Welcome to Loot.co.za!
Sign in / Register |Wishlists & Gift Vouchers |Help | Advanced search
|
Your cart is empty |
|||
Books > Earth & environment > The environment > Social impact of environmental issues > General
Whilst the science of conservation biology is thriving as a discipline, ultimately global conservation is failing. Why, when the majority of people say they value nature and its protection? David Johns argues that the loss of species and healthy ecosystems is best understood as human imposition of a colonial relationship on the non-human world - one of exploitation and domination. Global institutions benefit from transforming nature into commodities, and conservation is a low priority. This book places political issues at the forefront, and tackles critical questions of conservation efficacy. It considers the role of effective influence on decision making, key policy changes to reduce human footprint, and the centrality of culture in mobilising support. It draws on political lessons from successful social movements, including human anti-colonial struggles, to provide conservation biologists and practitioners in scientific and social science disciplines and NGOs with the tools and wider context to accelerate their work's impact.
Organized around issues, debates and discussions concerning the various ways in which the concept of nature has been used, this book looks at how the term has been endlessly deconstructed and reclaimed, as reflected in anthropological, scientific, and similar writing over the last several decades. Made up of ten of Roy Ellen's finest articles, this book looks back at his ideas about nature and includes a new introduction that contextualizes the arguments and takes them forward. Many of the chapters focus on research the author has conducted amongst the Nuaulu people of eastern Indonesia.
Big cities don't have to mean a dystopian future. They can be turned around to be powerhouses of well-being and environmental sustainability - if we empower women. This book is a unique collaboration between C40 and Friends of the Earth showcasing pioneering city mayors, key voices in the environmental and feminist movements, and academics. The essays collectively demonstrate both the need for women's empowerment for climate action and the powerful change it can bring. A rallying call - for the planet, for women, for everyone.
This book is the first authored overview of resilience in tourism and its relationship to the broader resilience literature. The volume takes a multi-scaled approach to examine resilience at the individual, organisation and destination levels, and with respect to the wider tourism system. It covers the different approaches to understanding resilience (the ecological and engineering approaches) and identifies issues with their understanding and application. The book connects issues of resilience to related key concepts such as vulnerability, adaptation, networks, systems, change and social capital. It is designed to be an upper level undergraduate and postgraduate primer on resilience in a tourism context and will be of interest to tourism researchers in planning, development, geography, impacts, sustainability, disaster management and environmental studies.
The authors in this volume make a case for LTSER s potential in providing insights, knowledge and experience necessary for a sustainability transition. This expertly edited selection of contributions from Europe and North America reviews the development of LTSER since its inception and assesses its current state, which has evolved to recognize the value of formulating solutions to the host of ecological threats we face. Through many case studies, this book gives the reader a greater sense of where we are and what still needs to be done to engage in and make meaning from long-term, place-based and cross-disciplinary engagements with socio-ecological systems."
Increasing recognition of the impact that globalization may be having on public health has led to widespread concern about the risks arising from emerging and re-emerging diseases, environmental degradation and demographic change. A distinguished, international team of contributors covers a comprehensive range of topics and geographic regions herein, arguing that health policy making is being affected by globalization and that these effects are, in turn, contributing to the global health issues faced today.
An incisive look at the consequences of today's costly and damaging suburban lifestyle In "The Cul-de-Sac Syndrome," Bloomberg News' John Wasik exposes
the economic, cultural, environmental, and health problems
underlying life in suburbia. Wasik provides powerful insights into
how the U.S. suburban lifestyle has become unsustainable and what
can be done to salvage it. His observations are firmly grounded in
exclusive on-the-ground research, interviews with thought leaders,
and the latest studies and statistics. The book The American Dream of moving further from a city to buy a bigger house and find better schools has become a costly nightmare. "The Cul-de-Sac Syndrome" examines why and what can be done.
As human activity and environmental change come to be increasingly recognized as intertwined phenomena on a rapidly urbanizing planet, the field of urban ecology has risen to offer useful ways of thinking about coupled human and natural systems. On the forefront of this discipline is Marina Alberti, whose innovative work offers a conceptual framework for uncovering fundamental laws that govern the complexity and resilience of cities, which she sees as key to understanding and responding to planetary change and the evolution of Earth. Bridging the fields of urban planning and ecology, Alberti describes a science of cities that work on a planetary scale and that links unpredictable dynamics to the potential for innovation. It is a science that considers interactions - at all scales - between people and built environments and between cities and their larger environments. Cities That Think like Planets advances strategies for planning a future that may look very different from the present, as rapid urbanization could tip the Earth toward abrupt and nonlinear change. Alberti's analyses of the various hybrid ecosystems, such as self-organization, heterogeneity, modularity, multiple equilibria, feedback, and transformation, may help humans participate in guiding the Earth away from inadvertent collapse and toward a new era of planetary co-evolution and resilience.
Our attitudes to our environment are widely and often acrimoniously discussed, commonly misunderstood, and will shape our future. We cannot assume that we behave as newly minted beings in a pristine garden nor as pre-programmed automata incapable of rational responsibility. Professor Berry has studied nature-nurture interactions for many years, and also been involved with many national and international decision making bodies which have influenced our environmental attitudes. He is therefore well-placed to describe what has moulded our present attitudes towards the environment. This book presents data and concepts from a range of disciplines - genetic, anthropological, social, historical and theological - to help us understand how we have responded in the past and how this influences our future. Beginning with a historical review and moving forwards to current conditions, readers will reach the end of this volume more capable and better prepared to make decisions which affect our communities and posterity.
The Climate Change 2001 volumes of the Third Assessment Report of the IPCC provide the most comprehensive assessment of climate change since its second report, Climate Change 1995. This Synthesis Report gives a comprehensive summary of the main points of the three separate volumes of the Report: The Scientific Basis; Impacts, Adaptation, and Vulnerability; and Mitigation.
This volume offers an open, transdisciplinary living space (also green) through which to explore the different connections between Basilicata and Southern Italy, cinema, and ecology, and thus to reflect on the different forms through which the historical, cultural, and social contexts of Southern Italian regions have been variously identified and represented. In order to explore these connections, the volume embraces a wide range of perspectives that may all be grouped under the key term film ecocriticism, offering the reader a thorough analysis not only of the different ways of representing reality but also of the processes of signification through which reality itself can be understood, rethought, and transformed. This is the general framework within which the authors consider film as a proper, effective medium for ecocritical and ecophilosophical reflections concerning not only Basilicata (to which the greater part of the volume is dedicated) but also Southern Italy and, therefore, its history and its territories, communities, and identities. Furthermore, in an even more general sense, Basilicata and Southern Italy reconnects with the very idea of the South, and of all Souths, to which this volume is dedicated.
Some issues addressed in this Working Group III volume are mitigation of greenhouse gas emissions, managing biological carbon reservoirs, geo-engineering, costing methods, and decision-making frameworks.
International institutions are prevalent in world politics. More than a thousand multilateral treaties are in place just to protect the environment alone, and there are many more. And yet, it is also clear that these institutions do not operate in a void but are enmeshed in larger, highly complex webs of governance arrangements. This compelling book conceptualises these broader structures as the 'architectures' of global governance. Here, over 40 international relations scholars offer an authoritative synthesis of a decade of research on global governance architectures with an empirical focus on protecting the environment and vital earth systems. They investigate the structural intricacies of earth system governance and explain how global architectures enable or hinder individual institutions and their overall effectiveness. The book offers much-needed conceptual clarity about key building blocks and structures of complex governance architectures, charts detailed directions for new research, and provides analytical groundwork for policy reform. This is one of a series of publications associated with the Earth System Governance Project. For more publications, see www.cambridge.org/earth-system-governance.
Analyses of the ecology, biology and society of past and present-day hunter-gatherers are at the core of this interdisciplinary volume. Since the seminal work of Man the Hunter in 1968, new research in these three areas has become increasingly specialized, and the lines of communication among academic disciplines have all but broken down. This volume aims to reestablish an interdisciplinary debate, presenting critical issues commanding an ongoing interest in hunter-gatherer research, covering the evolution and history, demography, biology, technology, social organization, art, and language of diverse groups. As a reference text, this book will be useful to scholars and students of social anthropology, archaeology, biological anthropology, and human sciences.
For generations the Rio Embudo watershed in northern New Mexico has been the home of Juan Estevan Arellano and his ancestors. From this unique perspective Arellano explores the ways people use water in dry places around the world. Touching on the Middle East, Europe, Mexico, and South America before circling back to New Mexico, Arellano makes a case for preserving the acequia irrigation system and calls for a future that respects the ecological limitations of the land."
Unless action is taken, the developing world will face recurrent problems of food security and conflict. This volume provides a summary and perspective of the field of land resources and suggests improvements needed to conserve resources for future generations. Coverage provides an authoritative review of the resources of soils, water, climate, forests and pastures on which agriculture depends. It assesses the interactions between land resources and wider aspects of development, including population and poverty. It provides a strong critique of current methods of assessing land degradation and placing an economic value on land. It should be read by all involved in rural development, including scientists, economists, geographers, sociologists, planners, and students of development studies.
Demographers predict that the world population will double during the first half of the 21st century before it will begin to level off. In this volume, a group of prominent authors examine what societal changes must occur to meet this challenge to the natural environment and the transformational changes that we must experience to achieve sustainability. Frances Cairncross, Herman E. Daly, Stephen H. Schneider and others provide a broad discussion of sustainable development. They detail economic and environmental, as well as spiritual and religious, corporate and social, scientific and political factors. Sustainable Development: The Challenge of Transition offers many insightful policy recommendations about how business, government, and individuals must change their current values, priorities, and behavior to meet present and future challenges. It will appeal to scholars and decision makers interested in global change, environmental policy, population growth, and sustainable development, and also to corporate environmental managers.
While scientists usually examine either ecological systems or social systems, the need exists for an interdisciplinary approach to the problems of environmental management and sustainable development. Developed under the auspices of the Beijer Institute in Stockholm, this volume analyzes social and ecological linkages in selected ecosystems using an international and interdisciplinary case study approach. The chapters provide detailed information on a variety of management practices for dealing with environmental change. Taken as a whole, the book contributes to the greater understanding of essential social responses to changes in ecosystems. A key feature is a set of new, or rediscovered, principles for sustainable ecosystem management.
*'Probably the best novel I'll read this year. It's about work and love and characters who ring true. By the time I was 50 pages in I couldn't put it down. Can't stop thinking about it' Stephen King* For generations, Rich Gundersen's family has made a living felling giant redwoods on California's rugged coast. It's treacherous work, and though his son, Chub, wants nothing more than to step into his father's boots, Rich longs for a bigger future for him. Colleen just wants a brother or sister for Chub, but she's losing hope. There is so much that she and Rich don't talk about these days - including her suspicions that there is something very wrong at the heart of the forest on which their community is built. When Rich is offered the opportunity to buy a plot of timber which borders Damnation Grove, he leaps at the chance - without telling Colleen. Soon the Gundersens find themselves on opposite sides of a battle that threatens to rip their town apart. Can they find a way to emerge from this together?
In this thoroughly revised and updated second edition of the highly successful "Ecological Ethics," Patrick Curry shows that a new and truly ecological ethic is both possible and urgently needed. With this distinctive proposition in mind, Curry introduces and discusses all the major concepts needed to understand the full range of ecological ethics. He discusses light green or anthropocentric ethics with the examples of stewardship, lifeboat ethics, and social ecology; the mid-green or intermediate ethics of animal liberation/rights; and dark or deep green ecocentric ethics. Particular attention is given to the Land Ethic, the Gaia Hypothesis and Deep Ecology and its offshoots: Deep Green Theory, Left Biocentrism and the Earth Manifesto. Ecofeminism is also considered and attention is paid to the close relationship between ecocentrism and virtue ethics. Other chapters discuss green ethics as post-secular, moral pluralism and pragmatism, green citizenship, and human population in the light of ecological ethics. In this new edition, all these have been updated and joined by discussions of climate change, sustainable economies, education, and food from an ecocentric perspective. This comprehensive and wide-ranging textbook offers a radical but critical introduction to the subject which puts ecocentrism and the critique of anthropocentrism back at the top of the ethical, intellectual and political agenda. It will be of great interest to students and activists, and to a wider public.
In this book, Robert Harms makes an important advance toward recovering the history of the people of the rain forest by telling the story of the Nunu, who live in and around swampy floodplains of the middle Zaire River. Using concepts drawn from game theory, Professor Harms explores the changing relationship between nature and culture among the Nunu. Picturing Nunu society as animated by a never-ending competition among lineages and households, he traces how the competition pushed people into new environments, and how adaption to the new environment, in turn, led to new forms of competition.
Microclimate for Cultural Heritage: Measurement, Risk Assessment, Conservation, Restoration, and Maintenance of Indoor and Outdoor Monuments, Third Edition, presents the latest on microclimates, environmental issues and the conservation of cultural heritage. It is a useful treatise on microphysics, acting as a practical handbook for conservators and specialists in physics, chemistry, architecture, engineering, geology and biology who focus on environmental issues and the conservation of works of art. It fills a gap between the application of atmospheric sciences, like the thermodynamic processes of clouds and dynamics of planetary boundary layer, and their application to a monument surface or a room within a museum. Sections covers applied theory, environmental issues and conservation, practical utilization, along with suggestions, examples, common issues and errors.
Born at a traditional Inuit camp in what is now Nunavut, Joan Scottie has spent decades protecting the Inuit hunting way of life, most famously with her long battle against the uranium mining industry. Twice, Scottie and her community of Baker Lake successfully stopped a proposed uranium mine. Working with geographer Warren Bernauer and social scientist Jack Hicks, Scottie here tells the history of her community's decades-long fight against uranium mining. Scottie's I Will Live for Both of Us is a reflection on recent political and environmental history and a call for a future in which Inuit traditional laws and values are respected and upheld. Drawing on Scottie's rich and storied life, together with document research by Bernauer and Hicks, their book brings the perspective of a hunter, Elder, grandmother, and community organizer to bear on important political developments and conflicts in the Canadian Arctic since the Second World War. In addition to telling the story of her community's struggle against the uranium industry, I Will Live for Both of Us discusses gender relations in traditional Inuit camps, the emotional dimensions of colonial oppression, Inuit experiences with residential schools, the politics of gold mining, and Inuit traditional laws regarding the land and animals. A collaboration between three committed activists, I Will Live for Both of Us provides key insights into Inuit history, Indigenous politics, resource management, and the nuclear industry. |
You may like...
Power Maths 2nd Edition Practice Book 1B
Tony Staneff, Josh Lury
Paperback
R119
Discovery Miles 1 190
30-Minute Dash Diet Cookbook - Fast and…
Andy de Santis, Luis Gonzalez
Paperback
|