Friday, February 27, 2009

How Many Calories Are In Pad Thai

Aim a little balance in this golden rooster in full song in Cameroon!

Coq caught live by Marie-Corinne Devilliers in a village in Cameroon.
The Golden Rooster, delicate posture of the sequence of Yang style tai chi, the only movement made on stiff leg without kicking leg after another.
Seeking photo of a snake that crawls, a white crane spreads its wings, a girl threw her shuttle to the four corners of the universe ... for the fans!

Friday, February 13, 2009

Suede Shoe Cleaner And Sealer

Landscapes Queyras and evolution (Historical Dictionary of Cultural and Queyras)

These are men who are landscapes. As the business changes, also changing the landscape. The main activity today is tourism, the landscape is shaped by this activity. In the villages of valley bottoms, the most intensively used lands are hayfields and ski resorts, the slopes facing south near urbanized, ski areas lie on the faces west or north beyond , the space is used extensively logging, trail herds in the pastures; summer use trails. The soil is left in the terraces of south-facing slope and in isolated pastures. Tourism is seasonal. In winter, it is the valley bottoms and slopes equipped with lifts that are used in summer, trails, remote natural sites. In Upper Guil, there are two types of landscapes: one that is shaped by tourism, Shelter and needles, and a protected environment area, Ristolas. The areas most humanized are also less structured and more visually degraded those remote villages are untouched by development and structured.

Three factors explain the evolution of landscapes: the degeneration of the economy agro-forestry-pastoral population exodus, the development of tourism. To realize one can distinguish four stages schematically.

In 1800, dominates the agro-forestry-pastoral. Vegetation sprawls along the altitude and exposure. On southerly, land in the valley and around the hamlets inhabited continuously cultivated (rye, barley or oats, potatoes): above lie the hayfields and pastures. On Ubac, from bottom to top, are staged hayfields, forests, pastures. Intense exchanges are on the road, those passes to the Piedmont and that of Combe.

In 1850, the trade is by road to areas where livestock with dairy products come from the Queyras competition. This is the opposite end of transhumance and summering Italians and the beginning of permanent emigration. With fruit, profits from the processing of milk left in the Queyras. The hamlets are becoming summering habitats and the population is concentrated in the towns.

In 1900, the population has halved. Queyras opens on areas complementary but not competing. The milk is collected by large dairies, Nestlé Gap, and the profits of its transformation is no longer allocated Queyrassins. Provence transhumant flocks. Beginning of tourism. The landscape is changing gradually. Hamlets adrets are slowly abandoned. Ubacs on the forest extends into the valley bottoms to the detriment of hayfields.

In 1980, tourism became the main activity. Queyras's economy depends on cities. Collar workers found an interest, but only in summer tourism. On southerly, cultivated fields have virtually disappeared and the area of hayfields was strongly reduced. The hamlets are no longer inhabited by summer tourists. The forest grows at the expense of high altitude pastures. On Ubac, the forest stretches to the detriment of the hayfields of the valley. The exchanges are by Combe and was also by the collar and Izoard Agnel.

In a century and a half, the traditional habitat has disappeared, or because the houses are falling apart, that is, converted the buildings have changed function: they are no longer firm, but the residences. Queyras moved from intensive farming to extensive farming endangered and an almost complete autarky to complete dependence vis-à-vis the outside. Without farmers, the landscape has changed. The patchwork of fields and hayfields that characterized disappeared in favor of the moors. The contours become blurred; forests being over grazed, the undergrowth being replenished. The larch is struggling to regenerate itself is challenged by spruce and stone pine, ancient cultures are replaced on southerly by dry grasslands and heathlands juniper, the hayfields are gradually colonized by forest; abandoned channel causes a change in flora and development of plants that merely low soil moist pastures are colonized by forest on the slopes that were once devoid of trees.

Monday, January 12, 2009

What Do You Do About Your Goggle Tan Lines?

Landscapes (Historical Dictionary of Cultural and Queyras)

In France (as elsewhere in the world), nature is not natural (it did also never been), but cultural. In other words, it is men who, through their work, shaping and shaped the nature, who have mastered and controlled, its management, giving the landscape the look that is theirs, often admirable, and under which we see them. This is true in the Queyras and elsewhere, although part of nature - the mountains, the rocky, steep ravines - to be away from men so that they have abandoned the process.

In fact, these landscapes are also historical, which means that over the centuries, depending on the work that produced them, landscapes change. Here's how VA Malte-Brun in 1882 in France is illustrated, described the valley of the Guil, between Château-Queyras and Old Town:
"fields where flax, barley, oats and rye to come a very great height grasslands through which meanders Guil, and extending as far as the vast forests of larch, which crown the mountains on these pastures and vast wealth of rare plants, including the hamlets Most of them are inhabited only during the summer, channels which, on scaffolding supported by masses of rock above the Guil, bear fertility one side of the valley to the other: this is the aspect of the country. "
Today, the appearance of this portion of the valley is quite different. Malte-Brun describes an agricultural landscape. In fact, there are no cultivated fields, raised more channels. The hamlets of summer pastures are often in disrepair, meadows mowed less often.

This is the forest. Two centuries ago, Queyras was less wooded than it is today. Long, the forest has been a resource for communities large, whose control has resulted in protracted conflicts (see the article on trials). During the long period of prosperity and population growth in the sixteenth to the eighteenth century, the area occupied by forests has declined, despite the measures taken to prevent massive deforestation, which has had consequences for their price of softwood work, more rare (Abbot Gondret evidenced in his Historical Memoirs). It has used the stone to replace the wood. In the 1860s, a forestry law was passed, which encouraged municipalities to preserve forests and, through tax incentives, to replant forests in land left fallow.

This is the hayfields. The example of pre Michel, located by the lookout Viso, in the town of Ristolas, is enlightening. As shown by the authors of a pamphlet published by the Regional Natural Park, the forest is gradually gaining on the meadow here and elsewhere across the Queyras since 1920 or 1940, for every field, from the moment he ceases being broke, are sprinkled in a few decades of aspens, then returns to forest. Photos du Pasquier, a hamlet in the town of Arvieux, taken in 1930 show a landscape near an altitude of well-defined and well maintained as if the grass had been combed through. Sixty years later, these basins, which are no longer broke, have gradually earned by shrubs.

Eventually, landscapes, made with terraced plots and hayfields, which for centuries have been typically Queyrassins, specific agricultural high mountains and are the work of men, may in a near future, when the last farmers have closed their stalls, to disappear and be made a sort of bush and tree in the forest. There are still a few, he must hurry to see. Thus, Saint-Veran. In July and August, in front of the village on the left bank of the White Aquamarine, the alluvial fans of a few torrents, free of any stone, probably irrigated and can be smoked in the spring or fall, are still broke. We admire the work of secular men who paved the midst of these shapeless rubble patches sharply defined, have maintained with loving care (imagine the long hours that all this need), and the grass cut flush varies from light green to dark green. This is one of the finest and most moving mountain landscapes that are can see in our country.

This is the terraces that are (or were when they were still maintained and visible) forms an essential part of the landscape Queyrassins. The terraces, they are dry stone walls or earth banks covered with grass that used to hold the topsoil and can cultivate steep plot. The slopes of clever, over or around the villages are organized well. A century ago, when the mountain was a hive of activity, it has the appearance of an immense garden sloping landscape, which unfortunately, is disappearing along with its authors, namely the farmers. For, in the mountains, they are also farmers who have made landscapes. The maintenance of the terraces is virtually assured, the meadows are mowed less often. The commons, that animals once grazed in the spring, are no longer in that wasteland weeds and shrubs. The consolidation that took place in Queyras, with difficulty, has eliminated the smaller plots.

In short, the landscape of Queyras, whose main characteristic is to be cultural, shaped by human hands, historical, changing, show how the idea of sanctuary - what some environmentalists would transform the Queyras - is a pure myth, based on the thesis Imaginary and belied by the facts of nature that has not changed since the Creation, always the same over the centuries, "natural" in some way .