College Accounting: Study Guide/Working Papers, Chapters 16-28
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    College Accounting: Study Guide/Working Papers, Chapters 16-28
    James A. Heintz , and Robert W. Parry
    Manufacturer: Southwestern Pub Co
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    ASIN: 053888603X
    Working Papers 16-28, College Accounting
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      Working Papers 16-28, College Accounting
      James A. Heintz
      Manufacturer: Thomson South-Western
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      Binding: Mass Market Paperback

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      ASIN: 0538852518

      Unite the Tribes: Ending Turf Wars for Career and Business Success
      Average customer rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars
      • Unite the Tribes: Required Reading for Any Business
      • Timely Advice for Those in the Marketplace, in Spite of One Critic...
      • Reprogram your viewpoint
      • useful but unoriginal
      • Should be required reading...
      Unite the Tribes: Ending Turf Wars for Career and Business Success
      Christopher Duncan
      Manufacturer: Apress
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      ASIN: 1590592409

      Book Description

      This book is a motivational treatise on the personal and corporate benefits of worker/manager unity. Business is war, both internally, and company to company. Unite the Tribes: Ending Turf Wars for Career and Business Success will show readers that they do indeed have a common sense of purpose with their coworkers, and that it's in their personal best interest to recognize this. Through unity and the application of practical strategies and people skills, even the most powerless corporate worker can transform his or her department into a powerhouse of productivity, enabling the individual to enjoy a better career and a better life as a result.

      Download Description

      Stop dreaming small, or you will always be small.

      From the beginning of time, people have been working for a living and, chances are, you're carrying on this tradition. Whether you labor as a frontline worker or toil in high-level management, this book is for you.

      This isn't a Greek tragedy nor a retelling of the woes of the business world that we hear about every day in the news, and it's not a comedy that pokes fun at the idiocies that people witness daily in the workplace. Unite the Tribes: Ending Turf Wars for Career and Business Success shows the imaginary lines that divide companies into separate “tribes,” with each fighting the other in small and petty turf wars. From this new perspective, you'll see how such internal divisiveness weakens your business and makes employees vulnerable to competitors in the marketplace. Most of all, however, this book demonstrates how important the overall health and well-being a company is to each individual who works there.

      In an age when it's common for people to be apathetic about the profitability of the companies they work for rather than thinking only of their personal needs, it may not be immediately apparent why one should work to unite isolated workplace tribes into a single, invincible empire. The reason, however, is as timeless as it is relevant to individual paychecks: rich and powerful empires have more wealth to share. Weak and vulnerable ones collapse, and, when they do, jobs die with them.

      No matter which tribe an individual belongs to, his or her loyalty must be to the greater good of this empire. Tribal members must stand together. No matter what part they play, they work not in isolation, but side by side with others. The message here is simple: strive for excellence and inspire those around you to reach for greater heights themselves. Whether you are a manager or a worker, bring people together, reward their efforts, and give them a reason to care about the cause. Do this, and you will know only victory and prosperity in your workplace.

      Company goals and personal aspirations are not at odds. They coincide at critical points. Both corporations and individuals seek success, financial freedom, security, and the recognition of accomplishment, and both face the same basic challenges: competition (whether from other employees or other companies), changing technologies and economic conditions, and a host of other events that can disrupt even the best-laid plans.

      Unite the Tribes: Ending Turf Wars for Career and Business Success presents a practical, ten-step strategy complete with the tactics you will need to implement changes that work in the real world. Get ready for change, get excited, and take action now!

      Customer Reviews:

      5 out of 5 stars Unite the Tribes: Required Reading for Any Business.......2006-06-23

      When I received my copy of Unite the Tribes, I thought, "OK, here is another philosophical book about corporate business life". As I started to get into the heart of this book, I found this to be true. However, Unite the Tribes, is a much more valuable resource than simple philosophy.

      Unite the Tribes is not just another book about corporate life but rather a road map to follow with lots of practical advice. This book is useful for anyone in any job. Duncan knows how to analyze systems.

      He has the ability to explain what works and what doesn't. More importantly, he gives the reasons why. Add to that specific suggested strategies, and you have a hand-book for success, in any business or organization, for that matter.

      There are many books which analyze business systems.
      Unite the Tribes is no exception. Duncan has the ability to explain ideas and concepts in plain English. He is a master teacher who takes time to make sure his students understand. He does not use the latest "buzz words" to make his point.

      Rather, he offers clear, concise examples. He wants you to comprehend the business system. He encourages you to look beyond the surface. He wants you to see the impact of your decisions and actions on the entire system.

      He describes "The Pillars of the Empire" as being the cornerstone for any organization. His message is clear from the beginning: unite and survive or continue to be divided and be conquered. Heed this advice or you may be out of a job. Valuable lessons for anyone, in any business.

      Duncan emphasizes, this book should not be read once and discarded. He emphasizes, Unite the Tribes is a handbook. This book is meant to be read and reread. Your copy should be "dog eared" with sticky notes and comments in the margin.

      Duncan has taken his concepts and broken them down into easy manageable bites. There is so much information contained in this volume, you need reminders. He gives you permission to write your own notes.

      I recommend Unite the Tribes to anyone in any business or system. I feel this is an incredible resource if you work in corporate America, a non-profit or even small or large business.
      Read this book, live this book. You will be a success!

      5 out of 5 stars Timely Advice for Those in the Marketplace, in Spite of One Critic..........2006-01-13

      I have to admit at the outset, I was doubtful about what this book could contribute to the entire question of free-market economics. After all, I've heard a lot of this before. What does Mr. Duncan have to contribute to this discussion? Well, let me see.

      I firmly believe -- and I think history confirms this -- that the free market and the beneficial relations which ought to exist between the owners, managers, and employees of any company -- no matter how large or small -- work (or ought to work) to enhance the lives of all involved and enable virtually all participants to improve their status regarding the so-called "pursuit of happiness," which is, after all, the intent of the whole capitalistic enterprise. Yes, contrary to those who think capitalism should be destroyed -- is the most evil of economic practices -- and that the future lies in so-called "socialistic" solutions, let me simply say this: "NoWhere, NoHow, Never, has socialism worked," and such an economic design will never work because it is basically contrary to human nature, something which has not changed within our knowledge of human history, in spite of those who have argued otherwise. The free market has done more to improve the lives of ordinary individuals than any other phenomenon in history.

      Now, let me address Mr. Duncan's book directly. His book is really a guidebook as to how to deal with people within the free-economic marketplace. His book is an attempt to unite those various categories of employees -- the "tribes" -- who have been, unfortunately, divided by those in "authority" and others who have sought to keep that division intact for their own selfish purposes -- as a political and social agenda. His call is for "tribal members to stand together." There should be no divide between those who are in "charge" and those whom they supervise. There should be no divide between those who manage and those who work for the management, in terms regarding the "ends" or the "purpose" of the company. Sounds pretty reasonable to me. After all, not everyone can be the "boss."

      Duncan's message is really rather simple: "Strive for excellence and inspire those around you to reach for greater heights themselves." In my opinion, what more could one ask? And, in fact, this is very Aristotelian, if I may say so -- and Aristotle is the one philosopher in history whom I admire without equivocation and who would have approved of Duncan's prescriptions. Aristotle's views regarding ethics and business policy is being promoted today by such an esteemed philosopher as Dr. Thomas Morris who conducts seminars for many major corporations about this very subject.

      The point is, in my view, that so-called "turf-wars" in the marketplace are ridiculous. They not only harm a company, but the employees as well. The old "office politics" syndrome, which I have experienced myself, is counterproductive. For a period of two years, back in the 1980s, I was a corporate executive for a major corporation, the Director of Advertising and Media for the company, and I saw firsthand what infighting amongst the executives at every level could do to destroy a company. We went through three Directors of Marketing during that period, mainly because of one management employee after another destroying a previous one for the sake of self-enhancement. The company, in the end, suffered and so did all the employees, even those below the management level.

      I have read the critique by a previous reviewer regarding this book and am, frankly, flabbergasted by her remarks. She says: "The first thing I noticed about this book is the lack of knowlege [sic] the author has of what is right and wrong activity in the workplace." I have to ask: What right and/or wrong? She doesn't say. Silence.

      Then she goes on to say: "Most organizations, such as the one I work for, would have to step in and put an end to activities such as those the author suggests in this book." What organization do you work for and, moreover, what activities should be ended? She doesn't say. Silence.

      Then she says: "Many of the ideas of what is appropriate behaviour in an organization are questionable. 90% of the activities suggested in this book are repetitive - it's like reading the same thing over and over." OK, but what behavior is questionable? She doesn't elaborate or spell it out. Regarding the repetitive matter, well, sometimes a reader doesn't get it the first time -- so what? Repeat, I say. Big deal!

      Now comes the clincher, as she says: "I would only recommend this book, perhaps, if someone couldn't afford a professional Human Resources or Organizational Management guide." Like you, Dr. Halstead? Let me state my opinion on that. These so-called "human-resourses" people have no more knowledge or information about us common human beings than we have about ourselves. This is not a "science," friends -- and many recent studies within the discipline of psychology itself shows this to be the case at this point.

      And finally, she says: "The pillar idea presented in the book is a good concept but, it could be a little too 'warrior' for some people who are looking for a serious guide to help their workplace." A little too 'warrior'? -- what the heck does that mean? I wasn't aware that Mr. Duncan was recommending that weapons were to be taken into the marketplace. Really.

      This is, despite the fact that much of it is really commonsense stuff, a book I would put into the hands of my managers and other employees simply to remind them that we are all in this together and we are not really enemies within the economic enterprise. Whatever can be done to bring all the components together to bring prosperity and happiness to all the members of a corporation or company together has my unqualified approval.

      4 out of 5 stars Reprogram your viewpoint.......2005-11-26

      Duncan's a colorful writer who sometimes gets a bit carried away with the metaphors. But that is part of the charm of this book. And it's what makes it work for the reader. Rather than give you a list of steps and then follow those with explanations that require mental gymnastics, Duncan paints you a picture. That picture is within the framework of ancient tribal warriors. This framework appeals more to men than to women--but for either audience, it makes you think.

      This book is organized into three main parts: The Lay of the Land, The Pillars of the Empire, and Making It Work.

      The Lay of the Land is basically an overview of where we are and why we're here. Duncan describes the basic problem every business faces, and where the real solution to that problem lies. He compares a business to an empire, and then bases the rest of the book on that metaphor.

      The Pillars of the Empire consists of ten "pillars," which are the competencies upon which a business (or empire) will succeed or fail. Each pillar consists of ten stones. So in this book, the stones are subchapters. First, Duncan briefly discusses the pillar, then he "takes it apart" stone by stone to show you the elements that make that pillar strong. You end up with 100 concepts for business and personal success.

      As Duncan goes through each concept, he provides a mix of anecdotes, metaphors, practical suggestions, and probing questions. He goes to great lengths to engage the reader, rather than merely to fill the page.

      Making It Work is basically the conclusion of the book. Duncan reviews the core ideas, and then prescribes methods for putting them into practice.

      If you're tired of bickering as usual, negative office politics, morale problems, and other issues related to infighting, this book offers fresh insights. If you want to thrive in the empire, this book can definitely help you. But approach some of the ideas with caution, or the empire will strike back.

      A a rah-rah feel-good tome offers hope by making you feel good--this isn't one of those. And a "here's how I did it" book is interesting, but what worked for the author won't work for you--this isn't one of those, either. We've all read books that give false hope or describe cures from a perspective that won't work for us--this isn't one of those, either. Most of us have attended seminars where we're all charged up until we think about what the speaker really said (if anything). And we've all been asked to paint by numbers on a canvas that isn't our own.

      This is where Duncan stands out from the crowd of management-relate books. This isn't feel good or "do these six simple steps." It's about reprogramming your viewpoint so you can function in reality.

      I think this book makes a solid addition to anyone's management library. It doesn't have all the answers, and you may disagree with some of the answers it does provide. But if you thoughtfully apply Duncan's ten pillars, you will come up with the answers that work for you.

      3 out of 5 stars useful but unoriginal.......2005-02-27

      Duncan uses throughout his book the metaphor of medieval warface. Specifically how a company is analogous to a kingdom of tribes that faces enemies who wish to destroy it. This stark comparison is of course scarcely original. He chooses it to inculcate in the reader a sense of danger and how a company's people need to face the ugly reality of ferocious competition.

      The suggestions he offers make sense, even if some are a little trite, and even if most are unoriginal. Perhaps the most amusing remark was that he considers a company's mission statement to be virtually useless. It is irrelevant to the day to day activities of most employees and it is often totally vacuous. Companies that push the mission statements often risk only engendering cynicism.

      5 out of 5 stars Should be required reading..........2004-04-14

      Do you work at a company where most of the energy is spent fighting each other instead of the competition? Unite The Tribes is an extremely good book that outlines a program for learning how to focus the company to conquer the real enemy, your competitor who would rather you didn't exist. This should be required reading in most all large corporations.

      Welfare Ranching: The Subsidized Destruction of the American West
      Average customer rating: 3 out of 5 stars
      • Science Speaks the Truth in Welfare Ranching
      • Grazing Public Lands - Decline in Habitat for Native Species
      • Major Setback for Resource Coalition-Building
      • Not so great
      • One Picture Tells 1,000 Lies
      Welfare Ranching: The Subsidized Destruction of the American West
      George Wuerthner , and Mollie Matteson
      Manufacturer: Foundations for Deep Ecology 2
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      ASIN: 1559639431

      Book Description

      In the American West, the sky is wide and the mountains are grand. Everything is on a big scale - including the debate over livestock production on the nation's public lands.

      For more than a century, ranching and its associated activities (such as the growing of irrigated feed crops) has been the major land use over most of the western states. While many Americans think of cowboys as heroes and the "Wild West" as a place for cattle roundups and rodeos, others see livestock as a scourge upon the land. What is most disturbing to some activists is that ranching activities occur not only on private property but also on public lands - more than 300 million acres of federal, state, and other publicly owned lands are used by private ranching operations. For the most part, the ranching operations pay very low fees to run their livestock on these lands, and also receive numerous government subsidies including range improvements, fencing, and predator control.

      Welfare Ranching presents one side of the debate over public lands ranching, offering a graphic look at the negative consequences of livestock production in the arid West. The authors highlight changes in the region that they see as being caused by ranching, and examine what they feel are problems associated with using tax dollars to support environmentally questionable activities. Through photographs and essays, the book shows examples of overgrazing along with what the authors argue are more subtle signs that indicate large - scale ecological disruption. The authors also discuss changes that could be made to help solve some of these problems.

      Welfare Ranching gives one view of the cultural and historical causes of the current situation and offers a vision of possible renewal.

      Customer Reviews:

      5 out of 5 stars Science Speaks the Truth in Welfare Ranching.......2007-02-02

      Welfare Ranching provides the data and insight into the public lands livestock industry that has long been needed. Here in the West the damage is seen on hundreds of millions of acres of our public lands. What is amazing is the lack of attention among our public officials at the tremendous cost of this outmoded practice. The lost soil, polluted streams and destroyed wildlife habitat have value in the billions of dollars on an annual basis that so far outweighs any possible economic benefit of livestock production, it is necessary for the public to become educated on this issue so they will pressure our lawmakers and public officials to make and enforce ecologically sound regulations and practices to restore this land. A final note, the soil loss and plant community losses are a loss in carbon storage - this is going to become a critical issue as we at last deal with greenhouse gases. Finally, let's not forget the history of the sheep and cattle industry in their efforts to have our public lands turned over to the States and then sold to ranchers for 10 cents an acre in the 1940's. This continues today with the farm and ranch lobby and their henchmen in congress who constantly are working to undermine environmental protections and have the land sold off to industry.

      5 out of 5 stars Grazing Public Lands - Decline in Habitat for Native Species.......2005-05-05

      Welfare Ranching is a beautiful book, full of full-color photos and articles by dozens of scientists and concerned biological conservationists regarding the destruction of the American West by cattle ranchers. Wuerthner and Matteson point out that there are 525 million acres of land in the Western United States which are used for livestock grazing. That only eleven percent of U.S. cattle producers are in the west, but their grazing area equals twenty-five percent of the total land area of the lower 48 United States and most of that is public land. These lands are often over-grazed, degraded, and denuded of plants. The water sources are manipulated by the ranchers to provide water for their livestock, thereby removing the water from access by native plants and wildlife. The introduction of livestock into the arid lands of the American west is like introducing an exotic species into a community. The livestock completely undermine and degrade the ecosystem and their presence is linked to the decline in native bird and vegetation populations. It has been noted that by raising domestic animals which demand large quantities of water and forage in a place that is dry, and by favoring slow-moving, heavy, and more or less defenseless livestock in terrain that is rugged, vast, and inhabited by native predators, ranchers have put themselves in a position of constant warfare with the land. Nearly all public lands [in the Western U.S.] that have any forage potential for livestock are leased for grazing. This includes 90% of Bureau of Land Management land, 69% of U.S. Forest Service land and a surprising number of wildlife refuges and national parks. Three hundred million of these acres have the potential for large-scale ecosystem restoration by terminating domestic livestock production on public lands
      Bird species need water and vegetation to survive, and many are threatened or driven into extinction by the ubiquitous livestock grazing which destroys their habitat. Birds generally do not respond to the presence of grazing livestock but to the impacts on vegetation as a result of grazing. Breeding Bird Survey data suggest that grassland birds as a group are showing greater population declines than any other avian assemblage in North America. This is attributable to habitat modifications including livestock grazing, fire suppression, prairie dog control, cultivations, and exotic grasses.
      Livestock grazing harms native species and promotes alien plant growth. The hundreds of photos in the book, Welfare Ranching, document the denuded, degraded land and polluted, manipulated water sources which result from cattle grazing. Some ranchers suggest that since bison used to naturally live on the grasslands, cattle are a good modern day substitute, but cattle and bison are not similar animals. Bison moved around a lot, effectively grazing on plants only once before moving on, and bison also lived in drier areas and ate drier plants than cattle do; domestic cattle spend most of their time within 400 meters of water. Cattle ranchers also suggest that the grasslands need to be grazed by cattle in order to be healthy, but in a native grassland there is a wide variety of animals that naturally graze in a sustainable way, such as nematodes, grasshoppers, prairie dogs, pronghorn antelope, elk, and bison.
      Livestock grazing is the most common land use in western North America. It is difficult to study in a controlled manner as there are not many large areas free of grazing because approximately 70% of the eleven western states is grazed. A study comparing Chaco Culture National Historic Park in northern New Mexico, one of the largest grazing exclosures in the American West, with six grazing sites, found that plant species richness was higher in the protected areas than in the grazed areas (Floyd et al. 2003). Recent paleo-ecological studies on the Colorado Plateau determined that the most severe vegetation changes of the last 5,400 years resulted from livestock grazing during the last two centuries (Cole et al. 1997).
      It is apparent that many species of grassland birds, and neo-tropical migratory birds have declined drastically in the past few decades. Much of the research on this subject has found that the decline in bird species is correlated to the decline in habitat and vegetation which is directly linked to grazing livestock on the majority of land area in the western United States. Over half of the grazing is done on publicly owned lands which, due to the time-honored traditions in the West of allowing cattle ranchers full access to any lands they want, and because these ranchers and their grazing interests have been very important in the political and social life of the West for over a century, and because, until recently, grazing on public lands has been an accepted practice with no special attention paid to it, the question of closing off public lands to grazing has become a power struggle and a contentious issue between conservationists, ranchers, the government, and land managers. There is enough documented evidence that grazing has many deleterious effects on the land such as: damaging the soil, polluting the water supply, destroying native vegetation, encouraging alien species, and that ranchers and land managers have altered the ecosystem by: controlling fires, diverting the scarce water supply to cattle use only, and actively killing many native animal species that they consider inconvenient or dangerous to their interests.
      It is obvious that livestock grazing on western lands is not a sustainable operation. It is environmentally damaging and causes great loss of biodiversity. It is sustained only through the political influence of cattle ranchers and the ignorance and indifference of the public. The great wave of new research which is being done by conservation biologists and environmentalists will help change this devastating scene in the future when students begin to inform themselves by reading these research papers, and when the popular media brings the desolation and waste to the notice of the people, that their land is being appropriated by private interests who are destroying the environment and profiting at the expense of thousands of plant and animal species each year.
      Welfare Ranching, The Subsidized Destruction of the American West, brings these facts to the people in the form of a beautiful well-documented book full of great photographs. Most of the information in this book is taken from scientific articles and journals. How many of us spend our time reading dry scientific journals? If you would like to have a combination of fact and photos, in an interesting to read and understand format with articles published by well-known conservation biologists and others whose main concern is to save our lands and our native plants and animals, then Welfare Ranching is the book to have.

      1 out of 5 stars Major Setback for Resource Coalition-Building.......2004-02-02

      I found this book while browsing at Cody's in Berkeley last week. It's big. It's colorful. It's angry. And sadly, it's packed full of deception. The problem is that if you live in Staten Island, NY you won't know that you're being decieved unless you've spent a lot of time visiting Nevada's Great Basin and watching the seasons change.

      Two examples (among many):
      - Lots of close-in photos of range cattle in late-summer condition standing near a water tank with cowpies scattered all over the bone-dry vicinity and not a blade of grass in sight. The fact is that if you zoom-out about 50 yds. you'll see a major difference between the heavily-tracked barren ground surrounding the water trough and the grazing allotment outside of the perimeter. Ditto for a different time of year. The perception is that the entire range is bone-dry, overstocked, and full of cowpies. Not true. The stocking rate on that sort of range is 1 cow for every 250 acres. Lots of room for a cow, her calf, and a few of their cowpies.
      - An aerial photo designed to discount the idea of ranching as a natural defense against urban sprawl is taken high above the Gallatin Valley in Montana - the source of urban sprawl would be Bozeman. The photo shows several thousand acres of ranches, mainly irrigated alfalfa farms. The point of the photo is, "well, obviously there's no sprawl here." The problem?Bozeman isn't even captured in the photo! So, the photo is a lie that would make even George Orwell blush.

      I'm an environmental activist. I think there's no more important issue facing our time than preventing a head-on collision with ecological catastrophe. So, it disappoints me greatly when a book like this is bankrolled and released by someone like Doug Tompkins, co-founder of Esprit, especially after his success with "Fatal Harvest".

      His credibility on this particular issue has been lost. More importantly, much of the hard work of building consensus among stakeholders in public lands coalitions has been vanquished because one green element decided to lie shamelessly to further its agenda of removing livestock from public lands. The hurt feelings and distrust will take years to mend, I'm afraid.

      This book should remain on the shelf.

      1 out of 5 stars Not so great.......2003-09-26

      This book is deceptive -- so readers be wary. A picture of a mountain meadow and something along the lines of: "This is the way it could be" and then a picture of a desert - "this is the way it is." The pictures are taken in two entirely different ecosystems! And yet the editors imply that if cows were not present, picture 2 would look like picture 1. Not true.

      Some interesting writing. Too bad, though, that it was framed by deception.

      1 out of 5 stars One Picture Tells 1,000 Lies.......2003-07-21

      I'm afraid that most readers will only look at the pictures and read the captions and headlines. That's the point. No one sits down and reads through a book like this, so the message is as broad, blatant, and one-sided as a billboard. It is meant to seduce anyone who gives it a superficial glance. Leaf through it casually and discover that cattle are bad for just about anything you care to name. Are they good for anything at all? No. This is propaganda at its best (or worst).
      "Welfare Ranching" is filled with pictures that are captioned to manipulate, rather than instruct. For every lush "cattle-free" area shown in the book, a barren area-just as "free"-could easily be found. The same is true of pictures showing cows on dry, dusty land. The photos are carefully chosen to show a single perspective.
      On page 275 is a photo captioned "Campground full of cow manure, Nevada." It shows a flattish clearing dotted with sage and grass and a few old, dry cow pies. In the background are tall brush and trees with the hint of a mountain in the distance. It could be Nevada. Someone might camp there, if they chose to. It could also be someone's back pasture. Page 45 is a full page picture of "Severely eroded land." OK. What eroded it? We are meant to believe it was cattle, but even the author won't stick that label on. A horrifying photo of a cow carcass in a river occupies page 193. It probably smells as bad as the deer carcasses I used to find in the creek behind my grandmother's Connecticut farm.
      The footnotes are probably not meant to be read, either. Otherwise, why would the author cite himself so often? Can a serious, reasonable argument against cattle ranching can be made by someone whose reference is a book called "The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory?" The chapter on the health implications of meat consumption is written by the author of "The Vegetarian Way." The chapter on livestock raising from a global perspective is co-authored by an "environmental activist" advocate for wolf recovery and a math professor who authored "Judaism and Vegetarianism."
      The "factual" parts of the book are a clever mixture of half-truths, excerpts out of context, skewed statistics and a grab-bag of factoids winkled out of scientific papers to fit the situation. For instance, on page 13 the author states that "ranching and associated activities provide very few jobs...most ranch operations...are not highly profitable...ranch families depend on [outside] jobs (to) help keep the ranch financially afloat." On page 15 the author argues that ranchers dominate Western politics because: "low salaries [of public office] rule out participation by people without other sources of income. Yet ranchers...having the financial latitude to engage in off-ranch pursuits-are able to hold office with less sacrifice than the work would require of others." The statement is made that "Vermont produces more beef than all the public lands in Nevada." USDA statistics show 500,000 head of cattle in Nevada in 2002, 285,000 in Vermont. Nevada has fewest cattle of any western state except Alaska.
      Then there are all those questionable critters that cows are accused of threatening. There are snails the size of a pinhead, cave bugs and tiny fish. I couldn't help wondering how many insects and reptiles survived the sprawl of Phoenix or Seattle? Shouldn't we get those people "off the land" too? Abundant dinosaurs roamed where Los Angeles is now. Maybe we should try to "restore" them? There's more than a hint of wanting to "play God" in all this fervor over weeds and worms.
      As for the cows, a "shift away from animal foods is not only an important individual choice, but also imperative for the well-being of humanity, and the ecological systems of the earth." (page 285)
      "Welfare Ranching" is not simply a vegetarian tract. There is an underlying, more sinister agenda-The Wildlands Project. That includes a wide swath of land from the tip of South America to Northernmost Canada that is to be free of all human activity. The author of this extreme fantasy is Reed Noss, cited more than half a dozen times in the footnotes. Buried in the text are lines like this: "The majority of the West is directly or indirectly influenced by livestock production, either as rangeland, as cultivated land or pasture growing feed for livestock, or as delimited reserves of nature where naturally migrating wildlife are persecuted the instant they step outside the boundaries people have imposed on them." (page xiv) So, if you take away the rangeland, cultivated land and pasture, "migrating wildlife" will no longer have those boundaries.
      In case anyone misses the point, in the next sentence the author adds the "hundreds of millions of acres of farmland in the Midwest" to the "total physical and ecological footprint of livestock production." When all that Midwest farmland is out of production, there will be room for all the westerners evicted from the Wildlands Project to live. (What they will eat might be a problem.)
      "There is no single conservation opportunity for rewilding...300 million acres as ending livestock grazing on all public lands." (page 324). Rewilding is the agenda. Concluding with "Our Vision" the author says: "We dream of a landscape where bison, pronghorn antelope, wolves, and grizzlies are free to roam...in which landscape-scale ecological processes can operate with a minimum of human interference. The elimination of livestock production from our public lands will set us on that pathway."
      It's not just a "pathway." The Wildlands Project calls for one half of the land area of the 48 states to be encompassed in core wilderness reserves and inner corridor zones (essentially extensions of core reserves) within the next few decades. What's left over is where people can live-within the boundaries set by the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity.

      Toward a New Millennium in Galaxy Morphology
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        Toward a New Millennium in Galaxy Morphology

        Manufacturer: Springer
        ProductGroup: Book
        Binding: Hardcover

        AstronomyAstronomy | Astronomy | Science | Subjects | Books
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        ASIN: 0792361857

        Book Description

        South Africa - a land of paradigm shifts. A land where we are willing to leave behind the old, to bravely accept the new. What do we need to exit the dark ages in the morphology of galaxies? How prevalent is the cherishing of old concepts? Traditional morphology has been `mask-oriented', focusing on masks of dust and gas which may constitute only 5 percent of the dynamical mass of a galaxy.
        Some of the world's foremost astronomers flew to South Africa to address morphologically related issues at an International Conference, the proceedings of which are contained in this volume. Examine predicted extinction curves for primordial dust at high redshift. Stars evolve; why not dust? Read about the breakdown of the Hubble sequence at a redshift of one. Explore the morphology of rings; the mysteries of metal-rich globular clusters; vigorous star-formation in the Large Magellanic Cloud; the world of secular evolution, where galaxies change their shapes within one Hubble time. And much more. Examine a new kinematical classification scheme of the unmasked, dust-penetrated near-infrared images of spiral galaxies.
        This volume contains over 80 refereed contributions (including 18 in-depth keynote review articles), 40 pages of questions and answers, a panel discussion transcribed from tape and 24 colour plates. The volume is unique in that contributions from both high and low redshift experts are represented at a level readily accessible to postdoctoral students entering the exciting world of morphology - whether it be of the local, or more distant, Universe.

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