The modern era is facing unprecedented governance challenges in striving to achieve long-term sustainability goals and to limit human impacts on the Earth system. This volume synthesizes a decade of multidisciplinary research into how diverse actors exercise authority in environmental decision making, and their capacity to deliver effective, legitimate and equitable Earth system governance. Actors from the global to the local level are considered, including governments, international organizations and corporations. Chapters cover how state and non-state actors engage with decision-making processes, the relationship between agency and structure, and the variations in governance and agency across different spheres and tiers of society. Providing an overview of the major questions, issues and debates, as well as the theories and methods used in studies of agency in earth system governance, this book provides a valuable resource for graduate students and researchers, as well as practitioners and policy makers working in environmental governance. 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.

Located in the Blue Mountains southwest of Sydney, the Blue Plateau is a contrary collection of canyons and creeks, cow paddocks and eucalyptus forests, the first people and ranchers. This book reveals the plateau through its inhabitants: the Gundungurra people who were there first and still remain; the Maxwell family, who tried, but failed, to tame the land; the affable, impoverished, often drunken ranchers and firefighters; and the author himself, a poet trying to insinuate his citified self into a rugged landscape defined by drought, fire, and scarcity. Like the works of Peter Mathiessen, Barry Lopez, and William Least Heat-Moon, "The Blue Plateau" is a deep examination of place that transcends genre, incorporating poetry, people's history, ecology, mythology, and memoir to reveal how humanity and nature intertwine to create a home. Elegiac and intimately composed, this vivid portrait of a rugged wilds expands readers' sense of the place they call home.

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.

Ecology is indispensable to understanding the biological world and addressing the environmental problems humanity faces. Its philosophy has never been more important. In this book, James Justus introduces readers to the philosophically rich issues ecology poses. Besides its crucial role in biological science generally, climate change, biodiversity loss, and other looming environmental challenges make ecology's role in understanding such threats and identifying solutions to them all the more critical. When ecology is applied and its insights marshalled to address these problems and guide policy formation, interesting philosophical issues emerge. Justus sets them out in detail, and explores the often ethically charged dimensions of applied ecological science, using accessible language and a wealth of scientifically-informed examples.

This book provides students in human geography with a vital resource - a collection of writings critical to understanding the field as a whole and revealing the interactions of its component parts. It is designed to give students ready access to the literature their studies are most likely to lead them to consult.

The book is divided into five parts. Parts I and II describe the nature of the enterprise and show the origins and current state of thinking on central issues. Part III is concerned with interactions between nature, culture and landscape. Part IV considers area differences and geographic units such as region, place and locality. Part V provides insights into the concepts of space, time and space-time. The editors have provided a general introduction, introductions to each part and contextual notes for each chapter. Each part concludes with sections of further reading by subject and the volume ends with a time chart of the main developments in geography.

This collection of seminal articles aims to be revealing, challenging and engaging. It amply demonstrates why human geography is a subject worthy of the student's engagement and provides a vital and rewarding resource for its understanding.

An essential, urgent book by the environmental journalist Marianne Brown, to publish at a time of accelerated climate crisis. When Marianne Brown arrived in Voe, Shetland, to attend the funeral of her father, she had packed enough clothes to last a week. But this was March 2020, and she would be unable to leave for another six months. Shetland is a place bound together by community, history and folklore. But when a huge windfarm is greenlit to mainly serve the mainland, it creates rifts between neighbours, friends and even families. One side support the benefit to a planet spiralling into climate disaster; the other challenge the impact on an environment with an already struggling wildlife population. As an environmental journalist, Marianne is drawn to investigate this story of sustainable power that is irrevocably tied to her grief. But nothing is ever straightforward, and she soon finds herself embroiled in a story of betrayal, power and politics that mirrors global concerns about how we save the planet.

Although climate change affects everybody it is not gender neutral. It has significant social impacts and magnifies existing inequalities such as the disparity between women and men in their vulnerability and ability to cope with this global phenomenon. This new textbook, edited by one of the authors of the seminal Women and the Environment in the Third World: Alliance for the Future (1988) which first exposed the links between environmental degradation and unequal impacts on women, provides a comprehensive introduction to gender aspects of climate change. Over 35 authors have contributed to the book. It starts with a short history of the thinking and practice around gender and sustainable development over the past decades. Next it provides a theoretical framework for analyzing climate change manifestations and policies from the perspective of gender and human security. Drawing on new research, the actual and potential effects of climate change on gender equality and women's vulnerabilities are examined, both in rural and urban contexts. This is illustrated with a rich range of case studies from all over the world and valuable lessons are drawn from these real experiences. Too often women are primarily seen as victims of climate change, and their positive roles as agents of change and contributors to livelihood strategies are neglected. The book disputes this characterization and provides many examples of how women around the world organize and build resilience and adapt to climate change and the role they are playing in climate change mitigation. The final section looks at how far gender mainstreaming in climate mitigation and adaptation has advanced, the policy frameworks in place and how we can move from policy to effective action. Accompanied by a wide range of references and key resources, this book provides students and professionals with an essential, comprehensive introduction to the gender aspects of climate change.

Discusses how young adult fiction offers new ways of thinking about climate change and definitions of citizenship. The Necessity of Young Adult Fiction argues that YA fiction helps us to think about some of most pressing problems of the twenty-first century by offering imaginative reconceptualizations about identity, nation, family, and the human relationship to the planet. Using examples from YA fiction that range from the Harry Potter series to Nnedi Okorafor's trilogy set in contemporary Nigeria, this book argues that the cultural work of YA fiction shapes readers perceptions, making them receptive to-and invested in-the possibility of positive social change. The novels examined could all be considered "fantastical," but they offer insights into the real world that all readers-and particularly young adult readers-might draw on in order to reimagine social structures and the well-being of the planet. The book is designed to bring readers into the conversation about how we might create cosmopolitan societies that are shaped around conversation and engagement rather than fear and isolation. Each of these novels, in different ways, illustrate the dangers inherent in fundamentalist visions of the world. Through its discussions about the relationships between reading and citizenship, monsters and families, the local and the global, The Necessity of Young Adult Fiction demonstrates that YA fiction is doing some of the most important and creative work in literature today.

Environmental justice aspires to a healthy environment for all, as well as fair and inclusive processes of environmental decision-making. In order to develop successful strategies to achieve this, it is important to understand the factors that shape environmental justice outcomes. This optimistic, accessible and wide-ranging book contributes to this understanding by assessing the extent of, and reasons for, environmental justice/injustice in seven diverse countries - United States, Republic of Korea (South Korea), United Kingdom, Sweden, China, Bolivia and Cuba. Factors discussed include: race and class discrimination; citizen power; industrialisation processes; political-economic context; and the influence of dominant environmental discourses. In particular, the role of capitalism is critically explored. Based on over a hundred interviews with politicians, experts, activists and citizens of these countries, this is a compelling analysis aimed at all academics, policy-makers and campaigners who are engaged in thinking or action to address the most urgent environmental and social issues of our time.

Global communities have arrived at a critical crossroads. The planet is heating up at a historically unprecedented rate and the ecological conditions sustaining vast species, including our own, are poised at irreversible tipping points. Time is up to avoid climate and ecological catastrophe. In such dire circumstances, 'business as usual' - and by extension 'politics as usual' - can no longer be accommodated. The Extinction Curve charts the dynamics of the economic and social relations driving this perilous climate endgame. Recent economic crises have fractured consent over the consequences of growth and globalisation, and political fracturing is now at a defining moment. Ultra-right nationalism, shaped by the vested interests of a tiny minority at the expense of the global majority, threatens descent into a darker and more fortressed world. In contrast, enhanced progressive and environmental activism presents hope of an alternative course. The 50-year attempt by the mainstream environmental movement to create a greener capitalism has failed to reach the required objectives. This book argues that reversing the extinction curve requires ending the growth pandemic embedded within the core of capitalism as a mode of production and consumption. It maps fresh directions for a democratic social, economic and sustainable ecological transformation in the interests of the global majority and, crucially, demonstrates how this can be achieved.

Humankind has long considered the relationship it holds with nature to be both a blessing and a challenge. The onset of climate change has brought a new impetus to this relationship. This volume of Advances in Sustainability and Environmental Justice will examine environmental philosophy from a number of viewpoints. Each contributor has a unique perspective on the interaction and engagement between humanity and the rest of nature, from the technological to the philosophical. Environmental Philosophy: the Art of Life in a World of Limits provides a series of interesting studies on humanity's place in the world, and the impact this is having on the planet. The book poses the question as to whether life can be lived in harmony with nature, and what limits can be achieved in the impact such life has on the world around us.

Communities affected by natural disasters are often stigmatized as being passive with regard to disaster prevention, mitigation and adaptation, waiting only for government assistance in the aftermath of such events. However, many innovative community initiatives have been developed to address natural disasters, which are often characterized as "local responses". While scrutinizing the potential strength and comparative advantage of community-based disaster response, this book analyzes and illustrates how individuals, families and social groups in rural and urban communities perceive natural disasters, their underlying reasons and their effects on their livelihoods, and documents and analyzes the role of local responses to natural disasters and conflict. Key factors determining the degree of vulnerability and resilience of affected communities are also elicited. Several pivotal issues related to community-based disaster responses are addressed, such as the relationship between local and external knowledge in addressing disasters, the relevance of institutional and policy frameworks for community-based disaster response and the role of social capital and collective action.

Simon Fairlie is possibly the most influential - and unusual - eco-activist you might not have heard of. The Observer Simon Fairlie is the original hippie. The Idler This is a fascinating, funny and moving record of an extraordinary life lived in extraordinary times. George Monbiot Going to Seed is the unforgettable firsthand account of how the hippie movement flowered in the late 1960s, appeared spent by the Thatcher-consumed 1980s, yet became the seedbed for progressive reform we now take for granted - and continues to inspire generations of rebels and visionaries. At a young age, Simon Fairlie rejected the rat race and embarked on a new trip to find his own path. He dropped out of Cambridge University to hitchhike to Istanbul and bicycle through India. Simon established a commune in France, was arrested multiple times for squatting and civil disobedience, and became a leading figure in protests against the British government's road building programmes of the 1980s and - later - in legislative battles to help people secure access to land for low impact, sustainable living. Over the course of fifty years, we witness a man's drive for self-sufficiency, freedom, authenticity and a deep connection to the land. Simon Fairlie grew up in a middle-class household in leafy middle England. His path had been laid out for him by his father: boarding school, Oxbridge and a career in journalism. But everything changed when Simon's life ran headfirst into London's counterculture in the 1960s. He finds Beat poetry, blues music, cannabis and anti-Vietnam War protests - and a powerful lust to be free. Instead of becoming a celebrated Fleet Street journalist like his father, Simon becomes a labourer, a stonemason, a farmer, a scythesman, a magazine editor and a writer of a very different sort. He shares the highs of his experience, alongside the painful costs of his ongoing search for freedom - estrangement from his family, financial insecurity and the loss of friends and lovers to the excesses of the 1960s, 70s, and 80s. Going to Seed questions the current trajectory of Western 'progress' - explosive consumerism, growing inequality and environmental devastation; it's for anyone who wonders how we got to such a place. Simon's story is for anyone who wonders what the world might look like if we began to chart a radically different course.

Demonstrating that all notions of nature are inextricably entangled in different forms of social life, the text elaborates the many ways in which the apparently natural world has been produced from within particular social practices. These are analyzed in terms of different senses, different times and the production of distinct spaces, including the local, the national and the global. The authors emphasize the importance of cultural understandings of the physical world, highlighting the ways in which these have been routinely misunderstood by academic and policy discourses. They show that popular conceptions of, and attitudes to, nature are often contradictory and that there are no simple ways of prevailing upon people to `save the environment'.

The third edition of this introductory textbook for both science students and non-science majors has been brought completely up-to-date. It reflects recent scientific progress in the field, as well as advances in the political arena around climate change. As in previous editions, it is tightly focussed on anthropogenic climate change. The first part of the book concentrates on the science of modern climate change, including evidence that the Earth is warming and a basic description of climate physics. Concepts such as radiative forcing, climate feedbacks, and the carbon cycle are discussed and explained using basic physics and algebra. The second half of the book goes beyond the science to address the economics and policy options to address climate change. The book's goal is for a student to leave the class ready to engage in the public policy debate on the climate crisis.

With current environmental, social and financial challenges facing society and the economy, there has been a rapid growth in interest in the role of social and sustainable enterprise. Accordingly, as government, industry and communities seek to find alternative ways to deliver product and services, this volume seeks to draw together contemporary entrepreneurial research which addresses current social and environmental issues, such as: social and community enterprise and entrepreneurship, including the tension between maintaining core social aims and continuing to prosper in a highly competitive and turbulent marketplace. Sustainable entrepreneurship and environmental impacts of enterprise, for example the pursuit of environmentally-responsible opportunities by mainstream enterprises, the creation of self-consciously 'eco-preneurial' ventures and more radical models that challenge prevailing assumptions about enterprise and growth; and ethics, enterprise and social responsibility, including the growth of ethical markets and the opportunities they create, such as providing services for disadvantaged groups or facilitating markets in fairly-traded goods and services.

Disaster by Design: The Aral Sea, Lessons for Sustainability addresses the impacts of the Aral Sea disaster. The virtual disappearance of what was the world's fourth largest inland body of water was neither natural nor accidental. It was the result of deliberate policy decisions. The sea's disappearance is hardly the entire disaster. Instead, we find an accumulation of cascading effects, beginning with the decision to grow cotton, reached remotely in Moscow that altered the farming practices surrounding the Aral Sea. Unsustainable choices resulted in soil salinization, water pollution and toxic blowing sands, impacting the entire bioregion and beyond. A remote island was used to test biological weapons. Uzbekistan, most notably Karakalpakstan, was the autonomous republic at the epicenter of the disaster. Sustainable prospects exist, including renewable energy, permaculture and strengthening the social fabric amidst poverty and ecological collapse. This volume of Research in Social Problems and Public Policy is essential reading for everyone concerned with averting environmental disaster and instead creating livable, sustainable communities. Disaster by Design is a clarion call and an insightful study of Central Asia today.

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.

In Constitutional Culture, Independence, and Rights, Javier García Oliva and Helen Hall coin the term "constitutional culture" to encapsulate the collective rules and expectations that govern the collective life within a jurisdiction. Significantly, these shared norms have both legal and social elements, including matters as diverse as standards of parenting, the modus operandi of police officers, and taboos around sexuality. Using Quebec, Scotland, and Catalonia as case studies, the book delves into what these constitutional battles mean for the rights, identity, and needs of everyday people, and it powerfully demonstrates why the hypothetical future independence of these regions would have far-reaching practical consequences, beyond the realm of political structures and academic theory. The book does not present a magic bullet to resolve debates around independence – this is not its purpose, and the text in fact demonstrates why there is no objectively optimal approach in any or all contexts. Instead, it seeks to shed light on aspects of these situations often overlooked in discussions around the fate of nations, and it addresses what the consequences of constitutional paradigm shifts might be for individuals. Constitutional culture is a complex web of interconnected understandings and behaviours, and the vibrations from shaking or cutting a fundamental strand will be felt throughout the structure.

Environmental Anthropology: A Reader is a collection of historically significant readings, dating from early in the twentieth century up to the present, on the cross-cultural study of relations between people and their environment.* Provides the historical perspective that is typically missing from recent work in environmental anthropology* Includes an extensive intellectual history and commentary by the volume's editors* Offers a unique perspective on current interest in cross-cultural environmental relations* Divided into five thematic sections: (1) the nature/culture divide; (2) relationship between environment and social organization; (3) methodological debates and innovations; (4) politics and practice; and (5) epistemological issues of environmental anthropology* Organized into a series of paired papers, which 'speak' to each other, designed to encourage readers to make connections that they might not customarily make

Conversations about climate change at the science-policy interface and in our lives have been stuck for some time. This handbook integrates lessons from the social sciences and humanities to more effectively make connections through issues, people, and things that everyday citizens care about. Readers will come away with an enhanced understanding that there is no 'silver bullet' to communications about climate change; instead, a 'silver buckshot' approach is needed, where strategies effectively reach different audiences in different contexts. This tactic can then significantly improve efforts that seek meaningful, substantive, and sustained responses to contemporary climate challenges. It can also help to effectively recapture a common or middle ground on climate change in the public arena. Readers will come away with ideas on how to harness creativity to better understand what kinds of communications work where, when, why, and under what conditions in the twenty-first century.

Set at the intersection of political theory and environmental politics, yet with broad engagement across the environmental social sciences and humanities, The Oxford Handbook of Environmental Political Theory, defines, illustrates, and challenges the field of environmental political theory (EPT). Featuring contributions from distinguished political scientists working in this field, this volume addresses canonical theorists and contemporary environmental problems with a diversity of theoretical approaches. The initial volume focuses on EPT as a field of inquiry, engaging both traditions of political thought and the academy. In the second section, the handbook explores conceptualizations of nature and the environment, as well as the nature of political subjects, communities, and boundaries within our environments. A third section addresses the values that motivate environmental theorists-including justice, responsibility, rights, limits, and flourishing-and the potential conflicts that can emerge within, between, and against these ideals. The final section examines the primary structures that constrain or enable the achievement of environmental ends, as well as theorizations of environmental movements, citizenship, and the potential for on-going environmental action and change.

Today, our lives are dominated by an ideology of extreme competition and individualism. It misrepresents human nature, destroying hope and common purpose. But we cannot replace it without a positive vision, one that reengages people in politics and lights a path to a better world. Urgent and passionate, George Monbiot shows how new findings in psychology, neuroscience and evolutionary biology cast humans in a radically different light: as the supreme altruists and cooperators. He shows how both democracy and economic life can be radically reorganised from the bottom up, enabling us to take back control and overthrow the forces that have thwarted our ambitions for a better society. Out of the Wreckage explains just how communities can be rebuilt with the help of a new "politics of belonging".

When you tug on a single thing in nature, said the conservationist John Muir, you find it is attached to the rest of the world. Nowhere is this more evident than in the climate crisis. Tugging on a thread of our shared atmosphere in China or the U.S., for example, by shunting pollution into the skies, causes the fabric of local weather patterns to unravel half a world away. Climate change is the biggest moral problem of our time, as people who have contributed little to the pollution responsible for global warming are increasingly understood to be most vulnerable to the shifting environment around them. In Boiling Point, Leonie Joubert embarks on a journey in which she explores the lives of some South Africans affected by this phenomenon: a rooibos tea farmer in the Northern Cape, a traditional fisherman in Lamberts Bay, a farmer in the center of the Free States maize belt, a political refugee in Pietermaritzburg and a sangoma in Limpopo mining country. Most of these communities live on a knife-edge because of poverty and their dependence on an already capricious natural environment. Boiling Point considers what might happen to them as normal weather trends are amplified in a hotter world.