Virgin Land Research Articles

The New Chinese Diplomacy’s Right Hand: The Chinese Red Cross

The study of Chinese Red Cross diplomacy is basically a virgin land to be reclaimed. The Chinese Red Cross Diplomacy, 1949–2009, is the first monograph on this topic. The author Wu Pei-hua reviewed and summarized the past 60 years of the Chinese Red Cross’ diplomacy after the new China founding. It enriches, enlarges and perfects the study of the Red Cross, filling in the blanks of the research margin at home and abroad. As one of the world’s three major international organizations, the Red Cross enjoys equal popularity with the United Nations and the IOC (International Olympic Committee). In fact, research on the evolution of the Chinese Red Cross’ diplomacy is the study of the history of modern China integrating into the international community. This book is divided into seven sections: preface, five chapters and the epilogue. In the first chapter, the author reviews the Chinese Red Cross’ establishment and development process. In the next four chapters, this book further excavates the Chinese Red Cross’ special contributions to Chinese diplomacy from four angles: war, peace, diplomacy and reunification process. The last chapter adds

The hydrological cycle in the ravine oak forests of steppe Prydniprovia

The characteristic of the hydrological cycle in the ravine oak forest is given in the work. In its preparation, we proceeded from assumption about the participation of groundwater in water feeding of wood vegetation. To confirm or refute this the term average groundwater depth, the changes in its long-term, seasonal and intraday level dynamics were analyzed. The intra-annual structure of the groundwater regime was established, while in the structure the three specific periods were identified – winter-spring recovery, spring-autumn recession and autumn recovery. It was established that the duration of the hydrological year between the beginning of winter-spring recovery and the ending of autumn recovery was about 11.5 months. Most often, the hydrological year flows between January and December of neighboring hydrological years. The groundwater depth during the observation period ranged from 7.65 to 10.08 m from the surface. The amplitude of level changes between seasons was 0.57–1.59 m. The speed of rise and fall level was set, while the instability of characterized indicators was observed, that is closely related to the temperature of atmospheric air of the previous period. The annual dynamics of groundwater level is compensatory in nature, in which the spring-autumn recession is compensated autumn and winter-spring recovery. From the position of winter minimum level and the deviation of the average annual rainfall norms, it was found that the course of the annual changes level has a close correlation with the amount of precipitation. Intraday dynamics of level conditions during the vegetation period has stepwise, descending character, which means that there is no direct connection of groundwater with woody vegetation. It was found that at the absence of available groundwater, the incoming part of the water balance was determined by the vegetation period precipitation and the moisture contained in the soil at the beginning of the vegetation period. The amount of precipitation of the vegetation period, excluding precipitation detained by the cover and litter, during the observation period was over 292 mm. Dynamics of soil moisture in 1.5 meters layer showed that the most dynamic changes in moisture took place in the upper meter of soil. During the non-growing period in the 1.5 meters layer up to 252 mm of moisture is accumulated. The total amount of rainfall and soil moisture in the 1.5 meters layer of soil at the beginning of vegetative period averages 542 mm, 46 % of which is soil moisture, and the remaining 54 % is the precipitation moisture. The average annual evapotranspiration coefficient is calculated from the ratio of the amount of soil moisture at the beginning of the vegetative period and all vegetative period precipitation to evapotranspiration of appropriate period of time. In this approach the figure for ravined oak forests is 0.78, 0.63 – for steppe plots of virgin land. The general moisture conditions prevailing here are local, are formed under the influence of geomorphological features on the background of climatic conditions and are responsible to the intrazonal type.

Livelihood Implications of Redd+ and Costs-Benefits of Agricultural Intensification in Redd+ Pilot Area of Kilosa, Tanzania

Agriculture is the primary driver of deforestation and degradation. This makes addressing deforesting and degrading agricultural practices highly pertinent in the REDD+ planning and implementation. REDD+ interventions target to mitigate deforestation and degradation by addressing underlying drivers such agricultural expansion into forestland. In tropical Africa, encroachment of forests in search of fertile virgin land has been a common practice. Inevitably, the REDD+ processes will impact on the local livelihoods in different ways – positive and negative. The local-level land use plans promoted under REDD+ are likely to alter how much land a farmer would access and where. Different groups of the poor will be affected differently. Land use alterations will impact on the local food security and food systems at large. In view of such impacts, compensations are made integral of REDD+ programming and delivery. REDD+ projects promote agricultural intensification practices such as conservation agriculture in order to attain higher food production per unit land while mitigating deforestation and degradation. As REDD+ concept is being piloted in the country, we have limited understanding of the livelihood implications of REDD+ interventions. Furthermore, local-scale economic viability of measures used to address drivers of deforestation and degradation such as agricultural expansion is empirically not well understood. This paper is a modest attempt to illuminate the livelihood implications of REDD+ interventions and estimate the economic viability of agricultural intensification practices in the REDD+ pilot area in Kilosa district, Tanzania.

Preservation by Neglect in Soviet-Era Town Planning in Tartu, Estonia

In the former Soviet Union, traditional urban districts with pre–World War II housing were considered obsolete and the aim was to demolish them, but in practice they were frequently ignored, because efforts were focused on new housing production in order to address acute housing shortages. Inertial forces stymied plan implementation for older districts during a rich period of plan making while new residential districts were built at a fast pace on virgin land. This research analyzes more than a dozen written planning documents from various periods during the twentieth century for Tartu, Estonia, where, had mid-twentieth century town plans been implemented, entire districts of nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century wooden houses and apartment buildings would have been demolished. Findings suggest that several factors acted in concert to set the conditions for both neglect and preservation of such districts during the second half of the twentieth century that resulted in continuous occupancy of the dwellings and preserved the built form (and the social structure) of the district. These factors include a focus on building new housing and new districts rather than renovating older districts; a lack of resources to renovate older districts; and a lack of resources to implement plans. This synthesis of town planning in Estonia demonstrates how planning ideas have evolved throughout the twentieth century parallel to—but temporally delayed compared to—Western Europe and North America.

Досліди Географічної мережі на Роганському стаціонарі та проблема заповідання чорноземів (до створення Червоної книги ґрунтів)

Retrospective results of the Geographic networke experiments with fertilizers on the experimental field of Kharkiv Agrarian University have been described and proposals on entering variants of agrochernozems of high bonitet along with vanishing and uncommon soils into the Red Book of soils are given. Key words: Geographic network of experiments, fertilizers, chernozems (black earth), virgin lands and agrozems, Red Book of soils, monitoring, nature conservation fund.

A Companion to the Literature and Culture of the American West by Nicolas S. Witschi (review)

Reviewed by: A Companion to the Literature and Culture of the American West by Nicolas S. Witschi David Wrobel A Companion to the Literature and Culture of the American West. By Nicolas S. Witschi. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2011. 597 pages, $199.95. Click for larger view View full resolution The Last Bookstore. In downtown Los Angeles. 2012. Photograph: Alexandra Mieczkowski. Nicolas S. Witschi’s A Companion to the Literature and Culture of the American West is a landmark collection and powerful testament to the maturation of an innovative field. The beginnings of the trend that leads us to this anthology might be found nearly four decades ago in influential works such as Richard Slotkin’s Regeneration through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600–1860 (1974) and Annette Kolodny’s The Lay of the Land: Metaphor as Experience and History in American Life and Letters (1975). The trend was more apparent a decade later in Kolodny’s Land Before Her: Fantasy and Experience of the American Frontiers, 1630–1860 (1984) and the second installment of Slotkin’s trilogy, The Fatal Environment: The Myth of the Frontier in the Age of Industrialization, 1860–1890 (1985). By the early 1990s, the [End Page 341] promise of this new, more critical, inclusive, gendered, and hard-edged analysis of western literary representation was increasingly evident in Slotkin’s concluding volume, Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America (1992) and Jane Tompkins’s controversial West of Everything: The Inner Life of Westerns (1992). These works appeared around the same time as the Smithsonian Institution’s “The West as America” exhibit (1990–1991) and accompanying volume (1991) and the heightened media coverage of the controversy surrounding the New Western History, which one reporter memorably dubbed “the gunfight at the politically OK corral.”1 By the last fin de siècle, the long, sustained, and developing trajectory of the New Western Literature was manifest in Blake Allmendinger’s Ten Most Wanted: The New Western Literature (1998), Krista Comer’s Landscapes of the New West: Gender and Geography in Contemporary Women’s Writing (1999), Neil Campbell’s The Cultures of the American West (2000), and Michael Kowalewski’s anthology, Reading the West: New Essays on the Literature of the American West (2006). In the more recent past, the trend continues with Campbell’s The Rhizomatic West: Representing the American West in a Transnational, Global, Media Age (2008), John Beck’s Dirty Wars: Landscape, Power, and Waste in Western American Literature (2009), and other volumes, a good number of them in Nebraska’s important Postwestern Horizons series. We might do better still to push the origins of the New Western Literature back even further to the founding of the Western Literature Association in 1965 (just a few years after the Western History Association, 1961), and should certainly not forget the important anthologies that the WLA sponsored and Thomas J. Lyon edited, including A Literary History of the American West (1987) and Updating the Literary West (1997). Or, better still, we might reconsider that more than six decades ago in the much discussed and still much misunderstood Virgin Land (1950), Henry Nash Smith cautioned that “the agrarian emphasis of … [historian Frederick Jackson Turner’s] frontier hypothesis has tended to divert attention from the problems created by industrialization” and added that “[t]he agrarian tradition has also made it difficult for Americans to think of themselves as members of a world community.”2 Smith was implying, of course, that the literary heritage of the American West had been moving down the same mythic, exceptionalist, and triumphalist path as the historical conceptualization of America’s frontier heritage, a path that was not just unhelpful, but one that was counterproductive given the industrial and global realities that faced the modern nation. The New Western Literature has now arrived in all its developed and dynamic multifariousness and in this excellent new Blackwell companion (itself a companion of sorts to William Deverell’s 2004 collection of largely historiographical essays), we see a wealth of evidence (a capstone of sorts to the storehouse of scholarly riches that has been building and developing for decades) that our understanding of transnational and...

Integrated Water Resources Management in Central Asia, as a way of survival in conditions of water scarcity

This paper presents the practical outputs of Integrated Water Resources Management (IWRM) pilot implementation in the Fergana Valley shared by three countries of Central Asia: Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan. IWRM was not a new approach for Central Asian countries. Some its elements have been practiced for irrigated agriculture development in the region during the Soviet time. For instance, hydrographic institutional set up, coordination between different water users across multiple levels of water hierarchy, water conservation, and consolidated records for all types of waters uses were applied for the development of virgin lands in the Golodnaya Steppe in the 1960–1970s. The new economic and financial conditions of the 1990s and restructuring of the agrarian sector required an updated vision of IWRM to support reforms. To respond to these needs, in 2001 Swiss Development Cooperation (SDC) suggested development of a vision of IWRM that would reflect the specificities of the region, and testing it in a pilot project in the Fergana Valley. The IWRM-Fergana project was implemented by national teams from Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan and coordinated by the Association of Scientific Information Center of Interstate Commission for Water Coordination (SIC ICWC) and International Water Management Institute (IWMI). The main purpose of the project was to contribute to more secure livelihoods, increased environmental sustainability, and greater social harmony through improved effectiveness of water resources management using IWRM principles.

Modifications in selected soil attributes as influenced by long-term continuous cropping in a calcareous semiarid environment

Intensified agriculture and irrigation practices over a long-term are an important factor in soil change phenomena that can appear some unwanted effects on soil attributes. To examine this hypothesis, physicochemical properties and clay mineralogy of four major soil types (Typic Haploxerepts, Typic Xerorthents, Typic Calcixerepts, and Fluventic Haploxerepts) under sunflower cultivation over five decades and adjoining virgin lands were investigated in order to monitor changes caused by long-term cropping. The comparison of cultivated soils and virgin lands indicated that cultivation resulted in an increase in clay (3–28 %) and silt (3–25 %) content, along with a decrease in sand content (2–17 %), resulting of the cultivation practices. For most of the examined soils, soil pH and calcium carbonate equivalent were marginally increased as 0.1–0.23 unit and 4–26 mg kg−1, respectively, following intensive cropping. A relative depletion was manifested in mean value of soil organic carbon (4–18 %), soluble K (47–197 %), exchangeable K (21–34 %), available K (20–34 %), potassium absorption ratio (43–45 %), and exchangeable potassium percentage (26–54 %) due to continuous sunflower cropping. Comparing with the virgin lands, the cultivated soils showed a considerable rise in electrical conductivity (18–122 %), sodium absorption ratio (18–122 %), exchangeable Na (4–48 %), and exchangeable sodium percentage (10–47 %) likely due to the chemistry of the irrigation water used, as well as the chemical interaction between the irrigation water and its receiving soils. Over the five decades of cultivation, some changes in the X-ray diffraction pattern of illite and smectite were observed mainly as result of cropping and K depletion as well as alternating wet–dry periods induced by irrigation practices.

БИОМАССА ПОЧВЕННЫХ МИКРООРГАНИЗМОВ В ПАХОТНЫХ ЧЕРНОЗЕМАХ МОЛДОВЫ

With the use of rehydration method the author investigated the annual dynamics of microbial biomass supply in weakly humus chernozem on the grounds of perennial soil station under monocultures, and also in crop rotation of cereal and cultivated crops on different backgrounds of organic and mineral fertilizers on experiment variants. In connection with cultivating culture, a mode of tillage and a dose of fertilizers the content of microbial mass was varied in the range of 0.202-1.06 mg C/h, that represents 1.34-2.53 % from total soil carbon. It was shown, that arable soils are more poor on content of microbial biomass as compared with virgin lands. The micromycetes, taking an active part in transformation of soil substances, on studied areas were presented by seven genera: Penicillium, Trichoderma, Alternaria, Fusarium, Mucor, Aspergillus and Botrytis with reliable domination of Penicillium genus. These results support this fact, that microorganism environment during practical using of soils acquires a carbooligotrophic properties, which limit the production of microbial biomass and thereby decrease of soil productivity.

Development of Sustainable Cold Rolled Surface Course Asphalt Mixtures Using Waste Fly Ash and Silica Fume

AbstractThe reduction of hot asphalt mixtures for the usage and development of sustainable supplementary cold asphalt mixtures (CAMs) for the construction of road and highway surface layers is a major issue for researchers around the world. This reduction will benefit environmental impact, cost effectiveness, and energy savings. Furthermore, because CAMs comprise a remarkable portion of industrial waste (the disposal of which consumes virgin lands), they are attractive to road and highway authorities. The primary aim of this investigation is to develop new cold rolled asphalt (CRA) with the same gradation as hot rolled asphalt (HRA), which is usually used as a surface course in the U.K., and to improve its mechanical properties and durability by using waste and by-product materials as mineral fillers and additives. Waste fly ash (WFA) was used as a replacement for conventional mineral filler and a by-product silica fume (SF) was used as an additive to enhance the mechanical properties and durability of CR...

Pregestational Nutrition and the Epigenetic Landscape in Next Generations: Still an Almost Virgin Land to be Explored

EpigenomicsVol. 5, No. 1 CommentaryPregestational nutrition and the epigenetic landscape in next generations: still an almost virgin land to be exploredMihai D NiculescuMihai D NiculescuDepartment of Nutrition & UNC Nutrition Research Institute, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Kannapolis, NC 28081, USA and UNC Nutrition Research Institute, 500 Laureate Way, Kannapolis, NC 28081, USA. Search for more papers by this authorEmail the corresponding author at mihai_niculescu@unc.eduPublished Online:15 Feb 2013https://doi.org/10.2217/epi.12.70AboutSectionsView ArticleView Full TextPDF/EPUB ToolsAdd to favoritesDownload CitationsTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints ShareShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail View articleKeywords: epigeneticsgenesinheritancenutritionpregestationalReferences1 Joss-Moore LA, Lane RH. Epigenetics and the developmental origins of disease: the key to unlocking the door of personalized medicine. Epigenomics4(5),471–473 (2012).Link, CAS, Google Scholar2 Niculescu MD. Nutritional genomics: the need for a unified and comprehensive approach. J. Nutrition Disorder Ther.1,e101 (2011).Crossref, Google Scholar3 Gemma C, Sookoian S, Alvarinas J et al. Maternal pregestational BMI is associated with methylation of the PPARGC1A promoter in newborns. Obesity (Silver Spring)17(5),1032–1039 (2009).Crossref, Medline, CAS, Google Scholar4 Bygren L, Kaati G, Edvinsson S. Longevity determined by paternal ancestors’ nutrition during their slow growth period. Acta Biotheor.49(1),53–59 (2001).Crossref, Medline, CAS, Google Scholar5 Nelson VR, Spiezio SH, Nadeau JH. Transgenerational genetic effects of the paternal Y chromosome on daughters’ phenotypes. Epigenomics2(4),513–521 (2010).Link, CAS, Google Scholar6 Nadeau JH. Transgenerational genetic effects on phenotypic variation and disease risk. Hum. Mol. Genet.18(R2),R202–R210 (2009).Crossref, Medline, CAS, Google Scholar7 Niculescu MD. Challenges in nutrition-related DNA methylation studies. BioMolecular Concepts3(2),151 (2012).Crossref, Medline, CAS, Google Scholar8 Niculescu MD. Epigenetic transgenerational inheritance: should obesity-prevention policies be reconsidered? Synesis2,G18–G26 (2011).Google ScholarFiguresReferencesRelatedDetailsCited ByFolded Futurity: Epigenetic Plasticity, Temporality, and New Thresholds of Fetal Life16 March 2017 | Science as Culture, Vol. 26, No. 3Differential Methylation of the Oxytocin Receptor Gene in Patients with Anorexia Nervosa: A Pilot Study11 February 2014 | PLoS ONE, Vol. 9, No. 2 Vol. 5, No. 1 Follow us on social media for the latest updates Metrics Downloaded 204 times History Published online 15 February 2013 Published in print February 2013 Information© Future Medicine LtdKeywordsepigeneticsgenesinheritancenutritionpregestationalFinancial & competing interests disclosureThe author has no relevant affiliations or financial involvement with any organization or entity with a financial interest in or financial conflict with the subject matter or materials discussed in the manuscript. This includes employment, consultancies, honoraria, stock ownership or options, expert testimony, grants or patents received or pending, or royalties.No writing assistance was utilized in the production of this manuscript.PDF download

Weathering the Soviet Countryside: The Impact of Climate and Agricultural Policies on Russian Grain Yields, 1958–2010

Agriculture in Russia has always had to contend with unfavorable climate. At the same time, large-scale socio-economic experiments have also strained the country’s food production potential throughout the 20th century. The relative role of climate and state agricultural policies in affecting production of cereals was studied for the period of 1958–2010. The study used statistical yield modeling to explain the variations in observed yields with slowly changing progress in technology and management and weather variability. The correlation between the actual and weather-explained yields is moderate to high: measured at the level of the entire country, Pearson’s r is 0.74 and Spearman’s rho is 0.68. Further, we suggest that the residual yield variability can be explained partially with the influence of large-scale changes in agricultural policies at the state level. Between these policies, we consider the following key periods in the history of Russian agriculture: “Virgin Lands” campaign (end of 1950s), Kosygin-Liberman initiatives (late 1960s), Brezhnev’s investment programmes in response of stagnation of agriculture (late 1970s – early 1980s), Gorbachev’s “Perestrojka” (1985–1991), and land privatization and price liberalization (1990s).

Land disputes and the ongoing development of the substantive rule of law in Myanmar (Burma)

The Myanmar Parliament has passed the Farmland Law and the Vacant, Fallow, and Virgin Lands Management Law. Both pieces of legislation form part of a legislative response as Myanmar (Burma) emerges from a sixty-year period of chronic armed conflict. Part 2 of this paper outlines the underlying grievances associated with land disputes with a focus upon Kayin (Karen) and Rakhine (Arakan) states. Part 3 critically analyses the relevant constitutional and legislative framework and the role of parliamentary bodies in light of these underlying grievances. Part 4 adopts a comparative stance and considers the approach taken in Kenya as it has sought to address similar issues. Finally, Part 5 reflects upon the role that constitutional and legislative reform in relation to land disputes plays in the ongoing development of the substantive rule of law in Myanmar (Burma).

Tending Our Vines:

The partnership and friendship of John Jay and Richard Peters reflect two extraordinary individuals who helped to plant the seed of American independence and nurture it in diverse ways for more than half a century through a long and devoted association. Toward the end of their lives, Peters wrote to Jay, “my recollections of the long and sincere love and friendship I have undeviatingly cherished for you afford to me the most gratifying and cordial satisfaction.” Their correspondence reflects two men with many shared interests but two distinct personalities. Both men were well educated and successful attorneys before the outbreak of the Revolution to which both became deeply committed. While their careers took different paths, their friendship strengthened over time and found expression in many unexpected ways as they “tended their vines.”

Volver a Colonia Clara. Historia y memoria de la colonización judía agraria en Argentina, 1892-1950

This work analyses the experience of the jewish agrarian colonization in Colonia Clara, the most important of the colony settlement in the Entre Rios' Province. It studies the expectations and demands of the settlers, its social, cultural and politic institutions. The voices of the colonists settled on Entre Ríos virgin lands, the confrontations with the settlement company to become a chacarero land owner, the deception of those that were win over by the nature or the economic regime, the reach of the mutual help institutions, scholar and religious institutions are taken into account to explain other reasons of the colonies abandonment.

Piecing Together National Character

Piecing Together National Character Elizabeth Fraterrigo (bio) Claude S. Fischer. Made in America: A Social History of American Culture and Character. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010. ix + 246 pp. Notes and index. $35.00. “The concept of a national character has been shattered by the historical pluralism of the past two decades,” Robert M. Collins wrote in this journal in 1988. “Like Humpty Dumpty it is beyond saving.”1 Claude S. Fischer, professor of sociology at the University of California, Berkeley, has nevertheless rallied all the king’s horses and men to the task. Drawing on the rich body of work by social historians over the past several decades, he has produced a synthesis that aims to trace the development and to limn the features of American culture and character since the nation’s founding. Made in America perceives striking continuity between past and present and offers a useful way to think about the relationship between the individual and society in the United States. Still, Fischer’s approach will no doubt rankle many, both in its determination that one can speak with certainty about such a thing as national character and for the broad brushstrokes with which it paints several centuries of history. For Fischer, the steady expansion of material well-being, social opportunities, and choices in all aspects of life constitutes the central force shaping American culture, while its distinguishing feature has been “its voluntarism.” Voluntarism is predicated on the belief in the “sovereign individual” as well as the conviction that individuals “succeed through fellowship.” In a voluntaristic society, individuals freely choose mutuality (pp. 10–11). “What is most notable about America,” Fischer writes, “is not radical individualism, the principle of going it alone, but voluntarism, the principle that individuals choose with whom they go” (p. 98). Life in early America was geared to voluntarism, a melding of “individualism, group-orientation, contract, and egalitarianism,” which then “spread and deepened” over time (pp. 100–101). Fischer’s quest to comprehend an American character once routinely occupied scholars. For Frederick Jackson Turner, Americans were forged on the frontier, which fostered individualism and democracy. His seminal 1893 address might well have been titled “The Influence of the Frontier on American Character,” observed historian David Potter. More than Turner’s ill-defined [End Page 606] frontier or the availability of so-called “free land,” Potter argued in People of Plenty: Economic Abundance and American Character (1954), the entirety of the nation’s resources and a capacity to exploit them helped account for democracy and other American “habits of fluidity, of mobility, of change, of the expectation of progress.”2 Other mid-century scholars joined Potter in the effort to make explicit the source and content of a distinctive national character, spurred in part by the post–World War II perception of American stability in an otherwise volatile world. An escalating Cold War infused the American Studies movement with political import, further inspiring the study of American exceptionalism.3 Among historians, interest in the power of national myths and the origins of an inimitable national character produced such works as Henry Nash Smith’s Virgin Land (1950), Louis Hartz’ The Liberal Tradition in America (1954), and Daniel J. Boorstin’s The Americans (1958). In the same years, David Riesman’s The Lonely Crowd (1950) and William H. Whyte, Jr.’s, The Organization Man (1956) attended to the features of a distinctly modern American type wrought in a society of corporations and suburbs, economic prosperity, and mass media. By the late 1960s, however, such efforts had grown both intellectually and politically suspect. Assertions about the United States’ special status among other nations now seemed part and parcel of a Cold War self-righteousness that propelled the U.S. into war in Vietnam. A further blow to the study of national character was dealt by an ascendant interest in the experiences of workers, women, immigrants, racial minorities, and other marginalized groups, which called for an interpretive framework emphasizing diversity and complexity over any search for a singular national experience.4 Shifting our attention once more from the parts to the whole, Made in America finds new ways to piece together a once seemingly fragmented past...

Europe’s Representation of Africa and Africans, African- Americans and Asians in Its Imperialistic Explorations and Colonization as It Appears in Literary Texts

In order to justify their annexation and subsequent subjugation and colonisation of Africa, the America and Asia, European imperalist nations had to depict Africa in a way that supported their missions. First, Africa had to be portaryed as a savage continent that needed the benevolence of the white man in order to attain civilisation. Second, Africa and the Americas had to be depicted as virgin lands that could provide all the raw materials that modern Europe needed for its indsutrial take-off. Third, one of the characteristics that was used in that project was that of the African man in genral and the "black" man in particular as a dangerous beast that is always in hot pursuit of the white woman's virginity. As a consequnence, the black man in Africa and in America had to be kept under constant check. This paper examines the problem whihc is represented by the fallacies put forth by Europe or the gap between the apologia and the reality in modern Europe's subjugation of the territories that it needed to posses for its own survival. The paper castigates the injustice and cruelty behind European colonisation and it also stresses the negative impact of such representations on today's post colonial citizens. Library research is the main approach. The main literary materials used are the racist and anti-racist texts and movies on Africa. Emphasis is laid on ideology and characterisation. Post colonial and Marxist Literary and Cultural theory and disaporan theory inform the research.

Changes in the orthopteran population over plant cover restoration in the fallow lands of the European steppe

A comparative analysis of the Orthopteran population in virgin and fallow lands of the European steppe has allowed finding out the colonization sources of the fallow lands: the inhabitants of the mesophytic intrazonal plant communities, including the formations of steppe bushes and polytopic species living in intact and disturbed steppe habitats have been found there. It has been shown that the structure of the Orthopteran population in the fallow lands in determined more by the composition of their plant cover than by the actual age of fallow lands or their zonal position. Fundamental changes in the structure of Orthopteran population are associated with the replacement of tall weed communities by an herb-grass cover; the faunistic similarity between the old fallow lands and zonal plots therewith increases. The abundance of Orthopteras in the fallow lands increases southward, while in zonal communities a reverse tendency is observed. The Orthopteran populations in the fallow lands of all the subzones are characterized by higher diversity and evenness if compared to zonal biotopes. A wide distribution of fallow lands with weed cover turns out to increase the faunistic and ecological diversity of the Orthopteran populations in the European steppe.

Rediscovering the Virgin Lands: Agricultural Investment and Rural Livelihoods in a Eurasian Frontier Area

Summary Against the global debate on socially responsible agro-investment, we explore the conditions, patterns, and impacts of recent agricultural recovery in Kazakhstan’s northern grain provinces. Vertically and horizontally integrated agroholdings brought outside investment and management to this region. With stable employment in agriculture, real consumption spending of rural households has doubled within an 8-year period. Due to the socialist tradition of industrialized farming operations, rural inhabitants regard themselves primarily as workers and not as land owners. We conclude that investment in large-scale farming can provide benefits to rural people even with less than ideal-type political representation.

Problems of desertification in the Tuva republic

In the history of the agricultural development of the territory of Tuva, a traditional 1000-year period of distant-pasture cattle breeding, the Soviet period, and modern periods can be distinguished. The main impact of the agrarian development of the territory of Tuva was the plowing of virgin lands in the 1960s–1970s. The second impact came more gradually, but with no less consequence for the nature of the steppes in connection with the development of animal husbandry. As a result, the landscapes of the steppes have suffered heavy environmental damage. Areas of steppes occupied by arable land were subject to the degradation of soil and wind erosion. Currently, against a background of the decline in agricultural production and the reduction of the total area of farmland (due to conservation of land), a reduction in the rate of land degradation has been observed in the Republic of Tuva.