This chapter traces the ways familiar depictions of Ireland are interrupted when we consider some of the rare co-imaginings of Irish and Pacific islands. When watched alone, Robert Flaherty’s Man of Aran (1934) presents the non-modern in modern Ireland. But when watched alongside Moana (1926, Robert and Frances Flaherty), Man of Aran reveals the traveling nature of non-modern tropes, as the Pacific non-modern and the Irish non-modern coalesce. The transoceanic movement of the “novel savage” is emphasized, and the quintessentially Irish becomes recognizably interislander. By tracing the connections between Ireland and the Cook Islands in Kenneth Sheils Reddin’s Another Shore (1945), as well as Charles Crichton’s 1948 adaptation, we see that Reddin draws on the seeming incontrovertibility of the Pacific’s arcadia to establish, first, Dublin’s modernity, then Dublin’s non-modernity, then the erroneous, nebulous nature of such categories. By tracing the transnational movement of tropes and stereotypes across Ireland and the Pacific, area studies divisions collapse and we recognize Ireland as part of a global archipelago of islands of discounted, nascent, imbricated modernity.

Non-marine molluscs stand out as the major animal group under the most severe threat. Among the 8664 mollusc species evaluated for the IUCN Red List (version 2019-1), 300 are considered Extinct out of a total 872 listed Extinct species. However, only ~10% of molluscs have been evaluated and other assessments of the number of extinct species are much higher, 3000 to over 5000, almost exclusively non-marine species. As for most other groups, threats faced by non-marine molluscs are habitat loss, probably the most important, but also impacts of introduced species, exploitation, generally of less concern, and climate change, likely to have serious effects into the future. Oceanic island species, often narrowly endemic, are especially threatened and constitute a high proportion of recorded extinctions. Anthropogenic activities have caused non-marine mollusc extinctions since prehistory, but threats have increased greatly over the last few centuries and will probably continue to increase. Most mollusc species for which a population trend has been evaluated by IUCN are stable or declining; those few that are increasing are primarily introduced and invasive. Most threatened are oceanic island snails, North American and other freshwater bivalves, and the diverse and highly endemic micro-snails of Southeast Asian limestone outcrops.

The chapter considers the contribution of the ICJ to the law of the sea, highlighting four areas where the Court has made a key contribution to the development of the law: maritime delimitation cases, the status of islands and rocks, navigational rights in straits and lastly, the conservation of natural resources. The author notes that the Court’s influence is not equal in all of these areas, but emphasises the significant rule that the Court has played in developing the principles and rules of international law applicable to maritime boundary delimitations.

The seaward limits of each jurisdictional zone are measured from baselines. Thus, rules concerning baselines are of particular importance in the law of the sea. In particular, rules governing straight baselines and bays merit serious consideration. Furthermore, attention must be devoted to the legal status of islands and low-tide elevations because the existence of these maritime features may affect the seaward limits of marine spaces under national jurisdiction. Against that background, this chapter will address rules concerning baselines and related issues, focusing mainly on the following questions: (1) the rules governing baselines, (2) the problems associated with rules with regard to straight baselines, (3) the rules governing juridical bays in international law, (4) historic bay, (5) the definition of an island, and (6) the differences between islands, rocks and low-tide elevations.

This chapter examines UNCLOS tribunals’ contribution to the development of the law on maritime entitlement and maritime delimitation-two distinct but related concepts. The chapter first analyses and assesses the extent to which UNCLOS tribunals—as the first international tribunals to deal with questions relating to the entitlement to a continental shelf beyond 200 nm and entitlement from insular features—have contributed to clarifying the legal ambiguities concerning these two issues. The chapter then analyses UNCLOS tribunals’ decisions relating to maritime delimitation within and beyond 200 nm, with a focus on examining the convergences and divergences in UNCLOS tribunals’ application of the established three-stage approach within 200 nm and on assessing the contribution of UNCLOS tribunals to clarifying the legal ambiguities concerning the delimitation of the continental shelf beyond 200 nm.

After a sketch of the history of the law of the sea and the traditional freedoms of the sea, this chapter discusses the various efforts to codify the law of the sea during the twentieth century, which culminated in the adoption of UNCLOS in 1982. Subsequently, the chapter examines the legal regimes governing the various maritime zones, as well as two international areas: the high seas and the Area. The chapter then takes up thematic issues in the law of the sea, namely the delimitation of maritime boundaries, the protection of the marine environment, the special interests of developing countries, and the system for the settlement of law of the sea disputes. The chapter concludes by noting that, despite the relatively comprehensive scope of UNCLOS, a number of new challenges have arisen with respect to the law of the sea, especially as a result of human-driven climate change.

After a sketch of the history of the law of the sea and the traditional freedoms of the sea, this chapter discusses the various efforts to codify the law of the sea during the twentieth century, which culminated in the adoption of UNCLOS in 1982. Subsequently, the chapter examines the legal regimes governing the various maritime zones, as well as two international areas: the high seas and the Area. The chapter then takes up thematic issues in the law of the sea, namely the delimitation of maritime boundaries, the protection of the marine environment, the special interests of developing countries, and the system for the settlement of law of the sea disputes. The chapter concludes by noting that, despite the relatively comprehensive scope of UNCLOS, a number of new challenges have arisen with respect to the law of the sea, especially as a result of human-driven climate change.

Acceptability and grammaticality are clearly closely related, but the relationship is not always straightforward. Sometimes, sentences that are thought to be ungrammatical are perceived as acceptable, leading to an illusion of grammaticality, or grammatical sentences are perceived as unacceptable, leading to an illusion of ungrammaticality. Such cases occur with morphological ambiguity, attachment ambiguity, agreement attraction, and negative polarity items, among others. Processing difficulty is one of the factors that can lower the acceptability of a grammatical sentence, as may be seen in the effects of constituent length and dependency length on acceptability. In some cases, such as superiority violations and island violations, it has been argued that these may actually be grammatical, but unacceptable, though this is the topic of much ongoing research involving cross-linguistic work and studies on repeated exposure (satiation) and memory capacity. Having better models of acceptability and better ways of directly measuring grammaticality would be desirable.

Species pools are the result of speciation and extinction, processes that mostly act at long time scales. We make the simplifying assumption that the number of species in the pool is a relatively stable number at the time scales used in community ecology. We describe how standard reference works and classic natural history studies provide data on species pools at a variety of scales. Three types of pools should be distinguished: the regional pool (an unfiltered pool of species which takes into account geographic limits), the habitat-specific pool (a filtered pool which takes into account habitat conditions) and the potential pool (which takes into account species that are adapted to different habitats and potential invasive species). We describe how pools can be constructed by processes including accumulating or downscaling. We discuss the challenges of creating consistent species pools for research and conservation purposes, and conclude that preparing such lists is an important priority in community ecology.

Elizabeth Bishop loved Florida, the “state with the prettiest name.” She settled for a time in Key West, on the southernmost archipelago of the continental United States, delighting in the vivid birds and bright fishes of its tropical environment. The shifting seascape of coral islands and submerged reefs resonated with Bishop’s deep sense of contingency and flux. The Keys is a place of hybridity; of silt, shadows, and salvage. Its soft and balmy climate belies a complex and traumatic history of colonial struggle, racial violence, and loss. This chapter explores Bishop’s affective response to and relationship with place through the complex interwoven histories of racial and cultural identity of Southern Florida. It argues that the ‘Bone Key’ became a proving ground for much of the poetry that made up Bishop’s first collection, North & South (1946), shaping and animating the imagined South that forms one of the volume’s poles.

This final chapter explores the aesthetics and materiality of stone, water and air. Theories of assemblage, non-human agency and differential time show how innovative was Scott’s approach to the relationships between people and the environments in which they live. Time frames are a key theme throughout the book: here, Jeffrey Cohen’s theory of lithic (stone) time, Rob Nixon’s account of the ‘slow time’ of many forms of environmental violence and Donna Haraway’s investigation into how animals over time became ‘companion’ species raise questions about permanence, solidity, transformation and modes of perception. Weather, seascapes and night skies are explored. Case studies compare Scott’s poetry and fiction with writing from American transcendentalism. Geographically, the chapter ranges from Scotland’s Borders, the Solway Firth, Shetland Isles and deeper Atlantic Ocean towards Iceland and Greenland. The chapter ends with episodes from Redgauntlet and Guy Mannering that look to the night sky, space and the stars.

I am not aware of any other book that has shed so much light on species diversity patterns and generalities across time and space as has M. L. Rosenzweig’s (1995) Species diversity in space and time. Rosenzweig compared the study of species diversity patterns with a dinosaur that has come alive and is challenging us. He then listed 10 major challenges that we as ecologists and biogeographers have to address. Some of these are focused on arguably the most general pattern, and definitely one of the oldest known patterns, in nature, i.e. the species–area relationship (SAR). Rosenzweig, 25 years ago, was signifying that, regardless of the vast number of studies on SARs, we were still lacking, at his time of writing, a complete understanding of the pattern. All of the preceding chapters in this volume highlight the amount of progress that has been made since Rosenzweig’s book, the range of new methods and patterns that have been brought to light and the many new and insightful questions that have been asked; some have been answered, others still challenge us. Herein, I discuss issues related to the SAR that still require our attention, some of which have been noted in the preceding chapters.

By taking advantage of spatially explicit modelling and network analysis, we investigated how species–area relationships (SARs) emerge and are maintained by dispersal and how the spatial arrangement of islands affects colonization/extinction dynamics of SARs. In particular, we generated different archipelagos characterized by varying geometric properties and then we simulated inter-island dispersal/colonization patterns. As the model proceeds through time, species accumulate on different islands according to their dispersal ability and depending on island size and isolation. During each time step, the model fit a power function that thus enabled us to track the emergence of island SARs (ISARs). After equilibrium was reached, we simulated a phase of reduced dispersal. Each simulated archipelago was analysed as a network in which each island was a node connected to other nodes (islands) based on pairwise spatial distances. We found that basic properties of the underlying connectivity network were correlated with ISAR properties, although the best predictor of richness was almost always island area. In nearly all simulations, the ISAR weakened after reducing the dispersal ability of the species. Our study demonstrates that a spatially explicit dispersal simulation model and network analysis can provide meaningful insight into the evolution and robustness of ISARs.

The last part of Chapter 2 and the first part of Chapter 3 of De mundo (392a31–393a8) describe the cosmic layers further below the sphere of the moon, leading down to the very centre of the universe. This section provides a brief overview of the sublunary layers of the four elements (fire, air, water and earth), some of which will be discussed in more detail later in the text. The two main theses that constitute the reasoning behind this section are (i) continuity throughout the entire cosmos and (ii) the great variety of phenomena and processes within the sublunary domain. The layers are organised from the most active one at the top down to the most passive one at the centre of the universe. The continuity among the layers is demonstrated on each and every level. There is, however, no suggestion that each lower, less active substance gains all its characteristics from the more active substance above. For our author’s purpose it is sufficient to demonstrate that there is some relation, some communication among the layers which can later be used by the divine dunamis permeating the entire cosmos. The final part of the present section concerns the claim that the continents are large islands surrounded by an ocean.