Essay on the Geography of Plants

Review of Essay on the Geography of Plants. Alexander von Humboldt and Aimé Bonpland. Edited and with an Introduction by Stephen T. Jackson. Translated by Sylvie Romanowski. 2009. University of Chicago Press, Chicago. Pp. 296, 1 color plate, 9 halftones, 7 tables, 1 poster. $45.00 (cloth). ISBN 9780226360669.</p

De la biogeografía al paisaje en Humboldt: pisos de vegetación y paisajes andinos equinocciales

The current recovery of the notion of landscape as a means of comprehending the relationships between nature, society and culture in their spatiotemporal dimensions, that is, as specifi c totalities, calls for a return to its most fecund presentations, beginning with what is perhaps the most outstanding version of them all, that of Alexander von Humboldt. On this occasion we intend to make a reading in terms of landscape of Essay on the Geography of Plants and of the accompanying Physical Tableau, the one of humboldtian works less known. We believe that our study will demonstrate that Humboldt’s contribution on landscape and landscapes was to a great extent contained in the initial text of Geography of Plants; which in turn enables us to explore the fundamental relationship between landscape and the initial development of Biogeography

The treatment of Australia in eight sixth grade geography textbooks.

Thesis (Ed.M.)--Boston Universit

Community concepts in plant ecology: from Humboldtian plant geography to the superorganism and beyond

The paper seeks to provide an introduction to, and review of, the history of concepts of the plant community. Eighteenth-century naturalists recognised that vegetation was distributed geographically and that different species of plants and animals were interconnected in what would later be called ecological relationships. It was not, however, until the early nineteenth century that the study of vegetation became a distinctive and autonomous form of scientific inquiry. Humboldt was the first to call communities of plants ‘associations’. His programme for the empirical study of plant communities was extended by many European and North American botanists, throughout the nineteenth and into the twentieth century. There developed an almost complete consensus among ecologists that vegetation was made up of natural communities, discrete entities with real boundaries. However, there was little agreement about the nature of the putative unit or how it should be classified. Gleason advanced the alternative view that vegetation was an assemblage of individual plants with each species being distributed according to its own physiological requirements and competitive interactions. This debate was never wholly resolved and the divergent opinions can be discerned within early ecosystem theory

Kaupapa Māori and a new curriculum in Aotearoa/New Zealand

While geographical education is our focus in this paper, the broader colonial history of education is the backdrop against which we first view the principles of Māori geographies in education. The essay underscores the importance of ‘authenticity’, the participation of local communities and local studies connected to local environments and histories. We use an educational program of the Raglan Area School on Whaingaroa Harbour as an illustrative example. The geographies of Whaingaroa Harbour provide an exemplary context for programs in geographical education and we suggest that the new curriculum in both English and Te Reo Māori (Māori language) can enhance the movement towards bi-cultural education in Aotearoa/New Zealand. Our argument is that the 2007 curriculum creates the opportunity; the impediments lie in providing appropriate resources and developing community support for the delivery of the bicultural educational approaches. is an important issue in debates about educational policy and implementing a new curriculum in Aotearoa/New Zealand. This paper explores how the development of the 2007 curriculum in Aotearoa/New Zealand attempted to address curriculum, teaching and learning options for Māori. Māori are a significant national community with needs and aspirations in education. Māori have tangata whenua status in Aotearoa/New Zealand, where this term acknowledges the arrival and settlement of migrant people of the Pacific centuries prior to significant European colonization in the 19th Century. While progress has been made in Māori education since the significant Treaty of Waitangi Act in 1975, we wish to explore the potential of Kaupapa Māori (Māori practice) in the development of a new curriculum, Te Marautanga o Aotearoa

Litigation\u27s Role in the Path of U.S. Federal Climate Change Regulation: Implications of AEP v. Connecticut

This symposium analyzes the role of litigation in climate change regulation, with a particular focus on the U.S. Supreme Court\u27s June 2011 decision in American Electric Power Co. v. Connecticut ( AEP ). 1 This Essay adds to that conversation by exploring the significance of AEP for U.S. federal legal approaches to regulating climate change

“Oceania as Peril and Promise: Towards a Worlded Vision of Transpacific Ecopoetics”

Excerpt from Oceanic Archives, Indigenous Epistempologies, and Transpacific American Studies, edited by Yuan Shu, Otto Heim, and Kendall Johnso

Hermeneutics and Nature

This paper contributes to the on-going research into the ways in which the humanities transformed the natural sciences in the late Eighteenth and early Nineteenth Centuries. By investigating the relationship between hermeneutics -- as developed by Herder -- and natural history, it shows how the methods used for the study of literary and artistic works played a crucial role in the emergence of key natural-scientific fields, including geography and ecology

Darwin's Other Books: “Red” and “Transmutation” Notebooks, “Sketch,” “Essay,” and Natural Selection

Study of Darwin's unpublished works, freely available on-line through the American Natural History Museum, reveals the origins of his thoughts on evolution