Complexity theories gained prominence in the 1990s with a focus on self-organising and complex adaptive systems. Since then, complexity theory has become one of the fastest growing topics in both the natural and social sciences, and touted as a revolutionary way of understanding the behaviour of complex systems. This book uses complexity theory to surface and challenge the deeply held cultural assumptions that shape how we think about reality and knowledge. In doing so it shows how our traditional approaches to generating and applying knowledge may be paradoxically exacerbating some of the 'wicked' environmental problems we are currently facing. The author proposes an innovative and compelling argument for rejecting old constructs of knowledge transfer, adaptive management and adaptive capacity. The book also presents a distinctively coherent and comprehensive synthesis of cognition, learning, knowledge and organizing from a complexity perspective. It concludes with a reconceptualization of the problem of knowledge transfer from a complexity perspective, proposing the concept of creative capacity as an alternative to adaptive capacity as a measure of resilience in socio-ecological systems. Although written from an environmental management perspective, it is relevant to the broader natural sciences and to a range of other disciplines, including knowledge management, organizational learning, organizational management, and the philosophy of science.

As ecological degradation continues to threaten permanent and dramatic changes for life on our planet, the question of how we can protect our imperiled Earth has become more pressing than ever before. In this book, Daniel Scheid draws on Catholic social thought as the foundation for a new type of interreligious ecological ethics, which he calls the cosmic common good, that sees humans as just a part of the greater whole of the cosmos. The cosmic common good emphasizes the instrumental and intrinsic value of nature and the integral connection between religious practice and the pursuit of the common good. Scheid begins his analysis by rooting his vision of the cosmic common good in the classical doctrines of creation found in the works of Augustine and Thomas Aquinas and in Thomas Berry's interpretation of the evolutionary cosmic story. He goes on to explore conceptions of a cosmic common good in other traditions, such as Hinduism, Buddhism, and American Indian religion. Scheid demonstrates that dialogue with these non-Christian traditions both confirms and expands the cosmic common good as a theologically authentic moral framework that re-envisions humanity's role in the universe.

Through a series of multidisciplinary readings, "Environmental Ethics: The Big Questions" contextualizes environmental ethics within the history of Western intellectual tradition and traces the development of theory since the 1970s. Includes an extended introduction that provides an historical and thematic introduction to the field of environmental ethics Features a selection of brief original essays on why to study environmental ethics by leaders in the field Contextualizes environmental ethics within the history of the Western intellectual tradition by exploring anthropocentric (human-centered) and nonanthropocentric precedents Offers an interdisciplinary approach to the field by featuring seminal work from eminent philosophers, biologists, ecologists, historians, economists, sociologists, anthropologists, nature writers, business writers, and others Designed to be used with a web-site which contains a continuously updated archive of case studies:

http: //environmentalethics.info/

How can we become more in tune with nature, even in the heart of the city? Once upon a time, a burnt-out Claire Dunn spent a year living off the grid in a wilderness survival experiment. Yet love and the possibilities of human connection drew her back to the city, where she soon found herself as overscheduled, addicted to her phone, and lost in IKEA as the rest of us. Given all the city offers - comfort, convenience, community, and opportunity - she wants to stay. But to do so, she'll have to learn how to rewild her own urban soul. Claire swims in city rivers, forages in the suburbs, and explores many other practices to connect to the world around her. Rewilding the Urban Soul is a field guide to being at one with nature, wherever you are.

Silent Spring is a watershed moment in the history of environmentalism. The 1962 work by Rachel Carson is credited with launching the modern environmental movement. It provoked the ban on DDT in the US ten years later and it has been an inspiration for feminist health movements. Yet changes in public health policy are possibly the most important legacy. In synthesizing a jumble of scientific and medical information into a coherent, readable argument about health and environment, Carson successfully challenged major chemical industries and the idea that modern societies could and should exert mastery over nature at any cost. This book provides an in-depth analysis and contextualisation of Silent Spring. It also surveys the lasting impact the text has had on the environmentalist movement in the last fifty years. Carson's Silent Spring is the first book to provide a full overview of what is a seminal work in the history of environmentalism.

Serpent River Resurgence tells the story of how the Serpent River Anishinaabek confronted the persistent forces of settler colonialism and the effects of uranium mining at Elliot Lake, Ontario. Drawing on extensive archival sources, oral histories, and newspaper articles, Lianne C. Leddy examines the environmental and political power relationships that affected her homeland in the Cold War period. Focusing on Indigenous-settler relations, the environmental and health consequences of the uranium industry, and the importance of traditional uses of land and what happens when they are compromised, Serpent River Resurgence explores how settler colonialism and Anishinaabe resistance remained potent forces in Indigenous communities throughout the second half of the twentieth century.

Capital is pushing into motion ever larger global material flows. In doing so it has come to depend on massive expenditures of energy, putting to work fossil fuels and the machines they animate to transform the world, accumulate power and grow the economy. The ecological relations and crises of today's societies are driven by the processes of extraction of the elements that come together as a throughput of material and energy flows controlled by capital and shaped by its imperative of valorization. In A Social Ecology of Capital, Eric Pineault proposes an original model of the fossil social metabolism that has sustained the growth of advanced capitalism in the last century. Drawing on ecological economics and critical political economy, the book analyses how the social structures of accumulation, production, consumption and waste determine and regulate the material flow and the accumulation of material artifacts. Showing how social relations shape the ecology of capital, the book highlights the contradictions humanity now faces.

Humanity's best hope for confronting the looming climate crisis rests with the new science of complexity. The sheer complexity of climate change stops most solutions in their tracks. How do we give up fossil fuels when energy is connected to everything, from great-power contests to the value of your pension? Global economic growth depends on consumption, but that also produces the garbage now choking the oceans. To give up cars, coal, or meat would upend industries and entire ways of life. Faced with seemingly impossible tradeoffs, politicians dither and economists offer solutions at the margins, all while we flirt with the sixth extinction. That's why humanity's last best hope is the young science of complex systems. Quitting coal, making autonomous cars ubiquitous, ending the middle-class addiction to consumption: all necessary to head off climate catastrophe, all deemed fantasies by pundits and policymakers, and all plausible in a complex systems view. Roland Kupers shows how we have already broken the interwoven path dependencies that make fundamental change so daunting. Consider the mid-2000s, when, against all predictions, the United States rapidly switched from a reliance on coal primarily to natural gas. The change required targeted regulations, a few lone investors, independent researchers, and generous technology subsidies. But in a stunningly short period of time, shale oil nudged out coal, and carbon dioxide emissions dropped by 10 percent. Kupers shows how to replicate such patterns in order to improve transit, reduce plastics consumption, and temper the environmental impact of middle-class diets. Whether dissecting China's Ecological Civilization or the United States' Green New Deal, Kupers describes what's folly, what's possible, and which solutions just might work.

Benjamin K. Sovacool applies concepts from justice and ethics theory to contemporary energy problems, and illustrates particular solutions to those problems with examples and case studies from around the world.

The essays collected here, by both eminent and emerging scholars, engage interlocutors from Machiavelli to Arendt. Individually, they contribute compelling readings of important political thinkers and add fresh insights to debates in areas such as environmentalism and human rights. Together, the volume issues a call to think anew about nature, not only as a traditional concept that should be deconstructed or affirmed but also as a site of human political activity and struggle worthy of sustained theoretical attention.

'Essential brain food' Conde Nast Traveler 'As much a manifesto as a guide' Los Angeles Times 'Read this book and save the planet' Soho House Notes One of Business Insider's Most Anticipated Non-fiction Books of 2022 We cannot save the planet without uplifting the voices of its people - especially those most often unheard. Leah Thomas coined the term 'intersectional environmentalism' to describe the inextricable link between climate change, activism, racism and privilege. The fight for the planet should go hand in hand with the fight for civil rights. In fact, one cannot exist without the other. This book is a call to action, a guide to instigating change for all and a pledge to work toward the empowerment of all people and the betterment of the planet - an indispensable primer for activists looking to create meaningful, inclusive and sustainable change. Driven by Leah's expert voice and complemented by the words of young activists from around the globe, it is essential reading on the issue - and the movement - that will define a generation.

The greening of citizenship, the state and ideology has created both opportunities and bottlenecks for progressive political movements. Scerri argues that these are pursuing justice by making holistic demands for: fair distribution and status recognition, adequate representation and effective participation.

Our attitude to nature has changed over time. This book explores the historical, literary and philosophical origins of the changes in our attitude to nature that allowed environmental catastrophes to happen. It presents a philosophical reflection on human societies' attitude to the environment, informed by the history of the concept of landscape and the role played by the concept of nature in the human imagination and features a wealth of examples from around the world to help understand the contemporary environmental crisis in the context of both the built and natural environment. Thinking Through Landscape locates the start of this change in human labour and urban elites being cut off from nature. Nature became an imaginary construct masking our real interaction with the natural world. The book argues that this gave rise to a theoretical and literary appreciation of landscape at the expense of an effective practical engagement with nature. It draws on Heideggerian ontology and Veblen's sociology, providing a powerful distinction between two attitudes to landscape: the tacit knowledge of earlier peoples engaged in creating the landscape through their work - "landscaping thought"- and the explicit theoretical and aesthetic attitudes of modern city dwellers who love nature while belonging to a civilization that destroys the landscape - "landscape thinking". This book gives a critical survey of landscape thought and theory for students, researchers and anyone interested in human societies' relation to nature in the fields of landscape studies, environmental philosophy, cultural geography and environmental history.

Persons only develop in relation to environment, much in the same way we develop psychologically in relation to our parents and caregivers. Neither child nor parent is properly conceptualized, modelled, or understood without the inclusion of the other in the map or model of psychological/ecological development. Likewise, we perceive, think, and feel with and not just about environment and material artifacts. The achievement of sustainability then implies making changes to minds that are mediated, extended and distributed across brains, bodies, and the materiality of one's environment. Our inherited world, however broken, guides our individual and collective becoming much as a parent guides the development of a child. The traces of (un-) sustainability perspective refutes the economistic conceptual model whereby rational economic actors are misperceived and misunderstood to have the moral right, if not the duty, to actively participate in the destruction of our collective future with ethical immunity. The presumed intelligence and naturalness of the market-based economic system is exposed as primarily a historically inherited culture-based delusion. If values and attitudes can be at least partially transformed by transforming the mundane materiality which is co-constitutive of our social mind, then an important milestone will have been achieved in our understanding of (un-) sustainability.

Humanity is dependent on Nature to survive, yet our society largely acts as if this is not the case. The energy that powers our very cells, the nutrients that make up our bodies, the ecosystem services that clean our water and air; these are all provided by the Nature from which we have evolved and of which we are a part. This book examines why we deny or ignore this dependence and what we can do differently to help solve the environmental crisis. Written in an accessible and engaging style, Haydn Washington provides an excellent overview of humanity's relationship with Nature. The book looks at energy flow, nutrient cycling, ecosystem services, ecosystem collapse as well as exploring our psychological and spiritual dependency on nature. It also examines anthropocentrism and denial as causes of our unwillingness to respect our inherent dependence on the natural environment. The book concludes by bringing these issues together and providing a framework for solutions to the environmental crisis.

Written for a wide range of readers in environmental science, philosophy, and policy-oriented programs The Routledge Companion to Environmental Ethics is a landmark, comprehensive reference work in this interdisciplinary field. Not merely a review of theoretical approaches to the ethics of the environment, the Companion focuses on specific environmental problems and other concrete issues. Its 65 chapters, all appearing in print here for the first time, have been organized into the following eleven parts: I. Animals II. Land III. Water IV. Climate V. Energy and Extraction VI. Cities VII. Agriculture VIII. Environmental Transformation IX. Policy Frameworks and Response Measures X. Regulatory Tools XI. Advocacy and Activism The volume not only explains the nuances of important core philosophical positions, but also cuts new pathways for the integration of important ethical and policy issues into environmental philosophy. It will be of immense help to undergraduate students and other readers coming up to the field for the first time, but also serve as a valuable resource for more advanced students as well as researchers who need a trusted resource that also offers fresh, policy-centered approaches.

"Schmidtz's central question - what counts as a life well lived?' - is as near as may be the same as Plato's: 'for our inquiry is not about some chance matter but about how we should live our lives' (Republic 344e). Here, then, is a prime example of how to continue 'the conversation that Plato began'... an altogether satisfying, rewarding, and above all, challenging read." - Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews "Part of what ties the essays together and makes the whole more than the sum of its parts is the fact that almost all of the pieces, in one way or another, address the question of what counts as a well-lived human life. Perhaps more important, they are united by a distinctive and attractive methodological approach, one that combines the high degree of analytical clarity and rigor that one would expect from a first-rate philosopher with a kind of commonsense wisdom that is not always so common, an attention to empirical detail that goes well beyond the use of examples as mere illustrations, and a refreshingly humanistic concern with life as it is lived by people as they actually are... Those who are already familiar with Schmidtz's body of work will welcome Person, Polis, Planet as a worthy brief of his accomplishments over the last fifteen years or so. And for those who have not yet discovered Schmidtz, the collection will provide a superb introduction to his work and will likely prompt readers to seek out more of his writing." -Ethics

Over the coming decades, every academic discipline will have to respond to the paradigm of more sustainable life practices because students will be living in a world challenged by competition for resources and climate change, and will demand that every academic discipline demonstrate substantial and corresponding relevance. This book takes as its point of departure that integrating a component of sustainability into a discipline-specific course arises from an educator asking a simple question: in the coming decades, as humanity faces unprecedented challenges, what can my discipline or area of research contribute toward a better understanding of these issues? The discipline need not be future-oriented: an archaeologist, for instance, could incorporate into a course some aspects of sustainable archaeological practices in areas threatened by rapid climate change, as well as examples of sustainable or unsustainable ways of living practised by members of the long-gone society under investigation. This book also argues that courses about sustainability need to cross disciplinary boundaries, both because of the inter-relatedness of the issues, and because students will require the ability to use interdisciplinary approaches to thrive through the multiple careers most of them will face. The contributions to this book are presented under four sections. "Sustainability as a Core Value in Education" considers the rationale for incorporating sustainability in disciplinary courses. "Teaching Sustainability in the Academic Disciplines" presents eight examples of courses from disciplines as varied as agriculture, composition, engineering, and teacher education. "Education as a Sustainable Practice" reviews how the physical environment of the classroom and the delivery of instruction need themselves to reflect the values being taught. The final section addresses the issues of leadership and long-term institutional change needed to embed sustainable practice as a core value on campus.

Over the coming decades, every academic discipline will have to respond to the paradigm of more sustainable life practices because students will be living in a world challenged by competition for resources and climate change, and will demand that every academic discipline demonstrate substantial and corresponding relevance. This book takes as its point of departure that integrating a component of sustainability into a discipline-specific course arises from an educator asking a simple question: in the coming decades, as humanity faces unprecedented challenges, what can my discipline or area of research contribute toward a better understanding of these issues? The discipline need not be future-oriented: an archaeologist, for instance, could incorporate into a course some aspects of sustainable archaeological practices in areas threatened by rapid climate change, as well as examples of sustainable or unsustainable ways of living practised by members of the long-gone society under investigation. This book also argues that courses about sustainability need to cross disciplinary boundaries, both because of the inter-relatedness of the issues, and because students will require the ability to use interdisciplinary approaches to thrive through the multiple careers most of them will face. The contributions to this book are presented under four sections. “Sustainability as a Core Value in Education” considers the rationale for incorporating sustainability in disciplinary courses. “Teaching Sustainability in the Academic Disciplines” presents eight examples of courses from disciplines as varied as agriculture, composition, engineering, and teacher education. “Education as a Sustainable Practice” reviews how the physical environment of the classroom and the delivery of instruction need themselves to reflect the values being taught. The final section addresses the issues of leadership and long-term institutional change needed to embed sustainable practice as a core value on campus.

Investigating the relationship between literature and climate, this Companion offers a genealogy of climate representations in literature while showing how literature can help us make sense of climate change. It argues that any discussion of literature and climate cannot help but be shaped by our current - and inescapable - vantage point from an era of climate change, and uncovers a longer literary history of climate that might inform our contemporary climate crisis. Essays explore the conceptualisation of climate in a range of literary and creative modes; they represent a diversity of cultural and historical perspectives, and a wide spectrum of voices and views across the categories of race, gender, and class. Key issues in climate criticism and literary studies are introduced and explained, while new and emerging concepts are discussed and debated in a final section that puts expert analyses in conversation with each other.

This book addresses the question of domestic environmental labour from an ecofeminist perspective. A work of cultural geography, it explores the proposition that the practice and politics of domestic labour being undertaken in the name of 'the environment' needs to be better recognized, understood and accounted for as a phenomenon shaped by, and shaping of, gender, class and spatial relations. The book argues that a significant yet neglected phenomenon worthy of research attention is the upsurge in voluntary, and yet mostly unrecognized, domestic environmental labour in high-consuming households in late modernity, with the burden often falling on women seeking to green their lives and homes in aid of a sustainable planet. Further, because domestic environmental labour is undervalued in governance and the formal economy, much like other types of domestic labour, householders have become an unrecognized and unaccounted-for supply of labour for the greening of capitalism. Situated within broad global debates on links between ecological and social change, the book has relevance in the many jurisdictions around the world in which households are positioned as sites of environmental protection through green consumption. The volume engages existing interest in household environmental behaviour and practice, advancing understanding of these topics in new ways.

This book offers a multidisciplinary environmental approach to ethics in response to the contemporary challenge of climate change caused by globalized economics and consumption. This book synthesizes the incredible complexity of the problem and the necessity of action in response, highlighting the unambiguous problem facing humanity in the 21st century, but arguing that it is essential to develop an ethics housed in ambiguity in response. Environmental Ethics and Uncertainty is divided into theoretical and applied chapters, with the theoretical sections engaging in dialogue with scholars from a variety of disciplines, while the applied chapters offer insight from 20th century activists who demonstrate and/or illuminate the theory, including Martin Luther King, Rachel Carson, and Frank Lloyd Wright. This book is written for scholars and students in the interdisciplinary field of environmental studies and the environmental humanities, and will appeal to courses in religion, philosophy, ethics, politics, and social theory.

Environmental History as a distinct discipline is now over a generation old, with a large and diverse group of practitioners around the globe. This book provides a reflection on the achievements, diversity, and direction of environmental history in its varied national, international and continental contexts.

Human societies have always been deeply interconnected with our ecosystems, but today those relationships are witnessing greater frictions, tensions, and harms than ever before. These harms mirror those experienced by marginalized groups across the planet. In this novel book, David Naguib Pellow introduces a new framework for critically analyzing Environmental Justice scholarship and activism. In doing so he extends the field's focus to topics not usually associated with environmental justice, including the Israel/Palestine conflict and the Black Lives Matter movement in the United States. In doing so he reveals that ecological violence is first and foremost a form of social violence, driven by and legitimated by social structures and discourses. Those already familiar with the discipline will find themselves invited to think about the subject in a new way. This book will be a vital resource for students, scholars, and policy makers interested in transformative approaches to one of the greatest challenges facing humanity and the planet.

This multi-disciplinary volume brings together the voices of biblical scholars, classicists, philosophers, theologians and political theorists to explore how ecology and theology intersected in ancient thinking, both pagan, Jewish and Christian. Ecological awareness is by no means purely a modern phenomenon. Of course, melting icecaps and plastic bag charges were of no concern in antiquity: frequently what made examining your relationship with the natural world urgent was the light this shed on human relationships with the divine. For, in the ancient world, to think about ecology was also to think about theology. This ancient eco-theological thinking - whilst in many ways worlds apart from our own environmental concerns - has also had a surprisingly rich impact on modern responses to our ecological crisis. As such, the voices gathered in this volume also reflect on whether and how these ancient ideas could inform modern responses to our environment and its pressing challenges. Through multi-disciplinary conversation this volume offers a new and dynamic exploration of the intersection of ecology and theology in ancient thinking, and its living legacy.