(2)
Thorough and closely argued essays ... one suspects that this work will form a key text in advancing the 'post-Washington consensus' in this area. (Development Policy Review )
Clearly and persuasively brings land issues back into the policy agenda ... rich in evidence and analysis ... refreshingly innovative in terms of methodology ... This book will be of relevance to readers interested in land issues in developing countries and, more broadly, to all those interested in poverty reduction, for which better access to land is an indispensable condition. (Raul Hopkins, International Fund for Agricultural Development )
For academics and policymakers interested in rural development, this book should be required reading ... Unlike most edited books this one hangs together exceptionally well; thanks in large part to the introductory chapter by the editors, which provides a road map and an analytical umbrella within which the chapters fit ... an extremely helpful resource for anyone serious about land relations and development. (Journal of Development Economics )
Twenty-five years ago David Petersen and his wife, Caroline, pulled up stakes, trading Laguna Beach, California, for a snug hand-built cabin in the wilderness. Today he knows that mountain land as intimately as anyone can know his home. Petersen conflates a quarter century into the adventures of four high-country seasons, tracking the rigors of survival from the snowmelt that announces the arrival of spring to the decline and death of autumn and winter that will establish the fertile ground needed for next year+s rebirth. In the past we listened to Henry David Thoreau or Aldo Leopold; today it is Petersen+s turn. His observations are lyrical, scientific, and from the heart. He reinforces Thoreau+s dictum: -in wildness is the preservation of the earth.+ In prose rich with mystery and soul, his words are a plea for the survival of the remnant wilderness.
The production of ‘human waste’ – or more precisely, wasted lives, the ‘superfluous’ populations of migrants, refugees and other outcasts – is an inevitable outcome of modernization. It is an unavoidable side-effect of economic progress and the quest for order which is characteristic of modernity. As long as large parts of the world remained wholly or partly unaffected by modernization, they were treated by modernizing societies as lands that were able to absorb the excess of population in the ‘developed countries’. Global solutions were sought, and temporarily found, to locally produced overpopulation problems. But as modernization has reached the furthest lands of the planet, ‘redundant population’ is produced everywhere and all localities have to bear the consequences of modernity’s global triumph. They are now confronted with the need to seek – in vain, it seems – local solutions to globally produced problems. The global spread of the modernity has given rise to growing quantities of human beings who are deprived of adequate means of survival, but the planet is fast running out of places to put them. Hence the new anxieties about ‘immigrants’ and ‘asylum seekers’ and the growing role played by diffuse ‘security fears’ on the contemporary political agenda. With characteristic brilliance, this new book by Zygmunt Bauman unravels the impact of this transformation on our contemporary culture and politics and shows that the problem of coping with ‘human waste’ provides a key for understanding some otherwise baffling features of our shared life, from the strategies of global domination to the most intimate aspects of human relationships.
