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Firstly, this article is not intended to be an exhaustive resource on the subject, nor is it aimed at corporate businesses whose business models can be very complex and take years to put in place. The idea here is that I will introduce the basic idea of business modelling to those unacquainted with the process, so that they can look at their business and consider their business model (if it even exists) and possibly review things a little to get back into shape.
So what do you understand by the word 'model' apart from fashion and plastic aeroplanes, a model comprises of a structure of components, that when put together, make the total picture, (so actually the plane metaphor might not be so far out). When we apply the word 'model' to your business, we are in this case looking at the various components of the business that will add value to your customers, hence creating the demand for your products and services in the marketplace.
Some of what you will cover as a business model may be found in your initial business plan (if you ever had one) but a business model is not the same as a business plan. A business model represents the DNA of your business. It is the blueprint of what will make your business work and deliver the returns you want, I assume here that most people are in business to make a good lifestyle for themselves, which will come from the profits derived from their ventures into the world of business.
So the basics of your business model will look at what is your business doing? A definitive question and deceptively simple, but many companies don't actually have this locked down. What is your business doing? Is one question and there will be an answer to that most people will readily be able to answer, but the next question, far more powerful, is what do you WANT your business to be doing?
Now you are in Business Model territory, as you are defining what you WANT to do and how our business will work in the most effective way to get there.
So now you have the starting point for your business model, next you need to figure out the process of how your business will make as much money for the least expenditure of resources in terms of your time, effort, travel, purchases, financial input, as possible. A bad business model is typified in small business, (and even large businesses to some degree) by the business owner effectively running around like a headless chicken, and the staff doing the same, trying to keep customers happy, then looking at their bank balance and realising forlornly, this isn't working!! And this can be ultimately placed at the door of a faulty business model.
So now you have a laser beam vision of what you WANT to do, you need to look at the basic dynamics of your business: How you will turn your available time and resources into a good return on your investment.
A really good place to start is with your pricing, pricing is probably one of the biggest areas that people get wrong. When you set your prices too low, and your effort and resources to get those products and services to market are too high, you have got it wrong. Setting the wrong price means your business is not going to be scalable, i.e. you cannot grow and make any real money as you have no cash left over in the business. So pricing is a good area to start putting together your business model.
Pricing can be a complex area, but the two things that affect it most are, firstly, what your customers are willing to pay? And secondly, how much you need to charge to make your business profitable.
So now we have an idea of what we want to charge, we now need to look at how we will add value through our products and services, in the most efficient manner so we take as much of that money we charge for ourselves, obviously allowing putting some money back into the business to create a cash reserve.
Time is the next consideration, very importantly, how much does your time and that of your staff cost? Actually work out how much that time is worth in terms of a cash value. Work out how much travel you are doing, (or if just starting out, how much you think you will be doing), to service your business?
A good business model will be one where your business has scalability built in, this simply means that the business CAN grow, beyond simply yours and your staff's available time, so you are not at a ceiling point and you can grow, (if that is what you want).
Even if you run a business and decide you are happy with it being small and keeping it that way, you will almost certainly want to have comfort in the use of your time, so that you are not running around with no time left and not enough reward.
The next area is buying. What are you spending money on and how much are you paying relative to how much you are making? A good business model will be one where you have aggressively (in the nicest way) sought the best prices so you can make a good profit, allowing for delivery charges etc. Look at this area and make sure it works, that is modelling, simulating the scenarios so you can see it all working.
The last area I will ask you to consider, is what you are personally taking out of the business? Many business owners are taking a little too much from their businesses and that can extend to the salaries and benefits extended to their staff. I am all in favour of having a highly dedicated workforce, and this should rightly be rewarded, but control is so important here as getting it wrong can be difficult to reverse once it is allowed to get out of control.
Your business model MUST be able to sustain the money you are taking out of the business, as mentioned, the idea should be that the business grows a surplus of cash, so that you are well placed for any opportunities that may require funding, or for overcoming any short term adversity.
In summary then, your business model is the DNA of how you WANT your business to work for you. It is the simulation of how it will work and an overview of how you will maximise your return for your time, effort and financial investment.
A simple business model can usually fit on the back of a postcard, it summarises the main cornerstones of your success formula, most importantly, you CAN change your model along the way. Very few get it 100% right first time every time, and it's actually fun working on what will ultimately make you successful and hopefully give you a very good lifestyle.
Let me know how it goes for you.
Phil Ashforth is a UK based Marketing Consultant, working with businesses both nationally and internationally on a wide range of marketing issues and driving many marketing projects forward for both corporate and SME companies.


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Race Criticism of "The Congo"
Initial charges, rebuttal, and countercharges over racial representation in Lindsay's poetry, featuring W. E. B. Du Bois, Lindsay, and NAACP chair Joel Spingarn. Subsequent criticism focusing on "The Congo": e.g. Aldon Nielsen, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, and Susan Gubar.
Racial representation in "The Congo" and in Lindsay's work generally, far from being settled issues, remain matters for critical controversy and debate. This I have argued, in brief, under the heading LINDSAY AND RACISM. Included below are documents from the initial exchanges between Lindsay and The Crisis--wherein the controversy involves other poems by Lindsay in addition to "The Congo"--and a range of current critical approaches to racial representation in "The Congo."
Comment by W. E. B. Du Bois, from "The Looking Glass: Literature," The Crisis 12.4 (Aug. 1916): 182:
Mr. Vachel Lindsay knows two things, and two things only, about Negroes: The beautiful rhythm of their music and the ugly side of their drunkards and outcasts. From this poverty of material he tries now and then to make a contribution to Negro literature. It goes without saying that he only partly succeeds. His "Booker Washington Trilogy," published in Poetry, shows his defects as well as his genius. The first part is a Negro sermon on "Simon Legree," ending:
They are playing poker and taking naps,
And old Legree is fat and fine;
He eats the fire, he drinks the wine--
Blood and burning turpentine--
Down, down with the Devil.
The second part is "John Brown":
I've been to Palestine.
What did you see in Palestine?
Old John Brown,
Old John Brown.
And there he sits
To judge the world.
His hunting-dogs
At his feet are curled.
His eyes half-closed,
But John Brown sees
The ends of the earth,
The Day of Doom.
And his shotgun lies
Across his knees--
Old John Brown,
Old John Brown.
The last of the Trilogy, "King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba," rises to a weird beauty:
King Solomon he kept the Sabbath holy,
And spoke with tongues in prophet-words so mighty--
We stamped and whirled and wept and shouted, "Glory!"
We were his people.
Mr. Lindsay explains:
Ideas are raging through the brains of even the duskiest of the Negro leaders, and one can handle for such an audience almost any large thought he thinks he understands. He can put it into Negro poetry, I maintain, if he is man enough, and still have it Negro poetry. But he must keep his manner bright-colored, full-throated, relaxed and tropical. By manner I do not mean dialect. There are innumerable Pullman porters who speak English in a close approach to the white man's way. But their thoughts and fancies are straight from the jungle.
All of which is well meant, but some of it is nonsense. Mr. Lindsay knows little of the Negro, and that little is dangerous.
Letter from Lindsay to Joel Spingarn, chairman of the board of directors of the NAACP; "Editorial: A Letter and an Answer," The Crisis 13.3 (Jan. 1917): 113-14:
Springfield, Ill., Nov. 2, 1916.
My Dear Mr. Spingarn:
Last August when I was away and my mail was being dammed up here in Springfield your invitation to the Amenia conference arrived. [The Amenia conference, held in August 1916, was organized by the N.A.A.C.P. to discuss matters of importance to the black civil rights movement; about 200 invitations were issued to black and white leaders in the movement.] Since then I have let everything go for a new book. Pardon me. My mail gets heavier every day and I can not yet afford a stenographer.
I send my belated thanks, being at last able to get into my mail again. Be sure I am with you in spirit. My "Congo" and "Booker T. Washington Trilogy" have both been denounced by the Colored people for reasons that I cannot fathom. As far as I can see, they have not taken the trouble to read them through. The third section of "The Congo" is certainly as hopeful as any human being dare to be in regard to any race, and the "John Brown" is certainly not an unsympathetic poem; and "King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba" is a prophesy of a colored Utopia. Yet The Crisis took the trouble to skin me not long ago. This in the face of the fact that they had published with great approval my story of the Golden-Faced People in The Crisis, November 1914. That is the index to all subsequent work.
I presume some of the men in your movement who have an intelligent angle on my intentions are responsible for my invitation to the Amenia Conference. When two or three of them get together sometime, I wish they would re-read "The Congo" (see volume of that name), "The Booker T. Washington Trilogy," in Poetry, A Magazine of Verse (543 Cass Street, Chicago), June, 1916, and also "The Crisis" article aforesaid. I would like to draw your attention also to pages 47 and 48 in the "Art of the Moving Picture," where I hae discussed the Reverend Thomas Dixon [whose novels celebrating the Ku Klux Klan provided the story for D. W. Griffith's infamous film The Birth of a Nation].
And after you have read this letter I would appreciate it if you will send it to the editor of the Crisis to be printed, if he cares to do so. Personally, Mr. Dubois has been most courteous, but I cannot understand his editorial attitude. Add a word to this letter if you care to do so.
Very sincerely
From Joel Spingarn to Lindsay, appearing immediately thereafter in "Editorial: A Letter and an Answer," The Crisis 13.3 (Jan. 1917): 114:
Amenia, N. Y., Nov. 6, 1916.
My dear Mr. Lindsay:
I wish you had been able to attend the Amenia Conference, and perhaps then you would have understood the difference between a poet's pageantry and a people's despair.
No colored man doubts your good intentions, but many of them doubt your understanding of their hopes. You look about you and see a black world full of a strange beauty different from that of the white world; they look about them and see other men with exactly the same feelings and desires who refuse to recognize the resemblance. You look forward to a colored Utopia separate and different from the hope of the white man; they have only one overwhelming desire, and that is to share in a common civilization in which all distinctions of race are blurred (or forgotten) by common aspiration and common labors.
Your poetry is wonderfully beautiful, and the poems on black men and women are no less beautiful than the rest. How can we fail to be grateful for all this beauty? But somehow we feel (and I say "we" because in this I share the feelings of the colored race), somehow we feel that you do not write about colored humanity as you write about white humanity. We remember your poem on "John Altgeld" (to mention only one), and realize that your heart goes out to--"the widow bereft of her crust, and the boy without youth, / The mocked and the scorned and the wounded, the lame and the poor"[--]but somehow we feel that for you, black men and women are not like others who have been mocked and scorned and wounded, but beings a little different from other sufferers who do not share the same ancestry and the same color of skin.
Faithfully yours,
J. E. Spingarn.
Aldon Nielsen, Reading Race: White American Poets and the Racial Discourse in the Twentieth Century, 30-32:
Vachel Lindsay had the experience common to many white Americans of his era of hearing several sides of America's racial controversy expounded at home from his earliest years. His father put forward the view that Lincoln was a reprobate and that Harriet Beecher Stowe's book appealed only to infidels, while his mother, though possessed of "many Southern ideas was all for Lincoln." Looking back upon this experience in "An Autobiographical Foreword" to his Collected Poems, Lindsay observes that "Mason and Dixon's line runs straight through our house in Springfield still, and straight through my heart" (23). Though it is true that Lindsay's early life brought him into contact with a greater variety of black people than did Gertrude Stein's, it is especially significant for this inquiry that when asked by "elegant ladies" how he had acquired his knowledge of the Negro, he begins his response with a purely literary source. He remembers clearly that his father used to read to the children from Uncle Remus, and so, even before Lindsay began to have significant contacts with blacks, he was internalizing a primarily linguistic structure of thought about them. All his future experiences would be filtered through a metaphorical veil, and the nonwhite could speak to him only through the concocted idioms of Joel Chandler Harris.
Paul H. Gray, "Performance and the Bardic Ambition of Vachel Lindsay," 222:
Part of the difficulty with "The Congo" lies in such descriptions of blacks as "Fat black bucks," "Barrel-house kings," and "The cake-walk royalty." These terms and a good many others now taken as signs of bigotry came, at the time "The Congo" was being written (1913), not from racists, but from brilliant and sophisticated black artists, as the following lyrics from Scott Joplin's "The Rag Time Dance" illustrate:
I attended a ball last Thursday night
Given by the dark town swells.
Every coon came out in full dress alright
and the girls were society belles.
The hall was illuminated by electric lights
It certainly was a sight to see.
So many colored folks there without a razor fight
'Twas a great surprise to me.
T. R. Hummer, "Laughed Off: Canon, Kharakter, and the Dismissal of Vachel Lindsay," 66-67:
"The Congo" is surely well-intentioned, meant as a compliment to what Lindsay, and America, would have perceived as the "primitive" energy of African culture. Still, it is poetry in blackface. At the heart of the Higher Vaudeville one can discern the Romantic minstrel as a literary clone of Mr. Bones . . . .
"The Congo" obviously must be read not as about Africa but as a projection of America--just as a dream says everything about the dreamer and nothing about the subject of the dream. If Lindsay's projections of Africans and African-Americans--and of Asians, and of women--remain cartoons, this fact speaks to the limitation of his underlying psycho-sprititual theory about the nature of poetry and of America. All this could be written off, as Elizabeth Hardwick writes it off, as provincialism, the "innocence" of a local and limited point of view, symptomatic of Lindsay's allegiance to what he called the "New Localism," linked to his "Gospel of Beauty." But it may also be an effect of the arrogance of the American sovereign self, and Lindsay's unquestioning championing thereof. At root, Lindsay's impetus is religious, however much it pretends here and there to be purely aesthetic, merely a show. And his religion is, of course, the typically American, Emersonian religion of the divine self and its sacred imagination, whose visions--when they present themselves as its purest products and not as overtly appropriative political gestures--must be, ipso facto, powerful, authoritative, true.
Rachel Blau DuPlessis, "'HOO, HOO, HOO': Some Episodes in the Construction of Modern Whiteness," 674-75:
However much Lindsay insisted that "the third section of the Congo is certainly as hopeful as any human being dare to be in regard to any race," the poem reads differently. Through its repetitious chant and its hypermelodramatic final lines (with their final "boo"), the poem subverts its stated argument and "intellectual" claim. The argument says Africa and its "jungles" will be transfigured and civilized with messianic imperialism. But the rhythm says that the menace and luring evil of Africa can never be extirpated. Blacks embody the primitive forces of sexuality and violence. Whether viewed as joyous sensual expressivity, the menace of evil powers, or both, these forces are uneradicable, essentialized, in the black body: "A Negro at the North Pole is Congo to the marrow of his bones, and believe me more luxurious than Assurbanipal and more fun than a goat" (Letters, 188). In Linday the very rhythms and rhetorics of poetry have been harnessed to uphold the formation of whiteness.
According to Lindsay, "the refrain stands for the ill fate and sinister power of Africa from the beginning" (Letters, 90). The popular appeal of the poem may well lie in its reduction of blacks to a repetitive beat, its judgmental participation in primitivist behavior that entertains whites by arousing them with the rhythms to which they feel superior. Lindsay argues that Africans and blacks are permanently and essentially the hoo-doo of the family of man, bringing the curse of primitive menace to everything.
Susan Gubar, Racechanges: White Skin, Black Face in American Culture, 139, 140-42:
Throughout the twentieth century, American, expatriate, and British poets used standard English inflected by rhythms marked as African in works overtly complicitous with brutal domination while others exploited African-American dialect to deplore such domination. Though they vary in their ideological designs and in their linguistic experimentation, early and later deployments of African rhythms, on the one hand, signal nostalgia for the oral, the originatory, the primordial, the real, the genuine; on the other hand, they denote white writers' consciousness that they are using not an undiluted but a minstrel-speak version of black talk that melds the genuine to the ersatz, generating a spurious speech to which the white imagination will perpetually be condemned. Among practitioners of what I am calling the Boomlay BOOM (ersatz African rhythms produced with standard English lexicons), Vachel Lindsay, Edith Sitwell, and T. S. Eliot illuminate the dynamics of imperialist nostalgia and amnesia even as they demonstrate the major role racial ventriloquism played in poetic experimentation. Despite their assaults on the culture and identity of black people, the reader's attention is deflected onto the taboo racechanges with which these racial ventriloquists flirt.
* * * *
The text of "The Congo"--with its stereotypically black rhythms glossed by directorial reading instructions in the prose marginalia--recalls Bakhtin's description of the clash between representing discourses that demolish represented languages in "parodic stylization." From this perspective, the onomatopoetic and phatic words, syncopation, repetition, and percussive delivery of "The Congo" effectively ridicule and condemn the religious traditions and aesthetic styles identified as African and African-American. But the listeners who laughed at Lindsay's first performance were probably not tickled so much by its racism as by his flamboyantly weird delivery, just as those who made it his signature act were less enthralled by its message, more by the frenzied rolling of his eyes, the shooting of his hands, the rising of his voice to a whoop or a yelp and its falling to a whisper. Written accounts of Lindsay's impassioned performances as well as extant recordings make him sound like a versifying Al Jolson. Curiously, too, the enormous popularity of the poem seemed to punish Lindsy for his cross-racial impersonation by forcing him repeatedly to stand in the place of the Other: Determined not to accede to the public's demands, he explained, "I will not be a slave to my yesterdays'" (Ruggles 412).
"People destroy their environment, and then they worship nature": If we apply the logic of [Renato] Rosald's thinking about imperialist nostalgia to modernist heteroglossia, it becomes clear that Lindsay demonizes African Americans and then reveres their animated vitality (which he himself stages), for the effect of "The Congo" depends less on its genocidal plot and more on the verbal exuberance of its "high density of 'sound effects'" derived from African and African-American folk conventions. Pounding and singing, laughing and beating, preaching and prancing are the activities attributed within the poem to blacks but actually undertaken by the white performer. . . .
It does seem as if the topic of the poem gave Lindsay and his audience permission to engage with verbal intensity not just in "romantic racism" or "slumming in slang" but also in the mimetic rivalry of an incantory chanting, singing, hymning, humming, slapping, drumming. All of "The Congo"'s lines aspire to the insistent, nonsensical condition of "Boomlay, boomlay, boomlay, BOOM." That is, the sense of the language is drained away by the repetition of sounds and words, by the alliteration, rhyme, and especially the preeminence of a rhythm so insistent it taps, claps, or drums through words. Phonetic similarity replaces semantic significance, as the ethnocentric effort to dethrone the African spiritual rituals of Mumbo Jumbo boomerangs to jettison the Western poet into his own mumbo jumbo of gibberish. Understandably, then, the strong beat and syncopation of Linday's Higher Vaudeville" led Edgar Lee Masters to refer to "The Congo" as "Beethoven jazz" (324). Its prose gloss turns the text into a score, explaining to actor-chanters the speed, intonation, pitch, pausing, accents, emphasis, tone, emotion, and song tunes advisable for an effective performance. "With a touch of negro dialect and as rapidly as possible toward the end," one such stage direction reads.
Yet a "touch of negro dialect" that can be turned on, then turned off proves how consciously Lindsay wrote as a white for whites. That Linday understood himself to be involved in a less than authentic "Study of the Negro Race"--his subtitle to the poem and purported purpose in composing it--finds evidence throughout. First "Their" savagery, "Their" spirits, and "Their" religion: The pronoun of the section titles illustrates his acknowledged distance from the race he attempts to delineate. Second, the drunken barrel-house kings with their silk umbrellas and the cake-walking royalty would be instantly recognizable types of the minstrel dandy. Third, Lindsay concedes that he and other whites have manipulated black representation: Ancient African voo-doo becomes "A roaring, epic, rag-time tune," a product of the contemporary Western imagination; the "negro fairyland" inhabited by the cake-walkers apears by "A minstrel river." Finally, it is possible to read the end of the poem as an admission that white efforts to control black representation will be doomed to failure. Although the conclusion of "The Congo" emphatically sttates that the god of Africa is dead, a far-away vulture speaks the last lines of the poem: "Mumbo-Jumbo will hoo-doo you. / Mumbo . . . Jumbo . . . will . . . hoo-doo . . . you." To be recited in a "penetrating, terrified whisper," these broken phrases bespeak the author's admission that his curse poem will fail to extirpate the alien powers of Otherness that haunt his imagination and shape his artistry.
Lindsay is often ignored in histories of twentieth-century poetry because judged to be exceptionally reactionary in his racism. However, he was much more liberal than many of his poetic contemporaries and he first performed "The Congo" at a Lincoln Day banquet held in Springfield. When Lindsay justified his pacifism during World War I, he said he would rather have died "of his own will mount[ing] a blazing pyre . . . by the side or in place of some black who had not trial by jury" than in the trenches (Ruggles, 250). "By the side or in the place of some black": Lindsay's self-sacrificial fantasy of racechange informed the poet's conviction that "the only way to end lynching would be to thrust yourself into the thick of such a mob and make the men slay you instead of the Negro. 'When they realized what they had done,'" Lindsay was supposed to have said, "'their hearts would be touched, their consicences shocked'" (Ruggles, 138; emphasis mine). Even in the midst of describing the destructive ferocity of African savag[e]ry, Lindsay's "Congo" contains lines blaming black violence on white imperialism, including a grisly injunction that we "listen to the yell of Leopold's ghost"; the Belgian King's exploitation of the Congo earns him "demons . . . / Cutting his hands off, down in Hell." Although the booming drumbeats of "black bucks" and "barrel-house kings" lead Lindsay to explain, "THEN I had religion, THEN I had a vision. / I could not turn from their revel in derision," he feels nothing but derision for the well-earned sufferings of King Leopold II punished in hell.
Rachel Blau Duplessis
Johnson has described a black person doing blackface minstrelsy. The main practice -- widespread in American society -- involved whites in blackface minstrelsy: troupes in all the major cities, traveling shows, amateur performances, and finally the absorption of practices of minstrelsy into performance materials and styles in vaudeville, early cinema, and musical comedy in the early twentieth century. Minstrelsy was a central cultural form in the construction of whiteness and the uses of blackness; indeed Lindsay�s "The Congo: a Study of the Negro Race" (1914) is arguably a one-man minstrel show. The poem is an overdetermined work showing the formation of whiteness.
During his career, Vachel Lindsay wrote a number of performance poems to be read "in your own variety of negro dialect." It is clear from heart-felt statements throughout his career that Lindsay wanted "love and good-will and witty conversation" between the races, that he believed strongly in and argued openly for the extirpation of race prejudice, and that he even thought his "negro" poems would help. "The Congo" was first performed publicly on February 12, 1914, the anniversary of Lincoln�s birthday in Springfield, Illinois; it was read at a private gathering in March sponsored by Poetry in the presence of W. B. Yeats. The US. invasion (1915) and occupation (until 1934) of Haiti added to the excitement of Lindsay�s early audiences and then interest in the poem, in which whiteness is affirmed as bringing order, rule, and correct government to sinister black chaos, evil, and "hoodoo."
Lindsay claimed that the poem tries to synthesize "vaudeville form back towards the old Greek precedent of the half-chanted lyric" and also spoke of it as "a rag-tune epic." This marked desire to fuse ancient poetic culture with more recent Euro- and African-American performance materials is part of Lindsay�s yearning to do something helpful to extirpate racial prejudice (in the aftermath of the Springfield anti-black riots in 1908), a yearning which is totally swamped by the poem�s raucous, sinister primitivisms. These occur under the rubric (in the subtitle) of a "study of the Negro race," which harnesses a social scientific word to the poems observations, as if they were authorized by, and part of, academic studies in an ethnographic mode. A free white gaze upon blacks is part of the power of whiteness. From the first, this poem was taken, by certain readers, as an indication of the failure of white liberalism; it is a bombastic response to the history of white misrule over blacks in the first half of the twentieth century. Confronting the 1908, or 1919, racist riots and lynchings, Lindsay changes the subject to "Africa" and its alleged traits.
"The Congo" is a six page poem in three sections. In "Their Basic Savagery," the "Fat black bucks" are like the "Negroes [who] seemed eight feet high" whom Lindsay had seen in the saloons he visited on behalf of the Women�s Christian Temperance Association, men who left him with "a jungle impression." The prurient desire to appropriate and devour such a source of potency is a rich motivator for "whiteness." Lindsay�s black drinkers inspire in his observer an atemporal Africanist "vision" of the Congo River "CREEPING THROUGH THE BLACK, / CUTTING THROUGH THE FOREST WITH A GOLDEN TRACK," with attendant "cannibals" and "sorcerers." The poem maintains a hint of just revenge for the Belgian atrocities in the Congo, but essentially it creates the fear of demonic, unmotivated cannibalism. Terror of blacks seems to be a central element in this construction of whiteness, terror combined with a brave fascination at seeing the "truth" of Africa displayed, even if it threatens to eat one alive. Or, as Lindsay explained: "�Congo, Congo, Congo, Congo, Congo, Congo,� I said to myself. The word began to haunt. It echoed with the war drums and cannibal yells of Africa" (1915).
The address from the "witch-doctors" is directed past the other characters inside the poem to the reader or listener "HOO, HOO, HOO" is the sound that at once warns and threatens. "Be careful what you do, / Or � / Mumbo-Jumbo will hoo-doo you" (Lindsay 1984, 175). Mumbo-Jumbo is a spooky god of demonic power and reach. Lindsay is calling upon the meaning "an object or fetish believed to have supernatural power," but his use also evokes other senses of the word � "gibberish," "nonsense," or "confused and meaningless activity, unintelligible incantation."
Lindsay fantasizes a free-floating black menace in the first section, and a free-floating black pleasure in the second. Called "Their Irrepressible High Spirits," the second section pastiches "juba" (West African group dance), "cakewalk" (black dance performances for racially mixed audiences), minstrel (white blackface lampoons performed mainly for whites), ragtime or jazz ("the well-known tunes of the parrot band," for jazz is often visualized during this period, by Euro-Americans, as behaviors raucous animals), and popular music -- a song of racial self-mockery written by the African-American vaudeville star Bert Williams (Cooley 1982, 52). The revelry is set in an exotic never-never land like a movie set, but given the poem�s tripartite construction and the political allegory (of hell-earth-heaven) loosely underlying it, the second section becomes worldly purgatory of garish sumptuousness and profligacy. Lindsay was an enthusiastic consumer of African-American forms and persons in theater. "Then there was a song �My Zulu Babe,� where [Bert] Williams as the buck and [George] Walker as the lady used to appear in black tights and brief ostrich-feathered skirts and go prancing in and out of the stage jungle in a mock wooing. They magically conveyed the voodoo power of Africa. The whole white audience turned into jungle savages and yelled with a sort of gorilla delight" (Lindsay 1915, 18). The construction of whiteness involves a positioning of blacks as the perpetually carnivalesque, authorizers of white libido -- from "woo" to "voodoo" -- under whose auspices whites could experience the Africanist pleasures of being "savages" and "gorillas." It was important to the making of whiteness that license be incited by, and blamable on, African materials.
As Gail Bederman has proposed, white "manhood" power accrued in monopolizing both the discourse of "manly and civilized" and of "masculine and savage" (1995, 42). In her pointed exposition of the symbolic stakes in the Jack Johnson-Jim Jeffries boxing match in 1910, during which the African-American boxer trounced the white man, and in her discussion of the racist arrangements of the World�s Columbian Exposition (1892), that excluded "Colored Americans" while exhibiting "the Negro as a repulsive savage" in the Dahomey village (39, citing a pamphlet written by Frederick Douglass and Ida B. Wells ), she opens a nuanced discussion of the formation of white manhood in the early period of modernism. White manhood depended on the assertion of racial dominance of whites over blacks by appropriation of the imagined potency of the so-called "primitive" to enhance the potency of the white and civilized. This is very like what Lindsay is offering both in the above description of "voodoo power," in his performance of this poem, and in his comments on musicals featuring blacks: "American men [playing] at being masculine barbarians themselves, savoring the visual pleasures of semiclad exotic dancers while simultaneously and inconsistently relishing their sense of superior, civilized, white manliness" (40).
Into this scene of revelry, the "sinister" witch-doctors interject their threat. But here, the lines about �Mumbo-Jumbo" are not apparently directed to the audience but to the black "scalawags prancing there." They are warned against their own attractive playfulness. The multiple allusions to African-American performance in this section suggest that the witch-doctors are acting for Lindsay in proposing the containment and control of African-American popular culture at the same time that Lindsay is both mimicking it in the poem and appropriating it in his exaggerated Africanist performance style (Gubar 1997, 141). He wants black mannerisms and voices for himself and also wants Mumbo-Jumbo to punish their real cultural owners. As Eric Lott argues, this "theft," absorption, or borrowing of African-American materials caused in whites great cultural anxiety that intermingled with their envious desire (Lott 1993, 57).
In the final section of "The Congo," Lindsay proposes "The Hope of their Religion" to extirpate this menacing and joyous-erotic black culture and society with Christianity:
And they all repented, a thousand strong
From their stupor and savagery and sin and wrong
And slammed with their hymn books till they shook the room
With "glory, glory, glory"
And "Boom, boom, BOOM."
The work overtly proposes the clearing of the jungle and the cleansing of African "temples" through the efforts of "pioneer angels," who preside over the triumph of a blue-silver, sunny whiteness that brings "light" to Africa. The trope of African inferiority, depicting a whole continent and its diasporic peoples as indolent, sinful, lascivious, and retarded without the aid and help of imperial intervention is evident in the words "stupor" and "wrong," yet the exciting but inappropriate use of religious books as percussion instruments ("BOOM") makes the wrong persist even as it is apparently ended (Mudimbe 1988, 13). To argue that Christian imperialism jump starts perpetually stalled African evolution is consistent with colonialist assumptions throughout this period. Interpreting Africa as the lowest stage of human, political, and spiritual development feeds the neo-Darwianian nativist hauteur of American whiteness (Michaels 1994, 40-41). One might also view this fierce disparaging of Africa as a collective ideology still attempting to justify the practices of slavery.
The transfiguration of the African landscape into a "Congo paradise" through Christian imperialism is shadowed by the same menacing, vibrant "Congo tune" that repeats throughout the poem (Lindsay 1984, 177, 178). Whispering vultures continue the hoodoo refrain at the very end, despite the poetic polemic which twice insists "Mumbo-Jumbo is dead in the jungle, / Never again will he hoo-doo you." The repetition of this formula presents not the death of "Mumbo-Jumbo" but his persistence.
Despite Lindsay�s protestations, this atavistic structure is related to the arguments of racist "science" and polemic in such contemporaneous work as R. W. Shufeldt�s America�s Greatest Problem: the Negro (1915). The terms Negro, savagery, and cannibalism are essentially interchangeable in this work, and the words displace sexual desire and guilt engendered by fantasies of devouring made possible by the political realities of enslavement and imperialism (Shufeldt 1915, 276). Shufeldt moves into a hysterical polemic against miscegenation as racial pollution, by asking "are we now to take up into our blood a race of human flesh-eaters, who would consume human flesh again with relish were they returned to the country from whence they came?" (139). This atavistic argument emerges only slightly mellowed in Lindsay�s configuration of the ideology of whiteness.
However much Lindsay insisted that "the third section of the Congo is certainly as hopeful as any human being dare to he in regard to any race," the poem reads differently (Lindsay 1979, 134. Nov 2, 1915). Through its repetitious chant and its hyper-melodramatic scare lines, the poem subverts its stated argument and "intellectual" claim. The argument says "Africa" will be transfigured and civilized with messianic imperialism. But the rhythm says that the menace and lurking evil of "Africa" can never be extirpated. Blacks embody the primitive forces of sexuality and violence; these forces are uneradicable, essentialized, in the black body. "A Negro at the North Pole is Congo to the marrow of his bones, and believe me more luxurious than Assurbanipal and more fun than a goat" (Lindsay 1979, �88, October 13, 1919). A social philology shows how the mystery phoneme, exaggerated rhythms, and repetitious rhetorics of this poetry have been harnessed to uphold the ideological formation "white manhood."
According to Lindsay, "the refrain stands for the ill fate and sinister power of Africa from the beginning" (90, February 17, 1914, soon after its first performance). The popular appeal of the poem is based on us judgmental participation in primitivist behavior that entertains whites by arousing them with the rhythms to which they feel superior. Lindsay argues that Africans and blacks are permanently and essentially the hoo-doo of the family of man, bringing the curse of primitive menace to everything. In her review of Lindsay�s work (1923), Marianne Moore slates that Lindsay�s intention, his claimed familiarity with black dialect, and his general humanitarian urges "cannot absolve such Aryan doggerel" (Moore 1986, 89).
Though the poem is superficial, it anneals two competing ideas about racial origins, ideas developed in the nineteenth century but still active within the racial discourses of the early twentieth century. To think of one overarching humanness, one root from which separate racial stems branched off --monogenesis � is to think of the potential (if far future) unity of all humankind, in spite of contemporary racisms and reductiveness. Monogenesis deemphasizes difference in favor of one striving human family. Lindsay claimed this was his opinion on racial matters. Polygenesis conceives of the races as separate species, separately evolved, with differential abilities (Fredrickson 1971, Chaps. 2�3). To speak of one race in its infancy and another as highly developed and to suggest the condescending uplift of one race by another was to stand on the seam between these positions, the social promise of monogenesis ("we" are all one humanity) abutted by the immediate polemical satisfactions of polygenesis ("they" are inferior to "us"). The self-congratulatory resolution inherent in this contradictory position ("we" help "them") helped construct whiteness. "The Congo" claims to think of us all as one big human family, but its garish emphasis on extremes of menace and joy; both "irresponsible" or under the sway of a capricious, vengeful god, and its zoological fascination with the Other invoke a shadowy sense of polygenesis, in which Africans are permanently different, tainted, and, of course, very powerful in their inferiority. Far from being "hopeful" about those it claims to anatomize, "The Congo" goes far toward marking and blighting the "Negro Race" as a whole.
Because Lindsay believed his poems could he socially effective against racial prejudice, he was stunned to find that "My �Congo� and �Booker T. Washington Trilogy� have both been denounced by the colored people for reasons that I cannot fathom" (Lindsay 1979, 134-35, Nov. 2, 1916). His correspondent, Joel Spingarn, one of the white founders of the NAACP, a noted editor at Harcourt Brace, and a strong supporter of black writers, tried to wise him up: "No colored man doubts your good intentions, but many of them doubt your understanding of their hopes. You look about you and see a black world full of a strange beauty different from that of the white world; they look about them and see other men with exactly the same feelings and desires who refuse to recognize the resemblance" (Wintz 1988, 159; Spingarn, 1917, 113-14). Lindsay must have his exotic, his primitive, his Other, based in different social histories and cultural outcomes, polygenesis sweetened by self-delusion. Spingarn speaks from a liberal monogenetic racial theory and from the idealistic center of a progressive integrationist ethos that wants to see "colored humanity" and "white humanity" as sharing in "a common civilization in which all distinctions of race are blurred (or forgotten) by common aspiration and common labors" (1917, 114).
In his numerous, even obsessive, discussions of what inspired "The Congo," the poet�s explanations exceed the poem and reveal a rich collection of demonizing attitudes. He begins with the "Dahomey War-Drums" and "Cannibal war dance" that he saw at the 1892 Chicago World Columbian Exposition, an exhibit analyzed by Gail Bederman as presenting an architecturally sustained ideological split between "the civilized grandeur of the manly White City contrasted with the rough savagery of the Dahomey Village" (Lindsay 1979, 88�89 [Feb. 6 and 17, 1914]; 95 [April 14, 1914]; Bederman 1995, 37). The eclectic list of Lindsay�s sources for "The Congo" run the gamut from romantic racialism (Stephen Forster, "Stanley�s Darkest Africa", his interpretation of "Joseph Conrad�s haunting African sketches full of fever and voodoo and marsh"), to appreciation of monuments in the struggles against slavery (the Emancipation Proclamation, Stowe�s novel), to the work of black intellectuals (Du Bois), to politically masturbatory and personally salacious evocations of cannibals, savage power, the jungle, and the like (Lindsay 1979, 88-89). It is a cornucopia of conflicting Africanist materials. Despite certain noble sentiments, a crisis about race was being solved by stigmatizing African-Americans as always part animal, part jungle, part predator -- a great black spot in the white imagination onto which negative, guilt -ridden, exciting emotions could he projected.
Lindsay includes among the incidents that provoked his poem "the Burnings alive of negroes in the South" (95; April 14, 1914). In her analysis of lynching as a ritual of exorcism, Trudier Harris reports that between 1882 and 1927, about 4,951 persons were lynched in the United States, of whom 3,513 were black (the vast majority were black men) (Hariss 1984, 7). The Crisis kept a grim running report on these crimes throughout this period; indeed, certain horrors were investigated by the NAACP, for example, the Waco, Texas, public torture and burning of a Negro in 1915, a report on which formed a special supplement to the July 1916 issue of The Crisis. Lindsay was deeply affected by the Springfiled anti-Negro riots of 1908, which ended in carnage and destruction.
But in an elaboration of these remarks to Harriet Monroe on the sources of "The Congo" he glosses the effects of the "ill fate and sinister power of Africa from the beginning" � the power of hoodoo, in his terms. He continues: "I do not say so [in the poem] but the Civil War was a case of Mumbo jumbo hoodooing in America. Any lynching is a yielding to the power of the Hoodoo. Any Burning alive, or hand-cutting depredations by Leopold, is a case of Mumbo-Jumbo Hoodooing Civilization" (Lindsay 1979, 90; Feb.17, 1914). The negative and sinister evil out of Africa infected or affected ("hoodooed") "Civilization." This formulation blames blacks for white violence directed against them.
White political terrorism occurs because white civilization has been spooked and cursed by hoodoo. Indeed, the ritual repetitions of the poem "The Congo" might be credited with proposing sub rosa the wish for such an exorcism of "black savagery" and "Mumbo Jumbo." Whites are coterminus with "Civilization"; Euro-Americans� falls from grace in fratricidal conflict and racial terrorism are due to their having black African witchcraft exercised upon them. The poem is thus as much a veiled justification for lynching as a criticism of it.
"The Congo" was an influential poem. Louis Untermeyer remembers, "Perhaps the most memorable occasion [on a trip to England] was when, prompted by one of my remarks about recent American poetry, James Stephens declaimed most of �The Congo.� Nothing like it was ever heard in that setting: a drum-banging poem by an American poet on a Negro theme chanted in an English restaurant by an Irish mystic with an accumulating brogue" [and heard by a Jewish anthologist] (Untermeyer 1939. 339-40).
From Genders, Races, and Religious Cultures in Modern American Poetry, 1908-1934. � 2001 Cambridge University Press.
Return to Vachel Lindsay


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We have lot's of new snow up here. We have wind forcasted for every day of the next week. Come on up to South lake Tahoe and join us for some snow kiting.
It's blowing 15 - 25 on the ridges right now. With up to 3 feet of new snow at the high elevations, this weekend promises to go off!
I can't ride until the weekend and would be happy to show some people around.
I was down in the bay this weekend and although I got some decent riding, I think I drove more for it than a weekend trip to Tahoe.
Time to turn snow kiting into a reality if you have not allready done so.


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Ecology, also called bioecology, bionomics, or environmental biology, study of the relationships between organisms and their environment. Some of the most pressing problems in human affairs—expanding populations, food scarcities, environmental pollution including global warming, extinctions of plant and animal species, and all the attendant sociological and political problems—are to a great degree ecological.
The word ecology was coined by the German zoologist Ernst Haeckel, who applied the term oekologie to the "relation of the animal both to its organic as well as its inorganic environment." The word comes from the Greek oikos, meaning "household," "home," or "place to live." Thus, ecology deals with the organism and its environment. The concept of environment includes both other organisms and physical surroundings. It involves relationships between individuals within a population and between individuals of different populations. These interactions between individuals, between populations, and between organisms and their environment form ecological systems, or ecosystems. Ecology has been defined variously as "the study of the interrelationships of organisms with their environment and each other," as "the economy of nature," and as "the biology of ecosystems."
Historical background
Ecology had no firm beginnings. It evolved from the natural history of the ancient Greeks, particularly Theophrastus, a friend and associate of Aristotle. Theophrastus first described the interrelationships between organisms and between organisms and their nonliving environment. Later foundations for modern ecology were laid in the early work of plant and animal physiologists.
In the early and mid-1900s two groups of botanists, one in Europe and the other in the United States, studied plant communities from two different points of view. The European botanists concerned themselves with the study of the composition, structure, and distribution of plant communities. The American botanists studied the development of plant communities, or succession (see community ecology: Ecological succession). Both plant and animal ecology developed separately until American biologists emphasized the interrelation of both plant and animal communities as a biotic whole.
During the same period, interest in population dynamics developed. The study of population dynamics received special impetus in the early 19th century, after the English economist Thomas Malthus called attention to the conflict between expanding populations and the capability of Earth to supply food. In the 1920s the American zoologist Raymond Pearl, the American chemist and statistician Alfred J. Lotka, and the Italian mathematician Vito Volterra developed mathematical foundations for the study of populations, and these studies led to experiments on the interaction of predators and prey, competitive relationships between species, and the regulation of populations. Investigations of the influence of behaviour on populations were stimulated by the recognition in 1920 of territoriality in nesting birds. Concepts of instinctive and aggressive behaviour were developed by the Austrian zoologist Konrad Lorenz and the Dutch-born British zoologist Nikolaas Tinbergen, and the role of social behaviour in the regulation of populations was explored by the British zoologist Vero Wynne-Edwards. (See population ecology.)
While some ecologists were studying the dynamics of communities and populations, others were concerned with energy budgets. In 1920 August Thienemann, a German freshwater biologist, introduced the concept of trophic, or feeding, levels (see trophic level), by which the energy of food is transferred through a series of organisms, from green plants (the producers) up to several levels of animals (the consumers). An English animal ecologist, Charles Elton (1927), further developed this approach with the concept of ecological niches and pyramids of numbers. In the 1930s, American freshwater biologists Edward Birge and Chancey Juday, in measuring the energy budgets of lakes, developed the idea of primary productivity, the rate at which food energy is generated, or fixed, by photosynthesis. In 1942 Raymond L. Lindeman of the United States developed the trophic-dynamic concept of ecology, which details the flow of energy through the ecosystem. Quantified field studies of energy flow through ecosystems were further developed by the brothers Eugene Odum and Howard Odum of the United States; similar early work on the cycling of nutrients was done by J.D. Ovington of England and Australia. (See community ecology: Trophic pyramids and the flow of energy; biosphere: The flow of energy and nutrient cycling.)
The study of both energy flow and nutrient cycling was stimulated by the development of new materials and techniques—radioisotope tracers, microcalorimetry, computer science, and applied mathematics—that enabled ecologists to label, track, and measure the movement of particular nutrients and energy through ecosystems. These modern methods (see below Methods in ecology) encouraged a new stage in the development of ecology—systems ecology, which is concerned with the structure and function of ecosystems.
Areas of study
Ecology is necessarily the union of many areas of study because its definition is so all-encompassing. There are many kinds of relationships between organisms and their environment. By organisms one might mean single individuals, groups of individuals, all the members of one species, the sum of many species, or the total mass of species (biomass) in an ecosystem. And the term environment includes not only physical and chemical features but also the biological environment, which involves yet more organisms.
In practice, ecology is composed of broadly overlapping approaches and further divided by the groups of species to be studied. There are many, for example, who specialize in the field of "bird behavioral ecology." The main approaches fall into the following classes.
Evolutionary ecology examines the environmental factors that drive species adaptation. Studies of the evolution of species might seek to answer the question of how populations have changed genetically over several generations but might not necessarily attempt to learn what the underlying mechanisms might be. Evolutionary ecology seeks those mechanisms. Thus, in the well-known example of the peppered moth, the populations in the industrialized English Midlands changed over generations from having wings coloured largely grayish white, peppered with black spots, to wings that were mostly blackish. The ecological mechanism involved predation—birds readily detected the light-coloured moths against the background of the tree trunks that industrial pollution had darkened, whereas the dark-coloured moths remained generally undetected.
Evolutionary ecology also examines broader issues, such as the observations that plants in arid environments often have no leaves or else very small ones or that some species of birds have helpers at the nest—individuals that raise young other than their own. A critical question for the subject is whether a set of adaptations arose once and has simply been retained by all species descended from a common ancestor having those adaptations or whether the adaptations evolved repeatedly because of the same environmental factors. In the case of plants that live in arid environments, cacti from the New World and euphorbia (see spurge) from the Old World can look strikingly similar even though they are in unrelated plant families.
Physiological ecology asks how organisms survive in their environments. There is often an emphasis on extreme conditions, such as very cold or very hot environments or aquatic environments with unusually high salt concentrations. Examples of the questions it may explore are: How do some animals flourish in the driest deserts, where temperatures are often high and freestanding water is never available? How do bacteria survive in hot springs, such as those in Yellowstone National Park in the western United States, that would cook most species? How do nematodes live in the soils of dry valleys in Antarctica? Physiological ecology looks at the special mechanisms that the individuals of a species use to function and at the limits on species imposed by the environment.
Behavioral ecology examines the ecological factors that drive behavioral adaptations. The subject considers how individuals find their food and avoid their enemies. For example, why do some birds migrate (see migration) while others are resident? Why do some animals, such as lions, live in groups while others, such as tigers, are largely solitary?
Population ecology, or autecology, examines single species. One immediate question that the subject addresses is why some species are rare while others are abundant. Interactions with other species may supply some of the answers. For example, enemies of a species can restrict its numbers, and those enemies include predators, disease organisms, and competitors—i.e., other species. Consequently, population ecology shares an indefinite boundary with community ecology, a subject that examines the interactions between several to many species. Species abundances vary both from year to year and across the species' geographic range. Population ecology asks what causes abundances to fluctuate. Why, for example, do numbers of some species, typically birds and mammals, change perhaps threefold or fourfold over a decade or so, while numbers of other species, typically insects, vary tenfold to a hundredfold from one year to the next? Another key question is what limits abundance, for, without limits, species numbers would grow exponentially.
Biogeography is the study of the geographical distribution of organisms, and it asks questions that parallel those of population ecology. Some species have tiny geographical ranges, being restricted to perhaps only a few square kilometres, while other species have ranges that cover a continent. Some species have more-or-less fixed geographical ranges, while others fluctuate, and still others are on the increase. If a species that is spreading is an agricultural pest, a disease organism, or a species that carries a disease, understanding the reasons for the increasing range may be a matter of considerable economic importance. Biogeography also considers the ranges of many species, asking why, for example, species with small geographic ranges are often found in special places that house many such species rather than scattered randomly about the planet.
Community ecology, or synecology, considers the ecology of communities, the set of species found in a particular place. Because the complete set of species for a particular place is usually not known, community ecology often focuses on subsets of organisms, asking questions, for example, about plant communities or insect communities. A fundamental question deals with the size of the "set of species"—that is, what ecological factors determine how many species are present in an area. There are many large-scale patterns; for example, more species are present in larger areas than smaller ones, more on continents than on islands (especially remote ones), and more in the tropics than in the Arctic. There are many hypotheses for each pattern. Ecological factors also cause the diversity of species to vary over smaller scales. For example, though predators may be harmful to individual species, the presence of a predator may actually increase the number of species present in a community by limiting the numbers of a particularly successful competitor that otherwise might monopolize all the available space or resources.
The questions above are generally applied to species at the same trophic level—say, the plants in a community, or the insects that feed on the plants there, or the birds that feed on the insects there. Yet a different set of questions in community ecology involves how many trophic levels there are in a particular place and what factors limit that number.
Conservation biology seeks to understand what factors predispose species to extinction and what humans can do about preventing extinction. Species in danger of extinction are often those with the smallest geographic ranges or the smallest population sizes, but other ecological factors are also involved.
Ecosystem ecology examines large-scale ecological issues, ones that often are framed in terms not of species but rather of measures such as biomass, energy flow, and nutrient cycling. Questions include how much carbon is absorbed from the atmosphere by terrestrial plants and marine phytoplankton during photosynthesis and how much of that is consumed by herbivores, the herbivores' predators, and so on up the food chain. Carbon is the basis of life (see carbon cycle), so these questions may be framed in terms of energy. How much food one has to eat each day, for instance, can be measured in terms of its dry weight or its calorie content. The same applies to measures of production for all the plants in an ecosystem or for different trophic levels of an ecosystem. A basic question in ecosystem ecology is how much production there is and what the factors are that affect it. Not surprisingly, warm, wet places such as rainforests produce more than extremely cold or dry places, but other factors are important. Nutrients are essential and may be in limited supply. The availability of phosphorus and nitrogen often determines productivity—it is the reason these substances are added to lawns and crops—and their availability is particularly important in aquatic systems. On the other hand, nutrients can represent too much of a good thing. Human activity has modified global ecosystems in ways that are increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide, a carbon source but also a greenhouse gas (see greenhouse effect), and causing excessive runoff of fertilizers into rivers and then into the ocean, where it kills the species that live there.
Methods in ecology
Because ecologists work with living systems possessing numerous variables, the scientific techniques used by physicists, chemists, mathematicians, and engineers require modification for use in ecology. Moreover, the techniques are not as easily applied in ecology, nor are the results as precise as those obtained in other sciences. It is relatively simple, for example, for a physicist to measure gain and loss of heat from metals or other inanimate objects, which possess certain constants of conductivity, expansion, surface features, and the like. To determine the heat exchange between an animal and its environment, however, a physiological ecologist is confronted with an array of almost unquantifiable variables and with the formidable task of gathering the numerous data and analyzing them. Ecological measurements may never be as precise or subject to the same ease of analysis as measurements in physics, chemistry, or certain quantifiable areas of biology.
In spite of these problems, various aspects of the environment can be determined by physical and chemical means, ranging from simple chemical identifications and physical measurements to the use of sophisticated mechanical apparatus. The development of biostatistics (statistics applied to the analysis of biological data), the elaboration of proper experimental design, and improved sampling methods now permit a quantified statistical approach to the study of ecology. Because of the extreme difficulties of controlling environmental variables in the field, studies involving the use of experimental design are largely confined to the laboratory and to controlled field experiments designed to test the effects of only one variable or several variables. The use of statistical procedures and computer models based on data obtained from the field provide insights into population interactions and ecosystem functions. Mathematical programming models are becoming increasingly important in applied ecology, especially in the management of natural resources and agricultural problems having an ecological basis.
Controlled environmental chambers enable experimenters to maintain plants and animals under known conditions of light, temperature, humidity, and day length so that the effects of each variable (or combination of variables) on the organism can be studied. Biotelemetry and other electronic tracking equipment, which allow the movements and behaviour of free-ranging organisms to be followed remotely, can provide rapid sampling of populations. Radioisotopes are used for tracing the pathways of nutrients through ecosystems, for determining the time and extent of transfer of energy and nutrients through the different components of the ecosystem, and for the determination of food chains. The use of laboratory microcosms—aquatic and soil micro-ecosystems, consisting of biotic and nonbiotic material from natural ecosystems, held under conditions similar to those found in the field—are useful in determining rates of nutrient cycling, ecosystem development, and other functional aspects of ecosystems. Microcosms enable the ecologist to duplicate experiments and to perform experimental manipulation on them.Robert Leo Smith Stuart L. Pimm
Learn More in these related Britannica articles:
community ecology: Ecological successionThe structure of communities is constantly changing. All communities are subject to periodic disturbances, ranging from events that have only localized effects, such as the loss of a tree that creates a gap in the canopy of a forest, to those that have catastrophic consequences, which include wildfires…
migration: Ecological significance of migrationThere are many ecological implications of migration. The food resources of some regions would not be adequately exploited without moving populations. The sequence of migratory movement is closely integrated in the annual cycle of ecosystems characterized by productivity fluctuations. Migratory behaviour…
animal disease: Role of ecologyEpidemiology, the study of epidemics, is sometimes defined as the medical aspect of ecology, for it is the study of diseases in animal populations. Hence the epidemiologist is concerned with the interactions of organisms and their environments as related to the presence of disease.…
zoology: EcologyThe harmony that Linnaeus found in nature, which redounded to the glory and wisdom of a Judaeo-Christian god, was the 18th-century counterpart of the balanced interaction now studied by ecologists. Linnaeus recognized that plants are adapted to the regions in which they grow, that…
More About Ecology15 references found in Britannica articles
Assorted References
- agricultural research
- Amazon rain forest
- animal diseases
- contribution by Elton
- cross-disciplinary studies
- evolution theory
- metapopulations
- oil spills


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Ask Your Library
Event box
Winter Reading Club For Kids
Calling all avid readers! Choose from a wide selection of books after reading for 180 minutes. Pick up reading logs at the information desk. Grades K-6.
- Date:
- Saturday, February 23, 2019 Show more dates
- Time:
- All Day Event
- Campus:
- George Mason Regional Library


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Online ESL/Remote English Tutor
- Employer
- Qkids
- Location
- Sykesville, MD
- Posted
- Apr 17, 2018
- Closes
- Apr 23, 2018
- Function
- School and Teaching, Tutor
- Industry
- Other
- Career Level
- Experienced (Non-Manager)
- Hours
- Full Time
Employment type: Contract, part-time Duration: Flexible Start date: ASAP Location: Remote, online Hours: 6-19 hours/week Rate: $16-20 USD/hr (2 lessons) About Qkids Qkids is an interactive online teaching platform that connects English teachers to young language learners with fun, user-friendly software in real time. Guiding learners through a curriculum of fun, dynamic, and engaging narrative gaming adventures, English teachers from the United States and Canada lead learners to English mastery from the comfort of their own homes. Qkids provides great support and incredible workplace flexibility that caters to any schedule. Join today! Responsibilities * Teach English to learners between 5 - 12 years of age through Qkids' interactive online teaching platform. Each in-lesson time is 30 minutes. All curricula are preset and incorporated with animated characters and games. Training and support provided. * Available to teach a minimum of 6 hours (12 lessons) per week. There are 19 hours (38 lessons) available weekly. [Qkids class time slots] 7 days a week - Morning Eastern Time (AM - EST): 6:40-7:10, 7:20-7:50, 8:00-8:30, 8:40-9:10 Plus Friday and Saturday - Night Eastern Time (PM - EST): 8:40-9:10, 9:20-9:50, 10:00-10:30, 10:40-11:10, 11:20-11:50 Requirements * Eligible to legally work in the US or Canada * Earned a degree or currently enrolled in a university program * Prior teaching experience or equivalent in education, tutoring, mentoring, schooling preferred. This can be any form of teaching related, such as homeschooling. Hiring Process Apply with all required materials - Initial screening - Demo Interview 1 - Demo Interview 2 - Trial Classes (paid) - Hired!


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Ocean City, Maryland Photo
"Dry Cleaning and Laundry."
Venables Cleaners
206 William StreetBerlin, MD 21811
"Dry Cleaning and Laundry."
Venables Cleaners
206 William StreetBerlin, MD 21811
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Brussels, 1 July 2009
EU cuts the cost of texting and mobile data services abroad – Frequently Asked Questions
How will EU citizens benefit as of today?
Effective immediately, the new EU roaming rules will:
Why was the EU Regulation on roaming extended to include text messages?
The EU Roaming Regulation which entered into force on 30 June 2007 ( IP/07/986 ) introduced limits to the wholesale and retail charges for roaming voice calls to ensure the proper functioning of the single market and a high level of consumer protection. These limits were until 30 June 2009 €0.46 for all calls made abroad and €0.22 for all calls received abroad and are now at €0.43 for calls made abroad and €0.19 for calls received abroad ( IP/08/1276 ).
Following a specific request from the European Parliament and Council of Telecoms Ministers, Article 11 of the EU's Roaming Regulation required the Commission to review the Regulation in the course of 2008 and to decide whether or not to extend it in time and scope, and to roaming text messages and data services in particular.
During this compulsory 2008 review, the Commission considered input from the operators themselves, the European Regulators Group (ERG), which gathers the 27 national telecoms regulators and several other studies and stakeholders. A public consultation took place form 7 May to 2 July 2008 (see IP/08/718 ) .
The Commission had initially hoped that mobile operators would demonstrate their willingness to voluntarily reduce the very high roaming charges for text messages and data. In February 2008, Commissioner Viviane Reding gave mobile operators a last chance to avoid regulation by asking them to voluntarily and credibly bring the prices for text messages down by 1 July 2008 ( SPEECH/08/70 ).
However, figures collected by the ERG show that prices for text messages have remained very high (on average €0.28 per SMS) and have shown little movement over the past years despite political pressure. This is why additional regulatory intervention was required, in the interest of the single market.
Euro-SMS tariff
How much will it cost as of today to send a text messages from abroad?
It will cost no more than €0.11 (excluding VAT) to send a text message while abroad, compared to a current average of €0.28. This is a price cap, so consumers can expect the cost of texts to be below this ceiling as operators compete with each other to make the best offer. Receiving an SMS in another EU country will remain free of charge.
How high were the prices for sending text messages while roaming before today?
Using your mobile phone to send text messages (SMS) from abroad was up to 10 times more expensive than for sending a message at home. This was demonstrated by responses to the European Commission's public consultation of July 2008, by the European Regulators Group and a specific study by the Danish National Regulatory Authority . For example, up to today customers from the Netherlands and Portugal have been paying more than €0.35 for each SMS sent while roaming.
Data roaming
Will I be able to surf the web when abroad without worrying about high prices?
Starting today, the cost of surfing the web and downloading movies or video programs with a mobile phone while abroad will fall, thanks to a wholesale cap of €1 per megabyte downloaded. ( 1 MB allows approximately 200 e-mails without attachments or less than an hour of browsing time, but only 1 minute of MP3 compressed music.) Until now, the EU's average wholesale price was €1.68 per megabyte downloaded, with peaks in Ireland (€6.82), Greece (€5.30) and Estonia (€5.10).
From March 2010, the new rules will protect consumers from 'bill shocks' by introducing a cut-off mechanism which will cut consumers' mobile connection to the internet when their bill reaches a specified limit. Operators must offer their customers a monthly cut-off limit of €50. They can also offer customers any other limit. Customers that do not make a choice by 1 July 2010 will have the cut-off limit set at €50 by default.
This will ensure that consumers will no longer face shock bills such as a recent example when a German customer roaming in France was faced with a bill of €46,000 for downloading a TV programme. Operators will have until March 2010 to put the cut-off mechanism in place.
How much were consumers paying until today for data roaming in the EU?
Up until now, consumer prices for data services ranged from €0.25 per megabyte (MB) in a number of Member States as part of a bundled offer (e.g. using the full allocation of a daily package which allows you a maximum amount of MB downloaded at a fixed price) to over €15/MB in Austria, Estonia, Belgium, Slovenia, Italy and Ireland for unbundled standard offers . As a result, the use of data roaming services remained limited as consumers were discouraged by extremely high charges compared to national prices, and also due to a lack of transparency regarding the charging by volume of data (megabytes).
High-volume users were susceptible to 'bill shocks' if, for example, they surfed the internet for long periods when using their datacard connection on a laptop computer ( IP/08/1048 ).
Will it become even cheaper to surf the web when abroad in the future?
Thanks to the new rules the price that operators pay per megabyte downloaded will fall over the next two years to €0.80 in 2010 and to €0.50 in 2011.These savings should be passed on to consumers.
Why will only wholesale tariffs for data services be regulated?
As of today, the highest charge an operator will pay for 1MB of data services is €1. This has been introduced as a safeguard limit and to eliminate very high charges for data services. However, it encourages mobile operators to continue to work to bring prices down.
The Commission will, from today, start to monitor the retail prices of data services and to ensure that operators pass on these savings to consumers. It will have to report to the European Parliament and Council by next year and then come up with proposals in two years time.
How can I find out what I will pay for roaming data services while abroad?
Consumers will receive information on what they will pay for data services as the new rules requires mobile operators to provide (via a text message) free, country-specific information on roaming charges to their customers when they enter another Member State.
Even cheaper calls to and from your mobile when abroad
How high were the prices for roaming phone calls until today?
Until 30 June 2007, using your mobile phone abroad was on average four times higher than national mobile calls . The average rate for making a call from abroad was €1.15 per minute ( IP/06/978 ). The EU Roaming Regulation introduced the 'Eurotariff' (price caps) bringing down mobile roaming charges up to 60% ( IP/07/1445 ) . Today, the Eurotariff is the default price offer for roaming in the EU. It is charged at €0.43 per minute for making a call and €0.19 per minute for receiving a call.
Do the new rules mean even lower prices for phone calls while abroad?
Starting today, it will cost only €0.43 per minute to make a phone call from your mobile phone when abroad. The prices will continue fall over the next two years to €0.39 on 1 July 2010 and to €0.35 by 1 July 2011 (all prices per minute, excluding VAT).
It will also be much cheaper to receive a call starting today: only €0.19 per minute. These price caps will also fall in the following years to €0.15 on 1 July 2010 and €0.11 on 1 July 2011 (all prices per minute, excluding VAT).
Up until yesterday (30 June 2009) the rate was €0.46 per minute for calls made and €0.22 for calls received abroad.
Will I be charged per second, or per minute for the calls I make or receive when roaming?
The new rules mean that from today, EU consumers will be billed per-second after 30 seconds for roamed calls made and from the very first second for calls received while abroad.
The European Regulators Group has found that under per-minute billing practices, consumers were paying 24% more than the minutes they actually used to make calls, and 19% more for calls they received. The new rules ensure that consumers are only charged for the service they actually use and are expected to cut phone bills by as much as 24%.
What is roaming?
Whenever you travel abroad and make or receive a mobile phone call, send text messages (SMS – Short Message Services) or download data (for electronic mails, surfing the web, photos, music, films) from the internet using a mobile connection, you are roaming. You are roaming on a mobile network of a foreign network operator because your home provider does not provide the service in the country in which you are travelling. For providing this service, the foreign network operator will charge your home operator. This charge, known as the wholesale charge, is passed on to you at a different rate, sometimes at a surprisingly high level for the consumer.
What is an EU Regulation? Does it have to be implemented nationally?
EU Regulations are legal acts that are directly applicable in the 27 EU Member States the day after their publication in the Official Journal of the European Union. Unlike an EU Directive, an EU Regulation does not need to be implemented into national law, but is the law throughout the EU from the day of its publication.
EU Regulation are thus instruments for achieving swift and uniform solutions in the interests of the EU's single market, legal certainty and concrete consumer benefits.
The EU Roaming Regulation specifically applies to mobile operators in the EU, and is monitored by national regulatory authorities in the EU Member States and the European Commission itself.
To amend an EU Regulation or to extend its scope, the Commission has to make a proposal upon which the European Parliament and the Council of Ministers have to agree to make it law.
Why was an EU regulation necessary? Couldn't the problem of high roaming charges have been tackled through the electronic communications framework or competition rules?
The European Commission proposed the first regulation on roaming , which entered into force in 2007, because national telecoms regulators were unable to tackle the problem on their own because roaming is a cross border service. National regulators only had the tools to tackle the problem at the wholesale level at the national level, by limiting the prices operators in their country charged operators in other countries whose consumers were using their network. For this reason, all the EU's national regulators asked the Commission to act on behalf of European consumers. However, doing this would not necessarily allow customers from their own country to benefit from lower roaming prices, because these prices depend on the wholesale charge set by operators in other countries, and on the final price the consumer's own operator charges its customers.
It should be remembered that both in 2007 and in 2009, the European Commission tried to avoid the need for regulation by calling on operators to voluntarily bring prices down. However, prices still remained unjustifiably high resulting in the Commission's decision to propose an amended regulation.
For more information please visit the European Commission's roaming website: http://ec.europa.eu/roaming/
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Ed Harris Gossip
Ed Harris gossip, latest news, photos, and video.
2 & 4 together
How will I focus the rest of the day? Jim Sturgess and Colin Farrell, numbers 2 and 4 on my Five List, just showed up together at a presser for The Way Back in London. They did not pose side by side. In a way I'm thankful for it. Remember last week when Ryan Gosling and Jake Gyllenhaal stood next to each other and exploded your lady business? This can be dangerous, non? Here's an example of how Quiver can take on different forms. Full Story


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Abbreviation: CAN
Capitol City
Ottawa (population 774,072)
Location and Climate
Northern North America, bordering the North Atlantic Ocean on the east, North Pacific Ocean on the west, and the Arctic Ocean on the north, north of the conterminous US. Climate varies from temperate in south to subarctic and arctic in north.
Roman Catholic 46%, Protestant 36%, other 18%
English 59.3% (official), French 23.2% (official), other 17.5%
Canadian dollar (CAD)
1 CAD = approx. 0.89 USD (September 2006)
Internet Country Code
Other Information for the Traveler
Citizens or permanent residents of the United States do not require passports or visas but identification is needed—a birth certificate, proof of citizenship, voter's certificate or other identifying papers. If under 18 and unaccompanied by an adult, you must bring written permission of parent or guardian to travel in Canada. If you are a citizen of another country and a resident in the United States, bring your Alien Registration Receipt Card.
If renting a car, note that the speed limits and distances between cities are posted in kilometers (1 km = 0.62 mi). Gasoline is sold by the liter and costs about 70 to 80 cents Canadian per liter, depending on province and city.
Both Toronto and Montreal have extensive subway systems that are efficient and inexpensive.
Telephone Information
Country code: 1
International dialling code: 011 1 + number
Provincial area codes:
Alberta 403
British Columbia 250
British Columbia (Lower Mainland) 604
Manitoba 204
New Brunswick 506
Newfoundland 709
Nova Scotia 902
Ontario (London) 519
Ontario (North Bay) 705
Ontario (Ottawa) 613
Ontario (Thunder Bay) 807
Ontario (Toronto Metro) 416
Ontario (Toronto Vicinity) 905
Prince Edward Island 902
Quebec (Montreal) 514
Quebec (Quebec City) 418
Quebec (Sherbrooke) 819
Saskatchewan 306
Emergency: 911
Same as in the US
This won't be anything new for you. You'll see many of your familiar restaurant chains serving the type of food you're used to. Still, there are some regional specialties [seafood on the coasts, beef in the Prairie provinces (Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba)] as well as some uniquely Canadian dishes, such as poutine, which consists of French fries covered with gravy and cheese curds, that may interest you.
Legal Status
The thing to remember here is: if it happens in private between two consenting adults, it's legal. This situation describes an Outcall Escort arrangement, in which the sex worker agrees to see the client in the client's home or hotel room. Outcall services are advertised in the Personals section in print media. Still, authorities in some areas have conducted sting operations on escort agencies, so seeing an independent, who is not employed by any agency, is the safest route.
Living off the income of prostitutes, soliciting, and keeping a brothel (called "bawdy house") are all illegal. Recently, the provincial government of Quebec toyed with the idea of allowing brothels, but so far, that hasn't come to pass. Massage parlors are not considered brothels, because the customer just pays for a massage, and anything beyond that is between two consenting adults. Still, police stings happen, sometimes to clear out undocumented workers.
Other related topics:
In 1997, Canada made it illegal for citizens to have sex with children in foreign countries. Those convicted of this crime face five years in prison.
In 1999, the Canadian Supreme Court ruled that lap dances can be included as protected speech, as long as no masturbation, sodomy, fellatio, or penetration takes place. This reversed a ruling that the Court had made two years prior. Still, many municipalities have chosen to ban or limit contact between dancers and patrons in strip clubs.
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The headline banner on the front page of its site (www.genkvetch.com) states "Out of place at Facebook, MySpace, and Friendster? Then this is your space!"
The creators are three senior Floridians – all over 60 - husband and wife Mel and Marilyn Carroll and Steve Greenbaum, all formerly from New York and now all living in Surfside, Florida, in Dade County. As to their backgrounds, Mel Carroll is a Litvak whose father, Louis emigrated to Dublin where he gave his name an Irish twist. He stayed with his brother Henry and thence, sometime later, he went onto America in 1914 or so where he met up with another brother, Abraham Carroll, who lived in the Bronx. Mel has been looking for his Uncle Abraham's son and daughter Paul and Molly Carroll whom he has not seen since he was eight years old.
Marilyn Carroll, Mel's wife, is descended from grandparents Sigmund Holzmann and his wife Matilde Engel Holzmann, both originally from Bratislava and Prague, Czechoslovakia, respectively. Later, this couple was resident in Vienna, Austria. It was from there, in 1941, that they were taken by the Nazis and killed during the Holocaust whilst in transit to Kaunas, Lithuania.
The third member of the team, Steve Greenbaum, is descended from several generations born in America and he knows little of his origins apart from that. He is like many who find themselves with no clues as to their heritage.
So it is that they all very ably represent three varied and different strands of American Jewry.
This creative team, two of whom are engineers, gave birth to their site in November, 2008. Whilst it has a Yiddish name, the GenKvetch site is like Facebook and is non-denominational. It attracts all segments of the retirement community worldwide. It has now expanded to over 5,000 members and is still growing exponentially. They utilize simplicity, humor, and a variety of links to focus on generation-geared content. This helps to attract many members who are not highly technical nor computer savvy.
As people hear about the site, it is expected that it will greatly expand the potential for communicating with others in the kvetch generation. Once it has hit its stride and expanded it geographical horizons, this will mean that there will be more opportunities for genealogical networking as there are on other such social networking sites.
The site has a Community section which then can be broken out into Groups and you can create a new group or forum which can involve your favorite activities or genealogical-related fare. It is at the very beginning of its development, so GenKvetch is open to all possibilities.
So, stayed tuned and perhaps even participate in GenKvetch if you are 50 or older. Take advantage of its potential and also add your little bit of genealogical savoir faire and senior experience to its content.


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Today's Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission hearing on credit rating agencies promises to shed quite a bit of light on one of the most profitable and corrupt businesses in Corporate America. Rating agencies score huge profits regardless of how accurate their ratings prove, and thus never felt any serious pain from the financial crisis, despite the central role rating agencies played in the collapse.
The basic model for rating agencies like Moody's, Standard & Poor's and Fitch Ratings is a conflict of interest. These companies rate securities– if a bank wants to package a bunch of mortgages into a security to sell to investors, the rating agencies stamp a rating on that security to indicate how safe the investment is. But Moody's et al do not get paid by the investors who use their ratings. Instead, they get paid by the banks that create and package the securities. That creates a clear incentive to inflate ratings in order to win more business from banks.
So not surprisingly, the rating agencies have a pretty terrible record. They slapped top-grade AAA ratings on trillions of dollars worth of mortgage-backed securities, only to watch those securities plummet in value and default like crazy when home prices started to decline in 2007.
Expect lots of discussion about the way whistleblowers at rating agencies were treated, and lots of damaging emails about rating agency top brass pressuring underlings to ignore clear signs of stress in securities they were rating.
But also pay close attention to the testimony of Berkshire Hathaway chief Warren Buffett. Buffett was once viewed as a financier who invested in quality firms and didn't hesitate to criticize major problems with the financial system. That reputation has been severely tarnished by the financial crisis and the following battle for financial reform– Buffett spent decades criticizing the market for derivatives, but has since lobbied hard to protect his own derivatives interests. He's lobbied so hard, in fact, that Buffett's Senator, Democrat Ben Nelson of Nebraska, joined a Republican filibuster to block Wall Street reform.
Buffett has adopted a similar strategy on ratings. He's been very critical of rating agencies for years, all while owning a huge stake in Moody's, and making a killing off of it.
Nobody likes the rating agencies. Even staunch defenders of big Wall Street banks hate Moody's and Fitch and S&P because they provide a convenient scapegoat. But it's important not to loose sight of the fact that, even at their worst, rating agencies were essentially just acting as agents of the big banks. And despite this widespread animosity, rating agencies still hold a very prominent place in the global economy by rating sovereign debt. With Greece and Spain under intense budget pressure, rating agency downgrades of each nation's debt has a tremendous impact on bond markets and the ability of government's to finance basic public services. Moody's has been particularly nefarious in this respect, even threatening to downgrade U.S. government debt, despite no evidence of default, and heavy demand among investors for U.S. Treasury bonds.


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Protecting the oceans through marine protected areas can provide higher and more sustained income through tourism and controlled fisheries than continued exploitation. This is the result of IUCN's new compilation of case studies about the economic benefits of marine protected areas, launched on World Biodiversity Day at the 2nd International Marine Protected Area Congress in Washington, D.C.
Along the western coast of Hawaii, a network of marine protected areas was established in 1999 following concerns about over harvesting by aquarium fishers. Eight years later, the total catch and the catch for the top two commercial species in the adjacent areas were higher than in the previous 40 years. Western Hawaii case study
In the Navakavu Locally Managed Marine Area near Viti Levu Island in Fiji, finfish catch increased by 3 per cent in the four years after putting the area under protection, resulting in a revenue increase of US$28,700 for local communities. Navakavu case study
A third case study shows that fishermen near the Kulape-Batu-Batu Marine Protected Area, in the Philippine Tawi-Tawi province, were able to increase their income by about 20 percent only one year after the establishment of the Kulape-Batu-Batu marine sanctuary. Kulape-Batu-Batu case study
"These case studies show that closing selected marine areas to fishing or other extractive uses makes economic sense," says Carl Gustaf Lundin, Head of IUCN's Global Marine Programme. "Marine protected areas, if well managed, help fish stocks replenish, which then increase yields in neighbouring areas and improve the economic situation of the local communities."
Marine protected areas also attract tourism, which is the other important source of income through marine conservation.
Since all fishing has been banned in the British Lundy Island No Take Zone, a small four square km marine protected area set up in the Bristol Channel in 2003, tourism has picked up significantly: the business of the area's tour operator, for example, has doubled since 2003. The fishing industry also benefits from the Lundy No Take Zone: lobsters have become more abundant and grown in average size, within and outside the protected zone, which is expected to replenish fish stocks in the area and increase fisheries yields. Lundy case study
"On World Biodiversity Day, IUCN gives the proof that protecting the oceans is not only good for biodiversity, but it also makes money," says Julia Marton-Lefèvre, IUCN Director General. "These examples from around the world prove that there are no excuses anymore for exploiting the oceans until nothing is left – it will ultimately destroy the fishing industry altogether, let alone the diversity of life on our planet."
Less than one percent of the world's oceans are currently protected, compared to about 12 percent of the land surface. Governments agreed under the UN Convention on Biological Diversity to increase protection of the oceans to 10 percent by 2010.
For more information, please contact:
- Brian Thomson, IUCN Global Communications, m +41 79 721 8326, e [email protected]
- Taffeta Gray, Marine Communications Officer, m +1 202 330 3615, e [email protected]
- Carl Gustaf Lundin, Head of IUCN Global Marine Programme, e [email protected]
- Experts on each of the four case studies - contact details enclosed in each case study.
Case studies:
Kulape-Batu-Batu Marine Protected Area, Philippines: https://www.iucn.org/downloads/marine_protected_areas_kulape_batu_batu.pdf
Navakavu Locally Managed Marine Area, Fiji: https://www.iucn.org/downloads/marine_protected_areas_navakavu.pdf
Western Hawaii Marine Protected Area Network, USA: https://www.iucn.org/downloads/marine_protected_areas_hawai.pdf
Lundy Island No Take Zone, England: https://www.iucn.org/downloads/marine_protected_areas_lundy.pdf