"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 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.

In 1967, Lynn White, Jr.'s seminal article The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis was published, essentially establishing the academic study of religion and nature. White argues that religions-particularly Western Christianity-are a major cause of worldwide ecological crises. He then asserts that if we are to halt, let alone revert, anthropogenic damages to the environment, we need to radically transform religious cosmologies. White's hugely influential thesis has been cited thousands of times in a variety of disciplines, including but not limited to religious studies, environmental ethics, history, ecological science, philosophy, psychology, and anthropology. In practical terms, the ecological crisis to which White was responding has only worsened in the decades since the article was published. This collection of original essays by leading scholars in a variety of interdisciplinary settings, including religion and nature, environmental ethics, animal studies, ecofeminism, restoration ecology, and ecotheology, considers the impact of White's arguments, offering constructive criticism as well as reflections on the ongoing, ever-changing scholarly debate about the way religion and culture contribute to both environmental crises and to their possible solutions. Religion and Ecological Crisis addresses a wide range of topics related to White's thesis, including its significance for environmental ethics and philosophy, the response from conservative Christians and evangelicals, its importance for Asian religious traditions, ecofeminist interpretations of the article, and which perspectives might have, ultimately, been left out of his analysis. This book is a timely reflection on the legacy and continuing challenge of White's influential article.

Ecocriticism has steadily gained footing within the larger arena of early modern scholarship, and with the publication of well over a dozen monographs, essay collections, and special journal issues, literary studies looks increasingly 'green'; yet the field lacks a straightforward, easy-to-use guide to do with reading and teaching early modern texts ecocritically. Accessible yet comprehensive, the cutting-edge collection Ecological Approaches to Early Modern English Texts fills this gap. Organized around the notion of contact zones (or points of intersection, that have often been constructed asymmetrically-especially with regard to the human-nonhuman dichotomy), the volume reassesses current trends in ecocriticism and the Renaissance; introduces analyses of neglected texts and authors; brings ecocriticism into conversation with cognate fields and approaches (e.g., queer theory, feminism, post-coloniality, food studies); and offers a significant section on pedagogy, ecocriticism and early modern literature. Engaging points of tension and central interest in the field, the collection is largely situated in the 'and/or' that resides between presentism-historicism, materiality-literary, somatic-semiotic, nature-culture, and, most importantly, human-nonhuman. Ecological Approaches to Early Modern English Texts balances coverage and methodology; its primary goal is to provide useful, yet nuanced discussions of ecological approaches to reading and teaching a range of representative early modern texts. As a whole, the volume includes a diverse selection of chapters that engage the complex issues that arise when reading and teaching early modern texts from a green perspective.

Understanding how rhetoric, and environmental rhetoric in particular, informs and is informed by local and global ecologies contributes to our conversations about sustainability and resilience - the preservation and conservation of the earth and the future of human society. This book explores some of the complex relationships, collaborations, compromises, and contradictions between human endeavor and situated discourses, identities and landscapes, social justice and natural resources, movement and geographies, unpacking and grappling with the complexities of rhetoric of presence. Making a significant contribution to exploring the complex discursive constructions of environmental rhetorics and place-based rhetorics, this collection considers discourses, actions, and adaptations concerning environmental regulations and development, sustainability, exploitation, and conservation of energy resources. Essays visit arguments on cultural values, social justice, environmental advocacy, and identity as political constructions of rhetorical place and space. Rural and urban case studies contribute to discussions of the ethics and identities of environment, and the rhetorics of environmental cartography and glocalization. Contributors represent a range of specialization across a variety of scholarly research in such fields as communication studies, rhetorical theory, social/cultural geography, technical/professional communication, cartography, anthropology, linguistics, comparative literature/ecocriticism, literacy studies, digital rhetoric/media studies, and discourse analysis. Thus, this book goes beyond the assumption that rhetorics are situated, and challenges us to consider not only how and why they are situated, but what we mean when we theorize notions of situated, place-based rhetorics.

Contributions to Law, Philosophy and Ecology: Exploring Re-Embodiments is a preliminary contribution to the establishment of re-embodiments as a theoretical strand within legal and ecological theory, and philosophy. Re-embodiments are all those contemporary practices and processes that exceed the epistemic horizon of modernity. As such, they offer a plurality of alternative modes of theory and practice that seek to counteract the ecocidal tendencies of the Anthropocene. The collection comprises eleven contributions approaching re-embodiments from a multiplicity of fields, including legal theory, eco-philosophy, eco-feminism and anthropology. The contributions are organized into three parts: 'Beyond Modernity', 'The Sacred Dimension' and 'The Legal Dimension'. The collection is opened by a comprehensive introduction that situates re-embodiments in theoretical context. Whilst closely bound with embodiment and new materialist theory, this book contributes a unique voice that echoes diverse political processes contemporaneous to our times. Written in an elegant and accessible language, the book will appeal to undergraduates, postgraduates and established scholars alike seeking to understand and take re-embodiments further, both politically and theoretically.

Like most of us, Damon Gameau has spent most of his adult years overwhelmed into inaction by the problem of climate change and its devastating effects on the planet. But when Damon became a father, he decided to do what he does best, and tell a story. The story became an imagining of what the world could look like in 2040, if we all decided to start doing things differently, right now. The result is the era-defining documentary 2040--a meticulously researched plea for the adoption of community-building, energy-generating, connection-forging, forest-renewing, ocean-replenishing measures that science tells us will reset our planet's health, drive our economies and improve lives across the globe. This book shows us how we can stitch this magnificent vision into everyday life by engaging in activities such as cooking, shopping, gardening, sharing, working and teaching our kids. It shows us that climate change is a practical problem that can be tackled by each of us, one small step at a time, and that we can make a genuine difference, if we know what to do. Brimming with practical wisdom and even 50 delicious recipes, the book empowers you to become the change you want to see in the world. Includes conversion chart.

This book moves beyond seeing the commons in the past tense, an entity passed over from the public into the private, to reimagine the commons as a process, a contest of force, a reconstitution, and a site of convening practices. It highlights new spaces of gathering opening up, such as the digital commons, and new practices of being in common, such as community economies and solidarity networks. The commons is seen as a contested domain of the collective and as a changing way of being in common, with the balance poised in the tensile play between political economy and social innovation. The book focuses on the possibility of recovering a future in which more can be held by the many, focusing on three concepts: nation and nature as a commons, publics and rights, and bodies, concerning the management of lives and livelihoods. Across these three passage points, the book finds evidence of a commons under attack but also defended in fragile though promising ways. With contributions from leading scholars, this thought provoking book will be of great interest to students and scholars in geography, environmental studies, politics, anthropology, and cultural studies.

As society has become increasingly aware of environmental issues, the challenge of structuring public participation opportunities that strengthen democracy, while promoting more sustainable communities has become crucial for many natural resource agencies, industries, interest groups and publics. The processes of negotiating between the often disparate values held by these diverse groups, and formulating and implementing policies that enable people to fulfil goals associated with these values, can strengthen communities as well as tear them apart. This book provides a critical examination of the role communication plays in social transition, through both construction and destruction of community. The authors examine the processes and practices put in play when people who may or may not have previously seen themselves as interconnected, communicate with each other, often in situations where they are competing for the same resources. Drawing upon a diverse selection of case-studies on the American, Asian and European continents, the chapters chart a range of approaches to environmental communication, including symbolic construction, modes of organising and agonistic politics of communication. This volume will be of great interest to researchers, teachers, and practitioners of environmental communication, environmental conflict, community development and natural resource management.

In recent decades, environmental issues have increasingly been incorporated into liberal democratic thought and political practice. Environmentalism and ecologism have become fashionable, even respectable schools of political thought. This apparently successful integration of environmental movements, issues and ideas in mainstream politics raises the question of whether there is a future for what once was a counter-movement and counter-ideology. Liberal Democracy and Environmentalism provides a reflective assessment of recent developments, social relevance and future of environmental political theory, concluding that although the alleged pacification of environmentalism is more than skin deep, it is not yet quite deep enough. This book will appeal to students and researchers of social science and philosophers with an interest in environmental issues.

When first published, Capitalism as if the World Matters, by one of the leading 'eco-warriors' of our time, shocked a generation of both environmentalists and business people. Jonathon Porritt brushed aside their artificial battle lines with a powerful argument that the only way to save the world from environmental catastrophe is to embrace a new type of capitalism, and to do it quickly. In this substantially revised and updated edition, Porritt extends his powerful and controversial argument by providing fresh evidence and suggesting new actions. New content includes in-depth coverage of the USA, with case studies examining the role of huge American corporations such as Wal-Mart and General Electric, plus a close look at China and the global impact this economic giant may have in the twenty-first century. This is a must-read for everyone who has a stake in the future of the world, from business executives to environmental activists, from community leaders to the politicians with their hands on the levers of power. Published with Forum for the Future

The concept of naturalness has largely disappeared from the academic discourse in general but also the particular field of environmental studies. This book is about naturalness in general - about why the idea of naturalness has been abandoned in modern academic discourse, why it is important to explicitly re-establish some meaning for the concept and what that meaning ought to be. Arguing that naturalness can and should be understood in light of a dispositional ontology, the book offers a point of view where the gap between instrumental and ethical perspectives can be bridged. Reaching a new foundation for the concept of 'naturalness' and its viability will help raise and inform further discussions within environmental philosophy and issues occurring in the crossroads between science, technology and society. This topical book will be of great interest to researchers and students in Environmental Studies, Environmental Philosophy, Science and Technology Studies, Conservation Studies as well as all those generally engaged in debates about the place of 'man in nature'.

The concept of 'harmonization' has become very popular in China, with the Chinese government increasingly applying the term 'harmonious society' to internal affairs and the term 'harmonious world' to international relationships. Harmonization as both an end and a means of China's development is deeply rooted in China's cultural tradition, which emphasizes moderation, balance and harmony between human beings and nature, between different social groups, and between the Chinese and other nationalities. This book examines the experience of enacting the concept of harmonization in China in recent years. It explores this in terms of developments within Chinese society, economic developments and changes in business practices, environmental challenges and coping strategies, and changing patterns of international relations. Throughout, it discusses the gaps between rhetoric and reality, policy and practice.

Why is ecofeminism still needed to address the environmental emergencies and challenges of our times? Ecofeminism has a chequered history in terms of its popularity and its perceived value in conceptualizing the relationship between gender and nature as well as feeding forms of activism that aim to confront the environmental challenges of the moment. This book provides a much-needed comprehensive overview of the relevance and value of using eco-feminist theories. It gives a broad coverage of traditional and emerging eco-feminist theories and explores, across a range of chapters, their various contributions and uniquely spans various strands of ecofeminist thinking. The origins of influential eco-feminist theories are discussed including key themes and some of its leading figures (contributors include Erika Cudworth, Greta Gaard, Trish Glazebrook and Niamh Moore), and outlines its influence on how scholars might come to a more generative understanding of the natural environment. The book examines eco-feminism's potential contribution for advancing current discussions and research on the relationships between the humans and more than humans that share our world. This timely volume makes a distinctive scholarly contribution and is a valuable resources for students and academics in the fields of environmentalism, political ecology, sustainability and nature resource management.

The Politics and Economics of Park Management examines national protected area systems, in both developed and developing countries, that have made a transformation from 'fortress parks' to a sustainable use model. The contributors park management, academics, and members of nongovenmental organizations contend that successful institutional change in protected area systems involves not only the adoption of appropriate legal and regulatory regimes covering sustainable use, but also the development of an informal culture of sustainable resource use among all of a park's stakeholders. While this latter requirement is often difficult to achieve, the contributors show how these informal attitudes may evolve over time, both within the management structure of a park agency and the community of resource users. The case studies cited represent examples of successful institutional change, demonstrating both financial and conservation benefits to protected area agencies, that should serve as model for managing parks today.

Must freedom be sacrificed to achieve ecological sustainability - or vice versa? Can we be genuinely free and live in sustainable societies? This book argues that we can, if we recognise and celebrate our ecological embeddedness, rather than seeking to transcend it. But this does not mean freedom can simply be redefined to fit within ecological limits. Addressing current unsustainability will involve significant restrictions, and hence will require political justification, not just scientific evidence. Drawing on material from perfectionist liberalism, capabilities approaches, human rights, relational ethics and virtue theory, Michael Hannis explores the relationship between freedom and sustainability, considering how each contributes to human flourishing. He argues that a substantive and ecologically literate conception of human flourishing can underpin both capability-based environmental rights and a eudaimonist ecological virtue ethics. With such a foundation in place, public authorities can act both to facilitate ecological virtue, and to remove structural incentives to ecological vice. Freedom and Environment is a lucid addition to existing literature in environmental politics and virtue ethics, and will be an excellent resource to those studying debates about freedom with debates about ecological sustainability.

This book is the first truly interdisciplinary intervention into the burgeoning field of Irish ecological criticism. Providing original and nuanced readings of Irish cultural texts and personalities in terms of contemporary ecological criticism, Flannery's readings of Irish literary fiction, poetry, travel writing, non-fiction, and essay writing are ground-breaking in their depth and scope. Explorations of figures and texts from Irish cultural and political history, including John McGahern, Derek Mahon, Roger Casement, and Tim Robinson, among many others, enable and invigorate the discipline of Irish cultural studies, and international ecocriticism on the whole. This book addresses the need to impress the urgency of lateral ecological awareness and responsibility among Irish cultural and political commentators; to highlight continuities and disparities between Irish ecological thought, writing, and praxis, and those of differential international writers, critics, and activists; and to establish both the singularity and contiguity of Irish ecological criticism to the wider international field of ecological criticism. With the introduction of concepts such as ecocosmopolitanism, "deep" history, ethics of proximity, Gaia Theory, urban ecology, and postcolonial environmentalism to Irish cultural studies, it takes Irish cultural studies in bracing new directions. Flannery furnishes working examples of the necessary interdisciplinarity of ecological criticism, and impresses the relevance of the Irish context to the broader debates within international ecological criticism. Crucially, the volume imports ecological critical paradigms into the field of Irish studies, and demonstrates the value of such conceptual dialogue for the future of Irish cultural and political criticism. This pioneering intervention exhibits the complexity of different Irish cultural and historical responses to ecological exploitation, degradation, and social justice.

Critically reflecting on the interplays between food and care, this multidisciplinary volume asks 'why do individuals, institutions and agencies care about what other people eat?' It explores how acts of caring about food and eating shape and intervene in individual bodies as well as being enacted in and through those bodies. In so doing, the volume extends current critical debates regarding food and care as political mechanisms through which social hierarchies are constructed and both self and 'other' (re)produced. Addressing the ways in which eating and caring interact on multiple scales and sites - from public health and clinical settings to the market, the home and online communities - Careful Eating asks what 'eating' and 'caring' are, what relationships they create and rupture, and how their interplay is experienced in myriad spaces of everyday life. Taking account of this two-directional flow of engagement between eating and caring, the chapters are organized into three central theoretical dimensions: how eating practices mobilize discourses and forms of care; how discourses and practices of care (look to) shape particular forms of eating and food preferences; and how it is often in the bodies of individual consumers that eating and care encounter one another.

Forestry and Forest Policy are key issues for the protection of China's natural environment and for its continued economic development. Originally published in 2003, the contributors to this title review the successes of China's forest policies and the growth of its forests over the past quarter-century and examine the challenges facing China's forests and rural environment. China's Forests: Global Lessons from Market Reforms is a valuable resource for students interested in environmental studies, international forest policy, and the modern development of China.

Like never before in history, humans are becoming increasingly interconnected with one another and with the other inhabitants and habitats of Earth. There are numerous signs of planetary interrelations, from social media and international trade to genetic engineering and global climate change. The scientific study of interrelations between organisms and environments, Ecology, is uniquely capable of addressing the complex challenges that characterize our era of planetary coexistence. Whole Earth Thinking and Planetary Coexistence focuses on newly emerging approaches to ecology that cross the disciplinary boundaries of sciences and humanities with the aim of responding to the challenges facing the current era of planetary interconnectedness. It introduces concepts that draw out a creative contrast between religious and secular approaches to the integration of sciences and humanities, with religious approaches represented by the "geologian" Thomas Berry and the whole Earth thinking of Stephanie Kaza and Gary Snyder, and the more secular approaches represented by the "geophilosophy" of poststructuralist theorists Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. This book will introduce concepts engaging with the ecological challenges of planetary coexistence to students and professionals in fields of environmental studies, philosophy and religious studies.

Ecocriticism has steadily gained footing within the larger arena of early modern scholarship, and with the publication of well over a dozen monographs, essay collections, and special journal issues, literary studies looks increasingly 'green'; yet the field lacks a straightforward, easy-to-use guide to do with reading and teaching early modern texts ecocritically. Accessible yet comprehensive, the cutting-edge collection Ecological Approaches to Early Modern English Texts fills this gap. Organized around the notion of contact zones (or points of intersection, that have often been constructed asymmetrically-especially with regard to the human-nonhuman dichotomy), the volume reassesses current trends in ecocriticism and the Renaissance; introduces analyses of neglected texts and authors; brings ecocriticism into conversation with cognate fields and approaches (e.g., queer theory, feminism, post-coloniality, food studies); and offers a significant section on pedagogy, ecocriticism and early modern literature. Engaging points of tension and central interest in the field, the collection is largely situated in the 'and/or' that resides between presentism-historicism, materiality-literary, somatic-semiotic, nature-culture, and, most importantly, human-nonhuman. Ecological Approaches to Early Modern English Texts balances coverage and methodology; its primary goal is to provide useful, yet nuanced discussions of ecological approaches to reading and teaching a range of representative early modern texts. As a whole, the volume includes a diverse selection of chapters that engage the complex issues that arise when reading and teaching early modern texts from a green perspective.

In this book, Toby Svoboda develops and defends a Kantian environmental virtue ethic, challenging the widely-held view that Kant's moral philosophy has little to offer environmental ethics. On the contrary, Svoboda contends that on Kantian grounds, there is good moral reason to care about non-human organisms in their own right and to value their flourishing independently of human interests, since doing so is constitutive of certain (environmental) virtues. Svoboda argues that Kant's account of indirect duties regarding nature can ground a compelling environmental ethic: the Kantian duty to develop morally virtuous dispositions strictly proscribes unnecessarily harming organisms, and it also gives us moral reason to act in ways that benefit such organisms. Svoboda's account engages the recent literature on environmental virtue (including Rosalind Hursthouse, Philip Cafaro, Ronald Sandler, Thomas Hill, and Louke van Wensveen) and provides an original argument for an environmental ethic firmly rooted in Kant's moral philosophy.

In this groundbreaking book, Renee Lertzman applies psychoanalytic theory and psychosocial research to the issue of public engagement and public apathy in response to chronic ecological threats. By highlighting unconscious and affective dimensions of contemporary ecological issues, Lertzman deconstructs the idea that there is a gap between what people care about and what is actually carried out in policy and personal practice. In doing so, she presents an innovative way to think about and design engagement practices and policy interventions. Based on key qualitative fieldwork and in-depth interviews conducted in Green Bay, Wisconsin, each chapter provides a psychosocial, psychoanalytic perspective on subjectivity, affect and identity, and considers what this means for understanding behaviour in relation to environmental crises and climate change. The book argues for a theory of environmental melancholia that accounts for the ways in which people experience profound loss and disruption caused by environmental issues, and yet may have trouble expressing or making sense of such experiences. Environmental Melancholia offers a fresh perspective to the field of environmental psychology that until now has been largely dominated by research in cognitive, behavioural and social psychology. It will appeal to academics, researchers and postgraduate students in the fields of psychoanalysis, psychosocial studies and sustainability, as well as policy makers and educators internationally.

Looking to live a life that goes beyond 'sustainability'? Welcome to the circular economy. But what it is exactly? Taking inspiration from nature, the circular economy is a series of interconnecting systems that make everyday life more sustainable. Plus, we can all be part of it: you, your second cousin, that guy that lives down the street and the person you follow on Instagram on the other side of the world. In this handy book, Claire Potter helps explain what the circular economy is, how we as individuals fit into a bigger landscape, how we can demand more of brands, corporations and governments - and how all the decisions we make really do make a difference.

This monograph length report, first published in 1970, originated from a program of research at Resources for the Future that dealt with the management of residuals and of environmental quality. It presents some of the broad concepts that the program was based on and represents the effort to break out of the traditional approach in pollution and policy research, which had treated air, water, and solid waste problems as separate categories. This book will be of interest to students of economics and environmental studies.