Academic literature on the topic 'Leaves, Fossil Australia'

Fossils from the Eocene of South Australia and Western Australia and the Oligo–Miocene of Victoria represent the first known Australian leaf fossils of subfamily Persoonioideae, tribe Persoonieae. Persoonieaephyllum blackburnii sp. nov. is described from Middle Eocene Nelly Creek sediments near Lake Eyre, South Australia. Persoonieae are an important clade for understanding vegetation transitions in Australasia. The Nelly Creek leaf fossils are small (~6mm wide) and belong to an assemblage that has some characteristics of open vegetation, which is also inferred for the Oligo–Miocene of the Latrobe Valley, Victoria. In contrast, the Western Australian Late Eocene Persoonieae occur with diverse Lauraceae and other elements now typical of closed rainforests, and may, therefore, have been derived from communities that are unlike those in which most Persoonieae now occur. All fossil Persoonieae leaves so far known are hypostomatic (or virtually so), a state of stomatal distribution now only found in species of reasonably mesic habitats in New Zealand, New Caledonia and eastern Australian eucalypt forests. The ancestral state of stomatal distribution in Persoonieae leaves is unclear, but evidence suggests ancient associations of amphistomaty with open habitats, evolutionary loss of adaxial stomata in more closed vegetation, and the evolution of pronounced xerophylly within south-western Australian heathlands.

We present evidence that fossil leaves from an early Eocene estuarine mudstone deposit at Lowana Road in western Tasmania include the oldest records of the extant monocot genus, Ripogonum (Ripogonaceae). These fossils are similar to the extant eastern Australian and Papua New Guinean R. album R.Br. and New Zealand R. scandens J.R. et G.Forst., and are described as a new species, R. tasmanicum Conran, R.J.Carp. & G.J.Jord. The venation, cuticular and other leaf features of this fossil are included in a morphology-based phylogenetic analysis for the genus, and character evolution is discussed in relation to the ecology of the extant species and the palaeoenvironments of known Ripogonaceae fossil sites. The fossil (albeit on leaf characters) was placed close to the base of a black-fruited, Australian endemic Ripogonum clade. This suggests that the family have a long and conservative evolutionary history in association with moist forests, with the fossil locality showing palaeoclimate similar to the environments that most Ripogonum species still occupy today.

Numerous flowers and a diverse assemblage of leaves are mummified in clay lenses in the base of the Demons Bluff Formation overlying the Eastern View Coal Measures. Fossil localities occur in the Alcoa of Australia open cut near Anglesea, Victoria, Australia. Flowers are tubular, less than 10 mm long, and about 5 mm wide. Four sepals are connate forming a cup-shaped calyx. Four petals are fused in their basal third and alternate with sepals. Flowers are all unisexual and staminate. Stamens are epipetalous and consistently 16 in number, arranged in 8 radial pairs. Pollen is subprolate, tricolporate, and about 32 μm in diameter. The exine is smooth to slightly scabrate. A rudimentary ovary occurs in some flowers. Sepals usually have a somewhat textureless abaxial cuticle with actinocytic stomata. Some sepals, however, have frill-like cuticular thickenings over some abaxial epidermal cells and some subsidiary cells with pronounced papillae overarching guard cells. One of the more common leaf types found associated with the flowers is characterized by the same peculiar cuticular thickenings and overarching papillae on subsidiary cells that occur on sepals. This cuticular similarity indicates that flowers and leaves represent a single taxon. Leaves are highly variable in size and shape but are consistently entire margined, with pinnate, brochidodromous venation. The suite of features characterizing the flowers is unique to the Ebenaceae. Flowers of many extant species of Diospyros (Ebenaceae) closely resemble the fossil flowers. Fossil leaves, too, are typical of leaves of extant Diospyros. Both flowers and leaves are considered conspecific and have been assigned the name Austrodiospyros cryptostoma gen. et sp. nov. The Anglesea fossils represent one of the earliest well-documented occurrences of the Ebenaceae and are the earliest known remains of Ebenaceae from Australia. They support the hypothesis of a Gondwanan origin for the family with late Tertiary diversification in the Malesian region.

Leaf collections made from Lenses A and B of Pit II at the Eocene Alcoa Anglesea locality produced the first Eocene record of mummified leaves of the Myrtaceae. In order to determine their diversity and affinities a set of 19 architectural and cuticular characters was selected with which to analyse the leaves. This character set was tested with 65 extant leaves from 11 species of six genera within the Myrtaceae. Operational taxonomic units were analysed using a semi-Euclidian distance metric and the UPGMA clustering algorithm. Results indicated that the character set and analyses successfully clustered all members of each species used, and in the case of Syzygium loosely clustered most species of the genus that were tested. When applied to 34 fossil Myrtaceae leaves, the character sets and analyses revealed that two distinct fossil leaf taxa were present. The organ genus Myrtaciphyllum Christophel & Lys is proposed for mummified leaves with affinities to the Myrtaceae. Two species are erected: the type species M. undulatum, and M. douglasii. The two species are primarily differentiated on cuticular features. The analyses further showed that, in addition to the two fossil groups being distinct from each other, neither demonstrated close affinities with any of the 11 species of extant Myrtaceae used in the analysis. Two fossil Myrtaceae leaves included from the Miocene Bacchus Marsh locality showed moderate affinity to Myrtaciphyllum undulatum.

Organically preserved Cainozoic leaf fossils previously referred to Agathis are re-examined, and in all cases their affinity with that genus is confirmed. Previously undescribed organically preserved leaf fossils from several Cainozoic sites in south-eastern Australia are compared with Agathis and Wollemia and two new species of Agathis are described. Intraspecific variation in leaf cuticle morphology is examined in extant A. macrophylla in particular, and is found to be much higher than previously recorded. This makes assignment of fossil Agathis leaves to species difficult, especially when only leaf fragments are available. The new fossils extend the record of organically preserved Agathis macro-remains back to the Late Paleocene, but do not significantly extend the known spatial distribution.

Flowers and fruits of the Myrtaceae are described from the Middle Eocene Golden Grove locality of South Australia, and the taxon is here named Tristaniandra alleyi gen. et sp.nov. Flowers are pentamerous and perigynous, with sepals, petals, and stamens inserted on the rim of a hypanthium. Filaments are basally fused to form antepetalous stamen bundles, each consisting of about 6–8 stamens. The tricarpellate ovary becomes exserted on maturation, forming a partly exserted, dry fruit with loculicidal dehiscence. These features are typical of capsular-fruited members of the Myrtaceae; in particular, taxa in the tribe Kanieae. While the characteristics of the fossils are not found within any one extant genus, the fossils show some similarity to living species of Tristaniopsis , although the staminal bundles are more comparable to those found in Tristania , which is only distantly related and has a rather different fruit. Capsular-fruited Myrtaceae are now primarily confined to Australasia, and appear to have had a Gondwanic origin in the latest Cretaceous to Paleogene. Nevertheless, as fossil flowers and fruits are rare, and infrafamilial identification of pollen and leaves is difficult, the Paleogene record of capsular Myrtaceae is largely equivocal. The Golden Grove fossils establish a record of the tribe Kanieae within Eocene coastal rainforest vegetation at paleolatitude 55°–58°S during a time of global warmth.

Fifteen new species belonging to five genera (one, Mesibovia, newly described) of the Podocarpaceae with imbricate leaves are described from Oligocene–Early Miocene localities in Tasmania. Nine of these species belong to Dacrycarpus, which is now extinct in Australia, and their living affinities are widespread in latitude and altitude from New Zealand to New Guinea. Three species of Dacrydium s. str. demonstrate that this genus was diverse in Tasmania in the Tertiary, although it is now extinct in Australia. A species of Microstrobos, which is very similar to the extant alpine/subalpine Tasmanian endemic M. niphophilus, occurs in both high- and low-altitude sites, and suggests that this type was once more widespread. The Oligocene Lagarostrobos marginata is intermediate between the two extant species of Lagarostrobos, and suggests a closer relationship between them than do other lines of evidence. Mesibovia rhomboideu, recovered from three localities, shares features with several extant genera, and is of importance in understanding evolution within this group. The significance of the fossils for climatic and vegetation reconstruction is discussed.

Eucryphia leaves recovered from Tertiary sediments in south-eastern Australia are assigned to three new species, E. falcata (Late Palaeocene, Lake Bungarby), E. microstoma (Early Eocene, Regatta Point) and E. aberensis (Middle to Late Eocene, Loch Aber). Leaves from Early Pleistocene sediments at Regatta Point are re-examined and are considered to be closely related to the extant species, E. lucida and E. milliganii. An examination of the leaf morphology of the fossil and extant species suggests that evolution has taken place, resulting in smaller leaves at higher latitudes and/or altitudes probably in response to climatic change. There is also evidence for an increase in the size and complexity of peltiform cuticular extensions on the abaxial leaf surface from the Early Tertiary to the present, which may be a response to lower water availability or increasing occurrence of frost.

Typescript
Copies of two papers co-authored by the author, in back cover pocket
Bibliography: leaves 128-143
143 leaves, [60] leaves : ill., maps ; 30 cm.
Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Adelaide, Dept. of Botany, 1987

An understanding of the taphonomic processes that form and possibly bias plant fossil assemblages is of central importance to understanding and interpreting some of the anomalies in the Australian Cenozoic plant fossil record. This study measured a variety of ecosystem processes in contiguous Nothofagus cunninghamii (Hook) Oerst. dominated cool temperate rainforest and Eucalyptus regnans F.Muell. dominated wet sclerophyll forest in southeastern Australian forest in order to find an ecological explanation for anomalies between the poor macrofossil record on the one hand, and high abundance of one of these taxa as pollen. From the examination of these two forests three sources of taphonomic bias between taxa were identified: 1) bias between standing crop and leaf biomass production between species; 2) bias in overland and riparian leaf transportation distance between species; and 3) bias in decay rates between species.

Nationalism: Past as Prologue began as a single volume being compiled by Ad Akande, a scholar from South Africa, who proposed it to me as co-author about two years ago. The original idea was to examine how the damaging roots of nationalism have been corroding political systems around the world, and creating dangerous obstacles for necessary international cooperation. Since I (Bruce E. Johansen) has written profusely about climate change (global warming, a.k.a. infrared forcing), I suggested a concerted effort in that direction. This is a worldwide existential threat that affects every living thing on Earth. It often compounds upon itself, so delays in reducing emissions of fossil fuels are shortening the amount of time remaining to eliminate the use of fossil fuels to preserve a livable planet. Nationalism often impedes solutions to this problem (among many others), as nations place their singular needs above the common good. Our initial proposal got around, and abstracts on many subjects arrived. Within a few weeks, we had enough good material for a 100,000-word book. The book then fattened to two moderate volumes and then to four two very hefty tomes. We tried several different titles as good submissions swelled. We also discovered that our best contributors were experts in their fields, which ranged the world. We settled on three stand-alone books:” 1/ nationalism and racial justice. Our first volume grew as the growth of Black Lives Matter following the brutal killing of George Floyd ignited protests over police brutality and other issues during 2020, following the police assassination of Floyd in Minneapolis. It is estimated that more people took part in protests of police brutality during the summer of 2020 than any other series of marches in United States history. This includes upheavals during the 1960s over racial issues and against the war in Southeast Asia (notably Vietnam). We choose a volume on racism because it is one of nationalism’s main motive forces. This volume provides a worldwide array of work on nationalism’s growth in various countries, usually by authors residing in them, or in the United States with ethnic ties to the nation being examined, often recent immigrants to the United States from them. Our roster of contributors comprises a small United Nations of insightful, well-written research and commentary from Indonesia, New Zealand, Australia, China, India, South Africa, France, Portugal, Estonia, Hungary, Russia, Poland, Kazakhstan, Georgia, and the United States. Volume 2 (this one) describes and analyzes nationalism, by country, around the world, except for the United States; and 3/material directly related to President Donald Trump, and the United States. The first volume is under consideration at the Texas A & M University Press. The other two are under contract to Nova Science Publishers (which includes social sciences). These three volumes may be used individually or as a set. Environmental material is taken up in appropriate places in each of the three books. * * * * * What became the United States of America has been strongly nationalist since the English of present-day Massachusetts and Jamestown first hit North America’s eastern shores. The country propelled itself across North America with the self-serving ideology of “manifest destiny” for four centuries before Donald Trump came along. Anyone who believes that a Trumpian affection for deportation of “illegals” is a new thing ought to take a look at immigration and deportation statistics in Adam Goodman’s The Deportation Machine: America’s Long History of Deporting Immigrants (Princeton University Press, 2020). Between 1920 and 2018, the United States deported 56.3 million people, compared with 51.7 million who were granted legal immigration status during the same dates. Nearly nine of ten deportees were Mexican (Nolan, 2020, 83). This kind of nationalism, has become an assassin of democracy as well as an impediment to solving global problems. Paul Krugman wrote in the New York Times (2019:A-25): that “In their 2018 book, How Democracies Die, the political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt documented how this process has played out in many countries, from Vladimir Putin’s Russia, to Recep Erdogan’s Turkey, to Viktor Orban’s Hungary. Add to these India’s Narendra Modi, China’s Xi Jinping, and the United States’ Donald Trump, among others. Bit by bit, the guardrails of democracy have been torn down, as institutions meant to serve the public became tools of ruling parties and self-serving ideologies, weaponized to punish and intimidate opposition parties’ opponents. On paper, these countries are still democracies; in practice, they have become one-party regimes….And it’s happening here [the United States] as we speak. If you are not worried about the future of American democracy, you aren’t paying attention” (Krugmam, 2019, A-25). We are reminded continuously that the late Carl Sagan, one of our most insightful scientific public intellectuals, had an interesting theory about highly developed civilizations. Given the number of stars and planets that must exist in the vast reaches of the universe, he said, there must be other highly developed and organized forms of life. Distance may keep us from making physical contact, but Sagan said that another reason we may never be on speaking terms with another intelligent race is (judging from our own example) could be their penchant for destroying themselves in relatively short order after reaching technological complexity. This book’s chapters, introduction, and conclusion examine the worldwide rise of partisan nationalism and the damage it has wrought on the worldwide pursuit of solutions for issues requiring worldwide scope, such scientific co-operation public health and others, mixing analysis of both. We use both historical description and analysis. This analysis concludes with a description of why we must avoid the isolating nature of nationalism that isolates people and encourages separation if we are to deal with issues of world-wide concern, and to maintain a sustainable, survivable Earth, placing the dominant political movement of our time against the Earth’s existential crises. Our contributors, all experts in their fields, each have assumed responsibility for a country, or two if they are related. This work entwines themes of worldwide concern with the political growth of nationalism because leaders with such a worldview are disinclined to co-operate internationally at a time when nations must find ways to solve common problems, such as the climate crisis. Inability to cooperate at this stage may doom everyone, eventually, to an overheated, stormy future plagued by droughts and deluges portending shortages of food and other essential commodities, meanwhile destroying large coastal urban areas because of rising sea levels. Future historians may look back at our time and wonder why as well as how our world succumbed to isolating nationalism at a time when time was so short for cooperative intervention which is crucial for survival of a sustainable earth. Pride in language and culture is salubrious to individuals’ sense of history and identity. Excess nationalism that prevents international co-operation on harmful worldwide maladies is quite another. As Pope Francis has pointed out: For all of our connectivity due to expansion of social media, ability to communicate can breed contempt as well as mutual trust. “For all our hyper-connectivity,” said Francis, “We witnessed a fragmentation that made it more difficult to resolve problems that affect us all” (Horowitz, 2020, A-12). The pope’s encyclical, titled “Brothers All,” also said: “The forces of myopic, extremist, resentful, and aggressive nationalism are on the rise.” The pope’s document also advocates support for migrants, as well as resistance to nationalist and tribal populism. Francis broadened his critique to the role of market capitalism, as well as nationalism has failed the peoples of the world when they need co-operation and solidarity in the face of the world-wide corona virus pandemic. Humankind needs to unite into “a new sense of the human family [Fratelli Tutti, “Brothers All”], that rejects war at all costs” (Pope, 2020, 6-A). Our journey takes us first to Russia, with the able eye and honed expertise of Richard D. Anderson, Jr. who teaches as UCLA and publishes on the subject of his chapter: “Putin, Russian identity, and Russia’s conduct at home and abroad.” Readers should find Dr. Anderson’s analysis fascinating because Vladimir Putin, the singular leader of Russian foreign and domestic policy these days (and perhaps for the rest of his life, given how malleable Russia’s Constitution has become) may be a short man physically, but has high ambitions. One of these involves restoring the old Russian (and Soviet) empire, which would involve re-subjugating a number of nations that broke off as the old order dissolved about 30 years ago. President (shall we say czar?) Putin also has international ambitions, notably by destabilizing the United States, where election meddling has become a specialty. The sight of Putin and U.S. president Donald Trump, two very rich men (Putin $70-$200 billion; Trump $2.5 billion), nuzzling in friendship would probably set Thomas Jefferson and Vladimir Lenin spinning in their graves. The road of history can take some unanticipated twists and turns. Consider Poland, from which we have an expert native analysis in chapter 2, Bartosz Hlebowicz, who is a Polish anthropologist and journalist. His piece is titled “Lawless and Unjust: How to Quickly Make Your Own Country a Puppet State Run by a Group of Hoodlums – the Hopeless Case of Poland (2015–2020).” When I visited Poland to teach and lecture twice between 2006 and 2008, most people seemed to be walking on air induced by freedom to conduct their own affairs to an unusual degree for a state usually squeezed between nationalists in Germany and Russia. What did the Poles then do in a couple of decades? Read Hlebowicz’ chapter and decide. It certainly isn’t soft-bellied liberalism. In Chapter 3, with Bruce E. Johansen, we visit China’s western provinces, the lands of Tibet as well as the Uighurs and other Muslims in the Xinjiang region, who would most assuredly resent being characterized as being possessed by the Chinese of the Han to the east. As a student of Native American history, I had never before thought of the Tibetans and Uighurs as Native peoples struggling against the Independence-minded peoples of a land that is called an adjunct of China on most of our maps. The random act of sitting next to a young woman on an Air India flight out of Hyderabad, bound for New Delhi taught me that the Tibetans had something to share with the Lakota, the Iroquois, and hundreds of other Native American states and nations in North America. Active resistance to Chinese rule lasted into the mid-nineteenth century, and continues today in a subversive manner, even in song, as I learned in 2018 when I acted as a foreign adjudicator on a Ph.D. dissertation by a Tibetan student at the University of Madras (in what is now in a city called Chennai), in southwestern India on resistance in song during Tibet’s recent history. Tibet is one of very few places on Earth where a young dissident can get shot to death for singing a song that troubles China’s Quest for Lebensraum. The situation in Xinjiang region, where close to a million Muslims have been interned in “reeducation” camps surrounded with brick walls and barbed wire. They sing, too. Come with us and hear the music. Back to Europe now, in Chapter 4, to Portugal and Spain, we find a break in the general pattern of nationalism. Portugal has been more progressive governmentally than most. Spain varies from a liberal majority to military coups, a pattern which has been exported to Latin America. A situation such as this can make use of the term “populism” problematic, because general usage in our time usually ties the word into a right-wing connotative straightjacket. “Populism” can be used to describe progressive (left-wing) insurgencies as well. José Pinto, who is native to Portugal and also researches and writes in Spanish as well as English, in “Populism in Portugal and Spain: a Real Neighbourhood?” provides insight into these historical paradoxes. Hungary shares some historical inclinations with Poland (above). Both emerged from Soviet dominance in an air of developing freedom and multicultural diversity after the Berlin Wall fell and the Soviet Union collapsed. Then, gradually at first, right wing-forces began to tighten up, stripping structures supporting popular freedom, from the courts, mass media, and other institutions. In Chapter 5, Bernard Tamas, in “From Youth Movement to Right-Liberal Wing Authoritarianism: The Rise of Fidesz and the Decline of Hungarian Democracy” puts the renewed growth of political and social repression into a context of worldwide nationalism. Tamas, an associate professor of political science at Valdosta State University, has been a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University and a Fulbright scholar at the Central European University in Budapest, Hungary. His books include From Dissident to Party Politics: The Struggle for Democracy in Post-Communist Hungary (2007). Bear in mind that not everyone shares Orbán’s vision of what will make this nation great, again. On graffiti-covered walls in Budapest, Runes (traditional Hungarian script) has been found that read “Orbán is a motherfucker” (Mikanowski, 2019, 58). Also in Europe, in Chapter 6, Professor Ronan Le Coadic, of the University of Rennes, Rennes, France, in “Is There a Revival of French Nationalism?” Stating this title in the form of a question is quite appropriate because France’s nationalistic shift has built and ebbed several times during the last few decades. For a time after 2000, it came close to assuming the role of a substantial minority, only to ebb after that. In 2017, the candidate of the National Front reached the second round of the French presidential election. This was the second time this nationalist party reached the second round of the presidential election in the history of the Fifth Republic. In 2002, however, Jean-Marie Le Pen had only obtained 17.79% of the votes, while fifteen years later his daughter, Marine Le Pen, almost doubled her father's record, reaching 33.90% of the votes cast. Moreover, in the 2019 European elections, re-named Rassemblement National obtained the largest number of votes of all French political formations and can therefore boast of being "the leading party in France.” The brutality of oppressive nationalism may be expressed in personal relationships, such as child abuse. While Indonesia and Aotearoa [the Maoris’ name for New Zealand] hold very different ranks in the United Nations Human Development Programme assessments, where Indonesia is classified as a medium development country and Aotearoa New Zealand as a very high development country. In Chapter 7, “Domestic Violence Against Women in Indonesia and Aotearoa New Zealand: Making Sense of Differences and Similarities” co-authors, in Chapter 8, Mandy Morgan and Dr. Elli N. Hayati, from New Zealand and Indonesia respectively, found that despite their socio-economic differences, one in three women in each country experience physical or sexual intimate partner violence over their lifetime. In this chapter ther authors aim to deepen understandings of domestic violence through discussion of the socio-economic and demographic characteristics of theit countries to address domestic violence alongside studies of women’s attitudes to gender norms and experiences of intimate partner violence. One of the most surprising and upsetting scholarly journeys that a North American student may take involves Adolf Hitler’s comments on oppression of American Indians and Blacks as he imagined the construction of the Nazi state, a genesis of nationalism that is all but unknown in the United States of America, traced in this volume (Chapter 8) by co-editor Johansen. Beginning in Mein Kampf, during the 1920s, Hitler explicitly used the westward expansion of the United States across North America as a model and justification for Nazi conquest and anticipated colonization by Germans of what the Nazis called the “wild East” – the Slavic nations of Poland, the Baltic states, Ukraine, and Russia, most of which were under control of the Soviet Union. The Volga River (in Russia) was styled by Hitler as the Germans’ Mississippi, and covered wagons were readied for the German “manifest destiny” of imprisoning, eradicating, and replacing peoples the Nazis deemed inferior, all with direct references to events in North America during the previous century. At the same time, with no sense of contradiction, the Nazis partook of a long-standing German romanticism of Native Americans. One of Goebbels’ less propitious schemes was to confer honorary Aryan status on Native American tribes, in the hope that they would rise up against their oppressors. U.S. racial attitudes were “evidence [to the Nazis] that America was evolving in the right direction, despite its specious rhetoric about equality.” Ming Xie, originally from Beijing, in the People’s Republic of China, in Chapter 9, “News Coverage and Public Perceptions of the Social Credit System in China,” writes that The State Council of China in 2014 announced “that a nationwide social credit system would be established” in China. “Under this system, individuals, private companies, social organizations, and governmental agencies are assigned a score which will be calculated based on their trustworthiness and daily actions such as transaction history, professional conduct, obedience to law, corruption, tax evasion, and academic plagiarism.” The “nationalism” in this case is that of the state over the individual. China has 1.4 billion people; this system takes their measure for the purpose of state control. Once fully operational, control will be more subtle. People who are subject to it, through modern technology (most often smart phones) will prompt many people to self-censor. Orwell, modernized, might write: “Your smart phone is watching you.” Ming Xie holds two Ph.Ds, one in Public Administration from University of Nebraska at Omaha and another in Cultural Anthropology from the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, Beijing, where she also worked for more than 10 years at a national think tank in the same institution. While there she summarized news from non-Chinese sources for senior members of the Chinese Communist Party. Ming is presently an assistant professor at the Department of Political Science and Criminal Justice, West Texas A&M University. In Chapter 10, analyzing native peoples and nationhood, Barbara Alice Mann, Professor of Honours at the University of Toledo, in “Divide, et Impera: The Self-Genocide Game” details ways in which European-American invaders deprive the conquered of their sense of nationhood as part of a subjugation system that amounts to genocide, rubbing out their languages and cultures -- and ultimately forcing the native peoples to assimilate on their own, for survival in a culture that is foreign to them. Mann is one of Native American Studies’ most acute critics of conquests’ contradictions, and an author who retrieves Native history with a powerful sense of voice and purpose, having authored roughly a dozen books and numerous book chapters, among many other works, who has traveled around the world lecturing and publishing on many subjects. Nalanda Roy and S. Mae Pedron in Chapter 11, “Understanding the Face of Humanity: The Rohingya Genocide.” describe one of the largest forced migrations in the history of the human race, the removal of 700,000 to 800,000 Muslims from Buddhist Myanmar to Bangladesh, which itself is already one of the most crowded and impoverished nations on Earth. With about 150 million people packed into an area the size of Nebraska and Iowa (population less than a tenth that of Bangladesh, a country that is losing land steadily to rising sea levels and erosion of the Ganges river delta. The Rohingyas’ refugee camp has been squeezed onto a gigantic, eroding, muddy slope that contains nearly no vegetation. However, Bangladesh is majority Muslim, so while the Rohingya may starve, they won’t be shot to death by marauding armies. Both authors of this exquisite (and excruciating) account teach at Georgia Southern University in Savannah, Georgia, Roy as an associate professor of International Studies and Asian politics, and Pedron as a graduate student; Roy originally hails from very eastern India, close to both Myanmar and Bangladesh, so he has special insight into the context of one of the most brutal genocides of our time, or any other. This is our case describing the problems that nationalism has and will pose for the sustainability of the Earth as our little blue-and-green orb becomes more crowded over time. The old ways, in which national arguments often end in devastating wars, are obsolete, given that the Earth and all the people, plants, and other animals that it sustains are faced with the existential threat of a climate crisis that within two centuries, more or less, will flood large parts of coastal cities, and endanger many species of plants and animals. To survive, we must listen to the Earth, and observe her travails, because they are increasingly our own.

This chapter aims to investigate the potential cooperation between Australia and the SAARC nations to facilitate generation and distribution of energy to better manage this sector and fulfil their commitments towards climate change conditions. As carbon emissions from non-renewables severely threatened the climate conditions, an effective transition to renewable resources is essential. In the Paris Agreement, Australia and SAARC nations committed to reduce their individual carbon emissions. But the SAARC lag in their commitments as they fail to unleash renewables and rely on fossil fuel. Australia leads in renewables, and SAARC provides a large market for it to relate services and technologies and improve energy efficiency and competitiveness. This chapter investigates the opportunities for strategic collaboration between these nations; challenges of energy trading, energy security, inefficient institutions, volatile prices and investment flows, collaborative capacity generation and distribution; and analyses comparative advantages for the countries to have mutually beneficial agreements to meet UNSDGs of affordable clean energy and climate action.

That the evolution of organisms depends in large part on the evolution of their environment is something paleontologists have been noting since the early nineteenth century, and indeed, it is so inherent in Darwinian theory as to seem almost banal. That this dependency might have been two-way—that the earth’s minerals, atmosphere, oceans, and climate have been in large measure determined by the evolution of different life-forms—was somewhat harder to document and accept, partly because the most dramatic evidence was hidden, at the molecular level, in the elusive Precambrian rocks. The concept of the coevolution of Earth and life saw its first cohesive and most provocative expression when James Lovelock presented his Gaia hypothesis in the early 1970s, but not until the end of the twentieth century were the basic tenets of the hypothesis accepted as a valid theory. Lovelock began conceiving the Gaia hypothesis when he was designing instruments for NASA’s first extraterrestrial explorations and it occurred to him that, unlike the moon and Mars, the earth had an atmosphere composed of gases that couldn’t and wouldn’t coexist without life’s intervention. At the same time, a handful of paleontologists and geochemists had been conceiving similar if less provocatively formulated hypotheses based on their studies of the earth’s most ancient rocks and sediments. In 1979, a decade after Geoff, Thomas Hoering, and Keith Kvenvolden had more or less given up on the prospect of garnering clues about early life-forms from the fossil molecules in Archean and early Proterozoic rocks, one of those paleontologists inadvertently inspired a certain Australian chemist to give it another go. Roger Summons met the paleontologist Preston Cloud when Cloud was on sabbatical at the Australian Institute of Marine Science. Summons was working in the biology department at Australian National University and had been assigned to play guide and chauffeur for Andrew Benson, a visiting American plant physiologist who was staying out at the marine institute. “There was a couple living in the guesthouse next to us,” Summons tells me. “And this guy was a jogger. He’d leave every morning at 5:00 A.M. and run past the house, clump clump clump clump, and I’d wake up.”