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Books > Earth & environment
Debates about the causes and impacts of global environmental
degradation go to the heart of economic and political systems and
raise fundamental questions about power and inequity in a
globalized world. The comprehensively revised 2nd edition of this
popular text provides wide-ranging coverage of the international
negotiations and on assessment of the international political
economy of the environment, normative and policy debates on
environmental governance, and of prospects for the pursuit of
environmental security.
A compliation of over 60 articles from 20 authors on the issues of
'rewilding' in nature conservation.
Must the strip mall and the eight-lane highway define 21st century
American life? That is a central question posed by critics of
suburban and exurban living in America. Yet despite the ubiquity of
the critique, it never sticks-Americans by the scores of millions
have willingly moved into sprawling developments over the past few
decades. Americans find many of the more substantial criticisms of
sprawl easy to ignore because they often come across as snobbish in
tone. Yet as Thad Williamson explains, sprawl does create real,
measurable social problems. Williamson's work is unique in two
important ways. First, while he highlights the deleterious effects
of sprawl on civic life in America, he is also evenhanded. He does
not dismiss the pastoral, homeowning ideal that is at the root of
sprawl, and is sympathetic to the vast numbers of Americans who
very clearly prefer it. Secondly, his critique is neither aesthetic
nor moralistic in tone, but based on social science. Utilizing a
landmark 30,000-person survey, he shows that sprawl fosters civic
disengagement, diminishes social trust, accentuates inequality, and
negatively impacts the environment. Sprawl, Justice, and
Citizenship will not only be the most comprehensive work in print
on the subject, it will be the first to offer a empirically
rigorous critique of the most popular form of living in America
today.
An annual collection of studies on individuals who have made
contributions to the development of geography and geographical
thought. Each paper describes the geographer's education, life and
work, discusses their influence and spread of academic ideas and
includes a bibliography of their work.
In 1973, a group of California lawyers formed a non-profit,
public-interest legal foundation dedicated to defending
conservative principles in court. Calling themselves the Pacific
Legal Foundation, they declared war on the U.S. regulatory
state-the sets of rules, legal precedents, and bureaucratic
processes that govern the way Americans do business. Believing that
the growing size and complexity of government regulations
threatened U.S. economy and infringed on property rights, Pacific
Legal Foundation began to file a series of lawsuits challenging the
government's power to plan the use of private land or protect
environmental qualities. By the end of the decade, they had been
joined in this effort by spin-off legal foundations across the
country. The Other Rights Revolution explains how a little-known
collection of lawyers and politicians-with some help from angry
property owners and bulldozer-driving Sagebrush Rebels-tried to
bring liberal government to heel in the final decades of the
twentieth century. Decker demonstrates how legal and constitutional
battles over property rights, preservation, and the environment
helped to shape the political ideas and policy agendas of modern
conservatism. By uncovering the history-including the regionally
distinctive experiences of the American West-behind the
conservative mobilization in the courts, Decker offers a new
interpretation of the Reagan-era right.
How are firms, networks of firms, and production systems organized
and how does this organization vary from place to place? What are
the new geographies emerging from the need to create, access, and
share knowledge, and sustain competitiveness? In what ways are
local clusters and global exchange relations intertwined and
co-constituted? What are the impacts of global changes in
technology, demand, and competition on the organization of
production, and how do these effects vary between communities,
regions, and nations?
This book synthesizes theories from across the social sciences with
empirical research and case studies in order to answer these
questions and to demonstrate how people and firms organize economic
action and interaction across local, national, and global flows of
knowledge and innovation. It is structured in four clear parts:
- Part I: Foundations of Relational Thinking
- Part II: Relational Clusters of Knowledge
- Part III: Knowledge Circulation Across Territories
- Part IV: Toward a Relational Economic Policy?
The book employs a novel relational framework, which recognizes
values, interpretative frameworks, and decision-making practices as
subject to the contextuality of the social institutions that
characterize the relationships between the human agents. It will be
a valuable resource for academics, researchers, and graduate
students across the social sciences, and practitioners in clusters
policy.
Restoring Layered Landscapes brings together historians,
geographers, philosophers, and interdisciplinary scholars to
explore ecological restoration in landscapes with complex histories
shaped by ongoing interactions between humans and nature. For many
decades, ecological restoration - particularly in the United States
- focused on returning degraded sites to conditions that prevailed
prior to human influence. This model has been broadened in recent
decades, and restoration now increasingly focuses on the recovery
of ecological functions and processes rather than on returning a
site to a specific historical state. Nevertheless, neither the
theory nor the practice of restoration has fully come to terms with
the challenges of restoring layered landscapes, where nature and
culture shape one another in deep and ongoing relationships. Former
military and industrial sites provide paradigmatic examples of
layered landscapes. Many of these sites are not only characterized
by natural ecosystems worth preserving and restoring, but also
embody significant political, social, and cultural histories. This
volume grapples with the challenges of restoring and interpreting
such complex sites: What should we aim to restore in such places?
How can restoration adequately take the legacies of human use into
account? Should traces of the past be left on the landscape, and
how can interpretive strategies be creatively employed to make
visible the complex legacies of an open pit mine or chemical
weapons manufacturing plant? Restoration aims to create new value,
but not always without loss. Restoration often disrupts existing
ecosystems, infrastructure, and artifacts. The chapters in this
volume consider what restoration can tell us more generally about
the relationship between continuity and change, and how the past
can and should inform our thinking about the future. These
insights, in turn, will help foster a more thoughtful approach to
human-environment relations in an era of unprecedented
anthropogenic global environmental change.
Exploration was a central and perhaps defining aspect of the West's
encounters with other peoples and lands. Rather than reproduce
celebratory narratives of individual heroism and national glory,
this volume focuses on exploration's instrumental role in shaping a
European sense of exceptionalism and its iconic importance in
defining the terms of cultural engagement with other peoples. In
chapters offering broad geographic range, the contributors address
many of the key themes of recent research on exploration, including
exploration's contribution to European imperial expansion, Western
scientific knowledge, Enlightenment ideas and practices, and
metropolitan print culture. They reassess indigenous peoples'
responses upon first contacts with European explorers, their
involvement as intermediaries in the operations of expeditions, and
the complications that their prior knowledge posed for European
claims of discovery. Underscoring that exploration must be seen as
a process of mediation between representation and reality, this
book provides a fresh and accessible introduction to the ongoing
reinterpretation of exploration's role in the making of the modern
world.
Migration began with our origin as the human species and continues
today. Each chapter of world history features distinct types of
migration. The earliest migrations spread humans across the globe.
Over the centuries, as our cultures, societies, and technologies
evolved in different material environments, migrants conflicted,
merged, and cohabited with each other, creating, entering, and
leaving various city-states, kingdoms, empires, and nations. During
the early modern period, migrations reconnected the continents,
including through colonization and forced migrations of subject
peoples, while political concepts like "citizen" and "alien"
developed. In recent history, migrations changed their character as
nation-states and transnational unions sought in new ways to
control the peoples who migrated across their borders. This volume
will explore the process of migration chronologically and also at
several levels, from the illuminating example of the migration of a
individual community, to larger patterns of the collective
movements of major ethnic groups, to the more abstract study of the
processes of emigration, migration, and immigration. This book will
concentrate on substantial migrations covering long distances and
involving large numbers of people. It will intentionally balance
evidence from the now diverse people's of the world, for example,
by highlighting an exemplary migration for each of the six chapters
that highlights different trajectories and by keeping issues of
gender and socio-economic class salient wherever appropriate.
Further, as a major theme, the volume will consider how technology,
the environment, and various polities have historically shaped
human migration. Exciting new scholarship in the several fields
inherent in this topic make it a particularly valuable and timely
project. Each chapter will contain short individual examples, maps,
illustrations, and brief quotations from diverse types of primary
documents, all integrated with each other and analyzed engagingly
in the text.
Based on fieldwork in Malaysia, this book provides a critical
examination of the country's main urban region. The study first
provides a theoretical reworking of geographies of modernity and
details the emergence of a globally-oriented, 'high-tech' stage of
national development. The Multimedia Super Corridor is framed in
terms of a political vision of a 'fully developed' Malaysia before
the author traces an imagined trajectory through surrounding
landscapes in the late 1990s. As the first book length giving an
academic analysis of the development of Kuala Lumpur Metropolitan
Area and the construction of the Multimedia Super Corridor, this
work offers a situated, contextual account which will appeal to all
those with research interests in Asian Urban Studies and Asian
Sociology.
Earth is constantly changing. Wind, water, and even humans change
Earth's surface. The land is broken down and worn away by erosion.
Introduce students to weathering and erosion with this science
reader that features easy-to-read text. Nonfiction text features
include a glossary, index, and detailed images to facilitate close
reading and help students connect back to the text. Aligned to
state and national standards, the book also includes a fun and
engaging science experiment to develop critical thinking and help
students practice what they have learned.
Concerns about sustainability have brought environmental economics
to the foreground. These volumes are particularly concerned with
issues relating to the long-term depletion of non-renewable
resources.
A comprehensive new introduction to Australian and Aotearoa/New
Zealand human and cultural geography. The authors integrate key
themes of globalisation, difference and inequality into this
student friendly book. Each chapter follows a strong pedagogical
framework designed to enhance students' ability to understand the
material.
When are borders justified? Who has a right to control them? Where
should they be drawn? Today people think of borders as an island's
shores. Just as beaches delimit a castaway's realm, so borders
define the edges of a territory, occupied by a unified people, to
whom the land legitimately belongs. Hence a territory is legitimate
only if it belongs to a people unified by a civic identity. Sadly,
this Desert Island Model of territorial politics forces us to
choose. If we want territories, then we can either have democratic
legitimacy, or inclusion of different civic identities-but not
both. The resulting politics creates mass xenophobia,
migrant-bashing, hoarding of natural resources, and border walls.
To escape all this, On Borders presents an alternative model.
Drawing on an intellectual tradition concerned with how land and
climate shape institutions, it argues that we should not see
territories as pieces of property owned by identity groups.
Instead, we should see them as watersheds: as interconnected
systems where institutions, people, the biota, and the land
together create overlapping civic duties and relations, what the
book calls place-specific duties. This Watershed Model argues that
borders are justified when they allow us to fulfill those duties;
that border-control rights spring from internationally-agreed
conventions-not from internal legitimacy; that borders should be
governed cooperatively by the neighboring states and the states
system; and that border redrawing should be done with environmental
conservation in mind. The book explores how this model undoes the
exclusionary politics of desert islands.
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