Patch Of Land Research Articles

“Without Even a Patch of Land”. Indigenous Policy in Response to the Privatization of the Pampas and North Patagonia (1860-1890)

El objetivo del siguiente artículo es analizar los rasgos que tuvo la política indígena en el contexto de formación de un mercado de tierras en las Pampas y Norpatagonia durante la segunda mitad del siglo xix. Para ello, se reconstruyen y analizan diferentes experiencias protagonizadas por caciques de tribus de “indios amigos”, en virtud de obtener la propiedad de la tierra, poniendo el foco en los recursos empleados, qué tipo de acción colectiva habilitaron y cuáles fueron sus resultados. Los principales resultados muestran la relevancia que adquirieron en estas experiencias las redes y relaciones sociopolíticas construidas por los caciques en los espacios de frontera e identifican los tipos de capitales que intervinieron de manera decisiva.

The Unknown Human Health Legacy of Nuclear Weapons Testing

For nearly half a century, the United States and the Soviet Union were locked in a fierce battle although no shots were actually fired. Starting in the 1940s, both started developing their arsenal of nuclear weapons, in preparation for an all-out nuclear war. The U.S. government primarily used a patch of land in Nye, NV, that was formerly a military base, to conduct their tests. It was flat with few animals nearby. It seemed far from civilization and wasn't adjacent to any water streams, which the government thought would minimize the spread of contamination that would be generated from the above-ground blasts. In other words, the site seemed to be perfect.

Probabilistic Foundations of Spatial Mean-Field Models in Ecology and Applications

Deterministic models of vegetation often summarize, at a macroscopic scale, a multitude of intrinsically random events occurring at a microscopic scale. We bridge the gap between these scales by demonstrating convergence to a mean-field limit for a general class of stochastic models representing each individual ecological event in the limit of large system size. The proof relies on classical stochastic coupling techniques that we generalize to cover spatially extended interactions. The mean-field limit is a spatially extended non-Markovian process characterized by nonlocal integro-differential equations describing the evolution of the probability for a patch of land to be in a given state (the generalized Kolmogorov equations of the process, GKEs). We thus provide an accessible general framework for spatially extending many classical finite-state models from ecology and population dynamics. We demonstrate the practical effectiveness of our approach through a detailed comparison of our limiting spatial model and the finite-size version of a specific savanna-forest model, the so-called Staver-Levin model. There is remarkable dynamic consistency between the GKEs and the finite-size system, in spite of almost sure forest extinction in the finite-size system. To resolve this apparent paradox, we show that the extinction rate drops sharply when nontrivial equilibria emerge in the GKEs, and that the finite-size system's quasi-stationary distribution (stationary distribution conditional on non-extinction) closely matches the bifurcation diagram of the GKEs. Furthermore, the limit process can support periodic oscillations of the probability distribution, thus providing an elementary example of a jump process that does not converge to a stationary distribution. In spatially extended settings, environmental heterogeneity can lead to waves of invasion and front-pinning phenomena.

Inhabiting the Chthulucene: Forging Tentacular Intimacies at the End of the World1

The task is to make kin in lines of inventive communication as a practice of learning to live and die well with each other in a thick present. –Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (2016) All successful life is Adaptable, Opportunistic, Tenacious, Interconnected, and Fecund. Understand this. Use it. Shape God. –Octavia Butler, Parable of the Sower (1993) You fear the chassis that was struck by lightning can't be wholly crushed. You should. Fear the radios left in scrap yards—still brimming with circuit and hum … –Jamaal May, “Mechanophobia: Fear of Machines” (2014) A version of “blasted” (or degraded) landscape, the detritus that stands in for the fallen factory in Jamaal May’s poem “Mechanophobia: Fear of Machines” is the product of Detroit’s failed automobile industry (Tsing). The poem, however, is not a conventional portrait of apocalypse—neither techno-dystopian nightmare; nor a satirical critique of the “end of capital,” such as we might glimpse in popular films like Snowpiercer (2013). In fact, May’s imagined landscape figures a productive departure from any typical dystopian scenario. So too, from a similarly teleological worldview: the “end of nature” narrative, which is generally framed by the imperialist impulses of a narrowly providential landscape ethic. A conventional lament, this narrative foregrounds the twilight of a distinctly American Arcadia now crumbling as the final patch of fecund land falls to industry. Such visions of imminent collapse, unlike the more fruitful examinations of the present that we find in works like May’s, or in earlier articulations of a Black Anthropocene like those of Octavia Butler, are necessarily teleological in nature—aligned with, among other things, expansionist or broadly developmentalist interests; and each evinces an anthropocentric worldview that forecloses the possibility of other ways of being in the world.

By the Fox or the Little Eagle: What Remains Not Regional?

By the Fox or the Little Eagle: What Remains Not Regional?

An agent-based model for assessing grazing strategies and institutional arrangements in Zeku, China

The assessment of grassland grazing strategies and institutional arrangements is essential for ensuring the sustainable development of grassland grazing systems. By employing per-pixel grazing information derived from remote sensing data, this paper presents an agent-based model of grassland grazing (ABMGG) for Zeku, China that was designed as a framework for assessing the effects of different combinations of grazing strategies and institutional arrangements on grassland status. By calibrating the parameter values of the ABMGG to the system status values under a policy that has already been implemented, the ABMGG can help us to understand grassland degradation in response to management interventions for each patch of land. In the Zeku implementation, it was found that although different grazing policy scenarios could not significantly improve or decrease the overall grassland leaf area index, a rotational group grazing scenario with a land market tenure system did produce a smaller number of severely degraded grass patches than other policy scenarios (except regional continuous grazing). This provides a new perspective on the consequences of grassland management practices where past research has concentrated more on overall grassland productivity. The ABMGG can extend the ability of policy assessment tools to a high resolution level with pixel-specific real-time remote sensing data, making the assessment results more accurate and representative.

From the Editor

From the Editor

Comparative economics of different farming systems In Himachal Pradesh

The farming systems represent integration of farm enterprises such as cropping systems, animal husbandry, fisheries, forestry, horticulture, etc. for optimal utilization of resources by the farmers. Farming systems of households in Solan, Shimla and Kangra districts of Himachal Pradesh were analyzed based on the primary data collected through a sample of 92 farmers by using two-stage stratified random sampling technique during the year 2016–17. About 63.03 per cent of the total farmers were found to be marginal, 23.91 per cent small farmers and 13.04 per cent other farmers. A total of nine farming systems including some non-farm componentswere identified. The average income of marginal farmers was highest in Agri+Wages type of system whereas average income of small and other farmers was highest from Horti+ Shop type of system. Across the categories, other farmers earned more than marginal and small farmers from the same patch of land. This gap was because of non-availability of credit to marginal and small farmers.

Particularities of Expropriation Works for Highways and Regional Planning in Romania

In the actual context of modernization and development of the road and railway infrastructure of Romania, we have to make some expropriation works. These works can assure the legal basis on which a said patch will be transferred from a private owner to the ownership of the Romanian state in order to be used for public interest, while the original owner would receive compensation for the patch of land. In this paper we wish to address the particularities of expropriation for highways and regional planning that provide the legal basis by which an estate passes from private property to state ownership in the public interest needs, none the less compensation being paid. In 2006-2007 began the first works of expropriation of land, on the Arad-Timisoara motorway section, under Government Decision no. 1546/2006. The motorway section we will bring up for discussion in 2016 is situated in the administrative-territorial division Galda de Jos, Alba Iulia County. For patches affected by the highway corridor, if it is to expropriate part of the patch, the cadastral documentation has to be established individually for each resulting lot, respectively for the lot/lots that remain in the ownership of the original owner, but also for the expropriated lot.

Czym były mazowieckie "płozy"? (uwagi wstępne)

15th–16th century German, Latin, Polish and Russian descriptions of northern and eastern borders of Masovia, as well as descriptions of proprietary boundaries of what later became the Podlessian voivodeship, make repeated mention of the term polish płozy. It appears that płozy were a type of boundary markers, whose essence was at that time commonly understood; what is more, no linguistic equivalent for płozy seemed to existed in Russian, German or Latin. In the oldest mention of the term (early 15th century), płozy appeared as a proper name denoting a Polish equivalent for the German term describing a military road which was trodden by the Teutonic Knights in their expeditions to Lithuania, and probably, too, by Lithuanian forces fighting against the Knights. Significantly, the road ran across forests nearby the Masovian- -Teutonic border. It is quite plausible that the traces of the name of the road (płozy) have survived in the name of the village of Płozy (German Plosse, Plohsen), located on the left bank of the river Wałpusza (left tributary of Omulwia, and right of Narew), some 3.5 km from Szczytno, where the frontier Teutonic castle stood, the prosecutor’s seat. The term płozy has not been noted in any Polish language dictionary, nor has it appeared in Polish expert literature on setting borders and boundary markers. In this context, the present article attempts to explain the etymology of the term in reference to several words: płosa – meaning ‘farmland, patch of land, belt’; plos, ploso – ‘site with a pool of clear water on an overgrown swamp’; płaz, płóz – ‘amphibian, reptile’ and also ‘smooth side’ (e.g. of a sword); the verb płazić, płozić – ‘crawl’; and nouns płoz, płoza – ‘sleigh, sledge’. Moreover, it cannot be ruled out that what also influenced the emergence of the term was the method of determining the boundary lines. The above-quoted mentioned have allowed us to interpret płozy as a boundary marker, a patch of land devoid of trees or shrubs, cut out deep in the forest or set aside as fallow lands. It had to be broad enough to have roads running on it; alternatively, it could be ploughed in order to increase one’s acreage of owned lands which however resulted in shifting the boundary line. Further investigations will aim at determining whether the term płozy as a boundary marker and subsequently as a road was used exclusively in Masovia and territories inhabited by Masovians, or whether it was applied also in other regions of Poland.

Where in the world?

It's time we reinvented the address, finds Joshua Howgego

Always Crashing in the Same Car: Shakespeare, Ballard, and Appropriation

In 1974, J.G. Ballard published his novel Concrete Island. This remarkable account of an architect’s survival after a car accident on a bleak patch of land demarcated by motorway furniture and flyovers, is, among other things, a reworking, adaptation, or appropriation of The Tempest: the Swan of Avon meets the Sage of Shepperton. But why tell this story using this precursor then? Answering such questions must involve moving beyond tracing the contiguities and discontinuities between the novel and the play. Instead, this article will do that but partly as a way to address methodological issues about reading Shakespearean appropriations historically; that is, focussing as much on our moment of re-reading as on Ballard’s moment of revision. So even as we think about what might have been the aims or effects of such an appropriation in the mid-1970s, we might also consider how we read it in the 2010s. Can we historicize our own readings of Shakespearean appropriation?

‘Making space public’ through occupation: The Aboriginal Tent Embassy, Canberra

Through the actions of activists involved in the Arab Spring uprisings, European anti-austerity movements and the Occupy and Umbrella movements among others, long-term occupations of public space have re-entered the repertoire of insurgent social movements to spectacular effect. These events have dramatised the challenges and limits of occupation as a spatial strategy for ‘making space public’. This paper seeks to make a contribution to the critical geographical literatures on occupation and public space, through analysis of the Aboriginal Tent Embassy – a politically motivated occupation of a patch of land in the Australian capital that is now entering its 45th year. The Embassy activists mobillised occupation in the process of making and sustaining a counterpublic. Counterpublic participants face a distinct set of geographical challenges in making space for both withdrawal and representation in the face of spatial subordination. Occupations like the Embassy seek to resolve these challenges by combining both of these activities in a single site. The Embassy draws our attention to two important sets of issues in relation to the counterpublic geography of occupations. First, it has much to teach about how space is made public through occupation, including dynamics related to the location, duration, reproduction and relations of occupation. Second, the Embassy issues a challenge about whose space is made public through occupation – as an embodied enactment of indigenous sovereignty, the Embassy reminds us that democratic politics in settler colonial nations like Australia is premised on a violent dispossession that has yet to be fully acknowledged or addressed.

Land’s complex role in climate change

To mitigate climate change at local, regional, and global scales, we must begin to think beyond greenhouse gases.

Vitamin N For the Soul

Vitamin N For the Soul

Analisis Sistem Pengupahan “Bawon” pada Pertanian Padi (Studi Kasus pada Petani di Desa Gambar Kecamatan Wonodadi Kabupaten Blitar)

As an agricultural country, agricultural sector plays an important role in the Indonesia economic life, especially in rural areas. Farm laborers as one component of the agricultural sector, have a considerable contribution in determining the success of this sector. But there are unique facts occur in Blitar Regency, one of which happened in Gambar, Wonodadi District, Blitar Regency related to wage system called "bawon" system when harvesting rice. The "bawon" system is a profit-sharing system given to farm laborers working on a patch of land from the start of the rice planting to the harvest, whose share of income depends on the area of cultivated land and the number of harvest yields. The purpose of this research is to analyze the Bawon system that is still done between the landowners and farm workers in the Village Picture District Wonodadi Blitar. This research used descriptive explorative statistical approach to provide an in-depth description of the Bawon system. To analyze the data obtained, the researchers used Component Analysis (Componential Analysis) technique, in which the researcher attempted to sort and illustrate the differences found in the data obtained from the field. The results showed that farm laborers earn 20% of the total grain yield when finished harvesting the crops, while 80% is the land owner's.

Detecting the changes in rural communities in Taiwan by applying multiphase segmentation on FORMOSA-2 satellite imagery

Agricultural activities mainly occur in rural areas; recently, ecological conservation and biological diversity are being emphasized in rural communities to promote sustainable development for rural communities, especially for rural communities in Taiwan. Therefore, since 2005, many rural communities in Taiwan have compiled their own development strategies in order to create their own unique characteristics to attract people to visit and stay in rural communities. By implementing these strategies, young people can stay in their own rural communities and the rural communities are rejuvenated. However, some rural communities introduce artificial construction into the community such that the ecological and biological environments are significantly degraded. The strategies need to be efficiently monitored because up to 67 rural communities have proposed rejuvenation projects. In 2015, up to 440 rural communities were estimated to be involved in rural community rejuvenations. How to monitor the changes occurring in those rural communities participating in rural community rejuvenation such that ecological conservation and ecological diversity can be satisfied is an important issue in rural community management. Remote sensing provides an efficient and rapid method to achieve this issue. Segmentation plays a fundamental role in human perception. In this respect, segmentation can be used as the process of transforming the collection of pixels of an image into a group of regions or objects with meaning. This paper proposed an algorithm based on the multiphase approach to segment the normalized difference vegetation index, NDVI, of the rural communities into several sub-regions, and to have the NDVI distribution in each sub-region be homogeneous. Those regions whose values of NDVI are close will be merged into the same class. In doing so, a complex NDVI map can be simplified into two groups: the high and low values of NDVI. The class with low NDVI values corresponds to those regions containing roads, buildings, and other manmade construction works and the class with high values of NDVI indicates that those regions contain vegetation in good health. In order to verify the processed results, the regional boundaries were extracted and laid down on the given images to check whether the extracted boundaries were laid down on buildings, roads, or other artificial constructions. In addition to the proposed approach, another approach called statistical region merging was employed by grouping sets of pixels with homogeneous properties such that those sets are iteratively grown by combining smaller regions or pixels. In doing so, the segmented NDVI map can be generated. By comparing the areas of the merged classes in different years, the changes occurring in the rural communities of Taiwan can be detected. The satellite imagery of FORMOSA-2 with 2-m ground resolution is employed to evaluate the performance of the proposed approach. The satellite imagery of two rural communities (Jhumen and Taomi communities) is chosen to evaluate environmental changes between 2005 and 2010. The change maps of 2005–2010 show that a high density of green on a patch of land is increased by 19.62 ha in Jhumen community and conversely a similar patch of land is significantly decreased by 236.59 ha in Taomi community. Furthermore, the change maps created by another image segmentation method called statistical region merging generate similar processed results to multiphase segmentation.

The Impact of New Land Acquisition Act 2013 (RFCTLARR Act 2013) on the Coal Bearing Areas (Acquisition and Development) Act 1957

The Coal Bearing areas (Acquisition & Development) Act 1957 is a offshoot of old Land Acquisition Act of 1894. The Coal Bearing Areas (A&D) Act in short CB Act was established in the economic interest of India for a greater public control over the coal mining industries and its development by providing for the acquisition by the state of un-worked land containing or likely to contain coal deposits or all rights in over such land, extinguishment or modification of such rights, acquiring by virtue of any agreement, lease, licence or otherwise. This Act was enacted by Parliament in the 8th year of Republic of India. It was operational parallel to the LA Act 1894 and was applicable to the allotted coal blocks in India that to only Government companies (PSUs) such as CIL & its subsidiaries and NTPC etc. During that time it was stated clear that same companies or PSUs shall apply the normal LA Act 1894 to the other acquisitions such as Land required for the company for infrastructure, Township and other requirements excluding the coal block. In both the cases such as CB Act an d LA Act 1894 the compensation calculation was almost parallel to each other hence applying both the act simultaneously has no impact on land cost except on time of acquisition. When RFCTLARR Act 2013 came into force in 1st January 2014 after abandoning the LA Act 1894, the equation of CB Act to the new LA Act 2013 requires introspection. This article is intended to highlight the impact for understanding of all those who are engaged in applying Land Acquisition through both CB act and LA Act and for academic and administrative purpose so that the coal extraction does not suffer. Section 105 of RFCTLARR Act, sub-sec (1) says that new Act shall not apply to the enactment relating to land acquisition specified in the 4th schedule of the RFCTLARR Act. The 4th Schedule contains the CB Act along with 13 other Acts, which will continue to remain in force, even if the LA Act 1894 is discontinued.In this context, the compensation calculation and the process of consent which is essence of new LA Act will not be applicable in the CB Act. The companies permitted to acquire land under CB Act are also to acquire land for other than the coal bearing area such as township, water corridor, rail corridor, rehab colony and allied activities where the CB Act cannot be made applicable for acquisition. Since this patch of land is not far away from the coal bearing area, the contradictory provisions of both the Acts will create the conflict of interests as a result the implementing agencies will face the difficulties on ground. This article is intended to bring the above anomalies to the notice of the readers and the policy planners to find out a solution to the impact likely to happen due to above areas at the time of amending new Act.

Guantánamo: An American History

Guantánamo: An American History

Earth And Its People

My father, who passed away at age 94 in January, was a quirky fellow. I loved him dearly, but he was a complex individual who was difficult to know and understand. He and my mother lived for more than 50 years on a 28-acre farm in southern New Jersey about 15 miles from downtown Philadelphia. To me, southern New Jersey is a rather featureless, unlovely region of the country, but my father loved that patch of land and knew every square foot of it. We had neighbors who lived across the road from us, and they took up scuba diving when they were in their 40s. They became avid divers, taking one or two weeklong trips every year. I remember my father saying that he couldn’t understand the attraction our neighbors felt for diving. “How many times can you go down there, for God’s sake?” he asked, rhetorically. “It’s got ...