Voice and Environmental Communication explores how people give voice to, and listen to the voices of, the environment. This foundational book introduces the relationship between these two fundamental aspects of human existence and extends our knowledge of the role of voice in the study of environmental communication.

This book presents narratives, perspectives and policies on the Arctic and brings to fore the strategies of five Asian countries - China, India, Japan, Republic of Korea and Singapore who were granted the status of Permanent Observers in the Arctic Council in 2013. The book also captures Arctic countries' reactions to Asian approaches, and their expectations from these countries. The melting of the polar sea-ice induced by climate change has placed the Arctic region in the forefront of global scientific, economic, strategic and academic interest. The discourse involves a number of issues such as claims of the littoral countries to the continental shelves of the region, the management and exploitation of its living and non-living resources, the rights and interests of indigenous communities, and the prospects of new ice-free shipping routes. The contemporary discourse also suggests that the Arctic region presents challenges and offers opportunities for the international community. These issues have given rise to new geopolitical, geoeconomic, and geostrategic dynamics amongst the Arctic littorals, and led to the growing interest of non-Arctic states in the affairs of the Arctic. It is evident that the Asian countries have a variety of interests in the Arctic, and the grant of Permanent Observer status to these countries is an acknowledgement of their capabilities. These countries are keen to explore opportunities in the Arctic, and have begun to formulate appropriate long-term national strategies. The preliminary approach of the Asian Observer countries has rightly been to graduate from 'involvement' to 'engagement' in the Arctic, which seems to have generated significant interest amongst analysts. This book helps to understand the approaches of various Arctic and non-Arctic stakeholders, in light of the evolving dynamics in the region.

This book shines a light on the meaning of happiness and how public perceptions of it have changed over time. A question that has engaged philosophers from the days of Aristotle, happiness is a subject of growing academic interest, and its recent integration into government policy is provoking increased debate into its definition and nature. Sandie McHugh and her associates build on the work of social anthropologist Tom Harrison's 'Worktown' Mass Observation study from 1938, repeating the original study today. Together these accounts show how perceptions of happiness have changed over the years for the people of Bolton, UK, and reveal major difference between its definition then and now. This unique study is a useful tool in the understanding and study of happiness, offering invaluable insights for scholars and practitioners working in the fields of social psychology, positive psychology, health psychology and wellbeing. With chapters by Martin Guha and Jerome Carson; John Haworth; Robert Snape; and Matthew Watson and Linda Withey.

This volume weaves together a variety of perspectives aimed at confronting a spectrum of ethico-political global challenges arising in the Anthropocene which affect the future of life on planet earth. In this book, the authors offer a multi-faceted approach to address the consequences of its imaginary and projective directions. The chapters span the disciplines of political economy, cybernetics, environmentalism, bio-science, psychoanalysis, bioacoustics, documentary film, installation art, geoperformativity, and glitch aesthetics. The first section attempts to flesh out new aspects of current debates. Questions over the Capitaloscene are explored via conflations of class and climate, revisiting the eco-Marxist analysis of capitalism, and the financial system that thrives on debt. The second section explores the imaginary narratives that raise questions regarding non-human involvement. The third section addresses 'geoartisty,' the counter artistic responses to the speculariztion of climate disasters, questioning eco-documentaries, and what a post-anthropocentric art might look like. The last section addresses the pedagogical response to the Anthropocene.

Measurements, Indicators, and Research Methods for Sustainability presents a thorough and accessible overview of the ways in which sustainability is charted worldwide. Some articles introduce basic concepts, such as quantitative versus qualitative data or the weak versus strong sustainability debate; others examine how indicators in specific areas (climate change and soil conservation, agriculture, and mining) have been applied (or not) to different regions. Research analysts explain the modes and media through which these measurements are broadcast, stressing the importance of developing methods that can be understood by both experts and ordinary citizens. They also examine the process of monitoring, itself a controversial topic affecting national or international policy, law, rules, and regulations.

In this edited volume, leading environmental policy experts from China, USA, and Europe provide a contemporary view of Chinese environmental policy, analyzing current discussions among various actors and agencies. The book covers a wide range of topics including the gap between national policy goals and their local implementation, cultural and social factors shaping political behavior, legal and political systems affecting environmental policy creation and execution, new societal forces participating in environmental policymaking and governance, and local state strategies tasked with navigating a mix of political, legal, and societal forces. Featuring in-depth, empirically-grounded analyses with interdisciplinary approaches, the book is ideal reading for scholars interested in the complex nature of balancing Chinese environmental sustainability and economic growth.

Are alternative energies and Green New Deals enough to deliver environmental justice? Peter Gelderloos argues that international governmental responses to the climate emergency are structurally incapable of solving the crisis. But there is hope. Across the world, grassroots networks of local communities are working to realise their visions of an alternative revolutionary response to planetary destruction, often pitted against the new megaprojects promoted by greenwashed alternative energy infrastructures and the neocolonialist, technocratic policies that are the forerunners of the Green New Deal. Gelderloos interviews food sovereignty activists in Venezuela, Indigenous communities reforesting their lands in Brazil and anarchists fighting biofuel plantations in Indonesia, looking at the battles that have cancelled airports, stopped pipelines, and helped the most marginalised to fight borders and environmental racism, to transform their cities, to win a dignified survival.

Colonialism, globalization and consumerism have devastated large parts of our world. For the past five centuries, the West has nurtured self-worth through the accumulation of worldly goods, serving our own selfish interests and exploiting others. This has been disastrous not only to human beings but to the whole ecology of the planet. Consumerism drives trade, but consumer buying is now like an unchained beast with tooth and claw causing han (unjust suffering) for exploited peoples as well as for other species and even for planet Earth. This book will examine ways of rethinking and reimagining ourselves, helping us to work in more just directions for a safer, sustainable planet. Empowering ourselves to act more justly includes reimagining and renewing our inspiration from God who is the transformative Spirit who gives, sustains and empowers life to all.

This book examines the ways in which decolonial theory has gained traction and influenced knowledge production, praxis and epistemic justice in various contemporary iterations of community psychology across the globe. With a notable Southern focus (although not exclusively so), the volume critically interrogates the biases in Western modernist thought in relation to community psychology, and to illuminate and consolidate current epistemic alternatives that contribute to the possibilities of emancipatory futures within community psychology. To this end, the volume includes contributions from community psychology theory and praxis across the globe that speak to standpoint approaches (e.g. critical race studies, queer theory, indigenous epistemologies) in which the experiences of the majority of the global population are more accurately reflected, address key social issues such as the on-going racialization of the globe, gender, class, poverty, xenophobia, sexuality, violence, diasporas, migrancy, environmental degradation, and transnationalism/globalisation, and embrace forms of knowledge production that involve the co-construction of new knowledges across the traditional binary of knowledge producers and consumers. This book is an engaging resource for scholars, researchers, practitioners, activists and advanced postgraduate students who are currently working within community psychology and cognate sub-disciplines within psychology more broadly. A secondary readership is those working in development studies, political science, community development and broader cognate disciplines within the social sciences, arts, and humanities.

Democratic Ideals and the Politization of Nature introduces the feral citizen as a response to a perceived need to revitalize the disruptive, critical, and exploratory nature of democratic culture. By learning from the traditions of aimless walking and by embracing a consciously feral method of political engagement, radically-democratic citizens can prompt political moments that create conditions where the primacy of the political can be performed, realized and defended. Ultimately, this book seeks not to solve the problems and paradoxes of democracy but to assist in unleashing and celebrating them. Garside concludes that using the methodology of feral citizenship - inspired by environmentalism and democratic articulation - to reprioritize the political within the green public sphere, citizens can reclaim necessary (and welcome) tensions between representations of nature and political citizenship.

Concepts from justice and ethics can significantly inform energy decision-makers. Benjamin K. Sovacool introduces readers to the injustices and insecurities inherent in the global energy system before presenting an energy justice conceptual framework consisting of availability, affordability, due process, good governance, prudence, intergenerational equity, intragenerational equity, and responsibility. He showcases the application of these principles to eight real-world case studies involving national energy planning in Denmark, the Warm Front program in the United Kingdom, the World Bank's Inspection Panel, the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative, Sao Tome e Principe's Natural Resource Fund, solar energy in Bangladesh, climate change adaptation efforts in least developed countries, and the Yasuni-ITT Initiative in Ecuador.

A Guardian 'Top 10 Nature Memoirs' pick 'Poetic and heartful' Guardian Icelandic author and activist Andri Snaer Magnason's 'Letter to the Future', an extraordinary and moving eulogy for the lost Okjoekull glacier, made global news and was shared by millions. Now he attempts to come to terms with the issues we all face in his new book On Time and Water. Magnason writes of the melting glaciers, the rising seas and acidity changes that haven't been seen for 50 million years. These are changes that will affect all life on earth. Taking a path to climate science through ancient myths about sacred cows, stories of ancestors and relatives and interviews with the Dalai Lama, Magnason allows himself to be both personal and scientific. The result is an absorbing mixture of travel, history, science and philosophy.

This book explores the social origins of the Western preoccupation with health and environmental hazards. It looks at the rise of the dichotomy between the vulnerable "in" and the threatening "out" by examining the pathologies associated with weather, domestic space, ventilation, clothing, and travel in Britain at the turn of the 19th century.

This book exposes the barriers to inclusive and effective public policy making, which are the current decision making paradigm and commonly held ideas that reduce public policy problems to scientific and technical ones. Through both environmental policy and other decision making examples, readers are shown the commonalities of all decision making. Solution-oriented practitioners and stakeholders will find this book filling a conceptual and methodological gap in existing policy literature and practice. The authors deftly guide readers from post-normal science, wicked problems, and uncertainty concepts to a conceptually-grounded, practical implementation of a new approach, the open solution approach. The Multi-criteria Integrated Resource Assessment (MIRA) is described as the first generation methodology that fulfills the expectations for the inclusive, transparent, and learning-based open solutions approach. MIRA is a holistic package of concepts, methods and analytical tools that is designed to assess Decision Uncertainty, the combined uncertainties that include data, problem formulation, expert judgments, and stakeholder opinions. Introduction of the Requisite Steps, the common steps found in all decision making, provides the yardstick for evaluating a variety of decision making processes, decision tools, and commonly found indices such as the Dow Jones Industrial Average or the Newsweek Green Ranking of corporations. The use of anecdotes, policy stories, and case examples makes this a very readable and practical book for citizens and experts. With this book, readers are prepared to critically evaluate these common indices for their personal use as well as challenge policy processes as a stakeholder. For policy practitioners, this guidebook will become a rubric to ensure an effective public policy making process and to critically evaluate decision support tools.

The history-making, ground-breaking speeches of Greta Thunberg, the young activist who has become the voice of a generation 'Everything needs to change. And it has to start today' In August 2018 a fifteen-year-old Swedish girl, Greta Thunberg, decided not to go to school one day. Her actions ended up sparking a global movement for action against the climate crisis, inspiring millions of pupils to go on strike for our planet, forcing governments to listen, and earning her a Nobel Peace Prize nomination. This book brings you Greta in her own words, for the first time. Collecting her speeches that have made history across Europe, from the UN to mass street protests, No One Is Too Small to Make A Difference is a rallying cry for why we must all wake up and fight to protect the living planet, no matter how powerless we feel. Our future depends upon it.

Introduction to Environmental Studies: Interdisciplinary Readings provides students with a carefully selected collection of articles that help them navigate the most important topics in environmental studies, focusing on different connections between humans and the environment. The anthology emphasizes voices outside the white, male canon to provide students with diverse perspectives and a broader understanding of contemporary issues within the discipline. Opening chapters introduce environmental studies, sustainability, and the connection between humans and the resources we extract from the environment. Subsequent chapters examine the history of environmentalism in North America, how our relationship to the environment has evolved over time, a concise survey of key environmental processes, and issues related to climate change and our climate crisis. Students read about the environmental impact of our food production processes on different countries and groups of people; issues related to environmental justice; the ways in which human population affects the environmental sustainability of our future; and sustainable energy issues. The anthology's final chapters address environmental legislation and policies; ethical issues around consumption and collective responsibility; and the future of our environment. Featuring compelling and timely readings, Introduction to Environmental Studies is an ideal resource for courses within the discipline.

Sixty years ago, an upsurge of social movements protested the ecological harms of industrial capitalism. In subsequent decades, environmentalism consolidated into forms of management and business strategy that aimed to tackle ecological degradation while enabling new forms of green economic growth. However, the focus on spaces and species to be protected saw questions of human work and histories of colonialism pushed out of view. This book traces a counter-history of modern environmentalism from the 1960s to the present day. It focuses on claims concerning land, labour and social reproduction arising at important moments in the history of environmentalism made by feminist, anti-colonial, Indigenous, workers’ and agrarian movements. Many of these movements did not consider themselves ‘environmental,’ and yet they offer vital ways forward in the face of escalating ecological damage and social injustice.

This book explores the intricacies of the science-policy linkage that pervades environmental policymaking in a democracy. These are the key questions that this primary textbook for courses on American public policymaking and environmental policymaking addresses and attempts to answer. Turmoil in American Public Policy: Science, Democracy, and the Environment first lays out the basics of the policymaking process in the United States in relation to the substantive issues of environmental policymaking. Drawing on hundreds of interviews, the authors highlight the views and experiences of scientists, especially natural scientists, in their interactions with policymakers and their efforts to harness the findings of their science to rational public policy. The proper role of science and scientists in relation to environmental policymaking hinges on fundamental questions at the intersection of political philosophy and scientific epistemology. How can the experimental nature of the scientific method and the probabilistic expression of scientific results be squared with the normative language of legislation and regulation? If scientists undertake to square the circle by hardening the tentative truths of their scientific models into positive truths to underpin public policy, at what point may they be judged to have exceeded the proper limits of scientific knowledge, relinquished their role as impartial experts, and become partisan advocates demanding too much say in a democratic setting? Providing students-and secondarily policymakers, scientists, and citizen activists-a theoretical and practical knowledge of the means availed by modern American democracy for resolving this tension is the object of this progressively structured textbook. Includes excerpts from 100 interviews with natural scientists and social scientists conducted over the past several years Provides two figures illustrating the concepts of pluralism and elitism in the United States public policymaking process Offers end-of-chapter reflection questions and suggested readings for students

Information is crucial when it comes to the management of resources. But what if knowledge is incomplete, or biased, or otherwise deficient? How did people define patterns of proper use in the absence of cognitive certainty? Discussing this challenge for a diverse set of resources from fish to rubber, these essays show that deficient knowledge is a far more pervasive challenge in resource history than conventional readings suggest. Furthermore, environmental ignorance does not inevitably shrink with the march of scientific progress: these essays suggest more of a dialectical relationship between knowledge and ignorance that has different shapes and trajectories. With its combination of empirical case studies and theoretical reflection, the essays make a significant contribution to the interdisciplinary debate on the production and resilience of ignorance. At the same time, this volume combines insights from different continents as well as the seas in between and thus sketches outlines of an emerging global resource history.

'One of the world's most prominent radical scientists.' The Guardian 'Vandana Shiva is an expert [on the dangers of gobalization] whose analysis has helped us understand this situation much more deeply.' Russell Brand A powerful new memoir published to coincide with Vandana Shiva's 70th birthday. Vandana Shiva has been described in many ways: the 'Gandhi of Grain,' 'a rock star' in the battle against GMOs, and 'the most powerful voice' for people of the developing world. For over four decades she has vociferously advocated for diversity, indigenous knowledge, localisation, and real democracy; she has been at the forefront of seed saving, food sovereignty, and connecting the dots between the destruction of nature, the polarization of societies, and indiscriminate corporate greed. In Terra Viva, Dr Shiva shares her most memorable campaigns, alongside some of the world's most celebrated activists and environmentalists, all working towards a livable planet and healthier democracies. For the very first time, she also recounts the stories of her childhood in post-partition India - the influence of the Himalayan forests she roamed; her parents, who saw no difference in the education of boys and girls at a time when this was not the norm; and the Chipko movement, whose women were 'the real custodians of biodiversity-related knowledge.' Throughout, Shiva's pursuit of a unique intellectual path marrying quantum physics with science, technology, and environmental policy will captivate the reader. Terra Viva is a celebration of a remarkable life and a clear-eyed assessment of the challenges we face moving forward - including those revealed by the Covid crisis, the privatisation of biotechnology, and the commodification of our biological and natural resources. 'All of us who care about the future of Planet Earth must be grateful to Vandana Shiva.' Jane Goodall, UN Messenger of Peace

Pollution, deforestation, elimination of species, greenhouse gases and depletion of the ozone layer. These results of human activity are, as most people would agree, undesirable. But what is the value of the natural world that would be lost if the environment were destroyed or seriously degraded? This is the central question of environmental ethics and the focus of this book. It argues that to properly understand how and why nature can have value requires a radical revision of the way philosophy is understood and practised, and an equally radical restructuring of the concepts and categories upon which modern philosophy has been based.

This book compiles research from leading experts in the social, behavioral, and cultural dimensions of sustainability, as well as local and global understandings of the concept, and on lived practices around the world. It contains studies focusing on ways of living, acting, and thinking which claim to favor the local and global ecological systems of which we are a part, and on which we depend for survival. The concept of sustainability as a product of concern about global environmental degradation, rising social inequalities, and dispossession is presented as a key concept. The contributors explore the opportunities to engage with questions of sustainability and to redefine the concept of sustainability in anthropological terms.

Consumers are not usually incorporated into the sociological concept of 'division of labour', but using the case of household recycling, this book shows why this foundational concept needs to be revised.

NIMBY (Not In My Back Yard) protests are often criticized as parochial and short-lived, generating no lasting influence on broader processes related to environmental politics. This volume offers a different perspective. Drawing on cases from around the globe, it demonstrates that NIMBY protests, although always arising from a local concern in a particular community, often result in broader political, social, and technological change. Chapters include cases from Europe, North America, and Asia, engaging with the full political spectrum from established democracies to non-democratic countries. Regardless of political setting, NIMBY movements can have a positive and proactive role in generating innovative solutions to local as well as transnational environmental issues. Furthermore, those solutions are now serving as models for communities and countries around the world.