This book takes a hemispheric approach to contemporary urban intervention, examining urban ecologies, communication technologies, and cultural practices in the twenty-first century. It argues that governmental and social regimes of control and forms of political resistance converge in speculation on disaster and that this convergence has formed a vision of urban environments in the Americas in which forms of play and imaginations of catastrophe intersect in the vertical field. Schifani explores a diverse range of resistant urban interventions, imagining the city as on the verge of or enmeshed in catastrophe. She also presents a model of ecocriticism that addresses aesthetic practices and forms of play in the urban environment. Tracing the historical roots of such tactics as well as mapping their hopes for the future will help the reader to locate the impacts of climate change not only on the physical space of the city, but also on the epistemological and aesthetic strategies that cities can help to engender. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of Urban Studies, Media Studies, American Studies, Global Studies, and the broad and interdisciplinary field of Environmental Humanities.

Poetics of the Earth is a work of environmental philosophy, based on a synthesis of eastern and western thought on natural and human history. It draws on recent biological research to show how the processes of evolution and history both function according to the same principles. Augustin Berque rejects the separation of nature and culture which he believes lies at the root of the environmental crisis. This book proposes a three stage process of "re-worlding" (moving away from the individualized self to become a part of the common world), "re-concretizing" (understanding the meaning and historical development of words and things) and "re-engaging" (reconsidering the relationship between history and subjectivity at every level of being) in order to bring western thought on nature and culture into sustainable harmony and alignment. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of environmental studies, environmental philosophy, Asian studies and the natural sciences.

Arguing for a renewed view of objects and nature, Ethical Responses to Nature's Call considers how it is possible to understand our ethical duties - in the form of ethical intuitionalism - to nature and the planet by listening to and releasing ourselves over to the call or address of nature. Blending several strands of philosophical thought, such as Graham Harman's Object-Oriented Ontology, W. D. Ross's prima fathics, Alphonso Lingis's phenomenological ethics traceable to The Imperative, and Michael Bonnett's ecophilosophy, this book offers a unique rejoinder to the problems and issues that continue to haunt humans' relationship to nature. The origins of such problems and issues largely remain obscured from view due to the oppressive influence of the "Cultural Framework" which gives form and structure to the ways we understand, discourse on, and comport ourselves in relation to the natural world. Through understanding this "Cultural Framework" we also come to know the responses we continue to offer in answer to nature's call and address, and are then in a position to analyze and assess those responses in terms of their potential ethical weight. Such a phenomenon is made possible through the descriptive-and-interpretive method of eco-phenomenology. This renewed vision of the human-and-nature provides direction for our interaction with and behavior toward nature in such a way that the ethical insight offers a diagnosis and provides a potentially compelling prescriptive for environmental ills.

More than thirty years after the collapse of the USSR, the critique of state socialism is still used to deny alternatives to capitalism, irrespective of global capitalist ecological and social devastation. There is seemingly nothing worthwhile salvaging from decades of state socialist experiences. As the climate crisis deepens, Engel-Di Mauro argues that we need to re-evaluate the environmental practices and policies of state socialism, especially as they had more environmentally beneficial than destructive effects. Rather than dismissing state socialism's heritage out of hand, we should reclaim it for contemporary eco-socialist ends. By means of a comparative and multiple-scaled approach, Engel-Di Mauro points to highly diverse and environmentally constructive state socialist experiences. Taking the reader from the USSR to China and Cuba, this is a fiery and contentious look at what worked, what didn't, and how we can move towards an eco-socialist future.

This book exposes the barriers to inclusive and effective public policy making, which are the current decision making paradigm and commonly held ideas that reduce public policy problems to scientific and technical ones. Through both environmental policy and other decision making examples, readers are shown the commonalities of all decision making. Solution-oriented practitioners and stakeholders will find this book filling a conceptual and methodological gap in existing policy literature and practice. The authors deftly guide readers from post-normal science, wicked problems, and uncertainty concepts to a conceptually-grounded, practical implementation of a new approach, the open solution approach. The Multi-criteria Integrated Resource Assessment (MIRA) is described as the first generation methodology that fulfills the expectations for the inclusive, transparent, and learning-based open solutions approach. MIRA is a holistic package of concepts, methods and analytical tools that is designed to assess Decision Uncertainty, the combined uncertainties that include data, problem formulation, expert judgments, and stakeholder opinions. Introduction of the Requisite Steps, the common steps found in all decision making, provides the yardstick for evaluating a variety of decision making processes, decision tools, and commonly found indices such as the Dow Jones Industrial Average or the Newsweek Green Ranking of corporations. The use of anecdotes, policy stories, and case examples makes this a very readable and practical book for citizens and experts. With this book, readers are prepared to critically evaluate these common indices for their personal use as well as challenge policy processes as a stakeholder. For policy practitioners, this guidebook will become a rubric to ensure an effective public policy making process and to critically evaluate decision support tools.

Climate and Crises: Magical Realism as Environmental Discourse makes a dual intervention in both world literature and ecocriticism by examining magical realism as an international style of writing that has long-standing links with environmental literature. The book argues that, in the era of climate change when humans are facing the prospect of species extinction, new ideas and new forms of expression are required to address what the novelist Amitav Gosh calls a "crisis of imagination." Magical realism enables writers to portray alternative intellectual paradigms, ontologies and epistemologies that typically contest the scientific rationalism derived from the European Enlightenment, and the exploitation of natural resources associated with both capitalism and imperialism. Climate and Crises explores the overlaps between magical realism and environmental literature, including their respective transgressive natures that dismantle binaries (such as human and non-human), a shared biocentric perspective that focuses on the inter-connectedness of all things in the universe, and, frequently, a critique of postcolonial legacies in formerly colonised territories. The book also challenges conventional conceptions of magical realism, arguing they are often influenced by a geographic bias in the construction of the orthodox global canon, and instead examines contemporary fiction from Asia (including China) and Australasia, two regions that have been largely neglected by scholarship of the narrative mode. As a result, the monograph modifies and expands our ideas of what magical realist fiction is.

This book addresses the intersections between the interdisciplinary realms of Ecocriticism and Indigenous and Native American Studies, and between academic theory and pragmatic eco-activism conducted by multiethnic and indigenous communities. It illuminates the multi-layered, polyvocal ways in which artistic expressions render ecological connections, drawing on scholars working in collaboration with Indigenous artists from all walks of life, including film, literature, performance, and other forms of multimedia to expand existing conversations. Both local and global in its focus, the volume includes essays from multiethnic and Indigenous communities across the world, visiting topics such as Navajo opera, Sami film production history, south Indian tribal documentary, Maori art installations, Native American and First Nations science-fiction literature and film, Amazonian poetry, and many others. Highlighting trans-Indigenous sensibilities that speak to worldwide crises of environmental politics and action against marginalization, the collection alerts readers to movements of community resilience and resistance, cosmological thinking about inter- and intra-generational multi-species relations, and understandings of indigenous aesthetics and material ecologies. It engages with emerging environmental concepts such as multispecies ethnography, cosmopolitics, and trans-indigeneity, as well as with new areas of ecocritical research such as material ecocriticism, biosemiotics, and media studies. In its breadth and scope, this book promises new directions for ecocritical thought and environmental humanities practice, providing thought-provoking insight into what it means to be human in a locally situated, globally networked, and cosmologically complex world.

This volume of the "Advances in Ecopolitics" examines the impact of the economic crisis on peripheral European states such as Ireland and Greece. Following an introductory chapter, it is divided into two geographically-focused sections, the first on Ireland, the second section on Greece. Specifically the book focuses on governance, sustainable politics and environmental policies, within the context of accelerated growth and the subsequent economic downturn. It also examines issues of governance and politics within these peripheral states, in addition to the development of policies within an EU/EC context. The book concludes with a discussion of the future for sustainable politics in the peripheral states of Europe, in the aftermath of the global downturn. "Advances in Ecopolitics" is essential reading for all academics, researchers and practitioners who are involved in the areas of environmentalism, providing insight and extending understanding of these issues.

The turn of the 1960s-70s, characterized by the rapid acceleration of globalization, prompted a radical transformation in the perception of urban and natural environments. The urban revolution and related prospect of the total urbanisation of the planet, in concert with rapid population growth and resource exploitation, instigated a surge in environmental awareness and activism. One implication of this moment is a growing recognition of the integration and interconnection of natural and urban entities. The present collection is an interdisciplinary inquiry into the changing modes of representation of nature in the city beginning from the turn of the 1960s/70s. Bringing together a number of different disciplinary approaches, including architectural studies and aesthetics, heritage studies and economics, environmental science and communication, the collection reflects upon the changing perception of socio-natures in the context of increasing urban expansion and global interconnectedness as they are/were manifest in specific representations. Using cases studies from around the globe, the collection offers a historical and theoretical understanding of a paradigmatic shift whose material and symbolic legacies are still accompanying us in the early 21st century.

Alesia Montgomery's Greening the Black Urban Regime: The Culture and Commerce of Sustainability in Detroit tells the story of the struggle to shape green redevelopment in Detroit. Cultural workers, envisioning a green city crafted by direct democracy, had begun to draw idealistic young newcomers to Detroit's street art and gardens. Then a billionaire developer and private foundations hired international consultants to redesign downtown and to devise a city plan. Using the justice-speak of cultural workers, these consultants did innovative outreach, but they did not enable democratic deliberation. The Detroit Future City plan won awards, and the new green venues in the gentrified downtown have gotten good press. However, low-income black Detroiters have little ability to shape "greening" as uneven development unfolds and poverty persists. Based on years of fieldwork, Montgomery takes us into the city council chambers, nonprofit offices, gardens, churches, cafes, street parties, and public protests where the future of Detroit was imagined, debated, and dictated. She begins by using statistical data and oral histories to trace the impacts of capital flight, and then she draws on interviews and observations to show how these impacts influence city planning. Hostility between blacks and whites shape the main narrative, yet indigenous, Asian, Arab, and Latinx peoples in Detroit add to the conflict. Montgomery compares Detroit to other historical black urban regimes (HBURs)-U.S. cities that elected their first black mayors soon after the 1960s civil rights movement. Critiques of ecological urbanism in HBURs typically focus on gentrification. In contrast, Montgomery identifies the danger as minoritization: the imposition of "beneficent" governance across gentrified and non-gentrified neighborhoods that treats the black urban poor as children of nature who lack the (mental, material) capacities to decide their future. Scholars and students in the social sciences, as well as general readers with social and environmental justice concerns, will find great value in this research.

In spite of decades of research on toxicants, along with the growing role of scientific expertise in public policy and the unprecedented rise in the number of national and international institutions dealing with environmental health issues, problems surrounding contaminants and their effects on health have never appeared so important, sometimes to the point of appearing insurmountable. This calls for a reconsideration of the roles of scientific knowledge and expertise in the definition and management of toxic issues, which this book seeks to do. It looks at complex historical, social, and political dynamics, made up of public controversies, environmental and health crises, economic interests, and political responses, and demonstrates how and to what extent scientific knowledge about toxicants has been caught between scientific, economic, and political imperatives.

The main purpose of this volume is to provide a new perception of multivariate environmental statistics using some examples that are of concern and interest today. The papers are presented by outstanding research workers. They discuss the current state of the art in different areas of multivariate environmental statistics and provide new problems for future research and instruction. A perspective is to cover a broad spectrum of methods and issues involving multivariate observations and processes, and not just classical multivariate analysis. The book will be valuable to current statistical theory and practice in this area, and will be used by researchers, teachers, and students alike.

This edited volume draws together educators and scholars to engage with the difficulties and benefits of teaching place-based education in a distinctive culture-laden area in North America: the United States South. Despite problematic past visions of cultural homogeneity, the South has always been a culturally diverse region with many historical layers of inhabitation and migration, each with their own set of religious and secular relationships to the land. Through site-specific narratives, this volume offers a blueprint for new approaches to place-based pedagogy, with an emphasis on the intersection between religion and the environment. By offering broadly applicable examples of pedagogical methods and practices, this book confronts the need to develop more sustainable local communities to address globally significant challenges.

The lives and futures of children and animals are linked to environmental challenges associated with the Anthropocene and the acceleration of human-caused extinctions. This book sparks a fascinating interdisciplinary conversation about child-animal relations, calling for a radical shift in how we understand our relationship with other animals and our place in the world. It addresses issues of interspecies and intergenerational environmental justice through examining the entanglement of children's and animal's lives and common worlds. It explores everyday encounters and unfolding relations between children and urban wildlife. Inspired by feminist environmental philosophies and indigenous cosmologies, the book poses a new relational ethics based upon the small achievements of child-animal interactions. It also provides an analysis of animal narratives in children's popular culture. It traces the geo-historical trajectories and convergences of these narratives and of the lives of children and animals in settler-colonised lands. This innovative book brings together the fields of more-than-human geography, childhood studies, multispecies studies, and the environmental humanities. It will be of interest to students and scholars who are reconsidering the ethics of child-animal relations from a fresh perspective.

'A dazzling illustrated edition of a 'hugely useful and fascinating resume of rewilding' Isabella Tree, author of Wilding 'Compelling ... succinct and objective' Financial Times Rewilding reveals the ways in which ecologists are restoring the lost interactions between animals, plants, and natural disturbances that are the essence of thriving ecosystems. It looks into a past in which industrialization and globalization have downgraded our grasslands; at present projects restoring plants and animals to their natural, untamed state; and into the future, with ten predictions for a rewilded planet. This illustrated edition combines beautiful natural history images with infographic flow-charts depicting the 'trophic cascades' of biodiverse ecosystems, to explore a brave new world repopulated with wild horses and cattle, beavers, rhinos, and wolves. 'A masterly job, explaining the science behind rewilding in an accessible, honest and compelling way. It deserves to be widely read and become a book of great influence.' Isabella Tree, author of Wilding.

This book examines the ways in which decolonial theory has gained traction and influenced knowledge production, praxis and epistemic justice in various contemporary iterations of community psychology across the globe. With a notable Southern focus (although not exclusively so), the volume critically interrogates the biases in Western modernist thought in relation to community psychology, and to illuminate and consolidate current epistemic alternatives that contribute to the possibilities of emancipatory futures within community psychology. To this end, the volume includes contributions from community psychology theory and praxis across the globe that speak to standpoint approaches (e.g. critical race studies, queer theory, indigenous epistemologies) in which the experiences of the majority of the global population are more accurately reflected, address key social issues such as the on-going racialization of the globe, gender, class, poverty, xenophobia, sexuality, violence, diasporas, migrancy, environmental degradation, and transnationalism/globalisation, and embrace forms of knowledge production that involve the co-construction of new knowledges across the traditional binary of knowledge producers and consumers. This book is an engaging resource for scholars, researchers, practitioners, activists and advanced postgraduate students who are currently working within community psychology and cognate sub-disciplines within psychology more broadly. A secondary readership is those working in development studies, political science, community development and broader cognate disciplines within the social sciences, arts, and humanities.

Dust storms. Flooding. The fear of nuclear fallout. While literary critics associate authors of the 1930s and '40s with leftist political and economic thought, they often ignore concern in the period's literary and cultural works with major environmental crises. To fill this gap in scholarship, author Matthew M. Lambert argues that depression-era authors contributed to the development of modern environmentalist thought in a variety of ways. Writers of the time provided a better understanding of the devastating effects that humans can have on the environment. They also depicted the ecological and cultural value of nonhuman nature, including animal ""predators"" and ""pests."" Finally, they laid the groundwork for ""environmental justice"" by focusing on the social effects of environmental exploitation. To show the reach of environmentalist thought during the period, the first three chapters of The Green Depression: American Ecoliterature in the 1930s and 1940s focus on different geographical landscapes, including the wild, rural, and urban. The fourth and final chapter shifts to debates over the social and environmental effects of technology during the period. In identifying modern environmental ideas and concerns in American literary and cultural works of the 1930s and '40s, The Green Depression highlights the importance of depression-era literature in understanding the development of environmentalist thought over the twentieth century. This book also builds upon a growing body of scholarship in ecocriticism that describes the unique contributions African American and other nonwhite authors have made to the environmental justice movement and to our understanding of the natural world.

As climate change has increasingly become the main focus of environmentalist activism since the late 1990s, the global economic drivers of CO2 emissions are now a major concern for radical greens. In turn, the emphasis on connected crises in both natural and social systems has attracted more activists to the Climate Justice movement and created a common cause between activists from the Global South and North. In the absence of a pervasive narrative of transnational or socialist economic planning to prevent catastrophic climate change, these activists have been eager to engage with advanced knowledge and ideas on political and economic structures that diminish risks and allow for new climate agency. This book breaks new ground by investigating what kind of economy the Climate Justice movement is calling for us to build and how the struggle for economic change has unfolded so far. Examining ecological debt, just transition, indigenous ecologies, social ecology, community economies and divestment among other topics, the authors provide a critical assessment and a common ground for future debate on economic innovation via social mobilization. Taking a transdisciplinary approach that synthesizes political economy, history, theory and ethnography, this volume will be of great interest to students and scholars of climate justice, environmental politics and policy, environmental economics and sustainable development.

This book compiles research from leading experts in the social, behavioral, and cultural dimensions of sustainability, as well as local and global understandings of the concept, and on lived practices around the world. It contains studies focusing on ways of living, acting, and thinking which claim to favor the local and global ecological systems of which we are a part, and on which we depend for survival. The concept of sustainability as a product of concern about global environmental degradation, rising social inequalities, and dispossession is presented as a key concept. The contributors explore the opportunities to engage with questions of sustainability and to redefine the concept of sustainability in anthropological terms.

Environments, landscapes, and ecological systems are often seen as fundamental by archaeologists, but how they relate to society is understood in very different ways. The chapters in this book take environment, culture, and technology together. All have been the focus of much attention; often one or other has been seen as the starting point for analysis, but this volume argues that it is the study of the inter-relationships between these three factors that offers a way forward. The contributions to this book pick up different strands within the tangled web of intersections between environment, technology, and society, providing a series of case studies which explore facets of this common theme in different settings and circumstances and from different perspectives. As well as addressing themes of theoretical and methodological interest, these case studies draw on primary research dealing with time periods from the late Pleistocene glacial maximum to the very recent past, and involve societies of very different types. Running through all the contributions, however, is a concern with the archaeological record and the ways in which scales of observation and availability of evidence affect the development of questions and explanations. The diversity of the chapters in this volume demonstrates the inherent weakness in any attempt to prioritise environment, technology, or society. These three factors are all embedded in any human activity, as change in one will result in change in the others: social and technical changes alter relations with the environment-and indeed the environment itself-and as environmental change drives changes in society and technology. As this book shows, it is possible to consider the relationship between the three factors from different perspectives, but any attempt to consider one or even two in isolation will mean that valuable insights will be missed.

This book focuses on lifelong learning for sustainable development, an aspect that has been rarely explored in great detail. It also discusses methodological approaches and experiences deriving from case studies and projects, which demonstrate how lifelong learning for sustainable development can be implemented in practice. The book provides respecting research institutions, universities, NGOs, and enterprises with an opportunity to display and present their work in this field. It fosters the exchange of information, ideas and experiences acquired in the context of concerning initiatives, especially with regard to successful projects and best practices.

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the environment and the future of development continue to be issues of crucial importance. Most explanations of environmental crisis emphasize the role of population growth, thus focusing their attention on the poor. By comparison, Peet and Watts' innovative book elaborates a political-economic explanation drawing from the most recent advances in social theory. This new edition has been extensively revised to reflect recent changes in debates over the real definitions of 'development' and 'environment', and contains nine completely new chapters.

Large parts of our world are filled with plants, and human life depends on, interacts with, affects and is affected by plant life in various ways. Yet plants have not received nearly as much attention from philosophers and ethicists as they deserve. In environmental philosophy, plants are often swiftly subsumed under the categories of "all living things" and rarely considered thematically. There is a need for developing a more sophisticated theoretical understanding of plants and their practical role in human experience. Plant Ethics: Concepts and Applications aims at opening a philosophical discussion that may begin to fill that gap. The book investigates issues in plants ontology, ethics and the role of plants and their cultivation in various fields of application. It explores and develops important concepts to shape and frame plants-related philosophical questions accurately, including new ideas of how to address moral questions when confronted with plants in concrete scenarios. This edited volume brings together for the first time, and in an interdisciplinary spirit, contemporary approaches to plant ethics by international scholars of established reputation. It will be of great interest to students and scholars of Philosophy and Ethics.

This book addresses hegemonic ruling class masculinity and emphasized femininity within renewables organisational governance, and critiques Anglo-Celtic male privilege, as a barrier to women's leadership participation. Primarily using the Australian socio-political context, the author considers the patriarchal control of organisations and renewables governance, and argues that women-led emphasized femininity-resistance strategies can challenge the hegemonic status of ruling elites to create a leadership that is less power oriented, more collaborative and open to change. Utilising detailed interviews with Australian women environmentalists, together with feminist, sociological and social movement theory, whilst considering the historic context of Red Vienna and contemporary political challenges (Brexit, Monarchism etc.), it puts forward an innovative policy framework for an Australian Bill of Rights Act and republican constitutional change. Written for academics, activists and policymakers alike, this book offers a unique insight into women's inequity within patriarchal institutionalist governance. It will be engaging and inspiring reading for feminist and environmentalist activists and practitioners, in addition to professional associations focussing on gender, justice and environmental change. Academics and postgraduates in Gender Studies, Ecofeminism, Sociology and Organisational Studies will also find the book of key interest in its interdisciplinary discussions of Sustainable Scientific-Technological Development Initiatives (SSTDI) and feminism in an Australian political context.