In this book, the major ideas behind Organic Computing are delineated, together with a sparse sample of computational projects undertaken in this new field. Biological metaphors include evolution, neural networks, gene-regulatory networks, networks of brain modules, hormone system, insect swarms, and ant colonies. Applications are as diverse as system design, optimization, artificial growth, task allocation, clustering, routing, face recognition, and sign language understanding.

In a time of uncertainty about our environmental future—an eye-opening global tour of some of the most wounded places on earth, and stories of how a passionate group of eco-restorers is leading the way to their revitalization. Award-winning science journalist Judith D. Schwartz takes us first to China’s Loess Plateau, where a landmark project has successfully restored a blighted region the size of Belgium, lifting millions of people out of poverty. She journeys on to Norway, where a young indigenous reindeer herder challenges the most powerful orthodoxies of conservation—and his own government. And in the Middle East, she follows the visionary work of an ambitious young American as he attempts to re-engineer the desert ecosystem, using plants as his most sophisticated technology. Schwartz explores regenerative solutions across a range of landscapes: deserts, grasslands, tropics, tundra, Mediterranean. She also highlights various human landscapes, the legacy of colonialism and industrial agriculture, and the endurance of indigenous knowledge. The Reindeer Chronicles demonstrates how solutions to seemingly intractable problems can come from the unlikeliest of places, and how the restoration of local water, carbon, nutrient, and energy cycles can play a dramatic role in stabilizing the global climate. Ultimately, it reveals how much is in our hands if we can find a way to work together and follow nature’s lead.

This first sustained ethnographic study of organic agriculture outside the United States traces its meanings, practices, and politics in two nations typically considered worlds apart: Latvia and Costa Rica. Situated on the frontiers of the European Union and the United States, these geopolitically and economically in-between places illustrate ways that international treaties have created contradictory pressures for organic farmers. Organic farmers in both countries build multispecies networks of biological and social diversity and create spaces of sovereignty within state and suprastate governance bodies. Organic associations in Central America and Eastern Europe face parallel challenges in balancing multiple identities as social movements, market sectors, and NGOs while finding their place in regions and nations reshaped by world events.

The new edition of this annual publication (previously published solely by IFOAM and FiBL) documents recent developments in global organic agriculture. It includes contributions from representatives of the organic sector from throughout the world and provides comprehensive organic farming statistics that cover surface area under organic management, numbers of farms and specific information about commodities and land use in organic systems. The book also contains information on the global market of the burgeoning organic sector, the latest developments in organic certification, standards and regulations, and insights into current status and emerging trends for organic agriculture by continent from the world's foremost experts.For this edition, all statistical data and regional review chapters have been thoroughly updated. Completely new chapters on organic agriculture in the Pacific, on the International Task Force on Harmonization and Equivalence in Organic Agriculture and on organic aquaculture have been added.Published with IFOAM and FiBL

A handbook for organic landscaping and turf management for recreational and commercial properties, public spaces, parks and urban gardens. Can you manage the landscape of a golf course, city park, or corporate campus without synthetic fertilizers and toxic pesticides? Absolutely! Organic landscaping is not only possible on a large scale, but it also makes sense both economically and environmentally. It promotes healthy soils and plants, which require less water and sequester more carbon—a winning combination for both your bottom line and the planet’s fight against resource depletion and global warming. Organic programs on a commercial scale have enormous potential to make a difference in the quality of our environment, our use of fuels, and climate change. And as those who have already converted to organics have discovered, they also cost a lot less over the long term. Organic Management for the Professional is the first comprehensive guide to “going green” in large-scale landscaping. Nationally recognized organic gardening expert Howard Garrett, with associates John Ferguson and Mike Amaranthus, not only explains in detail how to manage projects with natural organic techniques, but also presents the material in clear, simple terms so that commercial and institutional property owners can understand what to ask of their landscape architects, contractors, growers, and maintenance people. They give detailed, proven instructions for the key components of organic landscaping—soil building, correct planting techniques, fertilizing, pest control, compost, and mulch. Then they show how to apply these organic methods in large-scale landscaping, commercial growing, such as orchards, tree farms, nurseries, and greenhouse operations, and recreational properties such as sports fields and parks.

George Orwell, author of 1984, worked for the British Broadcasting Corporation for two years. Reflecting on his experience at the BBC, Orwell said, “Its atmosphere is something halfway between a girls’ school and a lunatic asylum and all we are doing at present is useless, or slightly worse than useless.” Many decades later, the BBC is exactly the same. How should we describe the places developing new A.I.? Halfway between Comic Con and a lunatic asylum? People are transfixed by Artificial Intelligence (A.I.). They have forgotten the power of Organic Intelligence (O.I.). Humans became masters of the world and landed men on the moon because of O.I. It was O.I. that thought up A.I. And even greater wonders are possible. Each of us has an unconscious mind with O.I. potentialities barely guessed at. The unconscious is the supreme terra incognita. What lies at the end of that land is the domain of gods, reachable by Bifröst, the sublime rainbow bridge. Discover the Creative Mind, the supra-liminal mind, the subliminal mind, the subjective mind, the bicameral mind. Did the gods once speak directly to us? Find out about synaptic pruning, the triune brain, the evolutionary theories of Lamarck and Wallace. Are their theories superior to Darwinism? The refrigerator mother, the malignant narcissist, the lack of secure base, the mother complex, autism ... how does it all fit together? Ant trails, stem cells, neural nets. What’s it all about? Is the local body controlled by a non-local mind? What is the transmission theory of consciousness? Is the brain a transceiver or a bi-directional transduction device? Is it a filter for cosmic consciousness? Are telepathy and telekinesis possible? Follow the pheromone trail of the ants to Golgonooza, the City of the Imagination, where the Magic Mirror is kept. Mirror, mirror, on the wall, who is the smartest of all? Can we optimize the mind? Is the optimized mind none other than God? Who will pay the Ferryman? Will you always be trapped on the near side of the river? You’ll never make it to the Other Side. Come inside and discover how far from organic intelligence A.I. truly is. Discover how amazing your own mind is, both consciously and unconsciously. Orwell said, “But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.” If thought optimizes language, language can also optimize thought. Does “God” think in perfect language? Is that what perfect O.I. is?

This volume is the hardcopy version of the electronic manuscript, "Proceedings of the Organic Mathematics Workshop" held at Simon Fraser University in December 1995 (www.cecm.sfu.ca/organics). The book provides a fixed, easily referenced, and permanent version of what is otherwise an evolving document. Contained in this work is a collection of articles on experimental and computational mathematics contributed by leading mathematicians around the world. The papers span a variety of mathematical fields - from juggling to differential equations to prime number theory. The book also contains biographies and photos of the contributing mathematicians and an in-depth characterization of organic mathematics.

A “lively, comprehensive, and . . . definitive account of organic food’s rise” from a “first-rate business journalist” (Michael Pollan). Who would have thought that a natural food supermarket could have been a financial refuge from the dot-com bust? But it had. Sales of organic food had shot up about 20 percent per year since 1990, reaching $11 billion by 2003 . . . Whole Foods managed to sidestep that fray by focusing on, well, people like me. Organic food has become a juggernaut in an otherwise sluggish food industry, growing at twenty percent a year as products like organic ketchup and corn chips vie for shelf space with conventional comestibles. But what is organic food? Is it really better for you? Where did it come from, and why are so many of us buying it? Business writer Samuel Fromartz set out to get the story behind this surprising success after he noticed that his own food choices were changing with the times. In Organic, Inc., Fromartz traces organic food back to its anti-industrial origins more than a century ago. Then he follows it forward again, casting a spotlight on the innovators who created an alternative way of producing food that took root and grew beyond their wildest expectations. In the process he captures how the industry came to risk betraying the very ideals that drove its success in a classically complex case of free-market triumph.