All effects of human action will inevitably be played out within our planet's limits; any hope of infinity is an illusion. And yet, as Wolfgang Sachs warned almost twenty years ago, environmental concerns have been assimilated into the rhetoric, dynamics and power structures of development. This classic collection of trenchant and elegant explorations addresses the crisis of the Western world's relations with nature and social justice. Examining the notions of efficiency, speed, globalization and development, Sachs shows that sustainability, truly conceived, is incompatible with the worldwide rule of economism. Planet Dialectics reveals that the Western development model is fundamentally at odds with both the quest for justice among the world's people and the aspiration to reconcile humanity and nature.

This is your concise, up to date guide to global environmental ethics. This fully updated and expanded textbook gives you new reflections on global environmental issues. It looks at issues including climate change, sustainable development and biodiversity preservation, and sensitively addresses global developments such as the Summits at Durban on climate and at Nagoya on biodiversity. Robin Attfield gives an ethical critique of current international environmental problems and negotiations, and explains how international regimes will need to change to be able to cope with global environmental problems. It offers a new chapter on the ethics of climate change. It contains up to date case studies on issues such as Haiti's re forestation project, food sovereignty and resistance to the Xayaburi Dam (Laos). It includes new passages on environmental aesthetics, lobbying websites and the Yasuni Reserve in Ecuador. It takes a distinctive approach to climate ethics. It integrates environmental ethics with ethical theory.

An ecopsychology that integrates our totemic selves-our kinship with a more than human world-with our technological selves. We need nature for our physical and psychological well-being. Our actions reflect this when we turn to beloved pets for companionship, vacation in spots of natural splendor, or spend hours working in the garden. Yet we are also a technological species and have been since we fashioned tools out of stone. Thus one of this century's central challenges is to embrace our kinship with a more-than-human world-"our totemic self"-and integrate that kinship with our scientific culture and technological selves. This book takes on that challenge and proposes a reenvisioned ecopsychology. Contributors consider such topics as the innate tendency for people to bond with local place; a meaningful nature language; the epidemiological evidence for the health benefits of nature interaction; the theory and practice of ecotherapy; Gaia theory; ecovillages; the neuroscience of perceiving natural beauty; and sacred geography. Taken together, the essays offer a vision for human flourishing and for a more grounded and realistic environmental psychology.

Satish Kumar has been a pilgrim ever since at the age of eight he joined the brotherhood of wandering Jain monks in his native India. Later he walked the length and breadth of India with Gandhi's successor Vinoba Bhave, persuading landowners to donate a portion of their lands to the poor; and in the 1960s he made an 8,000-mile pilgrimage for peace, which included walking from India over the Himalayas to Paris via Moscow. In Earth Pilgrim, Satish draws on this personal experience and also his understanding of the spiritual traditions of both East and West. The book takes the form of conversations between Satish and others about the inner and outer aspects of pilgrimage: to be a pilgrim is to be on a path of adventure, to move out of our comfort zones, to let go of our prejudices and preconditioning, to make strides towards the unknown. If we want to tread the pilgrim's path, we need to go beyond ideas of good and evil, and to be dedicated to our quest - to our natural calling. We need to shed not just our unnecessary material possessions, but also our burdens of fear, anxiety, doubt and worry; in this way we can find spiritual renewal and enter on the great adventure into the unknown. Paradoxically, being on a pilgrimage doesn't necessarily mean travelling from one place to another - it means a state of mind, a state of consciousness, a state of fearlessness. Satish believes that at this stage of human history we now need a new kind of pilgrim, unattached to any form of dogma - 'Earth Pilgrims', who are concerned with this world, not the next, and who are seeking a deep commitment to life in the here and now, upon this earth, in this world. We need to realise that we are all connected, and through that connectivity we become pilgrims.

This book brings together over thirty of the foremost contributions to environmental ethics, from pioneering papers to recent work at the cutting edge of thought in this field. It also unites them through an innovative introductory essay which appraises both strengths and weaknesses and presents a distinctive view of the subject. Areas covered include the land ethic, Deep Ecology, biocentric approaches, environmental virtue ethics, feminist contributions, debates on equity and on the interests and representation of future generations, preservation, sustainability and sustainable development. The importance of attempts to discover a comprehensive ethic relevant both to the environment and other key areas of ethical debate is highlighted. Robin Attfield has been working in this field for thirty years, and has published several related collections and monographs, of which the latest is Environmental Ethics: An Overview for the Twenty-First Century, published by Polity in 2003. The Ethics of The Environment complements that work, from which it incorporates a significant extract about the considerable practical difference that environmental ethics is capable of making.

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.

"A superb collection. Included here are the texts that galvanized Rachel Carson to write "Silent Spring" and inspired her to insist on a new vision of cooperation between man and nature. Dunlap's book provides the context for one of the defining debates of our time and shows us why a resolution remains so elusive." - Linda Lear, biographer and author of "Rachel Carson: Witness for Nature"

"To understand how DDT could win its developer a Nobel Prize and then be banned just decades later, read this book. Read it, too, if you want to understand the modern environmental movement. In these pages, those who helped make history tell you, in their own words, what happened." - Edmund P. Russell, University of Virginia

"This thought-provoking and occasionally surprising collection of readings brings needed attention to Rachel Carson and her work. Dunlap's book will prove valuable for classes in environmental studies and American environmental history and for historians studying conflicts over pesticides." - Nancy Langston, Professor, University of Wisconsin-Madison

"A fascinating and thought-provoking collection of texts that will give readers whole new perspectives on this critical controversy in the history of environmental thought." - William Cronon, University of Wisconsin-Madison

"Students can use this collection to gain greater understanding of the development of the environmental movement, changing ideas about progress, science, and technology, as well as changing ideas about the role of nature in the modern world." - David Stradling, University of Cincinnati

Thomas R. Dunlap is professor of history at Texas A & M University. He is the author of four books including "Faith in Nature: Environmentalism as Religious Quest" and "DDT: Scientists, Citizens, and Public Policy."

When did the human species turn against the planet that we depend on for survival? Human industry and consumption of resources have altered the climate, polluted the water and soil, destroyed ecosystems, and rendered many species extinct, vastly increasing the likelihood of an ecological catastrophe. How did humankind come to rule nature to such an extent? To regard the planet's resources and creatures as ours for the taking? To find ourselves on a seemingly relentless path toward ecocide?In After Eden, Kirkpatrick Sale answers these questions in a radically new way. Integrating research in paleontology, archaeology, and anthropology, he points to the beginning of big-game hunting as the origin of Homo sapiens' estrangement from the natural world. Sale contends that a new, recognizably modern human culture based on the hunting of large animals developed in Africa some 70,000 years ago in response to a fierce plunge in worldwide temperature triggered by an enormous volcanic explosion in Asia. Tracing the migration of populations and the development of hunting thousands of years forward in time, he shows that hunting became increasingly adversarial in relation to the environment as people fought over scarce prey during Europe's glacial period between 35,000 and 10,000 years ago. By the end of that era, humans' idea that they were the superior species on the planet, free to exploit other species toward their own ends, was well established. After Eden is a sobering tale, but not one without hope. Sale asserts that Homo erectus, the variation of the hominid species that preceded Homo sapiens and survived for nearly two million years, did not attempt to dominate the environment. He contends that vestiges of this more ecologically sound way of life exist today-in some tribal societies, in the central teachings of Hinduism and Buddhism, and in the core principles of the worldwide environmental movement-offering redemptive possibilities for ourselves and for the planet.

Globalization today is as much a problem for international harmony as it is a necessary condition of living together on our planet. Increasing interconnectedness in ecology, economy, technology, and politics has brought nations and societies into ever closer contact, creating acute demands for cooperation. Earthly Politics argues that in the coming decades global governance will have to accommodate differences even as it obliterates distance, and will have to respect many aspects of the local while developing institutions that transcend localism.This book analyzes a variety of environmental-governance approaches that balance the local and the global in order to encourage new, more flexible frameworks of global governance. On the theoretical level, it draws on insights from the field of science and technology studies to enrich our understanding of environmental-development politics. On the pragmatic level, it discusses the design of institutions and processes to address problems of environmental governance that increasingly refuse to remain within national boundaries.The cases in the book display the crucial relationship between knowledge and power--the links between the ways we understand environmental problems and the ways we manage them--and illustrate the different paths by which knowledge-power formations are arrived at, contested, defended, or set aside. By examining how local and global actors ranging from the World Bank to the Makah tribe in the Pacific Northwest respond to the contradictions of globalization, the authors identify some of the conditions for creating more effective engagement between the global and the local in environmental governance.

"Despite the fact that I have studied environmental justice from a women's-centered perspective for the last twenty years, every page of this book taught me something new. I found it so engaging that I couldn't bear to put it down." --Celene Krauss, professor, women's studies and sociology, Kean University "Keeping to its core of the environmental justice movement, where women shape the leadership of the grassroots, New Perspectives on Environmental Justice captures the historical and contemporary roles of gender and sexuality in environmental justice studies. A truly transformative collection whose leading insights every student, teacher, and scholar of environmental justice must confront." --Robert Figueroa, university studies, program coordinator of environmental studies and Latin American studies, Colgate University Women make up the vast majority of activists and organizers of grassroots movements fighting against environmental ills that threaten poor and people of color communities. New Perspectives on Environmental Justice is the first collection of essays that pays tribute to the enormous contributions women have made in these endeavors. The writers offer varied examples of environmental justice issues such as children's environmental-health campaigns, cancer research, AIDS/HIV activism, the Environmental Genome Project, and popular culture, among many others. Each one focuses on gender and sexuality as crucial factors in women's or gay men's activism and applies environmental justice principles to related struggles for sexual justice. Drawing on a wide variety of disciplinary perspectives, the contributors offer multiple vantage points on gender, sexuality, and activism. Feminist/womanist impulses shape and sustain environmental justice movements around the world, making an understanding of gender roles and differences crucial for the success of these efforts. Rachel Stein is professor of English and director of women's and multicultural studies at Siena College in New York. She is the author of Shifting the Ground: American Women Writers' Revisions of Nature, Gender and Race, and is coeditor of The Environmental Justice Reader: Politics, Poetics, and Pedagogy.

International relations (IR) traditionally theorises the social relationships between different peoples. In so doing, it ignores the ecological bases to life - the ground upon which we walk, the all-encompassing bind of nature. In the current climate of environmental degradation, international relations as a theory must in turn be altered. By broadening the term 'relations' to include this ecological framework, international relations can be approached from a changed perspective.
In this book, Susan Board uses a Foucauldian model of power to expand the boundaries of international relations. She argues that 'relations' can include other people or animals, and are not exclusively between states. Such a perspective acts to denaturalise the marginalization of women, animals and indigenous peoples and hence expand the constrained discipline of IR. By rethinking international relations to put ecological foundations first, we are pushed to think and act with consideration of the long-term sustainability of the global environment; an ecological focus reminds us of our interdependence with our environment and all our neighbours.
The book raises conceptual and methodological issues that go directly to the heart of current critical engagements within the discipline of IR. As such it will be of great interest to students and researchers in IR, environmental politics and political theory.

eBook available with sample pages: 0203164237

The founding chief of the U.S. Forest Service and twice governor of Pennsylvania, Gifford Pinchot was central to the early twentieth-century conservation movement in the United States and the political history and evolution of the Keystone State. This collection of Pinchot's essays, articles, and letters reveals a gifted public figure whose work and thoughts on the environment, politics, society, and science remain startlingly relevant today. A learned man and admirably accessible writer, Pinchot showed keen insight on issues as wide-ranging as the rights of women and minorities, war, education, Prohibition, agricultural policy, land use, and the craft of politics. He developed galvanizing arguments against the unregulated exploitation of natural resources, made a clear case for thinking globally but acting locally, railed at the pernicious impact of corporate power on democratic life, and firmly believed that governments were obligated to enhance public health, increase economic opportunity, and sustain the land. Pinchot's policy accomplishments-including the first clean-water legislation in Pennsylvania and the nation-speak to his effectiveness as a communicator and a politician. His observations on environmental issues were exceptionally prescient, as they anticipated the dilemmas currently confronting those who shape environmental public policy. Introduced and annotated by environmental historian Char Miller, this is the only comprehensive collection of Pinchot's writings. Those interested in the history of conservation, the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, American politics, and the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania will find this book invaluable.

In Molecular Red, McKenzie Wark creates philosophical tools for the Anthropocene, our new planetary epoch, in which human and natural forces are so entwined that the future of one determines that of the other. Wark explores the implications of Anthropocene through the story of two empires, the Soviet and then the American. The fall of the former prefigures that of the latter. From the ruins of these mighty histories, Wark salvages ideas to help us picture what kind of worlds collective labor might yet build. From the scientific pioneers who were trying to transform science during the Russia Revolution, to visionaries contemplating cyborg possibilities and science fiction dreams in late 20th century California, Molecular Red not only looks at the crisis of climate change that we face but also how we might be able to understand it, and how we might salvage some hope out of the wreckage.

Although suburb-building created major environmental problems, Christopher Sellers demonstrates that the environmental movement originated within suburbs--not just in response to unchecked urban sprawl. Drawn to the countryside as early as the late nineteenth century, new suburbanites turned to taming the wildness of their surroundings. They cultivated a fondness for the natural world around them, and in the decades that followed, they became sensitized to potential threats. Sellers shows how the philosophy, science, and emotions that catalyzed the environmental movement sprang directly from suburbanites' lives and their ideas about nature, as well as the unique ecology of the neighborhoods in which they dwelt. Sellers focuses on the spreading edges of New York and Los Angeles over the middle of the twentieth century to create an intimate portrait of what it was like to live amid suburban nature. As suburbanites learned about their land, became aware of pollution, and saw the forests shrinking around them, the vulnerability of both their bodies and their homes became apparent. Worries crossed lines of class and race and necessitated new ways of thinking and acting, Sellers argues, concluding that suburb-dwellers, through the knowledge and politics they forged, deserve much of the credit for inventing modern environmentalism.

We live in and from nature, but the way we have evolved of doing this is about to destroy us. Capitalism and its by-products - imperialism, war, neoliberal globalization, racism, poverty and the destruction of community - are all playing a part in the destruction of our ecosystem. Only now are we beginning to realise the depth of the crisis and the kind of transformation which will have to occur to ensure our survival. This second, thoroughly updated, edition of The Enemy of Nature speaks to this new environmental awareness. Joel Kovel argues against claims that we can achieve a better environment through the current Western 'way of being'. By suggesting a radical new way forward, a new kind of 'ecosocialism', Joel Kovel offers real hope and vision for a more sustainable future.

This collection gathers classic, influential, and important papers in environmental philosophy from the late 1960s and early 1970s (when academic environmental philosophy began to coalesce) to the present. The volumes explore environmental ethics, epistemological, metaphysical, and comparative worldview questions raised by environmental concerns. The set also represents a genuinely global and international focus. The set includes a full index and new introductions by the editors.

This comprehensive account of the past, present and future of the automobile examines the key trends, key technologies and key players involved in the race to develop clean, environmentally friendly vehicles that are affordable and that do not compromise on safety or design. Undertaking a rigorous interrogation of our global dependency on oil, the author demonstrates just how unwise and unnecessary this is in light of current developments such as the fuel cell revolution and the increasing viability of hybrid cars, which use both petrol and electricity - innovations that could signal a new era of clean, sustainable energy. The arguments put forward draw on support from an eclectic range of sources - including industry insiders, scientists, economists and environmentalists - to make for an enlightening read.

This important volume brings together scientific, cultural, literary, historical, and philosophical perspectives to offer new understandings of the critical issues of our ecological present and new models for the creation of alternative ecological futures. At a time when the narrative and theoretical threads of the environmental humanities are more entwined than ever with the scientific, ethical, and political challenges of the global ecological crisis, this volume invites us to rethink the Anthropocene, the posthuman, and the environmental from various cross-disciplinary viewpoints. The book enriches the environmental debate with new conceptual tools and revitalizes thematic and methodological collaborations in the trajectory of ecocriticism and the environmental humanities. Alliances between the humanities and the social and natural sciences are vital in addressing and finding viable solutions to our planetary predicaments. Drawing on cutting-edge studies in all the major fields of the eco-cultural debate, the chapters in this book build a creative critical discourse that explores, challenges and enhances the field of environmental humanities.

The term "Anthropocene", the era of mankind, is increasingly being used as a scientific designation for the current geological epoch. This is because the human species now dominates ecosystems worldwide, and affects nature in a way that rivals natural forces in magnitude and scale. Thinking about Animals in the Age of the Anthropocene presents a dozen chapters that address the role and place of animals in this epoch characterized by anthropogenic (human-made) environmental change. While some chapters describe our impact on the living conditions of animals, others question conventional ideas about human exceptionalism, and stress the complex cognitive and other abilities of animals. The Anthropocene idea forces us to rethink our relation to nature and to animals, and to critically reflect on our own role and place in the world, as a species. Nature is not what it was. Nor are the lives of animals as they used to be before mankinds rise to global ecological prominence. Can we eventually learn to live with animals, rather than causing extinction and ecological mayhem?

"Attached Files" is a selection of lectures and papers written by Imre Lazar, a medical anthropologist with twenty-five years of experience, situated at the crossroads and frontiers of several disciplines, including anthropology, health sciences, religious studies, human ecology, and environmental ethics. The shared focus, connecting these borderlands into a common semantic network, is the problem of the synergic logic of human bonds and attachment embodied by somatic, social, institutional and symbolic structures. The first part of the book deals with pluralism and the enculturation of the medical practice and its anthropological perspectives. The concept of attachment, metaphorized by the title, also provides a common ground to envisage cultural history, philosophy, literature, and biomedical sciences in terms of synergic human agency and its obstacles. The book integrates various strands of anthropology, such as the evolutionary and the symbolic, and the materialist and the idealist. The book will be useful for those interested in the fields of medical anthropology, health psychology, religious studies, human ecology, ecophilosophy, and environmental ethics.

Making Peace In and With the World: The Gulen Movement and Eco-Justice is a representative study and working analysis of contemporary Islamic thought on eco-justice. It cuts through problems facing humanity today, ranging from inequality and violence in the smaller globalized world to "the end/death of nature" as signaled by various environmental and ecological crises. Addressing these problems, this volume sheds light on two dimensions of peace in the earth community - making peace between differing human communities, and making peace between humanity and nature. The phrase Eco-Justice in this volume signifies this dual reality, thereby offering a unique and insightful view that justice in the world must go hand in hand with ecological justice if "peace" is to be made.With its dual foci of peace, this volume contributes to multi-disciplinary academic areas. It adds to a burgeoning field of religious ecology, by exploring the dynamics at play in the interaction between religion, human communities and nature, and by providing natural scientific works with considerable theoretical, philosophical and ethical implications. This volume also corresponds to studies in the interdisciplinary field of "war and peace." Since it deals centrally with the question of religion and eco-justice, this volume challenges assumptions of exclusivist religion, religion-oriented violence and the religion-based "Clash of Civilizations."The contributors of this volume from diverse academic backgrounds take Gulen and the Gulen movement as the case study. Muhammed Fethullah Gulen is one of the most significant Islamic theologians in the contemporary world, and his inspired Gulen movement is the fastest growing Islamic civic movement worldwide. This volume provides a key reference to studies in Gulen and his movement for new discussions and criticisms. And, by taking this figure and his movement as a case, it reveals a new dimension of peace among differing human communities and between humanity and nature.

The Philosophical Roots of the Ecological Crisis: Descartes and the Modern Worldview traces the conceptual sources of the present environmental degradation within the worldview of Modernity, and particularly within the thought of Rene Descartes, universally acclaimed as the father of modern philosophy. The book demonstrates how the triple foundations of the Modern worldview - in terms of an exaggerated anthropocentrism, a mechanistic conception of the natural world, and the metaphysical dualism between humanity and the rest of the physical world - can all be largely traced back to Cartesian thought, with direct ecological consequences.

In an age of consciousness about conservation, this is a worthy biography of a man with a passionate drive for forests. Charles Lane Poole (1885-1970), Western Australia's first Conservator of Forests, is the flawed hero of this biography. Motivated by the ideals of forest conservation and its science, he followed their dictates in Western Australia and across the world. Poole was the first man to attempt the task of managing and preserving Australia's magnificent jarrah and karri forests at a time when they were being felled for railway sleepers. This fascinating biography follows his life from his birth in England in 1885 to Ireland, France, South Africa, Sierra Leone, Western Australia, Papua New Guinea, Canberra, where he established Australia's national forestry school, and Sydney, where he died in 1970.

The Jianghan Plain in central China has been shaped by its relationship with water. Once a prolific rice-growing region that drew immigrants to its fertile paddy fields, it has, since the eighteenth century, become prone to devastating flooding and waterlogging. Over time, population pressures and dike building left more and more people in the region vulnerable to frequent water calamities. The first environmental and socioeconomic history of the region, Coping with Calamity considers the Jianghan Plain's volatile environment, the constant challenges it presented to peasants, and their often ingenious and sophisticated responses during the Qing and Republican periods.