The town of Longyearbyen in the high Arctic is the world's northernmost settlement. Here, climate change is happening fast. It is clearly seen and sensed by the locals; with higher temperatures, more rain and permafrost thaw. At the same time, the town is shifting from state-controlled coal production to tourism, research and development, rapidly globalising, with numerous languages spoken, cruise ships sounding the horn in the harbour and planes landing and taking off. Zdenka Sokolí�ková lived here between 2019 and 2021, and her research in the community uncovered a story about the conflict between sustainability and the driving forces of politics and economy in the rich global North. A small town of 2,400 inhabitants at 78 degrees latitude north on the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard, Longyearbyen provided a unique view into the unmistakable relationship between global capitalism and climate change. The Paradox of Svalbard looks at both local and global trends to access a deep understanding of the effects of tourism, immigration, labour and many other elements on the trajectory of climate crisis, and whether anything can be done to reverse them.

The German Romantic Friedrich Holderlin developed a unique perspective on the relationship between humankind and the rest of nature. He believed that humanity has a positive role to play in cosmic evolution, and that modernity is the crucial stage in fulfilling this role. In this book the author views Holderlin's ideas from the perspective of the environmental crisis of modernity. From this perspective the environmental crisis has a purpose. This perspective involves an inversion of the traditional notion of causality in the environmental crisis - instead of humans harming nature, it is nature which causes human suffering.

We all come from different cultures and practice different spiritual traditions, but we have one thing in common: we are all of the earth. Vanessa Chakour, founder of the rewilding programme Sacred Warrior, takes us on a journey to deepen our relationship with ourselves and the environment. Awakening Artemis is her love letter to the earth. Sharing her personal journey of rewilding, her stories act as tools, both practical and inspirational, to encourage growth, healing and reconnection to the regenerative power of the natural world. Vanessa will help you embrace the strength and beauty in the wild, the weeds, and the unsavoury parts of yourself in order to grow and heal. By allowing yourself and the earth to flourish and awakening your inner Artemis, Chakour promises that you will find joy, peace, compassion for yourself, others, and the planet.

In a time of darkening environmental prospects, frightening religious fundamentalism, and moribund liberalism, the remarkable and historically unprecedented rise of religious environmentalism is a profound source of hope. In A Greener Faith, Roger S. Gottlieb chronicles the promises of this critically important movement, illuminating its principal ideas, leading personalities, and ways of connecting care for the earth with justice for human beings. He also shows how religious environmentalism breaks the customary boundaries of "religious issues" in political life. Asserting that environmental degradation is sacrilegious, sinful, and an offense against God catapults religions directly into questions of social policy, economic and moral priorities, and the overall direction of secular society. Gottlieb contends that a spiritual perspective applied to the Earth provides the environmental movement with a uniquely appropriate way to voice its dream of a sustainable and just world. Equally important, it helps develop a world-making political agenda that far exceeds interest group politics applied to forests and toxic incinerators. Rather, religious environmentalism offers an all-inclusive vision of what human beings are and how we should treat each other and the rest of life.
Gottlieb deftly analyzes the growing synthesis of the movement's religious, social, and political aspects, as well as the challenges it faces in consumerism, fundamentalism, and globalization. Highly engaging and passionately argued, this book is an indispensable resource for people of faith, environmentalists, scholars, and anyone who is concerned about our planet's future.

According to him, this can only be achieved if people, of opposing view points and interests, listen to each other point of view and develop cooperation instead of competition. If they fail in their efforts, they will endanger the existence of man kind, because dwindling resources combined with endemic tendency of violence in human nature and availability of weapons of mass destruction would generate genocidal wars that would extinguish much of the life on Earth.

Unstoppable climate change. Extensive extinction. The breakdown of ecosystems. Mass displacement. Wars over resources. Societal collapse. The projections for our future feel too catastrophic to be plausible, too distant to be true. But ecology is the study of the connections that sustain life, and Daniel Macmillen Voskoboynik's book links history with biology, economics with physics, to join the dots between our overlapping crises. Whether it be environmental degradation or damaged health, racial oppression or gender injustice, our multiple problems have common roots but also shared solutions. Unpacking our past gives us the tools to build a more just future, where competition and control give way for cooperation and care. Avoiding the sterile language that so often surrounds climate change, The Memory We Could Be seeks to inspire, illustrating in human terms the world we could lose and the world we can still win. Open its pages to come to terms with complexity, and heal our separation from nature and each other. FOREWORD BY RAOUL MARTINEZ, AUTHOR OF CREATING FREEDOM: POWER, CONTROL AND THE FIGHT FOR OUR FUTURE

In the late 1990s, when California's deregulation of the production and sale of electric power created massive energy shortages, a group of environmental justice activists blocked construction of a power plant in their working-class Mexican and Central American neighborhoods. Why did they choose this battle? And how did the largely high school student activists come to prevail in the face of statewide political opinion?

"Power Politics" is a rich and readable study of a grassroots campaign where longtime labor and environmental allies found themselves on opposite sides of a conflict that pitted good jobs against good air. Karen Brodkin analyzes how those issues came to be opposed and in doing so unpacks the racial and class dynamics that shape Americans' grasp of labor and environmental issues. "Power Politics'" activists stood at the forefront of a movement that is building broad-based environmental coalitions and placing social justice at the heart of a new and robust vision.

“"Terra" is one of the important books of our time—and it will change the way you think about the world.” —Neil Shubin, Provost, Field Museum of Natural History

The natural world as humans have always known it evolved close to 100 million years ago with the appearance of flowering plants and pollinating insects during the age of the dinosaurs. Its tremendous history is now in danger of profound, catastrophic disruption. In this brilliant synthesis of evolutionary biology, paleontology, and modern environmental science, Michael Novacek shows how we can understand and prevent what he and others call today’s “mass extinction event.”

Green will illustrate and shed new light on the gamut of issues associated with renewable energy, a topic whose importance increases exponentially with every temperature record-setting year. Jane and Michael Hoffman use their years of experience to explain the technological and economic future of this ecologically significant issue. They incisively explain its politics: what countries are doing right now and, most importantly, what we should be doing. Green will cut through the hype and polemics surrounding ecologically friendly technologies and present the unvarnished truth. It will guide the reader through the misinformation and confusion over global warming, and demonstrate the degree to which renewable energy can be part of the solution.

Sense of Place and Sense of Planet analyzes the relationship between the imagination of the global and the ethical commitment to the local in environmentalist thought and writing from the 1960s to the present. Part One critically examines the emphasis on local identities and communities in North American environmentalism by establishing conceptual connections between environmentalism and ecocriticism, on one hand, and theories of globalization, transnationalism and cosmopolitanism, on the other. It proposes the concept of "eco-cosmopolitanism" as a shorthand for envisioning these connections and the cultural and aesthetic forms into which they translate. Part Two focuses on conceptualizations of environmental danger and connects environmentalist and ecocritical thought with the interdisciplinary field of risk theory in the social sciences, arguing that environmental justice theory and ecocriticism stand to benefit from closer consideration of the theories of cosmopolitanism that have arisen in this field from the analysis of transnational communities at risk. Both parts of the book combine in-depth theoretical discussion with detailed analyses of novels, poems, films, computer software and installation artworks from the US and abroad that translate new connections between global, national and local forms of awareness into innovative aesthetic forms combining allegory, epic, and views of the planet as a whole with modernist and postmodernist strategies of fragmentation, montage, collage, and zooming.

"Nature-study not only educates, but it educates nature-ward; and nature is ever our companion, whether we will or no. Even though we are determined to shut ourselves in an office, nature sends her messengers. The light, the dark, the moon, the cloud, the rain, the wind, the falling leaf, the fly, the bouquet, the bird, the cockroach-they are all ours. If one is to be happy, he must be in sympathy with common things. He must live in harmony with his environment. One cannot be happy yonder nor tomorrow: he is happy here and now, or never. Our stock of knowledge of common things should be great. Few of us can travel. We must know the things at home." from "The Meaning of the Nature-study Movement"

"To feel that one is a useful and cooperating part in nature is to give one kinship, and to open the mind to the great resources and the high enthusiasms. Here arise the fundamental common relations. Here arise also the great emotions and conceptions of sublimity and grandeur, of majesty and awe, the uplift of vast desires when one contemplates the earth and the universe and desires to take them into the soul and to express oneself in their terms; and here also the responsible practices of life take root." from "The Holy Earth"

Before Wendell Berry and Aldo Leopold, there was the horticulturalist and botanist Liberty Hyde Bailey (1858 1954). For Wendell Berry, Bailey was a revelation, a symbol of the nature-minded agrarianism Berry himself popularized. For Aldo Leopold, Bailey offered a model of the scholar-essayist-naturalist. In his revolutionary work of eco-theology, The Holy Earth, Bailey challenged the anthropomorphism the people-centeredness of a vulnerable world.

A trained scientist writing in the lyrical tradition of Emerson, Burroughs, and Muir, Bailey offered the twentieth century its first exquisitely interdisciplinary biocentric worldview; this Michigan farmer's son defined the intellectual and spiritual foundations of what would become the environmental movement. For nearly a half century, Bailey dominated matters agricultural, environmental, and scientific in the United States. He worked both to improve the lives of rural folk and to preserve the land from which they earned their livelihood. Along the way, he popularized nature study in U.S. classrooms, lobbied successfully for women's rights on and off the farm, and bulwarked Teddy Roosevelt's pioneering conservationism.

Here for the first time is an anthology of Bailey's most important writings suitable for the general and scholarly reader alike. Carefully selected and annotated by Zachary Michael Jack, this book offers a comprehensive introduction to Bailey's celebrated and revolutionary thinking on the urgent environmental, agrarian, educational, and ecospiritual dilemmas of his day and our own. Culled from ten of Bailey's most influential works, these lyrical selections highlight Bailey's contributions to the nature-study and the Country Life movements.

Published on the one-hundredth anniversary of Bailey's groundbreaking report on behalf of the Country Life Commission, Liberty Hyde Bailey: Essential Agrarian and Environmental Writings will inspire a new generation of nature writers, environmentalists, and those who share with Bailey a profound understanding of the elegance and power of the natural world and humanity's place within it."

In twenty short books, Penguin brings you the classics of the environmental movement. In the galvanising speeches and essays brought together in This Can't Be Happening, George Monbiot calls on humanity to stop averting its gaze from the destruction of the living planet, and wake up to the greatest predicament we have ever faced. Over the past 75 years, a new canon has emerged. As life on Earth has become irrevocably altered by humans, visionary thinkers around the world have raised their voices to defend the planet, and affirm our place at the heart of its restoration. Their words have endured through the decades, becoming the classics of a movement. Together, these books show the richness of environmental thought, and point the way to a fairer, saner, greener world.

Greening Your Office shows us why we should green up at work, and covers the many areas where more environmentally friendly initiatives can be put into practice in a simple A-Z format. It includes case studies of successes from offices both big and small to inspire others to follow in their footsteps. The book hows how, by making small changes, individuals and organisations can: * Reduce costs * Reduce waste * Increase sales * Create a positive feeling at work * Do your bit for climate change Greening Your Office is for anyone who works in an office, both management and staff, from the large offices of global corporations to the person working from a home office.

This work covers the impact of workers' rights struggles on the environmental movement.In an innovative fusion of labor and environmental history, ""Making a Living"" examines work as a central part of Americans' evolving relationship with nature, revealing the unexpected connections between the fight for workers' rights and the rise of the modern environmental movement.Chad Montrie offers six case studies: textile ""mill girls"" in antebellum New England, plantation slaves and newly freed sharecroppers in the Mississippi Delta, home-steading women in the Kansas and Nebraska grasslands, native-born coal miners in southern Appalachia, autoworkers in Detroit, and Mexican and Mexican American farm workers in southern California. Montrie shows how increasingly organized and mechanized production drove a wedge between workers and nature - and how workers fought back. Workers' resistance not only addressed wages and conditions, he argues, but also planted the seeds of environmental reform and environmental justice activism. Workers played a critical role in raising popular consciousness, pioneering strategies for enacting environmental regulatory policy, and initiating militant local protest.Filled with poignant and illuminating vignettes, ""Making a Living"" provides new insights into the intersection of the labor movement and environmentalism in America.

In "Global Environmental Challenges," a collection of experts examines globalization's multiple effects on the environments of countries in the Global South, and how they are addressed both domestically and internationally. As the process of globalization continues to unfold, several questions arise: What new environmental challenges has globalization brought to countries in the Global South? Has the international environmental agenda had an effect on the politics and policy of these countries? And finally, to what extent have international civil society actors influenced environmental management? Contributors here address these central questions by presenting eleven case studies from the Global South. In addressing these questions, "Global Environmental Challenges "examines the complex relationship between environmental management, development, and globalization.

For those who eagerly awaited its periodic appearance, it was more than a publication: it was a way of life. The Whole Earth Catalog billed itself as "Access to Tools," and it grew from a Bay Area blip to a national phenomenon catering to hippies, do-it-yourselfers, and anyone interested in self-sufficiency independent of mainstream America.

In recovering the history of the Catalog's unique brand of environmentalism, Andrew Kirk recounts how San Francisco's Stewart Brand and his counterculture cohorts in the Point Foundation promoted a philosophy of pragmatic environmentalism that celebrated technological achievement, human ingenuity, and sustainable living. By piecing together the social, cultural, material, environmental, and technological history of that philosophy's incarnation in the Catalog, Kirk reveals the driving forces behind it, tells the story of the appropriate technology movement it espoused, and assesses its fate.

This book takes a fresh look at the many individuals and organizations who worked in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s to construct this philosophy of pragmatic environmentalism. At a time when many of these ideas were seen as heretical to a predominantly wilderness-based movement, Whole Earth became a critical forum for environmental alternatives and a model for how complicated ecological ideas could be presented in a hopeful and even humorous way. It also enabled later environmental advocates like Al Gore to explain our current "inconvenient truth," and the actions of Brand's Point Foundation demonstrated that the epistemology of Whole Earth could be put into action in meaningful ways that might foster an environmental optimism distinctly different from the jeremiads that became the stock in trade of American environmentalism.

Kirk shows us that Whole Earth was more than a mere counterculture fad. In an era of political protest, it suggested that staying home and modifying your toilet or installing a solar collector could make a more significant contribution than taking to the streets to shout down establishment misdeeds. Given its visible legacy in the current views of Al Gore and others, the subtle environmental heresies of Whole Earth continue to resonate today, which makes Kirk's lucid and lively tale an extremely timely one as well.

In "State of the World 2007," the Worldwatch Institute's award-winning research team focuses on the urbanization of our planet to provide policymakers, strategic planners, researchers, students, and concerned citizens with comprehensive analysis of the global environmental problems we face, together with descriptions of practical, innovative solutions. This report will show what is needed to foster sustainable cities on a planet where urban areas are home to half the human population and a far larger share of natural resource use. Written in clear and concise language, with easy-to-read charts and tables, "State of the World 2007" presents a view of our changing world that we, and our leaders, cannot afford to ignore.

A shocking but informative, eye-catching and witty book of maps that illustrate the perilous state of our planet.

The maps in this book are often shocking, sometimes amusing, and packed with essential information:

• Did you know that just 67 companies worldwide are responsible for 67 per cent of global greenhouse emissions?
• Or that keeping a horse has the same carbon footprint as a 23,500-kilometre road trip?
• Did you know how many countries use less energy than is consumed globally by downloading porn from the internet?
• Do you know how much of the earth's surface has been concreted over?
• Or how many trees would we have to plant to make our planet carbon-neutral?

For many years, ecologists and the environmentalists who looked to ecology for authority depicted a dichotomy between a pristine, stable nature and disruptive human activity. Most contemporary ecologists, however, conceive of nature as undergoing continual change and find that "flux of nature" is a more accurate and fruitful metaphor than "balance of nature." The contributors to this volume address how this new paradigm fits into the broader history of ecological science and the cultural history of the West and, in particular, how environmental ethics and ecotheology should respond to it. Their discussions ask us to reconsider the intellectual foundations on which theories of human responsibility to nature are built. The provisional answer that develops throughout the book is to reintegrate scientific understanding of nature and human values, two realms of thought severed by intellectual and cultural forces during the last two centuries. Religious reflection and practice point the way toward a new humility in making the tough decisions and trade-offs that will always characterize environmental management. Timely and challenging, the essays suggest avenues toward a new framework for interdisciplinary conversation among theologians, philosophers, historians, and environmental ethicists. Contributors: David M. Lodge, Christopher Hamlin, Elspeth Whitney, Mark Stoll, Eugene Cittadino, Kyle S. Van Houtan, Stuart L. Pimm, Gary E. Belovsky, Peter S. White, Patricia A. Fleming, John F. Haught, and Larry Rasmussen.

"Thoreau's Living Ethics is the first full, rigorous account of Henry Thoreau's ethical philosophy. Focused on "Walden but ranging widely across his writings, the study situates Thoreau within a long tradition of ethical thinking in the West, from the ancients to the romantics and on to the present day. Philip Cafaro shows Thoreau grappling with important ethical questions that agitated his own society and discusses his value for those seeking to understand contemporary ethical issues. Cafaro's particular interest is in Thoreau's treatment of virtue ethics: the branch of ethics centered on personal and social flourishing. Ranging across the central elements of Thoreau's philosophy--life, virtue, economy, solitude and society, nature, and politics--Cafaro shows Thoreau developing a comprehensive virtue ethics, less based in ancient philosophy than many recent efforts and more grounded in modern life and experience. He presents Thoreau's evolutionary, experimental ethics as superior to the more static foundational efforts of current virtue ethicists. Another main focus is Thoreau's environmental ethics. The book shows Thoreau not only anticipating recent arguments for wild nature's intrinsic value, but also demonstrating how a personal connection to nature furthers self-development, moral character, knowledge, and creativity. Thoreau's life and writings, argues Cafaro, present a positive, life-affirming environmental ethics, combining respect and restraint with an appreciation for human possibilities for flourishing within nature.

Is stewardship a useful way of regarding our relationship with our environment - or is it a dangerous excuse for plunder? Is it possible for us to be effective stewards? Or are we irrelevant parasites? Or foolish virgins unprepared for the Master's return? The notion that God has appointed us to care for creation has a long history and has been taken over into secular thinking. But can we be responsible for something if we do not acknowledge an Owner? This book gathers together classical expositions of stewardship with criticisms of the concept and adds other contributions written especially for this collection, linked by a critical commentary from the editor, R. J. Berry. The authors include both religious thinkers and practical conservationists. The questions faced were sparked by a conference of scientists and theologians organized by the John Ray Initiative and continued in a consultation at St George's House, Windsor Castle, with papers from Robin Attfield (philosopher), Murray Rae (theologian), Calvin DeWitt (environmental biologist), and Jim Lovelock (biogeochemist). The essays presented here are not simply an intellectual pastiche; they are a distillation of ideas to challenge us how to treat our environment - whether or not we call it 'Creation'.

"We are surrounded by a world that talks, but we don't listen. We are part of a community engaged in a vast conversation, but we deny our role in it." In the face of climate change, species loss, and vast environmental destruction, the ability to stand in the flow of the great conversation of all creatures and the earth can feel utterly lost to the human race. But Belden C. Lane suggests that it can and must be recovered, not only for the sake of endangered species and the well-being of at-risk communities, but for the survival of the world itself. The Great Conversation is Lane's multi-faceted treatise on a spiritually centered environmentalism. At the core is a belief in the power of the natural world to act as teacher. In a series of personal anecdotes, Lane pairs his own experiences in the wild with the writings of saints and sages from a wide range of religious traditions. A night in a Missourian cave brings to mind the Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius of Loyola; the canyons of southern Utah elicit a response from the Chinese philosopher Laozi; 500,000 migrating sandhill cranes rest in Nebraska and evoke the Sufi poet Farid ud-Din Attar. With each chapter, the humility of spiritual masters through the ages melds with the author's encounters with natural teachers to offer guidance for entering once more into a conversation with the world.

Reveals the full extent of state involvement in the exploitation of natural resources in Ontario

This book is about ecofeminism and its encounter with theology, predominantly that of Christian theology in Euro-western contexts. It introduces and explores ecofeminism and the encounter. The goal is to understand the significance and implications of ecofeminism and its contribution and challenge to theology. A further goal is to assist ecofeminist theology, or theologies, to be more effective in preventing ecological ruin, assisting women's struggles for freedom and supporting the flourishing of all life on earth. Ecofeminism represents ways of discerning associations of many kinds between the feminist and ecological movements, and between the oppression and domination of both women and the earth. Ecofeminism is an insight, referring to critical analyses, political actions, historical research, intuitions and ideals. The ecological crisis is creating a pivotal moral and religious challenge, and new contexts for theology. There is a renewed spiritual sensitivity towards the natural world. We are in a time of a spiritual awakening, wherein the earth and all life are experienced, as sacred, where it is possible to experience awe and wonder, and encounter the ineffable. Ecofeminist theologies are at the intersection of these ideas and experiences. They are the efforts of particular people who see and experience possibilities for greater life, more justice and freedom. They do not accept that injustice and ecological ruin are inevitable. Ecofeminist efforts are directed towards reducing further ecological and social devastation, and awakening consciousness to the immense beauty and elegance of all life on this fragile yet awesome blue-green planet.