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This groundbreaking book of literary detective work alters our understanding of T. S. Eliot's poetic masterpiece,The Waste Land. Lawrence Rainey not only resolves longstanding mysteries surrounding the composition of the poem but also overturns traditional interpretations of the poem that have prevailed for more than eighty years. He shines new light on Eliot's greatest achievement and on the poem's place in the modern canon.Far from the austere and sober monument to neoclassicism that admirers have praised,The Waste Landturns out to be something quite different: something grim and wild, unruly and intractable, violent and shocking and radically indeterminate, yet also deeply compassionate. Rainey looks at how Eliot went about writing the poem and at the sequence in which he composed the parts. Arriving at new insights into the poet's intentions, Rainey unsettles tradition-bound views of the poem and shows us thatThe Waste Landis even stranger and more startling than we knew.

The Accidental Playground explores the remarkable landscape created by individuals and small groups who occupied and rebuilt an abandoned Brooklyn waterfront in Williamsburg. Without formal authority, capital, professional assistance, grand vision, consensus, or coordination with each other, these \"vernacular\" builders transformed a vacated waterfront railroad yard into a unique setting for recreation and creative endeavor. With the Manhattan skyline as its backdrop, the collapsing piers, eroded bulkhead, and remaining building foundations of the former Brooklyn Eastern District Terminal (BEDT) became the raw materials for various forms of waterside leisure and social spaces. Lacking predetermined rules governing its use, this waterfront evolved into the home turf for unusual and sometimes spectacular recreational, social, and creative subcultures. These included skateboarders who built a short-lived, but nationally renowned skatepark; a twenty-five-piece \"public\" marching band, fire performance troupes, and a variety of artists, photographers, and filmmakers. At the same time the site also served basic recreational needs of local residents. Collapsing piers became great places to catch fish, sunbathe, or take in the Manhattan skyline; the foundation of a demolished warehouse became an ideal place to practice music or skateboard; rubble-strewn earth became a compelling setting for film and fashion shoots; broken bulkhead became a beach; and thick patches of weeds dotted by ailanthus trees became a jungle. Drawing on a rich mix of documentary strategies including observation, ethnography, photography, and first-person narrative, Daniel Campo probes this accidental playground, allowing those who created it to share and examine their own narratives, perspectives, and conflicts. The multiple constituencies of this Williamsburg waterfront were surprisingly diverse, their stories colorful and provocative. When taken together, Campo argues, they suggest a radical reimagining of urban public space, the waterfront, and the practices by which they are created and maintained. The Accidental Playground, which treats readers to an utterly compelling story, is an exciting and distinctive contribution to the growing literature on the unplanned and the undesigned spaces and activities in cities today.

The Accidental Playground explores the remarkable landscape created by individuals and small groups who occupied and rebuilt an abandoned Brooklyn waterfront. While local residents, activists, garbage haulers, real estate developers, speculators, and two city administrations fought over the fate of the former Brooklyn Eastern District Terminal (BEDT), others simply took to this decaying edge, transforming it into a unique venue for leisure, creative, and everyday practices. These occupiers and do-it-yourself builders created their own waterfront parks and civic spaces absent every resource needed for successful urban development, including plans, designs, capital, professional assistance, consensus, and permission from the waterfront’s owners. Amid trash, ruins, weeds, homeless encampments, and the operation of an active garbage transfer station, they inadvertently created the “Brooklyn Riviera” and made this waterfront a destination that offered much more than its panoramic vistas of the Manhattan skyline. The terminal evolved into the home turf for unusual and sometimes spectacular recreational, social, and creative subcultures, including the skateboarders who built a short-lived but nationally renowned skatepark, a twenty-five-piece “public” marching band, fire performance troupes, artists, photographers, and filmmakers. At the same time it served the basic recreational needs of local residents. Collapsing piers became great places to catch fish, sunbathe, or take in the views; the foundation of a demolished warehouse became an ideal place to picnic, practice music, or do an art project; rubble-strewn earth became a compelling setting for film and fashion shoots; a broken bulkhead became a beach; and thick patches of weeds dotted by ailanthus trees became a jungle. These reclamations, all but ignored by city and state governments and property interests that were set to transform this waterfront, momentarily added to the distinctive cultural landscape of the city’s most bohemian and rapidly changing neighborhood.Drawing on a rich mix of documentary strategies, including observation, ethnography, photography, and first-person narrative, Daniel Campo probes this accidental playground, allowing those who created it to share and examine their own narratives, perspectives, and conflicts. The multiple constituencies of this waterfront were surprisingly diverse, their stories colorful and provocative. When taken together, Campo argues, they suggest a radical reimagining of urban parks and public spaces, and the practices by which they are created and maintained. The Accidental Playground, which treats readers to an utterly compelling story, is an exciting and distinctive contribution to the growing literature on unplanned spaces and practices in cities today.

The role of American hospital expansions in health disparities and medical apartheid Health Colonialism considers how U.S. urban development policies contribute to the uneven and unjust distribution of health care in this country. Here, Shiloh Krupar investigates the racially inequitable effects of elite U.S. hospitals on their surrounding neighborhoods and their role in consolidating frontiers of land primed for redevelopment. Naming this frontier “medical brownfields,” Krupar shows how hospitals leverage their domestic real estate empires to underwrite international prospecting for patients and overseas services and specialty clinics. Her pointed analysis reveals that decolonizing health care efforts must scrutinize the land practices of nonprofit medical institutions and the liberal foundations of medical apartheid perpetuated by globalizing American health care.

This article seeks to provide an improved and more comprehensive understanding of the concept and theories on wasteland. It achieves this by focusing on the Indian context, allowing us to unpack the importance of including multiple perspectives of wasteland narratives; this means including more positive narratives of the potential of wasteland to inform and improve prospects for land policies in the Global South. Wasteland is commonly recognized as an underutilized category of land that may transform into a valuable resource base with proper management measures. The term waste has multiple angles that carry different notions ranging from fallow to agroforestry land in the Global South and brownfield to green space in the Global North. We conduct a narrative review approach to qualitatively analyze the concept of wastelands, which has been studied in the pre-existing literature from 1970 to the present. This unsystematic literature review approach incorporates multiple elements of wasteland discourse, like understanding the meaning of the term on a global scale, setting out the meaning of the term waste into multiple perspectives explicitly in the Indian context, along with different classes and management approaches to wasteland from a national perspective. The multiple perspectives of wasteland not only generate misconceptions of land resources but spawn difficulties in land-use policy, particularly for the Indian scenario. For sustainable land-use policy, reclaiming wasteland would be the best possible way for India and other countries in the Global South, which requires a comprehensive methodological overview on wasteland narrative.

【Objective】 Hetao Irrigation District is one of the largest irrigation districts in Northwestern China. However, the imbalance between irrigation and drainage has resulted in soil salinization. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the characteristics of soil salinization in both planted and uncultivated soils in this region, as well as the key environmental factors that influence soil salinization. 【Method】 Field investigation and laboratory test were conducted to analyze the ion characteristics and its influential factors in cultivated and uncultivated soils. 【Result】 In the studied area, the predominant anion in both cultivated and uncultivated soils was chloride (Cl-), comprising 59.31% and 58.48% of the composition, respectively. The primary cations were potassium (K+) and sodium (Na+), accounting for 71.32% in cultivated soils and 72.64% in uncultivated soils. Correlation analysis showed that, in cultivated soils, K+ and Na+ were most correlated with sulfate (SO42-) with a correlation coefficient of 0.87, followed by with Cl-, with a correlation coefficient of 0.66; they were least correlated with HCO3-. In the uncultivated soils, K+ and Na+ were mostly correlated with Cl-, with a correlation coefficient of 0.93, followed by with SO42-, with a correlation coefficient of 0.73. Key factors affecting salinization in the cultivated soils included SO42-, magnesium (Mg2+), Cl-, K+ and Na+, while in the uncultivated soil, they were SO42-, Cl-, K+, Na+ and HCO3-. Redundancy analysis showed that salt ions and environmental factors accounted for 13.56% and 20.23% of the variation in salinization in cultivated soils, and 35.17% and 46.17% in salinization in cultivated soils, respectively. Groundwater quality affected soil salt ions the most, followed by soil texture. 【Conclusion】 Soil salinization in both cultivated and uncultivated soils is severe, with Cl-, K+, Na+ and SO42- being the dominant ions. Effective strategies to mitigate soil salinization should focus on improving groundwater quality and optimizing soil texture.

Water scarcity, soil salinization, and desertification threaten sustainable agricultural ecosystems of Hetao irrigation district, Yellow River Basin (YRB). Precise quantification of soil water dynamics and plant water consumption processes is essential for the agricultural sustainability of the irrigation district. Therefore, this study mainly focused on the crop coefficients and water consumption processes of three representative plant types in the Hetao irrigation district, each corresponding to a specific land system: Helianthus annuus (cultivated land), Tamarix chinensis (wasteland), and Phragmites australis (lake). The SIMDualKc model was calibrated and validated based on situ observation data (soil water content and yield) during 2018 (conventional conditions), 2023 and 2024 (deep water-saving conditions). Results show strong agreement between simulated and observed soil moisture and crop yields. The results indicate that the process curves of Kcb (basal crop coefficient) and Kcbadj (adjusted crop coefficient) nearly overlapped for the three plant types in 2018 and 2023. However, under the deep water-saving project implemented in 2024, the Kcbadj process curves for all three plant types exhibited a significant reduction (approximately 15%). Soil evaporation fractions (E/ETcadj) were stable at 19–30% during the 2018, 2023, and 2024. The contribution of capillary rise to ET reached 38.61–43.18% in cultivated land (Helianthus annuus), 41.52–48.93% in wasteland (Tamarix chinensis), and 38.08–46.57% in lake boundary areas (Phragmites australis), which underscores the significant role of groundwater recharge in sustaining plant water consumption. Actual-to-potential transpiration ratios (Ta/Tp) during 2023–2024 decreased by 3–11% for Helianthus annuus, 5–12% for Tamarix chinensis, and 23% for Phragmites australis compared to Ta/Tp values in 2018. Capillary rise decreased approximately 10% during the whole system. Deep water-saving practices increased the groundwater depth and restricted groundwater recharge to plants via capillary rise, thereby impairing plant transpiration and growth. These findings provide scientific support for sustainable agriculture and ecological security in the Yellow River Basin.

This Companion is the first to be dedicated to T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land, offering fifteen new essays from a team of international scholars. Written in a style that is both sophisticated and accessible, these fresh critical perspectives will serve as an invaluable guide for scholars, students, and general readers alike.

PurposePoor structure, nutrient deficiency, and acidification are core factors restricting the reclamation of rare earth mining wasteland soil (REMWS). Sewage sludge, bagasse, and molybdenum tailings, all of which need proper disposal, have great potentials in REMWS reclamation. The goal of this study was to explore the remediation effect on rare earth mining wasteland soil with the combined application of sewage sludge compost (SSC), bagasse, and modified molybdenum tailings (MMT).Materials and methodsSSC (T1), SSC + bagasse (T2), and SSC + bagasse + MMT (T3) were applied in REMWS as amendments in a 4-month pot experiment, and their effects on REMWS properties and heavy metals (HMs) toxicity were tested with Eucalyptus urophylla, which grows fast, resists environment stress, and is a promising plant in REMWS reclamation.ResultsThe application of SSC (T1) improved REMWS fertility, but increased Cu, Zn, Cd, and Ni contents in soil and E. urophylla seedlings, and inhibited E. urophylla growth. Bagasse application (T2) alleviated growth inhibition and further addition of bagasse + MMT (T3) significantly improved E. urophylla growth. Moreover, T3 improved soil physical properties, organic carbon content, pH, and reduced soil HMs bioavailability and plant HMs content as compared to T1 and T2. Structural equation modeling results revealed that plant nutrient accumulation increased plant HMs accumulation, the latter inhibited plant nutrient accumulation in turn, and soil pH played a key role in retarding HMs uptake and improving E. urophylla growth and nutrients uptake.ConclusionThese results suggested that the combined application of SSC, bagasse, and MMT is an effective approach for REMWS amelioration and land disposal of solid waste resources.

The intensive industrial activities of the twentieth century have left behind highly contaminated wasteland soils. It is well known that soil parameters and the presence of pollutants shape microbial communities. But in such industrial waste sites, the soil multi-contamination with organic (polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, PAH) and metallic (Zn, Pb, Cd) pollutants and long-term exposure may induce a selection pressure on microbial communities that may modify soil functioning. The aim of our study was to evaluate the impact of long-term multi-contamination and soil characteristics on bacterial taxonomic and functional diversity as related to the carbon cycle. We worked on 10 soils from northeast of France distributed into three groups (low anthropised controls, slag heaps, and settling ponds) based on their physico-chemical properties (texture, C, N) and pollution level. We assessed bacterial taxonomic diversity by 16S rDNA Illumina sequencing, and functional diversity using Biolog® and MicroResp™ microtiter plate tools. Although taxonomic diversity at the phylum level was not different among the soil groups, many operational taxonomic units were influenced by metal or PAH pollution, and by soil texture and total nitrogen content. Functional diversity was not influenced by PAH contamination while metal pollution selected microbial communities with reduced metabolic functional diversity but more tolerant to zinc. Limited microbial utilisation of carbon substrates in metal-polluted soils was mainly due to the nitrogen content. Based on these two observations, we hypothesised that reduced microbial activity and lower carbon cycle–related functional diversity may have contributed to the accumulation of organic matter in the soils that exhibited the highest levels of metal pollution.