The result of a lifetime in the field and in the classroom, Chance and Change challenges many of the tenets of establishment ecology. Charging that most of the environmental movement has ignored or rejected the changes in thinking that have infiltrated ecological theory since the mid 70s, William Drury presents a convincing case that disorder is what makes the natural world work, and that clinging to romantic notions of nature's grand design only saps the strength of the conservation movement. Drury's training in botany, geology, and zoology as well as his life-long devotion to work in the field gave him a depth and range of knowledge that few ecologists possess. This book opens our eyes to a new way of looking at the environment and forces us to think more deeply about nature and our role in it. Chance and Change is intended for the serious amateur naturalist or professional conservationist. Drury argues that chance and change are the rule, that the future is as unpredictable to other organisms as it is to us, and that natural disturbance is too frequent for equilibrium models to be useful. He stresses the centrality of natural selection in explaining the meaning of biology and insists the book and the laboratory must be checked at all times against the real world. Written in an easy, personal style, Drury's narrative comes alive with the landscape—the salt marshes, dunes, seashores, and forests—that he believed served as the best classroom. His novel approach of correlating landscape evolution with ecological principles offers a welcome corrective to discordance between what we observe in nature and what theory tells us we should see.

In this innovative study, Crystal Sanders explores how working-class black women, in collaboration with the federal government, created the Child Development Group of Mississippi (CDGM) in 1965, a Head Start program that not only gave poor black children access to early childhood education but also provided black women with greater opportunities for political activism during a crucial time in the unfolding of the civil rights movement. Women who had previously worked as domestics and sharecroppers secured jobs through CDGM as teachers and support staff and earned higher wages. The availability of jobs independent of the local white power structure afforded these women the freedom to vote in elections and petition officials without fear of reprisal. But CDGM's success antagonized segregationists at both the local and state levels who eventually defunded it. Tracing the stories of the more than 2,500 women who staffed Mississippi's CDGM preschool centers, Sanders's book remembers women who went beyond teaching children their shapes and colors to challenge the state's closed political system and white supremacist ideology and offers a profound example for future community organizing in the South.

The Industrial Revolution brought into being a distinct world, a world of greater affluence, longevity and mobility, an urban rather than a rural world. But the great surge of economic growth was balanced against severe constraints on the opportunities for expansion, revealing an intriguing paradox. This book, published to considerable critical acclaim, explores the paradox and attempts to provide a distinct model' of the changes that comprised the industrial revolution.

Chance is real. Not only is it a cause of societal change, but we as individuals are chance-given characters who discover and build our character in chancy circumstances. Chance is also expressed as coincidence and contingency, expressions which have episodically been of undeniable historical importance. Mattausch asserts the conventional picture of societal change is incorrect. Societal change is not a linear succession with each phase of change replacing its predecessor. Instead, the process is one of accumulative change in which chance plays various roles. Chance, Character, and Change develops the idea of chance, situating it within the history of thought and social change. By focusing strictly on manifestations of chance and of luck that can be seen and explained, Mattausch is able to show how chance acts in the environment of evolution and the social practices that regulate the inheritance of knowledge and technology. This, in turn, steers societal change and how change itself occurs. Chance's role is often characterized as coincidence or contingency, and this automatically is seen as progressive or degenerate. However, Mattausch notes that accumulative change is potentially both progressive as well as decadent. Chance also plays a part in the social aspects of our world--customs, practices, cultures, societies, and politics. When we act, Mattausch argues, we do not distinguish between good and bad, but rather between determinism and chance; the latter is a test of character, not of free will. This theory is general in its assertions and application, and can be related to many areas of study from economic theory, to human behavior, to politics. The rich texture of the writing and vivid use of examples from daily life and the work of other major thinkers draw in the reader. The most striking aspect of this work is the author's writing style and the way he weaves together evidence, classic research, and contemporary thought. It is skillfully, effectively, beautifully done.

Also available as an e-book Chance, Order, Change: The Course of International Law, General Course on Public International Law by J. Crawford The course of international law over time needs to be understood if international law is to be understood. This work aims to provide such an understanding. It is directed not at topics or subject headings — sources, treaties, states, human rights and so on — but at some of the key unresolved problems of the discipline. Unresolved, they call into question its status as a discipline. Is international law “law” properly so-called ? In what respects is it systematic ? Does it — can it — respect the rule of law ? These problems can be resolved, or at least reduced, by an imaginative reading of our shared practices and our increasingly shared history, with an emphasis on process. In this sense the practice of the institutions of international law is to be understood as the law itself. They are in a dialectical relationship with the law, shaping it and being shaped by it. This is explained by reference to actual cases and examples, providing a course of international law in some standard sense as well.

People setting up organisations often feel alone & are unaware of what they need to think about. Such individuals nearly always have drive & great instincts but may not have developed the networks needed to get an organisation off the ground. This practical book will give these people the tools they need to help them succeed.