Dysfunctional cities, catastrophic climate change, ever-deepening distance from nature--today we see environmental disaster everywhere we look. In Mobilizing the Green Imagination, philosophical provocateur Anthony Weston urges us to move beyond ever more desperate attempts to "green" the status quo toward entirely different and far more inviting ecological visions: * Life after transportation--decentralized work, inventive infill, and self-sufficient micro-communities to facilitate life in place * Adaptation with attitude--cities that welcome the rising waters * A great second chance--moving beyond exploitation of the whole natural world * A cosmic ecology--why not a green space program? These postcards from beyond the leading edge of today's green thinking are bold, audacious, extravagantly hopeful, and profoundly inspiring--the perfect antidote to the despair brought on by too many "doom and gloom" scenarios. Nothing less than a complete reinvention of contemporary environmentalism, Mobilizing the Green Imagination belongs in the back pocket of anyone who dares to dream of a brighter future and a better world. Anthony Weston is professor of philosophy and environmental studies at Elon University in North Carolina, where he teaches ethics, environmental studies, and "Millennial Imagination." He is the author of twelve other books, including How to Re-Imagine the World and Back to Earth, as well as many articles on ethics, critical thinking, education, and contemporary culture. At Elon, Weston has been named both Teacher of the Year and Scholar of the Year.

Our attitudes to our environment are widely and often acrimoniously discussed, commonly misunderstood, and will shape our future. We cannot assume that we behave as newly minted beings in a pristine garden nor as pre-programmed automata incapable of rational responsibility. Professor Berry has studied nature-nurture interactions for many years, and also been involved with many national and international decision making bodies which have influenced our environmental attitudes. He is therefore well-placed to describe what has moulded our present attitudes towards the environment. This book presents data and concepts from a range of disciplines - genetic, anthropological, social, historical and theological - to help us understand how we have responded in the past and how this influences our future. Beginning with a historical review and moving forwards to current conditions, readers will reach the end of this volume more capable and better prepared to make decisions which affect our communities and posterity.

History is not a prerogative of the human species, Edward O. Wilson declares in Half-Earth. Demonstrating that we blindly ignore the histories of millions of other species, Wilson warns us that a point of no return is imminent. Refusing to believe that our extinction is predetermined, Wilson has written Half-Earth as a cri de coeur, proposing that the only solution to our impending "Sixth Extinction" is to increase the area of natural reserves to half the surface of the earth. Half-Earth is a resounding conclusion to the best-selling trilogy begun by the "splendid" (Financial Times) The Social Conquest of Earth (ISBN 978 0 87140 363 6) and "engaging and highly readable" (Times Higher Education) The Meaning of Human Existence (ISBN 978 0 87140 100 7).

The Anthropocene is a proposed geological epoch marking humanity's alteration of the Earth: its rock structure, environments, atmosphere. The Cambridge Companion to Literature and the Anthropocene offers the most comprehensive survey yet of how literature can address the social, cultural, and philosophical questions posed by the Anthropocene. This volume addresses the old and new literary forms - from novels, plays, poetry, and essays to exciting and evolving genres such as 'cli-fi', experimental poetry, interspecies design, gaming, weird, ecotopian and petro-fiction, and 'new' nature writing. Studies range from the United States to India, from Palestine to Scotland, while addressing numerous global signifiers or consequences of the Anthropocene: catastrophe, extinction, 'fossil capital', warming, politics, ethics, interspecies relations, deep time, and Earth. This unique Companion offers a compelling account of how to read literature through the Anthropocene and of how literature might yet help us imagine a better world.

This book investigates the psycho-social phenomenon which is society's failure to respond to climate change. It analyses the non-rational dimensions of our collective paralysis in the face of worsening climate change and environmental destruction, exploring the emotional, ethical, social, organizational and cultural dynamics to blame for this global lack of action. The book features eleven research projects from four different countries and is divided in two parts, the first highlighting novel methodologies, the second presenting new findings. Contributors to the first part show how a 'deep listening' approach to research can reveal the anxieties, tensions, contradictions, frames and narratives that contribute to people's experiences, and the many ways climate change and other environmental risks are imagined through metaphor, imagery and dreams. Using detailed interview extracts drawn from politicians, scientists and activists as well as ordinary people, the second part of the book examines the many different ways in which we both avoid and square up to this gathering disaster, and the many faces of alarm, outrage, denial and indifference this involves.

Why are our environmental problems still growing despite a huge increase in global conservation efforts? Peterson del Mar untangles this paradox by showing how prosperity is essential to environmentalism. Industrialization drove people to look for meaning in nature even as they consumed its products more relentlessly. Hence England led the way in both manufacturing and preserving its countryside, and the United States created a matchless set of national parks as it became the world's pre-eminent economic and military power.

Environmental movements have produced some impressive results, including cleaner air and the preservation of selected species and places. But agendas that challenged western prosperity and comfort seldom made much progress, and many radical environmentalists have been unabashed utopianists. Environmentalism considers a wide range of 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.

One of the earliest warnings about climate change and one of environmentalism's lodestars 'Nature, we believe, takes forever. It moves with infinite slowness,' begins the first book to bring climate change to public attention. Interweaving lyrical observations from his life in the Adirondack Mountains with insights from the emerging science, Bill McKibben sets out the central developments not only of the environmental crisis now facing us but also the terms of our response, from policy to the fundamental, philosophical shift in our relationship with the natural world which, he argues, could save us. A moving elegy to nature in its pristine, pre-human wildness, The End of Nature is both a milestone in environmental thought, indispensable to understanding how we arrived here.

Ecosocialists believe that the prevention of an unprecedented ecological catastrophe and the preservation of a natural environment favourable to human life are incompatible with the expansive and destructive logic of the capitalist system. In Ecosocialism, Michael Lowy, Research Director at Paris' National Centre for Scientific Research, explores some of the main ecosocialist proposals and concrete experiences of struggle, particularly in Latin America.

In his book, The Monster at Our Door, the renowned activist and author Mike Davis warned of a coming global threat of viral catastrophes. Now in this expanded edition of that 2005 book, Davis explains how the problems he warned of remain, and he sets the COVID-19 pandemic in the context of previous disastrous outbreaks, notably the 1918 influenza disaster that killed at least forty million people in three months and the Avian flu of a decade and a half ago. In language both accessible and authoritative, The Monster Enters surveys the scientific and political roots of today's viral apocalypse. In doing so it exposes the key roles of agribusiness and the fast-food industries, abetted by corrupt governments and a capitalist global system careening out of control, in creating the ecological pre-conditions for a plague that has brought much of human existence to a juddering halt.

In twenty short books, Penguin brings you the classics of the environmental movement. In this personal and wide-ranging exploration of how our collective imaginations fail to grasp the scale of environmental destruction, Amitav Ghosh summons writers and novelists to confront the most urgent story of our times. 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.

The ecocide and domination of nature that is the Anthropocene does not represent the actions of all humans, but that of Man, the Western and masculine identified corporate, military, intellectual, and political class that long has masked itself as the civilized and the human. In this book, Jane Caputi looks at two major "myths" of the Earth, one ancient and one contemporary, and uses them to devise a manifesto for the survival of nature-which includes human beings-in our current ecological crisis. These are the myths of Mother Earth and the Anthropocene. The former personifies nature as a figure with the power to give life or death, and one who shares a communal destiny with all other living things. The latter myth sees humans as exceptional for exerting an implicitly sexual domination of Mother Earth through technological achievement, from the plow to synthetic biology and artificial intelligence. Much that we take for granted as inferior or taboo is based in a splitting apart of inherent unities: culture-nature; up-down, male-female; spirit-matter; mind-body; life-death; sacred-profane; reason-madness; human-beast; light-dark. The first is valued and the second reviled. This provides the framework for any number of related injustices-sexual, racial, and ecological. This book resists this pattern, in part, by deliberately putting the dirty back into the mind, the obscene back into the sacred, and vice versa. Ecofeminism and Environmental Justice argue for the significance and reality of the Earth Mother. Caputi engages specifically with the powers of that Mother, ones made taboo and even obscene throughout heteropatriarchal traditions. Jane Caputi rejects misogynist and colonialist stereotypes, and examines the potency of the Earth Mother in order to deepen awareness of how our relationship to the Earth went astray and what might be done to address this. Drawing upon Indigenous and African American, ecofeminism, ecowomanism, green activism, femme, queer and gender non-binary philosophies, literature and arts, Afrofuturism, and popular culture images, Call Your "Mutha" contends that the Anthropocene is not evidence so much of Man's supremacy, but instead a sign that Mother Nature-Earth, faced with disrespect, is turning away, withdrawing the support systems necessary for life and continuance. Caputi looks at contemporary narratives and artwork to consider the ways in which respect for the autonomous and potent Earth Mother and a call for their return has already reasserted itself into our political and popular culture.

In this book, Sander Van der Leeuw examines how the modern world has been caught in a socio-economic dynamic that has generated the conundrum of sustainability. Combining the methods of social science and complex systems science, he explores how western, developed nations have globalized their world view and how that view has led to the sustainability challenges we are now facing. Its central theme is the co-evolution of cognition, demography, social organization, technology and environmental impact. Beginning with the earliest human societies, Van der Leeuw links the distant past with the present in order to demonstrate how the information and communications technology revolution is undermining many of the institutional pillars on which contemporary societies have been constructed. An original view of social evolution as the history of human information-processing, his book shows how the past offers insight into the present, and can help us deal with the future. This title is also available as Open Access.

Das Buch untersucht die Auswirkungen eines Menschenrechts auf Wasser auf die Nutzung grenzuberschreitender Wasserressourcen und fragt nach den Implikationen fur das internationale Wasserrecht. Es bewegt sich damit an der Schnittstelle des internationalen Menschenrechtsschutzes und des Umweltvoelkerrechts. Die Nutzung von Susswasserressourcen stellt eine inharent internationale Frage dar. Obgleich die Erde von grenzuberschreitenden Gewassern gepragt ist, sind die Verpflichtungen von Staaten gegenuber Rechtstragern in anderen Landern weitestgehend unklar. Die Autorin entwickelt zunachst die These der extraterritorialen Geltung dieses Menschenrechts, womit dieses zum (zusatzlichen) Massstab im Umgang mit grenzuberschreitenden Gewassern wird. Das Buch untersucht was dieser neue, am Menschenrecht ausgerichtete Massstab beinhaltet und was dies fur das internationale Wasserrecht letztlich bedeutet. Sind die Metadaten final von Ihnen freigegeben, werde ich eine ISBN beantragen, ein Cover erstellen lassen und das Buch wird auf unserer Website sichtbar. Sobald dann noch die Summary und die Abdruckgenehmigung vorliegen, kann das Manuskript umgehend in Herstellung gehen.

Future generations, wildlife, and natural resources - collectively referred to as 'the voiceless' in this work - are the most vulnerable and least equipped populations to protect themselves from the impacts of global climate change. While domestic and international law protections are beginning to recognize rights and responsibilities that apply to the voiceless community, these legal developments have yet to be pursued in a collective manner and have not been considered together in the context of climate change and climate justice. In Climate Change and the Voiceless, Randall S. Abate identifies the common vulnerabilities of the voiceless in the Anthropocene era and demonstrates how the law, by incorporating principles of sustainable development, can evolve to protect their interests more effectively. This work should be read by anyone interested in how the law can be employed to mitigate the effects of climate change on those who stand to lose the most.

Green social work espouses a holistic approach to all peoples and other living things - plants and animals, and the physical ecosystem; emphasises the relational nature of all its constituent parts; and redefines the duty to care for and about others as one that includes the duty to care for and about planet earth. By acknowledging the interdependency of all living things it allows for the inclusion of all systems and institutions in its remit, including both (hu)man-made and natural disasters arising from the (hu)made ones of poverty to chemical pollution of the earth's land, waters and soils and climate change, to the natural hazards like earthquakes and volcanoes which turn to disasters through human (in)action. Green social work's value system is also one that favours equality, social inclusion, the equitable distribution of resources, and a rights-based approach to meeting people's needs to live in an ethical and sustainable manner. Responding to these issues is one of the biggest challenges facing social workers in the twenty-first century which this Handbook is intended to address. Through providing the theories, practices, policies, knowledge and skills required to act responsibly in responding to the diverse disasters that threaten to endanger all living things and planet earth itself, this green social work handbook will be required reading for all social work students, academics and professionals, as well as those working in the fields of community development and disaster management.

'Laurence Coupe's 'Green Studies Reader' provides an excellent overview of achievements to date in this emerging field . . . Coupe's anthology is a wide-ranging introduction to a thriving branch of literary study. The extracts are brief and well-chosen, and the wealth of introductory material is always informative. It should make a very good textbook, but it is also a stimulating collection for anyone interested in the fruitful intersection between environmentalism and literature.' - Annotated Bibliography for English Studies

Exploring the rich range of meanings that Shakespeare finds in the natural world, this book fuses ecocritical approaches to Renaissance literature with recent thinking about the significance of religion in Shakespeare's plays. MacFaul offers a clear introduction to some of the key problems in Renaissance natural philosophy and their relationship to Reformation theology, with individual chapters focusing on the role of animals in Shakespeare's universe, the representation of rural life, and the way in which humans' consumption of natural materials transforms their destinies. These discussions enable powerful new readings of Shakespeare's plays, including A Midsummer Night's Dream, As You Like It, King Lear, Macbeth, The Tempest, The Winter's Tale, and the history plays. Proposing that Shakespeare's representation of the relationship between man and nature anticipated that of the Romantics, this volume will interest scholars of Shakespeare studies, Renaissance drama and literature, and ecocritical studies of Shakespeare.

From internationally bestselling author and celebrated scientist Tim Flannery, a history of Europe unlike any before: an ecological account of the land itself and the forces shaping life on it. In Europe: A Natural History, world-renowned scientist, explorer, and conservationist Tim Flannery applies the eloquent interdisciplinary approach he used in his ecological histories of Australia and North America to the story of Europe. He begins 100 million years ago, when the continents of Asia, North America, and Africa interacted to create an island archipelago that would later become the Europe we know today. It was on these ancient tropical lands that the first distinctly European organisms evolved. Flannery teaches us about Europe's midwife toad, which has endured since the continent's beginning, while elephants, crocodiles, and giant sharks have come and gone. He explores the monumental changes wrought by the devastating comet strike and shows how rapid atmospheric shifts transformed the European archipelago into a single landmass during the Eocene. As the story moves through millions of years of evolutionary history, Flannery eventually turns to our own species, describing the immense impact humans had on the continent's flora and fauna--within 30,000 years of our arrival in Europe, the woolly rhino, the cave bear, and the giant elk, among others, would disappear completely. The story continues right up to the present, as Flannery describes Europe's leading role in wildlife restoration, and then looks ahead to ponder the continent's future: with advancements in gene editing technology, European scientists are working to recreate some of the continent's lost creatures, such as the great ox of Europe's primeval forests and even the woolly mammoth. Written with Flannery's characteristic combination of elegant prose and scientific expertise, Europe: A Natural History narrates the dramatic natural history and dynamic evolution of one of the most influential places on Earth.

Looking to the vast human history of water worship, a crucial study of our broken relationship with all things aquatic - and how we might mend it. Early human relationships with water were expressed through beliefs in serpentine aquatic deities: rainbow-coloured, feathered or horned serpents, giant anacondas and dragons. Representing the powers of water, these beings were bringers of life and sustenance, world creators, ancestors, guardian spirits and law makers. Worshipped and appeased, they embodied people's respect for water and its vital role in sustaining all living things. Yet today, though we still recognise that 'water is life', fresh- and saltwater ecosystems have been critically compromised by human activities. This major study of water beings, and what has happened to them in different cultural and historical contexts, demonstrates how and why some - but not all - societies have moved from worshipping water to wreaking havoc upon it, and asks what we can do to turn the tide. 'A far-ranging and gorgeously illustrated study, Water Beings explores humanity's enduring but always transforming connections to the wellsprings of life. A profound and entertaining book for a time when reimagining humanity's future has never been more vital.' - Caspar Henderson, author of The Book of Barely Imagined Beings 'With passion, rigor and creative depth, Strang eloquently takes readers across the world to further our understanding of water's natural, cultural, and symbolic qualities. Water beings are brought to life alongside relational beliefs and practices. This is a magnificent work that reflects a rich human/water/culture relationship, and explores possibilities to avoid a climate crisis future.' - Sandy Toussaint, University of Western Australia 'A spellbinding anthropological itinerary through the winding ways of serpentine water beings as they have manifested through history and across cultures. Luminously illustrated, ingeniously researched, and beautifully narrated, Strang's book is a treasure, a store of revelatory stories about how materiality, meaning, and myth have intertwined to create the aqueous spirits and deities that have accompanied human being and becoming.' - Stefan Helmreich, Elting E. Morison Professor of Anthropology, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

With cost-benefit analysis, economic sciences cultivate a specific decision-making procedure, which has also been partially adopted in politics. Although economists do not experience the approach as normative, on closer examination the approach can be identified as an economic ethics. The present philosophical and at the same time transdisciplinary (with special legal and economic components) treatment examines the persuasive power of this approach using climate change as an example, as the most important sustainability issue. The objections raised against the economisation of decision-making with regard to the utilitarian tradition, such as the criticism of the orientation towards weighing up options, the alleged lack of distributive justice or the tendency to describe people in behavioural science as selfish, are hardly or not at all convincing on closer examination. In several respects, however, it turns out that cost-benefit analysis faces insoluble problems. Firstly, the theoretical basis of (hidden normative) cost-benefit analysis in philosophical empiricism does not seem tenable. This means the idea of empiricism that normative questions must be transformed into questions of factual (countable and reproduceable) preferences of people. Secondly, there are massive collisions of cost-benefit analysis with a liberal-democratic constitutional law, whose principles are universal ethical principles. This concerns both freedom rights (which must not depend on the ability of humans to pay) and the model of democracy and respect for the rule of law. Thirdly, insoluble problems of application arise for cost-benefit analyses, which are particularly (but not only) apparent in the context of climate protection, in general considerations as in the case of legislation as well as in individual analyses, as done when constructing a coal-fired power plant. A strongly deflated cost-benefit analysis could nevertheless contribute factual material - such as partial aspects of decision consequences that can actually be depicted in monetary terms - to ethical or legal decision-making processes. In this respect the approach appears helpful and complementary, but not beyond that.

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.

India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh contain one-fifth of humanity, are home to many biodiversity hotspots, and are among the nations most subject to climatic stresses. By surveying their environmental history, we can gain major insights into the causes and implications of the Indian subcontinent's current conditions. This accessible new survey begins roughly 100 million years ago, when continental drift moved India from the South Pole and across the Indian Ocean, forming the Himalayan Mountains and creating monsoons. Coverage continues to the twenty-first century, taking readers beyond independence from colonial rule. The new nations of India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh have produced rising populations and have stretched natural resources, even as they have become increasingly engaged with climate change. To understand the region's current and future pressing issues, Michael H. Fisher argues that we must engage with the long and complex history of interactions among its people, land, climate, flora, and fauna.

Habit rules our lives. And yet climate change and the catastrophic future it portends, makes it clear that we cannot go on like this. Our habits are integral to narratives of the good life, to social norms and expectations, as well as to economic reality. Such shared shapes are vital. Yet while many of our individual habits seem perfectly reasonable, when aggregated together they spell disaster. Beyond consumerism, other forms of life and patterns of dwelling are clearly possible. But how can we get there from here? Who precisely is the 'we' that our habits have created, and who else might we be? Philosophy is about emancipation-from illusions, myths, and oppression. In Reoccupy Earth, the noted philosopher David Wood shows how an approach to philosophy attuned to our ecological existence can suspend the taken-for-granted and open up alternative forms of earthly dwelling. Sharing the earth, as we do, raises fundamental questions about space and time, place and history, territory and embodiment-questions that philosophy cannot directly answer but can help us to frame and to work out for ourselves. Deconstruction exposes all manner of exclusion, violence to the other, and silent subordination. Phenomenology and Whitehead's process philosophy offer further resources for an ecological imagination. Bringing an uncommon lucidity, directness, and even practicality to sophisticated philosophical questions, Wood plots experiential pathways that disrupt our habitual existence and challenge our everyday complacency. In walking us through a range of reversals, transformations, and estrangements that thinking ecologically demands of us, Wood shows how living responsibly with the earth means affirming the ways in which we are vulnerable, receptive, and dependent, and the need for solidarity all round. If we take seriously values like truth, justice, and compassion we must be willing to contemplate that the threat we pose to the earth might demand our own species' demise. Yet we have the capacity to live responsibly. In an unfashionable but spirited defense of an enlightened anthropocentrism, Wood argues that to deserve the privileges of Reason we must demonstrably deploy it through collective sustainable agency. Only in this way can we reinhabit the earth.

In twenty short books, Penguin brings you the classics of the environmental movement. With the precision of a scientist and the simplicity of a fable, Rachel Carson reveals how man-made pesticides have destroyed wildlife, creating a world of polluted streams and silent songbirds. 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.