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.

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.

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.

What explains our attitudes towards the environment? Why do so many climate change initiatives fail? How can we do more to prevent humans damaging the environment?

The Psychology of Climate Change explores the evidence for our changing environment, and suggests that there are significant cognitive biases in how we think about, and act on climate change. The authors examine how organisations have attempted to mobilise the public in the fight against climate change, but these initiatives have often failed due to the public’s unwillingness to adapt their behaviour. The book also explores why some people deny climate change altogether, and the influence that these climate change deniers can have on global action to mitigate further damage.

By analysing our attitudes to the environment, The Psychology of Climate Change argues that we must think differently about climate change to protect our planet, as a matter of great urgency.

Table of Contents

1. Introduction: The science and politics of climate change 2. The great climate change ‘debate’, and why this has been so damaging 3. Cognitive biases in our thinking about climate change. 4. Climate change initiatives, and why they failed. 5. Assessing our real attitudes to climate change. 6. How might we change underlying implicit attitudes? 7. Future challenges

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.

Ever get the feeling that things are falling apart? You're not alone. From bad banks to global warming it can all look hopeless, but what if everything could turn out, well, even better than before? What if the only thing holding us back is a lack of imagination and a surplus of old orthodoxies? In fascinating and iconoclastic detail - on everything from the cash in your pocket to the food on your plate and the shape of our working lives - Cancel the Apocalypse describes how the relentless race for economic growth is not always one worth winning, how excessive materialism has come at a terrible cost to our environment, and hasn't even made us any happier in the process. Simms believes passionately in the human capacity for change, and shows how the good life remains in our grasp. While global warming and financial meltdown might feel like modern day horsemen of the apocalypse, Simms shows how such end of the world scenarios offer us the chance for a new beginning.

This is the road from climate change to primate change.

PRIMATE CHANGE is a wide-ranging, polemical look at how and why the human body has changed since humankind first got up on two feet. Spanning the entirety of human history – from primate to transhuman – Vybarr Cregan-Reid’s book investigates where we came from, who we are today and how modern technology will change us beyond recognition.

In the last two hundred years, humans have made such a tremendous impact on the world that our geological epoch is about to be declared the ‘Anthropocene’, or the Age of Man. But while we have been busy changing the shape of the world we inhabit, the ways of living that we have been building have, as if under the cover of darkness, been transforming our bodies and altering the expression of our DNA, too.

Primate Change beautifully unscrambles the complex architecture of our modern human bodies, built over millions of years and only starting to give up on us now.

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.

'One of the most influential books about the natural world ever published' Paul Kingsnorth, Guardian 'There are some who can live without wild things, and some who cannot,' begins Aldo Leopold's totemic work of ecological thought. Ranging from lyrical observations of the changing seasons over a year on his Wisconsin farm to his hugely influential idea of a 'land ethic' signifying moral equilibrium between humans and all other life on earth, A Sand County Almanac changed perceptions of the natural world and helped give birth to the modern conservation movement. 'An unequivocal statement of conscience that will carry down the generations ... his argument seems more urgently true now than ever' The New York Times

For more than 40 years politicians, activists, advocates, and individuals have been seeking ways to solve the problem of climate change. Governments and the United Nations have taken an economic path, while others seek solutions in the equality of climate justice. Taking the step from green consumer to the streets at climate summits and protest camps, as well as taking direct action recasts activists as everything from tree huggers, to domestic extremists, to ecoterrorists. Political policing and new legislation increasingly criminalizes environmental activism, supported by media reporting that recasts environmental activism as actions to be feared. Why this has happened and how activists have learned to circumvent the media's recasting is the story of Environmental Activisim and the Media: The Politics of Protest. Through media movements to persuade the moveable middle, high court challenges, and gatekeeping, activists have found ways to challenge media and political discourse. This book identifies four key areas to tie together diverse sets of green governmentality, traditional media discourse, and activism: (1) environmental governance and green governmentality; (2) historical media discourse; (3) alternative communication infrastructures; and (4) local to the global. Using data from 50 interviews, archival research, and non-participatory observation from environmental activists from the UK, USA, and Australia, this text will show why protest is important in democratic political participation. From activists to slacktivists, Environmental Activism and the Media: The Politics of Protest is for those with an interest in cultural, social, and political studies; democratic processes; climate and social justice; governmentality; and/or the study of environmental politics, human geography, communication, and sustainability.

In the current age of science and technology, our lives have become dominated by countless scientific and technological innovations without which the earth would be a much poorer place. Life as we know would become absolutely bleak and boring without the inventions and advances being made all over the globe. In fact, scientific inventions, discoveries and innovations have ushered in a dramatic revolution in virtually every sphere of life. But at the same time, the skewed use of technology is at loggerheads with the environment. We, and our environment, now face a number of critical challenges and it is in response to this that we wrote this book to raise awareness for environmental issues and related management aspects. With a primary focus on Environmental Management - the rational reconciliation of man and nature, which involves the judicious exploitation and utilization of natural resources without disturbing the ecosystem's balance - it will thus help to improve the relationship between man and environment. Moreover, it offers a wealth of ready-to-use material for advanced undergraduate and graduate students of Environment and Water Management. The book systematically addresses a range of key aspects, e.g. scientific principles, methods and ideas, as well as life-long learning skills for students. Further, it provides a solid foundation for applying scientific approaches to environmental problems.

This book presents a critical history of the intersections between American environmental literature and ecological restoration policy and practice. Through a storying-restorying-restoring framework, this book explores how entanglements between writers and places have produced literary interventions in restoration politics. The book considers the ways literary landscapes are politicized by writers themselves, and by conservationists, activists, policymakers, and others, in defense of U.S. public lands and the idea of wilderness. The book profiles five environmental writers and examines how their writings on nature, wildness, wilderness, conservation, preservation, and restoration have variously inspired and been translated into ecological restoration programs and campaigns by environmental organizations. The featured authors are Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862) at Walden Pond, John Muir (1838-1914) in Yosemite National Park, Aldo Leopold (1887-1948) at his family's Wisconsin sand farm, Marjory Stoneman Douglas (1890-1998) in the Everglades, and Edward Abbey (1927-1989) in Glen Canyon. This book combines environmental history, literature, biography, philosophy, and politics in a commentary on considering (and developing) environmental literature's place in conversations on restoration ecology, ecological restoration, and rewilding.

In spite of the expanding role of public participation in environmental decisionmaking, there has been little systematic examination of whether it has, to date, contributed toward better environmental management. Neither have there been extensive empirical studies to examine how participation processes can be made more effective. Democracy in Practice brings together, for the first time, the collected experience of 30 years of public involvement in environmental decisionmaking. Using data from 239 cases, the authors evaluate the success of public participation and the contextual and procedural factors that lead to it. Thomas Beierle and Jerry Cayford demonstrate that public participation has not only improved environmental policy, but it has also played an important educational role and has helped resolve the conflict and mistrust that often plague environmental issues. Among the authors' findings are that intensive "problem-solving" processes are most effective for achieving a broad set of social goals, and participant motivation and agency responsiveness are key factors for success. Democracy in Practice will be useful for a broad range of interests. For researchers, it assembles the most comprehensive data set on the practice of public participation, and presents a systematic typology and evaluation framework. For policymakers, political leaders, and citizens, it provides concrete advice about what to expect from public participation, and how it can be made more effective. Democracy in Practice concludes with a systematic guide for use by government agencies in their efforts to design successful public participation efforts.

In 1954, a massive irradiated dinosaur emerged from Tokyo Bay and rained death and destruction on the Japanese capital: Godzilla. Over the course of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, Godzilla and other monsters such as Mothra and Gamera continually plague Japan and its people. These Japanese giant monsters, known as kaiju, and their respective movies, or kaiju eiga, have gained notoriety and cult status around the world. But what do these terrifying creatures represent? In this book, Sean Rhoads and Brooke McCorkle provide a new interpretation on this popular film genre. The authors argue that in addition to giant monsters, metropolitan mayhem, space travel, and alien invasions, across the genre kaiju eiga consistently address contemporary environmental concerns and ecological issues. By analyzing different aspects of Japanese history, society, and film, Rhoads and McCorkle demonstrate the various ways Japan's monster cinema tackles issues ranging from nuclear power and industrial pollution to biodiversity and climate change.

Why is there a gap between the questions that environmental philosophers discuss and the issues that motivate environmental activists? The author attempts to bridge this gap by combining tools of political philosophy with questions of environmental ethics and politics. He defends a radical position in relations to environmental protection and social policies, in order to put forward a political theory, which is not only philosophically sound, but also relevant to the practice of environmental activism. He argues that attempts to find "independent" values in nature can be at odds with the contemporary political debates surrounding environmental politics In the second half of the book, the author examines the environmental scope of several key political ideologies: liberalism, communitarianism, participatory democracy and socialism.

This book fills the gap between environmental philosophy and everyday environmental politics. The author puts forward a radical political theory of environmental protection, which binds together being environmentally friendly with community, deliberative democracy, and socialism. He argues that attempts to find 'independent' values in nature can be at odds with the contemporary political debates surrounding environmental politics. In the second half of the book, the author examines the environmental scope of several key political ideologies: liberalism, communitarianism, participatory democracy, and socialism.

A beautiful illustrated edition of Thoreau's classic treatise on man and nature. "Our life is frittered away by detail. . . . Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity!" Henry David Thoreau built his small cabin on the shore of Walden Pond in 1845. For the next two years, he lived there as simply as possible, learning to eliminate the unnecessary material and spiritual details that intrude upon human happiness. Thoreau described his experiences in Walden, using vivid, forceful prose that transforms his reflections on nature into richly evocative metaphors. In a world obsessed with technology and luxury, this American classic about seeking "the essential facts of life" seems more relevant today than ever. This beautiful, fully illustrated edition of Walden brings a rarely seen visual and artistic dimension to Thoreau's philosophical masterpiece.

This book examines the ways in which decolonial theory has gained traction and influenced knowledge production, praxis and epistemic justice in various contemporary iterations of community psychology across the globe. With a notable Southern focus (although not exclusively so), the volume critically interrogates the biases in Western modernist thought in relation to community psychology, and to illuminate and consolidate current epistemic alternatives that contribute to the possibilities of emancipatory futures within community psychology. To this end, the volume includes contributions from community psychology theory and praxis across the globe that speak to standpoint approaches (e.g. critical race studies, queer theory, indigenous epistemologies) in which the experiences of the majority of the global population are more accurately reflected, address key social issues such as the on-going racialization of the globe, gender, class, poverty, xenophobia, sexuality, violence, diasporas, migrancy, environmental degradation, and transnationalism/globalisation, and embrace forms of knowledge production that involve the co-construction of new knowledges across the traditional binary of knowledge producers and consumers. This book is an engaging resource for scholars, researchers, practitioners, activists and advanced postgraduate students who are currently working within community psychology and cognate sub-disciplines within psychology more broadly. A secondary readership is those working in development studies, political science, community development and broader cognate disciplines within the social sciences, arts, and humanities.

This book propagates a new way of thinking about managing our resources by integrating the perspectives of complex systems theory and social psychology. By resources, the authors mean objects, such as cell phones and cars, and human resources, such as family members, friends, and the small and large communities they belong to. As we all face the "replace or repair" dichotomy, readers will understand how to repair themselves, their relationships, and communities, accept the "new normal," and contribute to repairing the world. The book is offered to Zoomers, growing up in a world where it seems everything is falling apart; people in their 30s and 40s, who are thinking about how to live a fulfilling life; people from the Boomers generation, who are thinking back on life and how to repair relationships. The Reader will enjoy the intellectual adventure of connecting the natural and social worlds and understanding the transition's pathways from a "throwaway society" to a "repair society.

How can Daoism, China's indigenous religion, give us the aesthetic, ethical, political, and spiritual tools to address the root causes of our ecological crisis and construct a sustainable future? In China's Green Religion, James Miller shows how Daoism orients individuals toward a holistic understanding of religion and nature. Explicitly connecting human flourishing to the thriving of nature, Daoism fosters a "green" subjectivity and agency that transforms what it means to live a flourishing life on earth. Through a groundbreaking reconstruction of Daoist philosophy and religion, Miller argues for four key, green insights: a vision of nature as a subjective power that informs human life; an anthropological idea of the porous body based on a sense of qi flowing through landscapes and human beings; a tradition of knowing founded on the experience of transformative power in specific landscapes and topographies; and an aesthetic and moral sensibility based on an affective sensitivity to how the world pervades the body and the body pervades the world. Environmentalists struggle to raise consciousness for their cause, Miller argues, because their activism relies on a quasi-Christian concept of "saving the earth." Instead, environmentalists should integrate nature and culture more seamlessly, cultivating through a contemporary intellectual vocabulary a compelling vision of how the earth materially and spiritually supports human flourishing.

In twenty short books, Penguin brings you the classics of the environmental movement. In this lyrical meditation on America's wildlands, Aldo Leopold considers the different ways humans shape the natural landscape, and describes for the first time the far-reaching phenomenon now known as 'trophic cascades'. 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.

This book presents papers from the 9th Applied Research Conference in Africa (ARCA), showcasing the latest research on sustainable education and development. The conference is focused on applied research discussion and its dissemination, developing understanding about the role of research and researchers in the development of the continent. ARCA gathers papers which explain how key education is to transforming lives, eradicating poverty and driving sustainable development in Africa. Presenting high quality research about developing economies, construction, education and sustainability, this proceedings will be of interest to academics, postgraduate students, and industry professionals.

From one of our finest writers and leading environmental thinkers, a powerful book about how the land we share divides us-and how it could unite us Today, we are at a turning point as we face ecological and political crises that are rooted in conflicts over the land itself. But these problems can be solved if we draw on elements of our tradition that move us toward a new commonwealth-a community founded on the well-being of all people and the natural world. In this brief, powerful, timely, and hopeful book, Jedediah Purdy explores how we might begin to heal our fractured and contentious relationship with the land and with each other.