Throughout history, humanity has grappled with how to face the inevitability of death. Today, this struggle takes many forms, from efforts to extend life through medical and technological advances to the fascination with apocalyptic imagery in popular culture. To move beyond these ideas and explore new possibilities, we must seek precise knowledge across fields such as cosmology, biology, and evolution, examining the origins of life and death, which trace back billions of years to the earliest organisms and chemical compounds on Earth. For humans, these life stages prompt profound questions about the origins and meaning of life, why we age and die, and what, if anything, lies beyond death. These mysteries have driven human curiosity since our earliest days as a species, and we are better prepared than ever to explore these questions. Life Cycle in the Natural Sciences and Traditional Cultures as a Complex System Self-Organization explores the modeling and system analysis of the human life cycle, from the emergence and evolution of life to death and post-mortem phenomena, all within the framework of the theory of self-organization of complex systems. By treating life cycle events as wave and soliton processes, the research bridges anthropology, systems theory, geology, biochemistry, and evolution, among other fields. Covering topics such as death, senility, and transpersonal experience, this book is an excellent resource for academicians, researchers, educators, graduate and postgraduate students, philosophers of science, and more.

Exploring ideas of post-mortem existence through the lenses of complex systems and traditional cultural perspectives offers a deeper understanding about life, death, and the existence beyond. Self-organization theory provides a framework for examining how cultural systems evolve and adapt new concepts of post-mortem states, where individual consciousness and collective memory continue to evolve. Traditional cultures provide diverse and deep-rooted views on the afterlife, often envisioning a continued existence, spiritual transformation, or idea perpetuated by moral beliefs. Further research on integrating these perspectives is necessary to gain a more nuanced approach to post-mortem existence understanding and appreciation for evolving systems and cultural constructs. Post-Mortem Existence Within the Complex Systems Self-Organization Theory Framework and in Traditional Cultures explores the ideals of post-mortem existences in traditional cultures using a complex systems self-organization theory framework. Religious structures and cultural responses to death are outlined while examining various models and scenarios. This book covers topics such as biology, philosophy, and anthropology, and is a useful resource for scientists, biologists, medical professionals, philosophers, anthropologists, academicians, and researchers.

Annotation This text provides a comprehensive summary of 30 of the major theories that underpin Organization Theory and Economic Organization. Each theory is summarized in a stand-alone fashion, reflecting the diversity of thinking on these issues. The book has a wide application for courses designed to inform students of the main issues confronting organizations.

“A profound personal meditation on human existence . . . weaving together . . . historic and contemporary thought on the deepest question of all: why are we here?” —Gabor Maté M.D., author, In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts As our civilization careens toward climate breakdown, ecological destruction, and gaping inequality, people are losing their existential moorings. The dominant worldview of disconnection, which tells us we are split between mind and body, separate from each other, and at odds with the natural world, has been invalidated by modern science. Award-winning author Jeremy Lent, investigates humanity’s age-old questions—Who am I? Why am I? How should I live?—from a fresh perspective, weaving together findings from modern systems thinking, evolutionary biology, and cognitive neuroscience with insights from Buddhism, Taoism, and Indigenous wisdom. The result is a breathtaking accomplishment: a rich, coherent worldview based on a deep recognition of connectedness within ourselves, between each other, and with the entire natural world. It offers a compelling foundation for a new philosophical framework that could enable humanity to thrive sustainably on a flourishing Earth. The Web of Meaning is for everyone looking for deep and coherent answers to the crisis of civilization. “One of the most brilliant and insightful minds of our age, Jeremy Lent has written one of the most essential and compelling books of our time.” —David Korten, author, When Corporations Rule the World and The Great Turning: From Empire to Earth Community “We need, now more than ever, to figure out how to make all kinds of connections. This book can help—and therefore it can help with a lot of the urgent tasks we face.” —Bill McKibben, author, Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out?

Your timely source for more cost-effective and less disruptive solutions to your underground infrastructure needs. The North American Tunneling Conference is the premier biennial tunneling event for North America, bringing together the brightest, most resourceful, and innovative minds in the tunneling industry. It underscores the important role that the industry plays in the development of underground spaces, transportation and conveyance systems, and other forms of sustainable underground infrastructure. With every conference, the number of attendees and breadth of topics grow. The authors—experts and leaders in the industry—share the latest case histories, expertise, lessons learned, and real-world applications from around the globe. Crafted from a collection of 126 papers presented at the conference, this book takes you deep inside the projects. It includes challenging design issues, fresh approaches on performance, future projects, and industry trends as well as ground movement and support, structure analysis, risk and cost management, rock tunnels, caverns and shafts, TBM technology, and water and wastewater conveyance.

'Over recent years Complexity Science has revealed to us new limits to our possible knowledge and control in social, cultural and economic systems. Instead of supposing that past statistics and patterns will give us predictable outcomes for possible actions, we now know the world is, and will always be, creative and surprising. Continuous structural evolution within such systems may change the mechanisms, descriptors, problems and opportunities, often negating policy aims. We therefore need to redevelop our thinking about interventions, policies and policy making, moving perhaps to a humbler, more 'learning' approach. In this Handbook, leading thinkers in multiple domains set out these new ideas and allow us to understand how these new ideas are changing policymaking and policies in this new era.' - Peter M Allen, Cranfield University, UK

Managing Healthy Livestock Production and Consumption is a highly interdisciplinary resource based on scientific and empirical evidence. It is illustrated with best practices of low-input livestock systems from different continents and offers predictive modelling alternatives for a more resilient future. By addressing gaps of knowledge and presenting scientific perspective studies of livestock's impact on the environment and the global food supply up to 2050, this book is useful for those advocating for sustainable food systems. Existing evidence of the effects of livestock production on food quality and nutrition is reviewed. Livestock production and consumption is a highly diverse topic where current publications only include/focus a single aspect of the issues, for example, greenhouse gas emissions or health impacts, leading to unilateral decisions such as refraining from meat consumption. However, animals are necessary to soil fertility and ecosystems balance and a more realistic resource is necessary for researchers, scientists, and policy makers. This book clarifies perceptions by presenting sound scientific evidence across livestock landscapes for the scientific community to better appreciate the ecological web of life and the social web of community related to livestock production. An edited work written by globally diverse scientists and practitioners, including field workers, technicians, and policy makers, this is a valuable resource for researchers, teachers, and development agents working in the area of sustainable livestock production and consumption of animal source foods. National, international organizations, policy makers, and donors interested in sustainable development of the livestock sector will also find the information here practical and applicable. - Describes the public-health impacts of sustainable diets and livestock products - Presents the impacts of livestock production on the environment and food supply - Explores future scenarios (up to 2050) of low input livestock systems - Includes current case studies of low input livestock systems that offer potential for scaling-up and replication for sustainable livestock futures

The articulation between persistence and change is relevant to a great number of different disciplines. It is particularly central to the study of urban and rural forms in many different fields of research, in geography, archaeology, architecture and history. Resilience puts forward the idea that we can no longer be truly satisfied with the common approaches used to study the dynamics of landscapes, such as the palimpsest approach, the regressive method and the semiological analysis amongst others, because they are based on the separation between the past and the present, which itself stems from the differentiation between nature and society. This book combines spatio-temporalities, as described in archeogeography, with concepts that have been developed in the field of ecological resilience, such as panarchy and the adaptive cycle. Thus revived, the morphological analysis in this work considers landscapes as complex resilient adaptive systems. The permanence observed in landscapes is no longer presented as the endurance of inherited forms, but as the result of a dynamic that is fed by this constant dialogue between persistence and change. Thus, resilience is here decisively on the side of dynamics rather than that of resistance.

`Catherine Casey has written an excellent book that provides a lucid and comprehensive critical analysis of organizations....[It] extends in reach and relevance beyond the specific field of organization studies and the sociology of organizations to encompass broader intellectual developments that have had a significant impact on contemporary sociology and cultural studies′ - Barry Smart, Professor of Sociology, University of Portsmouth `I anticipate that it will prove to be an attractive book in organization studies, industrial sociology and general sociology. I am sure that this will be a book that will make a major impact′ - Mike Reed, Professor of Organization Theory, Lancaster University In this comprehensive and scholarly book, the essential critical strands in organizational analysis are explained. It examines how central traditions have realigned in relation to the challenge of postmodernism and the new reflexive turn in organizational studies. Judicious, innovative and written with the needs of students in mind, this book offers a renewed and revitalized critical accent in organization studies - one that focuses on existing and emerging social tendencies, contestations and struggles. It will be essential reading for senior students of organization studies and sociology.

Is the study of living systems a useful metaphor for political science? In this book, Dr. Dobuzinskis argues for further exploration of biopolitical models to explain the complexity of political theory and social change. His discussion emphasizes the new cybernetics, which considers not only self-regulating but also self-organizing or self-producing systems. Self-organizing systems operate in an autonomous sphere comparable to the autonomy of the political community and the political actors who compose this community. The autonomy of these systems is maintained through dynamic equilibration processes that entail not only the preservation of a given structure but also, at crucial times, the creative rearrangement of the existing structure and its transformation into a new pattern of relations. From this perspective, a political crisis is both a threat to the political system and the occasion of its renewal; stability may also mean decay. Emphasizing the links that have developed historically between the natural and social sciences, this book is a reflection on the merits of and difficulties involved in representing the evolutionary process at the political level as the problematic reproduction of national communities and states.