricapillus) and the golden-cheeked warbler (Dendroica chrysoparia), two federally endangered species. The black-capped vireo appears to be particularly vulnerable to parasitism. Once her nest is parasitized, a host female often abandons it. The female may then attempt to renest but, when cowbirds are abundant, this nest is also likely to be parasitized.
Governing the Affluent University
Authors: Keller Morton , Keller Phyllis
Published: November 2020

When Conant left the presidency in 1953, Harvard was still under the sway of its traditional soft-shoe, old boy administrative style. Pusey felt no great obligation to modernize governance. To the end of his presidential days, he relied on an almost ostentatiously small staff. When he came to work each morning, he opened his own mail. Here as elsewhere, older folkways stubbornly endured. Pusey’s closest associates in the 1950s were two very different breeds of cat. One was personal assistant William Bentinck-Smith ’37, an affable, cool-minded former journalist with a facile pen (something the president lacked). Bentinck-Smith was Pusey’s amanuensis and a close adviser on a variety of alumni and policy matters, very much as Calvert Smith had been for Conant in the 1940s. “I worked for him for eighteen extraordinary years, in a relationship of mutual trust and intimacy,” Bentinck-Smith recalled. Pusey’s (improbable) other close confidant was Faculty of Arts and Sciences dean McGeorge Bundy. If Pusey was as much a product of middle America as a Harvard president was likely to be, Bundy was as close to an aristocrat as America was likely to produce. He was a scion of the Boston Lowells, self-confident enough to have gone not to Harvard but to Yale. Rumor had it that the Corporation put pressure on Pusey to make Bundy dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. Fellow Roger Lee told the president-elect in the summer of 1953: “only if a first-rate administrator is available and thoroughly briefed before the opening of college will you yourself be free to deal with the many policy questions which will naturally arise with a change in the presidency.” Pusey himself says that he was attracted by an acerbic Bundy review of William Buckley’s assault on the liberal university, God and Man at Yale. Only thirty-four when he became dean in 1953, associate professor of Government Bundy soon showed those who didn’t know it already that he had as sharp a mind as anybody in the University. A consummate meritocrat, he handled his faculty with effortless ease, and for the most part they loved it.
What is Fibromyalgia?
Authors: Wallace Daniel J. , Brock Wallace Janice
Published: November 2020

When the Arthritis Foundation tried to categorize the 150 different forms of musculoskeletal conditions in 1963, it created a classification known as soft tissue rheumatism. Included in this listing are conditions in which joints are not involved. Soft tissue rheumatism encompasses the supporting structures of joints (e.g., ligaments, bursae, and tendons), muscles, and other soft tissues. Fibromyalgia is a form of soft tissue rheumatism. A combination of three terms—fibro (from the Latin fibra, or fibrous tissue), myo- (the Greek prefix myos, for muscles), and algia (from the Greek algos, which denotes pain)—fibromyalgia replaces earlier names for the syndrome that are still used by doctors and other health professionals such as myofibrositis, myofascitis, muscular rheumatism, fibrositis, and gener­alized musculoligamentous strain. Fibromyalgia is not a form of arthritis, since it is not associated with joint inflammation. In the late 1980s, a Multicenter Criteria Committee under the direction of Dr. Frederick Wolfe at the University of Kansas was formed to define fibromyalgia. In their study, 293 patients with presumed fibromyalgia were compared with 265 patients who had other rheumatic diseases in 16 centers throughout North America. The groups were evaluated for a variety of symptoms, signs, and laboratory abnormalities in an effort to ascertain which factors were the most sensitive and specific for defining the disorder. In other words, the investigators wanted to identify the most frequently found features of fibromyalgia (sensitivity) that could help doctors differentiate it from other disorders (specificity). The list in Table 1 was 88.4 percent sensitive and 81.1 percent specific in identifying fibromyalgia patients. As a result, these criteria were endorsed in 1990 by the American College of Rheumatology (ACR), the association to which nearly all 5,000 rheumatologists in the United States and Canada belong. Focusing on Table 1 and Figure 3, fibromyalgia essentially is: 1. Widespread pain of at least 3 months’ duration (this rules out viruses or traumatic insults which resolve on their own). 2. Pain in all four quadrants of the body (picture cutting the body into quarters, as in a pie): right side, left side, above the waist, below the waist.
“I’m Stiff and Achy”— Musculoskeletal Complaints
Authors: Wallace Daniel J. , Brock Wallace Janice
Published: November 2020

Patients with each of the 150 distinct rheumatic disorders frequently have overlapping muscle and joint complaints. Weakness, myalgias, arthralgias, spasm, lack of endurance, and stiffness are prominent features of fibromyalgia that may be difficult to differentiate from other conditions. The prominence of complaints in this area is what frequently brings patients to a musculoskeletal specialist such as a rheumatologist, as opposed to an infectious disease expert, general internist, or endocrinologist. Abigail was devastated after the unexpected death of her younger brother at age 30. Her physical and mental health had seemed tenuous, but she managed to pull herself together for the funeral and the visits of relatives from the Midwest. When it was over, Abigail’s coping skills began to fray. First, she began experiencing left-sided upper back pain and thought it was from lifting Aunt Minnie’s suitcase when taking her to the airport. Abigail saw the chiropractor she had consulted three or four times over a five-year period for similar backaches. However, this time the pain did not go away and spread to the right side. Dr. Johnson’s manipulations usually “snapped things back into place,” but this time they made her worse. Abigail became very concerned when her fiancée tried to take her to Myrtle Beach for a relaxing weekend and found that she was in agony whenever he hugged her. Although she had been an aerobics instructor, Abigail found it very difficult to do her morning exercise routine and after several weeks gave up. Trying to exercise was extremely painful. Innocent movements such as washing her back in the shower caused her muscles to tighten up and go into spasm. Dr. Johnson referred her to a rheumatologist, who diagnosed fibromyalgia and instituted a medication, education, and rehabilitation program. Over 80 percent of fibromyalgia patients have muscular symptoms or signs. Aching in the muscles, or myalgias, is common in the upper or lower back and neck area. Myalgias are usually present on both the right and left sides and present as a dull, throbbing discomfort. Spasm, defined as an involuntary muscular contraction, is less common than the sense of tightness in muscles that seems like spasm.
Properties of Electrical Rhythmicity in the Stomach
Authors: Sanders Kenton M. , Ördög Tamas
Published: November 2020

Gastric peristaltic contractions are the basis for emptying of solids from the stomach. These events begin in the mid to high corpus region, develop into a ring around the stomach, and spread down the length of the stomach to the pylorus. The pressure wave resulting from gastric peristalsis pushes the contents of the stomach toward the pyloric sphincter, but a nearly simultaneous contraction of the ring of muscle in the pyloric canal and the terminal antrum ultimately forces much of the food in the retrograde direction, toward the body of the stomach. Sheer forces that develop as a result of this forceful retropulsion cause mechanical disruption of solid particles. Repetitive peristaltic contractions (e.g., in the human these events occur about 3 times per minute), over a period of time, reduces ingested foods to small particles. The action of gastric peristalsis in the distal stomach facilitates emptying and the reduced particle diameter aides in chemical digestion of foods in the small intestine. Pathophysiological conditions that disrupt or disorganize gastric peristalsis can impair or delay normal gastric emptying. Gastric peristaltic contractions result from depolarization of the plasma membranes of smooth muscle cells. For many years it has been known that gastric muscles display periodic (or rhythmic) electrical activity in which membrane potential oscillates between negative potentials and more depolarized levels. The oscillations in membrane potential are known as electrical slow waves (see Color Figs. 2.1 and 2.2 in separate color insert). Slow waves are generated within the tunica muscularis of the proximal corpus along the greater curvature of the stomach, and these events spread around the circumference and down the stomach to the pylorus. A greater velocity of propagation around the stomach than down the stomach causes development of a ring of excitation, and this is the electrical basis underlying gastric peristaltic contractions. Studies have shown that electrical slow waves are generated by specialized pacemaker cells, known as interstitial cells of Cajal (ICCs). The main pacemaker ICCs in the stomach form a dense network of electrically coupled cells between the circular and longitudinal muscle layers of the corpus and antrum.
Forecast: Chilly Overcast Light Drizzle No People Left
Authors: Ehrenfeld David
Published: November 2020

I used to enjoy listening to the National Weather Service forecasts on my short-wave weather radio. An endlessly repeated taped message updated every few hours might be less than thrilling, but the voices of the half-dozen or so forecasters made it come alive. Each one had an identifiable style and intonation; it was easy to assign personalities, even faces, to them. Ten years ago the announcers were all men. There was the one I labeled the grand elder, with his pontifical voice and distinctive, rolling rhythms. When cost-cutting forced the station to move from Manhattan to the grounds of the Brookhaven National Laboratory, way out on Long Island, he disappeared from the airways. Perhaps the daily commute on the Long Island Expressway was too much for the old fellow. I am sure I wasn’t the only listener to mourn the loss of his avuncular cadences. Another announcer who appealed to me spoke fluently until he came to an American Indian place name such as Manasquan or Wanaque (both in New Jersey). Then he hesitated. I could imagine the look of terror in his eyes when he scanned the next line of the script, and there it was, a word with fearsome Q-sounds or daunting combinations of con-sonants and vowels. If I had had any way of getting in touch with him, I would have comforted him by explaining how lucky he was to be broadcasting in the New York–New Jersey metropolitan area. Up in northern Maine, the forecasters have to cope with names such as Caucomgomoc and Chemquasabamticook. Some announcers proclaimed their individuality with what seemed like deliberately odd pronunciations of common words. The most original was the fellow who figured out a new way to say “climate,” an achievement I would have thought was impossible. He did it by lengthening the separation between the two syllables and heavily stressing the second: “cly-matt.”Eventually, the Weather Service hired its first woman announcer, a welcome addition; she made her mark immediately by shortening the phrase “Here are the latest Central Park observations” to “Here is the latest Central Park.”
Affluence and Austerity
Authors: Ehrenfeld David
Published: November 2020

A funny thing happened to me on the road to affluence. I have talked about it with others often enough to discover that it is a common happening and an important one. But before you read any further, you should know that what you are about to encounter is presented as a middle-class problem—nobody dies in an unheated garret, nobody is thrown out on the street with their meager belongings, nobody is in prison as a birthright, nobody is caught in a drug runner’s crossfire. For all its bourgeois setting, however, my story is about the aspirations of our whole society; directly or indirectly it affects us all. What happened is that as I got more affluent, I didn’t feel any richer. Affluence, according to my Random House dictionary, is an “abundance of money, property, and other material goods.” Setting aside quibbles about what constitutes abundance, there is no doubt that I now have more money, property, and other material goods than I did, say, twenty-five years ago—especially if books count as material goods. So why don’t I feel wealthy? I can best explain by starting at what was forme the beginning. I grew up in a nice house in one of the better residential neighbor-hoods of Passaic, New Jersey, a city composed mostly of immigrants and their children and grandchildren. The town of Clifton, a more prosperous community, began one block over; you could tell you were leaving Passaic because there was a sign. (It was not until I went to camp in Maine that I realized that in other parts of the country there can be open space between towns.) Our house had wood siding, two stories plus an attic and basement, three bedrooms, and a garage in back. It had cost my parents $6,600 in the late 1930s—a good deal of money for a struggling young doctor who was helping to support his bankrupted parents. The property, narrow and moderately deep, amounted to about one-sixth of an acre.
The Death Penalty
Authors: Ehrenfeld David
Published: November 2020

On May 22, 2000, Randolph Walker, a seventy-one-year-old career actor, was struck and killed by a double-decker tour bus while crossing a street in midtown Manhattan near the low-rent apartment complex where he lived. This sad accident—an all-too-common occurrence in crowded cities—nevertheless galvanized the New York community for reasons that should concern us all. Mr. Walker was on his way home after an audition for a bit part in a movie called Dummy. He had been hopeful about getting the part; he was always hopeful. This is probably why he had been able to eke out a living as an actor for nearly twenty-five years after leaving a job in banking. He pieced together bit parts in plays, work in dinner theaters, and “under five” roles in soap operas, in which an actor is hired for one daya nd has less than five lines to speak. In his obituary in The New York Times (June 1, 2000), reporter Robin Pogrebin quotes a friend, Todd Heughens, as saying, “‘There are so many actors who don’t work at all, and here was a guy who supported himself as an actor. . . . So I think he took great pride in that.’” Yet he was described by his fellow actors as “non-competitive in the extreme. . . . He told his friends about roles he was seeking so they could try to get them also,” and “he was happy for them even when they won parts he had wanted.”Mr. Walker, who was six feet tall and slender and had a resonant voice, was generally cast in small character parts, such as butlers or undertakers. He loved acting and was an inspiration and mentor to younger actors, according to his agent, Michael Hartig, who was also quoted in the obituary: “‘When he worked on shows, they would gravitate toward him,’ Mr. Hartig said. . . . ‘He always had time to talk to them, to share his knowledge and his expertise.’” He was a quiet, unassuming professional who lived for his work, did not resent his lack of fame, and left be-hind nothing but good reports and sadness when he died.
Ideasclerosis
Authors: Orr David W.
Published: November 2020

The time between innovations in technology and new products introduced into markets has steadily declined so that what had once taken decades has been reduced to months or a few weeks. As a result, we now have less time than ever to consider the effects of various innovations or systems of technologies on any number of other things, including our longer-term prospects. Contrast this pace, driven by the frenetic search for profit or power, with the rate of innovation in those things that would accrue to our long-term ecological health. This difference captures an important dimension of the problem of human survival in the twenty-first century. While we introduce new computing equipment every few months, we still farm in ignorance of Charles Darwin and Albert Howard. Land-use thinking has barely begun to reckon with the thought of Aldo Leopold. After hundreds of studies on the potential for energy efficiency, our use of fossil energy, if somewhat more efficient, continues unabated. In short, innovations that produce fast wealth, whatever their ecological or human effects or impact on long-term prosperity, move ever more quickly from inception to market, while those having to do with human survival move at a glacial pace if they move at all. Why? One possibility is that we are buried in an avalanche of information and can no longer separate the critically important from that which is trivial or perhaps even dangerous. This is certainly true, but it still does not explain why some kinds of ideas move quickly while others are ignored. Exhausted by consumption and saturated by entertainment, perhaps we have become merely “a nation of nitwits” (Herbert 1995) no longer willing or able to do the hard work of thinking about serious things. “The American citizen,” Daniel Boorstin once wrote, “lives in a world where fantasy is more real than reality” (Boorstin [1961] 1978, 37). A casual survey of talk radio, television programs, and World Wrestling Federation events would lead one to believe this to be true as well. But, again, it does not explain why ecologically important ideas fail to excite us as much as contrived ones. Maybe the problem lies in the political arena, now dominated by wealthy corporations.
Soils and Paleoenvironmental Reconstructions
Authors: Holliday Vance T.
Published: November 2020

One of the earliest uses of soils in archaeological research, in addition to stratigraphic markers, was as paleoenvironmental indicators. Similar to soil stratigraphy, the use of soils as environmental indicators in archaeological research probably has its roots in Quaternary geology (e.g., Leighton, 1937; Bryan, 1941a, 1948; Bryan and Albritton, 1943; Movius, 1944; Ruhe, 1965; Haynes, 1968; Valentine and Dalrymple, 1976). Quaternary geologists and geomorphologists working with archaeologists were quick to use soils as clues to past environments (e.g., Leighton, 1936; Antevs, 1941; Bryan, 1941a; Hopkins and Giddings, 1953; Haynes, 1968). Likewise, the nature of prehistoric environments has long been a fundamental question in archaeology. Recognition of the relationship of soil development and morphology to environmental conditions goes back to the beginning of modern pedology, in the later 19th century in Russia and in the early 20th century in the United States (Thorp, 1941, 1949; Tandarich and Sprecher, 1994; Johnson and Hole, 1994). Climate and vegetation in particular were understood as important soil-forming factors long before Jenny produced his landmark volume on Factors of Soil Formation (1941). What Jenny (1941, 1980) brought to the discussion was a theoretical means, using the state factor approach, of assessing the effect of vegetation and climate on soils. By understanding these relationships via biosequences or climosequences, we are theoretically able to pick out the morphological and chemical characteristics of soils that are linked to climate or to vegetation. Climate most directly influences pedogenesis through precipitation and temperature and influences pedogenesis indirectly through vegetation. The most direct effects of biota probably come from the addition of a wide range of chemical compounds, from bioturbation, and from rooting. This chapter is a discussion of those characteristics of soils that have some utility for environmental reconstructions, including climate and vegetation estimates. The chapter also includes some discussion of the potential pitfalls in using soils as paleoenvironmental indicators. Longer and more in-depth discussions of soil–environment relationships in the context of soil geomorphology or environmental reconstruction are presented by Birkeland (1999, pp. 268–306) and chapters in Wilding et al. (1983b) and Martini and Chesworth (1992, pp. 155–306).
Soils and Landscape Evolution
Authors: Holliday Vance T.
Published: November 2020

Soils and archaeological sites are intimately related to the landscape. Investigating soils across past and present landscapes provides a means of reconstructing and understanding the regional environmental and geomorphic context of archaeological site settings and specific site locations, regional site formation processes, and aspects of the resources available to people in a region. Archaeological sites tend to occupy small segments of the landscape, but human activity may affect a much larger area, and in any case, people wander far and wide from sites, interacting with the environment—including the landscape. Thus, no matter whether a site is just a lithic scatter or bone bed or if it is a tell, understanding the regional landscape is an important part of understanding a site and human behavior, and soils are an important means of understanding a landscape. Soils are also important in reconstructing the evolution of landscapes and, consequently, the evolution of archaeological sites. That is, landscape evolution is an important external component of site-formation processes. Landscapes form the physical framework or underpinning for people and their activities and their resulting sites. As landscapes evolve, so do human activities and so do sites. Soils are key to recognizing and interpreting the evolutionary processes that shape the landscape and associated archaeological sites. Furthermore, the concept of landscape evolution also 1) is a logical continuation of the discussion of soil stratigraphy (chapters 5, 6) because it places soil stratigraphy in three or even four dimensions; 2) is a complement to the discussion of soils as environmental indicators (chapter 8), because landscape evolution can be linked to environmental change and because the evolution of the landscape itself, regardless of changes in other factors, represents a change in the environment from a human perspective; and 3) provides yet another means for predicting site locations. The discussion in this section, therefore, represents an integration of some of the principals outlined previously. Some of the studies presented in other chapters, such as the work on the Loess Plateau of China (chapters 6 and 8), and at Harappa and along the Ravi River (chapter 4), are good examples of landscape reconstructions for very large regions and are not repeated here.
Climate Variability and Ecological Response of the Marine Ecosystem in the Western Antarctic Peninsula (WAP) Region
Authors: Smith Raymond C. , Fraser William R.
Published: November 2020

The Antarctic Peninsula, a relatively long, narrow extension of the Antarctic continent, defines a strong climatic gradient between the cold, dry continental regime to its south and the warm, moist maritime regime to its north. The potential for these contrasting climate regimes to shift in dominance from season to season and year to year creates a highly variable environment that is sensitive to climate perturbation. Consequently, long-term studies in the western Antarctic Peninsula (WAP) region, which is the location of the Palmer LTER (figure 9.1), provide the opportunity to observe how climate-driven variability in the physical environment is related to changes in the marine ecosystem (Ross et al. 1996; Smith et al. 1996; Smith et al. 1999). This is a sea ice–dominated ecosystem where the annual advance and retreat of the sea ice is a major physical determinant of spatial and temporal change in its structure and function, from total annual primary production to the breeding success and survival of seabirds. Mounting evidence suggests that the earth is experiencing a period of rapid climate change, and air temperature records from the last half century confirm a statistically significant warming trend within the WAP during the past half century (King 1994; King and Harangozo 1998; Marshall and King 1998; Ross et al. 1996; Sansom 1989; Smith et al. 1996; Stark 1994; van den Broeke 1998; Weatherly et al. 1991). Air temperature–sea ice linkages appear to be very strong in the WAP region (Jacka 1990; Jacka and Budd 1991; King 1994; Smith et al. 1996; Weatherly et al. 1991), and a statistically significant anticorrelation between air temperatures and sea ice extent has been observed for this region. Consistent with this strong coupling, sea ice extent in the WAP area has trended down during this period of satellite observations, and the sea ice season has shortened. In addition, both air temperature and sea ice have been shown to be significantly correlated with the Southern Oscillation Index (SOI), which suggests possible linkages among sea ice, cyclonic activity, and global teleconnections.
Multidecadal Drought Cycles in South-Central New Mexico: Patterns and Consequences
Authors: Milne Bruce T. , Moore Douglas I.
Published: November 2020

Extreme, regional droughts are the most common form of disturbance in semiarid ecosystems typified by relatively slow recovery rates. Drought-driven impacts can include regionally synchronized insect outbreaks, wildfires, and tree mortality (Swetnam and Betancourt 1990), as well as disastrous failures of agriculture, silviculture, and livestock production (Mainguet 1994). Drought conditions, accompanied by anthropogenic land mismanagement, have led to subsequent invasions of grasslands and farmlands by woody shrubs and nonnative forbs and grasses, contributing to the modern “desertification” process manifested in many parts of the world (Archer et al. 1988). In the American Southwest, the drought of the 1950s was one of the most severe climate events of the past millennium because of wide ramifications for the region’s ecology (Herbel et al. 1972; Swetnam and Betancourt 1998), water resources (Thomas 1963), and economy (Regensberg 1996). As human population and resource needs increase in the Southwest, so will the economic sensitivity to largescale drought. A clear understanding of extreme droughts is necessary not only to understand long-term ecosystem dynamics, but also to mitigate socioeconomic impacts. The goals of this chapter are to use the Sevilleta LTER site in central New Mexico to (1) quantify the decadal variability in precipitation inferred from a 394-year record of tree rings, (2) relate the repeated decadal fluctuations in precipitation to major droughts of the 1890s and 1950s, (3) assess the ecological responses associated with droughts of the last century, and (4) elucidate the biotic-atmospheric feed backs that may influence future responses. We assess the magnitude, timing, and consequences of decadal fluctuations in annual precipitation. The Sevilleta LTER research site is located at the Sevilleta National Wildlife Refuge (NWR), Socorro County, New Mexico (34º20' N, 106º50' W). The Sevilleta NWR comprises 100,000 ha of grassland, desert, and woodland bordered by two mountain ranges and the Rio Grande Valley in between. Elevations range from 1,350 m at the Rio Grande to 2,797 m at Ladrón Peak in the northwestern portion of the refuge. Topography, geology, soils, and hydrology, interacting with major air mass dynamics, provide a spatial and temporal template that makes the region a transition zone between several biomes. The region contains communities that both represent and intersect Great Plains Grassland, Great Basin Shrub-steppe, Chihuahuan Desert, Interior Chaparral, and Montane Coniferous Forest (Brown 1982).
Introduction: Yahoo!
Authors: Goldsmith Jack , Wu Tim
Published: November 2020

Marc Knobel is a French Jew who has devoted his life to fighting neo-Nazism, a fight that has taken him repeatedly to the Internet and American websites. In February 2000, Knobel was sitting in Paris, searching the Web for Nazi memorabilia. He went to the auction site of yahoo.com, where to his horror he saw page after page of swastika arm bands, SS daggers, concentration camp photos, and even replicas of the Zyklon B gas canisters. He had found a vast collection of Nazi mementos, for sale and easily available in France but hosted on a computer in the United States by the Internet giant Yahoo. Two years earlier, Knobel had discovered Nazi hate sites on America Online and threatened a public relations war. AOL closed the sites, and Knobel assumed that a similar threat against Yahoo would have a similar effect. He was wrong. AOL, it turned out, was atypical. Located in the Washington, D.C. suburbs, AOL had always been sensitive to public relations, politics, and the realities of government power. It was more careful than most Internet companies about keeping offensive information off its sites. Yahoo, in contrast, was a product of Silicon Valley’s 1990s bubble culture. From its origins as the hobby of Stanford graduate students Jerry Yang and David Filo, Yahoo by 2000 had grown to be the mighty “Lord of the Portals.” At the time, Yahoo was the Internet entrance point for more users than any other website, with a stock price, as 2000 began, of $475 per share. Yang, Yahoo’s billionaire leader, was confident and brash—he “liked the general definition of a yahoo: ‘rude, unsophisticated, uncouth.’” Obsessed with expanding market share, he thought government dumb, and speech restrictions dumber still. Confronted by an obscure activist complaining about hate speech and invoking French law, Yang’s company shrugged its high-tech shoulders. Mark Knobel was not impressed. On April 11, 2000, he sued Yahoo in a French court on behalf of the International League against Racism and Anti-Semitism and others. Yahoo’s auctions, he charged, violated a French law banning trafficking in Nazi goods in France.
The God of the Internet
Authors: Goldsmith Jack , Wu Tim
Published: November 2020

If you had met Jon Postel in 1998, you might have been surprised to learn that you were in the presence of one of the Internet’s greatest living authorities. He had a rambling, ragged look, living in sandals and a large, unkempt beard. He lived like a modern-day Obi-Wan Kenobi, an academic hermit who favored solitary walks on the Southern California beach. When told once by a reporter that readers were interested in learning more about his personal life, he answered: “If we tell them, they won’t be interested anymore.” Yet this man was, and had been for as long as anyone could remember, the ultimate authority for assignment of the all-important Internet Protocol (IP) numbers that are the essential feature of Internet membership. Like the medallions assigned to New York City taxicabs, each globally unique number identifies a computer on the Net, determining who belongs and who doesn’t. “If the Net does have a God,” wrote the Economist in 1997, “he is probably Jon Postel.” Jon Postel was a quiet man who kept strong opinions and sometimes acted in surprising ways. The day of January 28, 1998, provided the best example. On that day Postel wrote an e-mail to the human operators of eight of the twelve “name servers” around the globe. Name servers are the critical computers that are ultimately responsible for making sure that when you type a name like google.com you reach the right address (123.23.83.0). On that day Postel asked the eight operators, all personally loyal to Postel, to recognize his computer as the “root,” or, in essence, the master computer for the whole Internet. The operators complied, pointing their servers to Postel’s computer instead of the authoritative root controlled by the United States government. The order made the operators nervous—Paul Vixie, one of the eight, quietly arranged to have someone look after his kids in case he was arrested. Postel was playing with fire. His act could have divided the Internet’s critical naming system into two gigantic networks, one headed by himself, the other headed by the United States. He engineered things so that the Internet continued to run smoothly. But had he wanted to during this critical time, he might have created chaos.