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      • Fefe,come

        by Laleh Jafari

        Fefe is a newborn giraffe in a beautiful jungle. He encounters different situations that teach him how to live in this world. In the first story, Fefe helps a sparrow stuck in a tree branch. In the second story, he manages to rescue a gazelle from a wolf. In the third story, he sings for a sad and depressed water snake to make him happy. Little by little, he finds the ability to help and make others happy. In the fourth story, he survives a wolf attack and learns how to escape to save his life. In the fifth story, an alligator tries to deceive him, but he does not fall into his trap and escapes. Therefore, he learns not to trust everyone. In the sixth story, he takes care of a newborn ibex and learns compassion. Fefe also learns to wait in the seventh story. Finally, in the eighth story, all the animals in the jungle surprise Fefe with a birthday cake

      • Science: general issues

        A Botany of Violence: 528 Years of Resistance & Resurgence

        by Pablo Escudero, Ghazal Jafari, Pierre Bélanger

        Smuggled and stolen by the Jesuits and the Spanish Monarchy in the 17th century, transplanted by Britain and Holland in India and Indonesia during the 18th century, mapped by German explorer Alexander von Humboldt in the 19th century, weaponized by the U.S. in the 20th century, and monopolized by global pharma in the 21st century, the story of the Cinchona plant—the tree called ‘fever’—literally lies at the base of modern civilization. The quest to find the cure for malaria and to control the production of quinine as seen in the corporate monopoly in Africa today also traces deep roots of territorial dispossession and labor exploitation that lie between the Amazon and the Andes. Behind the mask of heritage preservation and resource conservation, five centuries of graphic evidence put into sharp relief the uneven scales of racialized, gendered violence that are rooted in territorial injustices and underpinned by state nationalism.Bringing the map and the territory closer together, state-sanctioned policies of resource extraction and environmental destruction are interwoven with contemporary narratives of sovereignty and self-determination. Like a geopolitical treatise, the archival activism of this book rebuilds relations with the Cinchona plant, by reclaiming territorial histories of its peoples and its ancestral lands to confront the oppressive structures of the settler-state. Overlooked, suppressed, and marginalized, the long history of resistance movements and rebellions led by Indigenous and Afro-Latina women not only reveal the settler-colonial force of the nation-state. Their contemporary resurgence in the 21st century proposes a counter-map: a way challenge to the plague of violence and weaponization of resources of the past five centuries and its transformation into a regenerative flora of the future.

      • Global warming
        March 2017

        Climate Change and Agroforestry

        Adaptation, Mitigation and Livelihood Security

        by C.B.Pandey, Mahesh Kumar Gaur & R.K.Goyal

        Natural change in climate is slow and takes millions of years; and it is known to have made our planet hospitable to live. The climate change is not limited to one country or a continent. It is occurring across the globe as evident from droughts in Texas and flooding along the Missouri River in the United States and along the Red River in Canada. Climate change drives many stressors and interacts with many non-climatic stressors which make it difficult to forecast outcomes in any general way other than existing threats to agriculture. Agroforestry increases a high level of diversity within agricultural lands which supports numerous ecological and production services that bring resilience to the impact of climate change mitigation and adaptation. Climate change risk management is difficult in annual cropping systems due to increasing uncertainty of inter-annual variability in rainfall and temperature. Mixing of woody trees with crops, forage and livestock operations provides greater resilience to the inter-annual variability through crop diversification and increased resource use efficiency. Deep rooted trees allow better access to nutrients and water during droughts and when appropriately integrated into annual cropping systems and extract from different resource pools that would otherwise be lost from systems. Agroforestry increases soil porosity, reduces runoff and increases soil cover, which improve water infiltration and reduces moisture stress in low rainfall years. During periods of excessive soil moisture, tree based systems keep soils aerated by pumping out excess water and offer an economic return. The book contains 36 chapters mainly on agroforestry practices found in India and its role in climate change mitigation and adaptation.

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