This book arises out of an ESRC project devoted to an examination of the economic, social and cultural impacts of the 'service class' on rural areas. The research was an attempt to document these impacts through close empirical work in a set of three rural communities, but something happened on the way. The authors found that the 'rural' became a real sticking point. Respondents used it in different ways - as a bludgeon, as a badge, as a barometer - to signify many different things - security, identity, community, domesticity, gender, sexuality, ethnicity - nearly always by drawing on many different sources - the media, the landscape, friends and kin, animals. It became abundantly clear that the 'rural', whatever chameleon form it took, was a prime and deeply felt determinant of the actions of many respondents. Yet it was also clear that to the authors they possessed no theoretical framework that could allow them to negotiate the 'rural' to deconstruct its diverse nature as a category. Rather each of the extended essays in the book is an attempt by each author to draw out one aspect of the 'rural' by drawing on different traditions in social and cultural theory.

This book is about a subject that Michael Greenberg has worked on and lived with for almost forty years. He was brought up in the south Bronx at a time when his neighborhood suffered from terrible air and noise pollution, and domestic waste went untreated into the Hudson River. For him, the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) was a blessing. It included an ethical position about the environment, and the law required some level of accountability in the form of an environmental impact statement, or EIS.

After forty years of thinking about and working with NEPA and the EIS process, Greenberg decided to conduct his own evaluation from the perspective of a person trained in science who focuses on environmental and environmental health policies. This book of carefully chosen real case studies goes beyond the familiar checklists of what to do, and shows students and practitioners alike what really happens during the creation and implementation of an EIS.

This book examines how institutional and environmental features in neighbourhoods can contribute to social resilience, highlighting the related socio-demographic issues, as well as the infrastructure, planning, design and policies issues. It is divided into three themes - infrastructure, planning, and community. Infrastructure examines how physical features such as parks and street patterns influence neighborliness and resilience, while planning studies how urban design enhances social interactions. Lastly, community discusses policies that can forge social bonds, either through racial integration, grassroots activities, or social service. Overall, the book combines research and empirical work with scholarly models of resilience and governance philosophy, focusing on Singapore's urban planning and social policies.

Against Sustainability responds to the twenty-first-century environmental crisis by unearthing the nineteenth-century U.S. literary, cultural, and scientific contexts that gave rise to sustainability, recycling, and preservation. Through novel pairings of antebellum and contemporary writers including Walt Whitman and Lucille Clifton, George Catlin and Louise Erdrich, and Herman Melville and A. S. Byatt, the book demonstrates that some of our most vaunted strategies to address ecological crisis in fact perpetuate environmental degradation. Yet Michelle C. Neely also reveals that the nineteenth century offers useful and generative environmentalisms, if only we know where and how to find them. Henry David Thoreau and Emily Dickinson experimented with models of joyful, anti-consumerist frugality. Hannah Crafts and Harriet Wilson devised forms of radical pet-keeping that model more just ways of living with others. Ultimately, the book explores forms of utopianism that might more reliably guide mainstream environmental culture toward transformative forms of ecological and social justice. Through new readings of familiar texts, Against Sustainability demonstrates how nineteenth-century U.S. literature can help us rethink our environmental paradigms in order to imagine more just and environmentally sound futures.

Ecologists and economists both use models to help develop strategies for biodiversity management. The practical use of disciplinary models, however, can be limited because ecological models tend not to address the socioeconomic dimension of biodiversity management, whereas economic models tend to neglect the ecological dimension. Given these shortcomings of disciplinary models, there is a necessity to combine ecological and economic knowledge into ecological-economic models. Gradually guiding the reader into the field of ecological-economic modelling by introducing mathematical models and their role in general, this book provides an overview on ecological and economic modelling approaches relevant for research in the field of biodiversity conservation. It discusses the advantages of and challenges associated with ecological-economic modelling, together with an overview of useful ways of integration. Although being a book about mathematical modelling, ecological and economic concepts play an equally important role, making it accessible for readers from very different disciplinary backgrounds.

Yellowstone holds a special place in America's heart. As the world's first national park, it is globally recognized as the crown jewel of modern environmental preservation. But the park and its surrounding regions have recently become a lightning rod for environmental conflict, plagued by intense and intractable political struggles among the federal government, National Park Service, environmentalists, industry, local residents, and elected officials. The Battle for Yellowstone asks why it is that, with the flood of expert scientific, economic, and legal efforts to resolve disagreements over Yellowstone, there is no improvement? Why do even seemingly minor issues erupt into impassioned disputes? What can Yellowstone teach us about the worsening environmental conflicts worldwide? Justin Farrell argues that the battle for Yellowstone has deep moral, cultural, and spiritual roots that until now have been obscured by the supposedly rational and technical nature of the conflict. Tracing in unprecedented detail the moral causes and consequences of large-scale social change in the American West, he describes how a "new-west" social order has emerged that has devalued traditional American beliefs about manifest destiny and rugged individualism, and how morality and spirituality have influenced the most polarizing and techno-centric conflicts in Yellowstone's history. This groundbreaking book shows how the unprecedented conflict over Yellowstone is not all about science, law, or economic interests, but more surprisingly, is about cultural upheaval and the construction of new moral and spiritual boundaries in the American West.

Is climate catastrophe inevitable? In a world of extreme inequality, rising nationalism and mounting carbon emissions, the future looks gloomy. Yet one group of environmentalists, the 'ecomodernists', are optimistic. They argue that technological innovation and universal human development hold the keys to an ecologically vibrant future. However, this perspective, which advocates fighting climate change with all available technologies - including nuclear power, synthetic biology and others not yet invented - is deeply controversial because it rejects the Green movement's calls for greater harmony with nature. In this book, Jonathan Symons offers a qualified defence of the ecomodernist vision. Ecomodernism, he explains, is neither as radical or reactionary as its critics claim, but belongs in the social democratic tradition, promoting a third way between laissez-faire and anti-capitalism. Critiquing and extending ecomodernist ideas, Symons argues that states should defend against climate threats through transformative investments in technological innovation. A good Anthropocene is still possible - but only if we double down on science and humanism to push beyond the limits to growth.

Ecological Form brings together leading voices in nineteenth-century ecocriticism to suture the lingering divide between postcolonial and ecocritical approaches. Together, these essays show how Victorian thinkers used aesthetic form to engage problems of system, interconnection, and dispossession that remain our own. The authors reconsider Victorian literary structures in light of environmental catastrophe; coordinate "natural" questions with sociopolitical ones; and underscore the category of form as a means for generating environmental-and therefore political-knowledge. Moving from the elegy and the industrial novel to the utopian romance, the scientific treatise, and beyond, Ecological Form demonstrates how nineteenth-century thinkers conceptualized the circuits of extraction and violence linking Britain to its global network. Yet the book's most pressing argument is that this past thought can be a resource for reimagining the present.

The history of the Cold War has focused overwhelmingly on statecraft and military power, an approach that has naturally placed Moscow and Washington center stage. Meanwhile, regions such as Alaska, the polar landscapes, and the cold areas of the Soviet periphery have received little attention. However, such environments were of no small importance during the Cold War: in addition to their symbolic significance, they also had direct implications for everything from military strategy to natural resource management. Through histories of these extremely cold environments, this volume makes a novel intervention in Cold War historiography, one whose global and transnational approach undermines the simple opposition of "East" and "West."

This book highlights the first comparative long-term analysis of the negative impacts of large dams on riverine communities and on free-flowing rivers in Africa, the Middle East and Asia. Following the Foreword by Professor Asit K. Biswas, the first section covers the 1956-1973 period, when the author believed that large dams provided an exceptional opportunity for integrated river basin development. In turn, the second section (1976-1997) reflects the author's increasing concerns about the magnitude of the socio-economic and environmental costs of large dams, while the third (1998-2018) discusses why large dams are in fact not cost-effective in the long term.

World Seas: An Environmental Evaluation, Second Edition, Volume Three: Ecological Issues and Environmental Impacts covers global issues relating to our seas, including a biological description of the coast and continental shelf waters, the development and use of the coast, landfills and their effects, pollutant discharges over time, the effects of over-fishing, and the management methods and techniques used to ensure continued ecosystem functioning. The relative importance of water-borne and airborne routes differ in different parts of the world is explored, along with extensive coverage of major habitats and species groups, governmental, education and legal issues, fisheries effects, remote sensing, climate change and management. This book is an invaluable, worldwide reference source for students and researchers concerned with marine environmental science, fisheries, oceanography and engineering and coastal zone development.

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.

We are living in the midst of the Earth's sixth great extinction event, the first one caused by a single species: our own. In "Wild Dog Dreaming, " Deborah Bird Rose explores what constitutes an ethical relationship with nonhuman others in this era of loss. She asks, Who are we, as a species? How do we fit into the Earth's systems? Amidst so much change, how do we find our way into new stories to guide us? Rose explores these questions in the form of a dialogue between science and the humanities. Drawing on her conversations with Aboriginal people, for whom questions of extinction are up-close and very personal, Rose develops a mode of exposition that is dialogical, philosophical, and open-ended.

An inspiration for Rose--and a touchstone throughout her book--is the endangered dingo of Australia. The dingo is not the first animal to face extinction, but its story is particularly disturbing because the threat to its future is being actively engineered by humans. The brazenness with which the dingo is being wiped out sheds valuable, and chilling, light on the likely fate of countless other animal and plant species.

"People save what they love," observed Michael Soule, the great conservation biologist. We must ask whether we, as humans, are capable of loving--and therefore capable of caring for--the animals and plants that are disappearing in a cascade of extinctions. Wild Dog Dreaming engages this question, and the result is a bold account of the entangled ethics of love, contingency, and desire.

Though still a relatively young field, the study of Latin American environmental history is blossoming, as the contributions to this definitive volume demonstrate. Bringing together thirteen leading experts on the region, A Living Past synthesizes a wide range of scholarship to offer new perspectives on environmental change in Latin America and the Spanish Caribbean since the nineteenth century. Each chapter provides insightful, up-to-date syntheses of current scholarship on critical countries and ecosystems (including Brazil, Mexico, the Caribbean, the tropical Andes, and tropical forests) and such cross-cutting themes as agriculture, conservation, mining, ranching, science, and urbanization. Together, these studies provide valuable historical contexts for making sense of contemporary environmental challenges facing the region.

Every four days there are a million more people on the planet. More people and fewer resources. In this timely work, Alan Weisman examines how we can shrink our collective human footprint so that we don't stomp any more species - including our own - out of existence. The answer: reducing gradually and non-violently the number of humans on the planet whose activities, industries and lifestyles are damaging the Earth. Defining an optimum human population for the Earth is an explosive concept. Weisman, one of the most brilliant environmental writers, will travel the globe, from the settlements of Israel and the plains of Mexico to the bustling streets of Pakistan and the teeming cities of the UK. In his search for answers, he will speak to religious leaders, demographers, ecologists, economists, engineers and agriculturalists in what promises to be an international classic.

Finalist for the National Book Award An intimate reckoning with aquifer depletion in America's heartland The Ogallala aquifer has nourished life on the American Great Plains for millennia. But less than a century of unsustainable irrigation farming has taxed much of the aquifer beyond repair. The imminent depletion of the Ogallala and other aquifers around the world is a defining planetary crisis of our times. Running Out offers a uniquely personal account of aquifer depletion and the deeper layers through which it gains meaning and force. Anthropologist Lucas Bessire journeyed back to western Kansas, where five generations of his family lived as irrigation farmers and ranchers, to try to make sense of this vital resource and its loss. His search for water across the drying High Plains brings the reader face to face with the stark realities of industrial agriculture, eroding democratic norms, and surreal interpretations of a looming disaster. Yet the destination is far from predictable, as the book seeks to move beyond the words and genres through which destruction is often known. Instead, this journey into the morass of eradication offers a series of unexpected discoveries about what it means to inherit the troubled legacies of the past and how we can take responsibility for a more inclusive, sustainable future. An urgent and unsettling meditation on environmental change, Running Out is a revelatory account of family, complicity, loss, and what it means to find your way back home.

"Environmental Injustice in the United States" provides systematic insight into the social, economic, and political dynamics of environmental decision-making, and the impacts of those decisions on minority communities. The first part of the book examines closely the history of the environmental justice movement and the scholarly literature to date, with a discussion about how the issue made the public agenda in the first place. The second part of the book is a unique quantitative analysis of the relationship among race, class, political mobilization, and environmental harm at three levels-- state, county, and city. Despite the initial skepticism of the authors, their study finds both race and class to be significant variables in explaining patterns of environmental harm. The third part of the book then offers policy recommendations to decisionmakers, based on the book's findings. It was named a Choice Outstanding Academic Book of 2001.

Celebrated for its natural beauty and its abundance of wildlife, the Mekong river runs thousands of miles through China, Myanmar, Laos, Thailand, Cambodia, and Vietnam. Its basin is home to more than 70 million people and has for centuries been one of the world's richest agricultural areas and a biodynamic wonder. Today, however, it is undergoing profound changes. Development policies, led by a rising China in particular, aim to interconnect the region and urbanize the inhabitants. And a series of dams will harness the river's energy, while also stymieing its natural cycles and cutting off food supplies for swathes of the population. In Last Days of the Mighty Mekong, Brian Eyler travels from the river's headwaters in China to its delta in southern Vietnam to explore its modern evolution. Along the way he meets the region's diverse peoples, from villagers to community leaders, politicians to policy makers. Through conversations with them he reveals the urgent struggle to save the Mekong and its unique ecosystem.

This book explores the specifically human dimensions of the problem posed by a new generation of invasive pests and pathogens to tree health worldwide. The growth in global trade and transportation in recent decades, along with climate change, is allowing invasive pests and pathogens to establish in new environments, with profound consequences for the ecosystem services provided by trees and forests, and impacts on human wellbeing. The central theme of the book is to consider the role that social science can play in better understanding the social, economic and environmental impacts of such tree disease and pest outbreaks. Contributions include explorations of how pest outbreaks are socially constructed, drawing on the historical, cultural, social and situated contexts of outbreaks; the governance and economics of tree health for informing policy and decision-making; stakeholder engagement and communication tools; along with more philosophical approaches that draw on environmental ethics to consider 'non-human' perspectives. Taken together the book makes theoretical, methodological and applied contributions to our understanding of this important subject area and encourages researchers from across the social sciences and humanities to bring their own disciplinary perspectives and expertise to address the complexity that is the human dimensions of forest and tree health. Chapters 5 and 11 are open access under a CC BY 4.0 license via link.springer.com.

Unstoppable climate change. Extensive extinction. The breakdown of ecosystems. Mass displacement. Wars over resources. Societal collapse. The projections for our future feel too catastrophic to be plausible, too distant to be true. But ecology is the study of the connections that sustain life, and Daniel Macmillen Voskoboynik's book links history with biology, economics with physics, to join the dots between our overlapping crises. Whether it be environmental degradation or damaged health, racial oppression or gender injustice, our multiple problems have common roots but also shared solutions. Unpacking our past gives us the tools to build a more just future, where competition and control give way for cooperation and care. Avoiding the sterile language that so often surrounds climate change, The Memory We Could Be seeks to inspire, illustrating in human terms the world we could lose and the world we can still win. Open its pages to come to terms with complexity, and heal our separation from nature and each other. FOREWORD BY RAOUL MARTINEZ, AUTHOR OF CREATING FREEDOM: POWER, CONTROL AND THE FIGHT FOR OUR FUTURE

Rural Water Systems for Multiple Uses and Livelihood Security covers the technological, institutional, and policy choices for building rural water supply systems that are sustainable from physical, economic, and ecological points-of-view in developing countries. While there is abundant theoretical discourse on designing village water supply schemes as multiple use systems, there is too little understanding of the type of water needs in rural households, how they vary across socio-economic and climatic settings, the extent to which these needs are met by the existing single use water supply schemes, and what mechanisms exist to take care of unmet demands. The case studies presented in the book from different agro ecological regions quantify these benefits under different agro ecological settings, also examining the economic and environmental trade-offs in maximizing benefits. This book demonstrates how various physical and socio-economic processes alter the hydrology of tanks in rural settings, thereby affecting their performance, also including quantitative criteria that can be used to select tanks suitable for rehabilitation.

Case Studies for Integrating Science and the Global Environment is designed to help students of the environment and natural resources make the connections between their training in science and math and today's complex environmental issues. The book provides an opportunity for students to apply important skills, knowledge, and analytical tools to understand, evaluate, and propose solutions to today's critical environmental issues. The heart of the book includes four major content areas: water resources; the atmosphere and air quality; ecosystem alteration; and global resources and human needs. Each of these sections features in-depth case studies covering a range of issues for each resource, offering rich opportunities to teach how various scientific disciplines help inform the issue at hand. Case studies provide readers with experience in interpreting real data sets and considering alternate explanations for trends shown by the data. This book helps prepare students for careers that require collaboration with stakeholders and co-workers from various disciplines.

Contextualizing Disaster offers a comparative analysis of six recent "highly visible" disasters and several slow-burning, "hidden," crises that include typhoons, tsunamis, earthquakes, chemical spills, and the unfolding consequences of rising seas and climate change. The book argues that, while disasters are increasingly represented by the media as unique, exceptional, newsworthy events, it is a mistake to think of disasters as isolated or discrete occurrences. Rather, building on insights developed by political ecologists, this book makes a compelling argument for understanding disasters as transnational and global phenomena.