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Books > Earth & environment > The environment > Environmentalist, conservationist & Green organizations
French Ecocritique is the first book-length study of the culturally specific ways in which contemporary French literature and theory raise questions about nature and environment. Stephanie Posthumus's ground-breaking work brings together thinkers such as Guattari, Latour, and Serres with recent ecocritical theories to complicate what might otherwise become a reductive notion of "French ecocriticism." Working across contemporary philosophy and literature, the book defines the concept of the ecological as an attentiveness to specific nature-culture contexts and to a text's many interdiscursive connections. Posthumus identifies four key concepts, ecological subjectivity, ecological dwelling, ecological politics, and ecological ends, for changing how we think about human-nature relations. French Ecocritique highlights the importance of moving beyond canonical ecocritical texts and examining a diversity of cultural and literary traditions for new ways of imagining the environment.
What is activism? The answer is, typically, that it is a form of opposition, often expressed on the streets. Skoglund and Boehm argue differently. They identify forms of 'insider activism' within corporations, state agencies and villages, showing how people seek to transform society by working within the system, rather than outright opposing it. Using extensive empirical data, Skoglund and Boehm analyze the transformation of climate activism in a rapidly changing political landscape, arguing that it is time to think beyond the tensions between activism and enterprise. They trace the everyday renewable energy actions of a growing 'epistemic community' of climate activists who are dispersed across organizational boundaries and domains. This book is testament to a new way of understanding activism as an organizational force that brings about the transition towards sustainability across business and society and is of interest to social science scholars of business, renewable energy and sustainable development.
The environmental crisis in Eastern Europe - air and water pollution, toxic waste dumps, and unsafe nuclear facilities - has been vividly documented since the revolution of 1989. Not only did the communist states have an abysmal record of environmental destruction, but the issue of environmental protection and safety proved to be one of the msot powerful catalysts of unified opposition to these regimes. This collection of essays by both Western and East European experts examines the efforts to develop strategies for dealing with the crisis, both by governments and at the grassroots level of newly emerging Green movements. Among the countries represented here are Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Lithuania, Slovenia and the Commonwealth of Independent States.
Are money and technology the core illusions of our time? In this book, Alf Hornborg offers a fresh assessment of the inequalities and environmental degradation of the world. He shows how both mainstream and radical economists are limited by a particular worldview and, as a result, do not grasp that conventional money is at the root of many of the problems that are threatening societies, not to mention planet Earth itself. Hornborg demonstrates how market prices obscure asymmetric exchanges of resources - human labor, land, energy, materials - under a veil of fictive reciprocity. Such unequal exchange, he claims, underpins the phenomenon of technological development, which is, fundamentally, a redistribution of time and space - human labor and land - in world society. Hornborg deftly illustrates how money and technology have shaped our thinking and our social and ecological relations, with disturbing consequences. He also offers solutions for their redesign in ways that will promote justice and sustainability.
In the teeth of climate emergency, hope has to remain possible, because life insists on it. But hope also has to be realistic. And doesn't realism about our plight point towards despair? Don't the timid politicians, the failed summits and the locked-in consumerism all just mean that we have left things far too late to avoid catastrophe? There is a deeper realism of transformation which can keep life powerful within us. It comes at the price of accepting that our condition is tragic. That, in turn, calls for a harsher, more revolutionary approach to the demands of the emergency than most activists have yet been prepared to adopt. This is a book to think with, to argue and disagree with - and to hope with.
Grassroots activism is essential to the success of the contemporary environmental movement, which depends on the organization of local activists as well as state, national, and international organizations. Yet grassroots activists confront numerous challenges as they attempt to organize diverse participants and devise fresh strategies and tactics. Drawing on more than seven years of fieldwork following diverse organizations in Pittsburgh over time, this book sheds light on the struggles that activists face and the factors that sustain movements. Suzanne Staggenborg examines individual motivations and participation, organizational structures and cultures, relationships in movement communities, and strategies and tactics, including issue framing. The book shows that collective action campaigns and tactics generate solidarity, maintain involvement, and bring in new participants even as organizers struggle to devise effective new types of actions.
Grassroots activism is essential to the success of the contemporary environmental movement, which depends on the organization of local activists as well as state, national, and international organizations. Yet grassroots activists confront numerous challenges as they attempt to organize diverse participants and devise fresh strategies and tactics. Drawing on more than seven years of fieldwork following diverse organizations in Pittsburgh over time, this book sheds light on the struggles that activists face and the factors that sustain movements. Suzanne Staggenborg examines individual motivations and participation, organizational structures and cultures, relationships in movement communities, and strategies and tactics, including issue framing. The book shows that collective action campaigns and tactics generate solidarity, maintain involvement, and bring in new participants even as organizers struggle to devise effective new types of actions.
This book is about environmental defenders and the violence they face while seeking to protect their land and the environment. Between 2002 and 2019, at least two thousand people were killed in 57 countries for defending their lands and the environment. Recent policy initiatives and media coverage have provided much needed attention to the protection and support of defenders, but there has so far been little scholarly work. This edited volume explains who these defenders are, what threats they face, and what can be done to help support and protect them. Delving deep into the complex relations between and within communities, corporations, and government authorities, the book highlights the diversity of defenders, the collective character of their struggles, the many drivers and forms of violence they are facing, as well as the importance of emotions and gendered dimensions in protests and repression. Drawing on global case studies, it examines the violence taking place around different types of development projects, including fossil fuels, agro-industrial, renewable energy, and infrastructure. The volume also examines the violence surrounding conservation projects, including through militarized wildlife protection and surveillance technologies. The book concludes with a reflection on the perspectives of defenders about the best ways to support and protect them. It contrasts these with the lagging efforts of an international community often promoting economic growth over the lives of defenders. This volume is essential reading for all interested in understanding the challenges faced by environmental defenders and how to help and support them. It will also appeal to students, scholars and practitioners involved in environmental protection, environmental activism, human rights, social movements and development studies.
Feeding the world, climate change, biodiversity, antibiotics, plastics, pandemics - the list of concerns seems endless. But what is most pressing, and what should we do first? Do we all need to become vegetarian? How can we fly in a low-carbon world? How can we take control of technology? And, given the global nature of the challenges we now face, what on Earth can any of us do, as individuals? Mike Berners-Lee has crunched the numbers and plotted a course of action that is full of hope, practical, and enjoyable. This is the big-picture perspective on the environmental and economic challenges of our day, laid out in one place, and traced through to the underlying roots - questions of how we live and think. This updated edition has new material on protests, pandemics, wildfires, investments, carbon targets and of course, on the key question: given all this, what can I do?
Simon Fairlie is possibly the most influential - and unusual - eco-activist you might not have heard of. The Observer Simon Fairlie is the original hippie. The Idler This is a fascinating, funny and moving record of an extraordinary life lived in extraordinary times. George Monbiot Going to Seed is the unforgettable firsthand account of how the hippie movement flowered in the late 1960s, appeared spent by the Thatcher-consumed 1980s, yet became the seedbed for progressive reform we now take for granted - and continues to inspire generations of rebels and visionaries. At a young age, Simon Fairlie rejected the rat race and embarked on a new trip to find his own path. He dropped out of Cambridge University to hitchhike to Istanbul and bicycle through India. Simon established a commune in France, was arrested multiple times for squatting and civil disobedience, and became a leading figure in protests against the British government's road building programmes of the 1980s and - later - in legislative battles to help people secure access to land for low impact, sustainable living. Over the course of fifty years, we witness a man's drive for self-sufficiency, freedom, authenticity and a deep connection to the land. Simon Fairlie grew up in a middle-class household in leafy middle England. His path had been laid out for him by his father: boarding school, Oxbridge and a career in journalism. But everything changed when Simon's life ran headfirst into London's counterculture in the 1960s. He finds Beat poetry, blues music, cannabis and anti-Vietnam War protests - and a powerful lust to be free. Instead of becoming a celebrated Fleet Street journalist like his father, Simon becomes a labourer, a stonemason, a farmer, a scythesman, a magazine editor and a writer of a very different sort. He shares the highs of his experience, alongside the painful costs of his ongoing search for freedom - estrangement from his family, financial insecurity and the loss of friends and lovers to the excesses of the 1960s, 70s, and 80s. Going to Seed questions the current trajectory of Western 'progress' - explosive consumerism, growing inequality and environmental devastation; it's for anyone who wonders how we got to such a place. Simon's story is for anyone who wonders what the world might look like if we began to chart a radically different course.
Greening Democracy explains how nuclear energy became a seminal political issue and motivated new democratic engagement in West Germany during the 1970s. Using interviews, as well as the archives of environmental organizations and the Green party, the book traces the development of anti-nuclear protest from the grassroots to parliaments. It argues that worries about specific nuclear reactors became the basis for a widespread anti-nuclear movement only after government officials' unrelenting support for nuclear energy caused reactor opponents to become concerned about the state of their democracy. Surprisingly, many citizens thought transnationally, looking abroad for protest strategies, cooperating with activists in other countries, and conceiving of 'Europe' as a potential means of circumventing recalcitrant officials. At this nexus between local action and global thinking, anti-nuclear protest became the basis for citizens' increasing engagement in self-governance, expanding their conception of democracy well beyond electoral politics and helping to make quotidian personal concerns political.
This book examines the importance of Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) and how it can provide models for a time-tested form of sustainability needed in the world today. The essays, written by a team of scholars from diverse disciplinary backgrounds, explore TEK through compelling cases of environmental sustainability from multiple tribal and geographic locations in North America and beyond. Addressing the philosophical issues concerning indigenous and ecological knowledge production and maintenance, they focus on how environmental values and ethics are applied to the uses of land.Grounded in an understanding of the profound relationship between biological and cultural diversity, this book defines, interrogates, and problematizes, the many definitions of traditional ecological knowledge and sustainability. It includes a holistic and broad disciplinary approach to sustainability, including language, art, and ceremony, as critical ways to maintain healthy human-environment relations.
WINNER OF THE MILES FRANKLIN AWARD 2020 An exquisitely written, heartbreaking and hopeful novel of culture, language, tradition, suffering and empowerment 'A groundbreaking novel for black and white Australia' Richard Flanagan, Man Booker Prize winning author of The Narrow Road to the Deep North Knowing that he will soon die, Albert "Poppy" Gondiwindi has one final task he must fulfill. A member of the indigenous Wiradjuri tribe, he has spent his adult life in Prosperous House and the town of Massacre Plains, a small enclave on the banks of the Murrumby River. Before he takes his last breath, Poppy is determined to pass on the language of his people, the traditions of his ancestors, and everything that was ever remembered by those who came before him. The land itself aids him; he finds the words on the wind. After his passing, Poppy's granddaughter, August, returns home from Europe, where she has lived the past ten years, to attend his burial. Her overwhelming grief is compounded by the pain, anger, and sadness of memory of growing up in poverty before her mother's incarceration, of the racism she and her people endured, of the mysterious disappearance of her sister when they were children; an event that has haunted her and changed her life. Her homecoming is bittersweet as she confronts the love of her kin and news that Prosperous is to be repossessed by a mining company. Determined to make amends and honor Poppy and her family, she vows to save their land a quest guided by the voice of her grandfather that leads into the past, the stories of her people, the secrets of the river. Told in three masterfully woven narratives, The Yield is a celebration of language and an exploration of what makes a place "home." A story of a people and a culture dispossessed, it is also a joyful reminder of what once was and what endures a powerful reclaiming of Indigenous language, storytelling, and identity, that offers hope for the future.
To capture the diversity within environmentalism, this dictionary takes a global tack with a focus on ideas, events, institutions, initiatives, and green movements since the 1960s. It strives to avoid a common error in many histories of environmentalism: to exaggerate the input of the wealthy countries of Europe and North America and understate the influence of Africa, Asia, South and Central America, and the Polar Regions. It aims as well for a more comprehensive analysis than most histories of the modern environmental movement, understanding environmentalism as emerging not only from grassroots and formal nongovernmental associations, but also from corporate, governmental, and intergovernmental organizations and initiatives. This assumes the ideas and energy infusing environmentalism with political purpose arise from hundreds of thousands of sources: from corporate boardrooms to bureaucratic policies to international negotiations to activists. Thus, environmentalists are not only indigenous people blocking a logging road, Greenpeace activists protesting a seal hunt, or green candidates contesting an election; an equal or larger number of environmentalists are working within the Japanese bureaucracy to implement environmental policies, within the World Bank to assess the environmental impacts of loans, within Wal-Mart to green its purchasing practices, or within intergovernmental forums to negotiate international environmental agreements. This second edition of Historical Dictionary of Environmentalism contains a chronology, an introduction, and an extensive bibliography. The dictionary section has over 300 cross-referenced entries on important events, issues, organizations, ideas, and people shaping the direction of environmentalism worldwide. This book is an excellent access point for students, researchers, and anyone wanting to know more about environmentalism.
Presenting a broad range of case studies, this book explores rural social movements contesting natural resource development initiatives. Natural resource development takes multiple forms, including infrastructure corridors, mines, dams, resource processing plants and pipelines. Many of which are driven by economic valuations, whilst social and environmental effects are given limited consideration. In this volume the authors discuss the emergence, process and outcomes of social movements with respect to these natural resource development projects, including examples of confrontation seeking to either block developments or promote alternative development approaches, such as agritourism. The examples taken from Africa, Asia, North America, Europe and Latin America demonstrate the diversity of struggles stimulated by natural resource development, including both immediate and longer-term effects, repertoires of action, political and cultural work. Taken together the case studies provide a rich overview of current movements engaged in resisting the neoliberal agenda of global resource exploitation. This book will be key reading for scholars interested in social movements, natural resource development, environmental policy and development studies. It will also be of interest to activists engaged in mobilizations stimulated by natural resource development projects.
Mark Lynas was one of the original GM field wreckers. Back in the 1990s – working undercover with his colleagues in the environmental movement – he would descend on trial sites of genetically modified crops at night and hack them to pieces. Two decades later, most people around the world – from New York to China – still think that 'GMO' foods are bad for their health or likely to damage the environment. But Mark has changed his mind. This book explains why. In 2013, in a world-famous recantation speech, Mark apologised for having destroyed GM crops. He spent the subsequent years touring Africa and Asia, and working with plant scientists who are using this technology to help smallholder farmers in developing countries cope better with pests, diseases and droughts. This book lifts the lid on the anti-GMO craze and shows how science was left by the wayside as a wave of public hysteria swept the world. Mark takes us back to the origins of the technology and introduces the scientific pioneers who invented it. He explains what led him to question his earlier assumptions about GM food, and talks to both sides of this fractious debate to see what still motivates worldwide opposition today. In the process he asks – and answers – the killer question: how did we all get it so wrong on GMOs?
Education for Total Liberation is a collection of essays from leaders in the field of critical animal pedagogy (CAP). CAP emerges from activist educators teaching critical animal studies and is rooted in critical theory as well as the animal advocacy movement. Critical animal studies (CAS) argues for an interdisciplinary approach to understanding our relationships with nonhuman animals. CAS challenges two specific fields of theory: (1) animal studies, rooted in vivisection and testing on animals in the hard sciences and (2) human-animal studies, which reinforces a socially constructed binary between humans and animals and adopts abstract theoretical approaches. In contrast, CAS takes a progressive and committed approach to scholarship and sees the exploitation of nonhuman animals as interrelated with oppression of humans based on class, gender, race, ability, sexuality, age, and citizenship. CAS promotes the liberation of all animals and challenges all systems of domination. Education for Total Liberation is appropriate for undergraduate and graduate level readers (and beyond) who wish to learn from examples of radical pedagogical projects shaped by CAS and critical pedagogy. Contributing to this collection are Anne C. Bell, Anita de Melo, Carolyn Drew, Amber E. George, Karin Gunnarsson Dinker, Sinem Ketenci, John Lupinacci, Anthony J. Nocella II, Sean Parson, Helena Pedersen, Ian Purdy, Constance L. Russell, J.L. Schatz, Meneka Repka, William E. Shanahan III, and Richard J, White.
In the last 50 years marine conservation has grown from almost nothing to become a major topic of global activity involving many people and organisations. Marine conservation activities have been applied to a huge diversity of species, habitats, ecosystems and whole seas. Many marine conservation actions have focused on human impacts on the marine environment from development and pollution to the impacts of fisheries. Whilst science has provided the backbone of thinking on marine conservation, perhaps the biggest change over this period has been the use of an ever-increasing range of techniques and disciplines to further marine conservation ends. Bob Earll explores what marine conservation involves in practice by providing a synthesis of the main developments from the viewpoints of 19 leading practitioners and pioneers who have helped shape its progress and successes. Their narratives highlight the diversity and richness of activity, and the realities of delivering marine conservation in practice with reference to a host of projects and case studies. Many of these narratives demonstrate how innovative conservationists have been - often developing novel approaches to problems where little information and no frameworks exist. The case studies described are based on a wide range of European and international projects. This book takes an in-depth look at the reality of delivering marine conservation in practice, where achieving change is often a complicated process, with barriers to overcome that have nothing to do with science. Marine conservationists will often be working with stakeholders for whom marine conservation is not a priority. This book aims to help readers describe and understand those realities, and shows that successful and inspirational projects can be delivered against the odds.
The emergence of Greenpeace in the late 1960s from a loose-knit group of anti-nuclear and anti-whaling activists fundamentally changed the nature of environmentalism-its purpose, philosophy, and tactics-around the world. And yet there has been no comprehensive objective history of Greenpeace's origins-until now. Make It a Green Peace! draws upon meeting minutes, internal correspondence, manifestos, philosophical writings, and interviews with former members to offer the first full account of the origins of what has become the most recognizable environmental non-governmental organization in the world. Situating Greenpeace within the peace movement and counterculture of the 1960s, Frank Zelko provides a much deeper treatment of the group's groundbreaking brand of radical, media-savvy, direct-action environmentalism than has been previously attempted. Zelko traces the complex intellectual and cultural roots of Greenpeace to the various protest movements of the 1950s and 1960s, highlighting the influence of Quakerism-with its practice of bearing witness-Native American spirituality, and the non-violent resistance of Gandhi. Unlike the more strait-laced, less confrontational Sierra Club and Audubon Society, early Greenpeacers smoked dope, dropped acid, wore their hair long, and put their bodies on the line-interposing themselves between the harpoons of whalers and the clubs of seal-hunters-to save the animals and achieve what they hoped would be a lasting transformation in the way humans regarded the natural world. And while it may not have achieved its most revolutionary goals, Greenpeace inarguably created a heightened awareness of environmental issues that endures to this day. Narrating the key campaigns and arguments among the group's early members, Make It a Green Peace! vividly captures all the drama, pathos, and occasional moments of absurd comic relief of Greenpeace's tumultuous first decade.
The concept of community, in all its diverse definitions and manifestations, provides a unique approach to learn more about how groups of individuals and organizations are addressing the challenges posed by climate change. This new volume highlights specific cases of communities developing innovative approaches to climate mitigation and adaptation around the United States. Defining community more comprehensively than just spatial geography to include also communities of interest, identity and practice, this book highlights how individuals and organizations are addressing the challenges posed by climate change through more resilient social processes, government policies and sustainable practices. Through close examinations of community efforts across the United States, including agricultural stakeholder engagement and permaculture projects, coastal communities and prolonged drought areas, and university extension and local governments, this book shows the influence of building individual and institutional capacity toward addressing climate change issues at the community level. It will be useful to community development students, scholars and practitioners learning to respond to unexpected shocks and address chronic stress associated with climate change and its impacts.
The Long-Term Ecological Research (LTER) Program is, in a sense, an experiment to transform the nature of science, and represents one of the most effective mechanisms for catalyzing comprehensive site-based research that is collaborative, multidisciplinary, and long-term in nature. The scientific contributions of the Program are prodigious, but the broader impacts of participation have not been examined in a formal way. This book captures the consequences of participation in the Program on the perspectives, attitudes, and practices of environmental scientists. The edited volume comprises three sections. The first section includes two chapters that provide an overview of the history, goals, mission, and inner workings of the LTER network of sites. The second section comprises three dozen retrospective essays by scientists, data managers or educators who represent a broad spectrum of LTER sites from deserts to tropical forests and from arctic to marine ecosystems. Each essay addresses the same series of probing questions to uncover the extent to which participation has affected the ways that scientists conduct research, educate students, or provide outreach to the public. The final section encompasses 5 chapters, whose authors are biophysical scientists, historians, behavioral scientists, or social scientists. This section analyzes, integrates, or synthesizes the content of the previous chapters from multiple perspectives and uncovers emergent themes and future directions.
A sense of urgency pervades global environmentalism, and the degrowth movement is bursting into the mainstream. As climate catastrophe looms closer, people are eager to learn what degrowth is about, and whether we can save the planet by changing how we live. This book is an introduction to the movement. As politicians and corporations obsess over growth objectives, the degrowth movement demands that we must slow down the economy by transforming our economies, our politics and our cultures to live within the Earth's limits. This book navigates the practice and strategies of the movement, looking at its strengths and weaknesses. Covering horizontal democracy, local economies and the reduction of work, it shows us why degrowth is a compelling and realistic project.
With a vast river network and rainforests extending over eight South American countries, the Amazon plays a vital role particularly in maintaining biodiversity and terrestrial carbon storage. Due to its ecological characteristics, the Amazon benefits not only those countries but also the international community at large. However, the Amazon forests are being rapidly cleared with a consequent loss of biodiversity and impact on global climate. This book examines whether international law has an impact on the preservation of the Amazon by inquiring into the forms of cooperation that exist among the Amazon countries, and between them and the international community, and to what extent international cooperation can help protect the Amazon. Given the role of this region in maintaining the balance of the global environment, the book examines whether the Amazon should be granted a special legal status and possible implications in terms of international cooperation. |
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