Owning the Earth

Author: Andro Linklater
Publisher: A&C Black
ISBN: 1408815745
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 497

Book Description
Barely two centuries ago, most of the world's productive land still belonged either communally to traditional societies or to the higher powers of monarch or church. But that pattern, and the ways of life that went with it, were consigned to history as a result of the most creative - and, at the same time, destructive - cultural force in the modern era: the idea of individual, exclusive ownership of land. This notion laid waste to traditional communal civilisations, displacing entire peoples from their homelands, and brought into being a unique concept of individual freedom and a distinct form of representative government and democratic institutions. Other great civilizations, in Russia, China, and the Islamic world, evolved very different structures of land ownership, and thus very different forms of government and social responsibility.The seventeenth-century English surveyor William Petty was the first man to recognise the connection between private property and free-market capitalism; the American radical Wolf Ladejinsky redistributed land in Japan, Taiwan and South Korea after the Second World War to make possible the emergence of Asian tiger economies. Through the eyes of these remarkable individuals and many more, including Chinese emperors and German peasants, Andro Linklater here presents the evolution of land ownership to offer a radically new view of mankind's place on the planet.

Land: How the Hunger for Ownership Shaped the Modern World

Author: Simon Winchester
Publisher: HarperCollins UK
ISBN: 000835913X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 525

Book Description
From the bestselling author Simon Winchester, a human history of land around the world: who mapped it, owned it, stole it, cared for it, fought for it and gave it back.

Owning Our Future

Author: Marjorie Kelly
Publisher: Berrett-Koehler Publishers
ISBN: 1609945220
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 343

Book Description
A collection of company profiles that “succeeds in demonstrating how more sustainable business ventures can function in practice” (Publishers Weekly). As long as businesses are set up to focus exclusively on maximizing financial income for the few, our economy will be locked into endless growth and widening inequality. But now people are experimenting with new forms of ownership, which Marjorie Kelly calls generative: aimed at creating the conditions for life for many generations to come. These designs may hold the key to the deep transformation our civilization needs. To understand these emerging alternatives, Kelly reports from all over the world, visiting a community-owned wind facility in Massachusetts, a lobster cooperative in Maine, a multibillion-dollar employee-owned department-store chain in London, a foundation-owned pharmaceutical company in Denmark, a farmer-owned dairy in Wisconsin, and other places where a hopeful new economy is being built. Along the way, she finds the five essential patterns of ownership design that make these models work. “This magnificent book is a kind of recipe for how civilization might cope with its too-big-to-fail problem. It’s a hardheaded, clear-eyed, and therefore completely moving account of what a different world might look like—what it already does look like in enough places that you will emerge from its pages inspired to get involved.” —Bill McKibben, author of Deep Economy

Murmurs of Earth

Author: Carl Sagan
Publisher: Ballantine Books
ISBN: 0307802027
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description
In 1977, two extraodinary spacecraft called Voyager were launched to the stars. Affixed to each Voyager craft was a gold-coated copped phonograph record as a message to possible extra-terrestrial civilizations that might encounter the spacecraft in some distant space and time. Each record contained 118 photographs of our planet; almost 90 minutes of the world's greatest music; an evolutionary audio essay on "The Sounds of Earth"; and greetings in almost sixty human languages (and one whale language). This book is an account, written by those chiefly responsible for the contents of the Voyager Record, of why they did it, how they selected the repertoire, and precisely what the record contains.

The Fabric of America

Author: Andro Linklater
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 0802718507
Category : Technology & Engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 340

Book Description
Linklater opens with America's greatest surveyor, Andrew Ellicott, measuring the contentious boundary between Pennsylvania and Virginia in the summer of 1784; and he ends standing at the yellow line dividing the United States and Mexico at Tijuana. In between, he chronicles the evolving shape of the nation, physically and psychologically. As Americans pushed westward in the course of the nineteenth century, the borders and boundaries established by surveyors like Ellicott created property, uniting people in a desire for the government and laws that would protect it. Challenging Frederick Jackson Turner's famed frontier thesis, Linklater argues that we are , thus, defined not by open spaces but by boundaries. "What Americanized the immigrants was not the frontier experience" Linklater writes, "but the fact that it took place inside the United States frontier." Those same borders had the ability to divide as well as unite, as the great battle over internal boundaries during the Civil War would show. By century's end, however, we were spreading U.S. power beyond our borders, an act that, seen through Linklater's eyes, offers an intriguing perspective on our role in the world today. Linklater's great achievement is to weave these provocative arguments into a dramatic storyline, wherein the actions of Ellicott, Thomas Jefferson, the treasonous general James Wilkinson, Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas, and numerous hitherto invisible settlers, all illuminate the shaping of the nation. This brilliant book will alter forever readers' perception of America and what it means to be an American.

Who Owns the World

Author: Kevin Cahill
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 1780578407
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 1175

Book Description
Who Owns the World is the first ever compilation of landowners and landownership structures in every single one of the world's 197 states and 66 territories. It covers the history of landownership as far as written history will allow and shows the division of landownership in every region of the globe. Packed with revelatory information, the book: * identifies the person who owns the largest proportion of the world's land and documents that person's landholdings; * provides details of the next 25 top landowners; * reveals that aristocratic families own over 60 per cent of Europe's land mass and receive most of the EC's agricultural subsidy allowance; * documents the vast landholdings of the four largest religious groups: the Catholic Church and the other Christian churches, the Islamic trusts, and the temple possessions of the Hindus and Buddhists; * details the landownership structure of all the countries of the British Commonwealth; * contains a complete survey of the historic record of landownership, starting in Mesopotamia/Iraq in 8000 BC; * lists many of the world's great Domesdays, going back to the earliest, in Ptolemaic Egypt; * includes an analysis of the legal structures that have reduced 85 per cent of the earth's population to serfdom. This is a breathtaking tome of huge political, economic and social importance. It will revolutionise our understanding of our planet, its history and its land.

A Registry of My Passage Upon the Earth

Author: Daniel Mason
Publisher: Pan Macmillan
ISBN: 1529038510
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 179

Book Description
*Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction 2021** From Daniel Mason, the bestselling, award-winning author of The Winter Soldier and The Piano Tuner comes a collection of interlacing tales of men and women as they face the mysteries and magic of the world. On a fated flight, a balloonist makes a discovery that changes her life forever. A telegraph operator finds an unexpected companion in the middle of the Amazon. A doctor is beset by seizures, in which he is possessed by a second, perhaps better, version of himself. And in Regency London, a bare-knuckle fighter prepares to face his most fearsome opponent, while a young mother seeks a miraculous cure for her ailing son. At times funny and irreverent, always moving, these stories cap a fifteen-year project that has won both a National Magazine Award and Pushcart Prize. From the Nile’s depths to the highest reaches of the atmosphere, from volcano-wracked islands to an asylum on the outskirts of Rio de Janeiro, these are lives of ecstasy and epiphany.

Down to Earth

Author: Maya Moran
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 166

Book Description
In 1974, Maya Moran and her husband purchased a dilapidated Frank Lloyd Wright house in Riverside, Illinois. In Down to Earth, Moran tells how she spent the next twenty years resurrecting Wright's 1904 Tomek House, transforming it into both a home and an architectural gem. Moran describes in vivid and lively language how Wright's architectural touch had great impact on her life as she took on the roles of contractor, maintenance woman, decorator, furniture and landscape designer, gardener, curator, and tour guide. Illustrating her story with nearly ninety photographs and many of Wright's own drawings, Moran describes not only an early Frank Lloyd Wright Prairie house and its architectural significance but also the people who have lived in it.

Owning It All

Author: William Kittredge
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 208

Book Description
This is a deeply felt and highly informed essay collection about life in the American west by one of the finest writers ever to emerge from that region. As the Seattle Times has said of Owning It All: "You may never again see the American west in quite the same way if you take the time to view it through the eyes of William Kittredge. [This is a] stunning book." Having grown up on his family's cattle ranch in eastern Oregon, Kittredge directly confronts the contradictions and myths that lie at the heart of the Western experience: male freedom and female domesticity, the wild and the tame, self-interest and love of the land.

The Devil from over the Sea

Author: Sarah Covington
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192587676
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 420

Book Description
In Ireland, few figures have generated more hatred than Oliver Cromwell, whose seventeenth-century conquest, massacres, and dispossessions would endure in the social memory for ages to come. The Devil from over the Sea explores the many ways in which Cromwell was remembered and sometimes conveniently 'forgotten' in historical, religious, political, and literary texts, according to the interests of different communities across time. Cromwell's powerful afterlife in Ireland, however, cannot be understood without also investigating his presence in folklore and the landscape, in ruins and curses. Nor can he be separated from the idea of the 'Cromwellian': a term which came to elicit an entire chain of contemptuous associations that would begin after his invasion and assume a wholly new force in the nineteenth century. What emerges from all these memorializing traces is a multitudinous Cromwell who could be represented as brutal, comic, sympathetic, or satanic. He could be discarded also, tellingly, from the accounts of the past, and especially by those which viewed him as an embarrassment or worse. In addition to exploring the many reasons why Cromwell was so vehemently remembered or forgotten in Ireland, Sarah Covington finally uncovers the larger truths conveyed by sometimes fanciful or invented accounts. Contrary to being damaging examples of myth-making, the memorializations contained in martyrologies, folk tales, or newspaper polemics were often productive in cohering communities, or in displaying agency in the form of 'counter-memories' that claimed Cromwell for their own and reshaped Irish history in the process.