This text explores the evocations of place, and particularly American place, that have become central to the representational and narrative strategies of alternative and mainstream film and video.

What is life? Is it just the biologically familiar--birds, trees, snails, people--or is it an infinitely complex set of patterns that a computer could simulate? What role does intelligence play in separating the organic from the inorganic, the living from the inert? Does life evolve along a predestined path, or does it suddenly emerge from what appeared lifeless and programmatic? In this easily accessible and wide-ranging survey, Claus Emmeche outlines many of the challenges and controversies involved in the dynamic and curious science of artificial life. Emmeche describes the work being done by an international network of biologists, computer scientists, and physicists who are using computers to study life as it could be, or as it might evolve under conditions different from those on earth. Many artificial-life researchers believe that they can create new life in the computer by simulating the processes observed in traditional, biological life-forms. The flight of a flock of birds, for example, can be reproduced faithfully and in all its complexity by a relatively simple computer program that is designed to generate electronic "boids." Are these "boids" then alive? The central problem, Emmeche notes, lies in defining the salient differences between biological life and computer simulations of its processes. And yet, if we can breathe life into a computer, what might this mean for our other assumptions about what it means to be alive? The Garden in the Machine touches on every aspect of this complex and rapidly developing discipline, including its connections to artificial intelligence, chaos theory, computational theory, and studies of emergence. Drawing on the most current work in the field, this book is a major overview of artificial life. Professionals and nonscientists alike will find it an invaluable guide to concepts and technologies that may forever change our definition of life.

The Tennessee Valley Authority was the largest single agency created under the auspices of the New Deal legislation. Until 1933, when the project was initiated, the Tennessee Valley was known romantically as "a region of untapped potential" and, less romantically, as one of the most impoverished and isolated areas of the country. The TVA was responsible for three large-scale environmental projects–the river, land, and power machines–but the project also had social, even utopian, goals. In service to the latter, the TVA put together a cadre of regional planners, architects, and landscape architects that Avigail Sachs calls the "atelier TVA." These professionals contributed to the design of the system of multipurpose dams, arranged visitor centers and scenic routes, built housing and communities (although both were segregated), and instigated a regional recreation industry. In addition to its planning and design history audience, this volume will be of interest to environmental historians and historians of the Progressive Era. Publication of this volume was assisted by a grant from Furthermore: a program of the J. M. Kaplan Fund.

The volume reexamines the trope of the intrusive machine and the regenerative pastoral garden, laid out fifty years ago by Leo Marx in "The Machine in the Garden," one of the founding texts of American Studies. Contributions explore the lasting influence of the trope in American culture and the arts, rereading it as a dialectics where nature is as much technologized as technology is naturalized. They trace this dialectic trope in filmic and literary representations of industrial, bureaucratic, and digital gardens; they explore its function in the aftermath of the civil war, the rural electrification during the New Deal, in landscape art, and in ethnic literatures; and they discuss the historical premises and lasting influence of Leo Marx's seminal study.

For over four decades, Leo Marx's work has focused on the relationship between technology and culture in 19th- and 20th-century America. His research helped to define--and continues to give depth to--the area of American studies concerned with the links between scientific and technological advances, and the way society and culture both determine these links. The Machine in the Garden fully examines the difference between the "pastoral" and "progressive" ideals which characterized early 19th-century American culture, and which ultimately evolved into the basis for much of the environmental and nuclear debates of contemporary society. This new edition is appearing in celebration of the 35th anniversary of Marx's classic text. It features a new afterword by the author on the process of writing this pioneering book, a work that all but founded the discipline now called American Studies.

In Gardens and Gardening in the Chesapeake, Barbara Wells Sarudy recovers this lost world using a remarkable variety of sources - historic maps, travelers' accounts, diaries, paintings (some on the back of Baltimore painted chairs), account ledgers, catalogues, and newspaper advertisements. She offers an engaging account of the region's earliest gardens, introducing us to the people who designed and tended these often elaborate landscapes and explaining the forces and finances behind their creation. From the favorite books of early gardeners to the republican balance between table and ornamental gardens, Sarudy includes details that give us an understanding of Chesapeake gardening from settlement through the early national period.

There Is a Garden in the Mind presents an engaging look at the work and life of pioneering organic gardener Alan Chadwick and his profound influence on the organic farming movement. In this wide-ranging and philosophical memoir, author Paul Lee recounts his first serendipitous meeting with Chadwick in Santa Cruz, California, in 1967, and their subsequent founding of the Chadwick Garden at UC Santa Cruz, the first organic and biointensive garden at a U.S. university. Today, there are few who would dispute the ecological and health benefits of organically produced food, and the student garden project founded by Chadwick and Lee has evolved into a world-renowned research center that helps third-world farmers obtain high yields using organic gardening. But when Chadwick and Lee first broke ground in the 1960s, the term "organic" belonged to the university's chemists, and the Chadwick Garden spurred a heated battle against the whole system of industrial existence. Lee's memoir contextualizes this struggle by examining the centuries-old history of the conflict between industrial science and organic nature, the roots of the modern environmental movement and the slow food movement, and the origin of the term "organic." His account of Chadwick's work fills in a gap in the history of the sustainable agriculture movement and proposes that Chadwick's groundwork continues to bear fruit in today's burgeoning urban garden, locavore, and self-sufficiency movements. Table of contents: Chapter one The English Gardener Arrives Chapter two The English Gardener Goes to Work Chapter three The Garden Plot Chapter four Goethe the Vitalist contra Newton the Physicalist Chapter five Urea! I Found It! Chapter six USA and Earth Day Chapter seven The Method Chapter eight Chadwick Departs Chapter nine A Moral Equivalent of War Chapter ten The Death of Chadwick Chapter eleven California Cuisine and the Homeless Garden Project Chapter twelve A Biodynamic Garden on Long Island Chapter thirteen Chadwick's Legacy

Take a stroll through the garden of a self-confessed hortimaniac. Gardening is Marie Harrison's avocation, passion . . . some might say, obsession. In her personal, witty style (she refers to her husband as Amiable Spouse, or A.S. for short), Marie divulges her own tried-and-true ways of gardening along the coasts of the southeast United States. Marie covers perennials, flowers grown from bulbs, herbs, shrubs and small trees, vines, edible flowers, and herbs for flower borders. A section of full-color photos captures these beautiful plants and flowers in all their vibrant glory. Charming pen-and-ink illustrations are sprinkled throughout the text. Marie discusses the edible and medicinal properties of various plants (there's even a quick tip or two!), as well as coastal considerations such as salt tolerance; environmental issues such as pesticide use, beneficial insects, and exotic invasives; and gardening for birds and butterflies. She also offers her musings on the seasons in Florida and how she spends her time in the garden during each phase of the year. Whether you're seasoned gardener like Marie or a tentative beginner just starting out with a windowsill herb garden, this delightful book will make you appreciate the dirt under your fingernails.

The modernist garden, which flourished in France between the 1910s and the 1930s, vividly mirrored the geometries and cubist aesthetics familiar to the decorative and fine arts of the period. Created by architects and artists, these gardens were often conceived as tableaux in which plants played a role only as pigment or texture. This handsomely illustrated book by Dorothée Imbert presents for the first time - in word and image - a comprehensive study of these arresting architectonic gardens.

This book offers a fresh perspective on the Chinese diaspora. It is about the mobilisation of knowledge across time and space, exploring the history of Chinese market gardening in Australia and New Zealand. It enlarges our understanding of processes of technological change and human mobility, highlighting the mobility of migrants as an essential element in the mobility and adaptation of technologies. Truly multidisciplinary, Chinese Market Gardening in Australia and New Zealand incorporates elements of economic, agricultural, social, cultural and environmental history, along with archaeology, to document how Chinese market gardeners from subtropical southern China adapted their horticultural techniques and technologies to novel environments and the demands of European consumers. It shows that they made a significant contribution to the economies of Australia and New Zealand, developing flexible strategies to cope with the vagaries of climate and changing business and social environments which were often hostile towards Asian immigrants. Chinese Market Gardening in Australia and New Zealand will appeal to students and scholars in the fields of the Chinese diaspora, in particular the history of the Chinese in Australasia; the history of technology; horticultural and garden history; and environmental history, as well as Asian studies more generally.