Social policies of the future will have to be Green. As environmental problems multiply, and as welfare reform becomes more vital, so the debate concerning ecological social policies grows in importance. Yet what has been missing is a comprehensive review of the main questions, problems and themes that brings together the principal contributors to this debate.Environment and Welfare provides that review and so will be essential reading for all those interested in the welfare policies of the future.

Large parts of our world are filled with plants, and human life depends on, interacts with, affects and is affected by plant life in various ways. Yet plants have not received nearly as much attention from philosophers and ethicists as they deserve. In environmental philosophy, plants are often swiftly subsumed under the categories of "all living things" and rarely considered thematically. There is a need for developing a more sophisticated theoretical understanding of plants and their practical role in human experience. Plant Ethics: Concepts and Applications aims at opening a philosophical discussion that may begin to fill that gap. The book investigates issues in plants ontology, ethics and the role of plants and their cultivation in various fields of application. It explores and develops important concepts to shape and frame plants-related philosophical questions accurately, including new ideas of how to address moral questions when confronted with plants in concrete scenarios. This edited volume brings together for the first time, and in an interdisciplinary spirit, contemporary approaches to plant ethics by international scholars of established reputation. It will be of great interest to students and scholars of Philosophy and Ethics.

This book presents lively case studies of tourism developments in the European High North from diverse perspectives. It compares views of the changing political ecology of a fragile region shaped by climatic and cultural factors. In exploring the mutual relations between new developments in Arctic travel narratives and tourism practices. Green Ice: Tourism Ecologies in the European High North pays particular attention to the changing discourses that produce, and are in turn produced by, encounters between contemporary Arctic peoples and territories. Questions of gender and nationality are considered alongside a comparison of texts and practices in different languages, examining the politics of language and its significant role in tourism. This title pays attention to the changing symbolic value of Arctic discourses in environmental movements, in order to consider the close connections between global forms of environmentalist discourse and action and local cultural responses. An engaging and timely work, this book will be of great interest to scholars of Geography, Anthropology, and Arctic Tourism.

This book invites readers to think of Mediterranean cultures as interconnected worlds, seen in light of how they evolve, disappear, are reborn and perpetually transform. This perspective intends to build bridges between the Northern and Southern coasts of the sea in order to broaden and deepen our understanding of current evolutions in Mediterranean worlds, at the cultural, literary, artistic and geopolitical levels. As Paul Valery suggested, we can consider this plural space from the perspective of the intense cultural, economic and human exchanges which have always characterized the Mare Nostrum. We can also consider Mediterranean worlds within an open enactive process, deeply exploring their evolution between nature and culture, examining the natural environment and the transforming relationships between humans and non-humans. The writers and researchers in Re-storying Mediterranean Worlds call for a dialog between the two coasts in order to connect what has been broken. In this volume, they highlight an intercultural and creolized conscience, traversing the Mediterranean worlds - including Italian, French and Tunisian cultures, but also migrations from, to and within the region - and transcending any idea of communitarian withdrawal. These essays express the urgent need to shift from an understanding of migration as suffering to the notion that mobility is an unalienable right, building foundations for a new idea of global citizenship.

While the historical development of symbolic power has benefitted humanity enormously, there is an insidious and seldom recognised price that goes beyond environmental degradation and cultural disintegration. With insights from both social and natural sciences, this book explores the changing character of subjectivity in contemporary life.

The aim of this book is to elucidate the role of forests as part of a landscape in the life of people. Most landscapes today are cultural landscapes that are influenced by human activity and that in turn have a profound effect on our understanding of and identification with a place. The book proposes that a better understanding of the bond between people and forests as integrated part of a landscape may be helpful in landscape planning, and may contribute to the discussion of changes in forest cover which has been motivated by land use changes, rural development and the global climate debate. To this end, people's perception of forest landscapes, the reasons for different perceptions, and future perspectives are discussed. Given the wide range of forest landscapes, and cultural perspectives which exist across the world, the book focuses on Europe as a test case to explore the various relationships between society, culture, forests and landscapes. It looks at historical evidence of the impacts of people on forests and vice versa, explores the current factors affecting people's physical and emotional comfort in forest landscapes, and looks ahead to how changes in forest cover may alter the present relationships of people to forests. Drawing together a diverse literature and combining the expertise of natural and social scientists, this book will form a valuable reference for students and researchers working in the fields of landscape ecology and landscape architecture, geography, social science, environmental psychology or environmental history. It will also be of interest to researchers, government agencies and practitioners with an interest in issues such as sustainable forest management, sustainable tourism, reserve management, urban planning and environmental interpretation.

Must freedom be sacrificed to achieve ecological sustainability - or vice versa? Can we be genuinely free and live in sustainable societies? This book argues that we can, if we recognise and celebrate our ecological embeddedness, rather than seeking to transcend it. But this does not mean freedom can simply be redefined to fit within ecological limits. Addressing current unsustainability will involve significant restrictions, and hence will require political justification, not just scientific evidence. Drawing on material from perfectionist liberalism, capabilities approaches, human rights, relational ethics and virtue theory, Michael Hannis explores the relationship between freedom and sustainability, considering how each contributes to human flourishing. He argues that a substantive and ecologically literate conception of human flourishing can underpin both capability-based environmental rights and a eudaimonist ecological virtue ethics. With such a foundation in place, public authorities can act both to facilitate ecological virtue, and to remove structural incentives to ecological vice. Freedom and Environment is a lucid addition to existing literature in environmental politics and virtue ethics, and will be an excellent resource to those studying debates about freedom with debates about ecological sustainability.

This volume presents the concepts of schizoanalysis and ecosophy as Felix Guattari and Gilles Deleuze understood them, in interviews and analyses by their contemporaries and followers. This accessible yet authoritative introduction is written by distinguished specialists, combining testimonies from some of Guattari's colleagues at the La Borde psychiatric clinic where he practiced, with expository essays on his main ideas, schizoanalysis and ecosophy, as well as his relations with Lacan. The last section of the book deals with the subsequent creative application of those ideas by his philosophical and psychoanalytic followers situated within the contemporary moment. This collection also provides the crucial historical context of France at the time Guattari was developing his concepts, including the role of the Maoists and the significance of the political situation in Algeria.

Researchers in the natural sciences are faced with problems that require a novel approach to improve the quality of forecasts of processes that are sensitive to environmental conditions. Nonlinearity of a system may significantly complicate the predictability of future states: a small variation of parameters can dramatically change the dynamics, while sensitive dependence of the initial state may severely limit the predictability horizon. Uncertainties also play a role. This volume addresses such problems by using tools from chaos theory and systems theory, adapted for the analysis of problems in the environmental sciences. Sensitive dependence on the initial state (chaos) and the parameters are analyzed using methods such as Lyapunov exponents and Monte Carlo simulation. Uncertainty in the structure and the values of parameters of a model is studied in relation to processes that depend on the environmental conditions. These methods also apply to biology and economics. This text aims to be suitable for research workers at universities and (semi-) governmental institutes for the environment, agriculture, ecology, meteorology and water management, and theoretical economists.

The questions that inspired this study are central to contemporary research within environmental anthropology, political ecology, and environmental history: How does the introduction of a modern, capitalist, resource regime affect the livelihood of indigenous peoples? Can sustainable resource management be achieved in a situation of radical commodification> of land and other aspects of nature? Focusing on conflicts relating to forest management, mining, and land rights, the author offers an insightful account of present-day challenges for indigenous people to accommodate aspirations for ethnic sovereignty and development.

Bengt G. Karlsson is Associate Professor in Social Anthropology at Stockholm University in Sweden. He is the author of "Contested Belonging: An Indigenous People's Struggle for Forest and Identity in Sub-Himalayan Bengal" (Routledge 2000) and two edited books, "Indigeneity in India" (Kegan Paul 2006) and "Human Rights: An Anthropological Enquiry" (Earthworm Books 2005).

This book looks afresh, from a philosophical perspective, on the role economic theory plays in present-day ecological policy. It starts from fundamental questions concerning the nature of the problem of sustainability, of politics, and of economic science. It confronts the results of this investigation with the theoretical work of two prominent present-day economists. This book is written at a high academic level. It will be of interest to environmentalists, environmental economists, and for policy people charged with ecological problems.

This book advances Earth Stewardship toward a planetary scale, presenting a range of ecological worldviews, practices, and institutions in different parts of the world and to use them as the basis for considering what we could learn from one another, and what we could do together. Today, inter-hemispheric, intercultural, and transdisciplinary collaborations for Earth Stewardship are an imperative. Chapters document pathways that are being forged by socio-ecological research networks, religious alliances, policy actions, environmental citizenship and participation, and new forms of conservation, based on both traditional and contemporary ecological knowledge and values. "The Earth Stewardship Initiative of the Ecological Society of America fosters practices to provide a stable basis for civilization in the future. Biocultural ethic emphasizes that we are co-inhabitants in the natural world; no matter how complex our inventions may become" (Peter Raven).

The environment is part of everyone's life but there are difficulties in communicating complex environmental problems, such as climate change, to a lay audience. In this book Kloeckner defines environmental communication, providing a comprehensive and up-to-date analysis of the issues involved in encouraging pro-environmental behaviour.

Environmental History is one of the most exciting and rapidly expanding new areas of historical study, and draws upon a wide range of disciplines for its insights and themes. Nature's End provides fifteen essays from historians, geographers, anthropologists and natural scientists on key themes and methods in the field, that address both those new to environmental history and seasoned practitioners. These studies illustrate the diversity of approaches to historic relationships between humans and their environments, but throughout the book connect these to core narratives in more traditional history: the role of the state and institutions, the importance of intellectual fashions and politics, and the role of the sciences and history itself, as well as the importance of ecology, and thinking about conservation, risk and human destiny.

In the first detailed study of how a major environmental NGO works transnationally, Brian Doherty and Timothy Doyle examine the relationships between the 74 national organizations of Friends of the Earth International. Drawing from a rich mix of survey data, interviews, archival sources and access to internal meetings, they show how FoEI has developed a distinctive international environmentalism, which allows for the differences in context between regions and across the North-South divide. Following the expansion of FoEI into the global South, the challenges it then faced over questions of ideology, organization and campaign strategy are examined over a twenty year period. The book demonstrates the development of an FoEI tradition of solidarity which accounts for its ability to overcome internal crises and pursue joint campaigns despite conflicting understandings of politics between its national organizations.

This book traces shifting attitudes towards science and technology, nature and the environment in twentieth-century Germany. It approaches them through discussion of a range of literary texts largely new to English readers, in which practical environmental problems and underlying issues of ecological ethics are brought to life in (often semi-autobiographical) narratives. It explores the philosophical influences on them and their political contexts, and asks what part novels and plays, poems and essays have played in environmental debate. Technological disasters, living in the landscape, hunting and allotment gardens are among the topics discussed.

"Vivanco's well-written work clearly raises important questions regarding whether or not ecotourism can overcome the ecological and social equity challenges of sutainable development." - Choice "The work excels at showing how environmental conservation oat Monte Verde is and has been the result of a shifting range of social, political, and economic forces, and it also excels at showing the variety of environmentalisms that can be found there." - JRAI Since the 1970s and 1980s, Monte Verde, Costa Rica has emerged as one of the most renowned sites of nature conservation and ecotourism in Costa Rica, and some would argue, Latin America. It has received substantial attention in literature and media on tropical conservation, sustainable development, and tourism. Yet most of that analysis has uncritically evaluated the Monte Verde phenomenon, using celebratory language and barely scratching the surface of the many-faceted socio-cultural transformations provoked by and accompanying environmentalism. Because of its stature, Monte Verde represents an ideal case study to examine the socio-cultural and political complexities and dilemmas of practicing environmentalism in rural Costa Rica. Based on many years of close observation, this book offers rich and original material on the ongoing struggles between environmental activists and of collective and oppositional politics to Monte Verde's new "culture of nature." Luis A. Vivanco is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Vermont (1999-present). He received a Ph.D. in Cultural Anthropology from Princeton University. He is co-editor of Tarzan was an Ecotourist...and Other Tales in the Anthropology of Adventure (Berghahn Books, 2006). He is a co-editor of Talking About People: Readings in Contemporary Cultural Anthropology (McGraw Hill). His research focuses on the culture and politics of nature conservation, ecotourism, and sustainable development in Costa Rica and Oaxaca, Mexico.

Since the 1970s and 1980s, Monte Verde, Costa Rica has emerged as one of the most renowned sites of nature conservation and ecotourism in Costa Rica, and some would argue, Latin America. It has received substantial attention in literature and media on tropical conservation, sustainable development, and tourism. Yet most of that analysis has uncritically evaluated the Monte Verde phenomenon, using celebratory language and barely scratching the surface of the many-faceted socio-cultural transformations provoked by and accompanying environmentalism. Because of its stature, Monte Verde represents an ideal case study to examine the socio-cultural and political complexities and dilemmas of practicing environmentalism in rural Costa Rica. Based on many years of close observation, this book offers rich and original material on the ongoing struggles between environmental activists and of collective and oppositional politics to Monte Verde's new 'culture of nature.'

Discussion of Hollywood film has dominated much of the contemporary dialogue on ecocriticism and the cinema--until now. With "Transnational Ecocinemas," the editors open up the critical debate to look at a larger variety of films from many different countries and cultures. By foregrounding these films with their economic and political contexts, the contributors offer a more comprehensive and nuanced look at the role of place in ecocinema. The essays also interrogate proposed global solutions to environmental issues by presenting an ecocritical perspective on different film cultural considerations from around the globe.

Three-fourths of scientific research in the United States is funded by special interests. Many of these groups have specific practical goals, such as developing pharmaceuticals or establishing that a pollutant causes only minimal harm. For groups with financial conflicts of interest, their scientific findings often can be deeply flawed.
To uncover and assess these scientific flaws, award-winning biologist and philosopher of science Kristin Shrader-Frechette uses the analytical tools of classic philosophy of science. She identifies and evaluates the concepts, data, inferences, methods, models, and conclusions of science tainted by the influence of special interests. As a result, she challenges accepted scientific findings regarding risks such as chemical toxins and carcinogens, ionizing radiation, pesticides, hazardous-waste disposal, development of environmentally sensitive lands, threats to endangered species, and less-protective standards for workplace-pollution exposure. In so doing, she dissects the science on which many contemporary scientific controversies turn. Demonstrating and advocating "liberation science," she shows how practical, logical, methodological, and ethical evaluations of science can both improve its quality and credibility -- and protect people from harm caused by flawed science, such as underestimates of cancers caused by bovine growth hormones, cell phones, fracking, or high-voltage wires.
This book is both an in-depth look at the unreliable scientific findings at the root of contemporary debates in biochemistry, ecology, economics, hydrogeology, physics, and zoology -- and a call to action for scientists, philosophers of science, and all citizens.

The interconnected themes of land and labour were a common recourse for English literary writers between the sixteenth and twentieth centuries, and in the twenty-first they have become pressing again in the work of nature writers, environmentalists, poets, novelists and dramatists. Written by a team of sixteen subject specialists, this volume surveys the literature of rural working lives and landscapes written in English between 1500 and the present day, offering a range of scholarly perspectives on the georgic tradition, with insights from literary criticism, historical scholarship, classics, post-colonial studies, rural studies and ecocriticism. Providing an overview of the current scholarship in georgic literature and criticism, this collection argues that the work of people and animals in farming communities, and the land as it is understood through that work, has provided writers in English with one of their most complex and enduring themes.

Written both for general readers and college students, Dialogues on Climate Justice provides an engaging philosophical introduction to climate justice, and should be of interest to anyone wanting to think seriously about the climate crisis. The story follows the life and conversations of Hope, a fictional protagonist whose life is shaped by a terrifyingly real problem: climate change. From the election of Donald Trump in 2016 until the 2060s, the book documents Hope's discussions with a diverse cast of characters. As she ages, her conversations move from establishing the nature of the problem, to engaging with climate skepticism, to exploring her own climate responsibilities, through managing contentious international negotiations, to considering big technological fixes, and finally, as an older woman, to reflecting with her granddaughter on what one generation owes another. Following a philosophical tradition established by Plato more than two thousand years ago, these dialogues are not only philosophically substantive and carefully argued, but also distinctly human. The differing perspectives on display mirror those involved in real-world climate dialogues going on today. Key Features: Written in an engaging dialogue form, which includes characterization, clear exchanges of ideas, and a compelling story arc Clearly organized to allow readers both in-depth consideration and rapid overviews of various topics Memorable examples that enable and encourage discussion inside and outside the classroom An Introduction to the book aimed at instructors, which includes helpful instructions for teaching the book and engaging student assignments

Modeling Environmental Policy demonstrates the link between physical models of the environment and policy analysis in support of policy making. Each chapter addresses an environmental policy issue using a quantitative modeling approach. The volume addresses three general areas of environmental policy - non-point source pollution in the agricultural sector, pollution generated in the extractive industries, and transboundary pollutants from burning fossil fuels. The book concludes by discussing the modeling efforts and the use of mathematical models in general.