![]() |
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).
In the dramatic narratives that comprise The Republic of Nature, Mark Fiege reframes the canonical account of American history based on the simple but radical premise that nothing in the nation's past can be considered apart from the natural circumstances in which it occurred. Revisiting historical icons so familiar that schoolchildren learn to take them for granted, he makes surprising connections that enable readers to see old stories in a new light. Among the historical moments revisited here, a revolutionary nation arises from its environment and struggles to reconcile the diversity of its people with the claim that nature is the source of liberty. Abraham Lincoln, an unlettered citizen from the countryside, steers the Union through a moment of extreme peril, guided by his clear-eyed vision of nature's capacity for improvement. In Topeka, Kansas, transformations of land and life prompt a lawsuit that culminates in the momentous civil rights case of Brown v. Board of Education. By focusing on materials and processes intrinsic to all things and by highlighting the nature of the United States, Fiege recovers the forgotten and overlooked ground on which so much history has unfolded. In these pages, the nation's birth and development, pain and sorrow, ideals and enduring promise come to life as never before, making a once-familiar past seem new. The Republic of Nature points to a startlingly different version of history that calls on readers to reconnect with fundamental forces that shaped the American experience. For more information, visit the author's website: http://republicofnature.com/
This is a first evaluation of the physical impact of railway construction on the British coast. The building of railways has had a profound but largely ignored physical impact on Britain's coasts. This book explores the coming of railways to the edge of Britain, the ruthlessness of the companies involved and the transformation of our coasts through the destruction or damage to the environment. In many places today, railways are the first defence against the sea and similarly the embankments of long closed lines act as sea walls. It is ironic, at a time when climate change is very much favouring rail as a means of transport, that many lines are increasingly exposed to extreme weather and the very actions associated with their construction have exacerbated coastal erosion. With the benefit of hindsight, many coastal railways have been built in locations that would not have been chosen today. As our climate changes and storminess potentially increases, what might be the implications for some of Britain's lines on the edge? Features: unique combination of environmental and historical research; timely given the impact of the storms of January and February 2014; and, covers the breaching of the South Devon, Cambrian and Cumbrian coastal lines.
A revolutionary new theory and call to action on animal rights, ethics, and law from the renowned philosopher Martha C. Nussbaum. Animals are in trouble all over the world. Whether through the cruelties of the factory meat industry, poaching and game hunting, habitat destruction, or neglect of the companion animals that people purport to love, animals suffer injustice and horrors at our hands every day. The world needs an ethical awakening, a consciousness-raising movement of international proportions. In Justice for Animals, one of the world's most influential philosophers and humanists Martha C. Nussbaum provides a revolutionary approach to animal rights, ethics, and law. From dolphins to crows, elephants to octopuses, Nussbaum examines the entire animal kingdom, showcasing the lives of animals with wonder, awe, and compassion to understand how we can create a world in which human beings are truly friends of animals, not exploiters or users. All animals should have a shot at flourishing in their own way. Humans have a collective duty to face and solve animal harm. An urgent call to action and a manual for change, Nussbaum's groundbreaking theory directs politics and law to help us meet our ethical responsibilities as no book has done before.
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.
To reduce emissions and address climate change, we need to invest in renewables and rapidly decarbonise our energy networks. However, decarbonisation is often seen as a technical project, detached from questions of politics and social justice. What if this is leading to unfair transitions, in which some people bear the costs of change while others benefit? In this timely and expansive book, Ed Atkins asks: are we getting decarbonisation right? And how could it be made better for people and communities? In doing so, this book proposes a different type of energy transition. One that prioritises and takes opportunities to do better – to provide better jobs, community ownership and improve people’s homes and lives.
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.
In the face of rapid industrialisation in the last few decades, the tourism economy has blossomed into a major industry with positive impacts such as economic growth, infrastructure development, employment, and income generation. However, tourism brings negative environmental effects such as degradation of landscapes and habitats, increased vulnerability of avifauna and wildlife, and pollution leading to the decline of species. Environmental Impacts of Tourism in Developing Nations is a pivotal reference source that explores some of the critical challenges faced in the tourism economy particularly with regard to the impacts on the environment in developing nations. It also explores the impact tourism plays in the biophysical environment such as the issue of climate change. While highlighting topics such as environmental justice, ecosystems, and ecotourism, this book is ideally designed for academicians, policymakers, environmentalists, tourism professionals, and graduate-level students seeking current research on the environmental and economic impacts of tourism.
What are the implications of climate change for twenty-first-century conflict and security? Rising temperatures, it is often said, will bring increased drought, more famine, heightened social vulnerability, and large-scale political and violent conflict; indeed, many claim that this future is already with us. Divided Environments, however, shows that this is mistaken. Focusing especially on the links between climate change, water and security, and drawing on detailed evidence from Israel-Palestine, Syria, Sudan and elsewhere, it shows both that mainstream environmental security narratives are misleading, and that the actual security implications of climate change are very different from how they are often imagined. Addressing themes as wide-ranging as the politics of droughts, the contradictions of capitalist development and the role of racism in environmental change, while simultaneously articulating an original 'international political ecology' approach to the study of socio-environmental conflicts, Divided Environments offers a new and important interpretation of our planetary future.
The existential threat posed by climate change presents a challenge to all those concerned about the next generation. This Element reviews and discusses its implications for the development of children (ages 0-12) today and in the future, and for the parents, teachers, researchers, and professionals who have responsibility for children. This Element adopts a bioecological model to examine both the direct impacts on children's physical and psychological well-being as well as indirect impacts through all the systems external to the child, emphasizing the greater vulnerability of children in the Global South. Given evidence of well-founded climate anxiety, this Element examines children's coping strategies and discusses the key roles of caregivers and schools in protecting and preparing children to face current and future challenges - with knowledge, hope, and agency as central themes. This Element highlights many under-researched areas and calls for action by all those caring for and about children's future.
*'Probably the best novel I'll read this year. It's about work and love and characters who ring true. By the time I was 50 pages in I couldn't put it down. Can't stop thinking about it' Stephen King* For generations, Rich Gundersen's family has made a living felling giant redwoods on California's rugged coast. It's treacherous work, and though his son, Chub, wants nothing more than to step into his father's boots, Rich longs for a bigger future for him. Colleen just wants a brother or sister for Chub, but she's losing hope. There is so much that she and Rich don't talk about these days - including her suspicions that there is something very wrong at the heart of the forest on which their community is built. When Rich is offered the opportunity to buy a plot of timber which borders Damnation Grove, he leaps at the chance - without telling Colleen. Soon the Gundersens find themselves on opposite sides of a battle that threatens to rip their town apart. Can they find a way to emerge from this together?
The pressing nature of environmental threats, such as: climate change, land-grabbing, biopiracy, animal exploitation and human environmental victimisation, are pushing the entire world to seek alternatives to prevent environmental damage in every corner of the globe. Southern Green Criminology focuses on the threat the western world poses to the rest of the globe, and how Western imposed ideas of progress are damaging the planet, especially the southern hemisphere. In the past five years, the attention of green criminologists has been directed at the Global South as the geographical site that experiences the severest consequences of harmful environmental practices. Such criminological direction is aimed at combating the environmental harms that affect the geographical and the metaphorical Souths. The main topic of this book is the conflicts that arise in the interaction between human beings and our natural environment, seen from a Southern perspective with a focus on the victimisation of the South. This book is simultaneously a scientific and a political endeavour, and will prove invaluable to students, researchers and environmental enthusiasts alike.
The relationship between human communities and the environment is extremely complex. In order to resolve the issues involved with this relationship, interdisciplinary research combining natural sciences, social sciences, and humanities is necessary. In this 2010 book, specialists summarise methods and research strategies for various aspects of social research devoted to environmental issues. Each chapter is illustrated with ethnographic and environmental examples, ranging from Australia to Amazonia, from Madagascar to the United States, and from prehistoric and historic cases to contemporary rural and urban ones. It deals with climate change, deforestation, environmental knowledge, natural reserves, politics and ownership of natural resources, and the effect of differing spatial and temporal scales. Contributing to the intellectual project of interdisciplinary environmental social science, this book shows the possibilities social science can provide to environmental studies and to larger global problems and thus will be of equal interest to social and natural scientists and policy makers.
From Gaelic annals and medieval poetry to contemporary Irish literature, A History of Irish Literature and the Environment examines the connections between the Irish environment and Irish literary culture. Themes such as Ireland's island ecology, the ecological history of colonial-era plantation and deforestation, the Great Famine, cultural attitudes towards animals and towards the land, the postcolonial politics of food and energy generation, and the Covid-19 pandemic - this book shows how these factors determine not only a history of the Irish environment but also provide fresh perspectives from which to understand and analyze Irish literature. An international team of contributors provides a comprehensive analysis of Irish literature to show how the literary has always been deeply engaged with environmental questions in Ireland, a crucial new perspective in an age of climate crisis. A History of Irish Literature and the Environment reveals the socio-cultural, racial, and gendered aspects embedded in questions of the Irish environment.
The concept of environmental violence (EV) explains the harm that humanity is inflicting upon itself through our pollution emissions. This book argues that EV is present, active, and expanding at alarming rates in the contemporary human niche and in the Earth system. It explains how EV is produced and facilitated by the same inequalities that it creates and reinforces, and suggests that the causes can be attributed to a relatively small portion of the human population and to a fairly circumscribed set of behaviours. While the causes of EV are complex, the author makes this complexity manageable to ensure interventions are more readily discernible. The EV-model developed is both a theoretical concept and an analytical tool, substantiated with rigorous social and environmental scientific evidence, and designed with the intention to help disrupt the cycle of violence with effective policies and real change.
Political elites have been evading the causes of climate change through deceptive fixes. Their market-type instruments such as carbon trading aim to incentivise technological innovation which will supposedly decarbonize or replace dominant high-carbon systems. In practice this techno-market framework has perpetuated climate change and social injustices, thus provoking public controversy. Using this opportunity, social movements have counterposed low-carbon, resource-light, socially just alternatives. Such transformative mobilisations can fulfil the popular slogan, 'System Change Not Climate Change'. This book develops key critical concepts through case studies such as GM crops, biofuels, waste incineration and Green New Deal agendas.
One of the main features of the contemporary environmental crisis is that no-one has a clear pictue of what is taking place. Environmental problems are real enough but they bring home the inadequacy of our knowledge. How does the natural world relate to the social world? Why do we continue to have such a poor understanding? How can ecological knowledge be made to relate to our understanding of human society? The book argues that the division of labour is a key but neglected factor underlying people's inability to adequately understand and relate to the natural world. The argument extends Marx's theory of alienation to account for inadequate knowledge and therefore inadequate concern for nature. Using recent developments in "critical realist" philosophy, the book aims to find ways of reorganising knowledge in the light of ecological consciousness. It also corrects the emphasis of much environmental literature by focussing on production rather than consumption.
Science, which inevitably underlies environmental disputes, poses significant challenges for the scientifically untrained judges who decide such cases. In addition to disrupting ordinary fact-finding and causal inquiry, science can impact the framing of disputes and the standard of review. Judges must therefore adopt various tools to adjust the level of science allowed to enter their deliberations, which may fundamentally impact the legitimacy of their reasoning. While neglecting or replacing scientific authority can erode the convincing nature of judicial reasoning, the same authority, when treated properly, may lend persuasive force to adjudicatory findings, and buttress the legitimacy of judgments. In this work, Katalin Sulyok surveys the environmental case law of seven major jurisdictions and analyzes framing techniques, evidentiary procedures, causal inquiries and standards of review, offering valuable insight into how judges justify their choices between rival scientific claims in a convincing and legitimate manner.
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 advent of social complexity has been a longstanding debate among social scientists. Existing theories and approaches involving the origins of social complexity include environmental circumscription, population growth, technology transfers, prestige-based and interpersonal-group competition, organized conflict, perennial wartime leadership, wealth finance, opportunistic leadership, climatological change, transport and trade monopolies, resource circumscription, surplus and redistribution, ideological imperialism, and the consideration of individual agency. However, recent approaches such as the inclusion of bioarchaeological perspectives, prospection methods, systematically-investigated archaeological sites along with emerging technologies are necessarily transforming our understanding of socio-cultural evolutionary processes. In short, many pre-existing ways of explaining the origins and development of social complexity are being reassessed. Ultimately, the contributors to this edited volume challenge the status quo regarding how and why social complexity arose by providing revolutionary new understandings of social inequality and socio-political evolution.
This book applies a justice framework to analysis of the actual and potential role of international law with respect to people on the move in the context of anthropogenic climate change. That people are affected by the impacts of climate change is no longer doubted, including with implications for people movement (migration, displacement, relocation, etc.). Climate Change and People on the Move tackles unique questions concerning international responsibility for people movement arising from the inequities inherent to climate change. Corrective and distributive justice provide the analytical backbone, and are explored in a substantial theoretical chapter and then applied to subsequent contextual analysis. Corrective justice supports analysis as to whether people movement in the climate change context could be conceived or framed as harm, loss, or damage which is compensable under international law, either through fault-centred regimes or no-fault regimes (i.e. insurance). Distributive justice supports analysis as to whether such movement could be conceived or framed as a disproportionate burden, either for those faced with movement or those faced with sheltering people on the move, from which duties of re-distribution may stem. This book contributes to the growing scholarship and analysis concerning international law or governance and people movement in response to the impacts of climate change by investigating the bounds of the law where the phenomenon is viewed as one of (in)justice.
This work proposes a framework based on the concept of a fair distribution of environmental space to include the diverse needs of North and South. Drawing on research in 38 countries, it aims to give an equitable basis for global development in order to achieve sustainable consumption by the year 2050. The environmental space approach seeks to explain the limitations of the global market economy as a tool of development and to give us the means to alter it in order to achieve a genuine quality of life, rather than simple economic growth. In addition, this book seeks to urge all countries and peoples to consider and evaluate the environmental space approach and to join in a movement towards sustainable production and consumption for the 21st century.
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.
In this Element, the authors develop an account of the role of behaviour change that is more political and social by bringing questions of power and social justice to the heart of their enquiry in order to appreciate how questions of responsibility and agency are unevenly distributed within and between societies. The result is a more holistic understanding of behaviour, as just one node within an ecosystem of transformation that bridges the individual and systemic. Their account is more attentive to questions of governance and the processes of collective steering necessary to facilitate large scale change across a diversity of actors, sectors and regions than the dominant emphasis on individuals and households. It is also more historical in its approach, looking critically at the relevance of historical parallels regarding large-scale behaviour change and what might be learned and applied to the contemporary context action.
The last few years have witnessed a flurry of activity in global governance and international lawseeking to address the protection gaps for people fleeing the effects of climate change. This book discusses cutting-edge developments in law and policy on climate change and forced displacement, including theories and potential solutions, issues of governance, local and regional concerns, and future challenges. Chapters are written by a range of authors from academics to key figures in intergovernmental organisations, and offer detailed case studies of policy developments in the Americas, Europe, South-East Asia, and the Pacific. This is an ideal resource for graduate students and researchers from a range of disciplines, as well as policymakers working in environmental law, environmental governance, and refugee and migration law. This is one of a series of publications associated with the Earth System Governance Project. For more publications, see www.cambridge.org/earth-system-governance. |
You may like...
World Seas: An Environmental Evaluation…
Charles Sheppard
Paperback
Northeast and Midwest United States - An…
John T Cumbler
Hardcover
Ethics and Politics of Space for the…
Anu Valtonen, Outi Rantala, …
Hardcover
R3,406
Discovery Miles 34 060
Restoring Layered Landscapes - History…
Marion Hourdequin, David G. Havlick
Hardcover
R3,571
Discovery Miles 35 710
New Developments in Environmental…
Michael R. Redclift, Graham Woodgate
Hardcover
R6,620
Discovery Miles 66 200
|