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At home in the Okavango
An ethnographic portrayal of the lives of white citizens of the Okavango Delta, Botswana, this book examines their relationships with the natural and social environments of the region. In response to the insecurity of their position as a European-descended minority in a postcolonial African state, Gressier argues that white Batswana have developed cultural values and practices that have allowed them to attain high levels of belonging. Adventure is common for this frontier community, and the book follows their safari lifestyles as they construct and perform localized identities in their interactions with dangerous wildlife, the broader African community, and the global elite via their work in the nature-tourism industry.
eBook
The world atlas of rivers, estuaries, and deltas
From the Congo and the Mekong to the Seine and the Mississippi, Earth's rivers carve through landscapes before coursing into the world's oceans through estuaries and deltas. Their inexorable flow carries sediment and more, acting as lifeblood for a variety of ecosystems and communities. More than any other surface feature of Earth, rivers, estuaries, and deltas are vitally important to our economic and social well-being, and our management of them often sits at the sharp edge of today's most pressing environmental challenges. The World Atlas of Rivers, Estuaries, and Deltas takes readers on an unforgettable tour of these dynamic bodies of water, explaining how they function at each stage of their flow. Combining maps and graphics with informative essays and beautiful photos, this invaluable reference book will give you a new appreciation for the power that rivers, estuaries, and deltas wield. Features a wealth of colour photos, maps, and infographics. Brings together invaluable perspectives from leading experts. Describes the rich biodiversity associated with the world's rivers, estuaries, and deltas. Explains how rivers, estuaries, and deltas work, from river networks to deltaic floodplains, and sheds light on the erosion, movement, and deposition of sediment. Describes the anatomy of rivers, estuaries, and deltas, from channel geometry and river planforms to estuarine shape and delta morphology. Examines the ecology and ecosystems of rivers, estuaries, and deltas and how humans interact with these environments. Additional topics include damming, climate change, water use, pollution, resource management, and planetary health, as well as future perspectives on these vital landscapes.
BOOK
State Healthcare and Yanomami Transformations
Amazonian indigenous peoples have preserved many aspects of their culture and cosmology while also developing complex relationships with dominant non-indigenous society. Until now, anthropological writing on Amazonian peoples has been divided between \"traditional\" topics like kinship, cosmology, ritual, and myth, on the one hand, and the analysis of their struggles with the nation-state on the other. What has been lacking is work that bridges these two approaches and takes into consideration the meaning of relationships with the state from an indigenous perspective.That long-standing dichotomy is challenged in this new ethnography by anthropologist José Kelly. Kelly places the study of culture and cosmology squarely within the context of the modern nation-state and its institutions. He explores Indian-white relations as seen through the operation of a state-run health system among the indigenous Yanomami of southern Venezuela.With theoretical foundations in the fields of medical and Amazonian anthropology, Kelly sheds light on how Amerindian cosmology shapes concepts of the state at the community level. The result is a symmetrical anthropology that treats white and Amerindian perceptions of each other within a single theoretical framework, thus expanding our understanding of each group and its influences on the other. This book will be valuable to those studying Amazonian peoples, medical anthropology, development studies, and Latin America. Its new takes on theory and methodology make it ideal for classroom use.
eBook
Sedimentary crisis at the global scale
Volume 1: \"The Earth's oceans are currently undergoing unprecedented changes: rivers have suffered a severe reduction in their sediment transport, and as a result, sediment input to the oceans has dropped lower than ever before. These inputs have varied over millennia as a result of both natural occurrences and human actions, such as the building of dams and the extraction of materials from riverbeds. Sedimentary Crisis at the Global Scale 1 examines how river basins have been affected by the sedimentary crises of various historical epochs. By studying global balances, it provides insights into the profound disruption of the solid transport of fluvial bodies. The book also explores studies of various rivers, from the Amazon, which remains relatively unaffected, to dying rivers such as the Colorado and the Nile.\" -- Back cover.
Book
Entropy and optimality in river deltas
The form and function of river deltas is intricately linked to the evolving structure of their channel networks, which controls how effectively deltas are nourished with sediments and nutrients. Understanding the coevolution of deltaic channels and their flux organization is crucial for guiding maintenance strategies of these highly stressed systems from a range of anthropogenic activities. To date, however, a unified theory explaining how deltas self-organize to distribute water and sediment up to the shoreline remains elusive. Here, we provide evidence for an optimality principle underlying the self-organized partition of fluxes in delta channel networks. By introducing a suitable nonlocal entropy rate (nER) and by analyzing field and simulated deltas, we suggest that delta networks achieve configurations that maximize the diversity of water and sediment flux delivery to the shoreline. We thus suggest that prograding deltas attain dynamically accessible optima of flux distributions on their channel network topologies, thus effectively decoupling evolutionary time scales of geomorphology and hydrology. When interpreted in terms of delta resilience, high nER configurations reflect an increased ability to withstand perturbations. However, the distributive mechanism responsible for both diversifying flux delivery to the shoreline and dampening possible perturbations might lead to catastrophic events when those perturbations exceed certain intensity thresholds.
Journal Article
American Congo
This is the story of how rural black people struggled against the oppressive sharecropping system of the Arkansas and Mississippi Delta during the first half of the twentieth century. Delta planters, aided by local law enforcement, engaged in peonage, murder, theft, and disfranchisement. As individuals and through collective struggle, black men and women fought back, demanding a just return for their crops and laying claim to a democratic vision of citizenship. Nan Woodruff shows how the freedom fighters of the 1960s would draw on this half-century tradition of protest, thus expanding our standard notions of the civil rights movement and illuminating a neglected but significant slice of the American black experience.
eBook
Comparing futures for the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta
An ecosystem in freefall, a shrinking water supply for cities and agriculture, an antiquated network of failure-prone levees—this is the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, the major hub of California's water system. Written by a team of independent water experts, this analysis of the latest data evaluates proposed solutions to the Delta's myriad problems. Through in-depth economic and ecological analysis, the authors find that the current policy of channeling water exports through the Delta is not sustainable for any interest. Employing a peripheral canal-conveying water around the Delta instead of through it—as part of a larger habitat and water management plan appears to be the best strategy to maintain both a high-quality water supply and at the same time improve conditions for native fish and wildlife. This important assessment includes integrated analysis of long term ecosystem and water management options and demonstrates how issues such as climate change and sustainability will shape the future.
eBook
Review: Advances in delta-subsidence research using satellite methods
Most of the world’s major river deltas are sinking relative to local sea level. The effects of subsidence can include aquifer salinization, infrastructure damage, increased vulnerability to flooding and storm surges, and permanent inundation of low-lying land. Consequently, determining the relative importance of natural vs. anthropogenic pressures in driving delta subsidence is a topic of ongoing research. This article presents a review of knowledge with respect to delta surface-elevation loss. The field is rapidly advancing due to applications of space-based techniques: InSAR (interferometric synthetic aperture radar), GPS (global positioning system), and satellite ocean altimetry. These techniques have shed new light on a variety of subsidence processes, including tectonics, isostatic adjustment, and the spatial and temporal variability of sediment compaction. They also confirm that subsidence associated with fluid extraction can outpace sea-level rise by up to two orders of magnitude, resulting in effective sea-level rise that is one-hundred times faster than the global average rate. In coming years, space-based and airborne instruments will be critical in providing near-real-time monitoring to facilitate management decisions in sinking deltas. However, ground-based observations continue to be necessary for generating complete measurements of surface-elevation change. Numerical modeling should seek to simulate couplings between subsidence processes for greater predictive power.
Journal Article
Developed river deltas: are they sustainable?
Background. Coastal river deltas provide multiple ecosystem services. Many deltas serve as major centers of agriculture, industry and commerce. The annual economic benefits derived from major deltas are often a substantial fraction of a country's GDP. Yet, many deltas are losing land due to erosion, subsidence and subsequent flooding. Such vulnerabilities are often increased due to local land and water management decisions, relative sea-level rise, and increases in climate extremes. Aim of this review. Considerable literature exists addressing the formation of deltas and the effects of increasing urbanization, industrialization and crop and fish production, increases in relative sea level rise, and decreasing sediment deposition. This leads to the question: are the economic, environmental, ecological and social benefits derived from developed river deltas sustainable? This review focuses on this question. Methods/Design. Over 180 published documents were identified and reviewed using various search engines and key words. These key words included river deltas; delta sustainability, vulnerability, resilience, coasts, ecology, hazards, erosion, water management, urbanization, reclamation, agriculture, governance, pollution, geomorphology, economic development, socio-economic changes, and delta wetlands; relative sea level change; sediment trapping; sand mining; salinity intrusion; coastal restoration; estuarine engineering; shoreline evolution; estuarine processes; and the names of specific river basin deltas. Review Results/Synthesis and Discussion. Deltas provide humans important resources and ecosystem services leading to their intensive development. The impacts of this development, together with sea-level rise, threatens the sustainability of many river deltas. Various management and governance measures are available to help sustain deltas. Controls on land use, improved farming and transport technology, wetland habitat protection, and d improved governance are some that might help sustain the economic and ecological services provided by deltas. However, increased population growth and the impacts of climate change will put increased pressure on deltas and the benefits derived from them.
Journal Article