The Princeton Guide to Ecology

Edited by Simon A. Levin

Stephen R. Carpenter, H. Charles J. Godfray, Ann P. Kinzig, Michel Loreau, Jonathan B. Losos, Brian Walker & David S. Wilcove, associate editors

The Princeton Guide to Ecology is a concise, authoritative one-volume reference to the field's major subjects and key concepts. Edited by eminent ecologist Simon Levin, with contributions from an international team of leading ecologists, the book contains more than ninety clear, accurate, and up-to-date articles on the most important topics within seven major areas: autecology, population ecology, communities and ecosystems, landscapes and the biosphere, conservation biology, ecosystem services, and biosphere management. Complete with more than 200 illustrations (including sixteen pages in color), a glossary of key terms, a chronology of milestones in the field, suggestions for further reading on each topic, and an index, this is an essential volume for undergraduate and graduate students, research ecologists, scientists in related fields, policymakers, and anyone else with a serious interest in ecology.

• Explains key topics in one concise and authoritative volume


• Features more than ninety articles written by an international team of leading ecologists


• Contains more than 200 illustrations, including sixteen pages in color


• Includes glossary, chronology, suggestions for further reading, and index


• Covers autecology, population ecology, communities and ecosystems, landscapes and the biosphere, conservation biology, ecosystem services, and biosphere management
  

Simon A. Levin is the George M. Moffett Professor of Biology and a professor of ecology and environmental biology at Princeton University, where he directs the Center for BioComplexity. He is the author, editor, or coeditor of many books, including the Encyclopedia of Biodiversity. Among his many awards are the Heineken Prize for Environmental Sciences and the Kyoto Prize in Basic Sciences.

What Have We Done to Democracy?

Of Nearsighted Progress, Feral Howls, Consensus, Chaos, and a New Cold War in Kashmir

By Arundhati Roy

While we're still arguing about whether there's life after death, can we add another question to the cart? Is there life after democracy? What sort of life will it be? By "democracy" I don't mean democracy as an ideal or an aspiration. I mean the working model: Western liberal democracy, and its variants, such as they are.

So, is there life after democracy?

Attempts to answer this question often turn into a comparison of different systems of governance, and end with a somewhat prickly, combative defense of democracy. It's flawed, we say. It isn't perfect, but it's better than everything else that's on offer. Inevitably, someone in the room will say: "Afghanistan, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Somalia... is that what you would prefer?"

Whether democracy should be the utopia that all "developing" societies aspire to is a separate question altogether. (I think it should. The early, idealistic phase can be quite heady.) The question about life after democracy is addressed to those of us who already live in democracies, or in countries that pretend to be democracies. It isn't meant to suggest that we lapse into older, discredited models of totalitarian or authoritarian governance. It's meant to suggest that the system of representative democracy -- too much representation, too little democracy -- needs some structural adjustment.

The question here, really, is what have we done to democracy? What have we turned it into? What happens once democracy has been used up? When it has been hollowed out and emptied of meaning? What happens when each of its institutions has metastasized into something dangerous? What happens now that democracy and the free market have fused into a single predatory organism with a thin, constricted imagination that revolves almost entirely around the idea of maximizing profit?

Is it possible to reverse this process? Can something that has mutated go back to being what it used to be? What we need today, for the sake of the survival of this planet, is long-term vision. Can governments whose very survival depends on immediate, extractive, short-term gain provide this? Could it be that democracy, the sacred answer to our short-term hopes and prayers, the protector of our individual freedoms and nurturer of our avaricious dreams, will turn out to be the endgame for the human race? Could it be that democracy is such a hit with modern humans precisely because it mirrors our greatest folly -- our nearsightedness?

Our inability to live entirely in the present (like most animals do), combined with our inability to see very far into the future, makes us strange in-between creatures, neither beast nor prophet. Our amazing intelligence seems to have outstripped our instinct for survival. We plunder the earth hoping that accumulating material surplus will make up for the profound, unfathomable thing that we have lost. It would be conceit to pretend I have the answers to any of these questions. But it does look as if the beacon could be failing and democracy can perhaps no longer be relied upon to deliver the justice and stability we once dreamed it would.

Arundhati Roy was born in 1959 in Shillong, India. She studied architecture in New Delhi, where she now lives. She has worked as a film designer and screenplay writer in India. Roy is the author of the novel The God of Small Things, for which she received the 1997 Booker Prize. Her new book, just published by Haymarket Books, is Field Notes on Democracy: Listening to Grasshoppers. This post is adapted from the introduction to that book.

Tomgram: Arundhati Roy, Is Democracy Melting?

So you, as a citizen, want to run for a seat in the House of Representatives? Well, you may be too late. Back in 1990, according to OpenSecrets.org, a website of the Center for Responsive Politics, the average cost of a winning campaign for the House was $407,556. Pocket change for your average citizen. But that was so twentieth century. The average cost for winning a House seat in 2008: almost $1.4 million. Keep in mind, as well, that most of those House seats don't change hands, because in the American democratic system of the twenty-first century, incumbents basically don't lose, they retire or die.

In 2008, 403 incumbents ran for seats in the House and 380 of them won. Just to run a losing race last year would have cost you, on average, $492,928, almost $100,000 more than it cost to win in 1990. As for becoming a Senator? Not in your wildest dreams, unless you have some really good pals in pharmaceuticals and health care ($236,022,031 in lobbying paid out in 2008), insurance ($153,694,224), or oil and gas ($131,978,521). A winning senatorial seat came in at a nifty $8,531,267 and a losing seat at $4,130,078 in 2008. In other words, you don't have a hope in hell of being a loser in the American Congressional system, and what does that make you?

Of course, if you're a young, red-blooded American, you may have set your sights a little higher. So you want to be president? In that case, just to be safe for 2012, you probably should consider raising somewhere in the range of one billion dollars. After all, the 2008 campaign cost Barack Obama's team approximately $730 million and the price of a place at the table just keeps going up. Of course, it helps to know the right people. Last year, the total lobbying bill, including money that went out for electoral campaigns and for lobbying Congress and federal agencies, came to $3.3 billion and almost 9 months into 2009, another $1.63 billion has already gone out without an election in sight.

Let's face it. At the national level, this is what American democracy comes down to today, and this is what George W. Bush & Co. were so infernally proud to export by force of arms to Afghanistan and Iraq. This is why we need to think about the questions that Arundhati Roy -- to my mind, a heroic figure in a rather unheroic age -- raises about democracy globally in an essay adapted from the introduction to her latest book. That book, Field Notes on Democracy: Listening to Grasshoppers, has just been published (with one essay included that originally appeared at TomDispatch). Let's face it, she's just one of those authors -- I count Eduardo Galeano as another -- who must be read. Need I say more? Tom

How Transnational Corporations Damage the World's Poor (New Updated Edition)

John Madeley is a best-selling author, journalist and broadcaster, specialising in economic and social development issues, notably international trade, transnational corporations, food and agriculture, aid and human rights. He is the author of many books, newspaper articles and other publications. Based in Reading, he keeps in trim with medium-distance cycling.

About the Book
Transnational corporations are one of the most important actors in the global economy, occupying a more powerful position than ever before. In their persistent battle to increase profits, they have increasingly turned to the developing world, a world that holds many attractions for them. But what is their impact on the poor?

Now in its second edition, Big Business, Poor Peoples finds that these corporations are damaging the lives of millions of poor people in developing countries. Looking at every sector where transnational corporations are involved, this vital book is packed with detail of how the poor are affected. The book exposes how many of the natural resources of developing countries are being ceded to transnational corporations and how governments are unwilling or unable to control corporations who answerable to no one but their shareholders. The author argues that transnational corporations have used their money, size and power to influence international negotiations and that they have taken full advantage of the move towards privatisation to influence the policies of governments. Sovereignty, he concludes, is passing into corporate hands and the poor are paying the price. But people are fighting back. Citizens, workers, communities, are exposing the corporations and looking for alternatives.

The first edition of this path-breaking book put the issue of transnational corporations and the poor firmly on the agenda. This second edition contains significant new and updated material and is an essential read for anyone who wants to know more about the effects of corporate power on the poor.

La décroissance - Un nouveau projet politique

Paul Ariès

La gauche et la droite partagent le même bilan écologique effroyable.

Les deux idéologies ont fait durant le 20e siècle de l'environnement la variable d'ajustement de leur système au nom de leur foi dans le productivisme et le "toujours plus". Ces deux modèles sont en faillite au regard de l'effondrement environnemental actuel. La droite et les milieux d'affaires entendent profiter d'un nouveau rapport de force qui leur est plus favorable pour payer aux pauvres la facture environnementale.

La gauche est aphone incapable de marier la justice sociale et les contraintes de la nature. Entre ceux qui prônent avec Hulot de "polluer un peu moins pour pouvoir polluer plus longtemps" et ceux qui entendent avec Claude Allègre et Florence Parisot "polluer pour pouvoir dépolluer" en augmentant toujours plus la croissance, la production, la consommation et les emplois l'objection de croissance n'est-elle pas la véritable alternative pour les pays riches ? Un livre qui dépasse le domaine des seuls constats pour faire des propositions concrètes.

Un livre qui envisage la construction d'une nouvelle pensée politique de la décroissance. L'auteur ne cache pas les risques : il fait aussi état des débats et des polémiques parfois vives. Un ouvrage indispensable pour tous ceux qui ne veulent plus "développer en rond".

La Bourse ou la vie

Responsable(s) : Damien Millet & Eric Toussaint

Animée par le Comité pour l’annulation de la dette du tiers-monde, une collection qui travaille à l’émergence d’alternatives qui puissent briser la spirale infernale de l’endettement par l’établissement de modèles de développement socialement justes et écologiquement durables.Constitution d’un fonds de développement démocratiquement contrôlé par les populations et alimenté par l’annulation de cette dette ; rétrocession des biens mal acquis ; taxation des transactions financières ; établissement d’une nouvelle architecture économique et financière internationale ; réforme radicale de la logique de l’OMC ; contrôle des marchés financiers ; suppression des paradis fiscaux, etc. Autant de questions traitées par cette collection.