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
" People and Environment, A Global Approach" provides an introduction to the main areas of environmental concern for geographers, environmental scientists and planners at the beginning of the twenty-first century. These include:
The book argues that our knowledge and understanding of the environment is now so great that we can predict with considerable accuracy where the skills of science and technology need to be focused in order to prevent severe environmental damage from occurring. Achieving successful management of the environment has become dependent upon active participation of a society prepared to pay for a high quality of life, and the willingness of our elected politicians to legislate and enforce the very highest standards of environmental management. Key features:
This book will be essential reading for students of geography, environmental studies/science and land use planners, and will also contribute valuable information forclimatology, biogeography, hydrology, land economy and forestry students. Gareth Jones is Senior Lecturer in Geography at the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow. His other books include: "Vegetation Productivity "(1979); "The Conservation of Ecosystems and Species "(1987); Collins Reference Dictionary "Environmental Science "(1990) and "Resources, Society and Environmental Management "(1997).
How does the way that those involved in policy planning talk affect environmental planning? Can negotiation be turned into consensus-building and deliberation? How do planners legitimate their activities through discourse, and what are the prospects of a rationality of sustainable development? Using a new institutionalist, theoretical framework, Yvonne Rydin tackles these key questions.
Discover how to fight extinction and become a #2minutesuperhero. Have you got 2 minutes? Of course you have! Get ready to team up with some of world's rarest animals. Together we can fight extinction and save the earth's wildlife by speaking up and changing what we eat, how we travel and the things we buy. Find out how you can become a #2minutesuperhero by completing 60 fun missions at home, school and in your community that can help the planet and save the animals at risk of extinction. Informative, practical and positive, this guide for children is written by Martin Dorey, anti-plastic campaigner and author of the bestselling No. More. Plastic, and is the founder of the Beach Clean Network and the #2minutebeachclean movement. He believes that every voice matters on this urgent issue.
The clock is relentlessly ticking...Our world teeters on a knife-edge between a peaceful and prosperous future for all, and a dark winter of death and destruction that threatens to smother the light of civilization.Within 30 years, in the 2030 decade, six powerful "drivers" will converge with unprecedented force in a statistical spike that could tear humanity apart and plunge the world into a new Dark Age. Depleted fuel supplies, massive population growth, poverty, global climate change, famine, growing water shortages and international lawlessness are on a crash course, with potentially catastrophic consequences. In the face of both doomsaying and denial over the state of our world, Colin Mason cuts through the rhetoric and reams of often conflicting data to muster the evidence to illustrate a broad picture of the world as it is, and of our possible futures. Ultimately his message is clear: we must act decisively, collectively and immediately to alter the trajectory of humanity away from catastrophe.Offering over 100 priorities for immediate action, "The 2030 Spike" serves as a guidebook for humanity through the trecherous minefields and wastelands ahead to a bright, peaceful and prosperous future in which all humans have the opportunity to thrive and build a better civilization.This book is powerful and essential reading for all people concerned with the future of humanity and planet earth.
Renewable blue water flows will very soon be insufficient to meet the growing demands of the industrial, agricultural and domestic sectors. Within a generation, the proportion of the world 's population facing acute water stress could be as high as 50 per cent, because of increased pollution, population growth, urbanization, economic growth and, above all, because of poor management practices.The awareness of this crisis is growing and with it the realization that new approaches to water management are desperately needed. This book will provide the resources to create them. In it, many of the most successful and innovative managers today explain what can be achieved and how to improve the conservation of water, its distribution and its quality.
This book breaks new ground by accounting for the welfare implications of both severe inequality and environmental degradation and developing a sustainable development indicator that incorporates changes over time in each of these dimensions. The model is applied to data from Brazil spanning the 1965 -1998 period. The book's findings cast significant doubt on the proposition that rapid economic growth in Brazil has resulted in comparable welfare gains. The evidence presented more generally illustrates the often unsustainable nature of rapid GDP growth phases, as well as the general unreliability of GDP growth as an indicator of well-being improvement. The specific policy implication is that Brazil should discontinue - or at least severely curtail - the regressive and resource intensive economic policies it has followed in recent decades in the interest of welfare improvement not only for the poorer groups in society, but for future generations of Brazilians as well.
The triple bottom line has become the standard modus operandi for assessing the sustainability of financial markets, industries, institutions and corporations. This Research Handbook provides the most recent developments, current practices and new initiatives related to sustainable finance and impact investing. In doing so, it demonstrates how the triple bottom line principle can be used to design sustainable strategies for firms, markets and the economy as a whole. The Handbook covers aspects of socially responsible investment, finance and sustainable development, corporate socially responsible banking, green bonds and sustainable financial instruments. Comprising 20 topical chapters from experts in the field, this Handbook is a comprehensive investigation of financial services and products that help cope with sustainable investing and climate risk management. Chapters discuss the role of regulation framework in guaranteeing the stability and resilience of financial markets and offer insight into governance issues including the management of organizational risks, CSR culture, and social-impact investing culture. An essential reference for scholars and students, the multidisciplinary approach covers business, finance, accounting, management and entrepreneurship. Practitioners such as financial analysts, rating agencies and regulators will also find this an accessible read for exploring the possibilities the triple bottom line principle can provide. Contributors include: M. Amidu, W.R. Ang, M. Ariff, F. Aubert, H. Bassan, F. Bazzana, K. Berensmann, N. Boubakri, E. Broccardo, F. Dafe, F. de Mariz, K. Delchet-Cochet, M. Dempsey, G.N. Dong, K.U. Ehigiamusoe, J. Fouilloux, R. Gabriele, J.-F. Gajewski, J. Grira, K. Gupta, H. Issahaku, L. Kermiche, H.H. Lean, K.T. Liaw, N. Lindenberg, J.R. Mason, M. Mazzuca, R. McIver, C. Nitsche, G. Porino, J.M. Puaschunder, J.R.F. Savoia, M. Schroeder, V. Tankoyeva, J.-L. Viviani, L.-C. Vo, O. Weber, A. Zarei
Capitalism is destroying our planet, but like most social progress in the last two centuries, ecological justice can only be achieved through working-class struggle. In Workers of the Earth, Stefania Barca uncovers the environmental history and political ecology of labour to shed new light on the potentiality of workers as ecological subjects. Taking an ecofeminist approach, this ground-breaking book makes a unique contribution to the emerging field of environmental labour studies, expanding the category of labour to include waged and unwaged, industrial and meta-industrial workers. Going beyond conventional categories of ‘production’ and ‘reproduction’ as separate spheres of human experience, Barca offers a fresh perspective on the place of labour in today’s global climate struggle, reminding us that the fight against climate change is a fight against capitalism.
Global challenges ranging from climate change and ecological regime shifts to refugee crises and post-national territorial claims are rapidly moving ecosystem thresholds and altering the social fabric of societies worldwide. This book addresses the vital question of how to navigate the contested forces of stability and change in a world shaped by multiple interconnected global challenges. It proposes that senses of place is a vital concept for supporting individual and social processes for navigating these contested forces and encourages scholars to rethink how to theorise and conceptualise changes in senses of place in the face of global challenges. It also makes the case that our concepts of sense of place need to be revisited, given that our experiences of place are changing. This book is essential reading for those seeking a new understanding of the multiple and shifting experiences of place.
News reports appear every day now on the ecological state of our planetary home and the news is not good. Ecological systems are in terrible peril, species are dying by the millions, and global warming is getting worse. Increasing numbers of people feel the impact of this, feel some form of what is being called climate grief, ecological loss, or sometimes even solastalgia. Our species is entering a time of difficult and deep mourning. As environmentalist Leslie Head has said, "Grief will be our companion on this journey-it is not something we can deal with and move on." It will be with us for a long time to come. Stephen Harrod Buhner takes the reader on a journey into and through that grief to what is waiting on the other side, a place that Viktor Frankl, Jacques Cousteau, Vaclav Havel, Elizabeth Kubler-Ross and so many others have found. It's where one becomes an engaged witness, alive to the losses that are occurring and the grief that is felt but is not overcome by them. Then he travels into and through the common feelings of guilt and shame (feelings that are put on so many but in actuality belong to very few) that come from ecological devastation. From there Stephen moves deep into what occurs when those we love die, when the planetary landscapes, forests, fields and rivers that are engraved into our deepest selves are lost, when we are forced to travel into the territory of death and loss and deep grief ourselves. Throughout it, Stephen draws on his studies with Elizabeth Kubler Ross and others who worked with the dying, his years as a psychotherapist, extensive work with the chronically ill, and deep immersion in and relationship with plants, wild ecosystems, and this living planet that is our home. At journey's end what arises is not the optimism of false hope (as Greta Thunberg calls it) but a deeper and more realistic hope, one that is intimately entangled with gravitas and the journey through loss. It's born from the heart's integration of grief and a deep faith in the green world, in this planet from which we have emerged, and in the new life that comes with every spring. Stephen's book is written with the exquisite prose style, intimacy, depth of insight, and engaged storytelling for which he is known. No one who reads it will remain unmoved or ever again feel as if they are alone in the grief they feel for what is happening to our home.
The legacies of a century of fossil-fuel based development and overconsumption, of treating the environment as a waste sink for industry and agriculture, have left devastating impacts on the earth's air, water and land, and these are directly implicated in Climate Change. In response, a number of global institutions and nations, including the European Union and China, have committed themselves to the development of a 'circular economy'. This will require a transformation of today's 'linear economy' of 'make, use and dispose' as the market dictates, into a Circular Economy. The aim of the Circular Economy is to decouple economic growth from resource and energy use through iterative, systemic social, economic and technological reform. This book presents new theoretical and practical insights into this concept, based on case studies from both the developing and developed world, with an emphasis on economic and material transformation, design for reuse and waste reduction, industrial 'symbiosis' (the planned circulation of resources and energy within an industrial setting), and social innovation and entrepreneurship. Four central themes emerge through the essays presented here: the importance of 'restorative design' in transforming resource flows through both production and consumption, the value of understanding and enumerating wastes in more detail to enable their reuse, the central role of advancing technology and applied science to further this transformation of materials for reuse, and finally, a reconfiguration of design, consumption and retail, so that the present 'linear' economy of 'make, use and trash' can be replaced with a more 'circular' model.
Few people who think about the state of the world are content with the status quo. The increasingly complex mix of economic, social, environmental and political problems at all scales requires new ways of thinking. It also requires new ways of integrating mutually supportive ideas and approaches, which is what this useful new book offers around the theme of sustainable consumption. The editors and contributors offer a breadth and depth of research from three domains: the new economics, socio-technical transitions and social practice, with a focus on consumption that meets the needs of people within the limits of the biosphere.' - Peter A. Victor, York University, Canada'This is a very timely and inspiring book. The editors have carefully compiled original contributions from leading researchers in sustainable consumption, reflecting the important work of the SCORAI network and beyond. This is a "must" read for those who want to know where research in sustainable consumption is really heading.' - Lucia A. Reisch, Copenhagen Business School, Denmark This timely volume recognizes that traditional policy approaches to reduce human impacts on the environment through technological change - for example, emphasizing resource efficiency and the development of renewable energy sources - are insufficient to meet the most pressing sustainability challenges of the twenty-first century. Instead, the editors and contributors argue that we must fundamentally reconfigure our lifestyles and social institutions if we are to make the transition toward a truly sustainable future. These expert contributions pinpoint specific areas in which innovation will be required. These include economic policies, socio-technical systems of production and consumption, and dominant social practices. Drawing on these and other diverse areas of scholarship, this fascinating book highlights new conceptual frameworks for achieving the twin sustainability goals of decreased resource use and enhanced individual and societal well-being. Students, professors and policymakers in ecological economics, innovation studies, environmental policy and many other related fields will find much of interest in this pathbreaking volume. Contributors: M.M. Bell, H.S. Brown, M.J. Cohen, B. Halkier, J.M. Harris, D.J. Hess, S. Hielscher, R. Kemp, E. Kennedy, H. Krahn, N.T. Krogman, S.M. McCauley, I. Ropke, G. Seyfang, A. Smith, G. Spaargaren, J.C. Stephens, J. Stutz, E. Ubert, H. van Lente, P.J. Vergragt
This volume analyzes the ways in which natural resource wealth has shaped authoritarian political regimes and statist economic systems in the countries of southern Africa in the post-colonial period. It consists of five essays. The first sets out the historical framework and emergence of natural resources as the crucial driver of economies in sub-Saharan Africa. Three essays, drawing on in-country research, focus on Tanzania, Zambia and Zimbabwe. They show how this explains the economic evolution of those countries - in particular, the impacts of economic and institutional changes on the bulk of the population, the rural poor. The final essay explores the nature of the changes and their neoliberal economic context, and the ways in which their harmful consequences might be relieved.
While there is no shortage of of books on the environment there are few introductory texts that outline the social theory that informs human geographical approaches to the interactions between ecology and society. Students arriving at university often lack the understanding of history, economics, politics, sociology and philosophy that contemporary human geography requires. Environments in a Changing World addresses this deficit, providing foundation knowledge in a form that is accessible to first year students and applied to the understanding of both contemporary environmental issues and the challenge of sustainability. Students are challenged to develop and defend their own ethical and political positions on sustainability and respond to the need for new forms of ecological citizenship.
Survival: The state or fact of continuing to live or exist, typically in spite of an accident, ordeal, or difficult circumstances. Climate change: A change in global or regional climate patterns, in particular, a change apparent from the mid to late 20th century onwards and attributed largely to the increased levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide produced by the use of fossil fuels. This is a survival guide. It rests on the idea that we could possibly survive a changing climate. Temperatures are already climbing, sea levels are rising and parts of South Africa are on their way to being uninhabitable. Life is already incredibly hard for many people and nobody will be exempt from climate change. Circumstances are going to get a lot more difficult very soon, and we need a plan. This is a practical handbook that explores what climate change is likely to mean for us as South Africans, how we can prepare for it, and how we can – in our everyday lives – help to mitigate the impacts it will have.
Y O U C A N M A K E A P O S I T I V E D I F F E R E N C E This inspiring, easy-to-use guide will help kickstart any activist's journey. From supporting independent businesses and amplifying marginalised voices, to community gardening and giving to a food bank, there's something you can do to make a positive change - whether you have a day, an hour, or just five minutes to spare. Divided into three parts, Everyday Activism suggests 60 small actions that can slip easily into any busy schedule. If you want to change the world for the better but are unsure how, this is the perfect place to begin.
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 ebook edition of this title is Open Access and is freely available to read online. Crises pose an immediate risk to life, health, and the environment and require urgent action. The public's use of social media has important implications for contingency policies and practices. Social media have the potential for risk reduction and preventive interaction with the public. This book is about how different communicators - whether crisis managers, first responders, journalists, or private citizens and disaster victims - have used social media to communicate about risks and crises. It is also about how these very different actors can play a crucial role in mitigating or preventing crises. How can they use social media to strengthen their own and the public's awareness and understanding of crises when they unfold? How can they use social media to promote resilience during crises and the ability to deal with the after-effects? Chapters address such questions by presenting new research-based knowledge on social media use during different crises: the terrorist attacks in Norway on 22 July 2011; the central European floods in Austria in 2013; and the West African Ebola-outbreak in 2014. The collection also presents research on the development of a tool for gathering social media information, based on a user-centered design. Social Media use in Crisis and Risk Communication presents cutting-edge research on the use of social media in crisis communication and reporting. It gives recommendations about how different crisis communicators (information officers, crisis managers, journalists) can improve their ability to gather information, communicate and raise people's crisis awareness by using social media.
Debates over science, facts, and values are pivotal in the struggle for environmental justice. For decades, environmental justice activists have campaigned against the misuse of science, engaging in community-led citizen science that champions knowledge produced by and for ordinary people living with environmental risks and hazards. However, post-truth politics have threatened science itself. Toxic truths examines the relationship between environmental justice and citizen science, focusing on enduring issues and new challenges in a post-truth age. The volume features a range of community-based participatory environmental health and justice research projects that seek to establish different ways of sensing, witnessing, and interpreting environmental injustice. From struggles in American hog country and contaminated indigenous communities, to local environmental controversies in Spain and China, this volume examines political strategies for seeking environmental justice. With international, interdisciplinary contributions from distinguished authors, emerging scholars and community activists, Toxic truths is essential reading for those seeking to understand the cutting edge of citizen science and activism around the world. -- .
The needs of human geography have produced a quite distinct menu of techniques. This book explores the range of techniques which are useful to human geographers, stressing the importance of using the particular techniques that are appropriate to the context. The text offers a guide to purposeful use of techniques work in detail - survey and qualitative, numerical, spatial and computer-based - drawing on important case studies, such as the decennial census, to illustrate applications. The importance of up-to-date IT-based techniques is particularly stressed, introducing widely recognized applications. A final section explores the Internet, which offers exciting new resources but also creates problems for researchers used to traditional academic fields. Identifying important new directions of recent developments, particularly within computer mapping, GIS and Online searching, the author anticipates the ways in which techniques available to human geographers will change in the near future.
This volume presents twenty updated and new theories of travelers' decisions and behaviors. It describes the advances in theory construction and practical applications of theory in the disciplines of tourism, hospitality, leisure, and entertainment (THLE) research. The chapters all build on the grand models appearing in these four literature streams during 1965-2015. This approach is comprehensive in both coverage and depth with regard to constructing, testing, and applying theories of travelers' decisions and behaviors, which includes original work in updating grand theories and micro (algorithm-conscious and non-conscious based) theories of travelers' decisions and behavior. This volume is the first to fully recognize and construct theories across the THLE discipline. This volume describes the synergies, symbioses, and serendipity occurring in THLE behavior. It tears down researchers' parochial fences of what is and is not tourism, hospitality, leisure, and entertainment. The time has arrived tor tourism to embrace hospitality, hospitality to embrace tourism, and all to embrace leisure and entertainment, and this volume serves as a catalyst to accomplish this embrace.
Knowledge is power. Get informed and choose action over despair. Everything you need to know about the earth and the life it supports - right now. From the challenges we face with global environmental, health, poverty, equality, technological, political and justice issues to the pioneering places and people making a difference to our future. With 40 simple ways to support change. 'While the hour is late, the future remains ours to make. This hugely enjoyable book is a powerful introduction to the way things are and the way things can be. Keep it by your bed.' Tim Smit, co-founder The Eden Project
Why is it that food prices are so high that millions of South African families go hungry, while the prices paid to farmers for that same food are so low that many cannot stay in business? Why are the people who produce our food – farmworkers – among the most insecure of all? Why do high levels of rural poverty persist while corporate profits in the food sector keep rising? How did a country with a constitutional right to food become a place where 1 in 4 children is so malnourished that they are classified as stunted? An Empty Plate analyses the state of the South African agri-food system. Tracy Ledger demonstrates how this system is perpetuating poverty, threatening land reform, entrenching inequality and tearing apart our social fabric. The book asks two crucial questions: how did we get to this point and how might we go about solving the problem. This is a story of money, of power, of unanticipated consequences, and of personal and social tragedy. But it is also a story of what is possible if we reimagine our society and build a new system on the foundation of solidarity and ethical food citizenship.
This special volume of Research in Political Sociology addresses the interconnectivity of environment, politics and society. Contributors engage with critical topics such as water resource management, climate change, civil rights, poverty and social inequality, green transportation and brain drain, and examines these issues internationally in North America, South America, Asia and the Middle East. In the midst of vigorous discussions on environmental sustainability and crises that make global communities more vulnerable than ever before, on local, regional, and global scales, the chapters in this volume offer a much-needed dialogue, and will be of interest to politicians, policymakers and scientists as well as academic researchers. |
You may like...
Ethics and Politics of Space for the…
Anu Valtonen, Outi Rantala, …
Hardcover
R2,871
Discovery Miles 28 710
Understanding Urban Ecosystems - A New…
Alan R. Berkowitz, Charles H. Nilon, …
Hardcover
R4,382
Discovery Miles 43 820
Handbook on Teaching and Learning for…
Walter Leal Filho, Amanda Lange Salvia, …
Hardcover
R6,443
Discovery Miles 64 430
The Impact of Environmental Law…
Rose-Liza Eisma-Osorio, Elizabeth A. Kirk, …
Paperback
R1,149
Discovery Miles 11 490
Handbook on Energy Justice
Stefan Bouzarovski, Sara Fuller, …
Hardcover
R5,151
Discovery Miles 51 510
Handbook on Inequality and the…
Michael A Long, Michael J Lynch, …
Hardcover
R7,138
Discovery Miles 71 380
|