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Books > Earth & environment > The environment > Environmentalist thought & ideology
Our planet is approaching a critical environmental juncture. Across the globe we continue to deplete the five pools of carbon  soil, wood, coal, oil, and natural gas  at an unsustainable rate. We've burned up half the planet's known reserves of oil  one trillion barrels  in less than a century. When these sources of energy-rich carbon go into severe decline, as they surely will, society will follow.Former archeologist and Sierra Club activist Courtney White calls this moment the Age of Consequences a time when the worrying consequences of our environmental actions or inaction  have begun to raise unavoidable and difficult questions. How should we respond? What are effective (and realistic) solutions?In exploring these questions, White draws on his formidable experience as an environmentalist and activist as well as his experience as a father to two children living through this vital moment in time. As a result, The Age of Consequences is a book of ideas and action, but it is also a chronicle of personal experience. Readers follow White as he travels the country --- from Kansas to Los Angeles, New York City, Italy, France, Yellowstone, and New England. Along the way he recounts stories of Amish farmers in Ohio, cattle ranchers in the Southwest, creek restorationists in New Mexico, local food entrepreneurs in Arizona, and carbon pioneers in Australia. Their stories inform and entertain, but they also reveal encouraging and hopeful answers to anguished questions about our collective future, including issues of sustainability, climate change mitigation, resilience, land health, collaborative conservation, ecological restoration, and regenerative agriculture.The Age of Consequences is an engaging and informative look at our current environmental predicament, as well as an important contribution to the growing body of environmental literature by writers such as Wallace Stegner, Wendell Berry, Barbara Kingsolver, Bill McKibben and E.O. Wilson, and Michael Pollan. For fans of Paul Hawken's Blessed Unrest and Elizabeth Kolbert's Field Notes of a Catastrophe.
This is my most comprehensive and definitive work. In it you will learn: What the philosophy of global warming is and why it is of great importance. Why the decision-making process concerning the appropriate human response to global warming requires a consideration of the evolutionary forces which propel the planet. Why cutting fossil fuel emissions is a futile exercise. What the human species is and how it relates to the non-human life-forms of the Earth. Why the human species has a special place in the universe and how this is related to global warming. What it means to say that your life has a purpose. Why the evolution of technology and the evolution of spirituality are deeply interconnected. Why there is an urgent need for the technological regulation of the temperature of the Earth's atmosphere. The book has 3 parts. Part 1 contains 12 chapters each of which contains a particular theme which is of relevance to the philosophy of global warming. Taken as a whole this part of the book can be thought of as providing a detailed overview of my philosophical worldview. Part 2 is a lengthy dialogue in which I respond to an Objector who poses 86 questions, queries and objections relating to my philosophical worldview. Part 3 contains 37 articles which expand on particular topics relating to the philosophy of global warming. I hope that by the end of the book you will have a clear understanding concerning your, and our, place in the universe and how this relates to global warming.
The debate over the value of community-based environmental collaboration is one that dominates current discussions of the management of public lands and other resources. In Community-Based Collaboration: Bridging Socio-Ecological Research and Practice, the volume's contributors offer an in-depth interdisciplinary exploration of what attracts people to this collaborative mode. The authors address the new institutional roles adopted by community-based collaborators and their interaction with existing governance institutions in order to achieve more holistic solutions to complex environmental challenges. Contributors: Heidi L. Ballard, University of California, Davis * Juliana E. Birkhoff, RESOLVE * Charles Curtin, Antioch University * Cecilia Danks, University of Vermont * E. Franklin Dukes, University of Virginia and George Mason University * Maria Fernandez-Gimenez, Colorado State University * Karen E. Firehock, University of Virginia * Melanie Hughes McDermott, Rutgers University * William D. Leach, California State University, Sacramento * Margaret Ann Moote, private consultant * Susan L. Senecah, State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry * Gregg B. Walker, Oregon State University
Sustainability: Global Issues, Global Perspectives Workbook is a companion text to the anthology of the same title. The workbook is a valuable learning tool that supports mastery of the material from the main text through meaningful, rigorous questions, and data analysis exercises. While the workbook is intended for regular, weekly use, its flexible design allows instructors to use chapters selectively as well as comprehensively from start to finish. It gives students the opportunity to further explore topics such as the global food economy, environmentally sound landscaping, waste management, and human migration. Sustainability: Global Issues, Global Perspectives Workbook is one of the few practical exercise workbooks designed to accompany texts on sustainability. It is intended for introductory or survey courses in environmental studies and global issues.
Sustainability has become a compelling topic of domestic and international debate as the world searches for effective solutions to accumulating ecological problems. In Return to Nature? An Ecological Counterhistory, Fred Dallmayr demonstrates how nature has been marginalized, colonized, and abused in the modern era. Although nature was regarded as a matrix that encompassed all beings in premodern and classical thought, modern Western thinkers tend to disregard this original unity, essentially exiling nature from human life. By means of a philosophical counterhistory leading from Spinoza to Dewey and beyond, the book traces successive efforts to correct this tendency. Grounding his writing in a holistic relationism that reconnects humanity with ecology, Dallmayr pleads for the reintroduction of nature into contemporary philosophical discussion and sociopolitical practice. Return to Nature? unites learning, intelligence, sensibility, and moral passion to offer a multifaceted history of philosophy with regard to our place in the natural world. Dallmayr's visionary writings provide an informed foundation for environmental policy and represent an impassioned call to reclaim nature in our everyday lives.
In the last three decades of the twentieth century, the environmental movement experienced a quiet revolution. In This is Our Land, Ferguson documents this little-noted change as he describes the efforts of three representative grassroots groups - in Montana, Arizona, and Tennessee - revealing how quite ordinary citizens fought to solve environmental problems. Here are stories of common people who, confronting environmental threats to the health and safety of their families and communities, bonded together to protect their interests. These stories include successes and failures as citizens learned how to participate in their democracy and redefined what participation meant. Equally important, Ferguson describes how several laws passed in the seventies - such as the National Environmental Policy Act - gave citizens the opportunity and the tools to fight for the environment. These laws gave people a say in the decisions that affected the world around them, including the air they breathed, the water they drank, the land on which they made their living, and the communities they called home. Moreover, Ferguson shows that through their experiences over the course of the 1970s, '80s, and '90s, these citizen activists broadened their understanding of "this is our land" to mean "this is our community, this is our country, this is our democracy, and this is our planet." As they did, they redefined political participation and expanded the ability of citizens to shape their world. Challenging us to see activism in a new way, This is Our Land recovers the stories of often-unseen citizens who have been vitally important to the environmental movement. It will inspire readers to confront environmental threats and make our world a safer, more just, and more sustainable place to live.
No single event played a greater role in the birth of modern environmentalism than the publication of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring and its assault on insecticides. The documents collected by Thomas Dunlap trace shifting attitudes toward DDT and pesticides in general through a variety of sources: excerpts from scientific studies and government reports, advertisements from industry journals, articles from popular magazines, and the famous "Fable for Tomorrow" from Silent Spring. Beginning with attitudes toward nature at the turn of the twentieth century, the book moves through the use and early regulation of pesticides; the introduction and early success of DDT; the discovery of its environmental effects; and the uproar over Silent Spring. It ends with recent debates about DDT as a potential solution to malaria in Africa.
Utilizing Francois Laruelle's "non-philosophical" method, Smith constructs a unified theory of philosophical theology and ecology by challenging environmental philosophy and theology, claiming that and engagement with scientific ecology can radically change the standard metaphysics of nature, as well as ethical problems related to "the natural".
Spaces in-between goes beyond the emphasis on externalities signalled by the term 'environment' to address the isolation of modern technological culture from nature. Solutions require more than an awareness of 'natural surroundings' and human destructiveness. We think in terms of the re-conceptualization, re-design and re-negotiation of space. The book is concerned with social practices, belief systems, urban designs, the organization and representation of landscapes and modes of living. These aspects of 'spatiality' suggest how to conceive and practice the intermingling of nature and culture and how to develop public commitment to such practices. In the process we show how concern for the environment as an aspect of space helps us to reconceive and reinterpret what it means to be human.
The calamitous impacts of climate change that are beginning to be felt around the world today expose the inextricability of human and natural histories. Arguing for a more complex account of such calamities, Kate Rigby examines a variety of past disasters, from the Black Death of the Middle Ages to the mega-hurricanes of the twenty-first century, revealing the dynamic interaction of diverse human and nonhuman factors in their causation, unfolding, and aftermath. Focusing on the link between the ways disasters are framed by the stories told about them and how people tend to respond to them in practice, Rigby also shows how works of narrative fiction invite ethical reflection on human relations with one another, with our often unruly earthly environs, and with other species in the face of eco-catastrophe. In its investigation of an array of authors from the Romantic period to the present-including Heinrich von Kleist, Mary Shelley, Theodor Storm, Colin Thiele, and Alexis Wright- Dancing with Disaster demonstrates the importance of the environmental humanities in the development of more creative, compassionate, ecologically oriented, and socially just responses to the perils and possibilities of the Anthropocene.
"Her great virtue as an advocate is that she is not a reductionist. Her awareness of the complex connections among economy and nature and culture preserves her from oversimplification. So does her understanding of the importance of diversity." -- Wendell Berry, from the foreword Motivated by agricultural devastation in her home country of India, Vandana Shiva became one of the world's most influential and highly acclaimed environmental and antiglobalization activists. Her groundbreaking research has exposed the destructive effects of monocultures and commercial agriculture and revealed the links between ecology, gender, and poverty. In The Vandana Shiva Reader, Shiva assembles her most influential writings, combining trenchant critiques of the corporate monopolization of agriculture with a powerful defense of biodiversity and food democracy. Containing up-to-date data and a foreword by Wendell Berry, this essential collection demonstrates the full range of Shiva's research and activism, from her condemnation of commercial seed technology, genetically modified organisms (GMOs), and the international agriculture industry's dependence on fossil fuels, to her tireless documentation of the extensive human costs of ecological deterioration. This important volume illuminates Shiva's profound understanding of both the perils and potential of our interconnected world and calls on citizens of all nations to renew their commitment to love and care for soil, seeds, and people.
This book is available as open access through the Bloomsbury Open Access programme and is available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. Clare Saunders' book is an important contribution to the literature on social movements and environmentalism. Using the concept of 'environmental networks', it explores the extent to which social movement theory helps us understand how a broad range of environmental organizations interact. It considers the practicalities of social movement theories and it goes on to relate them to the practices of environmental networks. Theoretically and empirically rich, the book draws on extensive survey material with 144 UK environmental organizations, as diverse as not-in-my-backyard (NIMBY) groups, reformists, conservationists and radicals; interviews with more than 40 key campaigners and extensive participant-observation, particularly in London. Focussing particularly on the crucial question of networking dynamics, the book reveals that there are broad ranging network links across the movements' spatial and ideological dimensions. Combined with inevitable ideological clashes and a degree of sectarian rivalry, these links helps produce vibrant environmental networks that together work to protect and/or preserve the environment. This book is an invaluable resource for anyone concerned with environmental issues, politics and movements.
In this collection of essays, Paul Cudenec calls for a new deeper level of resistance to global capitalism - one which is rooted in the collective soul not just of humankind but of the living planet. He leads us along the intertwining environmental and philosophical strands of Antibodies, through the passion of Anarchangels and The Task and on to a cutting analysis of Gladio, a state-terrorist branch of what he calls the "plutofascist" system. Also included, alongside short pieces on Taoism and Jungian psychology, is an interview with the author, in which he explains key aspects of his approach. "Very readable and profoundly thoughtful... Many new insights on the destructive relationship between the greater part of humanity and the planet which tries to sustain them." Peter Marshall, author of Demanding the Impossible: A History of Anarchism and Nature's Web: An Exploration of Ecological Thinking.
Bestselling author and environmental activist Bill McKibben recounts the personal and global story of the fight to build and preserve a sustainable planet Bill McKibben is not a person you'd expect to find handcuffed and behind bars, but that's where he found himself in the summer of 2011 after leading the largest civil disobedience in thirty years, protesting the Keystone XL pipeline in front of the White House. With the Arctic melting, the Midwest in drought, and Irene scouring the Atlantic, McKibben recognized that action was needed if solutions were to be found. Some of those would come at the local level, where McKibben joins forces with a Vermont beekeeper raising his hives as part of the growing trend toward local food. Other solutions would come from a much larger fight against the fossil-fuel industry as a whole. "Oil and Honey" is McKibben's account of these two necessary and mutually reinforcing sides of the global climate fight--from the center of the maelstrom and from the growing hive of small-scale local answers. With empathy and passion he makes the case for a renewed commitment on both levels, telling the story of raising one year's honey crop and building a social movement that's still cresting.
Engaging important discussions about social conflict, environmental change, and imperialism in Africa, "Different Shades of Green" points to legacies of African environmental writing, often neglected as a result of critical perspectives shaped by dominant Western conceptions of nature and environmentalism. Drawing on an interdisciplinary framework employing postcolonial studies, political ecology, environmental history, and writing by African environmental activists, Byron Caminero-Santangelo emphasizes connections within African environmental literature, highlighting how African writers have challenged unjust, ecologically destructive forms of imperial development and resource extraction. "Different Shades of Green "also brings into dialogue a wide range of African creative writing--including works by Chinua Achebe, Ng g wa Thiong'o, Bessie Head, Nadine Gordimer, Zakes Mda, Nuruddin Farah, Wangari Maathai, and Ken Saro-Wiwa--in order to explore vexing questions for those involved in the struggle for environmental justice, in the study of political ecology, and in the environmental humanities, urging continued imaginative thinking in effecting a more equitable, sustain¬able future in Africa."
In this, his third book, Paul Cudenec depicts a humanity dispossessed, a society in which freedom, autonomy, creativity, culture, and the spirit of collective solidarity have been deliberately suffocated by a ruthlessly violent and exploitative elite hiding behind the masks of Authority, Property, Law, Progress and God. But he also identifies an underground current of heresy and resistance which resurfaces at key moments in history and which, he argues, has the primal strength to sweep away the prison walls of our diseased civilization and carry us forward to a future of vitality and renewal.
Engaging important discussions about social conflict, environmental change, and imperialism in Africa, "Different Shades of Green" points to legacies of African environmental writing, often neglected as a result of critical perspectives shaped by dominant Western conceptions of nature and environmentalism. Drawing on an interdisciplinary framework employing postcolonial studies, political ecology, environmental history, and writing by African environmental activists, Byron Caminero-Santangelo emphasizes connections within African environmental literature, highlighting how African writers have challenged unjust, ecologically destructive forms of imperial development and resource extraction. "Different Shades of Green "also brings into dialogue a wide range of African creative writing--including works by Chinua Achebe, Ng g wa Thiong'o, Bessie Head, Nadine Gordimer, Zakes Mda, Nuruddin Farah, Wangari Maathai, and Ken Saro-Wiwa--in order to explore vexing questions for those involved in the struggle for environmental justice, in the study of political ecology, and in the environmental humanities, urging continued imaginative thinking in effecting a more equitable, sustain¬able future in Africa."
This book presents state-of-the-art research on bioremediation, which is understood as a discipline that uses organisms or their products to reduce or eliminate the adverse effects of pollutants in the environment. Today, there are many research groups that focus on remedying the adverse effects of our industrialised society, which release compounds daily, increasingly polluting the environment. This book compiles the most important work of distinguished scientists around the world who are at the vanguard in this discipline, covering the environments of soil and water, as well as a great variety of micro-organisms and mechanism bioremediators. Thus, the bioremediation strategy and bioremediator should be chosen according to the pollutant. This material is one of the few available for discussion in literature, and the authors and editorial board hope that this book can be used as a guide or as a base material useful for people who want to develop or apply new strategies in the bioremediation field. The book consists of the following sections: 1) bacterial bioremediation, 2) microbioremediation, 3) phyto- and phycoremediation, 4) composite bioremediation and finally 5) derivative bioremediation. Each section is disposed depending on the kind and type of pollutant; inorganic or organic; and by the complexity of organic mixtures. Studies include in silico, in vitro, in situ, ex situ approaches, from mathematical models to real landscape cases, including analytical methods to assess bioremediation efficacy and the biotechnological use of rhamnolipids, acetogenins, surfactants, micro-bubbles, agricultural residues and enzymes to improve or achieve bioremediation. This book is intended to provide tools to readers in order to apply or to understand the feasibility, advances, advantages, disadvantages, aspects, processes, challenges and future prospects in bioremediation.
New expanded edition In this beautifully presented, full-color book in a deluxe padded hardcover, bestselling artist and author Toni Carmine Salerno offers reflections and meditations in honor of Mother Nature and the feminine spirit. Featuring illuminating illustrations and depictions of nature and the Goddess, this is a book you refer to time and again. |
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