BiblioVault - Books about Lessons

People, Forests, and Change

Lessons from the Pacific Northwest

Edited by Deanna H. Olson and Beatrice Van Horne

Island Press, 2017

We owe much of our economic prosperity to the vast forested landscapes that cover the earth. The timber we use to build our homes, the water we drink, and the oxygen in the air we breathe come from the complex forested ecosystem that many of us take for granted. As urban boundaries expand and rural landscapes are developed, forests are under more pressure than ever. It is time to forgo the thinking that forests can be managed outside of human influence, and shift instead to management strategies that consider humans to be part of the forest ecosystem. Only then can we realistically plan for coexisting and sustainable forests and human communities in the future.

In People, Forests, and Change: Lessons from the Pacific Northwest, editors Deanna H. Olson and Beatrice Van Horne have assembled an expert panel of social and forest scientists to consider the nature of forests in flux and how to best balance the needs of forests and the rural communities closely tied to them. The book considers the temperate moist-coniferous forests of the US Pacific Northwest, but many of the concepts apply broadly to challenges in forest management in other regions and countries. In the US northwest, forest ecosystem management has been underway for two decades, and key lessons are emerging. The text is divided into four parts that set the stage for forests and rural forest economies, describe dynamic forest systems at work, consider new science in forest ecology and management, and ponder the future for these coniferous forests under different scenarios.

People, Forests, and Change brings together ideas grounded in science for policy makers, forest and natural resource managers, students, and conservationists who wish to understand how to manage forests conscientiously to assure their long-term viability and that of human communities who depend on them.

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Perennial Ceremony

Lessons and Gifts from a Dakota Garden

Teresa Peterson

University of Minnesota Press, 2024

Travel through a garden’s seasons toward healing, reclamation, and wholeness—for us, and for our beloved relative, the Earth

In this rich collection of prose, poetry, and recipes, Teresa Peterson shares how she found refuge from the struggle to reconcile her Christianity and Dakota spirituality, discovering solace and ceremony in communing with the earth. Observing and embracing the cycles of her garden, she awakens to the constant affirmation that healing and wellness can be attained through a deep relationship with land, plants, and waters. Dakota people call this way of seeing and being in the world mitakuye owasin: all my relations. Perennial Ceremony brings us into this relationship, as Peterson guides us through the Dakota seasons to impart lessons from her life as a gardener, gatherer, and lover of the land.

We see the awakening of Wetu (spring), a transitional time when nature comes alive and sweet sap flows from maples, and the imperfect splendor of Bdoketu (summer), when rain becomes a needed and nourishing gift. We share in the harvesting wisdom of Ptaŋyetu (fall), a time to savor daylight and reap the garden’s abundance, and the restorative solitude of Waniyetu (winter), when snow blankets the landscape and sharpens every sound. Through it all, Peterson walks with us along the path that both divides and joins Christian doctrine, everyday spiritual experience, and the healing powers of Indigenous wisdom and spirituality.

In this intimate seasonal cycle, we learn how the garden becomes a healing balm. Peterson teaches us how ceremony may be found there: how in the vegetables and flowers, the woods, the hillsides, the river valley—even in the feeding of friends and family—we can reclaim and honor our relationship with Mother Earth. She encourages us to bring perennial ceremony into our own lives, inviting us on a journey that brings us full circle to makoce kiŋ mitakuye: the land is my relative.

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The Politics of Health Care Reform

Lessons from the Past, Prospects for the Future

James A. Morone and Gary S. Belkin, eds.

Duke University Press, 1994

This distinguished collection stands out from the recent flurry of books on health reform by its sustained and sophisticated analysis of the political dimension. In The Politics of Health Care Reform, some of America’s best-known political scientists, historians, and legal scholars make sense of our most turbulent policy issue. They dig below the jargon and minutiae to explore the enduring questions of American politics, government reform, and health care.
The Politics of Health Care Reform explains how successful reforms occur in the United States and shows what is unique about health care issues. Theoretically informed, politically astute, historically nuanced, this volume takes an inventory of our health policy infrastructure. Here is an account of the institutions, ideas, and interests that shape health policy in the 1990s: Congress, the federal courts, interest groups, state governments, the public bureaucracy, business (large and small), the insurance industry, the medical profession. The volume offers a fresh look at such critical matters as public opinion, the politics of race and gender, and the lessons we can draw from other nations.
The Politics of Health Care Reform is the definitive collection of political science essays about health care. Expanded from two special issues of the Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law, the most prominent scholarly journal in the field it helped create, this collection will enliven the present debate over health reform and instruct everyone who is concerned about the future of American health care.

Contributors. Lawrence Brown, Robert Evans, William Glaser, Colleen Grogan, Robert Hackey, Lawrence Jacobs, Nancy Jecker, Taeku Lee, Joan Lehman, David McBride, Ted Marmor, Cathie Jo Martin, James A. Morone, Mark Peterson, David Rochefort, Rand Rosenblatt, David Rothman, Joan Ruttenberg, Mark Schlesinger, Theda Skocpol, Michael Sparer, Deborah Stone, Kenneth Thorpe

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Power, Institutions, and Leadership in War and Peace

Lessons from Peru and Ecuador, 1995–1998

By David R. Mares and David Scott Palmer

University of Texas Press, 2012

In January 1995, fighting broke out between Ecuadorian and Peruvian military forces in a remote section of the Amazon. It took more than three years and the interplay of multiple actors and factors to achieve a definitive peace agreement, thus ending what had been the region's oldest unresolved border dispute. This conflict and its resolution provide insights about other unresolved and/or disputed land and sea boundaries which involve almost every country in the Western Hemisphere.

Drawing on extensive field research at the time of the dispute and during its aftermath, including interviews with high-ranking diplomats and military officials, Power, Institutions, and Leadership in War and Peace is the first book-length study to relate this complex border dispute and its resolution to broader theories of conflict. The findings emphasize an emerging leadership approach in which individuals are not mere captives of power and institutions. In addition, the authors illuminate an overlap in national and international arenas in shaping effective articulation, perception, and selection of policy.

In the “new” democratic Latin America that emerged in the late 1970s through the early 1990s, historical memory remains influential in shaping the context of disputes, in spite of presumed U.S. post–Cold War influence. This study offers important, broader perspectives on a hemisphere still rife with boundary disputes as a rising number of people and products (including arms) pass through these borderlands.

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