Contents:
1. Sustainability and Social Policy 2. Sustainable Development: The Policy Response 3. Local Agenda 21 4. Green Ideas 5. Environmental Health 6. Housing and Urban Development 7. Food 8. Work 9. One World

Climate has infused the literary history of the United States, from the writings of explorers and conquerors, over early national celebrations of the American climate, to the flowering of romantic nature writing. This volume traces this complex semantic history in American thought and literature to examine rhetorical and philosophical discourses that continue to propel and constrain American climate perceptions today. It explores how American literature from its inception up until the present engages with the climate, both real and perceived. Climate and American Literature attends to the central place that the climate has historically occupied in virtually all aspects of American life, from public health and medicine, over the organization of the political system and the public sphere, to the culture of sensibility, aesthetics and literary culture. It details American inflections of climate perceptions over time to offer revealing new perspectives on one of the most pressing issues of our time.

Presupposing no prior knowledge of philosophy, John Benson introduces the fundamentals of environmental ethics by asking whether a concern with human well-being is an adequate basis for environmental ethics. He encourages the reader to explore this question, considering techniques used to value the environment and critically examining 'light green' to 'deep green' environmentalism. Each chapter is linked to a reading from a key thinker such as J.S. Mill and E.O. Wilson.
Key features include activities and exercises, enabling readers to monitor their progress throughout the book, chapter summaries and guides to further reading.

The connection between economic growth and the quality of the environment is a popular subject. Since the second half of the 1980s, there has been an increasingly frequent use of the term "sustainable development," to refer to the preoccupation that the production of goods and services may decrease standards of living. It is natural to analyze this question from the point of view of economic models, which may be helpful in at least identifying the main factors behind such preoccupations and perhaps in suggesting policy measures. Indeed, models are useful to discuss some relevant factors, like the structure of production of the economy, the type of preferences and goals pursued by agents, and the elements of uncertainty. This monograph will consider some of these themes: there will be a study of the analytical framework which can be used for the purpose of defining and analyzing sustainability, and some discussion of how to calibrate a restricted version of the model to empirical data. There will be also some analysis about which type of uncertainty should be incorporated into the model, and which objective functions may be useful for policy purposes. Also, there will be discussions about the key variables which should be included, and some description of a general framework.

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'.

This revised second edition highlights the opportunities for achieving cost savings and environmental improvements to enhance competitiveness in organizations of all sizes, with specific guidance for small businesses. The manual sets out effective and simple mechanisms to encourage participation and commitment from both staff and suppliers. It builds on the advice of the first edition, with a wide range of new case studies from different sectors, including retailers, hotels and hospitality, schools and educational institutions, airports and prisons, and plenty of office-based examples. A new chapter on environmental reporting considers international developments in environmental management, reporting and sustainable business, including the Global Reporting Initiative and the European Environmental Reporting Awards, with a link to DETR guidance. An extended chapter on energy and utilities provides an update on environmental legislation, government position and industry trends. An office waste chapter looks at examples of successful waste exchanges that save disposal costs to donors and purchase costs to recipients.

A clear, comprehensive treatment of the subject, Environmental Statistics with S-PLUS is an ideal resource for environmental scientists, engineers, regulators, and students, even those with only a limited knowledge of statistics. It provides insight into what to think about before you collect environmental data, how to collect it, and how to make sense of it after you have it. This book addresses the vast array of methods used today by scientists, researchers, and regulators.

Through its convenient showcase of information and numerous data sets posted on the Web, Environmental Statistics with S-PLUS shows you how to implement these methods using the statistical software package S-PLUS and the add-in modules EnvironmentalStats for S-PLUS, S+SpatialStats, and S-PLUS for ArcView. This survey of statistical methods, definitions, and concepts helps you collect and effectively analyze data for environmental pollution problems.

Concern over the environment and what people are doing to it has put important questions on the moral and political agenda. One that is often asked in the West is whether we do indeed face a terminal environmental catastrophe in the foreseeable future. Less dramatic but still serious threats to the attractiveness and sustaining powers of the world in which we live are also important considerations. This book provides an accessible introduction to the radical challenges that environmentalism poses to concepts that have become almost second nature in the modern world, including: the ideas of science and objectivity; the conventional placement of the human being within the environment; and the individualism of convential modern thought. Written in an accessible way for those without a background in philosophy, this text examines ways of thinking about ourselves, nature and our relationship with nature. It offers an introduction to the phenomenological perspective on environmental issues, and also to the questions of what natural beauty is for the threat to it to play a role in practical decision-making.

The idea of ecological modernisation originated in Western Europe in the 1980s, gaining attention around the world by the late 1990s. At the core of this social scientific and policy-oriented approach is the view that contemporary societies have the capability of dealing with their environmental crises. Experiences in some countries demonstrate that modern institutions can incorporate environmental interests into their daily routines. Elsewhere, economic and political interests dominate development trajectories and environmental deterioration continues, challenging the premises of ecological modernisation. This volume brings together research on ecological modernisation practices around the world. Studies on Western, Central, and Eastern Europe, the USA, and Southeast Asia examine the applicability of this approach to advanced industrial countries, transitional economies and developing countries respectively. Authors critically examine the premises of ecological modernisation theory, assess its value for understanding past and present environmental transformations, and outline paths for designing future sustainable development. Taken together, the studies in collected this volume offer significant refinements, extensions and critiques of ecological modernisation theory and suggest important directions for future research on social and policy dimensions of environmental change.

The movement toward creating more sustainable communities has been growing for decades, and in recent years has gained new prominence with the increasing visibility of planning approaches such as the New Urbanism. Yet there are few examples of successful and time-tested sustainable communities.Village Homes outside of Davis, California offers one such example. Built between 1975 and 1981 on 60 acres of land, it offers unique features including extensive common areas and green space; community gardens, orchards, and vineyards; narrow streets; pedestrian and bike paths; solar homes; and an innovative ecological drainage system. Authors Judy and Michael Corbett were intimately involved with the design, development, and building of Village Homes, and have resided there since 1977.In "Designing Sustainable Communities," they examine the history of the sustainable community movement and discuss how Village Homes fits into the context of that movement. They offer an inside look at the development of the project from start to finish, describing how the project came about, obstacles that needed to be overcome, design approaches they took, problems that were encountered and how those problems were solved, and changes that have occurred over the years. In addition, they compare Village Homes with other communities and developments across the country, and discuss the future prospects for the continued growth of the sustainable communities movement.The book offers detailed information on a holistic approach to designing and building successful communities. It represents an invaluable guide for professionals and students involved with planning, architecture, development, and landscape architecture, and for anyone interested increating more sustainable communities.

African American intellectual thought has long provided a touchstone for national politics and civil rights, but, as Kimberly Smith reveals, it also has much to say about our relationship to nature. In this first single-authored book to link African American and environmental studies, Smith uncovers a rich tradition stretching from the abolition movement through the Harlem Renaissance, demonstrating that black Americans have been far from indifferent to environmental concerns.

Beginning with environmental critiques of slave agriculture in the early nineteenth century and evolving through critical engagements with scientific racism, artistic primitivism, pragmatism, and twentieth-century urban reform, Smith highlights the continuity of twentieth-century black politics with earlier efforts by slaves and freedmen to possess the land. She examines the works of such canonical figures as Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Alain Locke, all of whom wrote forcefully about how slavery and racial oppression affected black Americans' relationship to the environment.

Smith's analysis focuses on the importance of freedom in humans' relationship with nature. According to black theorists, the denial of freedom can distort one's relationship to the natural world, impairing stewardship and alienating one from the land. Her pathbreaking study offers the first linkage of the early conservation movement to black history, the first detailed description of black agrarianism, and the first analysis of scientific racism as an environmental theory. It also offers a new way to conceptualize black politics by bringing into view its environmental dimension, as well as a normative environmental theory grounded in pragmatism and aimed at identifying the social conditions for environmental virtue.

Smith's work offers a new approach to established writers and thinkers and shows that they justly deserve a place in the canon of American environmental thought. African American Environmental Thought enriches our understanding of black politics and environmental history, and of environmental theory in general. Because slavery and racism have shaped the meaning of the American landscape, this body of thought offers us fresh conceptual resources by which we can make better sense of our world.

The Law and Politics of Sustainability explores efforts made to address pressing environmental concerns through legislation, conventions, directives, treaties, and protocols. Articles explain the mechanics of environmental law, the concepts that shape sustainable development, case studies and rulings that have set precedents, approaches to sustainable development taken by legal systems around the world, and more. Experts and scholars in the field raise provocative questions about the effectiveness of international law versus national law in protecting the environment, and about the effect of current laws on future generations. They analyze the successes and shortcomings of present legal instruments, corporate and public policies, social movements, and conceptual strategies, offering readers a preview of the steps necessary to develop laws and policies that will promote genuine sustainability.

The Business of Sustainability is a core resource for policy makers, members of the development community, entrepreneurs, and corporate executives, as well as business and economics students and their professors. It contains rich analysis of how sustainability is being factored into industries across the globe, with enlightening case studies of businesses serving as agents of change. Contributing authors provide a groundbreaking body of research-based knowledge. They explain that the concept of sustainability is being re-framed to be positive about business instead of being tied to the old notion of a trade-off between business and society (that is, if business wins, society and the environment must lose), and they explore how economic development can contribute to building our common future.

Natural Resources and Sustainability explores how human needs and desires, from sustenance and shelter to recreation and travel, have spurred the consumption of Earth's material resources. Scientists, ecologists, and other expert authors present the historical impact of commercial activities (in industries as varied as fisheries, agriculture, energy, and mineral extraction), discuss the global distribution and use of renewable and nonrenewable resources, and focus on innovative approaches for the future. Readers will learn why renewal doesn't necessarily put a resource beyond harm and why the no-free-lunch adage applies to all natural resources.

Climate Justice in India brings together a collective of academics, activists, and artists to paint a collage of action-oriented visions for a climate just India. This unique and agenda setting volume informs researchers and readers interested in topics of just transition, energy democracy, intersectionality of access to drinking water, agroecology and women's land rights, national and state climate plans, urban policy, caste justice, and environmental and climate social movements in India. It synthesizes the historical, social, economic, and political roots of climate vulnerability in India and articulates a research and policy agenda for collective democratic deliberations and action. This crossover volume will be of interest to academics, researchers, social activists, policymakers, politicians, and a general reader looking for a comprehensive introduction to the unprecedented challenge of building a praxis of justice in a climate-changed world. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

This book examines how the European environmental movement, as part of an emerging European civil society, has impinged on the problem definitions and solution strategies in the European politics of the environment. Examining core case studies in European environmental policy - biodiversity politics (Natura 2000), the politics of genetically modified organisms, Trans-European Transport Networks, and the European politics of climate change - this study, written at the crossroads of social movement, public sphere and political discourse theory, argues that a social movement's most important feature is its 'cognitive praxis', its ability to successfully challenge dominant conceptions of realty and to create new green public spheres. It examines whether 'ecological modernization' is able to solve the tension between economic growth and environmental protection, and to what extent European environmentalism has contributed to the emergence of a green 'normative power Europe'.

Challenges the notion of how early modern women may or may not have spoken for (or even with) nature. By focusing on various forms of 'dialogue, ' these essays shift our interest away from speaking and toward listening, to illuminate ways that early modern Englishwomen interacted with their natural surroundings

This book develops a fresh perspective on everyday forms of engagement, one that foregrounds the role of objects, technologies and settings in democracy. Examining a range of devices, from smart meters to eco-homes, the book sets out new concepts and methods for analyzing the relations between participation, innovation and the environment.

This open access book discusses the contribution of sociology and survey research to climate research. The authors address the questions of which behaviors are of climate relevance, who is engaging in these behaviors, in which contexts do these behaviors occur, and which individual perceptions and values are related to them. Utilizing survey research, the book focuses on the measurement of climate-relevant behaviors with population surveys and develops an instrument that allows a valid estimate of an individual's GHG emissions with a few core items. While the development of these instruments was based on surveys and qualitative interviews conducted in Austria, the instruments were subsequently tested in a set of 31 European countries, revealing the international relevance of such research. The book also concludes with a brief consideration of the effects of the COVID-19 crisis on environmental attitudes, situating the project globally.

This handbook highlights a range of ground breaking, radical and liberatory clinical and critical community psychology projects from around the world. The disciplines of critical community psychology and clinical psychology are currently experiencing radical innovations that in this book are characterised as moving from the individualising practice realm toward an altogether more contextualising orientation. Both fields are responding to an array of political, social and economic injustices and a global political context. Community and clinical psychologists have found themselves reorienting their practice to confront, resist and subvert the structures that are so damaging to the lives of the vulnerable people they work with. This text posits that these approaches refute and resist the psychologising that has strengthened oppressive structures. Such practices are starting to engage in the political character of power-knowledge relationships that demand a more 'action-oriented' and less 'clinical' psychology praxis and there is a growing interest in, and commitment to, social justice in the field of mental wellbeing. Using examples of scholar, activist and practitioner work from around the world, this collection explores and documents those practices where the traditional remits of community and clinical psychology have been subverted, altered, stretched, changed and reworked in order to reframe practice around human rights, creativity, political activism, social change, space and place, systemic violence, community transformation, resource allocation and radical practices of disruption and direct action.

Disputes over hazardous waste sites usually are resolved by giving greater weight to expert opinion over public "not-in-my-back-yard" reactions. Challenging the assumption that policy experts are better able to discern the general welfare, Gregory E. McAvoy here proposes that citizen opinion and democratic dissent occupy a vital, constructive place in environmental policymaking.

McAvoy explores the issues of citizen rationality, the tension between democracy and technocracy, and the link between public opinion and policy in the case of an unsuccessful attempt to site a hazardous waste facility in Minnesota. He shows how the site was defeated by citizens who had reasonable doubts over the need for the facility.

Offering a comprehensive look at the policymaking process, McAvoy examines the motivations of public officials, the resources they have for shaping opinion, the influence of interest groups, and the evolution of waste reduction programs in Minnesota and other states. Integrating archival material, interviews, and quantitative survey data, he argues that NIMBY movements can bring miscalculations to light and provide an essential check on policy experts' often partisan views.

This book will be of value to those who work or study in the fields of hazardous waste policy, facility siting, environmental policy, public policy, public administration, and political science.

Ecology is indispensable to understanding the biological world and addressing the environmental problems humanity faces. Its philosophy has never been more important. In this book, James Justus introduces readers to the philosophically rich issues ecology poses. Besides its crucial role in biological science generally, climate change, biodiversity loss, and other looming environmental challenges make ecology's role in understanding such threats and identifying solutions to them all the more critical. When ecology is applied and its insights marshalled to address these problems and guide policy formation, interesting philosophical issues emerge. Justus sets them out in detail, and explores the often ethically charged dimensions of applied ecological science, using accessible language and a wealth of scientifically-informed examples.

Clarence Glacken wrote one of the most important books on environmental issues published in the twentieth century. His magnum opus, Traces on the Rhodian Shore, first published in 1976, details the ways in which perceptions of the natural environment have profoundly influenced human enterprise over the centuries while, conversely, permitting humans to radically alter the Earth. Although Glacken did not publish a comparable book before his death in 1989, he did write a follow-up collection of essays-lost works now compiled at last in Genealogies of Environmental Thought. This new volume comprises all of Glacken's unpublished writings to follow Traces and covers a broad temporal and geographic canvas, spanning the globe from the mid-eighteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries. Each essay offers a brief intellectual biography of an important environmental thinker and addresses questions such as how many people the Earth can hold, what resources can sustain such populations, and where land for growth is located. This collection-carefully edited and annotated, and organized chronologically-will prove both a classic text and a springboard for further discussions on the history of environmental thought.

The question of how environmental awareness originated and developed has been subject to sharply contesting points of view. Recently the debate has been expressed epistemologically in constructivist versus materialist approaches. In this book, Mark Luccarelli pushes past unproductive mind/body debates by rooting the rise of environmental awareness in the political and geographical history of the US. Considering history in terms of the categorical development of space - social, territorial and conceptual - the book examines the forces that drove people to ignore their surroundings by distancing culture from place and by assiduously advancing the dissolution of social bonds. Thus beneath the question of the surround, and the key to its renewal today, is the quest to re-engage the common. The latter is still a part of the approach to space, its arrangement and disposition, and has a necessary environmental dimension.Concepts of urbanism, place identity, picturesque landscape and nature are part of a larger Western intellectual and cultural context but, by examining the imaging of cities and landscape, Luccarelli links particular American geographic settings - as well as the political ideals and practices of the republic - to the application and aesthetic reading of these ideas. The advocates of these various perspectives shared an aesthetic orientation as a means of redefining or recovering the common. The book looks at various American urban and regional contexts, as well as the work of artists, writers and public figures, including painter and engraver William Birch, Thomas Jefferson, engraver John Hill, Henry David Thoreau and Frederick Law Olmsted. Luccarelli embeds his environmental study in the works of these men and in the course of American history between the planting of the city of Philadelphia and the establishment of Olmsted's major urban parks.