Josephine Miles

“You could say I saw California grow up. Right along with me!” So Josephine Miles linked her life and region (Childress 40). The link between her poetry and California has not always been declared by the poet or detected by her readers. Miles mused upon the problem: “Sometimes there’s a certain kind of critic that says I’m a California poet [. . .] he says I have a lot of loose lines and a lot of locale. But then another critic will say, ‘She’s not to be identified as anything but English because her poetry is rather neat and universal’” (Marie 37). While Denis Donoghue cannot find “a California element in her sensibility” (443), Donald Davie detects in Miles “that California aspiration” to place poetry back into “the humdrum of daily life” (85)

Vern Rutsala

According to one version of regionalism, the poet readily draws from the experience of living in a particular place. The poet’s youthful books, like many first novels, depict the autobiography and the home scene. Later, the poet learns to generalize from the local or to abandon it altogether for a broader, more significant canvas. The poet progresses to writing about the universal

Dynamic Energy Budget models: fertile ground for understanding resource allocation in plants in a changing world.

Climate change is having dramatic effects on the diversity and distribution of species. Many of these effects are mediated by how an organisms physiological patterns of resource allocation translate into fitness through effects on growth, survival and reproduction. Empirically, resource allocation is challenging to measure directly and so has often been approached using mathematical models, such as Dynamic Energy Budget (DEB) models. The fact that all plants require a very similar set of exogenous resources, namely light, water and nutrients, integrates well with the DEB framework in which a small number of variables and processes linked through pathways represent an organisms state as it changes through time. Most DEB theory has been developed in reference to animals and microorganisms. However, terrestrial vascular plants differ from these organisms in fundamental ways that make resource allocation, and the trade-offs and feedbacks arising from it, particularly fundamental to their life histories, but also challenging to represent using existing DEB theory. Here, we describe key features of the anatomy, morphology, physiology, biochemistry, and ecology of terrestrial vascular plants that should be considered in the development of a generic DEB model for plants. We then describe possible approaches to doing so using existing DEB theory and point out features that may require significant development for DEB theory to accommodate them. We end by presenting a generic DEB model for plants that accounts for many of these key features and describing gaps that would need to be addressed for DEB theory to predict the responses of plants to climate change. DEB models offer a powerful and generalizable framework for modelling resource allocation in terrestrial vascular plants, and our review contributes a framework for expansion and development of DEB theory to address how plants respond to anthropogenic change

Nationalism and the puzzle of reversing state size

Having increased for centuries, territorial state size began to decline toward the end of the nineteenth century and has continued to do so. The authors argue that processes triggered by ethnic nationalism are the main drivers of this development. Their empirical approach relies on time-varying spatial data on state borders and ethnic geography since the nineteenth century. Focusing on deviations from the nation-state ideal, the authors postulate that state internal ethnic fragmentation leads to reduction in state size and that the cross-border presence of dominant ethnic groups makes state expansion more likely. Conducted at the systemic and state levels, the analysis exploits information at the interstate dyadic level to capture specific nationalist processes of border change, such as ethnic secession, unification, and irredentism. The authors find that although nationalism exerts both integrating and disintegrating effects on states' territories, it is the latter impact that has dominated

Right-peopling" the state: nationalism, historical legacies and ethnic cleansing in Europe, 1885-2020

Many European nation-states were historically homogenized through violent ethnic cleansing. Despite its historical importance, we lack systematic evidence of the conditions under which groups where targeted with cleansing and how it impacted states’ ethnic demography. Rising nationalism in the 19th century threatened multi-ethnic states with right-sizing through secessionism and irredentism. States therefore frequently turned to brutal right-peopling, in particular where cross-border minorities and those with a history of political independence increased the risk of territorial losses. We test this argument with new spatial, time-variant data on ethnic geography and ethnic cleansing from 1886 to the present. We find that minorities that politically dominated another state and those that have lost political independence were most at risk of ethnic cleansing, especially in times of interstate war. At the macro-level, our results show that ethnic cleansing increased European states’ ethnic homogeneity almost as much as border change. Both produced today’s nation-states by aligning states and ethnic nations