Book Description
Not since the Crusades of the Middle Ages has Islam evoked the degree of fear, hostility, and ethnic and religious stereotyping that is evident throughout Western culture today. As conflicts continue to proliferate around the globe, the perception of a colossal, unyielding, and unavoidable struggle between Islam and the West has intensified. These numerous conflicts, both actual and ideological, have revived fears of an ongoing "clash of civilizations" -- an intractable and irreconcilable conflict of values between Western cultures and an Islam that is portrayed as hostile and alien.
The New Crusades takes head-on the idea of an emergent "Cold War" between Islam and the West. It explores the historical, political, and institutional forces that have raised the specter of a threatening and monolithic Muslim enemy and provides a nuanced critique of much received wisdom on the topic, particularly the "clash of civilizations" theory. Bringing together twelve of the most influential thinkers in Middle Eastern and religious studies -- including Edward Said, Roy Mottahedeh, and Fatema Mernissi -- this timely collection confronts such depictions of the Arab-Islamic world, showing their inner workings and how they both empower and shield from scrutiny Islamic radicals who operate from similar paradigms of inevitable and absolute conflict.
Customer Reviews:
Nice Muslims.......2005-12-21
Muslims is nice. Don't smite me, please. I am good on Islam, yes? I vote 5 stars for this nice nice book!
An average book.......2005-03-11
The book is ok. Its well written, and raises some valid points, however the issue is presented almost totally in an 'America-vs-Islam' context. The main conflicts Qureshi deals with involve post 9-11 America v certain parts of the Middle East and Israel-Palestine.
Qureshi has missed a major oppertunity to investigate other conflicts which involve Islam. Why does he not discuss Kashmir, Chechnya, Southern Thailand, Timor, Ughur/Western China? All of these conflicts have a religous dimension to them, and all of them are often talked about by Radical Jihadists, yet none of them really involve the US or Israel. His lack of attention to this means his book has just become another generic study which simplifies the whole issue.
Overall it is an ok book, and from an academic point of view it does provide an alternative to Huntingdon's theory. But sadly it has a narrow scope and leaves too many crucial questions unanswered.
An impressive achievement.......2004-06-24
Distinguished intellectuals offer in this extremely important not to mention timely book a much needed analysis of islamophobia and its lingering implications for international peace and security. These leading political commentators explain why hatred towards Islam still pervades Western societies. Nowhere is overgeneralization so evident as when it comes to Islam. Muslims are frequently portrayed by mass media as intransigent extremists whose values are completely incompatible with those of the westerners. One of those who strongly assert that Islam poses a grave threat to the West is Harvard Professor Samuel Huntington, presumably best known for his "Clash of Civilizations" thesis. Huntington suggests in his book that a peaceful co-existence between the West and the Arab world is an impossibility. By describing Muslims as a homogenous entity, Huntington's analysis becomes seriously flawed because he fails to take into account a number of important factors such as the fact that there are over 1 billion Muslims worldwide who have different cultures and speak different languages. Needless to say, failing to even consider these factors is indicative of spurious scholarship. One of the principal objectives of this book is to offer a rebuttal of Huntington's thesis. Edward Said's contribution in this book is a devestating critique of Huntington's assertions. Unfortunately, as has frequently been the case in the past, there is a tendency in the West to award writers who defame and misrepresent the true messages of Islam, as in the case of Ivo Andric who was awarded Nobel Prize for his book The Bridge on the Drina. Andric depicted Bosnian Muslims as atavistic people and treacherous converts who did not belong in Bosnia. Clearly oblivious to the fact that the majority of Bosnian Muslims were secularized individuals for whom religion played a rather insignificant role in social life, I can corroborate that from personal experience, Andric claimed that Bosnian Muslims were a serious threat to Christianity. In point of fact, Bosnian Muslims were and still are much less religious than their Serb and Croat counterparts. Paradoxically, many western experts spoke of the rise of Islamic fundamentalism in Bosnia and displayed a flagrant disregard for extremely well documented Serb nationalism and mythology which subsequently enabled the genocide of Bosnian Muslims. According to Michael Sells' and Norman Cigar's brilliant analyses, Serb mythology played a pivotal role in the extermination of Bosnian Muslims and yet no one talked of the Orthodox Christian fundamentalism and the other adjectives commonly employed for describing Muslims only. Christians who commit abhorrent crimes are rarely if ever referred to as Christian extremists but rather as lunatics in need of psychiatric care. Nonetheless, when a few extremely unstable individuals knowingly misinterpret the Quaran, they are immediately labelled religious fanatics. Note that the careless (in my view deliberate) use of the word Islam such as in the "Islamic fundamentalism" implicitly suggests that Islam condones terrorism and unjustifiable killing of innocent civilians. This unwarranted and unjustified use of the word Islam in similar contexts helps foster islamophobia in the West. There is and there always will be extremism on all sides but as long as we keep focusing on one side only, there will never be justice. I recommend this extremely well argued and extraordinarily well written masterpiece to all who believe that justice must apply to all. This is irrefutably one of the most important books ever published.
Necessary antidote for reading on Islam or the US "Crusade".......2004-02-01
Serious readers about Islam and US policy should reflect on most of the essays in this book. It is a necessary antidote to all the simplifications and hidden agendas in the press, policy, and publications by "popular" writers on Islam who so often seem driven by hate, profits, or noteriety. Read here to reconsider the "Huntington Thesis" and it Lewis 'roots'. Reflect on the implications for Bush's "Crusade". The essay on Christian Serb terrorism and the manipulation of hatred is valuable for its general lessons as well. How think tanks and best sellers sway policy among those with limited depth of knowlege is worth considering -- especially when there seems to be an intellectual "Gresham's Law" of punditry. The continued importance of history and memory is highlighted. A variety of authors with considerable knowlege and depth offer valuable insights into where we are and how we got there - about myths and reality that are central to the what has been dubbed "the war on terror" and is often seen by Muslims with some justification as a "war on Islam" -- a Crusade.
A clarion call against the dangerous simplification of Islam.......2003-12-21
The New Crusades is a timely collection of essays that deals with a dangerous myth - the inherent violence of Islamic civilisation. The editors provide a useful introduction on the ideological shaping of the new Muslim enemy. They point out that the real fundamentalists are those who refuse to see the multiple identities that claim overlapping allegiances in the territorial bounds of the Arab and Muslim world. In support of diversity, the contributors included in the collection are heterogeneous - they range from first-rate scholars and Islamicists like Roy Mottahedeh of Harvard University to well-known journalists like Ahmed Rashid who have written popular accounts of militant Muslim movements. Edward Said is included in this collection, which makes the Post-Orientalist political bent of this volume clear enough (e.g. Bernard Lewis is mostly on the receiving end. but through reasoned argument, it must be said). There is a particularly illuminating essay by Mottahedeh that elegantly dispatches with Huntington's clash of civilisation thesis in the manner of a master historian dealing with a sophomore's essay. Another contributor demolishes the dangerous and bigoted simplifications of Islam contained in the work of V.S. Naipaul. But there are also the sounds of axes grinding in this collection and "ancient hatreds" between feuding academics and rival disciplines in the study of Islam, Muslims and the Arab world. One world sees all of Islam as potentially violent. The other sees potential violence arising from the demonisation of Islam.
Indeed, after reading many of the essays, you will come to the depressing conclusion that the crusades of the East of the 11th to 13th century are still very much alive in the 21st century.
Average customer rating:
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Risck Analysis In Forest Management (Managing Forest Ecosystems)
Klaus, Ed. von Gadow
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ASIN: 0792369009 |
Book Description
Due to the long-term planning horizons and the great variety of natural, economic, and operational hazards affecting forest ecosystems, uncertainty and multiple risk are typical aspects of forest management. Applications of risk analysis are surprisingly rare, in spite of the rich assortment of sophisticated forest planning tools that are available today. The objective of this particular volume within the book series
Managing Forest Ecosystems is to present state-of-the-art research results, concepts, and techniques regarding the assessment and evaluation of natural hazards and the analysis of risk and uncertainty relating to forest management. Various aspects of risk analysis are covered, including examples of specific modelling tools. The book is divided into three sections covering ecological perspectives, applications in engineering and planning, and methods applicable to economics and policy.
Book Description
This digital document is a journal article from Forest Ecology and Management, published by Elsevier in 2005. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Media Library immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.
Description:
The application of hazard and risk analysis to specific project areas prone to uncharacteristic wildland fires is a useful way to estimate the effects of management alternatives (including no action). These project-level analyses need to be done in the context of surrounding landscape conditions. A landscape-level analysis is often at the catchment scale or larger, while project work is generally at a smaller scale, limited by practical considerations such as budget, land ownership patterns and public perception. This difference in scale requires an interpretative procedure to select an ecologically effective project alternative, and we propose a decision process involving several steps of hazard and risk analysis. The first step is to evaluate wildfire hazard and risk elements at the landscape level over longer time frames to provide insight into the factors dominating fire behavior and the most imperiled physical or ecologic domain such as vegetative succession, watershed values or human health and safety. Second, we suggest an additional spatial consideration to estimate the representative elemental scale (RES) of the fire process in the landscape. Consideration of the RES allows estimation of project-scale impacts to landscape-scale problems, while considering the hazard and risk assessment helps estimate longer-term project impacts, and possible cumulative impacts from multiple project activities. Third, we propose considerations and objective functions to be used in locating and sizing project areas, and applying treatment prescriptions to specific situations within the project area. The latter steps require fire history data and output from a fire behavior or vegetative succession computer model. We use data from the Southwest Oregon Demonstration Project [Roloff, G.J., Mealey, S.P., Clay, C., Barry, J., Yanish, K., Neuenschwander, L. A process for modeling short- and long-term risks in the Southern Oregon Cascades, submitted for publication.] to illustrate the methods proposed. Roloff et al. demonstrate a formal model incorporating these concepts.
Book Description
This digital document is a journal article from Forest Ecology and Management, published by Elsevier in 2005. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Media Library immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.
Description:
Organizations managing forest land often make fire management decisions that seem overly risk-averse in relation to their stated goals for ecosystem restoration, protection of sensitive species and habitats, and protection of water and timber resources. Research in behavioral decision theory has shown that people faced with difficult decisions under uncertainty and decisions with multiple and conflicting objectives adopt mental shortcuts that systematically bias decision-making. Fire management decisions exhibit exactly the characteristics that are likely to trigger such mental shortcuts. Cumulative and unwitting use of mental shortcuts can lead to fire management decisions that are excessively risk-averse, to the point of jeopardizing stated management goals. It can also cause retrospective analyses of fire decisions to focus inappropriately on placing blame for bad outcomes and fail to scrutinize the quality of the decision itself. Excessive risk aversion is evident in the behavior of individual land managers, land management organizations, regulatory agencies that review land management decisions, and the general public and its agents in the media, courts and legislature. Remedies to excessive risk aversion include: (1) wider use of structured decision processes designed to counteract the mental shortcuts that plague human decision-making, (2) structural and educational changes within and between organizations to change perverse incentives that reward risk aversion and discourage adaptive management, and (3) locally focused collaborations among land management agencies, regulatory agencies, and citizens to build trust and to enhance understanding of forest management goals and practices.
Book Description
This digital document is a journal article from Forest Ecology and Management, published by Elsevier in 2005. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Media Library immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.
Description:
Quantitative fire risk analysis depends on characterizing and combining fire behavior probabilities and effects. Fire behavior probabilities are different from fire occurrence statistics (historic numbers or probabilities of discovered ignitions) because they depend on spatial and temporal factors controlling fire growth. That is, the likelihood of fire burning a specific area is dependent on ignitions occurring off-site and the fuels, topography, weather, and relative fire direction allowing each fire to reach that location. Research is required to compare computational short-cuts that have been proposed for approximating these fire behavior distributions. Fire effects in a risk analysis must also be evaluated on a common scale for the variety of values susceptible to wildland fire. This means that appraisals of fire impacts to human infrastructure and ecological values must be measured by the same currency so that the risk assessment yields a single expectation of fire effects. Ultimately, this will help guide planning and investment into management activities that can alter either the probabilities of damaging fire or the susceptibility to those fire behaviors.
Book Description
This digital document is a journal article from Forest Ecology and Management, published by Elsevier in 2005. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Media Library immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.
Description:
Wildfire poses risks to fish and wildlife habitat, among other things. Management projects to reduce the severity of wildfire effects by implementing hazardous fuel reduction treatments also pose risks. How can land managers determine which risk is greater? Comparison of risks and benefits from fuel treatment projects to risks from severe wildfire effects is consistent with policies requiring public land managers to analyze short- and long-term environmental effects. However, formulating the problem as a comparison of temporal considerations often results in decisions to reject fuels treatment projects near imperiled species habitat, even though the adverse effects of short-term project actions may result in substantial long-term net benefits from reducing the severity of wildfire effects. Consistent with widely accepted ecological risk assessment methods, the problem is formulated in a conceptual model. Salmonid fish populations are the risk assessment endpoint, and one stressor adversely affecting them is sediment from wildfire or logging. The model compares short-term effects of implementing fuels reduction treatments to longer-term wildfire effects with and without fuel treatments, including risk reduction benefits. Used quantitatively or qualitatively, the model may contribute to sustainable resource management decisions by improving communication among stakeholders, risk managers in land and resource management agencies, and risk assessors in agencies responsible for enforcing the Endangered Species Act. Act.
Book Description
This digital document is a journal article from Forest Ecology and Management, published by Elsevier in 2005. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Media Library immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.
Description:
The perception and measurement of the risk of natural disturbances often varies depending on the spatial and temporal scales over which information is collected or analyzed. This can lead to conflicting conclusions about severity of current or past disturbances or the risk of future ones. Failure to look across scales also complicates local implementation of policies developed from broad-scale perceptions of risk because perception of risk is relative and depends on context. Methods that help policymakers, managers, and the public look across spatial and temporal scales can improve their understanding of the long-term dynamics of disturbances like wildfire and insect outbreaks. This capability provides a foundation for prioritizing restoration management activities, especially in forest types prone to frequent or severe disturbances. Although techniques for estimating risk over increasingly large spatial scales are becoming more widespread, the connection of risk assessments from broad to fine scales is not well established. We use a synthesis of five existing analyses to illustrate how scale affects the perception and interpretation of risk as information, models, and findings are stepped down from broad scale (interior Columbia basin) to mid scale (parts of a river basins) to fine scale (watersheds). We present results from the Interior Columbia Basin Ecosystem Management Project (ICBEMP) and the Interior Northwest Landscape Analysis System (INLAS) efforts that compare wildfire risk and other resource attributes. Our findings compare action and no-action alternatives to illustrate the use of multiple-scale ''step-down'' analysis for understanding the relation of broad-scale policy to the feasibility and impact of local management.
Book Description
This digital document is a journal article from Forest Policy and Economics, published by Elsevier in 2006. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Media Library immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.
Description:
This paper provides an example of the practical application of multi-attribute trade-off analysis (MATA) to wildfire management. The MATA approach supports more informed decision-making because it exposes important trade-offs among competing management objectives (requiring value-based choices), helps guide and structure necessary technical judgements, explicitly represents uncertainty (i.e., not just expected outcomes but risk profiles around outcomes) and addresses temporal trade-offs. MATA promotes critical thinking about what analysis is required for decision-making. A MATA approach can be applied for all types of forest and fire management decisions. In this paper, we provide a sample application of MATA to an evaluation of landscape-level fuel treatments for managing wildfire risk. The study area is located in southeastern British Columbia, Canada where historical fire suppression policies and expanding development in wildland urban interface areas have resulted in an increase in both the probability and the consequences of stand replacement fires. We specify management objectives and develop measurable attributes for fire management costs, timber supply, property damage, landscape-level biodiversity, local air quality and climate change. We then simulate the effects on these attributes of four alternative fuel management strategies that include combinations of mechanical treatments and prescribed burning over a 100-year period. The evaluation illustrates the key features of MATA while highlighting the benefits and challenges of implementing the approach.
Book Description
This digital document is a journal article from Forest Ecology and Management, published by Elsevier in 2005. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Media Library immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.
Description:
Laws and policies require federal land and resource management agencies, and regulatory agencies charged with conserving imperiled species, to assess risks associated with proposed actions and to manage wildland fire risks and habitat for species-at-risk of extinction. For most all federal land management activities, the National Environmental Policy Act of 1969 requires analysis of risks and other adverse consequences of proposed actions, and documentation of short- and long-term effects of a range of management alternatives, including no action. To reduce wildland fire risks on federal lands, the National Fire Plan was developed in 2000. Reducing hazardous fuels is one of the Plan's objectives. The Healthy Forests Restoration Act of 2003 requires, among other things, that courts balance short- and long-term effects of proposed action and no action before enjoining fuel-reduction treatment projects. The Endangered Species Act of 1973 prohibits any federal action that would ''jeopardize'' a species-at-risk of extinction or adversely affect habitat. Evaluations of projects that could pose such risks are assessed during consultation between the agency proposing action and regulatory agencies. Recent policies modify this process for National Fire Plan implementation projects. Current regulations for implementing the National Forest Management Act of 1976 require assessing species-at-risk on National Forest System lands. Proposed regulations call for balancing short- and long-term risks. It is unclear what form risk assessments should take to support agency and court decisions about risk trade-offs. One option is adapting the US Environmental Protection Agency's ecological risk assessment procedures so that management trade-offs can be evaluated.
Book Description
This digital document is a journal article from Forest Ecology and Management, published by Elsevier in 2007. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Media Library immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.
Description:
Fifteen years after the heavy storm ''Vivian'', it is still not clear how succession in subalpine forests that were affected by the storm will continue and when regrowing forests will provide effective protection from natural hazards such as avalanches. We used a simulation model to evaluate forest succession, forest structure and the protective effect in subalpine blowdown areas after 50 simulation years under different scenarios. The scenarios included the effects of different management strategies such as clearing the fallen logs or leaving the sites untouched (''uncleared''), variations in seed supply, and ungulate browsing. The simulation results indicated that forest structure was heterogeneous after 50 years, with a high amount of trees between 11 and 100@?cm height, and a low amount of trees taller than 1@?m. The number of trees >5@?m, which is important for the protective effect of a site, was lower at uncleared areas if the area was covered with high amounts of fallen logs, but diversity of microsites was higher than at cleared areas. We found that it is particularly important that abundant seed supply occurs within the first few years after the blowdown at cleared sites, because in later stages there was high competition by tall herbs, which prevented the establishment of tree regeneration. Larger time lags between seed years in the simulations led to retarded tree regeneration. Particularly at cleared sites, ungulate browsing retarded tree regeneration. In contrast, uncleared sites had a higher potential to recover from high browsing pressure due to a high amount of favourable microsites that are provided by decaying logs. These results of our model simulations may help understanding the dynamics of forest regeneration and providing perspectives for management after blowdown events.
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![Application of hazard and risk analysis at the project level to assess ecologic impact [An article from: Forest Ecology and Management]](http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/21NEN6B0DAL.jpg)
![Multi-attribute evaluation of landscape-level fuel management to reduce wildfire risk [An article from: Forest Policy and Economics]](http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/21T1VZF3XRL.jpg)