Peri-urban interfaces - the zones where urban and rural areas meet - suffer from the greatest problems to humans caused by rapid urbanization, including intense pressures on resources, slum formation, lack of adequate services such as water and sanitation, poor planning and degradation of farmland. These areas, home to hundreds of millions of people, face unique problems and need distinctive and innovative approaches and solutions. This book, authored by top researchers and practitioners, covers the full breadth and depth of the impacts of rapid urbanization on livelihoods, poverty and resources in the peri-urban zones in diverse African, Asian, Latin American and Caribbean contexts. Topics include peri-urban resource sustainability, ecosystems and societies and environmental changes in peri-urban zones. Rich case studies cover production systems and livelihoods including the impacts of irrigated vegetable production, horticulture, dairy enterprises, waste-fed fisheries and pastoral livelihoods. Also addressed are planning and development issues in the peri-urban interface including the difficulty in achieving sustainability, conflict and cooperation over resources, and a fresh look at the relationship between people and their environment. The final part of the book presents policies and strategies for promoting and measuring sustainability in peri-urban zones including community-based waste management, the co-management of watersheds and empowerment of the poor. This book is the most comprehensive examination of the challenges and solutions facing the people and environments of peri-urban zones and is essential reading for all practitioners, students and academics in geography and development.

A cultural portrait of the Mid-Atlantic coastal ecosystem

A coastal region's oldest inhabitants, particularly families of watermen and commercial fishers, often possess the deepest knowledge about a region and its ecological problems. Because of this, assaults on watermen lifeways and commercial fishing families -- whether from organized recreational interests, real estate developers, or public policy makers -- reduce the cultural and biological diversity of the coast and often upset the delicate environmental balance. Through the lens of the Mid-Atlantic Coast, especially the Chesapeake Bay and the Albermarle and Pamlico Sounds of North Carolina, David Griffith develops the theme that environmental degradation follows the loss of the most intimate understandings of coastal ecosystems.

In The Estuary's Gift, Griffith traces the development of Mid-Atlantic cultures from the Algonquins and the earliest European families who hunted whales and netted herring, to present-day commercial fishing families who work the complex estuarine systems of the coast. In the process, he chronicles a series of developments that erode communities across American landscapes: the wearing away of local and regional history that results when national retail and restaurant chains convert local merchants into clerks and busboys, or the loss of biological diversity that follows the reconfiguration of countrysides to support monocrop agriculture, industrial chicken production, hog farming, forestry, and mining.

Griffith insists that we heed the ways we treat one another in light of the ways we treat nature, measuring both by the standards we invoke when we give and receive gifts. Stories of conflict amongfishers, of Mexican immigrant women brought to seafood houses to pick the meat from cooked, cooled crab -- displacing and replacing African-American women -- and of the slow yet steady attempts to criminalize family fishing practices that reach back thirteen generations show the ways in which the rights, obligations, and responsibilities of gift exchange have eroded. Only when we consider human relations as an integral part of the natural cycles will we begin to restore the balance.

More than an account of the decline of fishing families or stressed natural resources, The Estuary's Gift illustrates how pressing social problems, such as environmental degradation and assaults on working families, play out in local contexts and local history.

Many researchers have studied people's everyday use of time. National and international agencies increasingly collect and analyze time-use data. Yet this perspective and its techniques remain a black box to most social science researchers and applied practitioners, and the potential of time-use data to expand explanation in the social sciences is not fully recognized by even most time-use researchers.Sociologist William Michelson's unique book places the study of time-use data in perspective, demystifies its collection and analytic options, and carefully examines the potential of time-use analysis for a wide range of benefits to the social sciences. These include the sampling of otherwise socially "hidden" groups, bridging the gap between qualitative and quantitative phenomena, gender studies, family dynamics, multitasking, social networks, built environments, and risk exposure.

This book contains a collection of cutting-edge chapters that explore various connections between urban living, sexuality and sexual desire around the world. The key themes featured address a number of topical issues including: the controversies and debates raging around the evolution, defining patterns and appropriate regulation of commercial sex zones and markets in the urban landscape how gay public spaces, districts and 'gay villages' emerged and developed in various towns and cities around the world how changing attitudes to, and the usage of urban sexual spaces, as depicted in iconic television series such as Sex and the City and Queer as Folk, reflect the reality of working women's or gay men's changing life experiences. With detailed case studies, and a strong interdisciplinary appeal, this book will be a valuable reference for postgraduates and advanced students in the fields of cultural studies as well as human, urban and social geography. This book was previously published as a special issue of the journal Urban Studies.

Bringing together well-established interdisciplinary scholars - including geographers Phil Hubbard, Chris Philo and Hester Parr, and sociologists Jenny Hockey, Mike Hepworth and John Urry - and a new generation of researchers, this volume presents a wide range of innovative studies of fundamentally important questions of emotion. Following an overarching introduction, three interlinked sections elaborate key intersections between emotions and spatial concepts, on which each chapter offers a particular take informed by substantive research. At the heart of the collection lies a commitment to convey how emotions always spill over from one domain to another, as well as to illuminate the multiplicity of spaces that produce and are produced by emotional life. The book demonstrates the richness that an interdisciplinary engagement with the emotionality of socio-spatial life generates.

Terrestrial Ecosystem Research Infrastructures: Challenges and Opportunities reveals how environmental research infrastructures (RIs) provide new valuable insights on ecological processes that cannot be realized by more traditional short-term funding cycles and are integral to understand our changing world. This book bonds the latest state-of-the-science knowledge on environmental RIs, the challenges in creating them, their place in addressing scientific frontiers, and the new perspectives they bear. Each chapter is thoughtfully invested with fresh viewpoints from the environmental RI vantage as the authors explore and explain many topics such as the rationale and challenges in global change, field and modeling platforms, new tools, challenges in data management, distilling information into knowledge, and new developments in large-scale RIs. This work serves an advantageous guide for academics and practitioners alike who aim to deepen their knowledge in the field of science and project management, and logistics operations.

This is a new edition of the classic examination of major philosophical, ethical, scientific and economic roots of environmental problems which examines the ways that radical ecologists can transform science and society in order to sustain life on this planet. It features a new Introduction from the author, a thorough updating of chapters, and two entirely new chapters on recent Global Movements and Globalization and the Environment.

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.

For forty years, in a variety of books and articles, Gerhard Lenski has become the most influential proponent of ecological and evolutionary explanations of human societies, their development and transformations, from the Stone Age to the present. In his newest book, Lenski offers a succinct but comprehensive statement of the full body of his theory followed by demonstration of how it can be used to generate new and valuable insights when applied to a set of highly diverse issues. These include debates concerning the origin of ancient Israel and its distinctive culture, the rise of the West in the modern era, the highly varied trajectories of development of Third World nations in recent decades, and the failure of Marxist efforts to transform society in the Soviet Union and elsewhere. In the concluding chapter, Lenski discusses a number of other issues and areas where ecological-evolutionary theory may be fruitfully applied in the future.

Cognitive mapping is a construct that encompasses those processes that enable people to acquire, code, store, recall, and manipulate information about the nature of their spatial environment. It refers to the attributes and relative locations of people and objects in the environment, and is an essential component in the adaptive process of spatial decision-making--such as finding a safe and quick route to from work, locating potential sites for a new house or business, and deciding where to travel on a vacation trip.

Cognitive processes are not constant, but undergo change with age or development and use or learning. Image and Environment, now in paperback, is a pioneer study. It brings a new academic discipline to a wide audience. The volume is divided into six sections, which represent a comprehensive breakdown of cognitive mapping studies: "Theory"; "Cognitive Representations"; "Spatial Preferences"; "The Development of Spatial Cognition"; "Geographical and Spatial Orientation"; and "Cognitive Distance." Contributors include Edward Tolman, James Blaut, Stephen Kaplan, Terence Lee, Donald Appleyard, Peter Orleans, Thomas Saarinen, Kevin Cox, Georgia Zannaras, Peter Gould, Roger Hart, Gary Moore, Donald Griffin, Kevin Lynch, Ulf Lundberg, Ronald Lowrey, and Ronald Briggs.

Social Impact Assessment (SIA) is the process of analysing and managing the intended and unintended consequences on the human environment of planned interventions (policies, programmes, plans, projects) so as to bring about a more sustainable and equitable biophysical and human environment. This important Handbook presents an indispensable overview of the range of new methods and of the conceptual advances in SIA. Recent increased attention to social considerations has led to substantial development in the techniques useful to, and the thinking in, SIA. A distinguished group of contributors provides an up-to-date and comprehensive account of the cutting-edge in SIA development. This Handbook outlines a new understanding and definition of SIA and, as such, will be an invaluable reference tool for both practitioners and scholars at different levels working in the fields of SIA and environmental studies (including both impact assessment and management).

This book inquires into the relations between society and its natural environment by examining the historical discourse around several cases of state building in the American West: the construction of three high dams from 1928 to 1963.

'Human Geography' examines the major trends, debates, research and conceptual evolution of human geography during the twentieth century. Considering each of the subject's primary subfields in turn, it addresses developments in both continental European and Anglo-American geography, providing a cutting-edge evaluation of each. Written clearly and accessibly by leading researchers, the book combines historical astuteness with personal insights and draws on a range of theoretical positions. A central theme of the book is the relative decline of the traditional subdisciplines towards the end of the twentieth century, and the continuing movement towards interdisciplinarity in which the various strands of human geography are seen as inextricably linked. This stimulating and exciting new book provides a unique insight into the study of geography during the twentieth century, and is essential reading for anyone studying the history and philosophy of the subject.

This book redefines transnationalism, viewing it as a space that can be occupied by a wide range of actors with a variety of positionalities, not all of whom are conventionally connected to transnational communities even. In this way, it expands the study of transnationalism from the sociology of migration to include the transnationalities of people, places and things. It contains a number of empirical case studies looking at Europe, Asia and the US.

Children often fare the worst when communities face social and environmental changes. The quality of food, water, affection and education that children receive can have major impacts on their subsequent lives and their potential to become engaged and productive citizens. At the same time, children often lack both a private and public voice, and are powerless against government and private decision-making. In taking a child rights-based approach to sustainable development, this volume defines and identifies children as the subjects of development, and explores how their rights can be respected, protected and promoted while also ensuring the economic, social and environmental sustainability of our planet.

Drawing on anthropological and historical data, this book examines human-wildlife relations in China, Tibet, Japan, Bhutan, Indonesia, the Philippines, Malaysia, India, Thailand and Vietnam. The volume initially focuses on the various ways in which wild animals are exploited as a resource, for food, medicine and crop-picking labour, before examining animals termed as pests or predators that are deemed to be harmful and dangerous.

Bringing together anthropologists and historians, this book analyses the range, variability and historical mutability of human sensibilities towards animals in Asia and will be of interest to Asianists and anthropologists alike.

In a world where trust in politicians, corporations and the processes that determine our lives continues to dwindle, this innovative book brings together research, case studies and stories that begin to answer a central question for society: How we can create organisations, institutions, groups and societies that can nurture trusting relationships with one another and among individuals?Something to Believe In provides a fresh take on the corporate responsibility debate, based as it is on the work of key global thinkers on corporate social responsibility, along with a raft of work developed from collaborations between the New Academy of Business and the United Nations Volunteers, UK Department for International Development and TERI-Europe in countries such as Brazil, Nicaragua, Ghana, India, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Lebanon, Nigeria, the Philippines and South Africa. The focus is on business, and particularly how deeper, more systemic changes to current ways of understanding and undertaking business can and have been enacted in both developed countries and in nations where the Western concept of CSR means nothing. The market-based model of economic thinking-the increasingly distrusted globalisation project-which threatens to sweep all before it is challenged by many of the contributions to this book.The book tells stories such as the mobilization of civil society in Ghana to bring business to account; the reorientation of a business school to focus on values; the life-cycle of ethical chocolate; the accountability of the diamond business in a war zone; the need to reinvent codes of conduct for women workers in the plantations and factories of Nicaragua; a Philippine initiative to economically empower former Moslem liberation fighters; and the development of local governance practices in a South African eco-village.The book is split into four sections. "Through Some Looking Glasses" contains short, thought-provoking pieces about the issues of trust, belief and change from writers including Thabo Mbeki, Malcolm McIntosh and a reprinted piece from E.M. Forster. Section Two asks how it will be possible to believe in our corporations and provides new approaches from around the world on how space is being opened up to found businesses that are able to create trust. Section Three examines the role of auditing in fostering trust. Corporations continue to attempt to engender trust through their activities in philanthropy, reporting and voluntary programmes. But, post-Enron et al., even the most highly praised corporate mission statements are tarnished. Can social and environmental audits of corporate reports, codes and practices assuage our doubts about boardroom democracy? Section Four examines alternative forms of accountability, transparency and governance from around the world and offers some different ways of thinking about the practice of creating trust in society.Something to Believe In provides a host of fascinating suggestions about redefining and renewing the underlying deal between society and its organizations. It will become a key text for students, thinkers and practitioners in the field of corporate responsibility.

Raging floods, massive storms and cataclysmic earthquakes: every year up to 340 million people are affected by these and other disasters, which cause loss of life and damage to personal property, agriculture, and infrastructure. So what can be done? The key to understanding the causes of disasters and mitigating their impacts is the concept of 'vulnerability'. Mapping Vulnerability analyses 'vulnerability' as a concept central to the way we understand disasters and their magnitude and impact. Written and edited by a distinguished group of disaster scholars and practitioners, this book is a counterbalance to those technocratic approaches that limit themselves to simply looking at disasters as natural phenomena. Through the notion of vulnerability, the authors stress the importance of social processes and human-environmental interactions as causal agents in the making of disasters. They critically examine what renders communities unsafe - a condition, they argue, that depends primarily on the relative position of advantage or disadvantage that a particular group occupies within a society's social order. The book also looks at vulnerability in terms of its relationship to development and its impact on policy and people's lives, through consideration of selected case studies drawn from Africa, Asia and Latin America. Mapping Vulnerability is essential reading for academics, students, policymakers and practitioners in disaster studies, geography, development studies, economics, environmental studies and sociology.

Altered Earth aims to get the Anthropocene right in three senses. With essays by leading scientists, it highlights the growing consensus that our planet entered a dangerous new state in the mid-twentieth century. Second, it gets the Anthropocene right in human terms, bringing together a range of leading authors to explore, in fiction and non-fiction, our deep past, global conquest, inequality, nuclear disasters, and space travel. Finally, this landmark collection presents what hope might look like in this seemingly hopeless situation, proposing new political forms and mutualistic cities. 'Right' in this book means being as accurate as possible in describing the physical phenomenon of the Anthropocene; as balanced as possible in weighing the complex human developments, some willed and some unintended, that led to this predicament; and as just as possible in envisioning potential futures.

Although sustainability efforts in business are still a work in progress, it is increasingly clear that key elements of a new generation of enterprises will be radically different from those of our contemporary modern industrial economy. The core distinctions between what currently exists and what is being created are communicated in this book through the compelling metaphor of "Ants, Galileo, and Gandhi."This collection, developed from The Natural Step's conference on Sustainability and Innovation in 2002, provides radical ideas for generating a new perspective on the dynamics of business systems. 'Ants' symbolize the lessons to be learned from nature and the dependence of individual beings on broader, complex systems. "Galileo" embodies brilliance in perceiving and proving that the current paradigm is flawed. "Gandhi" exemplifies exceptional compassion in fighting for fundamental change. All of these attributes are increasingly relevant in a world where, globally, we are experiencing both a steady decline in life-supporting resources and rising demands. Recognition of these challenges is sparking innovation within the private sector where the first glimmers of systemic change can be seen. The book examines the emergence of 21st-century enterprises that recognize their reliance on broad social and ecological systems ("ants"), incorporate sparks of genius rooted in rigorous analyses ('Galileo'), and acknowledge the importance of compassion and determination within any endeavour ('Gandhi'). With contributions from Ray Anderson, Gretchen Daily, Karl-Henrik Robert, Alois Flatz, Allen White and many more, the book illustrates that pioneering companies recognize that new opportunities emerge from recognizing the broader systems on which all businesses rely. Efforts to work with ecological and social dynamics of vibrancy and resilience offer a new space for innovation. Companies are stepping into this space and exploring innovative approaches to developing sustainability-focused products, operations and strategies. These sustainability-inspired business efforts are considering new ways to address human needs and desires. The most promising approaches are based on systems thinking and recognition of the linkages between 'upstream' and 'downstream' effects of actions. Understanding the undesired 'downstream' impacts of a firm's practices draws attention 'upstream'. This assessment highlights the most expedient approach: to design these impacts out of enterprises from the very start.The book is divided into five sections to present a set of theories emerging about sustainability and its application to: business strategy and operations; financial-sector practices; accountability and reporting drivers; and organizational change pathways. Together, these sections illustrate the current range of sustainability theories and applications."Ants, Galileo, and Gandhi" will be essential reading for both academics looking for robust teaching material, practitioners looking for inspiration and the general reader interested in exploring the state of the art in the realignment of 21st-century business."

Contents:
Foreword Preface List of figures and tables Part 1: Framework and Theory 1. The challenge of disasters and our approach 1.1 In at the deep end 1.2 Conventional views of disaster 1.3 What is vulnerability? 1.4 Changes since the first edition 1.5 The International decade for natural disaster reduction 1.6 Convergence and critique 1.7 Audiences 1.8 Scope and plan of the book 1.9 Limits and assumptions 2. The disaster pressure and release model 2.1 The nature of vulnerability 2.2 Cause and effects in the disaster pressure model 2.3 Time and the chain of explanation 2.4 Limits to our knowledge 2.5 Global trends and dynamic pressures 2.6 Uses of the pressure and release model 3. Access to resources and coping in adversity 3.1 Access to resources - an introduction 3.2 New thinking since 1994 3.3 'Normal life' - the formal Access model 3.4 Coping and access to safety Part 2: Vulnerability and Hazard Types 4. Famine and natural hazards 4.1 Introduction 4.2 Famines and their causes 4.3 Explanations of famine 4.4 Complex emergencies, policy famines and human rights 4.5 Causes, pressures, unsafe conditions and famine 4.6 Access and famines 4.7 Policy 4.8 Conclusion 5. Biological hazards 5.1 Introduction 5.2 What are biological hazards? 5.3 Limitations to our treatment of biological hazards 5.4 Biological links with other hazards 5.5 Livelihoods, resources and disasters 5.6 Vulnerability-creating processes 5.7 Pressures affecting defences against biological hazards 5.8 Root causes and pressures 5.9 Steps toward risk reduction 6. Floods 6.1 Introduction 6.2 Floods as known risks 6.3 Disastrous outcomes for vulnerable people 6.4 Floods and vulnerability 6.5 Summary: flood prevention and mitigation 7. Coastal storms 7.1 Introduction 7.2 The physical hazard 7.3 Patterns of vulnerability 7.4 Case-studies 7.5 Policy responses 8. Earthquakes and volcanoes 8.1 Introduction 8.2 Classic case-studies: Guatemala and Mexico 8.3 Recent case-studies 8.4 Volcanoes and related hazards 8.5 Goma, Congo, eruption of Mount Nyiragongo 2002 8.6 Policy response and mitigation Part 3: Towards a Safer Environment 9. Towards a safer environment 9.1 Towards a safer environment: are statements of intent merely hot air? 9.2 From Yokohama to Johannesburg via Geneva 9.3 Risk reduction objectives Notes Bibliography

Written during the height of the ecology movement, " The Ecological Transition " is a stunning interdisciplinary work. It combines anthropology, ecology, and sociology to formulate an understanding of cultural-environmental relationships. While anthropologists have been studying relationships between humans and the physical environment for a very long time, only in the last thirty years have questions inherent in these relationships broadened beyond description and classification. For example, the concept of environment has been extended beyond the physical into the social.

Although anthropologists have adopted many of the concepts that Bennett develops in the book, he also feels that the central issues have never been addressed, either by anthropologists or by people in related disciplines. The most important of these, in Bennett's opinion, is the failure to incorporate a respect for the environmental in contemporary culture, which would allow making exceptions in certain human practices in order to protect the environment. His point in " The Ecological Transition " is that a basic cultural change in modern civilization is necessary to achieve this end.

Both a theoretical and a practical work, " The Ecological Transition " emphasizes the relationships between human culture, the physical environment, technology, and social policy. " The Ecological Transition " is a challenging volume that makes us face the consequences of human behavior in the modern world: its effect on pollution, natural resources, agriculture, the economy, and population, to name just a few areas. The book remains a significant contribution to the discourse on social, economic, and environmental problems. While the book was first published in 1976, it still reads as a contemporary tract.

" John W. Bennett " is emeritus professor of anthropology at Washington University, St. Louis. He has served as president of the American Ethnological Society and the Society for Applied Anthropology, and has been a member of the editorial boards of the " Annual Review of Anthropology " and " Reviews in Anthropology. " He is the author of " Classic Anthropology: Critical Essays, 1944-1996 " and " Human Ecology as Human Behavior: Essays in Environmental and Development Anthropology ," both published by Transaction.

Contents:
Part 1: Environmental Problems 1. Technology and Society 2. Energy and Environment 3. Sustainable Technology Part 2: Sustainable Technology 4. Green Technology 5. The Nuclear Alternative 6. Renewable Energy 7. Renewables Worldwide 8. Sustainable Energy Strategy Part 3: Problems of Implementation 9. Getting Started: Institutional Obstacles 10. Keeping Going: Deployment Problems 11. Case-Study: Public Reactions to Wind Farms in the UK 12. Public Acceptance: The Need for Negotiation Part 4: Sustainable Society 13. Sustainable Development 14. The Global Perspective 15. Sustainable Future 16. Conclusions: The Way Ahead?

Whilst energy use is fundamental to human existence, it is also at the heart of many environmental problems we face in the 21st century. Deteriorating air quality and the global warming phenomenon can all be attributed to our use of fossil fuels. The re-emergence of nuclear power as an alternative also prompts major concerns. Sustainable alternatives such as wind and hydroelectric power also face opposition.
Energy, Society and Environment explores the ways in which energy interacts with society and the environment. The book is structured to provide:
· an understanding of energy related environmental problems
· an appreciation of the strengths and weaknesses of technological solutions
· knowledge of the social and institutional obstacles to implementing these solutions
· an understanding of the strategic issues facing sustainable energy use.
The revised edition reflects recent changes in the area. Chapters on nuclear and wind energy have been revised in response to recent debates. Coverage of fossil fuels has also been strengthened, whilst there is greater emphasis on environmental and energy policy in the context of the debate surrounding the Kyoto accord. Additional case-studies have been added which highlight alternative energy solutions.
Energy, Society and Environment examines the potential and limits of technological solutions to energy-related environmental problems and suggests that social, economic and political solutions may also be necessary to avoid serious environmental damage in the future. Global case-studies are used throughout to ground the debates and illustrate the interaction between technological and social aspects.