Empirical regularities in the poverty-environment relationship of African rural households

Analysis of rural households and environmental resources is beset by inadequate data, especially in Africa. Using purpose-collected panel data from Zimbabwe, we demonstrate seven empirical regularities in the rural poverty-environment relationship. Most importantly, environmental resources make a significant contribution to average rural incomes. Poorer households also depend heavily on these resources, which contribute c.40 percent to their incomes. However richer household use greater quantities of environmental resources in total. Finally, considerable differentiation exists in the economic characteristics of environmental goods. These results demonstrate the considerable economic significance of environmental resources to rural households. Surveys which ignore them miscalculate rural incomes and welfare.Africa; Zimbabwe; Poverty; Rural Households; Environment; Common Property Resources

Nouvelle méthode et invention extraordinaire de dresser les chevaux...

ERF

When The News Was Sung: Ballads as News Media in Early Modern Europe

News songs differ in crucial ways to the other news media of the early modern period like newsletters, newspapers, or diplomatic correspondence – they differ even from the prose broadsheets and pamphlets that they so closely resemble. As historians of news we need to ask different kinds of questions of these multi-media artifacts. For example, how does the presentation in a performative genre affect the dissemination and reception of information about events? What part do orality and aurality play in how the news was sold and received? Here the activities and social status of street singers play an important role. We must consider the production, format and distribution of these songs in order to understand their impact. We also need to pay attention to the conjunction between text and melody, and the ways in which this affected the presentation of a news event. On a broader scale, what kind of information can ballads provide about specific news events that other documents cannot or will not provide? Can they offer us a new medium by which to interpret historical events? And lastly, how should historians deal with these profoundly emotive texts? The combination of sensationalist language and affecting music meant that songs had the potential to provoke a more powerful response than any other contemporary news source, and this emotional potency can at times be challenging for a modern historian to decipher and explain. This article will attempt to answer some of these questions and suggest some of the skills we as historians need to develop in order to appreciate the full meaning of songs as the most popular of news media in early modern Europe

Vitalism and the Resistance to Experimentation on Life in the Eighteenth Century

There is a familiar opposition between a ‘Scientific Revolution’ ethos and practice of experimentation, including experimentation on life, and a ‘vitalist’ reaction to this outlook. The former is often allied with different forms of mechanism – if all of Nature obeys mechanical laws, including living bodies, ‘iatromechanism’ should encounter no obstructions in investigating the particularities of animal-machines – or with more chimiatric theories of life and matter, as in the ‘Oxford Physiologists’. The latter reaction also comes in different, perhaps irreducibly heterogeneous forms, ranging from metaphysical and ethical objections to the destruction of life, as in Margaret Cavendish, to more epistemological objections against the usage of instruments, the ‘anatomical’ outlook and experimentation, e.g. in Locke and Sydenham. But I will mainly focus on a third anti-interventionist argument, which I call ‘vitalist’ since it is often articulated in the writings of the so-called Montpellier Vitalists, including their medical articles for the Encyclopédie. The vitalist argument against experimentation on life is subtly different from the metaphysical, ethical and epistemological arguments, although at times it may borrow from any of them. It expresses a Hippocratic sensibility – understood as an artifact of early modernity, not as some atemporal trait of medical thought – in which Life resists the experimenter, or conversely, for the experimenter to grasp something about Life, it will have to be without torturing or radically intervening in it. I suggest that this view does not have to imply that Nature is something mysterious or sacred; nor does the vitalist have to attack experimentation on life in the name of some ‘vital force’ – which makes it less surprising to find a vivisectionist like Claude Bernard sounding so close to the vitalists

The re-discovery of contemplation through science : with Tom McLeish, “The Re-Discovery of Contemplation through Science: Boyle Lecture 2021”; Rowan Williams, “The Re-Discovery of Contemplation through Science: A Response to Tom McLeish”; Fraser Watts, “Discussion of the Boyle Lecture 2021”; and Tom McLeish, “Response to Boyle Lecture 2021 Panel and Participant Discussion.”

Some of the early-modern changes in the social framing of science, while often believed to be essential, are shown to be contingent. They contribute to the flawed public narrative around science today, and especially to the misconceptions around science and religion. Four are examined in detail, each of which contributes to the demise of the contemplative stance that science both requires and offers. They are: (1) a turn from an immersed subject to the pretense of a pure objectivity, (2) a turn from imagination as a legitimate pathway to knowledge, (3) a turn from shared and participative science to a restricted professionalism, and (4) an overprosaic reading of the metaphor of the “Book of Nature.” All four, but especially the imperative to consider reading nature as poetry, and a deeper examination of the entanglements between poetry and theoretical science, draw unavoidably on theological ideas, and contribute to a developing “theology of science.”

Disease Surveillance of Wild Hogs in Great Smoky Mountains National Park – A Focus on Pseudorabies

Great Smoky Mountains National Park (GRSM) has received credible reports of individuals obtaining feral hogs from other states and illegally releasing them near the park boundary. These reports have been supported by the removal of hogs with physical and behavioral characteristics not common of wild hogs in GRSM. In 2001, GRSM established a partnership with the North Carolina Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services to survey for wild hog diseases and, in 2005, similar partnerships were established with the Tennessee Department of Agriculture and the United States Department of Agriculture, Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, Veterinary Services. From 2001 to 2007, 497 wild hog serological samples (28.4% of all hogs removed) were collected and tested for swine brucellosis and pseudorabies. All samples were negative for swine brucellosis. Since 2005, 16 wild hog samples (3.2%) tested positive for pseudorabies and the most recent sampling indicates that the prevalence and distribution of the disease may be increasing in GRSM. The occurrence of pseudorabies in GRSM is thought to be directly related to the illegal release of feral hogs near the park boundary