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Books > Earth & environment > The environment > Environmentalist thought & ideology
Martin D. Yaffe's Judaism and Environmental Ethics: A Reader is a well-conceived exploration of three interrelated questions: Does the Hebrew Bible, or subsequent Jewish tradition, teach environmental responsibility or not? What Jewish teachings, if any, appropriately address today's environmental crisis? Do ecology, Judaism, and philosophy work together, or are they at odds with each other in confronting the current crisis? Yaffe's extensive introduction analyzes and appraises the anthologized essays, each of which serves to deepen and enrich our understanding of current reflection on Judaism and environmental ethics. Brought together in one volume for the first time, the most important scholars in the field touch on diverse disciplines including deep ecology, political philosophy, and biblical hermeneutics. This ambitious book illustrates precisely because of its interdisciplinary focus how longstanding disagreements and controversies may spark further interchange among ecologists, Jews, and philosophers. Both accessible and thoroughly scholarly, this dialogue will benefit anyone interested in ethical and religious considerations of contemporary ecology."
Through 140 drawings, thought experiments, recipes, activist instructions, gardening ideas, insurgences and personal revolutions, artists who spend their lives thinking outside the box guide you to a new worldview; where you and the planet are one. Everything here is new. We invite you to rip out pages, to hang them up at home, to draw and scribble, to cook, to meditate, to take the book to your nearest green space. Featuring Olafur Eliasson, Etel Adnan, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Jane Fonda & Swoon, Judy Chicago, Black Quantum Futurism Collective, Vivienne Westwood, Cauleen Smith, Marina Abramovic, Karrabing Film Collective, and many more.
'An inspiring rallying cry for activists everywhere to work together to build a just, ecosocialist future' - Grace Blakeley Time is up. The climate crisis is no longer a future to be feared, but a devastating reality. We see it in the wildfires in California and floods across Britain - the 'once in a generation' extreme weather events that now happen every year. In a world where those in charge are constantly letting us down, real change in our lifetime means taking power into our own hands. The task ahead of us is daunting, but the emergence of a new wave of movements focused on climate justice, equality and solidarity also brings hope. Asking how we have arrived at this moment, Chris Saltmarsh argues that the profoundly political nature of the environmental crisis has been relentlessly downplayed. After all, how can solar panels save us while capitalism places profit over the future of the planet? Analysing the failures of NGOs, the limitations of Extinction Rebellion and Youth Strikes, the role of trade unions, and the possibilities of a Green New Deal, Burnt issues a powerful call for a radical collective movement: saving the world is not enough; we must build a better one in the process.
Transnational Identity Politics and the Environment attempts to transcend current social science paradigms for interpreting the relations between globalization and environmental activism, and to develop an alternative perspective that recognizes the effects of economic globalization, accelerating migration, and the retreat of the state on environmental social movements and politics. The book is a study in global sociology, and makes use of both quantitative analysis and qualitative case studies. By addressing cutting-edge theories of globalization from several disciplines, using multiple methods and multiple sources of data, and illustrating its major arguments with case studies of Turkey and Lithuania, Transnational Identity Politics and the Environment represents a theoretically daring and empirically compelling approach to environmental politics. Specifically, the book argues that trends in the direction of economic liberalization, media globalization, migration, and supranational political organization have weakened environmental movements and coalitions that relied on the nation-state and "big science." While such groups have lost popularity and influence, since the 1980s, newer groups linking environmental issues with ethnic and religious activism have flourished. An analyses of global data on the establishment of nonprofit environmental organizations, and case studies of hybrid, transnational ethnic/environmental and religious/environmental groups in Turkey and Lithuania, support the books main arguments on globalization, the state, and contemporary environmental activism.
For better or worse, the view through a car's windshield has
redefined how we see the world around us. In some cases, such as
the American parkway, the view from the road was the be-all and
end-all of the highway; in others, such as the Italian autostrada,
the view of a fast, efficient transportation machine celebrating
either Fascism or its absence was the goal. These varied
environments are neither necessary nor accidental but the outcomes
of historical negotiations, and whether we abhor them or take
delight in them, they have become part of the fabric of human
existence.
By moving beyond traditional aesthetic categories (beauty, the sublime, the religious), Eco-Aesthetics takes an inter-disciplinary approach bridging the arts, humanities and social sciences and explores what aesthetics might mean in the 21st century. It is one in a series of new, radical aesthetics promoting debate, confronting convention and formulating alternative ways of thinking about art practice. There is no doubt that the social and environmental spheres are interconnected but can art and artists really make a difference to the global environmental crisis? Can art practice meaningfully contribute to the development of sustainable lifestyles? Malcolm Miles explores the strands of eco-art, eco-aesthetics and contemporary aesthetic theories, offering timely critiques of consumerism and globalisation and, ultimately, offers a possible formulation of an engaged eco-aesthetic for the early 21st century.
The past three centuries have witnessed the accumulation of unprecedented levels of wealth and the production of unprecedented risks. These risks include the declining integrity and stability of many of the world's environments, which face dramatic and possibly irreversible change as the environmental burdens of late modern lifestyles increasingly shift to fragile ecosystems, vulnerable communities, and future generations. Globalization has increased the scope and scale of these risks, as well as the pace of their emergence. It has also made possible global environmental governance, attempts to manage risk by unprecedented numbers and types of authoritative agents, including state and non-state actors at the local, national, regional, and global levels. In The Gardeners' Dirty Hands: Environmental Politics and Christian Ethics, Noah Toly offers an interpretation of environmental governance that draws upon insights into the tragic - the need to forego, give up, undermine, or destroy one or more goods in order to possess or secure one or more other goods. Toly engages Christian and classical Greek ideas of the tragic to illuminate the enduring challenges of environmental politics. He suggests that Christians have unique resources for responsible engagement with global environmental politics while acknowledging the need for mutually agreed, and ultimately normative, restraints.
Bioregionalism asks us to reimagine ourselves and the places where we live in ecological terms and to harmonize human activities with the natural systems that sustain life. As one of the originators of the concept of bioregionalism, Peter Berg (1937-2011) is a founding figure of contemporary environmental thought. The Biosphere and the Bioregion: Essential Writings of Peter Berg introduces readers to the biospheric vision and post-environmental genius of Berg. From books and essays to published interviews, this selection of writings represents Berg's bioregional vision and its global, local, urban, and rural applications. The Biosphere and the Bioregion provides a highly accessible introduction to bioregional philosophy, making Berg's paradigm available as a guiding vision and practical "greenprint" for the twenty-first century. This valuable compilation lays the groundwork for future research by offering the first-ever comprehensive bibliography of Berg's publications and should be of interest to students and scholars in the interdisciplinary fields of environmental humanities, environment and sustainability studies, as well as political ecology, environmental sociology and anthropology.
While struggling to deny it, many practising environmentalists already suspect what they cannot admit: that it is now too late for sustainability. This book makes clear why that is true, but rather than despairing, it explores where coming out of denial could take us. It shows where the deep environmental crisis truly lies, in the way we think about ourselves and our lives as much as in our material arrangements. This in turn suggests what we might be able to retrieve from breakdown. Giving an original philosophical account, After Sustainability argues that the roots of our embedded denial lie in progressivism which, either as insatiable material consumption or as the self-blinded optimism of sustainable development, underlies the whole environmental problematic. As progressivism has provided the impetus for many genuine advances in material welfare, this book shows that our environmental situation is tragic in the full sense and entails losses which cannot be mitigated or compensated. But it also reveals us to ourselves and shows how we can break free from a progressive mindset in conceptual and practical terms.This book thus develops a unique account of natural responsibility in environmental-philosophical terms, and also challenges the conventional modern conception of the individual without embracing any sort of quasi-mystical 'ecological self'. It concludes by suggesting what may be possible politically, educationally and economically, if we approach what is coming with honesty and a new realism grounded in genuinely non-optimistic life-hope. This book is essential reading for students and researchers in environment and sustainability, geography, sociology, philosophy, climate change and economics. Academically informed, it is accessible to an interested general reader, as well as to policy makers and environmentalists.
Tourism is the world's largest industry. In the past decade it is the natural resource-based sector that has experienced the greatest growth. In particular, adventure, cultural and eco tourism (ACE tourism), for example skiing, white water rafting, whale watching, festivals and fairs. This book provides an in-depth overview of the different operations of ACE tourism. It draws on theory from recreation and leisure studies, tourism, marketing, and environmental management to demonstrate the importance of effective program planning. This is especially significant as industry competition becomes more intense in this growth sector.
In nineteenth-century Europe, differences among human bodies were understood to be matters of scientific classification. At the height of scientific acceptance, it was unthinkable that race or sex or diagnosis or indigence were invention. Today, however, differences among human bodies are understood as matters of social construction. The philosophy of social construction understands differences among humans to be matters of human imposition. Social constructionism's way of understanding the origin of differences among humans is so well-established as to have no currently viable alternatives, even among new materialists, social constructionism's most ardent critics. This book argues that new materialists and social constructionists share a distinction between the political and the ecological. Emily Anne Parker centers her argument on the philosophical concept of the polis, according to which there is one complete human form. It is this form that is to blame for our current political and ecological crisis. Political hierarchies and ecological crises are often considered to be two different problems: for example, many speak of parallel problems, climate change and racial injustice. Parker argues that these are not parallel crises so much as one problem: the polis. The philosophy of the polis asserts that there is one complete human body, and that body is meant to govern all other things. In that sense there are not two crises, but instead one concern: to perceive the ways in which this tradition of the polis constrains the present. Elemental difference in the polis is appreciated in the fact that "empirical bodily non-identity," an Aristotelian concept, can be called upon to elevate one group of bodies among the rest. Parker builds from Sylvia Wynter, who argues that the very idea of empirical bodily non-identity begins with the modern science of racial anatomy, or what Wynter calls biocentrism. Parker argues that biocentrism is a feature of the polis, according to which the one complete body was defined by its capacity for disembodied thought. The sciences of racial anatomy are a more explicit commitment to biocentrism, but the ranking of matter with respect to one complete human, a body that is the site of supra-natural thinking, is a practice that has always characterized the polis. In this way, the polis is responsible for both political and ecological hierarchy. It is as responsible for what is euphemistically called climate change as it is for the political hierarchy that constitutes it. Elemental Difference and the Climate of the Body ultimately bridges the insights of social constructionism and new materialisms to create a philosophy of elemental difference. Difference, rather than needing to be either dismissed based on its social construction or reified in keeping with the hierarchies of the polis, is crucial for addressing contemporary crises of the polis.
Today it is widely recognized that we face urgent and serious environmental problems and we know much about them, yet we do very little. What explains this lack of motivation and change? Why is it so hard to change our lives? This book addresses this question by means of a philosophical inquiry into the conditions of possibility for environmental change. It discusses how we can become more motivated to do environmental good and what kind of knowledge we need for this, and explores the relations between motivation, knowledge, and modernity. After reviewing a broad range of possible philosophical and psychological responses to environmental apathy and inertia, the author argues for moving away from a modern focus on either detached reason and control (Stoicism and Enlightenment reason) or the natural, the sentiments, and the authentic (Romanticism), both of which make possible disengaging and alienating modes of relating to our environment.
The moral values and interpretive systems of religions are crucially involved in how people imagine the challenges of sustainability and how societies mobilize to enhance ecosystem resilience and human well-being. The Routledge Handbook of Religion and Ecology provides the most comprehensive and authoritative overview of the field. It encourages both appreciative and critical angles regarding religious traditions, communities, attitude, and practices. It presents contrasting ways of thinking about "religion" and about "ecology" and about ways of connecting the two terms. Written by a team of leading international experts, the Handbook discusses dynamics of change within religious traditions as well as their roles in responding to global challenges such as climate change, water, conservation, food and population. It explores the interpretations of indigenous traditions regarding modern environmental problems drawing on such concepts as lifeway and indigenous knowledge. This volume uniquely intersects the field of religion and ecology with new directions within the humanities and the sciences. This interdisciplinary volume is an essential reference for scholars and students across the social sciences and humanities and for all those looking to understand the significance of religion in environmental studies and policy.
Disputes over hazardous waste sites usually are resolved by giving greater weight to expert opinion over public "not-in-my-back-yard" reactions. Challenging the assumption that policy experts are better able to discern the general welfare, Gregory E. McAvoy here proposes that citizen opinion and democratic dissent occupy a vital, constructive place in environmental policymaking. McAvoy explores the issues of citizen rationality, the tension between democracy and technocracy, and the link between public opinion and policy in the case of an unsuccessful attempt to site a hazardous waste facility in Minnesota. He shows how the site was defeated by citizens who had reasonable doubts over the need for the facility. Offering a comprehensive look at the policymaking process, McAvoy examines the motivations of public officials, the resources they have for shaping opinion, the influence of interest groups, and the evolution of waste reduction programs in Minnesota and other states. Integrating archival material, interviews, and quantitative survey data, he argues that NIMBY movements can bring miscalculations to light and provide an essential check on policy experts' often partisan views. This book will be of value to those who work or study in the fields of hazardous waste policy, facility siting, environmental policy, public policy, public administration, and political science.
This book details various stages in the introduction, establishment and evolution of China's environmental management system. By combining a literature review, comparative analysis, and case study, it investigates the environmental management system in several key periods in order to systematically assess the necessary measures and appropriate adjustments the Chinese Government implemented to reconcile the growing conflicts between economic development and resources conservation, in the context of rapid economic growth and economic transformation. Given its scope, the book offers a valuable resource for experts, scholars, and government officials in related fields.
The planet is sick. Human beings are guilty of damaging it. We have to pay. Today, that is the orthodoxy throughout the Western world. Distrust of progress and science, calls for individual and collective self-sacrifice to save the planet and cultivation of fear: behind the carbon commissars, a dangerous and counterproductive ecological catastrophism is gaining ground. Modern society s susceptibility to this kind of thinking derives from what Bruckner calls the seductive attraction of disaster, as exemplified by the popular appeal of disaster movies. But ecological catastrophism is harmful in that it draws attention away from other, more solvable problems and injustices in the world in order to focus on something that is portrayed as an Apocalypse. Rather than preaching catastrophe and pessimism, we need to develop a democratic and generous ecology that addresses specific problems in a practical way.
Conversations about climate change are filled with challenges involving complex data, deeply held values, and political issues. Understanding Climate Change examines climate change as both a scientific and a public policy issue. Sarah L. Burch and Sara E. Harris explain the basics of the climate system, climate models and prediction, and human and biophysical impacts, as well as strategies for climate change adaptation and mitigation. The second edition has been fully updated throughout, including coverage of new advances in climate modelling and of the shifting landscape of renewable energy production and distribution. A brand new chapter discusses global governance, including the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and the Paris Agreement, as well as mitigation efforts at the national and subnational levels. This new chapter makes the book even more relevant to climate change courses housed in social sciences departments such as political science and geography. An effective and integrated introduction to an urgent and controversial issue, this book is well-suited to adoption in a variety of introductory climate change courses found in a number of science and social science departments. Its ultimate goal is to equip readers with the tools needed to become constructive participants in the human response to climate change.
Ecology is indispensable to understanding the biological world and addressing the environmental problems humanity faces. Its philosophy has never been more important. In this book, James Justus introduces readers to the philosophically rich issues ecology poses. Besides its crucial role in biological science generally, climate change, biodiversity loss, and other looming environmental challenges make ecology's role in understanding such threats and identifying solutions to them all the more critical. When ecology is applied and its insights marshalled to address these problems and guide policy formation, interesting philosophical issues emerge. Justus sets them out in detail, and explores the often ethically charged dimensions of applied ecological science, using accessible language and a wealth of scientifically-informed examples.
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.
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.
NIMBY (Not In My Back Yard) protests are often criticized as parochial and short-lived, generating no lasting influence on broader processes related to environmental politics. This volume offers a different perspective. Drawing on cases from around the globe, it demonstrates that NIMBY protests, although always arising from a local concern in a particular community, often result in broader political, social, and technological change. Chapters include cases from Europe, North America, and Asia, engaging with the full political spectrum from established democracies to non-democratic countries. Regardless of political setting, NIMBY movements can have a positive and proactive role in generating innovative solutions to local as well as transnational environmental issues. Furthermore, those solutions are now serving as models for communities and countries around the world.
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.
GREEN WITNESS is a work in theological ethics, addressed to theologians and seminarians, but also to clergy and church study groups. Yordy approaches the topic of Christian environmental work not from the perspective of a global crisis that must be solved, but from the perspective of God's promise of the Kingdom. She argues that Christians can and should work for the wholeness of the biophysical environment whether or not their efforts bear immediate visible fruit, because God always welcomes and makes good use of faithful discipleship. This is good news to religious environmentalists who have grown weary of struggling to "make a difference" amid ever-louder announcements of environmental destruction. The eschaton is clearly a realm of interspecies peace, abundance, and diversity, and part of the church's mission is to demonstrate these aspects of God's plan for the world, although only God can and will consummate the Kingdom. LAURA RUTH YORDY is Assistant Professor of Philosophy and Religion at Bridgewater College in Virginia. "Often confronted by the so-called 'environmental crisis, ' many are led to despair that nothing can be done. Drawing on profound theological insights, Laura Yordy helps us see that something can be done because Christ's redemption is sure and good. Hopefully this book will find its way into many congregational discussions of how we can better live as witnesses to God's glorious creation." STANLEY HAUERWAS, Gilbert T. Rowe Professor of Theological Ethics at Duke Divinity School, Duke University "Yordy encourages us to think the meaning of creation in terms of the inbreaking Kingdom of God. With this eschatological reading of our environmental troubles she invites us to a more exacting and merciful discipleship that is patterned on the Trinitarian God who brings all creation into being and sustains it until its final redemption in Christ. Yordy's views will challenge established patterns of thinking, and inspire churches to be more faithful witnesses to the healing presence of God in our world." NORMAN WIRZBA, Author of The Paradise of God: Renewing Religion in an Ecological Age
Melbourne, founded in 1835 among marshes and beside a sluggish stream, grew from wetlands into a world-class modern city. Drawing on a wide range of historical, literary and artistic sources, this book explores the cultural and environmental history of the city and its site. Tracing the city from its swampy beginnings in a squatter's settlement nestled in the marshy delta of the Yarra and Maribyrnong Rivers, Rod Giblett illuminates Melbourne through its visible structures and the invisible history of its site. The book places Melbourne within an international context by comparing and contrasting it to other cities built on or beside wetlands, including London, New York, Paris, Los Angeles and Toronto. Further, it is the first book to apply the work of European thinkers and writers on modernity and the modern city - such as Walter Benjamin and Peter Sloterdijk - to an analysis of Melbourne. Giblett considers the intertwining of nature and culture, people and place, and cities and wetlands in this bioregional and ecocultural analysis. Placing the city in its proper bioregional and international contexts, Modern Melbourne provides a rich historical analysis of the cultural capital of Australia. |
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