The accelerating interpenetration of nature and culture is the hallmark of the new "light-green" social order that has emerged in postwar France, argues Michael Bess in this penetrating new history. On one hand, a preoccupation with natural qualities and equilibrium has increasingly infused France's economic and cultural life. On the other, human activities have laid an ever more potent and pervasive touch on the environment, whether through the intrusion of agriculture, industry, and urban growth, or through the much subtler and more well-intentioned efforts of ecological management.
"The Light-Green Society" limns sharply these trends over the last fifty years. The rise of environmentalism in the 1960s stemmed from a fervent desire to "save" wild nature-nature conceived as a qualitatively distinct domain, wholly separate from human designs and endeavors. And yet, Bess shows, after forty years of environmentalist agitation, much of it remarkably successful in achieving its aims, the old conception of nature as a "separate sphere" has become largely untenable. In the light-green society, where ecology and technological modernity continually flow together, a new hybrid vision of intermingled "nature-culture" has increasingly taken its place.

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

In this Element, the authors develop an account of the role of behaviour change that is more political and social by bringing questions of power and social justice to the heart of their enquiry in order to appreciate how questions of responsibility and agency are unevenly distributed within and between societies. The result is a more holistic understanding of behaviour, as just one node within an ecosystem of transformation that bridges the individual and systemic. Their account is more attentive to questions of governance and the processes of collective steering necessary to facilitate large scale change across a diversity of actors, sectors and regions than the dominant emphasis on individuals and households. It is also more historical in its approach, looking critically at the relevance of historical parallels regarding large-scale behaviour change and what might be learned and applied to the contemporary context action.

As seen on Oprah's Book Club! The #1 New Zealand Bestseller! Discover how to live a happier life - simple, traditional wisdom for difficult modern times. Aroha is an ancient Maori word and way of thinking. Maori psychiatrist Dr Hinemoa Elder explores how Aroha can help us all by sharing 52 thought-provoking whakatauki, traditional Maori life lessons - one for each week of the year. Discover how we can all find greater contentment and kindness for ourselves, each other and our world by understanding how we might invite the values of Aroha into our daily lives. Ki te kotahi te kakaho ka whati, ki te kapuia, e kore e whati. When we stand alone we are vulnerable but together we are unbreakable.

Adolf Hitler was a vegetarian and the Dachau concentration camp had an organic herb garden. Vegetarianism, organic farming, and other such practices have enticed a wide variety of Germans, from socialists, liberals, and radical anti-Semites in the nineteenth century to fascists, communists, and Greens in the twentieth century. Corinna Treitel offers a fascinating new account of how Germans became world leaders in developing more 'natural' ways to eat and farm. Used to conserve nutritional resources with extreme efficiency at times of hunger and to optimize the nation's health at times of nutritional abundance, natural foods and farming belong to the biopolitics of German modernity. Eating Nature in Modern Germany brings together histories of science, medicine, agriculture, the environment, and popular culture to offer the most thorough and historically comprehensive treatment yet of this remarkable story.

Our current ecological crises compel us not only to understand how contemporary media shapes our conceptions of human relationships with the environment, but also to examine the historical genealogies of such perspectives. Written during the onset of the Little Ice Age in Britain, Middle English romances provide a fascinating window into the worldviews of popular vernacular literature (and its audiences) at the close of the Middle Ages. Andrew M. Richmond shows how literary conventions of romances shaped and were in turn influenced by contemporary perspectives on the natural world. These popular texts also reveal widespread concern regarding the damaging effects of human actions and climate change. The natural world was a constant presence in the writing, thoughts, and lives of the audiences and authors of medieval English romance - and these close readings reveal that our environmental concerns go back further in our history and culture than we think.

The Appalachian Trail, a thin ribbon of wilderness running through the densely populated eastern United States, offers a refuge from modern society and a place apart from human ideas and institutions. But as environmental historian-and thru-hiker-Sarah Mittlefehldt argues, the trail is also a conduit for community engagement and a model for public-private cooperation and environmental stewardship. In Tangled Roots, Mittlefehldt tells the story of the trail's creation. The project was one of the first in which the National Park Service attempted to create public wilderness space within heavily populated, privately owned lands. Originally a regional grassroots endeavor, under federal leadership the trail project retained unprecedented levels of community involvement. As citizen volunteers came together and entered into conversation with the National Parks Service, boundaries between "local" and "nonlocal," "public" and "private," "amateur" and "expert" frequently broke down. Today, as Mittlefehldt tells us, the Appalachian Trail remains an unusual hybrid of public and private efforts and an inspiring success story of environmental protection. Watch the trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AFyhuGqbCGc

In a time of climate change, environmental degradation, and social injustice, the question of the value and purpose of human life has become urgent. What are the grounds for hope in a wounded world? This Sacred Life gives a deep philosophical and religious articulation of humanity's identity and vocation by rooting people in a symbiotic, meshwork world that is saturated with sacred gifts. The benefits of artificial intelligence and genetic enhancement notwithstanding, Norman Wirzba shows how an account of humans as interdependent and vulnerable creatures orients people to be a creative, healing presence in a world punctuated by wounds. He argues that the commodification of places and creatures needs to be resisted so that all life can be cherished and celebrated. Humanity's fundamental vocation is to bear witness to God's love for creaturely life, and to commit to the construction of a hospitable and beautiful world.

The tensions between democracy and justice have long preoccupied political theorists. Institutions that are procedurally democratic do not necessarily make substantively just decisions. Democratizing Global Justice shows that democracy and justice can be mutually reinforcing in global governance - a domain where both are conspicuously lacking - and indeed that global justice requires global democratization. This novel reconceptualization of the problematic relationship between global democracy and global justice emphasises the role of inclusive deliberative processes. These processes can empower the agents necessary to determine what justice should mean and how it should be implemented in any given context. Key agents include citizens and the global poor; and not just the states but also international organizations and advocacy groups active in global governance. The argument is informed by and applied to the decision process leading to adoption of the Sustainable Development Goals, and climate governance inasmuch as it takes on questions of climate justice.

The tensions between democracy and justice have long preoccupied political theorists. Institutions that are procedurally democratic do not necessarily make substantively just decisions. Democratizing Global Justice shows that democracy and justice can be mutually reinforcing in global governance - a domain where both are conspicuously lacking - and indeed that global justice requires global democratization. This novel reconceptualization of the problematic relationship between global democracy and global justice emphasises the role of inclusive deliberative processes. These processes can empower the agents necessary to determine what justice should mean and how it should be implemented in any given context. Key agents include citizens and the global poor; and not just the states but also international organizations and advocacy groups active in global governance. The argument is informed by and applied to the decision process leading to adoption of the Sustainable Development Goals, and climate governance inasmuch as it takes on questions of climate justice.

This book rekindles the well-known connection between people and place in the context of a global pandemic. The chapters are divided into two sections. In the first section, "Place Attachment During a Pandemic," we review the nature of the COVID-19 pandemic and the extent of its impact on place attachment and human-environment interactions. We examine how restrictions in mobility and environmental changes can have a significant psychological burden on people who are dealing with the effect of place attachment disruption that arises during a pandemic. In the second section, "Adjusting to Place Attachment Disruption During and After a Pandemic," we focus on adaptive processes and responses that could enable people to adjust positively to place attachment disruption. We conclude the book by discussing the potential for pro-environmental behavior to promote place attachment and flourishing in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic by introducing an integrative framework of place flourishing and exploring its implications for theory, research, policy, and practice.

Nature, money, work, care, food, energy, and lives: these are the seven things that have made our world and will shape its future. In making these things cheap, modern commerce has transformed, governed, and devastated Earth. In A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things, Raj Patel and Jason W. Moore present a new approach to analyzing today's planetary emergencies. Bringing the latest ecological research together with histories of colonialism, indigenous struggles, slave revolts, and other rebellions and uprisings, Patel and Moore demonstrate that throughout history, crises have always prompted fresh strategies to make the world cheap and safe for capitalism. At a time of crisis in all seven cheap things, innovative and systemic thinking is urgently required. This book proposes a radical new way of understanding-and reclaiming-the planet in the turbulent twenty-first century.

This book offers the first interdisciplinary survey of community research in the humanities and social sciences to consider such diverse disciplines as philosophy, religious studies, anthropology, sociology, disabilities studies, linguistics, communication studies, and film studies. Bringing together leading international experts, the collection of essays critically maps and explores the state of the art in community research, while also developing future perspectives for a cross-disciplinary rethinking of community. Pursuing such a critical, transdisciplinary approach to community, the book argues, can counteract reductive appropriations of the term 'community' and, instead, pave the way for a novel assessment of the concept's complexity. Since community is, above all, a lived practice that shapes people's everyday lives, the essays also suggest ways of redoing community; they discuss concrete examples of community practice, thereby bridging the gap between scholars and activists working in the field.

Synthetic biology is a field of biotechnology that is rapidly growing in various applications, such as in medicine, environmental sustainability, and energy production. However these technologies also have unforeseen risks and applications to humans and the environment. This open access book presents discussions on risks and mitigation strategies for these technologies including biosecurity, or the potential of synthetic biology technologies and processes to be deliberately misused for nefarious purposes. The book presents strategies to prevent, mitigate, and recover from 'dual-use concern' biosecurity challenges that may be raised by individuals, rogue states, or non-state actors. Several key topics are explored including opportunities to develop more coherent and scalable approaches to govern biosecurity from a laboratory perspective up to the international scale and strategies to prevent potential health and environmental hazards posed by deliberate misuse of synthetic biology without stifling innovation. The book brings together the expertise of top scholars in synthetic biology and biotechnology risk assessment, management, and communication to discuss potential biosecurity governing strategies and offer perspectives for collaboration in oversight and future regulatory guidance.

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, one of our finest writers and leading environmental thinkers, explores how we might begin to heal our fractured and contentious relationship with the land and with each other. From the coalfields of Appalachia and the tobacco fields of the Carolinas to the public lands of the West, Purdy shows how the land has always united and divided Americans, holding us in common projects and fates but also separating us into insiders and outsiders, owners and dependents, workers and bosses. Expropriated from Native Americans and transformed by slave labor, the same land that represents a history of racism and exploitation could, in the face of environmental catastrophe, bind us together in relationships of reciprocity and mutual responsibility. This may seem idealistic in our polarized time, but we are at a historical fork in the road, and if we do not make efforts now to move toward a commonwealth, Purdy warns, environmental and political pressures will create harsher and crueler conflicts-between citizens, between countries, and between humans and the rest of the world.

Synthetic biology is a field of biotechnology that is rapidly growing in various applications, such as in medicine, environmental sustainability, and energy production. However these technologies also have unforeseen risks and applications to humans and the environment. This open access book presents discussions on risks and mitigation strategies for these technologies including biosecurity, or the potential of synthetic biology technologies and processes to be deliberately misused for nefarious purposes. The book presents strategies to prevent, mitigate, and recover from 'dual-use concern' biosecurity challenges that may be raised by individuals, rogue states, or non-state actors. Several key topics are explored including opportunities to develop more coherent and scalable approaches to govern biosecurity from a laboratory perspective up to the international scale and strategies to prevent potential health and environmental hazards posed by deliberate misuse of synthetic biology without stifling innovation. The book brings together the expertise of top scholars in synthetic biology and biotechnology risk assessment, management, and communication to discuss potential biosecurity governing strategies and offer perspectives for collaboration in oversight and future regulatory guidance.

Today, one-quarter of all the land in Latin America is set apart for nature protection. In Nationalizing Nature, Frederico Freitas uncovers the crucial role played by conservation in the region's territorial development by exploring how Brazil and Argentina used national parks to nationalize borderlands. In the 1930s, Brazil and Argentina created some of their first national parks around the massive Iguazu Falls, shared by the two countries. The parks were designed as tools to attract migrants from their densely populated Atlantic seaboards to a sparsely inhabited borderland. In the 1970s, a change in paradigm led the military regimes in Brazil and Argentina to violently evict settlers from their national parks, highlighting the complicated relationship between authoritarianism and conservation in the Southern Cone. By tracking almost one hundred years of national park history in Latin America's largest countries, Nationalizing Nature shows how conservation policy promoted national programs of frontier development and border control.

Climate has infused the literary history of the United States, from the writings of explorers and conquerors, over early national celebrations of the American climate, to the flowering of romantic nature writing. This volume traces this complex semantic history in American thought and literature to examine rhetorical and philosophical discourses that continue to propel and constrain American climate perceptions today. It explores how American literature from its inception up until the present engages with the climate, both real and perceived. Climate and American Literature attends to the central place that the climate has historically occupied in virtually all aspects of American life, from public health and medicine, over the organization of the political system and the public sphere, to the culture of sensibility, aesthetics and literary culture. It details American inflections of climate perceptions over time to offer revealing new perspectives on one of the most pressing issues of our time.

This book bridges the gap between two critical issues-environmental literacy and social norms - and explores various topics and case studies from Sinophone and Taiwanese perspectives. Each chapter includes extensive information on pro-environmental behaviors, and on people with working experiences, home experiences, and actual philosophies in their daily lives. In keeping with the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), this book highlights our potential to contribute to social inclusion and environmental protection, and offers a comprehensive guide for scholars, students, practitioners, and entrepreneurs in environmental education and related disciplines.

The distinction between humans and the natural world is an artefact and more a matter of linguistic communication than a conceptual separation. This Element proposes ecosemiotics as an epistemological tool to better understand the relationship between human and natural processes. Ecosemiotics with its affinity to the humanities, is presented here as the best disciplinary approach for interpreting complex environmental conditions for a broad audience, across a multitude of temporal and spatial scales. It is proposed as an intellectual bridge between divergent sciences to incorporate within a unique framework different paradigms. The ecosemiotic paradigm helps to explain how organisms interact with their external environments using mechanisms common to all living beings that capture external information and matter for internal usage. This paradigm can be applied in all the circumstances where a living being (man, animal, plant, fungi, etc.) performs processes to stay alive.

Urban resilience and building resilience are "hot topics" of research and practice on sustainability in the context of climate change. The edited volume advances the "state of art" of urban resilience research through focusing on three important processes of building resilience: knowledge integration, implementation, and learning. In the volume, knowledge integration primarily refers to the combination of specialized knowledge domains (e.g., flood risk management and urban planning). Implementation refers to realized specific changes of the building stock and related green, blue and grey infrastructures at local level (e.g., for dealing with rising temperatures and heat waves at the neighborhood scale in cities). Learning requires moving beyond single projects and experiments of resilience to enhance sustainability at city and regional scale. The editors adopt an interdisciplinary approach to this volume of the Springer series on resilience. The volume includes contributions from civil engineering, physical geography, the social sciences, and urban planning.

The work of Walter Scott, one of the most globally influential authors of the nineteenth century, provides us with a unique narrative of the changing ecologies of Scotland over several centuries and writes this narrative into the history of environmental literature. Farmed environments, mountains, moors and forests along with rivers, shorelines, islands and oceans are explored, situating Scott's writing about shared human and nonhuman environments in the context of the emerging Anthropocene. Susan Oliver attends to changes and losses acting in counterpoint to the narratives of 'improvement' that underpin modernization in land management. She investigates the imaginative ecologies of folklore and local culture. Each chapter establishes a dialogue between ecocritical theory and Scott as storyteller of social history. This is a book that shows how Scott challenged conventional assumptions about the permanency of stone and the evanescence of air; it begins with the land and ends by looking at the stars.

Ecology is indispensable to understanding the biological world and addressing the environmental problems humanity faces. Its philosophy has never been more important. In this book, James Justus introduces readers to the philosophically rich issues ecology poses. Besides its crucial role in biological science generally, climate change, biodiversity loss, and other looming environmental challenges make ecology's role in understanding such threats and identifying solutions to them all the more critical. When ecology is applied and its insights marshalled to address these problems and guide policy formation, interesting philosophical issues emerge. Justus sets them out in detail, and explores the often ethically charged dimensions of applied ecological science, using accessible language and a wealth of scientifically-informed examples.

This book details various stages in the introduction, establishment and evolution of China's environmental management system. By combining a literature review, comparative analysis, and case study, it investigates the environmental management system in several key periods in order to systematically assess the necessary measures and appropriate adjustments the Chinese Government implemented to reconcile the growing conflicts between economic development and resources conservation, in the context of rapid economic growth and economic transformation. Given its scope, the book offers a valuable resource for experts, scholars, and government officials in related fields.

Global governance now provides people with recourse for harm through International Grievance Mechanisms, such as the Independent Accountability Mechanisms of the Multilateral Development Banks. Yet little is known about how such mechanisms work. This Element examines how IGMs provide recourse for infringements of three procedural environmental rights: access to information, access to participation, and access to justice in environmental matters, as well as environmental protections drawn from the United Nations Guiding Principles and the World Bank's protection standards. A content analysis of 394 original IAM claims details how people invoke these rights. The sections then unpack how the IAMs provide community engagement through 'problem solving', and 'compliance investigations' that identify whether the harm resulted from the MDBs. Using a database of all known submissions to the IAMs (1,052 claims from 1994 to mid-2019), this Element demonstrate how the IAMs enable people to air their grievances, without necessarily solving their problems.