A Book of Rather Strange Animals

From the creator of the hugely popular @StrangeAnimals on Twitter comes A Book of Rather Strange Animals – a collection of one hundred remarkable animal specimens from around the world. With fascinating descriptions of nasty feeding habits, bizarre mating rituals and shocking defence mechanisms, you will marvel at both the splendour and gruesomeness of nature.

Meet the lizard that shoots blood from its eyes, the isopod that replaces the tongues of fish, the bug that stacks the corpses of ants on its back and the amphibian that looks like a penis.

Come and discover the world’s most peculiar species!

Indigenous Knowledge on Traditional Upland Rice Farming in Sierra Leone

“Learning can be acquired by reading books, but the much more necessary learning, the knowledge of the world, is only to be acquired by reading men, and studying all the various facets of them.” (Phillip Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield).

Indigenous Knowledge in Traditional Upland Rice Farming is a result of living and studying the rice farmers in the southern region of Sierra Leone, West Africa, over years of extension and rural development work. It is a result of years of effort trying to unearth how farmers generate and share information from their knowledge which remained unknown to professionals who attempt intervention projects aimed at addressing the constraints the farmers faced.

These ventures often fail to get the desired results with a waste of time and resources due to the lack of knowledge and understanding on the underpinning knowledge in a system they want to correct. It gives an insight into this farming system in a way that can be applicable to other farming systems in the country and elsewhere around the world. Fortunately, the information collected into this book was done before the rebel war in Sierra Leone, which claimed the lives of the majority of the seasoned and knowledgeable farmers. There is currently a drive by the government of Sierra Leone to encourage entrepreneurship in agribusiness around the country to improve agriculture and food production, in order to alleviate the problem of food shortages in the country.

This book offers an opportunity for those with the capital to grasp the fundamental principles underlying the practices in the farming system, the major source of food production in the country, as an insurance for their capital investments. This book can be translated into the local languages for the adult education of young farmers in the country who have not had the opportunity to have learned from their parents and older farmers through the method of oral traditional learning, as a result of the decade of rebel war which may have claimed their lives.

Climate Change And The Cargo Cult

Climate Change is a major threat to our way of life, and requires urgent political action to remedy its many threats, but is it a symptom rather than the disease? This book argues that the problem lies deep in our commitment to the quest for ever increasing economic growth. At some time in the 1970s the Western World passed a point of economic satiety beyond which further economic growth was of little benefit, and indeed was counter-productive, to living the good life.  We must therefore seek a better understanding of our environment and of what constitutes genuine wealth. Life without the frenetic economic activity and culture of selfish possession that drives the modern economy can indeed be more humane, more pleasant and more meaningful than what we have today , but to reach it will require a major re-evaluation of what is important in business, politics and culture.