Environmental psychology is an increasingly important area of research, focusing on the individual and social factors responsible for many critical human responses to the physical environment. With such rapid and widespread growth, the main theoretical strands have often been left unclear and their scientific and practical implications have been underdeveloped. This essential and stimulating book contextualizes and critically analyzes the main theoretical ideas. It compares the different theories, assessing each one's possibilities and limitations, and demonstrates how each approach has been used for the development of knowledge of environmental psychology. The research area infiltrates a broad selection of disciplines, including psychology, architecture, planning, geography, sociology, environmental issues, economics and law. It also offers significant contributions to a wide range of policy evaluations. It will prove invaluable to academics and practitioners from across these disciplines, above all those in planning, environmental studies, human geography and psychology.

Predictions about the success of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) are pessimistic. It has now become commonplace to bemoan the scope, ambition, and deeply political nature of a convention that addresses issues ranging from ecosystems protection to the exploitation of genetic resources, from conservation to justice, and from commerce to scientific knowledge. Ten years after its adoption, how can we assess the difference that the CBD has made? Is it in danger of collapsing under its own weight or is it building the foundations of new patterns of relations between societies and nature? What achievements can we record and what challenges does it face? In this book, which is unique in its scope, diversity and the wealth of information it contains, contributors from a variety of academic disciplines tackle an issue of enduring importance to the protection of biodiversity and enhance our understanding of humanity's capacity to reconcile its various aspirations and halt the destructive path upon which it is set.

Throughout the tropical world, especially in South and Southeast Asia, tropical America, Africa and Oceania, there exists a range of forest garden farming systems. These are small, low-input, but productive and sustainable family units of highly diversified trees, palms, bushes and vines, with few conventional field crops or livestock. Providing a survey of these systems around the world and an in-depth analysis of the farms around Kandy, Sri Lanka, this book offers an economic and ecological description and evaluation of this ancient agroforestry system and its relationship to a wide range of global agro-development and environmental problems. Guided by a table that lists some 30 socio-economic and social criteria by which all farming systems can and should be evaluated, the book presents persuasive evidence supported by comprehensive references. It also examines historical and archaeological findings in order to assess the role these tropical forests played in the general adoption of agricultural farming.

Theories of social-ecological resilience have developed over the past decades and rapidly become an important framework for governance of complex non-linear environmental problems. This book explores the resilience theories and their compatibility with law, it identifies corresponding legal features. The legal features identified, including legal measures, mechanisms, principles and approaches, form a legal design for social-ecological resilience. A legal design that can be applied to different governance situations. It can be a tool both for designing new laws, as well as for assessing the effectiveness of current laws and legal systems. In many ways environmental law has adjusted and developed new approaches to meet complex environmental problems, but law is still challenged by the complexity that characterize environmental problems and the environmental change connected with the Anthropocene. This book provides a comprehensive review of the most fundamental components of the governance framework for social-ecological resilience and the role of law.

Why care about the environment? Is the earth's climate really changing for the worse? What are CFCs exactly? And who or what is the WTO? What are the causes of environmental problems? Who are the main actors, and what are the main ideas and issues in international environmental politics? Which countries have the best/worst environmental record and policies?
The International Encyclopedia of Environmental Politics is the essential reference source to enable all those with an interest in the politics of the environment - particularly students and academics working within political science - to answer these questions, and to explore many other related topics in international environmental politics. It will be welcomed as an essential teaching resource and a trusty companion to independent study.
Written by a team of international experts, the Encyclopedia is vital for fact-checking, provides authoritative initial orientation to a particular topic or issue and will serve as a solid starting point for wider explanation. With over 300 fully cross-referenced entries, many of which are followed with suggestions for further reading, the Encyclopedia includes:
* Country and regional entries, with country entries giving a concise overview of the history, main actors, issues and policies related to its environmental politics
* Normative and ethical dimensions of environmental politics, from animal rights, social and global justice to deep ecology
* Environmental movements, organizations, struggles and actors from local to international levels
* Issues in international environmental politics such as global warming, biodiversity, trade and the environment
* Prominent individuals (historical and current) who have inspired or been actively involved in international environmental politics - such as Mahatma Gandhi, Petra Kelly, Vandana Shiva and Aldo Leopold
* Central topics and issues in environmental politics - such as global warming, globalization, wildlife preservation, eco-taxes, energy production and consumption, sustainable development and the World Trade Organisation

Kenneth Allsop was a writer, journalist and broadcaster who in the 1960s and early 70s became one of Britain's first television celebrities. Voted the 'fifth most handsome man in the world', he enjoyed the high life of fast cars, jazz and smart London parties, moving among the nation's glitterati from the arts, media and politics. But he was also an accomplished naturalist and a passionate conservationist who fought fiercely to hold back mounting threats to Britain's wildlife and landscapes. He played a key role in raising the public's concern for the environment long before the advent of the UK's now-powerful green movement. Keeping the Barbarians at Bay focuses on the last few years of Allsop's short life, when he escaped London to live in a seventeenth- century watermill in the secret, crumpled landscape of West Dorset. The book describes how the threat of oil and gas exploration in this protected area of outstanding natural beauty forced him to become an environmental activist, and how his grassroots campaigning led him to the BBC's first environmentalist TV series Down to Earth, and to a radical 'green' column in The Sunday Times. Not surprisingly, he made powerful enemies in government and big business, at a time when there were few other environmental champions to lend him support. Using his unpublished diaries and papers, Keeping the Barbarians at Bay reveals the inside story of Allsop's struggles on three fronts: with 'the barbarians'; with the constant physical pain from his amputated right leg; and with his despair at the huge environmental challenges facing the planet. In the end, they were battles he could not win, and in May 1973 he took his own life at the tragically early age of 53.

Is "conservative environmentalism" an oxymoron? Is "more" environmental regulation "good" for business? "The Greening of Conservative America" contends that the adherents to any well-considered conservative political philosophy should, on first principles, support pro-conservation, pro-environment policies. Furthermore, and pragmatically, Bliese demonstrates with repeated examples how environmental protection policies actually benefit business by stimulating greater efficiency and innovation and by spurring the creation of green products and services for new markets around the globe. These ideas are applied in chapters on specific environmental issues, including pollution, global warming, biodiversity, public-land management, and sustainability. The book concludes with criticisms of "free-market environmentalism" and calls conservatives back to their root principles on matters of the environment. Concerned citizens of any political persuasion will find much in this book to inform their views on public debates over environmental issues and policies.

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.

Today, one-quarter of all the land in Latin America is set apart for nature protection. In Nationalizing Nature, Frederico Freitas uncovers the crucial role played by conservation in the region's territorial development by exploring how Brazil and Argentina used national parks to nationalize borderlands. In the 1930s, Brazil and Argentina created some of their first national parks around the massive Iguazu Falls, shared by the two countries. The parks were designed as tools to attract migrants from their densely populated Atlantic seaboards to a sparsely inhabited borderland. In the 1970s, a change in paradigm led the military regimes in Brazil and Argentina to violently evict settlers from their national parks, highlighting the complicated relationship between authoritarianism and conservation in the Southern Cone. By tracking almost one hundred years of national park history in Latin America's largest countries, Nationalizing Nature shows how conservation policy promoted national programs of frontier development and border control.

The distinction between humans and the natural world is an artefact and more a matter of linguistic communication than a conceptual separation. This Element proposes ecosemiotics as an epistemological tool to better understand the relationship between human and natural processes. Ecosemiotics with its affinity to the humanities, is presented here as the best disciplinary approach for interpreting complex environmental conditions for a broad audience, across a multitude of temporal and spatial scales. It is proposed as an intellectual bridge between divergent sciences to incorporate within a unique framework different paradigms. The ecosemiotic paradigm helps to explain how organisms interact with their external environments using mechanisms common to all living beings that capture external information and matter for internal usage. This paradigm can be applied in all the circumstances where a living being (man, animal, plant, fungi, etc.) performs processes to stay alive.

This book is designed as a basic text for courses that are part of an interdisciplinary program in environmental studies. The intended reader is anyone who expects environmental stewardship to be an important part of his or her life, as a citizen, a policy maker, or an environmental management professional. In addition to discussing major issues in environmental ethics, it invites readers to think about how an ethicist's perspective differs from the perspectives encountered in other environmental studies courses. Additional topics covered include corporate social responsibility, ecological citizenship, property theory, and the concept of stewardship as a vocation.

How do we extend the "conservation ethic" to include the cultural links between local populations and their physical environments? Can considerations of human capital be incorporated into the definition and measurement of sustainability in managed forests? Can forests be managed in a manner that fulfills traditional goals for ecological integrity while also addressing the well-being of its human residents?

In this groundbreaking work, an international team of investigators apply a diverse range of social science methods to focus on the interests of the stakeholders living in the most intimate proximity to managed forests. Building on a series of criteria and indicators of sustainable forest management first tested by the editors and their colleagues in the mid-1990s, the researchers address topics such as intergenerational access to resources, gender relations and forest utilization, and equity in both forest-rich and forest-poor contexts.

People Managing Forests begins with an overview of concepts and measures of sustainability. Using examples from North America, Asia, Africa, and Latin America, the book explores the overlapping systems that characterize the management of tropical forests. With rigor, insight, and a balance of quantitative and qualitative analysis, the contributors demonstrate that the diversity of forests extends to the cultures of their human inhabitants and the relationships they have with their environment. For forest managers, social scientists, and policymakers, the result is an approach to sustainability that is more accurate, complete, and humane.

People Managing Forests is a copublication of Resources for the Future (RFF) and the Center forInternational Forestry Research (CIFOR).

New edition of Environmental Problems in Third World Cities Cities in Africa, Asia and Latin America contain some of the world's most life- and health-threatening human environments. Environment-related diseases and injuries cause millions of preventable deaths each year. In many squatter settlements, children are 40 to 50 times more likely to die before the age of five than they would be in Europe or North America and most such deaths are environment-related. Many cities also cause serious environmental degradation to their surroundings and increasingly contribute to global warming. This updated and much expanded edition of the classic Environmental Problems in Third World Cities describes environmental problems and their effect on human health, local ecosystems and global cycles. It points to the political causes that underpin many of these problems - including ineffective, unaccountable governments, and aid agencies' reluctance to work with the urban poor. It also highlights innovative solutions such as: * High-quality, low-cost homes and neighbourhoods developed by urban poor groups working with local non-governmental organizations * Local Agenda 21s developed by municipal governments in partnership with community organizations.* In their analysis, the authors show that cities can meet sustainable development goals. There are practical, affordable solutions to their environmental problems, but most of these depend on more competent and accountable city governments and on more support for low-income households and their organizations. The book also outlines the changes needed international aid agencies to support this. PRAISE FOR THE FIRST EDITION 'It's rare to encounter a work as authoritative and accessible as this. It is a mine of useful information from cities in every corner of the Third World, which does not shy away from the immensity of the problems, but says as much about the solutions to them as about the problems themselves' Jonathon Porritt 'Well written and very accessible' The Geographical Journal 'Of value to students, teachers, practitioners, policy makers and aid agencies' Third World Planning Review 'A valuable resource for understanding the underlying problems [this book offers] practical alternatives' Cities International.

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.

Although Green approaches to politics have had some practical successes in a range of different countries, the movement has lacked a fully developed and coherent political theory. In this unique study David Wells and Tony Lynch demonstrate that ecological understanding and environmental concern are not just consistent with notions of social equity and grass-roots democracy, but that a concern for these aims are the logical consequence of what might be called 'political ecology'. They begin with a critique of existing approaches to Green politics, with particular attention to the claims of 'deep ecology' and go on to develop an important examination of the relationship between economic and ecological styles of thinking. They conclude with a 'social commons' inspired revision of Lockean politics. What emerges is an important understanding of the tasks of politics: rather than focusing on 'foreground' issues of individual choice, the central political challenge of our age is with the management and provision of the background conditions (the ecological conditions - understood in the broadest sense) which allows the possibility of a reasonable life. The analysis shows a concern with environmental commons engenders equal concerns for social, economic and cultural commons, develops an account of how such commons can be effectively managed and relates this account to more traditional political themes of democracy, liberty and equity.

In 1992, at the Earth Summit in Rio, the United Nations adopted the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) to agree international measures aimed at preserving the vital ecosystems and biological resources on which we all depend. This is the official handbook to the Convention and presents all the most important information about the CBD, including a guide to the decisions adopted and to ongoing activities. It is an essential resource for all the governments, intergovernmental agencies, NGOs and conservation bodies and researchers working in this area. Included with the book is a fully indexed and cross-referenced CD-ROM containing all the relevant background material to the Convention, linked to relevant decisions and other sources of information.

Our oceans are suffering under the impacts of climate change. Despite the critical role that oceans play in climate regulation, international climate law and the law of the sea are developed as two different, largely separate, legal regimes. The main objective of this book is to assess how the law of the sea can be interpreted, developed and applied to support the objectives of the United Nations Climate Regime. By identifying the potential and constraints of the law of the sea regime in supporting and complementing the climate regime in the mitigation of and adaptation to climate change, this book offers a new perspective on the law of the sea and its capacity to evolve to respond to systemic challenges, and its potential to adapt and ensure a resilient and sustainable future.

This Element provides an accessible introduction to ecosemiotics and demonstrates its pertinence for the study of today's unstable culture-nature relations. Ecosemiotics can be defined as the study of sign processes responsible for ecological phenomena. The arguments in this Element are developed in three steps that take inspiration from both humanities and biological sciences: 1) Showing the diversity, reach and effects of sign-mediated relations in the natural environment from the level of a single individual up the functioning of the ecosystem. 2) Demonstrating numerous ways in which prelinguistic semiotic relations are part of culture and identifying detrimental environmental effects that self-contained and purely symbol-based sign systems, texts and discourses bring along. 3) Demonstrating how ecosemiotic analysis centred on models and modelling can effectively map relations between texts and the natural environment, or the lack thereof, and how this methodology can be used artistically to initiate environmentally friendly cultural forms and practices.

Ten years ago Blueprint for a Green Economy changed the face of economic and environmental policy. It made front page news and introduced the public as well as the professionals to the central role that the environment should play in economic and public policy decisions.Ten years on, David Pearce and Edward Barbier have written the sequel to show what has been achieved, how to consolidate that and what remains to be done. In the clear language which made the earlier book so accessible and influential, they examine the efforts to define and implement the concept of sustainable economic development, its relationship to the use of 'natural' capital and human welfare, and its influence on recent environmental policy debates. They show how far environmental concerns have been integrated into everyday economic decision making--through the valuation of environmental goods and services, cost-benefit techniques, indicators for sustainable development, and the use of market-based instruments for environmental policy making around the world.Yet large, new challenges exist. Global environmental issues such as climate change, biodiversity loss and trade-environment linkages require greater cooperation towards new international agreements, institutions and distributive measures. The complex problems facing many poor economies such as deforestation, land degradation, overpopulation and resource exhaustion will demand the increasing use of environmental economics in development policy making. In all these areas, the authors demonstrate how sustainability can be brought from the periphery to the center of economic management.The book provides a blueprint for the start of a century in which our ultimatedependence on the environment will have to be at the heart of the business and policy decisions we take if we are to achieve genuinely sustainable development for economies all around the globe.

Global governance now provides people with recourse for harm through International Grievance Mechanisms, such as the Independent Accountability Mechanisms of the Multilateral Development Banks. Yet little is known about how such mechanisms work. This Element examines how IGMs provide recourse for infringements of three procedural environmental rights: access to information, access to participation, and access to justice in environmental matters, as well as environmental protections drawn from the United Nations Guiding Principles and the World Bank's protection standards. A content analysis of 394 original IAM claims details how people invoke these rights. The sections then unpack how the IAMs provide community engagement through 'problem solving', and 'compliance investigations' that identify whether the harm resulted from the MDBs. Using a database of all known submissions to the IAMs (1,052 claims from 1994 to mid-2019), this Element demonstrate how the IAMs enable people to air their grievances, without necessarily solving their problems.

A revolutionary perspective on the climate catastrophe bridging history, philosophy, science, and religion. You’ve heard the hard-hitting data and you’ve seen the documentaries. But what will it truly take for humanity to change? We will not tackle the climate catastrophe with data alone – we need new stories and new ways of seeing and thinking. By drawing on traditional eco-philosophies and Buddhist wisdom, Erik Jampa Andersson offers an approach to our environmental emergency that will make us rethink the very nature of our existence on this incredible planet. Looking at the climate catastrophe through the framework of disease, Unseen Beings examines our ecological diagnosis, its historical causes and conditions and, crucially, its much-needed treatment, as well as exploring: · how and why we constructed a human-centric worldview · amazing recent discoveries around non-human intelligence · how religious traditions have dealt with questions of nature, sentience and ecology · critical connections between human health and environmental health This book is a call to action. Climate anxiety has left many of us feeling confused and powerless, but there is another way. If we can recover our natural sense of enchantment and kinship with non-human beings, we may still find a path to build a better future.

Social workers are called upon to shift from a human-centric bias to an ecological ethical sensibility by embracing love as integral to their justice mission and by extending the idea of social justice to include environmental and species justice. This book presents the love ethic model as a way to do eco-justice work using public campaigns, research, community arts practice and other nonviolent, direct action strategies. The model is premised on an active and ongoing commitment to the eco-values of love, eco-justice and nonviolence for the purpose of upholding the public interest. The love ethic model is informed by the stories of eco-activists who used nonviolent actions to address ecological issues such as: pollution; degradation of the environment; exploitation of farm animals; mining industry overriding First Nation Peoples' land rights; and human health and social costs related to the natural resource industries, private land developments and government infrastructure projects. Informed by practice insights by activists from a range of eco-justice concerns, this innovative book provides new directions in social work and environmental studies involving transformational change leadership and dialogical group work between interest groups. It should be considered essential reading for social work students, researchers and practitioners as well as eco-activists more generally.

Economic activity imposes increasing costs on the global environment. The lack of progress being made in environmental management is often not as much a question of economics, technology or even of interest, as it is of perception, assumptions and how one approaches problems. Green Logic seeks to highlight the key questions regarding entrepreneurship and sustainability in terms of motivation, government intervention and ethics. Written by the highly regarded author of Managing World Economic Change, this important and accessible new book aims to examine how "Green Logic" works, how it differs from other logics and how green thinking can be targeted in order to create environmentally responsible businesses in an era of rapid change. Key questions addressed in depth include:What are the minimal ethical principles to guide environmental living and working? What motives and obstacles characterise ecopreneurship? What principles of creativity and entrepreneurship can be used as tools? In short, what does it really take to motivate entrepreneurs to design and start up green businesses? Green Logic is suitable for both business and academic audiences and significantly pushes forward the debate on environmental responsibility.

The Greeks and Romans have been charged with destroying the ecosystems within which they lived. In this book, however, M. D. Usher argues rather that we can find in their lives and thought the origin of modern ideas about systems and sustainability, important topics for humans today and in the future. With chapters running the gamut of Greek and Roman experience - from the Presocratics and Plato to Roman agronomy and the Benedictine Rule - Plato's Pigs brings together unlikely bedfellows, both ancient and modern, to reveal surprising connections. Lively prose and liberal use of anecdotal detail, including an afterword about the author's own experiments with sustainable living on his sheep farm in Vermont, add a strong authorial voice. In short, this is a unique, first-of-its-kind book that is sure to be of interest to anyone working in Classics, environmental studies, philosophy, ecology, or the history of ideas.

Numerous laws - including the Green New Deal - have been proposed or passed in cities, states, and countries to transition from fossil fuels to 100% clean, renewable energy in order to address climate change, air pollution, and energy insecurity. This textbook lays out the science, technology, economics, policy, and social aspects of such transitions. It discusses the renewable electricity and heat generating technologies needed; the electricity, heat, cold, and hydrogen storage technologies required; how to keep the electric power grid stable; and how to address non-energy sources of emissions. It discusses the history of the 100% Movement, which evolved from a collaboration among scientists, cultural leaders, business people, and community leaders. Finally, it discusses current progress in transitioning to 100% renewables, and the new policies needed to complete the transition. Online course supplements include lecture slides, answers to the end-of-chapter student exercises, and a list of extra resources.