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This chapter describes the history and continuing impact of the rust fungus, Hemileia vastatrix, on coffee crops. In the 19th century, this pathogen wiped-out coffee crops in Ceylon (Sri Lanka) and transformed the country into a tea-producing island. The scientist Harry Marshall Ward played a key role in the story of coffee rust, and was posted to Ceylon in 1880 to identify the cause of the epidemic. Coffee rust remains an exceedingly important agricultural problem in the developing world. A diversity of stories about the biology and sociology of this fungal disease of international importance is presented.

This chapter explores the future of the ongoing competition between humans and fungi for control of the biosphere. The emerging diseases of white pine blister rust, sudden oak death, jarrah dieback, soybean rust, and rice blast offer useful perspectives on the planet’s rotten present and rotten future. The use of fungi as agents of agricultural and biological warfare is also featured. The global impact of fungal disease is highlighted, with the idea that a fungal super-pathogen of Cretaceous plants may have contributed to the extinction of the dinosaurs.

This chapter discusses fungal diseases of staple cereal crops and their historical and contemporary effects upon agriculture and civilization. Two thousand years ago, the Romans tried to combat wheat diseases by placating their mildew god called Robigus. The scientific study of plant diseases began in the 1750s with experiments on stinking bunt of wheat by the French investigator Mathieu Tillet. Revolutionary work on the same disease by Bénédict Prévost in the early 19th century was followed by the innovative research of Anton de Bary on the rust life cycle. Modern work on fungal evolution, plant breeding, and fungicide development is also considered in this chapter.

This chapter discusses the plant diseases caused by fungi. Fungi cause more plant diseases than all other enemies combined. Since the beginning of agriculture, livelihoods and lives have been lost to rusts, smuts, bunts, mildews, potato blight, and rice blast. Of particular significance in this discussion is a pestilence called coffee rust that ravages an indispensable coffee crop in South America. Fungi also spoil food after it has been harvested, rotting fruits and vegetables during storage, transport, and in the recesses of refrigerators.

As in life, so in redox reactions: some are good and some are bad. Corrosion is one of the evil among redox reactions. It is the unwanted oxidation of a metal that cuts short the lifetimes of steel products such as bridges and vehicles. Replacing corroded metal parts costs industry and society a huge amount each year. Understanding it helps us to find ways to prevent it. Not all corrosion, however, is unwanted: the green patina of copper roofs is often sought and can be beautiful; the induced oxidation of aluminium in the presence of dyes can also be intentional and can bring graceful colour to a building. I shall focus on the corrosion of iron, Fe (from the Latin ferrum), its rusting, as it is so common a way of death for our everyday artefacts. Iron rusts when it is exposed to damp air, with both oxygen and water present. In the process the Fe atoms of the metal are oxidized—lose some electrons—and become Fe3+ ions. These ions pick up some oxide ions, O2–, and are deposited as the red–brown oxide, Fe2O3. The corrosion of iron is very much like its reversion to the ore, which is also typically Fe2O3, from which, with so great an effort and all the expensive and energy-intensive, environmentally invasive fury of a blast furnace, it was originally obtained (Reaction 4). In the process of forming Fe3+, the oxygen of the air, the oxidizing agent, is converted to water. The hydrogen atoms needed for the formation of H2O molecules from O2 molecules are scavenged from the surrounding solution, especially if it is acidic and rich in hydrogen ions. I shall now show you the reaction in more detail and try to lead you into appreciating visually what is going on inside a small droplet of water on the surface of a sheet of rusting iron. Although rusting is rarely thought beautiful, there is a beauty and subtlety in the choreography of the atomic events that underlie its formation. As usual, you should imagine shrinking to the size of a molecule, plunging below the droplet’s surface, and descending diver-like through the densely agitating, bustling, tumbling water molecules.

This chapter describes Jack Reed’s 1956 speech before an all-black audience at Rust College, a Methodist college in the north Mississippi town of Holly Springs. Reed spoke about his faith and the issue of integration, and concluded with some positive words about the state of Mississippi’s economy and how its improvement would benefit its black citizens.

In Globalia and Le Parfum d’Adam J.-C. Rufin explores what could go wrong with the environmentalist movement, if it were co-opted by unwise or greedy leaders. Globalia is the sole country in a dystopian world governed according to the principles of deep ecology: vegetarianism, strict protection of forests and animals, and zero population growth. It is a sterile, climate-controlled world, covered by domes. “Non-zones” outside the domes are homes to mobsters, warring tribes, and resistants. They constitute a feared outside enemy which serves to unite most Globalians in support of their totalitarian government. This novel echoes Alexis de Tocqueville’s fear that a “tyranny of the majority” might someday rule the United States. Le Parfum d’Adam is a thriller about ecoterrorists who, obsessed by the deep ecology principle that world population must decrease, plot to contaminate the water system of a huge favela of Rio de Janeiro. They believe that poor people—too busy surviving to think about ecology—are destroying the planet.

This chapter discusses the wood-destroying fungi that cause wood to rot, decompose, or decay. These fungi are vital in the maintenance of living, growing forests. Without them, dead woody debris, fallen trees, logs, branches, and twigs would accumulate on the forest floor year after year without end. Decay fungi are an entirely different set of fungus species than those forming mycorrhizae. The fruiting body of most decay fungi is known as a conk or shelf fungus. A conk grows on the surface of its tree host, and its hyphae grow directly into the tree's tissues without touching the soil. Most of the decay fungi are polypores (family Polyporaceae), whose spores are liberated through numerous fine pores on the lower surface of the cap or shelf. Red-belted (also known as red-banded) polypore (Fomitopsis pinicola) attacks the majority of conifers. The fungus attacks dead trees, producing reddish brown, rotted wood that is divided first into neat cubes, which later crumble. Other conifer parasites are rust fungi and a genus of parasitic flowering plants called dwarf mistletoes.

This chapter begins with a background on the demolition of Frank Lloyd Wright's Larkin building in 1950 which proved ominous for Buffalo. It sketches Buffalo's impending socioeconomic decline by citing several landmark events from the decade, such as the relocation of the prominent Technical High School from the black East Side to the white West Side in 1954. It also follows five decades of decline that halved Buffalo's population and hastened its transformation into a rust belt cornerstone. The chapter focuses on Buffalo in the present time, which looks to refugee resettlement as a means to rejuvenate its distressed neighborhoods, starting with 11,000 refugees who have resettled in Buffalo since 2008. It stresses how Buffalo continues to receive the highest number of refugees in New York State, which afforded the city with a much-needed urban stimulus and jolted its lethargic public systems reeling from decades of regression.

This chapter presents an English translation of George Rust’s Latin academic text entitled The Messiah Promised in the Holy Scripture Came a Long Time Ago. Here Rust talks about how he considered demonstrating that ‘Jesus himself was the promised Messiah, since it is an accepted fact among liberal and judicious men that the stubborn incredulity of the Jews and their sworn hatred towards God’s Christ cannot be justified by any means’. Rust explains how he has defended his arguments from the Holy Scriptures from all the objections raised by the Jews. In conclusion, he declares that ‘The Messiah promised in the Holy Scripture came a long time ago’.

During the 1970s and 1980s, municipal officials launched a massive campaign of urban revitalization to stimulate Flint’s economy. As part of this effort, local policymakers cleared hundreds of acres of land for redevelopment, provided dozens of tax abatements to corporations, and used annexation to absorb businesses in neighboring suburbs. City leaders also supported the development of AutoWorld, the Water Street Festival Marketplace, and other projects designed to revitalize the city. Still, local officials could not persuade General Motors executives to modernize their urban plants. Faced with an ongoing loss of market share, GM laid off tens of thousands of Flint workers and closed numerous local plants during the 1970s and 1980s. The plant closures and layoffs devastated Flint’s economy along with its reputation as a company town. Local filmmaker Michael Moore documented GM’s disinvestment from Flint in his 1989 film, Roger and Me. Though deindustrialization created crises in many areas of the country, Flint, with its strong unions and high wages, bore the brunt of GM’s restructuring initiatives. Between 1970 and 2000, GM cut its local workforce dramatically while investing heavily in the Sunbelt and abroad. These long-distance capital migrations marked Flint’s emergence as an epicenter of the “Rust Belt.”

This chapter begins with the story of Brian Rust, who died in his sleep at the age of eighty-eight on January 5, 2011. Rust was one of the world's foremost jazz record collectors. By the time he turned twenty, his research into the background and origins of rare and obscure recordings was so encyclopedic that he had already become known within the politically fractious, jealous, and mutually suspicious community of jazz music collectors as the “Sage of Edgware.” It was Rust who first visualized the discography's potential as a platform for research. The chapter also discusses the meaning of “discography” and defines a typology of the editing approaches that comprehensive discographers used over the years to limit the size and scope of their works.

This chapter describes notable discographies and discographers from 1961–70. These include Brian Rust's publication of his long-awaited Jazz Records, A-Z, 1897–1931; the first volume of Jørgen Grunnet Jepsen's Jazz Records, 1942–196X; John Godrich and Robert Dixon's Blues and Gospel Records, 1902–1942; and Leadbitter and Slaven's Blues Records, 1943–1966.

This chapter describes notable discographies and discographers from 1979 onwards. These include the fourth edition of Brian Rust's Jazz Records, A-Z; the twenty-sixth and final volume of Tom Lord's The Jazz Discography; the Internet's expansion of new alternatives to Lord's all-encompassing general discography; and do-it-yourself discography.

This chapter discusses two urban self-portraits, Tony Buba's Lightning Over Braddock (1988) and Michael Moore's Roger & Me (1989), in the context of historic urban identities giving way for the development of global cities. These films illustrate the decline of the American Rust Belt cities in the 1980s through first-person narratives in which the directors themselves appeared onscreen. Buba and Moore became characters as important as the depicted cities by using their own body and subjectivity in order to convey the main concerns of their community. And by combining an ironic self-portrait based on the aesthetics of failure with committed activism and guerrilla practices, both Buba and Moore widen the discursive possibilities of the socio-political documentary film, joining the defence of their respective communities with the expression of their own subjectivity.

Whether you are breaking prairie sod in the nineteenth century or raising a family and scrambling to make ends meet in the twenty-first, it is hard to get worked up over abstract possibilities. There is too much that needs doing, right here, right now. Even knowing the odds, people still live in earthquake zones, hurricane alleys, and the unprotected floodplains of mighty rivers. The warm embrace of a thirsty aridland city is not so different. Generally speaking, it is hard for any of us to get seriously concerned about what might happen until it does happen. That’s why the politics of climate change are so difficult. The measurements and observations that convince scientists about the warming of Earth are invisible to the rest of us. We fail to sense them at the scale of our personal lives. And believing in the verdicts of computer models about what might happen twenty or forty years in the future, well, that is tantamount to a leap of faith, and most people don’t ordinarily jump that far. Believing in the growth of cities can be difficult, too. Beginning in 2007, the domino of subprime mortgage defaults knocked over the domino of overleveraged investment banks, which toppled a wobbly world credit system, which upended industries around the globe and ushered in the Great Recession. 1 The home-building industries of growth-crazy cities like Las Vegas and Phoenix collapsed virtually overnight. Suburbs from Florida to California became ghost towns where wind-driven litter piled up in doorways and weeds grew higher than the sills of boarded-up windows. Some analysts predicted the emergence of a new generation of suburban slums and the death of gas-guzzling, car-dependent, long-commute suburban lifestyles. 2 Indeed, in the long run, considering the implications of peak oil and peak water and the likelihood of more severe climate reckonings than we’ve yet seen, such a demise seems likely—though maybe not quite yet.

The hockey film Slap Shot (1977) develops a rust-belt realism and a radical kind of masculinity that have not been sufficiently appreciated. Chapter 3 discusses how this drama, filmed in a western Pennsylvania steel town, exposes the social consequences of neoliberalism by linking the mill’s closure to the fate of its middling hockey team. Written by unorthodox feminist Nancy Dowd, the film also explores gender performance and physicality as a means to reform masculinity through play. Echoes of gay liberation and a pacifist movement for noncompetitive games appear in the team’s adoption of the goon’s subversive and violent playing style—pummeling opponents to the delight of the crowd and agitating against establishment social codes. A hero, played by Paul Newman, leads the charge. This film re-imagines virility without hegemony and exemplifies a leftist populism that courses through the genre.