Biological Diversity VS. Urgent Protection

TheQinghai-TibetPlateauhasanaverageelevationofover4,000meters,andcoversanareaof2.5millionkm.Thiscreatesgreatbiologicaldiversitybetweenthefloraandfaunaofthewetforests,comparativelydryandsemi-drygrasslandsordeserts.Suchadiversityfindsexpressionalsoinplantspecieswhichtotal12,000intheQinghai-TibetPlateau,including5,700inTibet.Mostarefoundhuddlingonthesoutheasternplateau.TheymakeuphalfoftheplantspeciesfoundinthewholeofChina.Biologicaldiversityproducesrichplantresources.Asearlyasthe17thcentury,o…     

Rescuing “Diversity” from Affirmative Action and Campus Activists

Although diversity is constantly celebrated, the word is regularly used in a distorted if not dishonest manner. In connection with Fisher v. University of Texas and the 2003 Supreme Court cases involving the University of Michigan, for example, critics of racial preferences who promote color-blindness have been portrayed as enemies of “diversity.” Scrutinizing the recent explosion of racially themed campus protests reveals tendencies that are even more alarming. First, activists are demanding rapid increases in the hiring of minority faculty and staff while ignoring the antidiscrimination mandates imposed by the Civil Rights Act. Novel dangers to academic freedom and intellectual rigor, moreover, have been surfacing as student groups assert imperious authority over university affairs, threaten to squelch criticisms of Black Lives Matter, and demand that professors be evaluated for “microaggressions.”     

Modeling Mechanisms of Cultural Diversity and Ethnicity in Hunter–Gatherers

This paper aims to analyze the emergence of ethnicity and cultural differentiation in hunter–gatherer groups, using computer simulation methods. The existence of differences and similarities between populations has long been a major topic of investigation for archaeologists, who have traditionally used material culture as a means to identify different human groups. Today, this approach is perceived as being too simplistic. However, in the absence of satisfactory models, it often continues to be assumed as valid. In this paper, we present a preliminary model and its computer implementation to predict how hunter–gatherer societies interacted and built cultural identities as a consequence of the way they interacted. Our starting point for such analysis assumes the definition of ethnicity as the production and reproduction of group identity among members of a community, resulting from restricted cooperation flows. Results are compared with ongoing ethnoarchaeological research of Patagonian hunter–gatherers.     

Reinforcing Diversity: From the ‘inside’ and the ‘outside’

This paper focuses on Jan Monk's contribution to reinforcing diversity and collaboration in the field of human geography. It illustrates how gendered diversity and feminism is promoted in her academic work both inside the Anglo-American academic world and outside, by exposing the feminist voices from around the world and mainstreaming them in her collaborative work. Fostering and reinforcing diversity has become a body of knowledge in her extensive publications in which she assesses the varying extent and nature of feminist geography in the Anglophone world and across countries, attempting to interpret differences in terms of geographical and cultural contexts and disciplinary trends. The paper emphasizes how fostering diversity and collaboration in Jan's academic work is not only about writing articles, editing books and producing a film, but also engages the formulation of organizational structures such as the Routledge book series and the initiation and establishment of the Commission of Gender and Geography of the International Geographical Union which have contributed to the production of collaborative feminist geographical knowledge across spaces and places.     

‘Indigenous Knowledge’ and ‘Science’: Reframing the Debate on Knowledge Diversity

Responding to Kai Horsthemke’s call for the valorisation of universal knowledge within the debate on indigenous knowledge, the paper argues for an understanding of knowledge that is based neither universalism nor relativism. Arguing against the dualisms of ‘indigenous knowledge’ and ‘science’, the paper proposes that the debate be focused rather on knowledge diversity. Drawing on the work of Nelson Goodman and Catherine Elgin, the paper argues that diverse epistemologies ought to be evaluated not on their capacity to express a strict realism but on their ability to advance understanding. Such an approach allows for the evaluation of the advancement of understanding without necessarily requiring the expression of the literal truths that divide ‘belief’ from ‘knowledge’.     

Diversity and change in Australia's rangelands: a post–productivist transition with a difference?

Australia's rangelands are experiencing a post–productivist transition at a tempo comparable to Western Europe's, but in contexts that ensure marked divergence in impulses, actors, processes and outcomes. In Australia's most marginal lands, a flimsy mode of pastoral occupance is being displaced by renewed indigenous occupance, conservation and tourism, with significant changes in land ownership, property rights, investment sources and power relations, but also with structural problems arising from fugitive income streams. The sharp delineation between structurally coherent commodity–oriented regions and emerging amenity–oriented regions can provisionally be mapped at a national scale. A comparison of Australia with Western Europe indicates that three distinct but interconnected driving forces are propelling the rural transition, namely: agricultural overcapacity; the emergence of amenity–oriented uses; and changing societal values.     

Unity and Diversity in the European Iron Age: Out of the Mists, Some Clarity?

While some researchers continue to focus fruitfully on traditional issues, in recent years new perspectives, some strongly revisionist, have developed within European Iron Age archaeology, moving it from a long-static state into a rapidly changing milieu. Studies of colonialism, imperialism, and interaction have undergone sequential shifts into new territory, while topics related to sacred activity, political apparatuses, and the ruler-subject relationship have undergone substantial reworking. Perspectives absent from earlier literature have emerged: gender, age, ethnicity, and identity, and interpretations employing theories of practice, agency, landscape, and embodiment have emerged, mirroring broader disciplinary shifts. An overarching trend sees Iron Age Europe as a series of interactive societies with both broad similarities and sharp regional, even local, differences, moving through time and ever-changing relationships, influences, and trajectories. The collision of traditional and revisionist scholarship has produced debate, some heated, but has improved and invigorated the field.     

Assessing the Diversity of Mission Populations through the Comparison of Native American Residences at Mission Santa Clara de Asís

Mission establishments in Alta California and elsewhere were home to complex, pluralistic communities in which native peoples actively but differentially negotiated aspects of colonialism through daily practice and the reinterpretation of identity. To explore these issues, we compare the archaeological evidence from two different indigenous dwellings at California’s Mission Santa Clara de Asís: an adobe barracks and a native-style thatched house. In particular, we consider possible differences between the dwellings’ inhabitants in terms of relative status, ethnolinguistic affiliation, and re-articulation of indigenous traditions.     

Diversity and employment growth in Canada, 1971–2001: can diversification policies succeed?

In this paper, we explore the link between diversity in the local economy, the process of diversification and employment growth. To do so, we first examine diversification trends between 1971 and 2001 across 382 Canadian areas (urban and rural). We then examine whether or not the more diversified areas display faster employment growth. Over some periods and for some types of area they do, but over other periods they do not. Furthermore, there is no clear link between the process of diversification and growth. Also, proximity to a large diversified economic unit (metropolitan areas) tends to be associated with growth; thus, it is not only the local characteristics of regions that determine their growth levels. Our evidence suggests that economies associated with diversity can occur concurrently with economies associated with specialisation. In the light of these complex relationships, we conclude that diversification policies are difficult to justify on the grounds of employment growth and would in any case be difficult to implement successfully due to the overall inertia observed in diversity levels.     

The British Left in the Problems of Peace Lectures, 1926–38: Diversity that E.H. Carr Ignored

The proceedings of the Problems of Peace conferences held annually at the League of Nations headquarters in Geneva from 1926 to 1938 included lectures from an array of ideological positions. Some contributors were from the Left, ranging from moderate liberal socialists to the more firmly anti-capitalist thinkers. Those of the latter category presented challenges to the existing international order, holding views that bore some affinities to E.H. Carr's beliefs. They were, however, unlike Carr, committed to liberal-democratic processes as a means to change. Nevertheless, in the turbulent environment of the inter-war years optimism gave way to anxiety among many on the Left. A wider division between the moderate and more radical British democratic socialists emerged. Some thinkers repositioned themselves within the broader Left. These different positions and shifts are evident in the Problems of Peace lectures, and this helps expose the limitations of Carr's binary utopianism/realism division of inter-war international thought. A weakness of the socialists in question is that the demands for change are conventional and thus undeveloped where the real have-not peoples of the empires are concerned. Nevertheless, by ignoring the lectures Carr neglected diversity and innovation in the internationalism of the British inter-war Left.     

Soldiers under the Skin: Diversity of Race,Ethnicity, and Class in the Illinois National Guard, 1870–1916

A close examination of the Illinois National Guard (ING) between 1870 and 1916 demonstrates that contrary to the commonplace assumption of a homogeneous, white, middle class, native‐born membership, the ING had a very heterogeneous membership, drawing in rural and urban men, and men from an array of ethnicities, races and economic circumstances. Information on 2245 members drawn from enlistment data and the federal census, combined with evidence drawn from a wide variety of textual sources firmly establishes that this organization attracted men from a broad range of backgrounds. The ING stands out against other male‐only organizations of its time as an organization whose membership was consistently drawn from a broad cross‐section of the American population. The Illinois National Guard of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries offered an organization that could unite many American men across cultural and social boundaries at a time when there was much to divide them.     

Center of Diversity: Sámi in Early Modern Stockholm in the Light of European Colonial Expansion. A Historical Archaeological Approach

This paper deals with the presence of Sámi in central and southern Sweden in the seventeenth century. The Nordic countries have generally been believed to be ethnically homogeneous, with the** colonial subjects not being present in the center of these empires. If the multicultural aspects of early modern Nordic countries are at all discussed, Sámi and other ethnic groups are understood as peoples living on the outskirts of the empires. This notion has cemented an idea that cities such as Copenhagen or Stockholm were inhabited solely by peoples from southern Scandinavia and the continent. Drawing on the experience of the role and presence of indigenous people from the Americas and the Arctic in cities such as London in the seventeenth century, this paper examines the multi-ethnic aspects of early modern Stockholm, capital of Sweden, as an imperial center.     

Between the Vinča and <Emphasis Type="Italic">Linearbandkeramik</Emphasis> Worlds: The Diversity of Practices and Identities in the 54th–53rd Centuries cal BC in Southwest Hungary and Beyond

Perhaps nowhere in European prehistory does the idea of clearly-defined cultural boundaries remain more current than in the initial Neolithic, where the southeast–northwest trend of the spread of farming crosses what is perceived as a sharp divide between the Balkans and central Europe. This corresponds to a distinction between the Vin?a culture package, named for a classic site in Serbia, with its characteristic pottery assemblage and absence of longhouses, and the Linearbandkeramik (LBK), with equally diagnostic but different pottery, and its apparently culturally-diagnostic longhouses, extending in a more northerly belt through central Europe westward to the Dutch coast. In this paper we question the concept of such a clear division through a presentation of new data from the site of Szederkény-Kukorica-d?l?. A large settlement in southeast Transdanubia, Hungary, excavated in advance of road construction, Szederkény is notable for its combination of pottery styles, variously including Vin?a A, Ra?i?te and LBK, and longhouses of a kind otherwise familiar from the LBK world. Formal modelling of its date establishes that the site probably began in the later 54th century cal BC, lasting until the first decades of the 52nd century cal BC. Occupation, featuring longhouses, pits and graves, probably began at the same time in the eastern and western parts of the settlement, starting a decade or two later in the central part; the western part was probably the last to be abandoned. Vin?a pottery is predominantly associated with the eastern and central parts of the site, and Ra?i?te pottery with the west. Formal modelling of the early history of longhouses in the LBK world suggests their emergence in the Formative LBK of Transdanubia c. 5500 cal BC followed by rapid dispersal in the middle of the 54th century cal BC, associated with the ‘earliest’ (älteste) LBK. The adoption of longhouses at Szederkény thus appears to come a few generations after the start of this ‘diaspora’. Rather than explaining the mixture of things, practices and perhaps people at Szederkény with reference to problematic notions such as hybridity, we propose instead a more fluid and varied vocabulary, encompassing combination and amalgamation, relationships and performance in the flow of social life, and networks; this makes greater allowance for diversity and interleaving in a context of rapid change.