Wisdom From the Collard Field: Exploring Agrarian Community in Twenty and Twenty-first Century American Literature

This dissertation surveys agrarian literature written by American writers since World War II. It compares the Southern Agrarians of Vanderbilt University and New Agrarians such as Wendell Berry, Wes Jackson, and Gene Logsdon to examine their understanding of place and home. I begin my inquiry with a personal frame story of time I have spent in and around the sustainable agriculture movement. Drawing on various forms of literature, including memoirs, cookbooks, novels, reportage, and other scholarship, I explore American ideals since World War II relating to the production and consumption of food. I begin my opening chapter with a reassessment of the Southern Agrarians of Vanderbilt University as a starting off point in a defense of small-scale agriculture, organic farming, and the local food movement as antidotes for the excess of industrial capitalism. I put three members of the erstwhile group in conversation with green critics Lawrence Buell and Murray Bookchin as a way to wring emancipatory power from their argument and assess what can be reclaimed in the twenty-first century. In my second chapter, I question the New Agrarian call to stay home, examining the idea of drudgery in farming by comparing Paul Shephard’s Nature and Madnessto Wendell Berry, Gene Logsdon, Wes Jackson, and Joel Salatin’s defense of agriculture. The chapter continues with examples of small-scale agricultural practices that exemplify a more correct relationship with nature, such as seed saving, by exploring the traditional practices of Gary Nabhan, Janisse Ray, Bill Best, before turning to Ruth Ozeki’s All Over Creation. My last chapter continues with an assessment of various people in the contemporary agrarian movement in a discussion of privilege, equity, and accessibility. Next, I look to agrarian traditions of the past by appraising what was lost in the Great Migration through Harriette Arnow’s The Dollmakerand Edna Lewis’s cookbook, The Taste of Country Cookingbefore concluding the chapter with a discussion of present-day Detroit

Black Single Parent Families: Coping and Functioning

The University Archives has determined that this item is of continuing value to OSU's history.Presenter: Jacquelyn Wallace Gorum, D.S.W., Director of Undergraduate Program, School of Social Welfare, Health Science Center, SUNY/Stoney Brook, Stoney Brook, New York - "Black Single Parent Families: Coping and Functioning".The Ohio State University College of Social Wor

Sinkhole development in the Sivas gypsum karst, Turkey

The extensive gypsum karst of Sivas, Turkey is one of the most outstanding examples of bare gypsum karst in the world. It displays a number of remarkable geomorphic features, including: (1) two stepped planation surfaces cut-across folded gypsum developed during an initial phase of slow base level deepening punctuated by periods of stability; (2) unusual deeply entrenched gypsum canyons related to a subsequent phase of rapid fluvial incision and water table lowering; (3) a polygonal karst of superlative quality mainly developed in the upper surface; (4) relict valleys disrupted by sinkholes in the lower erosional surface; (5) a large number of bedrock collapse sinkholes mostly associated with the lower surface; and (6) numerous cover subsidence sinkholes developed in the valley floors. This work analyses the spatial distribution, characteristics and evolution of the sinkholes within the broad Plio-Quaternary geomorphological and paleohydrological evolution of the epigene karst system dominated by autogenic recharge. A cartographic sinkhole inventory has been produced in an area covering 2820 km(2) with morphometric data and including 295 bedrock collapse sinkholes and 302 cover subsidence sinkholes. The different sinkhole types show a general spatial zonation controlled by the hydrogeological functioning of the different sectors: (1) solution sinkholes (polygonal karst) in the upper recharge area; (2) bedrock collapse sinkholes in the lower denudation surface and close to the base level, where well developed caves are inferred; and (3) cover subsidence sinkholes, with high densities probably associated with areas of preferred groundwater discharge. The morphology of the bedrock collapse sinkholes, varying from small cylindrical holes to large and deep tronco-conical depressions with gentle slopes reflect to geomorphic evolution of these sinkholes that reach exceptionally large hectometre-scale diameters. Their evolution, involving substantial enlargement and deepening, is attributed to the solutional removal as solute load of large volumes of gypsum by downward vadose flow. This type of morphological evolution with significant post-collapse solutional denudation differs from that observed in carbonate rocks characterised by lower solubility and erodibility. The analysis of historical imagery reveals that bedrock collapse sinkholes currently have a very low probability of occurrence and that buried cover subsidence sinkholes are used for urban development creating risk situations. (C) 2021 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier B.V

Speech-recognition in landslide predictive modelling:A case for a next generation early warning system

Traditional landslide early warnings are based on the notion that intensity-duration relations can be approximated to single precipitation values cumulated over fixed time windows. Here, we take on a similar task being inspired by modeling architectures typical of speech-recognition tasks. We aim at classifying the Turkish landscape into 5 km grids assigned with dynamic landslide susceptibility estimates. We collected all available national information on precipitation-induced landslide occurrences. This information is passed to a Long Short-Term Memory equipped with the whole rainfall time series, obtained from daily CHIRPS data. We test this model: 1) by randomizing the presence/absence data to represent the slope instability over Turkey and over 13 years under consideration (2008–2020) and 2) by assessing the effect of different time windows used to pass the rainfall signal to the neural network. Results show that the inclusion of the full precipitation signal rather than its scalar approximation leads to a substantial increase in prediction power (approximately 20%). This may potentially pave the road for a new generation of speech-recognition-based landslide early warning systems.</p

MONITORING THE SLOWLY DEVELOPING LANDSLIDE WITH THE INSAR TECHNIQUE IN SAMSUN PROVINCE, NORTHERN TURKEY

Landslides are prominent natural events with high destructive power. Since they affect large areas, it is important to monitor the areas they cover and analyse their movement. Remote sensing data and image processing techniques have been used to monitor landslides in different areas. Synthetic aperture radar (SAR) data, particularly with the Interferometric SAR (InSAR) method, is used to determine the velocity vector of the surface motion. This study aims to detect the landslide movements in Samsun, located in the north of Turkey, using persistent scattering InSAR method. Archived Copernicus Sentinel-1 satellite images taken between 2017 and 2022 were used in both descending and ascending directions. The results revealed surface movements in the direction of the line of sight, ranging between &minus;6 and 6 mm/year in the study area. Persistent Scatterer (PS) points were identified mainly in human structures such as roads, coasts, ports, and golf courses, especially in settlements. While some regions exhibited similar movements in both descending and ascending results, opposite movements were observed in some regions. The results produced in both descending and ascending directions were used together and decomposed into horizontal and vertical deformation components. It was observed that the western coastal part experienced approximately 4.5 cm/year vertical deformation, while the central part there is more significant horizontal deformation, reaching up to approximately 6 cm/year

Traditional and modified Newmark displacement methods after the 2022 Ms 6.8 Luding earthquake (Eastern Tibetan Plateau)

peer reviewedThe Newmark displacement (ND) method, which reproduces the interactions between waves, solids, and fluids during an earthquake, has experienced numerous modifications. We compare the performances of a traditional and a modified version of the ND method through the analysis of co-seismic landslides triggered by the 2022 Ms 6.8 Luding earthquake (Sichuan, China). We implemented 23 ND scenarios with each equation, assuming different landslide depths, as well as various soil-rock geomechanical properties derived from previous studies in regions of similar lithology. These scenarios allowed verifying the presence or absence of such landslides and predict the likely occurrence locations. We evaluated the topographic and slope aspect amplification effects on both equations. The oldest equation has a better landslide predictive ability, as it considers both slope stability and earthquake intensity. Contrarily, the newer version of the ND method has a greater emphasis on slope stability compared to the earthquake intensity and hence tends to give high ND values only when the critical acceleration is weak. The topographic amplification does not improve the predictive capacity of these equations, most likely because few or no massive landslides were triggered from mountain peaks. This approach allows structural, focal mechanism, and site effects to be considered when designing ND models, which could help to explain and predict new landslide distribution patterns such as the abundance of landslides on the NE, E, S, and SE-facing slopes observed in the Luding case