Land Theft as Rural Eco-Crime

Land grabbing in various forms is happening in many different parts of this globe. This involves ‘outsiders’ - nation-states as well as corporations - colluding with local domestic elites to radically alter existing land ownership and land uses. Contemporary forms of land theft take place under the guise of acquiring land for food and biofuels, and through imposition of resource extraction activities such as logging and mining. They also occur when land is sealed up for the purposes of carbon sequestration and for conservation. From the point of view of environmental justice, such land reconfigurations represent ‘theft’ insofar as they challenge the basic ways of life and subsistence abilities of traditional land owners. These stakeholders are generally vulnerable to land grabs by powerful interests, leading to immediate and longer term hardship. For green criminology, activity which diminishes social equity in the provision of healthy sustainable environments can be considered a type of eco-crime

Environmental harm and crime prevention

This paper discusses what can be learned from traditional crime prevention to reduce and prevent environmental harm. It underlines how a problem-solving approach involves tailoring interventions and strategies based on the source and type of harm, and according to place, scale and the perceived threat

Gapped Heisenberg spin chains in a field

We consider the fully anisotropic Heisenberg spin-1/2 antiferromagnet in a uniform magnetic field, whose ground-state is characterized by broken spin rotation symmetry and gapped spinon excitations. We expand on a recent mean-field approach to the problem by incorporating fluctuations in a loop expansion. Quantitative results for the magnetization, excitation gap and specific heat are obtained. We compare our predictions with new DMRG and exact diagonalization data and, for zero field, with the exact solution of the ${XYZ}$ spin chain from the Bethe Ansatz.Comment: 11 pages, 14 figure

STB-White

The final design of a hypersonic, SCRAMjet research aircraft, which is to be dropped from a carrier plane, is considered. Topics such as propulsion systems, aerodynamics, component weight analysis, and aircraft design with waverider analyses are stressed with smaller emphasis placed on aircraft systems such as cockpit design and landing gear configurations. Propulsion systems include analysis of the turbofanramjet for acceleration to low hypersonic speed (Mach 6.0) and analysis of the SCRAMjets themselves to carry the aircraft to Mach 10.0. Both analyses include the use of liquid hydrogen as fuel. Inlet design for both propulsion systems is analyzed as well. Aerodynamic properties are found using empirical and theoretical formulas for lift and drag on delta-wing aircraft. The aircraft design involves the integration of all preliminary studies into a modified waverider configuration

Analysis of prehistoric brown earth paleosols under the podzol soils of Exmoor, UK

The deforestation of the upland landscapes in southwest Britain during prehistory is an established archaeological narrative, documenting human impacts on the environment and questioning the relationship of prehistoric societies to the upland landscapes they inhabited. Allied to the paleoenvironmental analyses of pollen sequences, which have provided the evidence of this change, there has been some investigation of prehistoric paleosols fossilized under principally Bronze Age archaeological monuments. These analyses identified brown earth soils that were originally associated with temperate deciduous woodland, on occasion showing evidence of human impacts such as tilling. However, the number of analyses of these paleosols has been limited. This study presents the first analysis of a series of pre‐podzol brown earth paleosols on Exmoor, UK, two of which are associated with colluvial soil erosion sediments before the formation of peat. This study indicates these paleosols are spatially extensive and have considerable potential to inform a more nuanced understanding of prehistoric human impacts on the upland environments of the early‐mid Holocene and assess human agency in driving ecosystem change