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Abstract
Living in urban environments can leave people disconnected from nature and less likely to engage with biodiversity conservation. Within urban areas, residential gardens can occupy large proportions of greenspace and provide important habitat for biodiversity. Understanding the views and knowledge of garden owners who have collective responsibility for managing these areas is therefore important. We aimed to understand how urban garden owners understand biodiversity. We surveyed garden owners in Derby, UK, across 20 census output areas spanning a socioeconomic spectrum. Residents were asked to explain their understanding of 'biodiversity' in a short definition format. Responses were classified using thematic and word frequency analyses. Of 255 respondents, approximately one-third were unable to provide a definition. Themes that emerged in frequency order were as follows: variety of species or environments, coexistence of organisms, conservation of nature, a synonym for habitat and uncommon answers not clearly related to biodiversity. Members of wildlife or gardening charities and people with higher levels of formal education were more likely to provide definitions in line with formal definitions. We detected no difference between keen and less keen gardeners and little association between definitions and gardening for wildlife behaviours. These short-form responses captured many themes longer and/or qualitative assessments have identified, illustrating a diversity and depth of understanding of the concepts of biodiversity, without necessarily adhering to the formal definition. Given the variety of understanding, at this critical period, technical terms, even common ones, should be used with an open mind about how people interpret and act on them.

In The Gardeners' Dirty Hands: Environmental Politics and Christian Ethics, Noah Toly engages Christian and classical Greek ideas of the tragic to illuminate the enduring challenges of environmental politics. He suggests that Christians have unique resources for responsible engagement with global environmental politics.

In many parts of the United States, jardinería, or suburban maintenance gardening, has become a gendered occupational niche for Mexican immigrant men. Based on participant observation research with a group of Mexican immigrant gardeners in Los Angeles, this article examines the construction of masculinity in a workplace occupied by Mexican immigrant men. These jardineros construct, affirm, challenge, and negotiate their masculinity through their routine work activities and through their daily on-the-job interactions with their fellow workers. Moving beyond a sort of reiteration of a flat, cultural concept of machismo, jardinero masculinity stresses a more nuanced structural understanding of Mexican immigrant men's masculinity and how it is intertwined with their performance of masculinized ''dirty work'' in private households. It is a distinctly working-class form of masculinity, which results from the interplay between very specific, localized cultural constructions, and deployment in the context of racialized nativism and citizenship hierarchy in the United States.

Leonardo da Vinci once mused that "we know more about the movement of celestial bodies than about the soil underfoot," an observation that is as apt today as it was five hundred years ago. The biological world under our toes is often unexplored and unappreciated, yet it teems with life. In one square meter of earth, there lives trillions of bacteria, millions of nematodes, hundreds of thousands of mites, thousands of insects and worms, and hundreds of snails and slugs. But because of their location and size, many of these creatures are as unfamiliar and bizarre to us as anything found at the b

Intro -- Halftitle -- Title Page -- Copyright -- Table of Contents -- Foreword by Theodore Dalrymple -- Preface -- PART ONE: THE GARDENER'S CREED -- Chapter I: Introduction -- Chapter II: The problem of ignorance -- Chapter III: What gardeners know about what works and what doesn't -- Chapter IV: Designer's democracy or gardener's democracy? -- Chapter V: Identity, justice, and representation -- PART TWO: GARDENING IN A COLD CLIMATE: EXAMPLES OF HOW CANADIANS MIGHT APPLY THE GARDENER'S CREED -- Chapter VI: Tending the urban garden -- Chapter VII: Gardening for the planet -- Chapter VIII: Natural Resources, Indigenous Canadians and Social Licence -- Chapter IX: Health care for gardeners -- Chapter X: Conclusion -- Endnotes -- Bibliography -- Index -- Backcover.

Sites of urban agriculture are often contested urban open spaces. In the current dominant ideal of the 'competitive' and 'global' city, little recognition is given to the potential benefits of urban agriculture, beyond beautification, subsistence or therapeutic purposes. In this context, urban agriculture is often viewed as an activity performed by 'gardeners', either contributing to individual well-being or reducing the costs of maintenance of public spaces. A less 'tolerant' perspective perceives such 'gardeners' as squatters inhibiting cities' productivity. By contrast, urban agriculture enthusiasts advocate the recognition of the right to farm in the city as an essential condition for either food security or food sovereignty. This paper argues that urban agriculture can also be interpreted as a means to claim, nurture and propagate alternative views on spatial justice, place and citizenship-making, defying the maldistributional and misrecognition patterns that typically produce and reproduce unequal urban geographies. Drawing from a four-year research collaboration in the Greater Accra Metropolitan Area (GAMA) undertaken by the authors at the Development Planning Unit (DPU) with the International Water Management Institute (IWMI), People's Dialogue and the Ghana Federation of the Urban Poor, the analysis examines the trajectories of female and male farmers working under different and fast-changing land tenure systems across the Accra-Ashaiman corridor. Adopting an environmental justice perspective, the analysis explores the extent to which urban agriculture might constitute a practice through which marginalised groups might actively claim spaces of daily sociability and political articulation within the city. © 2013 Copyright Taylor and Francis Group, LLC.