Combo Gà Con Lon Ton (Bộ 18 Cuốn) tải về miễn phí cuốn sách

Francisco Tapia maverickartz — This is clearly an important book, and the "star-rating" system doesn't really do justice to it. So if you're wondering whether to read this book, consider it a five-star review. It has some flaws, but as someone said of Kant (if I recall correctly), the mistakes of a great thinker are more valuable than a thousand correct platitudes from a lesser one. McWilliams takes on one of the hottest topics in food politics, the whole question of the "locavores" who emphasize the need for eating locally. In his first chapter, he demolishes the whole "food miles" paradigm. Without even pausing for a breath, he then proceeds to take on organic agriculture, genetically engineered foods, land based animals, aquaculture, and ecological economics. His approach is nonideological. He just wants to preserve the environment and feed the world, and thinks we need technology to do that. On the other hand, unlike Stewart Brand (who comes across as essentially an apostate from environmentalism) he is not uncritical of technology nor of the human institutions that use it. He sees a place for both chemical agriculture and even GMOs. But he is quite scathing of meat production. Only aquaculture -- and only some aquaculture, at that -- escapes his wrath. I liked his critique of localism and of eating animals. He clearly understands the problem of organic agriculture -- it's valuable, but does it scale up to feeding the world? This same problem applies to GMOs. GMO technology is now in the hands of private for-profit corporations who are making a mess of things, but in principle, according to McWilliams, GMO technology could be used for good rather than evil. Here is where the problems with the book start -- with his treatment (or non-treatment) of ecological economics. He says somewhere early on that when he wrote the book, he in effect "threw down his hand" when he felt his case was strong enough to be published. This isn't bad advice for a magazine writer: if your case is better than anything that's currently widely circulated, throw it out there. But the problem is that our economic system is fundamentally flawed and is without mainstream critics. Yes, his case is better than anything currently out there, but that's not saying all that much. I wish he had looked deeper. He might have written a very different kind of book. He essentially presupposes the case for continued economic growth. Uh, it's not going to happen. We'll be lucky if we ever even get back to the state of the world economy in 2005, much less expand the economy beyond that point. Peak oil will see to that. And our agricultural system depends on oil, and consequently won't be expanding very much further in any event. Food prices and oil prices are rising in tandem; the only thing that will save us from starvation because of high food prices, will be another recession or depression, which will lower food prices (which the poor still may not be able to afford, though). The first consideration of ecological economics is "how big can our economy get?" (Before, that is, resource limitations such as land, oil, etc. restrict further economic growth.) He doesn't really address this and while I'm sure he is aware of it, it doesn't enter into the discussion either in chapter 6 ("Merging Ecology and Economy") or anywhere else. Our agricultural system is already in ecological overshoot and we need to address the question, how much food can be sustainably produced at all? And how many people can be fed in such a world? If he had addressed these questions, he would probably come up with an answer of about 2 to 3 billion. (I'm speaking off the top of my head here -- I need to write my own book to fully explain this statement.) And THAT'S assuming we're using technology to the max and we're all vegans. We can probably support more than that for a while -- perhaps quite a while -- but inevitably there will be a population crash. The original "Limits to Growth" study set this date at about 2050 in the "main" (business as usual) scenario. The question of how big our agriculture can get is extremely significant, and how we can get from where we are now to a sustainable agriculture (and a lower population) is even more perplexing. No one is really talking about it. I hope that McWilliams will turn his considerable analytical talents in this direction. It is a most difficult task because there is currently no popular version of "ecological economics" out there. There is some technical academic stuff from Herman Daly, et. al. (whom he quotes at least once, as I recall), but we lack even the most basic tools to discuss this subject intelligently in public. Instead, all he can do is talk about "perverse subsidies" -- which is fine as far as it goes, but doesn't go nearly far enough.

Mariana Hahnemann _arianahgonzaga — I love fairy tale retellings, and Angela Carter writes beautiful prose. Unfortunately, I just couldn't get into the darkly bloody and sexual nature of most of these stories. There were some I liked better than others, such as Puss in Boots and The Tiger's Bride, the later of which was an interesting version of Beauty and the Beast. For the most part, though, I doubt this is a collection I would ever read for a second time.