Most Popular Books by Stephen Levine

Quem gosta de meditar terá neste livro um grande aliado. Nele podem ser encontradas orientações para todos os tipos de meditações, desde um texto singelo que nos mobiliza internamente para a tranqüilidade, passando por meditações mais profundas, de cura, até as leituras adequadas para o momento da morte. Um excelente guia, tanto para profissionais como para praticantes, experientes ou não.

A 95 year old mystery solved, well maybe. It is a clear, peaceful day when a British cargo vessel, the Asiatic Prince, departs America on a regular trip to Japan. She was carrying general cargo and valuable bullion. Eight days later, she sends out a distress call, and a rescue mission begins. The search cannot find any trace of the ship, so the rumours start. There were many reports in newspapers worldwide speculating the fate of the ship, her crew, and the bullion. Was there a mutiny, or did pirates attack the ship? There were suggestions that a meteorite or a tidal wave hit her. After extensive commercial and navy craft searches, no trace of the vessel or her crew has been found. The ship''s fate is still a mystery, but we try to bring an up- to-date perspective on what occurred on that fateful day, 24 March 1928.

A description of the towns in the county of Sussex with history and details of local government and the setting up of the town halls and police service.

On a quiet Autumn evening in October 1968, the peace was broken by a large explosion at sea. Two more explosions followed it. The residents of the quiet seaside town of Eastbourne and other nearby towns rushed into the streets to see what had caused this disturbance. An oil tanker travelling down the English Channel was the cause of all this excitement. Fishing boats, tugs and a Royal Navy frigate all rushed to the aid of the vessel in distress. Our story recounts the events day by day of the crew''s rescue and the fight against the raging fire. After the tragedy of the Torrey Canyon the previous year, and the disastrous pollution of the sea and beaches in Cornwall, this was of great concern in the town. Local firefighters with no experience in fighting large fires at sea and two tugs with firefighting equipment managed to extinguish the blaze, but they could not save the tanker. We tell the story of the battle of those brave men.

Great Britain was at war with France after the breakdown of the Treaty of Amiens in 1803. Napoleon was ravishing Europe and there was great concern about an invasion across the English Channel. The authorities decided that they needed additional defences and a new department was setup by the War Office. They considered the south coast most vulnerable and began a large and expensive program of barrack building.This is a story about one such infantry barrack built in a small town in Sussex. I tell details of the setting up of the Barrack Master''s Office and the building of the barrack. There is information about the coming and goings of the many regiments that visited Hailsham while the barrack was maintained. After the defeat of Napoleon many barracks along the southern counties were closed.This is a record of all the regiments that visited along with church burial records that have survived. Soldiers were dying of disease, accidents, fights and the occasional suicide. Life was very difficult for the regular soldier.

Alteration of savanna systems is driven by a wide range of natural and anthropogenic disturbance regimes. This research investigates seasonal trends in vegetation cover and productivity within central Texas environments. Through a combined methodological approach that utilizes vegetation transect fieldwork and satellite imagery analysis, this project provides insight into the influence of management strategies on savanna vegetation. Both a protected area and privately owned land were assessed in order to determine differences between the management strategies employed. Multiple spatial and temporal analysis approaches were employed to better understand vegetation patterning and function within central Texas’ savanna environments. Regression analysis of woody vegetation structural canopy data resulted in significant relationships existing between the presence of graminoid ground cover and the use of prescribed burn management. Time-series analysis of vegetation productivity using a remotely-sensed vegetation index provided insight into the influence of variable precipitation trends and drought conditions on this system. A comparison of functional group diversity and species diversity also investigated the ability of such metrics to predict productivity in these systems, ultimately leading to the suggestion of a combined approach. Lastly, remotely-sensed vegetation indices were included with species distribution modeling of central Texas’ golden-cheeked warblers, allowing for an investigation into strategies to better identify suitable habitats. These findings will inform land management strategies for land owners, land managers, and park managers for a variety of goals including support of grazing capacity, reduction of encroachment, reduction of invasive species, and habitat provision for key species.

Extensive land use change and global climate change present major threats to native ecosystems due to shifts in species ranges and the alteration of species assemblages through non-native species introductions. The conservation of these landscapes and associated biodiversity is pertinent and requires comprehensive biogeographic and ecological analyses that identify past, present, and future patterns of species distributions and ecosystem function. With an ever-increasing amount of spatial data related to species occurrences available through online citizen science platforms, the number and types of questions that can be answered related to conservation biogeography are rapidly expanding. However, spatial and taxonomic biases are known to exist in these datasets and the implementation of such data requires proper consideration. The application of these opportunistic datasets to conservation planning is further complicated by issues of access in settings with public/private land divides. The conceptual approach taken for this dissertation pulls from multiple subfields of environmental geography in order to adequately encapsulate the challenges inherent to local and regional scale conservation research and implementation. The assessment of a public/private landscape in the Texas Hill Country via satellite imagery and in situ vegetation surveys provides an example of spatially- and temporally- dynamic landscape assessment in a heterogeneous land tenure setting. The included spatial analyses of citizen science data investigate socioeconomic and demographic patterns in opportunistic species datasets and inform approaches to accounting for inherent spatial and taxonomic gaps in these data using the monarch butterfly (Danaus plexxipus) as a baseline species of analysis. Lastly, these studies are bridged together by an investigation of novel landscapes in Texas’ Blackland Prairies and the influence of exotic game ranching across Texas with discussion of the impacts of novel species assemblages and habitat fragmentation. The collected discussions and conclusions in this dissertation support recommendations for land managers and landowners and provide insight for conservation biogeographers working across spatially- and temporally- heterogeneous land tenure settings