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Books > Earth & environment > The environment > Environmentalist thought & ideology
Why, with absolutely no idea what Brexit actually meant, did the UK
vote for Brexit? Why, rather than vote for the best-qualified
candidate ever to stand as US President, did voters opt for a
reality TV star with no political experience? In both cases, the
winning side promised change and offered hope. They told a story
voters longed to hear. And in the absence of greater, more unifying
narratives, then true or not, voters plumped for the best story
available. Once upon a time our society was rich in stories. They
brought us together and helped us to understand the world and
ourselves. We called them myths. Today, we have a myth gap - a
vacuum that Alex Evans argues powerfully and persuasively is both
dangerous and an opportunity. In this time of global crisis and
transition- mass migration, inequality, resource scarcity, and
climate change - It is stories, rather than facts and
pie-charts,that will animate us and bring us together. It is by
finding new myths, those that speak to us of renewal and
restoration, that we will navigate our way to a better future.
Drawing on his first-hand experience as a political adviser within
British government and at the United Nations, and examining the
history of climate change campaigning and recent contests such as
Brexit and the US presidential election, Alex Evans explores: *how
tomorrow's activists are using narratives for change, * how modern
stories have been used and abused, * where we might find the right
myths that will take us forward
Deleuze's fondness for geography has long been recognised as
central to his thought. This is the first book to introduce
researchers to the breadth of his engagements with space, place and
movement. Focusing on pressing global issues such as urbanization,
war, migration, and climate change, Arun Saldanha presents a
detailed Deleuzian rejoinder to a number of theoretical and
political questions about globalization in a variety of
disciplines. This systematic overview of moments in Deleuze's
corpus where space is implicitly or explicitly theorized shows why
he can be called the twentieth century's most interesting thinker
of space. Anyone with an interest in refining such concepts as
territory, assemblage, body, event and Anthropocene will learn much
from the "geophilosophy" which Deleuze and Guattari proposed for
our critical times.
A major study of environmentalism and Islam in practice and theory,
with an historical overview that sets out future challenges,
including reformulating the fiqh or Islamic legal tradition to take
the ecological dimension seriously. In addressing this book to the
one billion Muslims in the world it has the potential to
reinvigorate the desire for environmental change in a community
that is ignored at the planets peril. In arguing that modernity,
consumerism and industrialisation need to be rethought, alongside
an appeal to reconnect man and woman with creation in the divine
order, this book has the potential to transform a generation. In
the same way that Naomi Klein's This Changes Everything presented
the argument for environmental action in a Capitalist framework,
Fazlun Khalid has written a book that demands action from those
whose primary orientation is towards the Islamic faith.
Global warming has reached terrifying heights of severity, human
consumption has caused the extinction of countless species and
neoliberalism has led to a destructive divide in wealth and a
polarization of mainstream politics. The climate crisis demands
action. Your planet needs you! Can we shop our way out of a crisis?
Will technology save the day? What does it mean to be a citizen and
not a consumer? Are the real solutions inside of us? Who Cares Wins
provides a plethora of solutions guaranteed to inspire and create
lasting global change. Lily Cole has met with some of the millions
of people around the world who are working on creative, innovative
solutions to our biggest challenges and are committed to creating a
more sustainable and peaceful future for humanity. Embracing debate
and exploring issues from fast fashion to fast food, farming to
plastic waste, renewable energy to gender equality, the book
features interviews with diverse voices from entrepreneurs like
Stella McCartney and Elon Musk, to activists such as Extinction
Rebellion co-founder Dr Gail Bradbrook, Farhana Yamin, Isabella
Tree, Putanny Yawanawa and Alice Waters, to offer a beacon of
possibility and celebrate the joy and power of collective global
creativity in challenging times. Who Cares Wins is a rousing call
to action that will instil hope and leave you feeling equipped with
the solutions and practical steps needed to make a difference. We
are the ancestors of our future: a generation that will either be
celebrated for its activism or blamed for its apathy.
__________________ It is time for us to choose solutions over
despair, to act now and create a better future. 'It's a positive,
useful book - how to make choices. We need to get governments on
board. I wish Lily was world controller' Vivienne Westwood, fashion
designer and founder of Vivienne Westwood Ltd 'A welcome and
thorough overview of some of the many aspects of the crisis
humanity is now facing alongside the visionary possibilities for
change at our fingertips. If we don't act it isn't for lack of good
ideas' Dr Gail Bradbrook, co-founder of Extinction Rebellion 'Your
book is golden, like you' Patti Smith
We live during a crucial period of human history on Earth.
Anthropogenic environmental changes are occurring on global scales
at unprecedented rates. Despite a long history of environmental
intervention, never before has the collective impact of human
behaviors threatened all of the major bio-systems on the planet.
Decisions we make today will have significant consequences for the
basic conditions of all life into the indefinite future. What
should we do? How should we behave? In what ways ought we organize
and respond? The future of the world as we know it depends on our
actions today. A cutting-edge introduction to environmental ethics
in a time of dramatic global environmental change, this collection
contains forty-five newly commissioned articles, with contributions
from well-established experts and emerging voices in the field.
Chapters are arranged in topical sections: social contexts
(history, science, economics, law, and the Anthropocene), who or
what is of value (humanity, conscious animals, living individuals,
and wild nature), the nature of value (truth and goodness,
practical reasons, hermeneutics, phenomenology, and aesthetics),
how things ought to matter (consequences, duty and obligation,
character traits, caring for others, and the sacred), essential
concepts (responsibility, justice, gender, rights, ecological
space, risk and precaution, citizenship, future generations, and
sustainability), key issues (pollution, population, energy, food,
water, mass extinction, technology, and ecosystem management),
climate change (mitigation, adaptation, diplomacy, and
geoengineering), and social change (conflict, pragmatism,
sacrifice, and action). Each chapter explains the role played by
central theories, ideas, issues, and concepts in contemporary
environmental ethics, and their relevance for the challenges of the
future.
The Adirondack region is trapped in a cycle of conflict. Nature
lovers advocate for the preservation of wilderness, while sports
enthusiasts demand infrastructure for recreation. Local residents
seek economic opportunities, while environmentalists fight
industrial or real estate growth. These clashes have played out
over the course of the twentieth century and continue into the
twenty-first. Through a series of case studies, historian Jonathan
D. Anzalone highlights the role of public and private interests in
the region and shows how partnerships frayed and realigned in the
course of several key developments: the rise of camping in the
1920s and 1930s; the 1932 Lake Placid Olympics; the construction of
a highway to the top of Whiteface Mountain; the postwar rise of
downhill skiing; the completion of I-87 and the resulting demand
for second homes; and the 1980 Lake Placid Olympics. Battles of the
North Country reveals how class, economic self-interest, state
power, and a wide range of environmental concerns have shaped
modern politics in the Adirondacks and beyond.
With skillful storytelling, Matthew McKenzie weaves together the
industrial, cultural, political, and ecological history of New
England's fisheries through the story of how the Boston haddock
fleet - one of the region's largest and most heavily industrialized
- rose, flourished, and then fished itself into near oblivion
before the arrival of foreign competition in 1961. This fleet also
embodied the industry's change during this period, as it shucked
its sail-and-oar, hook-and-line origins to embrace mechanized power
and propulsion, more sophisticated business practices, and
political engagement. Books, films, and the media have long
portrayed the Yankee fisherman's hard-scrabble existence, as he
faced brutal weather on the open seas and unnecessary governmental
restrictions. As McKenzie contends, this simplistic view has long
betrayed commercial fisheries' sophisticated legislative campaigns
in Washington, DC, as they sought federal subsidies and relief and,
eventually, fewer constricting regulations. This clash between
fisheries' representation and their reality still grips fishing
communities today as they struggle to navigate age-old trends of
fleet consolidation, stock decline, and intense competition.
This book is available as open access through the Bloomsbury Open
Access programme and is available on www.bloomsburycollections.com.
Drawing on a wide range of examples from literature, comics, film,
television and digital media, Nerd Ecology is the first substantial
ecocritical study of nerd culture's engagement with environmental
issues. Exploring such works as Star Trek, Tolkien's Lord of the
Rings, The Matrix, Joss Whedon's Buffy the Vampire Slayer and
Firefly, the fiction of Thomas Pynchon, The Hunger Games, and
superhero comics such as Green Lantern and X-Men, Anthony Lioi maps
out the development of nerd culture and its intersections with the
most fundamental ecocritical themes. In this way Lioi finds in the
narratives of unpopular culture - narratives in which marginalised
individuals and communities unite to save the planet - the building
blocks of a new environmental politics in tune with the concerns of
contemporary ecocritical theory and practice.
This book is available as open access through the Bloomsbury Open
Access programme and is available on www.bloomsburycollections.com.
From New Orleans to New York, from London to Paris to Venice, many
of the world's great cities were built on wetlands and swamps.
Cities and Wetlands is the first book to explore the literary and
cultural histories of these cities and their relationships to their
environments and buried histories. Developing a ground-breaking new
mode of psychoanalytic ecology and surveying a wide range of major
cities in North America and Europe, ecocritic and activist Rod
Giblett shows how the wetland origins of these cities haunt their
later literature and culture and might prompt us to reconsider the
relationship between human culture and the environment. Cities
covered include: Berlin, Boston, Chicago, Hamburg, London, New
Orleans, New York, Paris, St. Petersburg, Toronto, Venice and
Washington.
Although scholars in the environmental humanities have been
exploring the dichotomy between “wild” and “built”
environments for several years, few have focused on the
field of disability studies, a discipline that
enlists the contingency between environments and bodies as a
foundation of its scholarship. On the other hand, scholars in
disability studies have demonstrated the ways in which the
built environment privileges some bodies and minds over others, yet
they have rarely examined the ways in which toxic
environments engender chronic illness and disability or how
environmental illnesses disrupt dominant paradigms for scrutinizing
“disability.” Designed as a reader for undergraduate and
graduate courses, Disability Studies and the Environmental
Humanities employs interdisciplinary perspectives to examine such
issues as slow violence, imperialism, race, toxicity, eco-sickness,
the body in environmental justice, ableism, and other topics. With
a historical scope spanning the seventeenth century to the present,
this collection not only presents the foundational documents
informing this intersection of fields but also showcases the most
current work, making it an indispensable reference.
In the spring of 2014, rancher Cliven Bundy and his armed
supporters engaged in a standoff with Bureau of Land Management
agents, and once again, the federal management of public lands was
in the national spotlight. The conflict arose because Bundy had not
paid required grazing fees and a federal judge ordered the
confiscation of his cattle. The ensuing media coverage highlighted
information that may have surprised those outside the rural West:
the federal government manages 640 million acres of public land,
with over 90 percent of it in the West. In Open Spaces, Open
Rebellions, Michael J. Makley offers a succinct and compelling
history of the federal government's management of public lands. As
Makley reveals, beginning in the nineteenth century and continuing
to the present day, debates over how best to balance the use of
these lands by the general public, fee-paying ranchers, and
resource developers have always been complex and contentious.
Indeed, these debates have often been met with demands for
privatization or state control, best exemplified by the Sagebrush
Rebellion of the 1980s and the 2016 occupation of Oregon's Malheur
National Wildlife Refuge.
The anthology Sustainability: Global Issues, Global Perspectives
gives readers a firm grounding in issues related to sustainability
today. The book is rooted in the idea that to achieve
sustainability requires an understanding of many global topics, and
it uses global examples and case studies. The readings are
organized into three sections. The first introduces major concepts
and trends in environmental thinking, the second identifies current
challenges to sustainability, and the third addresses paradigm
shifts for sustainability. The selections are a blend of
environmental science, especially as it relates to agriculture,
soils, and land management with social topics such as how to govern
fairly and equitably to ensure that the voices of all seven billion
of Earth's inhabitants will be heard. Specific topics include the
global food economy, environmentally sound landscaping, waste
management, and human migration. Figures and tables throughout the
book provide visual support. Forward-looking, the book discusses
governance structures that work and what different countries are
doing to reform their education systems to respond to
sustainability issues. Sustainability: Global Issues, Global
Perspectives is intended for introductory or survey courses in
environmental studies and global issues.
How might literary scholarship engage with the sustainability
debate? Aimed at research scholars and advanced students in
literary and environmental studies, this collection brings together
twelve essays by leading and up-coming scholars on the theme of
literature and sustainability. In today's sociopolitical world,
sustainability has become a ubiquitous term, yet one potentially
driven to near meaninglessness by the extent of its usage. While
much has been written on sustainability in various domains, this
volume sets out to foreground the contributions literary
scholarship might make to notions of sustainability, both as an
idea with a particular history and as an attempt to reconceptualise
the way we live. Essays in this volume take a range of approaches,
using the tools of literary analysis to interrogate
sustainability's various paradoxes and to examine how literature in
its various forms might envisage notions of sustainability. -- .
"A beautiful, absorbing, tragic book."--Larry McMurtry In 1851, a
war began in what would become Yosemite National Park, a war
against the indigenous inhabitants. A century later--in 1951--and a
hundred and fifty miles away, another war began when the U.S.
government started setting off nuclear bombs at the Nevada Test
Site. It was called a nuclear testing program, but functioned as a
war against the land and people of the Great Basin. In this
foundational book of landscape theory and environmental thinking,
Rebecca Solnit explores our national Eden and Armageddon and offers
a pathbreaking history of the west, focusing on the relationship
between culture and its implementation as politics. In a new
preface, she considers the continuities and changes of these
invisible wars in the context of our current climate change crisis,
and reveals how the long arm of these histories continue to inspire
her writing and hope.
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