Displacement caused by climate change is an area of growing concern. With current rises in sea levels and changes to the global climate, it is an issue of fundamental importance to the future of many parts of the world. This book critically examines whether States have obligations to protect people displaced by climate change under international refugee law, international human rights law, and the international law on statelessness. Drawing on field work undertaken in Bangladesh, India, and the Pacific island States of Kiribati and Tuvalu, it evaluates whether the phenomenon of 'climate change-induced displacement' is an empirically sound category for academic inquiry. It does so by examining the reasons why people move (or choose not to move); the extent to which climate change, as opposed to underlying socio-economic factors, provides a trigger for such movement; and whether traditional international responses, such as the conclusion of new treaties and the creation of new institutions, are appropriate solutions in this context. In this way, the book queries whether flight from habitat destruction should be viewed as another facet of traditional international protection or as a new challenge requiring more creative legal and policy responses. law, and the international law on statelessness. Drawing on

A collection of essays on the ecology, biodiversity, and restoration of the Texas Hill Country. For most of five decades, evolutionary biologist David Hillis has studied the biodiversity of the Texas Hill Country. Since the 1990s, he has worked to restore the natural beauty and diversity of his Mason County ranch, the Double Helix. In his excursions around his ranch and across the Edwards Plateau, Hillis came to realize how little most people know about the plants and animals around them or their importance to our everyday lives. He began thinking about how natural history is connected to our enjoyment of life, especially in a place as beautiful and beloved as the Hill Country, which, not coincidentally, happens to be one of the most biodiverse parts of Texas. Featuring short nontechnical essays accompanied by vivid color photos, Armadillos to Ziziphus is a charming and casual introduction to the environment of the region. Whether walking the pasture with his Longhorn cattle, explaining the ecological significance of microscopic organisms in springtime mud puddles, or marveling at the local Ziziphus (aka Lotebush, a spiny shrub), Hillis guides first-time visitors and long-term residents alike in an appreciation for the Hill Country’s natural beauty and diversity.

All too plausibly, it seems, popes and scientists are warning us of impending collapse-yet humanity and our fellow creatures could still be looking forward to a long and glorious future: at least a million years of peace and personal fulfilment, with abundant and diverse wildlife. But to achieve this we need to re-think everything that we do and take for granted, from the day-to-day mundanities of growing and cooking, to the economy and methods of governance, to the most arcane reaches of science and metaphysics. It all amounts to nothing less than a Renaissance-a re-birth-and the Renaissance to come must be driven and led by us, ordinary Joes and Jos, because the oligarchy of governments, corporates, financiers, and their attendant intellectuals who now dominate the world have largely lost touch with the moral and ecological realities of life. The transformation won't be easy but-the good news!-millions of grassroots initiatives of all kinds the world over are already moving in the right directions.

Environmental degradation in China has not only brought a wider range of diseases and other health consequences than previously understood, it has also taken a heavy toll on Chinese society, the economy, and the legitimacy of the party-state. In Toxic Politics, Yanzhong Huang presents new evidence of China's deepening health crisis and challenges the widespread view that China is winning the war on pollution. Although government leaders are learning, stricter and more centralized policy enforcement measures have not been able to substantially reduce pollution or improve public health. Huang connects this failure to pathologies inherent in the institutional structure of the Chinese party-state, which embeds conflicting incentives for officials and limits the capacity of the state to deliver public goods. Toxic Politics reveals a political system that is remarkably resilient but fundamentally flawed. Huang examines the implications for China's future, both domestically and internationally.

The history of urbanization was inseparably connected with the exploitation of the environment and the subjugation of rivers. Today we experience the effects of this expansion in the form of escalating water problems. The book outlines the processes of transformation of anthropogenic, natural and waterborne structures in urban environment, which were presented in three historical phases: the period of Respect, Conquest and Return. River-friendly cities require integrated water management in entire catchments from the source to the recipient. The key to the success of the Return strategy is the recovery of space for greenery and water, responsible spatial planning, circular economy and rainwater management as well as continuous raising of awareness of the whole society.

The volume examines complex intersections of environmental conditions, geopolitical tensions and local innovative reactions characterising 'the Arctic' in the early twenty-first century. What happens in the region (such as permafrost thaw or methane release) not only sweeps rapidly through local ecosystems but also has profound global implications. Bringing together a unique combination of authors who are local practitioners, indigenous scholars and international researchers, the book provides nuanced views of the social consequences of climate change and environmental risks across human and non-human realms.

At a time when it is clear that climate change adaptation and mitigation are failing, this book examines how our assumptions about (valid and usable) knowledge are preventing effective climate action. Through a cross-disciplinary, empirically-based analysis of climate science and policy, the book situates the failures of climate policy in the cultural history of prediction and its interfaces with policy. Fava calls into question the current interfaces between scientific research and climate policy by tracing multiple connections between modelling, epistemology, politics, food security, religion, art, and the apocalyptic. Demonstrating how the current domination of climate policy by models and scenarios is part of the problem, the book examines how artistic practices are a critical location to ask questions differently, rethink environmental futures, and activate social change. The analysis starts with another moment of climatic change in recent western history: the overlap of the Little Ice Age and the "scientific revolution," during which intense climatic, scientific and political change were contemporary with mathematical calculation of the apocalypse. Dealing with the need for complex answers to complex and urgent questions, this is essential reading for those interested in climate action, interdisciplinary research and methodological innovation. The empirical analyses amount to a methodological experiment, across history of science, theology, art theory and history, architecture, future studies, climatology, computer modelling, and agricultural policy. This book is a major contribution to understanding how we are precluding effective climate action, and designing futures that resemble our worst nightmares.

In Europe and other developed countries, much of the population live in small and medium sized towns. For many such places the pursuit of growth is no longer a viable strategic option. As the ability of small towns to compete with larger cities for private investment and government support diminishes, the number trapped in a spiral of long-term decline grows. Beginning with a brief overview of the global context, highlighting that urban shrinkage and decline is a widespread problem, Schlappa and Nishino illustrate how small towns can generate sustainable forward strategies in contrasting institutional contexts by fostering co-production, adjusting public facilities and right sizing the urban area. The analytical tools and practical examples provided by Schlappa and Nishino are relevant for political and administrative decisionmakers, leaders of civil society and business organisations in developing locally appropriate, creative and robust strategies to shrink smart and re-grow smaller.

Drawing on the Pakistan Earthquake Reconstruction and Recovery Project (PERRP), this volume explores the sociocultural side of post-disaster infrastructure reconstruction. As the latter is often fraught with delays and even abandonment-one cause being ineffective interactions between construction and local people-PERRP used anthropological and participatory approaches. Along with strong construction management, such approaches led to the rebuilding being completed on time. As disasters are increasing in number and intensity, so too will be the need for reconstruction, for which PERRP has lessons to offer.

One of the world's leading scholars of religious trends shows how climate change has driven dramatic religious upheavals. Long before the current era of man-made climate change, the world has suffered repeated, severe climate-driven shocks. These shocks have resulted in famine, disease, violence, social upheaval, and mass migration. But these shocks were also religious events. Dramatic shifts in climate have often been understood in religious terms by the people who experienced them. They were described in the language of apocalypse, millennium, and Judgment. Often, too, the eras in which these shocks occurred have been marked by far-reaching changes in the nature of religion and spirituality. Those changes have varied widely - from growing religious fervor and commitment; to the stirring of mystical and apocalyptic expectations; to waves of religious scapegoating and persecution; or the spawning of new religious movements and revivals. In many cases, such responses have had lasting impacts, fundamentally reshaping particular religious traditions. In Climate, Catastrophe, and Faith historian Philip Jenkins draws out the complex relationship between religion and climate change. He asserts that the religious movements and ideas that emerge from climate shocks often last for many decades, and even become a familiar part of the religious landscape, even though their origins in particular moments of crisis may be increasingly consigned to remote memory. By stirring conflicts and provoking persecutions that defined themselves in religious terms, changes in climate have redrawn the world's religious maps, and created the global concentrations of believers as we know them today. This bold new argument will change the way we think about the history of religion, regardless of tradition. And it will demonstrate how our growing climate crisis will likely have a comparable religious impact across the Global South.

This topical and engaging Handbook brings together cutting edge research on the relationship between happiness and the natural environment. With interdisciplinary contributions from top scholars, it explores the role of happiness research as a new approach to environmental social science, illustrating the critical links between human wellbeing, happiness and the environment. Addressing key environmental issues that impact happiness, the book examines: climate change and extreme weather events, air pollution, noise, odour, access to green space, and the importance of green lifestyles. This wide range of environmental concerns is analysed through the lens of differing cultural backgrounds, exploring the importance of different forms of human interaction with the environment globally, as well as its effects. Environmental economics and sociology scholars will find the key case studies discussed particularly useful in assessing different cultural, political and regional approaches to the topic. It will also be an interesting read for policy-makers looking to better understand how the environment affects human happiness and wellbeing. Contributors include: M. Ahmadiani, M. Berlemann, F. Brereton, L. Bruni, X. Chen, C.A. Coral-Guerrero, S. Ferreira, H. Folmer, B.S. Frey, D. Fujiwara, F. Garcia-Quero, I. Gramatki, J. Guardiola, P. Howley, B.A. Jones, K. Kagohashi, S. Kant, K. Keohane, C. Krekel, K. Laffan, R. Lawton, A. Levinson, G. MacKerron, D. Maddison, S. Managi, M. Moro, S. Mourato, A. Oswald, J. Regner, K. Rehdanz, H. Ren, T. Ruckelshauss, J. Tang, T. Tsurumi, J. Tutt, R. Veenhoven, I. Vertinsky, H. Welsch, X. Zhang, X. Zhang, B. Zheng

The completion of this volume would not have been possible without the generous and dedicated help of numerous people. The book had its genesis in a conference held at Cornell University in the fall of 1990 that was organized by Dudley Poston, Paul Eberts, and Michael Hannan, all professors at the time at Cornell. With the very generous financial assistance of David Call, then the dean of Cornell's College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, Poston, Eberts, and Hannan put together a two-day conference oflectures and papers by human ecologists from Cornell University and elsewhere. The conference focused on sociological human ecology and celebrated the fortieth anniversary of the publication of Amos Hawley's Human Ecology (Ronald Press 1950). Professor Hawley was the keynote speaker at the conference. Many of the authors of the chapters in this volume presented earlier versions at the Cornell conference in 1990. Cornell's Departments of Rural Sociology and Sociology also contrib uted financial assistance; however, without Dean Call's very generous support, the conference would not have been possible. A few months after the conference, Poston and Michael Micklin discussed the possibility of asking the various authors of the Cornell conference papers to revise them for publication in a volume on sociological human ecology. Many opted to do so, but others did not because of time and other kinds of commitments and constraints."

Human-induced climate change is causing resource scarcities, natural disasters, and mass migrations, which in turn destabilize national, international, and human security structures and multiply the human inputs to climate change. Alarms about the expanding role of climate change as a force multiplier of existing threats to national, international, and human security structures studies are being raised at all levels of governance and intelligence—national (including the U.S. Senate, the Director of National Intelligence, the Central Intelligence Agency, and the Pentagon), transnational (including the European Union and the United Nations), and private (such as the Central News Agency and the American Security Project). Climate Change and Security: A Gathering Storm of Global Challenges focuses on the three major feedback effects of human-induced climate change on human and international security—resource scarcity, natural disasters, and sea-level rise. Decreasing per capita availability of renewable resources due to such regional effects of climate change as drought and desertification leads to intensified competition for these resources and may result in armed violence—especially when compounded by conditions of rapid population growth, tribalism, and sectarianism, as in Darfur and Somalia. The increase in the frequency and intensity of meteorological disasters associated with global warming weakens already debilitated tropical societies and makes them still more vulnerable to political instability, as in Haiti. Sea-level rise will lead to disruptive mass migrations of climate refugees as dense littoral populations are forced to abandon low-lying coastal regions, as in Bangladesh.

How to Make A Wetland tells the story of two Turkish coastal areas, both shaped by ecological change and political uncertainty. On the Black Sea coast and the shores of the Aegean, farmers, scientists, fishermen, and families grapple with livelihoods in transition, as their environment is bound up in national and international conservation projects. Bridges and drainage canals, apartment buildings and highways-as well as the birds, water buffalo, and various animals of the regions-all inform a moral ecology in the making. Drawing on six years of fieldwork in wetlands and deltas, Caterina Scaramelli offers an anthropological understanding of sweeping environmental and infrastructural change, and the moral claims made on livability and materiality in Turkey, and beyond. Beginning from a moral ecological position, she takes into account the notion that politics is not simply projected onto animals, plants, soil, water, sediments, rocks, and other non-human beings and materials. Rather, people make politics through them. With this book, she highlights the aspirations, moral relations, and care practices in constant play in contestations and alliances over environmental change.

Why do people living in different areas vote in different ways? Why does this change over time? How do people talk about politics with friends and neighbours, and with what effect? Does the geography of well-being influence the geography of party support? Do parties try to talk to all voters
at election time, or are they interested only in the views of a small number of voters living in a small number of seats? Is electoral participation in decline, and how does the geography of the vote affect this? How can a party win a majority of seats in Parliament without a majority of votes in
the country? Putting Voters in their Place explores these questions by placing the analysis of electoral behaviour into its geographical context. Using information from the latest elections, including the 2005 General Election, the book shows how both voters and parties are affected by, and seek to
influence, both national and local forces. Trends are set in the context of the latest research and scholarship on electoral behaviour. The book also reports on new research findings.

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.

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.

This is a moment of major and rapid historical change. The global elite - what used to be called the ruling class - are confronted by crises to which they have no credible response. First, the economic and political system presided over by the US is in turbulent decline. Second, within the next few years, global oil production will be in decline and, with the 'easy oil' gone, energy production is becoming dirtier than ever. Third, climate change is gathering momentum and is just one aspect of a broader environmental crisis which threatens human survival. Toxic Futures is about the world brought into being through the collusion of state and corporate power. Maintaining profit has relied on institutionalized fraud on the one hand and a war on the poor and on the environment on the other. Resistance is growing at all scales and, however chaotic, constitutes a fourth dimension of the elite crisis. This significant and timely book locates South Africa in the crisis and explores the implications for environmental, social, and economic justice. It concludes that another world is inevitable. Whether people allow the political and economic elite to lead them into a world of growing destruction or take charge to create a world of mutual solidarity is the central challenge of the age.

This volume characterizes the current state of natural science and socioeconomic modeling of the impacts of climate change and current climate variability on forests, grasslands, and water. It identifies what can be done currently with impact assessments and suggests how to undertake such assessments. Impediments to linking biophysical and socioeconomic models into integrated assessments for policy purposes are identified, and recommendations for future research activities to improve the state of the art and remove these impediments to model integration are provided. This book is for natural and social scientists with an interest in the impacts of climate change on terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems and their socioeconomic impacts, and policy makers interested in understanding the status of current assessment capabilities and in identifying priority areas for future research.

This new critical volume presents various perspectives on teaching and teacher education in the face of the global climate crisis, environmental degradation, and social injustice. Teaching in the Anthropocene calls for a reorientation of the aims of teaching so that we might imagine multiple futures in which children, youths, and families can thrive amid a myriad of challenges related to the earth's decreasing habitability.Referring to the uncertainty of the time in which we live and teach, the term Anthropocene is used to acknowledge anthropogenic contributions to the climate crisis and to consider and reflect on the emotional responses to adverse climate events. The text begins with the editors' discussion of this contested term and then moves on to make the case that we must decentre anthropocentric models in teacher education praxis. The four thematic parts include chapters on the challenges to teacher education practice and praxis, affective dimensions of teaching in the face of the global crisis, relational pedagogies in the Anthropocene, and ways to ignite the empathic imaginations of tomorrow's teachers. Together the authors discuss new theoretical eco-orientations and describe innovative pedagogies that create opportunities for students and teachers to live in greater harmony with the more-than-human world. This incredibly timely volume will be essential to pre- and in-service teachers and teacher educators. FEATURES: Offers critical reflections on anthropocentrism from multiple perspectives in education, including continuing education, educational organization, K-12, post-secondary, and more Includes accounts that not only deconstruct the disavowal of the climate crisis in schools but also articulate an ecosophical approach to education Features discussion prompts in each chapter to enhance student engagement with the material

From the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe's resistance against the Dakota Access pipeline to the Nepalese Newar community's protest of the Fast Track Road Project, Indigenous peoples around the world are standing up and speaking out against global capitalism to protect the land, water, and air. By reminding us of the fundamental importance of placing Indigenous politics, histories, and ontologies at the center of our social movements, Indigenous Resurgence positions environmental justice within historical, social, political, and economic contexts, exploring the troubling relationship between colonial and environmental violence and reframing climate change and environmental degradation through an anticolonial lens.

The sixth mass extinction or Anthropocene extinction is one of the most pervasive issues of our time. Animals, Plants and Afterimages brings together leading scholars in the humanities and life sciences to explore how extinct species are represented in art and visual culture, with a special emphasis on museums. Engaging with celebrated cases of vanished species such as the quagga and the thylacine as well as less well-known examples of animals and plants, these essays explore how representations of recent and ancient extinctions help advance scientific understanding and speak to contemporary ecological and environmental concerns.

Although poisonous substances have been a hazard for the whole of human history, it is only with the development and large-scale production of new chemical substances over the last two centuries that toxic, manmade pollutants have become such a varied and widespread danger. Covering a host of both notorious and little-known chemicals, the chapters in this collection investigate the emergence of specific toxic, pathogenic, carcinogenic, and ecologically harmful chemicals as well as the scientific, cultural and legislative responses they have prompted. Each study situates chemical hazards in a long-term and transnational framework and demonstrates the importance of considering both the natural and the social contexts in which their histories have unfolded.

On March 11, 2011, a tsunami warning was issued for Tonga in Polynesia. On the low and small island of Kotu, people were unperturbed in the face of impending catastrophe. The book starts out from the puzzle of peoples' responses and reactions to this warning as well as their attitudes to a gradual rise of sea level and questions why people seemed so unconcerned about this and the accompanying loss of land. The book is an ethnography of the relationship between people and their environment based on fieldwork over three decades.