In "Smokestacks and Progressives," David Stradling explains the evolution of one of America's first environmental movements--the antismoke crusade of the early 1900s. The roots of modern environmentalism, Stradling explains, reach deep into the Victorian era, when early reformers connected beauty, health, and cleanliness with morality and demanded government assistance in maintaining all of them. Air quality became an important issue for middle-class residents in coal-dependent cities--how could a city without pure air, they asked, truly be clean, healthful, and moral? Eventually engineers came to the fore, displaced the reformers (many of them women) as leaders of the movement, and answered their own question--how to abate dirty air.

This book examines current trends in scholarly thinking about the new field of the Environmental Humanities, focusing in particular on how the history of globalization and imperialism represents a special challenge to the representation of environmental issues. Essays in this path-breaking collection examine the role that narrative, visual, and aesthetic forms can play in drawing attention to and shaping our ideas about long-term and catastrophic environmental challenges such as climate change, militarism, deforestation, the pollution and management of the global commons, petrocapitalism, and the commodification of nature. The volume presents a postcolonial approach to the environmental humanities, especially in conjunction with current thinking in areas such as political ecology and environmental justice. Spanning regions such as Africa, Asia, Eastern Europe, Latin America and the Caribbean, Australasia and the Pacific, as well as North America, the volume includes essays by founding figures in the field as well as new scholars, providing vital new interdisciplinary perspectives on: the politics of the earth; disaster, vulnerability, and resilience; political ecologies and environmental justice; world ecologies; and the Anthropocene. In engaging critical ecologies, the volume poses a postcolonial environmental humanities for the twenty-first century. At the heart of this is a conviction that a thoroughly global, postcolonial, and comparative approach is essential to defining the emergent field of the environmental humanities, and that this field has much to offer in understanding critical issues surrounding the creation of alternative ecological futures.

At the beginning of the 21st century, the environment and the future of development continue to be issues of crucial importance. Most explanations of environmental crisis emphasize the role of population growth, thus focusing their attention on the poor. By comparison, Liberation Ecologies elaborates a political-economic explanation drawing from the most recent advances in social theory. The new edition has been extensively revised to reflect recent changes in debates over the real definitions of 'development' and 'environment', and contains nine completely new chapters.

How do scientists, scholars, and other experts engage with the general public and with the communities affected by their work or residing in their sites of study? Where are the fine lines between public scholarship, civic engagement, and activism? Must academics 'give back' once they collect data and publish results? In this volume, authors from a wide range of disciplines examine these relationships to assess how they can be fruitful or challenging. Describing the methodological and ethical issues that experts must consider when carrying out public scholarship, this book includes a checklist for critical factors of success in engagement and an examination of the role of digital social media in science communication. Illustrated by a range of case studies addressing environmental issues (climate change, resource use, post-disaster policy) and education, it offers an investigation into the levels and ways in which scholars can engage, and how and whether academics and experts who engage in community work and public scholarship are acknowledged and rewarded for doing so by their institutions. Also bringing into the debate the perspective of citizens who have collaborated with academics, the book offers an exploration of the democratizing potential of participatory action research.

A bestseller on Amazon.com within months of its first release, Alan AtKisson's debut book quickly became a modern classic of sustainability literature. Global companies, grassroots groups, university courses, government agencies, and even the US Army ordered it by the box. Now fully revised and updated, Believing Cassandra: How to be an Optimist in a Pessimist's World is even more relevant, fresh, and motivating than when it first appeared in 1999. In a style that's refreshingly candid and vivid, with unforgettable personal anecdotes, AtKisson provides us with a bridge over the sea of despair, and shows us how to catch the wave to an enticing, sustainable future. He empowers the reader to join the pioneers who created the ideas, techniques and practices of sustainable living - the people who prove Cassandra's warnings wrong, by believing in them, and taking strategic action.

Global seawater levels are rising and the low-lying coasts of the North Sea basin are amongst the most vulnerable in Europe. In our current moment of environmental crisis, the North Sea coasts are literary arenas in which the challenges and concerns of the Anthropocene are being played out. This book shows how the fragile landscapes around the North Sea have served as bellwethers for environmental concern both now and in the recent past. It looks at literary sources drawn from the countries around the North Sea (Denmark, Germany, the Netherlands, and England) from the mid-nineteenth century onwards, taking them out of their established national and cultural contexts and reframing them in the light of human concern with fast-changing and hazardous environments. The six chapters serve as literary case studies that highlight memories of flood disaster and recovery, attempts to engineer the landscape into submission, perceptions of the landscape as both local and global, and the imagination of the future of our planet. This approach, which combines environmental history and ecocriticism, shows the importance of cultural artefacts in understandings of, and responses to, environmental change, and advocates for the importance of literary studies in the environmental humanities. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of the Environmental Humanities, including Eco-criticism and Environmental History, as well as anyone studying literature from the Germanic philologies.

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.

An essential guide for every person on earth to help save our planet.

How do we live more gently on our planet? Can we put a stop to the environmental disasters that loom larger every day? These burning questions are on everyone’s mind. Wise About Waste addresses these urgent issues by providing a practical guide to reducing the waste we generate. Well-known author, academic and activist Helen Moffett looks at how we can all create less waste, and use resources more wisely. She tackles plastic waste, energy waste, food waste, manufacturing waste and much more – from homes to businesses, from immediate actions to long-term plans, there’s a strategy for everyone.

With over 150 practical tips and ideas, from the tiny and the quirky to the big and the dramatic, Wise About Waste can help us work towards waste-wise lifestyles. While there are tough questions and even tougher answers, these go hand-in-hand with reasons for hope and a good dash of humour.

In a world all too familiar with environmental disasters, Horst Kornberger argues that the bee crisis is a more significant problem than deforestation, pollution and global warming put together, as it points to the causes behind all these. Global Hive is a rallying cry for a new understanding of world ecology. More than a study of bees, this book offers both an entirely new way of thinking about the bee crisis and its causes, and a way to use the crisis to explore wider social and ecological issues. Kornberger challenges the dominant scientific worldview that reduces everything to minute detail and fails to see the larger holistic picture. He argues that we urgently need to start thinking about ecology in a different way -- by developing a new science which draws on empathy and imagination -- if we want to mend our relationship with the natural world. From this perspective, the worldwide threat of the bee crisis becomes a starting point for global change. Global Hive is a thought-provoking treatise on what colony collapse teaches us about our society, our choices and how we can build a more sustainable 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.

The volatility of climate change is increasing. It is bad news, and many climatologists, policy analysts and environmental groups regard the West as the largest contributor to the problems caused by climate change. This book raises questions concerning the systemic and cultural reasons for Western countries unwillingness to bear full responsibility for their carbon emissions. Is the Western paradigm failing? Can other cultures offer solutions? Are there alternatives for designing a better future?

Just as the roots of the problem of climate change are cultural, the solution must be too. The contributors to Global Ethics on Climate Change explore cultural alternatives. This differs from conventional climate ethics, which tends to address the crisis with utilitarian, legalistic, and analytic tools. The authors in this volume doubt whether such paradigm patches will work. It may be time to think outside the box and consider non-Western insights about the good life, indigenous wisdom on being-in-the-world, and new ideas for civil evolution. This book is an examination of candidates for a Plan B.

This book was published as a special issue of the Journal of Global Ethics.

In twenty short books, Penguin brings you the classics of the environmental movement. In The Democracy of Species Robin Wall Kimmerer guides us towards a more reciprocal, grateful and joyful relationship with our animate earth, from the wild leeks in the field to the deer in the woods. Over the past 75 years, a new canon has emerged. As life on Earth has become irrevocably altered by humans, visionary thinkers around the world have raised their voices to defend the planet, and affirm our place at the heart of its restoration. Their words have endured through the decades, becoming the classics of a movement. Together, these books show the richness of environmental thought, and point the way to a fairer, saner, greener world.

Impending environmental crises have led to general consensus within green political thought that liberal principles of justice and green concerns make for uneasy bedfellows. This book critiques the contextual framework within which Rawls's political liberalism is assessed as suitable or unsuitable for 'greening'. It provides a detailed and comprehensive overview of the research done on the subjects of Rawls and environmental concerns. It challenges an emerging consensus within the existing literature that Rawls's political philosophy can only incorporate minimal green concerns by offering an alternative communitarian reading of Rawls's 'well-ordered society' that allows for the possibility of a 'darker' green, Rawlsian stewardship ethic. The book outlines the plurality of methodological and ethical approaches undertaken by green political theorists in analysing the contribution Rawls's theory makes to environmental concerns. The variety of approaches undertaken by theorists in this area highlight a certain arbitrariness of the 'tests' or 'standards' used to measure the green credentials of Rawls's political theory.Finally the book argues that attempts to rule out the green credentials of Rawls's theory form part of a wider disquiet, and even frustration, with the inability of liberal and procedurally-neutral polities to instil the requisite virtues and qualities of character to develop a new generation of environmental citizens able to address environmental crises. Rawls and Environmental Stewardship fills the gap for a much needed reassessment of 25 years of critiques of Rawls. This inspiring book is of great interest to researchers in contemporary political philosophy, environmental ethics, green political theory, stewardship theory and all those interested in renewing existing conceptions of deliberative democracy.

The Environmental Documentary provides the first extensive coverage of the most important environmental films of the decade, including their approach to their topics and their impacts on public opinion and political debate. While documentaries with themes of environmental activism date back at least to Pare Lorenz's films of the 1930's, no previous decade has produced the number and quality of films that engage environmental issues from an activist viewpoint. The convergence of high profile issues like climate change, fossil fuel depletion, animal abuse, and corporate malfeasance has combined with the miniaturization of high quality recording equipment and the expansion of documentary programming, to produce an unprecedented number of important and influential documentary productions. The text examines the processes of production and distribution that have produced this explosion in documentaries. The films range from a high-profile Hollywood production with theatrical distribution like An Inconvenient Truth, to shorter independently produced films like The End of Suburbia that have reached a small audience of activists through video distribution, interviews with many of the filmmakers, and word of mouth.

In Time is Running Out: Reflections on an Alternative Way of Being, John Reed presents the reader with an honest and uncompromising appraisal of how politics, capitalism, social conditions and climate change are interrelating so as to constitute a 'perfect storm' of challenges that will determine the future of civilisation. John Reed explains that 'the ones most adaptable to change' will be those with the necessary psycho/spiritual resources. This book examines what that means and how human consciousness must evolve to make life sustainable in society and on the planet as a whole. This is an important and timely polemic.

From Jamestown to 9/11, concerns about the landscape, husbanding of natural resources, and the health of our environment have been important to the American way of life. Natural Protest is the first collection of original essays to offer a cohesive social and political examination of environmental awareness, activism, and justice throughout American history. Editors Michael Egan and Jeff Crane have selected the finest new scholarship in the field, establishing this complex and fascinating subject firmly at the forefront of American historical study.

Focused and thought-provoking, Natural Protest presents a cutting-edge perspective on American environmentalism and environmental history, providing an invaluable resource for anyone concerned about the ecological fate of the world around us.

Do depictions of crazy cat ladies obscure more sinister structural violence against animals hoarded in factory farms? Highlighting the frequent pathologization of animal lovers and animal rights activists, this book examines how the "madness" of our relationships with animals intersects with the "madness" of taking animals seriously. The essays collected in this volume argue that "animaladies" are expressive of political and psychological discontent, and the characterization of animal advocacy as mad or "crazy" distracts attention from broader social unease regarding human exploitation of animal life. While allusions to madness are both subtle and overt, they are also very often gendered, thought to be overly sentimental with an added sense that emotions are being directed at the wrong species. Animaladies are obstacles for the political uptake of interest in animal issues-as the intersections between this volume and established feminist scholarship show, the fear of being labeled unreasonable or mad still has political currency.

Environmental issues raise crucial questions. What should we value? What is our place in nature? What kind of life should we live? How should we interact with other living things? Environmental management and policy-making is ultimately based on answers to these and similar questions, but do we need a new ethics to be able overcome the environmental crisis we face? This book addresses these important questions and explores the values that decision-makers often presuppose in their environmental policy-making. Examining the content of the ethics of sustainable development that the UN and the world's governments want us to embrace, this book examines alternatives to this kind of ethics, and the differences in basic values that these make in practice. Offering a detailed analysis of the ethics that lie behind current policy-making as it is expressed in documents such as Agenda 21 and the Rio Declaration, this unique contribution to the field of environmental studies shows how different environmental ethical theories support different goals of environmental management and generate different policies when it comes to population growth, agriculture, and preservation and management of wilderness areas and endangered species. Mikael Stenmark concludes that policy-makers must take more seriously the value assumptions and conflicts connected to environmental issues, and state explicitly on what values their own proposals and decisions are based and why these should be accepted. Those studying environmental issues or environmental philosophy will find this accessible text invaluable in presenting a clear understanding of environmental ethics and contemporary applications and policies.

Offering an exciting ride into how the world could be, this book is the one we have been waiting for. Feminists have long been saying we could do life differently, here is the local and global exploration of what needs to change, what must go and how together we can make a new reality. A visionary book with a focus on local and global politics and social movements, Wild Politics presents a powerful critique of global western culture. Susan Hawthorne unpicks the structures of power and knowledge, law and international trade rules, as well as probing issues that intimately affect our daily lives. Wild Politics concludes with a compelling vision for a world inspired by biodiversity

In twenty short books, Penguin brings you the classics of the environmental movement. Emphasizing joy in the world, human cooperation and the value of all living things, this selection of Arne Naess' philosophical writings is filled with wit, learning and an intense connection with nature. Over the past 75 years, a new canon has emerged. As life on Earth has become irrevocably altered by humans, visionary thinkers around the world have raised their voices to defend the planet, and affirm our place at the heart of its restoration. Their words have endured through the decades, becoming the classics of a movement. Together, these books show the richness of environmental thought, and point the way to a fairer, saner, greener world.

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.

Table of Contents

A New Environmental Agenda for Cities? * Environmental Problems in the Home, Workplace and Neighbourhood * The City Environment * Who Bears the Environmental Costs in Cities * The Rural, Regional and Global Impacts of Cities * Tackling Environmental Health Problems * Tackling City-wide Problems * Sustainable Development and Cities * Conclusions *

The body as a measuring tool for planetary harm. A nervous system under increasing stress. In this urgent collection that moves from the personal to the political and back again, writer, activist, and migrant Jessica Gaitan Johannesson explores how we respond to crises. She draws parallels between an eating disorder and environmental neurosis, examines the perils of an activist movement built on non-parenthood, dissects the privilege of how we talk about hope, and more. The synapses that spark between these essays connect essential narratives of response and responsibility, community and choice, belonging and bodies. They carry vital signals.

The profoundly moving story of how love, courage and determination brought Greta Thunberg's family back from the brink This is the story of a happy family whose life suddenly fell apart, never to be the same again. Of two devoted parents plunged into a waking nightmare as their eleven-year-old daughter Greta stopped speaking and eating, and her younger sister struggled to cope. They desperately searched for answers, and began to see how their children's suffering reached far beyond medical diagnoses. This crisis was not theirs alone: they were burned-out people on a burned-out planet. And so they decided to act. Our House is on Fire shows how, amid forces that tried to silence them, one family found ways to strengthen, heal, and gain courage from the love they had for each other - and for the living world. It is a parable of hope and determination in an emergency that affects us all.

Environmental movements have produced some impressive results, including cleaner air and the preservation of selected species and places. But movements that challenged western prosperity and comfort seldom made much progress, and many radical environmentalists have been unabashed utopianists. In this short guide, Peterson del Mar untangles this paradox by showing how prosperity is essential to environmentalism. Industrialisation made conservation sensible, but also drove people to look for meaning in nature even as they consumed its products more relentlessly. Hence Englandled the way in both manufacturing and preserving its countryside, and the United Statescreated a matchless set of national parks as it became the world's pre-eminent economic and military power. Environmentalismconsiders both the conservation and preservation movements and less organized forms of nature loving (from seaside vacations to ecotourism) to argue that these activities have commonly distracted us from the hard work of creating a sustainable and sensible relationship with the environment.