Books on the topic 'Founder viruses'

In addition to grazing, another form of top-down control of microbes is lysis by viruses. Every organism in the biosphere is probably infected by at least one virus, but the most common viruses are thought to be those that infect bacteria. Viruses come in many varieties, but the simplest is a form of nucleic acid wrapped in a protein coat. The form of nucleic acid can be virtually any type of RNA or DNA, single or double stranded. Few viruses in nature can be identified by traditional methods because their hosts cannot be grown in the laboratory. Direct count methods have found that viruses are very abundant, being about ten-fold more abundant than bacteria, but the ratio of viruses to bacteria varies greatly. Viruses are thought to account for about 50% of bacterial mortality but the percentage varies from zero to 100%, depending on the environment and time. In addition to viruses of bacteria and cyanobacteria, microbial ecologists have examined viruses of algae and the possibility that viral lysis ends phytoplankton blooms. Viruses infecting fungi do not appear to lyse their host and are transmitted from one fungus to another without being released into the external environment. While viral lysis and grazing are both top-down controls on microbial growth, they differ in several crucial respects. Unlike grazers, which often completely oxidize prey organic material to carbon dioxide and inorganic nutrients, viral lysis releases the organic material from hosts more or less without modification. Perhaps even more important, viruses may facilitate the exchange of genetic material from one host to another. Metagenomic approaches have been used to explore viral diversity and the dynamics of virus communities in natural environments.

The focus of this chapter is an examination of the diversity of living organisms found within urban environments, both inside and outside buildings. The discussion commences with prions and viruses before moving on to consider micro-organisms, plants, and animals. Prions and viruses cause disease in plants and animals, including humans. Micro-organisms are ubiquitous and are found in great numbers throughout urban environments. New technologies are providing new insights into their diversity. Plants may be found inside buildings as well as in gardens and other green spaces. The final sections of the chapter offer a discussion of the diversity of animals that live in urban areas for part or all of their life cycle. Examples of the diversity of life in urban environments are presented throughout, including native and non-native species, those that are benign and deadly, and the common and the rare.

Hand washing is the main subject of this chapter. The importance of hand hygiene cannot be too strongly emphasized. How infections occur and the chain of infection are described. Important organisms such as HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, vancomycin-resistant Enterococcus (VRE), methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA), and hepatitis viruses are all included. What to do about needlestick injuries, using the N95 mask, and information about recent advances in hand hygiene using alcohol are all to be found here.

This book consists of stories about what the foreigners living in China saw during the epidemic. In the book, the authors describe the situation of the epidemic and the dedication of the government and front-line medical personnel from their perspectives. They expressed the thoughts of shared human future with simplest and warmest words. This book aims to show the public an objective and true situation of China’s fight against COVID-19. This book is published jointly by Global Century Press (GCP) and Jiangxi Education Publishing House (JXEPH). GCP is a UK-based publisher dedicated to publishing social scientific and humanities academic and popular books bilingually in a global context. Founded in 1985, JXEPH is one of China’s leading education publishing houses. JXEPH is familiar to millions through a diverse publishing program that includes scholarly works in all academic disciplines, school and college textbooks, workbooks, materials for teaching Chinese as a foreign language, dictionaries and reference books, literary works, children’s books and periodicals.

Pests, Diseases and Beneficials helps gardeners to identify and deal with those common insects and small animals (such as bugs, beetles, caterpillars, thrips and mites) that are found in every Australian garden.
 It offers clear descriptions and full colour images to aid in identifying insects or other organisms, and provides useful advice on how to recognise and treat problems. The book also covers feeding habits, life cycles and insect biology.
 Based on the 1980 book Friends and Foes of Australian Gardens, this new work has been revised and expanded to include general garden situations as well as Australian native plants, and provides further information on plant diseases, harmless and beneficial fungi, bacteria and viruses, physiological disorders and problems caused by horticultural mismanagement.

Bacteria are the most frequent causes of severe sepsis and septic shock, while viruses, fungi, and parasites are implicated less often. Positive cultures are found in only 60% of cases; this may be the result of previous antibiotic therapy or inadequate sampling or testing. The etiology of sepsis is constantly changing; whereas Gram-negative organisms used to make up the majority of cases, Gram-positive bacteria now predominate. Sepsis due to fungal disease has also seen a dramatic rise. These changes may be explained by alterations in patient demographics, such as an increasingly elderly population with multiple comorbidities; an increased frequency of indwelling catheters or devices; and greater numbers of patients with immunosuppression as a result of disease or drug therapy. This chapter covers symptoms, demographics, diagnosis, investigation, prognosis, and treatment within the ITU environment.

Community structure refers to the taxonomic types of microbes and their relative abundance in an environment. This chapter focuses on bacteria with a few words about fungi; protists and viruses are discussed in Chapters 9 and 10. Traditional methods for identifying microbes rely on biochemical testing of phenotype observable in the laboratory. Even for cultivated microbes and larger organisms, the traditional, phenotype approach has been replaced by comparing sequences of specific genes, those for 16S rRNA (archaea and bacteria) or 18S rRNA (microbial eukaryotes). Cultivation-independent approaches based on 16S rRNA gene sequencing have revealed that natural microbial communities have a few abundant types and many rare ones. These organisms differ substantially from those that can be grown in the laboratory using cultivation-dependent approaches. The abundant types of microbes found in soils, freshwater lakes, and oceans all differ. Once thought to be confined to extreme habitats, Archaea are now known to occur everywhere, but are particularly abundant in the deep ocean, where they make up as much as 50% of the total microbial abundance. Dispersal of bacteria and other small microbes is thought to be easy, leading to the Bass Becking hypothesis that “everything is everywhere, but the environment selects.” Among several factors known to affect community structure, salinity and temperature are very important, as is pH especially in soils. In addition to bottom-up factors, both top-down factors, grazing and viral lysis, also shape community structure. According to the Kill the Winner hypothesis, viruses select for fast-growing types, allowing slower growing defensive specialists to survive. Cultivation-independent approaches indicate that fungi are more diverse than previously appreciated, but they are less diverse than bacteria, especially in aquatic habitats. The community structure of fungi is affected by many of the same factors shaping bacterial community structure, but the dispersal of fungi is more limited than that of bacteria. The chapter ends with a discussion about the relationship between community structure and biogeochemical processes. The value of community structure information varies with the process and the degree of metabolic redundancy among the community members for the process.

Primary liver cancer is one of the most commonly occurring cancers globally, and is the second most common cause of cancer death worldwide. There are two major histologic forms of primary liver cancer: hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) and cholangiocarcinoma. It is a rapidly and almost uniformly fatal disease, yet there is already sufficient knowledge about its major risk factors, many of which are modifiable, to make primary prevention effective. Primary liver cancer is one of the first common human cancer that was found to have an infectious etiology, with hepatitis B virus (HBV) and hepatitis C virus (HCV) for HCC, and parasitic liver flukes for cholangiocarcinoma. Obesity is emerging as an important risk factor, particularly in Western countries, where primary liver cancer rates appear to be increasing over time. A number of additional risk factors and potential preventive factors are considered in this chapter.

HIV-1 originated in the early 1920s in southern Cameroon and the Democratic Republic of Congo. From Africa, HIV rapidly spread in the late 1960s to the Caribbean and then the United States, Europe, and other areas of the world, leading to the global AIDS pandemic. Both HIV-1 and HIV-2 descended genetically from Simian immunodeficiency virus via cross-species transmission. HIV-1 group M was the first lineage discovered and represents the pandemic form of the virus. Group M consists of nine viral subtypes (A–K), has a widespread distribution, and accounts for approximately 95% of all HIV-1 infections. HIV-2 was not discovered until 1986 and makes up approximately 3% of cases worldwide. It is found mainly in West Africa. The genetic diversity of HIV does not appear to significantly affect viral response to antiretroviral therapy. However, viral diversity continues to present challenges for the development of an effective HIV vaccine.

Rabies virus is epidemic in most parts of the world. It can replicate in all warm-blooded animals in which it causes a devastating neurological illness, which almost invariably results in death. Rabies is a disease of animals and human infection is a ‘spillover’ event occurring most commonly following a bite from an infected dog. Infection is seen in different patterns; rabies with little or no wildlife involvement, sometimes known as urban or street rabies, or in the wildlife population with spillover into domesticated animals (sylvatic).Eleven distinct species of lyssavirus are now recognized: species 1 is the most common strain found predominately in terrestrial animals. Species 2-7 are found in bat species with the exception of Mokola virus (species 4). Despite the availability of effective vaccines significant mortality still occurs, mostly in the tropics. The majority of rabies free countries are islands which are able to remain rabies free by import controls. Effective animal vaccines are available and dog rabies is well controlled in most parts of the developed world with dog vaccination. However, it remains an intractable problem in many countries in Asia and Africa due to lack of infrastructure, cost of vaccines and difficulty to control dog population. In recent years progress in controlling wildlife rabies has been achieved in west Europe using vaccine in bait, which offers promise for other regions with complex epidemiology.

The primary goal of therapy is to prevent HIV-associated morbidity and mortality. In addition to the dramatic decline in HIV-related illness and death that has been observed as a result of the introduction and expansion of combination antiretroviral therapy, evidence is emerging that uncontrolled HIV replication also has a deleterious impact on conditions that are not conventionally associated with immune deficiency. These conditions include cardiovascular disease, kidney disease, liver disease, neurologic complications, and malignancy. Studies have found an independent association between cumulative exposure to replicating virus over time and mortality. Emerging data also increasingly support the earlier use of ART.

Urban environments are characterized by the density of buildings and elements of a number of infrastructures that support urban residents in their daily life. These built elements and the activities that take place within towns and cities create a distinctive climate and increase air, water, and soil pollution. Within this context the elements of the natural environment that either are residual areas representative of the pre-urbanized area or are created by people contain distinctive floral and faunal communities that do not exist in the wild. The diverse prions, viruses, micro-organisms, plants, and animals that live there for all or part of their life cycle and their relationships with each other and with humans are illustrated with examples of diseases, parasites, and pests. Plants and animals are found inside as well as outside buildings. The roles of plants inside buildings and of domestic and companion animals are evaluated. Temporal and spatial distribution patterns of plants and animals living outside buildings are set out and generalizations are drawn, while exceptions are also discussed. The strategies used and adaptions (genotypic, phenotypic, and behavioural) adopted by plants and animals in face of the challenges presented by urban environments are explained. The final two chapters contain discussions of the impacts of urban environments on human biology and how humans might change these environments in order to address the illnesses that are characteristic of urbanites in the early twenty-first century.

Hepatitis B virus (HBV) has been causally linked to a variety of renal diseases, the most common being glomerular diseases and systemic autoimmune disease. Membranous nephropathy (MN) is the commonest HBV-associated glomerulonephritis (HBV-GN), followed by membranoproliferative glomerulonephritis (MPGN), mesangial proliferative glomerulonephritis, immunoglobulin (Ig)-A nephropathy, and focal segmental glomerulosclerosis (FSGS). Polyarteritis nodosa is a rare manifestation. The incidence of HBV-associated renal diseases seems to be decreasing with the introduction of vaccination programmes.HBV-MN is the most frequent cause of nephrotic syndrome in children in countries with high endemicity of HBV infection. The clinical course is usually benign in children with high rates of spontaneous remission rates and low risk of progression to renal failure. The prognosis is worse in adults. Of the systemic autoimmune disorders associated with HBV infection that involve the kidneys, the strongest link has been found with polyarteritis nodosa (PAN), a lesion that causes arteritis of medium-sized renal vessels. HBV-associated PAN (HBV-PAN) usually manifests in the first year after infection, and is clinically indistinguishable from classic PAN.Diagnosis of HBV-GN or -PAN is based on the clinical picture, histological findings, evidence of viral replication in serum and/or liver and detection of HBV antigens or DNA in the tissue. Besides deposition of immune complexes, other mechanisms such as virus-induced cytopathic damage have been proposed to explain the pathogenesis.HBV-GN and HBV-PAN appear to respond to antiviral treatment. Both show remission after HBeAg seroconversion. The available studies predominantly employed first-generation agents like interferon alpha and lamivudine, which showed suppression of viral replication and clinical remission of HBV-associated renal disease. Immunosuppressive therapy appears to be inevitable for the control of severe HBV-PAN and could be helpful in addition to antiviral treatment for cases of HBV-GN not responding clinically to antiviral treatment.

The Covid-19 pandemic is an ongoing disaster on a scale no one living can recall. Since the end of 2019, it is causing not only countless deaths and physical debility, but also extraordinary social disruption, changing every aspect of people’s working and social lives. As a consequence, in the wake of the virus has come a second wave of psychiatric consequences, mostly prominently anxiety, depression, and posttraumatic stress. This flood of illness and distress will likely continue at least until an effective vaccine is found and distributed and, even then, will leave psychic scars. How best to treat the slew of psychiatric suffering from such tragedy or, indeed, from any ongoing disaster? Interpersonal psychotherapy (IPT) is an evidence-based, time-limited, affect- and life event–focused psychotherapy, repeatedly tested in more than forty years of treatment research and shown to help patients with mood, anxiety, and trauma disorders. With adaptation to the particular current conditions, IPT appears an excellent fit for the strong feelings and symptoms arising from these horrific life events. his manual by Dr. John Markowitz, a leading IPT expert, equips therapists to treat the most common psychiatric consequences of the pandemic.

The advent of genome-wide association studies (GWAS) has been an exciting breakthrough in our understanding of the genetic aetiology of autoimmune diseases. Substantial overlap has been found in susceptibility genes across multiple diseases, from connective tissue diseases and rheumatoid arthritis (RA) to inflammatory bowel disease, coeliac disease, and psoriasis. Major technological advances now permit genotyping of millions of single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs). Group analysis of SNPs by haplotypes, aided by completion of the Hapmap project, has improved our ability to pinpoint causal genetic variants. International collaboration to pool large-scale cohorts of patients has enabled GWAS in systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE), systemic sclerosis and Behçet's disease, with studies in progress for ANCA-associated vasculitis. These 'hypothesis-free' studies have revealed many novel disease-associated genes. In both SLE and systemic sclerosis, identified genes map to known pathways including antigen presentation (MHC, TNFSF4), autoreactivity of B and T lymphocytes (BLK, BANK1), type I interferon production (STAT4, IRF5) and the NFκ‎B pathway (TNIP1). In SLE alone, additional genes appear to be involved in dysregulated apoptotic cell clearance (ITGAM, TREX1, C1q, C4) and recognition of immune complexes (FCGR2A, FCGR3B). Future developments include whole-genome sequencing to identify rare variants, and efforts to understand functional consequences of susceptibility genes. Putative environmental triggers for connective tissue diseases include infectious agents, especially Epstein-Barr virus; cigarette smoking; occupational exposure to toxins including silica; and low vitamin D, due to its immunomodulatory effects. Despite numerous studies looking at toxin exposure and connective tissue diseases, conclusive evidence is lacking, due to either rarity of exposure or rarity of disease.

Invasive species come in all sizes, from plant pathogens like the chestnut blight in eastern North America, to the red imported fire ant that has spread throughout the South, the predatory Indian mongoose now found in the Caribbean and Hawaii, and the huge Burmese python populating the Florida swamps. And while many invasive species are safe and even beneficial, the more harmful varieties cost the world economy billions of dollars annually, devastate agriculture, spread painful and even lethal diseases, and otherwise diminish our quality of life in myriad surprising ways. In Invasive Species: What Everyone Needs to Know, award-winning biologist Daniel Simberloff offers a wide-ranging and informative survey that sheds light on virtually every aspect of these biological invaders. Filled with case studies of an astonishing array of invasive species, the book covers such topics as how humans introduce these species-sometimes inadvertently, but often deliberately-the areas that have suffered the most biological invasions, the methods we use to keep our borders safe, the policies we currently have in place to manage these species, and future prospects for controlling their spread. An eminent ecologist, Simberloff analyzes the direct and indirect impacts of invasive species on various ecosystems, such as when non-native species out-compete native species for food or light, describes how invasive species (such as the Asian mosquito that is a vector for West Nile virus, itself an invasive species) transmit pathogens, and explains his acclaimed theory of "invasional meltdown" in which two or more introduced species combine to produce a far more devastating impact than any one of them would have caused alone. The book also discusses the more controversial issues surrounding invasive species and it concludes with suggested readings and a list of related web sites.

Any public debate about air pollution starts with the premise that air pollution cannot be good for you, so we should have less of it. However, it is much more difficult to determine how much is dangerous, and even more difficult to decide how much we are willing to pay for improvements in measured air pollution. Recent UK estimates suggest that fine particulate pollution causes about 6500 deaths per year, although it is not clear how many years of life are lost as a result. Some deaths may just be brought forward by a few days or weeks, while others may be truly premature. Globally, household pollution from cooking fuels may cause up to two million premature deaths per year in the developing world. The hazards of black smoke air pollution have been known since antiquity. The first descriptions of deaths caused by air pollution are those recorded after the eruption of Vesuvius in ad 79. In modern times, the infamous smogs of the early twentieth century in Belgium and London were clearly shown to trigger deaths in people with chronic bronchitis and heart disease. In mechanistic terms, black smoke and sulphur dioxide generated from industrial processes and domestic coal burning cause airway inflammation, exacerbation of chronic bronchitis, and consequent heart failure. Epidemiological analysis has confirmed that the deaths included both those who were likely to have died soon anyway and those who might well have survived for months or years if the pollution event had not occurred. Clean air legislation has dramatically reduced the levels of these traditional pollutants in the West, although these pollutants are still important in China, and smoke from solid cooking fuel continues to take a heavy toll amongst women in less developed parts of the world. New forms of air pollution have emerged, principally due to the increase in motor vehicle traffic since the 1950s. The combination of fine particulates and ground-level ozone causes ‘summer smogs’ which intensify over cities during summer periods of high barometric pressure. In Los Angeles and Mexico City, ozone concentrations commonly reach levels which are associated with adverse respiratory effects in normal and asthmatic subjects. Ozone directly affects the airways, causing reduced inspiratory capacity. This effect is more marked in patients with asthma and is clinically important, since epidemiological studies have found linear associations between ozone concentrations and admission rates for asthma and related respiratory diseases. Ozone induces an acute neutrophilic inflammatory response in both human and animal airways, together with release of chemokines (e.g. interleukin 8 and growth-related oncogene-alpha). Nitrogen oxides have less direct effect on human airways, but they increase the response to allergen challenge in patients with atopic asthma. Nitrogen oxide exposure also increases the risk of becoming ill after exposure to influenza. Alveolar macrophages are less able to inactivate influenza viruses and this leads to an increased probability of infection after experimental exposure to influenza. In the last two decades, major concerns have been raised about the effects of fine particulates. An association between fine particulate levels and cardiovascular and respiratory mortality and morbidity was first reported in 1993 and has since been confirmed in several other countries. Globally, about 90% of airborne particles are formed naturally, from sea spray, dust storms, volcanoes, and burning grass and forests. Human activity accounts for about 10% of aerosols (in terms of mass). This comes from transport, power stations, and various industrial processes. Diesel exhaust is the principal source of fine particulate pollution in Europe, while sea spray is the principal source in California, and agricultural activity is a major contributor in inland areas of the US. Dust storms are important sources in the Sahara, the Middle East, and parts of China. The mechanism of adverse health effects remains unclear but, unlike the case for ozone and nitrogen oxides, there is no safe threshold for the health effects of particulates. Since the 1990s, tax measures aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions have led to a rapid rise in the proportion of new cars with diesel engines. In the UK, this rose from 4% in 1990 to one-third of new cars in 2004 while, in France, over half of new vehicles have diesel engines. Diesel exhaust particles may increase the risk of sensitization to airborne allergens and cause airways inflammation both in vitro and in vivo. Extensive epidemiological work has confirmed that there is an association between increased exposure to environmental fine particulates and death from cardiovascular causes. Various mechanisms have been proposed: cardiac rhythm disturbance seems the most likely at present. It has also been proposed that high numbers of ultrafine particles may cause alveolar inflammation which then exacerbates preexisting cardiac and pulmonary disease. In support of this hypothesis, the metal content of ultrafine particles induces oxidative stress when alveolar macrophages are exposed to particles in vitro. While this is a plausible mechanism, in epidemiological studies it is difficult to separate the effects of ultrafine particles from those of other traffic-related pollutants.

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.