This groundbreaking collection brings together for the first time diverse geographical work on the social construction of nature. Eleven leading contributors not only discuss social nature, but look at the concrete ways in which it is made and the political implications of its construction.
Brings together for the first time diverse geographical work on the social construction of nature.
Eleven leading contributors not only discuss social nature, but look at the concrete ways in which it is made and the political implications of its construction.
Uses international case studies to illustrate the theoretical positions.
A helpful introduction by the editors sets the chapters in context.
Enables teachers and students to explore the ways in which social nature is evident and to engage with the direct implications of this for human lives, ecologies and politics.

In September 2021 a very special academic conference took place: T2051MCC - The 2051 Munich Climate Conference. Researchers from across the academic spectrum assembled to discuss climate change. What made it special was that everyone held their lecture as if it took place in an imagined year 2051. The theatre collective Buro Grandezza had released an open call for contributions to a conference in Munich. Almost 50 researchers wrote papers on climate narratives, geoengineering, coastal adaptation and other topics. This particular framework allowed them to break out of the constraints of the current discourse without neglecting methodology or thematic sharpness.

How do we talk about climate grief in the church? And when we have found the words, what do we do with that grief? There is a sudden and dramatic rise in people experiencing a profound sense of anxiety in the face of our dying planet, and a consequent need for churches to be better resourced pastorally and theologically to deal with this threat. Words for a Dying World brings together voices from across the world - from the Pacific islands to the pipelines of Canada, from farming communities in Namibia to activism in the UK. Author royalties from the sale of this book are split evenly between contributors. The majority will be pooled as a donation to ClientEarth. The remainder will directly support the communities represented in this collection. Contributors include Anderson Jeremiah, Azariah France-Williams, David Benjamin Blower, Holly-Anna Petersen, Isabel Mukonyora, Jione Havea, and Maggi Dawn.

In A City on a Lake Matthew Vitz tracks the environmental and political history of Mexico City and explains its transformation from a forested, water-rich environment into a smog-infested megacity plagued by environmental problems and social inequality. Vitz shows how Mexico City's unequal urbanization and environmental decline stemmed from numerous scientific and social disputes over water policy, housing, forestry, and sanitary engineering. From the prerevolutionary efforts to create a hygienic city supportive of capitalist growth, through revolutionary demands for a more democratic distribution of resources, to the mid-twentieth-century emergence of a technocratic bureaucracy that served the interests of urban elites, Mexico City's environmental history helps us better understand how urban power has been exercised, reproduced, and challenged throughout Latin America.

Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. What is the environment, this elusive object that impacts us so profoundly--our odds to be born; the way we look, feel, and function; and how long and comfortable we may live? The environment is not only everything we see around us but also, at a lesser scale, a hailstorm of molecules large and small that constantly penetrates our bodies, simultaneously nourishing and threatening our health. The concept of oneness with our surroundings urges a reckoning of what we are doing to 'the environment,' and consequently, what we are doing to ourselves. By taking us through this journey of questioning, Rolf Halden's Environment empowers readers with new knowledge and a heightened appreciation of how our daily lifestyle decisions are impacting the places we occupy, our health, and humanity's prospect of survival. With illustrations by Griffin Finke. Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in The Atlantic.

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

An important goal of environmental research is to inform policy and decision making. However, environmental experts working at the interface between science, policy and society face complex challenges, including how to identify sources of disagreement over environmental issues, communicate uncertainties and limitations of knowledge, and tackle controversial topics such as genetic modification and the use of biofuels. This book discusses the problems environmental experts encounter in the interaction between knowledge, society, and policy on both a practical and conceptual level. Key findings from social science research are illustrated with a range of case studies, from fisheries to fracking. The book offers guidance on how to tackle these challenges, equipping readers with tools to better understand the diversity of environmental knowledge and its role in complex environmental issues. Written by leading natural and social scientists, this text provides an essential resource for students, scientists and professionals working at the science-policy interface.

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.

As everything from global warming to GM foods becomes headline news, the use and abuse of nature is on the agenda as never before. Is geography just one of several disciplines whose task is to reveal the "truths" of nature so that governments, businesses and the public can know what threats and opportunities it presents for human well-being?
"Nature "describes and explains the shifting ways geographers have studied nature, emphasizing the linkages and differences between human geography, physical geography and the middle ground of resource and hazards geography. It argues that it is no easy matter to determine which of these ideas is "correct." Instead, these ideas are seen to be part of a high-stakes game in which all sorts of actors--academics, citizens, politicians and the media, for example--determine how we act (or don't act) towards the many different aspects of nature. Indeed, these various actions and inactions we take have profound material and moral consequences as the ongoing controversies about human cloning and global warming indicate.
This distinctive text is the first to consider the topic of nature in modern geography as a whole. Secondly, it considers nature in all the major meanings of the term, from the human body and psyche through to the non-human world. Finally, it develops an original argument, namely that student readers should abandon the idea to know what nature is in favor of a close scrutiny of what agendas lie behind competing conceptions of nature.

Societal Dimensions of Environmental Science: Global Case Studies of Collaboration and Transformation, brings together several key examples of the successes and the challenges that exist for environmental stakeholders trying to strike a balance between science and the societal implications of the issues involved. This book provides important methods and approaches necessary for informed decision making and a better understanding of the common threads of learning, collaboration, negotiation, and compromise. It also explains that concepts and skills needed to better understand how specific project goals can be best achieved in the rapidly changing field of environmental management, by providing practical situations and solutions, across a global landscape. This book provides anyone who works in a community setting with the necessary tools and strategies for solving environmental problems and achieving the goals of an environmental project of any type and specifically addresses the topic of how to synthesize community engagement and the environmental science. It describes current environmental issues and lessons learned of what works and what doesn't work in real situations, and why. It also highlights key examples, which can be used by both management practitioners and research scientists in their specific circumstances. Showcasing a unique compilation of the diverse and specific examples from societies in Asia, Oceania, North America, and the Middle East, with an equally diverse array of authorship, this book serves all policy makers, scientists, organizers, and community members that desire to build better group dynamics for addressing environmental issues.

Hispanic Ecocriticism finds a rich soil in the main topics of environmental concern in the literature of Latin America and Spain, not only as a source for renewing critical analysis and hermeneutics, but also for the benefit of global environmental awareness. In a renewed exchange of transatlantic relationships, Hispanic Ecocriticism intermingles Latin American ecocritical issues of interest - the oil industry; contamination of forests and rivers; urban ecologies; African, Andean, and Amazonian biocultural ecosystems - with those of interest in Spain - animal rights and the ecological footprints of human activity in contemporary narratives of eco-science fiction, in dystopias, and in literature inspired by natural or rural landscapes that conceal ways of life and cultures in peril of extinction.

Environment and Society connects the core themes of environmental studies to the urgent issues and debates of the twenty-first century. In an era marked by climate change, rapid urbanization, and resource scarcity, environmental studies has emerged as a crucial arena of study. Assembling canonical and contemporary texts, this volume presents a systematic survey of concepts and issues central to the environment in society, such as: social mobilization on behalf of environmental objectives; the relationships between human population, economic growth and stresses on the planet's natural resources; debates about the relative effects of collective and individual action; and unequal distribution of the social costs of environmental degradation. Organized around key themes, with each section featuring questions for debate and suggestions for further reading, the book introduces students to the history of environmental studies, and demonstrates how the field's interdisciplinary approach uniquely engages the essential issues of the present.

This is a history of the impact of humankind on the natural environment from earliest times to the present. The first edition has been widely adopted in universities, acclaimed both for its wide scholarship and its author's readable style. The new edition is fully revised throughout and takes account of comments and suggestions received from all over the world. It has been restructured into a form appropriate for new methods of university teaching, the diagrams have been clarified, and references and sections of further reading provided at the end of each chapter.

To the underlying argument that access to energy is a crucial influence on the use and exploitation of nature, the author has now added a revealing perspective drawn from a critical understanding of the evolution of world systems. In a new and thoughtful conclusion he considers the variable rate of environmental change, the problems of prediction, and the complex issues surrounding the formulation and implementation of national and international policy

Open access edition: DOI 10.6069/9780295748733 Dominica, a place once described as "Nature's Island," was rich in biodiversity and seemingly abundant water, but in the eighteenth century a brief, failed attempt by colonial administrators to replace cultivation of varied plant species with sugarcane caused widespread ecological and social disruption. Illustrating how deeply intertwined plantation slavery was with the environmental devastation it caused, Mapping Water in Dominica situates the social lives of eighteenth-century enslaved laborers in the natural history of two Dominican enclaves. Mark Hauser draws on archaeological and archival history from Dominica to reconstruct the changing ways that enslaved people interacted with water and exposes crucial pieces of Dominica's colonial history that have been omitted from official documents. The archaeological record-which preserves traces of slave households, waterways, boiling houses, mills, and vessels for storing water-reveals changes in political authority and in how social relations were mediated through the environment. Plantation monoculture, which depended on both slavery and an abundant supply of water, worked through the environment to create predicaments around scarcity, mobility, and belonging whose resolution was a matter of life and death. In following the vestiges of these struggles, this investigation documents a valuable example of an environmental challenge centered around insufficient water. Mapping Water in Dominica is available in an open access edition through the Sustainable History Monograph Pilot, thanks to the generous support of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and Northwestern University Libraries.

As American politics has become increasingly polarized, gridlock at the federal level has led to a greater reliance on state governments to get things done. But this arrangement depends a great deal on state cooperation, and not all state officials have chosen to cooperate. Some have opted for conflict with the federal government. Conservative Innovators traces the activity of far-right conservatives in Kansas who have in the past decade used the powers of state-level offices to fight federal regulation on a range of topics from gun control to voting processes to Medicaid. Telling their story, Ben Merriman then expands the scope of the book to look at the tactics used by conservative state governments across the country to resist federal regulations, including coordinated lawsuits by state attorneys general, refusals to accept federal funds and spending mandates, and the creation of programs designed to restrict voting rights. Through this combination of state-initiated lawsuits and new administrative practices, these state officials weakened or halted major parts of the Obama Administration's healthcare, environmental protection, and immigration agendas and eroded federal voting rights protections. Conservative Innovators argues that American federalism is entering a new, conflict-ridden era that will make state governments more important in American life than they have been at any time in the past century.

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.

Does climate change cause conflict? Did it cause the Syrian uprising? Some policymakers and academics have made this claim, but is it true? This study presents a new conceptual framework to evaluate this claim. Contributing to scholarship in the fields of critical security, environmental security, human security, and Arab politics, Marwa Daoudy prioritizes non-Western and marginalized perspectives to make sense of Syria's place in this international debate. Designing an innovative multidisciplinary framework and applying it to the Syrian case, Daoudy uses extensive field research and her own personal background as a Syrian scholar to present primary interviews with Syrian government officials and citizens, as well as the research of domestic Syrian experts, to provide a unique insight into Syria's environmental, economic and social vulnerabilities leading up to the 2011 uprising.

With its implications for health care, the economy, and an assortment of other policy areas, population aging is one of the most pressing issues facing governments and society today, and confronting its complex reality is becoming increasingly urgent, particularly in the age of COVID-19. In The Four Lenses of Population Aging, Patrik Marier looks at how Canada's ten provinces are preparing for an aging society. Focusing on a wide range of administrative and policy challenges, this analysis explores multiple actions from the development of strategic plans to the expansion of long-term care capacity. To enhance this analysis, Marier adopts four lenses: the intergenerational, the medical, the social gerontological, and the organizational. By comparing the unique insights and contributions of each lens, Marier draws attention to the vital lessons and possible solutions to the challenges of an aging society. Drawing on over a hundred interviews with senior civil servants and thousands of policy documents, The Four Lenses of Population Aging is a significant contribution to public administration, provincial politics, and comparative public policy literatures, and a timely resource for policymakers and general readers seeking an informed perspective on a timely and important issue.

The impact of humanity on the earth overshoots the earth's bio-capacity to supply humanity's needs, meaning that people are living off earth's capital rather than its income. However, not all countries are equal and this book explores why apparently similar patterns of daily living can lead to larger and smaller environmental impacts. The contributors describe daily life in many different places in the world and then calculate the environmental impact of these ways of living from the perspective of ecological and carbon footprints. This leads to comparison and discussion of what living within the limits of the planet might mean. Current footprints for countries are derived from national statistics and these hide the variety of impacts made by individual people and the choices they make in their daily lives. This book takes a 'bottom-up' approach by calculating the footprints of daily living. The purpose is to show that small changes in behaviour now could avoid some very challenging problems in the future. Offering a global perspective on the question of sustainable living, this book will be of great interest to anyone with a concern for the future, as well as students and researchers in environmental studies, human geography and development studies.

This is the authoritative book on sea level rise and its coastal consequences. On Shismaref Island in Alaska, homes are being washed into the sea. In the South Pacific, small island nations face annihilation by encroaching waters. In coastal Louisiana, an area the size of a football field disappears every day. For these communities, sea level rise isn't a distant, abstract fear: it's happening now and it's threatening their way of life. In "The Rising Sea", Orrin H. Pilkey and Rob Young warn that many other coastal areas may be close behind. Prominent scientists predict that the oceans may rise by as much as seven feet in the next hundred years. That means coastal cities will be forced to construct dikes and seawalls or to move buildings, roads, pipelines, and railways to avert inundation and destruction. The question is no longer whether climate change is causing the oceans to swell, but by how much and how quickly. Pilkey and Young deftly guide readers through the science, explaining the facts and debunking the claims of industry-sponsored 'sceptics'. They also explore the consequences for fish, wildlife - and people. While rising seas are now inevitable, we are far from helpless. By making hard choices - including uprooting citizens, changing where and how we build, and developing a coordinated national response - we can save property, and ultimately lives. With unassailable research and practical insights, "The Rising Sea" is a critical first step in understanding the threat and keeping our heads above water.

In the era of the Anthropocene, artists and scientists are facing a new paradigm in their attempts to represent nature. Seven chapters, which focus on art from 1780 to the present that engages with Nordic landscapes, argue that a number of artists in this period work in the intersection between art, science, and media technologies to examine the human impact on these landscapes and question the blurred boundaries between nature and the human. Canadian artists such as Lawren Harris and Geronimo Inutiq are considered alongside artists from Scandinavia and Iceland such as J.C. Dahl, Eija-Liisa Ahtila, Toril Johannessen, and Bjoerk.

Lewis Mumford, one of the most respected public intellectuals of the twentieth century, speaking at a conference on the future environments of North America, said, "In order to secure human survival we must transition from a technological culture to an ecological culture." In Ecohumanism and the Ecological Culture, William Cohen shows how Mumford's conception of an educational philosophy was enacted by Mumford's mentee, Ian McHarg, the renowned landscape architect and regional planner at the University of Pennsylvania. McHarg advanced a new way to achieve an ecological culture through an educational curriculum based on fusing ecohumanism to the planning and design disciplines. Cohen explores Mumford's important vision of ecohumanism-a synthesis of natural systems ecology with the myriad dimensions of human systems, or human ecology and how McHarg actually formulated and made that vision happen. He considers the emergence of alternative energy systems and new approaches to planning and community development to achieve these goals. The ecohumanism graduate curriculum should become the basis to train the next generation of planners and designers to lead us into the ecological culture, thereby securing the educational legacy of both Lewis Mumford and Ian McHarg.

In" The Lure of the Local" Lucy R. Lippard weaves together cultural studies, history, geography, and contemporary art to provide a fascinating examination of our multiple senses of place.

Divided into five parts--Around Here; Manipulating Memory; Down to Earth: Land Use; The Last Frontiers: Cities and Suburbs; and Looking Around--the book extends far beyond the confines of the art worlds, including issues of community, land use, perceptions of nature, how we produce the landscape, and how the landscape affects our lives. Praised by critics and readers alike, she consistently makes unexpected connections between contemporary art and its political, social, and cultural contexts.

Here is an indispensable text and reference book for anyone interested in a systems approach to environmental studies. It will be useful not only to geographers but also to ecologists and other environmental scientists; planners; economists and other social scientists; philosophers; and applied mathematicians. Bennett and Chorley's book has a number of broad aims: first, to employ the systems approach to provide an interdisciplinary focus on environmental structures and techniques; second, to use this approach to aid in developing the interfacing of social and economic theory with physical and biological theory; and third, to investigate the implications of this interfacing for human response to current environmental dilemmas, and hence to expose the technological and social bases of values which underlie our use of natural resources. Interpreting the "environment" so as to embrace physical, biological, man-made, social, and economic reality, the authors show that the systems approach provides a powerful vehicle for the statement of environmental situations of ever-growing temporal and spatial magnitude, and for reducing the areas of uncertainty in our increasingly complex decision making arenas. Originally published in 1979. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.