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Intellectual, emotional, restless, dogged, loyal, selfish; Kandinsky was an artist - and a man - of contradictions. This genre-defying painter didn't pick up a brush until he was thirty years old. He was an academic with a promising career that he threw away to explore the arts.

Based on extensive fieldwork in the region this ground-breaking book explores the important role that environmental movements from these countries are playing in promoting effective energy and environmental governance. By comparing the nature of this activism under two very different political regimes, Adam Simpson provides crucial theoretical insights for sustainable resource development in the South.

American Wild: it can kill you, or exhilarate you. It's always there, a character in its own right in the great unfolding narrative of American writing. This issue of Granta is dedicated to stories of the wild, from MELINDA MOUSTAKIS on gutting fish in Alaska to CLAIRE VAYE WATKINS on a lost child in a dystopian California. Also: ANTHONY DOERR on a family of pioneers in Idaho, ADAM NICOLSON on tracking wolves in New Mexico and DAVID TREUER on cage fighting and his Ojibwe heritage.

The mantra of energy security is regularly employed as an excuse for governing elites in the less affluent South to pursue large-scale energy projects that are often inappropriate and unnecessary for local development needs. This situation is exemplified in Thailand, Burma and Laos. Here the dominant classes have created an energy 'love triangle', whereby Thailand exports the many problems associated with cross-border energy projects to its more authoritarian neighbours while importing the resultant energy. This article employs critical security literature and the concept of earth rights to investigate these relationships and elucidate resultant linkages between environmental and energy security. It finds that, far from safeguarding local communities from depravation, these projects often exacerbate existing social tensions and conflict, hastening environmental degradation and intensifying various manifestations of insecurity.

Asian mystery snails (Cipangopaludina chinensis Gray, 1834 and Cipangopaludina Japonica von Martens, 1861) were introduced to the United States in the 1890s and have since spread to waterbodies across the country. Besides the classic effects of invasive species, mystery snails may accumulate and distribute metals in invaded ecosystems. Few studies have evaluated this phenomenon in non-native mystery snail populations, specifically regarding partitioning of metals between different tissues and shells, and metal maternal transfer. Our goal was to compare metal concentrations (Cd, Cu, Ni, Pb, Zn) of shells, tissues, and environment of mystery snails, and the extent to which metals are maternally transferred. Mystery snails, water, and sediment were collected from several locations in northwestern Pennsylvania, USA, between 2021-2023. Metal concentrations in environmental matrices, tissues, and shells of mystery snails were evaluated via inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry. Snail metal concentrations were compared to environmental concentrations to determine allocation between tissues and putative routes of accumulation. All five metals were detected in mystery snail tissues, with evidence of substantial accumulation of Cd, Pb, and Ni. Bioconcentration and biota sediment accumulation factors revealed that for most metals, accumulation may have occurred from water, likely reflecting snail feeding strategies and metal bioavailability. Significant correlations between maternal and offspring metal concentrations were found for all five metals, but Cu showed elevated concentrations in offspring compared to mothers. This suggests maternal transfer, increasing potential trophic transfer through predation on juvenile snails. Quantifying metal concentrations in mystery snails provides insight into potential exposure risks and trophic transfer, with implications for evaluating adverse effects in native species.

This study examined how genotypes of Daphnia pulicaria from a single population, separated by thousands of generations of evolution in the wild, differ in their sensitivity to a novel anthropogenic stressor. These genotypes were resurrected from preserved resting eggs isolated from sediments belonging to three time periods: 2002–2008, 1967–1977, and 1301–1646 A.D. Toxicity of the organophosphate insecticide chlorpyrifos was determined through a series of acute toxicity tests. There was a significant dose–response effect in all genotypes studied. Moreover, significant variation in toxicity among genotypes within each time period was detected. Importantly, a significant effect of time period on sensitivity to chlorpyrifos was found. Analysis of the median effect concentrations (EC50s) for genotypes within each time period indicated that the 1301–1646 genotypes were 2.7 times more sensitive than the 1967–1977 genotypes. This trend may be partially explained by microevolutionary shifts in response to cultural eutrophication.

Tree nurseries and greenhouses within the USDA red imported fire ant (RIFA) quarantine zone are required to incorporate insecticides into their potting media to prevent artificial spread of RIFA. Bifenthrin and fipronil are two common insecticides that are incorporated into potting media. During irrigation and stormwater events, there is potential for insecticides to leach from nursery pots, resulting in the contamination of nearby surface waters. In this study, occurrences of insecticides in simulated nursery runoff were compared with two irrigation strategies and two types of containers in single pot leaching and field runoff simulations. In addition, toxicity of pot leachate to the aquatic invertebrate, Hyallela azteca, was measured, and removal efficiencies of insecticides from bioretention cell media were evaluated. Overhead irrigation resulted in significantly higher concentrations than drip irrigation, and RootMaker® pots allowed more leaching as compared to standard slick-wall pots. However, in all tests, the average concentration of bifenthrin during 15 days of leaching in both pot and field simulations was greater than 200 ng/L; more than 100-fold greater than the LC₅₀ for H. azteca. Toxicity studies confirmed this level of toxicity. Higher amounts of compost, 20 and 40 %, in bioretention cell media resulted in greater percent reduction of both bifenthrin and fipronil. This study determined that management techniques may be able to limit the amount of insecticide that leaches from pots and runs off to receiving water bodies. Specifically, the selection of appropriate pot types, irrigation strategies, or filtering runoff through bioretention cells may reduce contamination loads. Thus, further best management strategies such as the use of bioretention cells are needed in nursery and greenhouse facilities to prevent surface water runoff from transporting toxic insecticides.

The Asian Development Bank (adb) is engaged in development projects throughout the Greater Mekong Subregion, although for most of the past two decades it has boycotted Myanmar (Burma) because of donor government sanctions. Despite being criticised for its neoliberal focus and its lack of transparency and accountability, the adb's operations compare favourably to those of the Myanmar government and many transnational corporations constructing and financing projects there. This article engages with the concept of risk, which increasingly frames how development in fragile states like Myanmar is understood, to critically analyse the adb's nascent re-engagement in Myanmar according to the risks this poses for five constituencies: the adb itself; donor states; the Myanmar government and military; private capital; and marginalised communities. While deeper engagement in Myanmar poses different risks for each group, critical analysis suggests that the adb must increase the genuine participation of civil society actors in its activities to address the most significant risks of all, those facing marginalised communities.

This work covers major weapons throughout human history, beginning with clubs and maces; through crossbows, swords, and gunpowder; up to the hypersonic railgun, lasers, and robotic weapons under development today.

Starting in the early 1900s, chlorinating potable water supplies dramatically reduced the incidence of waterborne diseases. However, in the 1970s, analytical chemists discov-ered trihalomethanes (THMs) as byproducts of chlorination reactions with natural organic matter (NOM) in drinking water. Although greater than 600 disinfection byproducts (DBPs) have since been characterized in drinking water, regulations continue to focus on THMS and haloacetic acids (HAAs). With recent toxicological studies demonstrating that other DBPs have orders of magnitude higher toxic potencies than THMs and HAAs, cur-rent research has shifted to focus on characterizing newer classes of DBPs that could con-tribute to toxicity. However, these investigations remain arduous due to the difficulty in characterizing DBP precursors found in NOM. Nonetheless, research using amino acids and other model precursors demonstrates that yields of THMs and HAAs are < 1% due to the difficulty of breaking carbon-carbon bonds to liberate these 1-2 carbon byproducts from larger precursor structures. Identifying the higher-yield initial products of chlorine addition to components of NOM has been difficult because the structures of these NOM compo-nents are unclear. With regards to food, pathogenic outbreaks are still prevalent. It is estimated that foodborne pathogen outbreaks now exceed those in drinking water. Free chlorine is the most widely used food disinfectant. Although chlorine exposures required for food wash-ing in packaging facilities have not yet been codified, chlorine doses (50-200 mg/L as Cl2) and precursor concentrations (solid food) are much higher than encountered in drinking water. Although research on the formation of DBPs in chemically disinfected foods has been published, these studies tend to focus on the same low-yield DBPs (e.g., THMs) that are the focus of drinking water research. They are unlikely to represent an exposure con-cern in food because they tend to partition to the washwater rather than the food. In con-trast, the structures of the biomolecular precursors in food (e.g., the amino acids constitut-ing protein and the fatty acids constituting lipids) are well-characterized. Instead, I argue that the initial products of chlorine addition to amino acids and fatty acids will be of greater importance for consumer exposure since they will form at high yield and remain bound in food matrices. This dissertation introduces (chapter 2) the reader to: the necessity of food disinfec-tion, food processing, mechanisms of disinfection by chlorine and ozone, and the study of food disinfection byproducts as the backdrop for understanding the subsequent chapters. Following this introduction, the dissertation uses the formation of chlorotyrosines from protein-bound tyrosines in produce as a model for the initial chlorine addition products to proteins within produce and demonstrates their importance as toxicity drivers relative to the 1-2 carbon DBPs of current research interest (chapter 3). Finally, this work (chapter 4) shows the formation of fatty acid chlorohydrins from lipid-bound fatty acids as a model for the initial chlorine addition products to lipids inside chlorine-treated produce. Overall, this dissertation shows the complexity of food disinfection byproduct research, and the need for further investigation of these contaminants as potentially dominant components of the over-all toxic exposures.