A gracefully written treatment of the mutual relationship between pine trees and jays, this book covers a wide range of regions, focusing on the Rocky Mountains and the American Southwest, but also ranging from the Alps to Finland, and from Siberia to China. The book treats one of the more satisfying stories of symbiosis and natural history from perspectives of evolution, ecology, and animal behaviour.

We live in unprecedented times - the Anthropocene - defined by far-reaching human impacts on the natural systems that underpin civilisation. Planetary Health explores the many environmental changes that threaten to undermine progress in human health, and explains how these changes affect health outcomes, from pandemics to infectious diseases to mental health, from chronic diseases to injuries. It shows how people can adapt to those changes that are now unavoidable, through actions that both improve health and safeguard the environment. But humanity must do more than just adapt: we need transformative changes across many sectors - energy, housing, transport, food, and health care. The book discusses specific policies, technologies, and interventions to achieve the change required, and explains how these can be implemented. It presents the evidence, builds hope in our common future, and aims to motivate action by everyone, from the general public to policymakers to health practitioners.

Concentrating on the period between the end of World War II and the end of the century, this reader argues that there is a reciprocal relationship between the constitution of places and people. It brings together an interdisciplinary collection of articles for social and cultural geographers and examines the argument that the close associations of the 1950s between place (the home, community and the nation state) and the social divisions (gender, class and nationality) are breaking down in the 1990s. Drawing out the oppositional movements in each decade, it seeks to show how the supposed stability of one and the mobility of the other are exaggerated.

- What makes people care about the environment? - Why and how do different cultural groups value land in different ways? With increasing international concern about green issues, and the apparent failure of mechanistic solutions to complex problems, Uncommon Ground provides a timely understanding of the cultural values that underpin human-environmental relations. Through a comparison of two very different groups, the Aboriginal people and the white cattle farmers in Far North Queensland, Uncommon Ground explores how the human-environmental relationship is culturally constructed. This highly topical study also examines the long-term conflicts over land in Australia, which have brought to the surface each group's environmental values. The author considers how these values are acquired, and the universal and cultural factors that lead to their development. Major emphasis is put on the cultural forms that create and express environmental values for the Aborigines and the white pastoralists, such as: - historical background - land use and economic modes - socio-spatial organization - language, knowledge and methods of socialization - oral and visual representation - cosmological beliefs and systems of law This book is very accessible and should be widely used on anthropology, environmental studies and geography courses.]

Every person on our home planet is affected by a worldwide deluge of man-made chemicals and pollutants - most of which have never been tested for safety. Our chemical emissions are six times larger than our total greenhouse gas emissions. They are in our food, our water, the air we breathe, our homes and workplaces, the things we use each day. This universal poisoning affects our minds, our bodies, our genes, our grandkids, and all life on Earth. Julian Cribb describes the full scale of the chemical catastrophe we have unleashed. He proposes a new Human Right - not to be poisoned. He maps an empowering and hopeful way forward: to rid our planet of these toxins and return Earth to the clean, healthy condition which our forebears enjoyed, and our grandchildren should too.

A valuable and documented source.

--Choice

Ferkiss has navigated an exceedingly complex course through our philosophical history, tracing the lineage of ideas about nature and technology as they evolved from ancient times through Taoism, industrialism, Marxism, and several other isms.'
--Sierra Magazine

Offers a colorful, concise, and well-written survey of formal thought on the role of science and technology.

--Policy Currents

Worldwide in its scope and reach, Ferkiss's book encompasses ethics and technology, society, and international relations--a true renaissance perspective. It is written clearly and without trepidations.
--Amitai Etzioni, author of The Moral Dimension

A valuable overview of conceptions of nature, science, and technology since ancient times. Anyone concerned with global environmental issues will benefit from its temperate, even- handed treatment of the hundreds of thinkers who have participated in great age-old debate over the human conquest of the earth and its resources.
--W. Warren Wagar, Distinguished Teaching Professor, SUNY, Binghamton

A fine book . . . an excellent source book and] a valuable reference work, one of those books that belong on the shelf, near at hand, in the collection of any serious student of environmentalism and the history of technology. It will be consulted often.
--Walter Rosenbaum, University of Florida, author of Environmental Politics and Policy

An extraordinary achievement--a dazzling scholarly tour de force that is so clearly and elegantly written that readers are gripped by the superb story Ferkiss] tells. It is the story of what may be the central issue of our time--humanity's relationship with nature. . . . Perhaps no scholar on earth is better equipped to tell this story. . . . Ferkiss] exhibits an extraordinary command of the subject as he takes readers on a fascinating guided tour through Western and Eastern culture, beautifully summarizing and judiciously commenting on the changing attitudes shown by people ranging from Buddhists to Nazis, from the ancient Greeks to today's Earth Firsters and ecotopians .... A genuine treat.
--Edward Cornish, President, World Future Society

A fine book...it reaches broadly and deeply into our cultural roots, bringing religion, theology, popular culture, science, folklore, natural history and much else into the discussion...an excellent source book and] a valuable reference work, one of those books that belong on the shelf, near at hand, in the collection of any serious student of environmentalism and the history of technology. It will be consulted often.
-- Walter Rosenbaum, University of Florida, author of Environmental Politics and Policy

While all human societies have enlisted technologies to control nature, the last hundred years have witnessed the technological exploitation and destruction of natural resources on an unprecedented scale. As environmental groups and the scientific community sound the alarm about deforestation, global warming and ozone depletion, the obvious question arises: how did we get where we are today? Victor Ferkiss here sets out to answer this central question, emphasizing that we cannot escape from our present environmental predicament unless we understand the ideas which have created it.
Tracing the development of cultural attitudes toward the environment and technology over almost the whole span of human civilization, this book is distinctive both in its comprehensiveness, and in its attempt to place side by side influential thinkers and movements with varied views on these issues.
In this extraordinary book Ferkiss asks the basic questions concerning humans and their relationship to the environment. He traces cultural attitudes towards the environment from early mankind to the present day. This book is distinguished in its comprehensiveness, as well as in its attempt to place influential thinkers and movements with varied views side-by-side.

Hailed as "one of the most eminent environmental historians of the West" by Alan Brinkley in The New York Times Book Review, Donald Worster has been a leader in reshaping the study of American history. Winner of the prestigious Bancroft Prize for his book Dust Bowl, Worster has helped bring humanity's interaction with nature to the forefront of historical thinking. Now, in The Wealth of Nature, he offers a series of thoughtful, eloquent essays which lay out his views on environmental history, tying the study of the past to today's agenda for change.
The Wealth of Nature captures the fruit of what Worster calls "my own intellectual turning to the land." History, he writes, represents a dialogue between humanity and nature--though it is usually reported as if it were simple dictation. Worster takes as his point of departure the approach expressed early on by Aldo Leopold, who stresses the importance of nature in determining human history; Leopold pointed out that the spread of bluegrass in Kentucky, for instance, created new pastures and fed the rush of American settlers across the Appalachians, which affected the contest between Britain, France, and the U.S. for control of the area. Worster's own work offers an even more subtly textured understanding, noting in this example, for instance, that bluegrass itself was an import from the Old World which supplanted native vegetation--a form of "environmental imperialism." He ranges across such areas as agriculture, water development, and other questions, examining them as environmental issues, showing how they have affected--and continue to affect--human settlement. Environmental history, he argues, is not simply the history of rural and wilderness areas; cities clearly have a tremendous impact on the land, on which they depend for their existence. He argues for a comprehensive approach to understanding our past as well as our present in environmental terms.
"Nostalgia runs all through this society," Worster writes, "fortunately, for it may be our only hope of salvation." These reflective and engaging essays capture the fascination of environmental history--and the beauty of nature lost or endangered--underscoring the importance of intelligent action in the present.

This book argues that the unique environments of the North have been born of the relationship between humans and nature. Approaching the topic through the lens of environmental history, the contributors examine a broad range of geographies, including those of Iceland and other islands in the Northern Atlantic, Sweden, Finland, Russia, the Pacific Northwest, and Canada, over a time span ranging from CE 800 to 2000. Northscapes is bound together by the intellectual project of investigating the North both as an imagined and mythologized space and as an environment shaped by human technology.

This new volume in the OSEB series presents reviews of key theoretical ideas and frameworks, and outlines progress in evolutionary studies.

We can't stop shopping but we must stop shopping - the consumer dilemma that defines our lives and our future. What would happen if we did? We are using up the planet at almost double the rate it can regenerate. To support our economies, we're told we must shop now like we've never shopped before, yet the scale of our consumption remains the biggest factor in the ruination of the world. But what would life look like if we stopped? Visiting places where economies have experienced temporary shut-downs, artisan producers, zero-consumption societies and bringing together a host of expert views, this is both a history of our relationship with consumption and a story about the future. 'Lays out a wealth of knowledge and wisdom' Ronald Wright, author of A Short History of Progress

In the mid-eighteenth century metaphysics was broadly understood as the study of three areas of philosophical thought: theology, psychology and cosmology. This book examines the fortunes of the third of these formidable metaphysical concepts, the world. Sean Gaston provides a clear and concise account of the concept of world from the mid-eighteenth century to the end of the twentieth century, exploring its possibilities and limitations and engaging with current issues in politics and ecology. He focuses on the work of five principal thinkers: Kant, Hegel, Husserl, Heidegger and Derrida, all of whom attempt to establish new grounds for seeing the world as a whole. Gaston presents a critique of the self-evident use of the concept of world in philosophy and asks whether one can move beyond the need for a world-like vantage point to maintain a concept of world. From Kant to the present day this concept has been a problem for philosophy and it remains to be seen if we need a new Copernican revolution when it comes to the concept of world.

This book assesses and illustrates innovative and practical world-wide measures for combating sea level rise from the profession of landscape architecture. The work explores how the appropriate mixture of integrated, multi-scalar flood protection mechanisms can reduce risks associated with flood events including sea level rise. Because sea level rise is a global issue, illustrative case studies performed from the United States, Korea, Australia, New Zealand, Thailand, Japan, China, and the Netherlands identify the structural (engineered), non-structural (nature-based), and hybrid mechanisms (mixed) used to combat sea level rise and increase flood resilience. The alternative flood risk reduction mechanisms are extracted and analyzed from each case study to develop and explain a set of design-based typologies to combat sea level rise which can then be applied to help proctor new and existing communities. It is important for those located within the current or future floodplain considering sea level rise and those responsible for land use, developmental, and population-related activities within these areas to strategically implement a series of integrated constructed and green infrastructure-based flood risk reduction mechanisms to adequately protect threatened areas. As a result, this book is beneficial to both academics and practitioners related to multiple design professions such as urban designers, urban planners, architects, real estate developers, and landscape architects.

Spatial and cultural analysis have recently found much common ground, focusing in particular on the nature of the city. Place/Culture/Representation brings together new and established voices involved in the reshaping of cultural geography.
The authors argue that as we write our geographies we are not just representing some reality, we are creating meaning. Writing becomes as much about the author as it is about purported geographical reality. The issue becomes not scientific truth as the end but the interpretation of cultural constructions as the means.
Discussing authorial power, discourses of the other, texts and textuality, landscape metaphor, the sites of power-knowledge relations and notions of community and the sense of place, the authors explore the ways in which a more fluid and sensitive geographer's art can help us make sense of ourselves and the landscapes and places we inhabit and think about.

Global climate change policy has failed us all, but what is the reasoning that underlies this failure? Why are some people more disposed to reflect on confounding issues like climate change, recognise the danger, seek a solution, and act accordingly, more than others? This book is concerned with how we think and act in response to climate change. In particular, faced with deep uncertainty and the multifaceted complexities that characterise the climate change conundrum, how the various actors and institutions involved in the policymaking process make decisions that both aid and impede in the design and implementation of climate change policy. This book focuses on how these actors and institutions frame and use the knowledge available - under conditions of competing ideologies and interests - and synthesise it to form often-disparate mental models, or worldviews, that inspire them to become firm advocates of meaningful climate change action or indeed, sceptics that continue to downplay the threat, and hence the need for urgency. By exploring how we think about climate change and the disparate mental models we hold as a result, this book explores why humankind has thus far failed in its endeavours to solve the climate change problem. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of climate change, environmental policy and environmental psychology.

This book deepens the understanding of the broader processes that shape and mediate the responses to climate change of poor urban households and communities in Asia, Africa and Latin America. Representing an important contribution to the evolution of more effective pro-poor climate change policies in urban areas by local governments, national governments and international organisations, this book is invaluable reading to students and scholars of environment and development studies.

Indigenous Sustainable Wisdom: First Nation Know-how for Global Flourishing's contributors describe ways of being in the world that reflect a worldview that guided humanity for 99% of human history: They describe the practical traditional wisdom that stems from Nature-based relational cultures that were or are guided by this worldview. Such cultures did not cause the kinds of anti-Nature and de-humanizing or inequitable policies and practices that now pervade our world. Far from romanticizing Indigenous histories, Indigenous Sustainable Wisdom offers facts about how human beings, with our potential for good and evil behaviors, can live in relative harmony again. Contributions cover views from anthropology, psychology, sociology, leadership, native science, native history, and native art.

In 1972, James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis began collaborating on the Gaia hypothesis. They suggested that over geological time, life on Earth has had a major role in both producing and regulating its own environment. Gaia is now an ecological and environmental worldview underpinning vital scientific and cultural debates over environmental issues. Their ideas have transformed the Earth and life sciences, as well as contemporary conceptions of nature. Their correspondence describes these crucial developments from the inside, showing how their partnership proved decisive for the development of the Gaia hypothesis. Clarke and Dutreuil provide historical background and explain the concepts and references introduced throughout the Lovelock-Margulis correspondence, while highlighting the major landmarks of their collaboration within the sequence of almost 300 letters written between 1970 and 2007. This book will be of interest to researchers in ecology, history of science, environmental history and climate change, and cultural science studies.

In the age of climate change, the possibility that dramatic environmental transformations might cause the dislocation of millions of people has become not only a matter for scientific speculation or science-fiction narratives, but the object of strategic planning and military analysis. Environmental History of Modern Migrations offers a worldwide perspective on the history of migrations throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and provides an opportunity to reflect on the global ecological transformations and developments which have occurred throughout the last few centuries. With a primary focus on the environment/migration nexus, this book advocates that global environmental changes are not distinct from global social transformations. Instead, it offers a progressive method of combining environmental and social history, which manages to both encompass and transcend current approaches to environmental justice issues. This edited collection will be of great interest to students and practitioners of environmental history and migration studies, as well as those with an interest in history and sociology.

This study focuses on the relationship between environment, history, politics, and rhetorical discourses in James Joyce's Ulysses. Delving into different aspects of Joyce's use of nature and linguistic discourses in orchestrating a specific dynamic of eco-politics, it adopts an interdisciplinary approach that includes cultural politics, historiographical poetics, and genetic criticism with close reading of the text. The first of the two sessions of the book addresses the environmental questions of land and consumption through discussions on co-operative politics, garden city movement, and the eco-politics of waste. The second section moves to examine the diverse ways in which nature and nation are (re)imagined exemplarily in Joyce's composition of the forest and the marketplace. By examining several thematic environmental issues addressed in Ulysses with the evidence of historical and archival resources, this study has demonstrated that Joyce is after all a writer with the environment in mind, and that the imagination of nature in Ulysses is inseparable from that of the emergent nation of fin-de-siecle Ireland.

The issue of 'sustainability' in the developed world is nowhere more critical than in the field of personal travel, which in many countries has become the fastest-growing contributor to global warming. Unless the use of cars can be brought under control, there is little chance of meeting government targets for reducing greenhouse emissions. Personal Transport and the Greenhouse Effect sets out the steps that could be taken to lessen the conflict between personal mobility and long-term environmental security. It provides a detailed analysis of the policy options available for limiting carbon dioxide emissions, and highlights the limitations of technological measures in solving the problem. Instead, the book's 12-point plan for sustainability shows how a significant reduction in emissions requires the use of all the policy measures available. This valuable contribution to a crucial area of debate covering energy, transport policy and the environment will be essential reading for policy makers, planners and students alike. Peter Huges is deputy editor of Local Transport Today, and has contributed to a wide range of publications including The Daily Telegraph, The Guardian, New Scientist and Energy Policy. Originally published in 1993

When disaster strikes, a ritual unfolds: a flood of experts, bureaucrats, and analysts rush to the scene; personal tragedies are played out in a barrage of media coverage; on the ground, confusion and uncertainty reign. In this major comparative study, Gregory Button draws on three decades of research on the most infamous human and environmental calamities to break new ground in our understanding of these moments of chaos. He explains how corporations, state agencies, social advocacy organizations, and other actors attempt to control disaster narratives, adopting public relations strategies that may either downplay or amplify a sense of uncertainty in order to advance political and policy goals. Importantly, he shows that disasters are not isolated events, offering a holistic account of the political dynamics of uncertainty in times of calamity.

Based on 40 years of experience, Integrated Environmental Management: A Transdisciplinary Approach brings together many ecological and technological tool boxes and applies them in a transdisciplinary method. The book demonstrates how to combine continuous improvement management tools and principles with proven environmental assessment methodologies. This integrated ecological and environmental management approach lets you view environmental problems from a holistic angle, considering the ecosystem as an entity as well as the entire spectrum of solutions and possible combinations of solutions. The book discusses the importance of examining all facets or possible problems associated with an ecosystem simultaneously and evaluating all the solution possibilities proposed by the relevant disciplines at the same time. The authors underline that there is no alternative to integrated, multidisciplinary, ecological-environmental management-at least not on a long-term basis. They lay down the fundamental concepts in an applications-oriented manner that allows you to apply the seven steps of environmental management directly. However, the book goes beyond delineating the available tool boxes; it also details how they can be integrated and combined to find an optimum solution to ecological-environmental problems.

This substantially revised second edition of Merchant's classic guide to radical environmental politics and movements, offers a comprehensive overview of the philosophical, ethical, scientific and economic aspects of the environment. With a new introduction, updated chapters, and two new sections on recent global movements and on globalization and the environment, it specifically identifies ways in which radical ecologists can transform science and society in order to sustain life. This classic work by one of the most important voices in the environmental movement is a must-read for those involved in the fields of ecology, sociology and social policy.