Search results

There is a growing concern that many important ecosystems, such as coral reefs and tropical rain forests, might be at risk of sudden collapse as a result of human disturbance. At the same time, efforts to support the recovery of degraded ecosystems are increasing, through approaches such as ecological restoration and rewilding. Given the dependence of human livelihoods on the multiple benefits provided by ecosystems, there is an urgent need to understand the situations under which ecosystem collapse can occur, and how ecosystem recovery can best be supported. To help develop this understanding, this volume provides the first scientific account of the ecological mechanisms associated with the collapse of ecosystems and their subsequent recovery. After providing an overview of relevant theory, the text evaluates these ideas in the light of available empirical evidence, by profiling case studies drawn from both contemporary and prehistoric ecosystems. Implications for conservation policy and practice are then examined.

Forests have become the focus of intense conservation interest over the past two decades, reflecting widespread concern about high rates of deforestation and forest degradation, in particular in tropical countries. The aim of this book is to outline the main methods and techniques available to forest ecologists.

This book is the result of an international collaborative research effort focusing on the tropical montane forests of Mexico and the temperate rain forests of southern South America. The over-all aim of the research was to investigate the impact of human activity on the key processes influencing biodiversity in fragmented forest landscapes, and to use the research results to develop practical tools for evaluating land use decisions, thereby indicating how sustainable forest management might be achieved in practice.

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Preface -- 1. Before 1914: the Old Colony -- 2.World War I: Privation and Profiteering -- 3. The Political Awakening of the Community, 1918-1919 -- 4. The Lure of Argentina in the 1920s: Big Business and the German-Speaking Immigrants -- 5. Notes on the Immigrant Experience im Affenland -- 6. Political Conflict, 1919-1929 -- 7. The Social Crisis of the Middle Class, 1918-1933 -- 8. Assimilation and the School Question, 1918-1933 -- 9. Cultural Despair, Perceptions of Nazism, and the Gleichschaltung of 1933 -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index

Between 1933 and the end of World War II, Argentina became the home of some 43,000 Jewish refugees from Nazism, almost all of them of German, Austrian, or West European origin. Measured against the country's total population, 13 million in 1931, 16 million according to the 1947 census, Argentina received more Jewish refugees per capita than any other country in the world except Palestine (Wasserstein, 1979: 7,45). This did not occur by design of the Argentine government; on the contrary, its immigration policies became interestingly restrictive as the years of the world crisis wore on.In practice, however, Argentina was unable to patrol effectively its long borders with the neighboring republics of Chile, Bolivia, Paraguay, Brazil, and Uruguay. The overseas consuls of these nations, especially the first three, did a brisk and lucrative trade in visas and entry permits for persons desperate to escape the Nazi terror.

Übersicht über den Anstieg der Emigration verfolgter deutschsprachiger Juden nach Argentinien seit 1933 mit Informationen über die Beteiligung internationaler Hilfsorganisationen. Darstellung der Schwierigkeiten angesichts der restriktiven Einwanderungsbestimmungen und der Sympathiekundgebungen deutscher Nationalsozialisten für die argentinische Führung und Hinweis auf die britischen Versuche zur Beeinflußung der Aufnahmebereitschaft

In the aftermath of the military revolt that overthrew the Popular Unity government of Dr. Salvador Allende in September 1973, reports began to seep out of Chile that the junta was supervising revision of the constitution in a "corporativist" sense. The structural alterations contemplated are designed, in the first instance, to ensure permanent military representation in the councils of government. However, General Augusto Pinochet Ugarte, head of the military junta, has made it known that the new constitution will also give a prominent place to industrial, commercial, agrobusiness, mining, and professional associations, which he terms "the authentic representatives of the people." Such employers' and trade associations—known collectively as "gremios patronales," to distinguish them from trade unions or "gremios de obreros" — have been in existence for many years, but a number of them experienced a sharp upsurge of political militancy in the late 1960's in reaction to what their leaders perceived as the leftward drift of the then-ruling Christian Democratic Party. Their role, under the direction of the Confederation of Production and Commerce, in arousing resistance to the Popular Unity government elected in 1970 and, ultimately, in paralyzing it before its final downfall is widely known, at least in outline.

The National University of Buenos Aires, the largest and for many years the most prestigious in Latin America, is today more commonly taken as the archetype of the political Latin American university—and the connotations of "political" are wholly pejorative. This notoriety may be due in part, as Kalman Silvert suggests, to the high visibility of the University, especially to touring North American newsmen. Nevertheless, as its numerous critics allege, there seems to be abundant evidence to link politics to the manifest disarray of the educational process: in the well-publicized brawls among contending student factions and confrontations between demonstrators and the police, student strikes in opposition to procedural reforms desirable on grounds of efficiency, the reputed "terrorization" of heterodox professors, several student homicides in recent years, the distressingly high incidence of abandonos (for it is assumed, erroneously, that many withdrawals from the University are motivated by disgust with its politics); student political behavior as in the abusive reception tendered W. W. Rostow by a student group in Economic Sciences in February 1965, may have international repercussions. Such depressing phenomena have led even temperate and knowledgeable observers to speak of the "failure" of the University, and to call for a thoroughgoing structural overhaul, conducive, among other things, to depoliticization.