The lives of people around the world, particularly in developed countries, depend on relatively inexpensive movement of people and goods. Now, more than ever, the prospect of rising costs puts continuation of this transport dependence in question. Costs could rise significantly due to the needs to reduce pollution, reverse urban sprawl, enhance security and, above all, use fuel that will become dramatically more expensive than those used now. This book sets out the challenges that will soon threaten modern society's dependence on low-cost transport in the light of the problems posed by oil supply and climate change. It proposes organizational and technical innovations that could ensure effective, secure movement of people and goods in ways that minimize environmental impacts and make the best use of renewable sources of energy. The authors conclude that transport in the first half of the 21st century will feature at least two revolutions. One will involve the use of electric drives rather than internal combustion engines. The other will involve powering these drives directly from the electric grid rather than from on-board fuel. The authors also address revolutions in marine transport and aviation and analyze the politics and business of transport and how these will undergo profound change in the decades ahead. This fresh look at the topic offers explanations, challenges the failures of governments and industry and proposes strategies and actions that can move transport towards sustainability.

The West African Sahel is predicted to be heavily affected by climate change in the future. Slow-onset environmental changes, such as increasing rainfall variability and rising temperature, are presumed to worsen the livelihood conditions and to increase the out-migration from the affected regions. Based on qualitative and quantitative data from study areas in Mali and Senegal, this book examines the relationship between population dynamics, livelihoods and environment in the Sahel region, focussing specifically on motives for migration. Critiquing the assumption that environmental stress is the dominating migration driver, the author demonstrates the important role of individual aspirations and social processes, such as educational opportunities and the pull of urban lifestyles. In doing so, the book provides a more nuanced picture of the environment-migration nexus, arguing that slow-onset environmental changes may actually be less important as drivers of migration in the Sahel than they are often depicted in the media and climate change literature. This is a valuable resource for academics and students of environmental sociology, migration and development studies.

Climate Change and Ocean Governance brings together authors from political science and cognate disciplines to examine the political and policy dimensions of climate change for our oceans. The environmental, social and economic consequences of oceanic change present tremendous challenges for governments and other actors. New and innovative policies for governing oceans and seas - and for managing vital marine resources - have never been more important. Existing national and international institutions for marine governance that were created when oceanic conditions were relatively static may not be adequate for a future characterized by continuous oceanic change. Responses to oceanic change will result in winners and losers, and thus will involve politics in all its manifestations. This book reveals the unavoidable connections between climate change, the oceans, and questions of governance. It provides valuable lessons for researchers, policymakers and activists concerned about governing oceanic change into the future.

Environmental constraints are becoming increasingly severe, and now more than ever it is time that we confront head-on the change from an "underground resources" type of civilization to one with a new way of life and technology that embraces a sense of nature. To do so, we need to understand the process of the civilization change. We must change our way of thinking to backcasting in order to design future lifestyles and learn from the elderly who lived with nature under severe environmental constraints more than 70 years ago. We must also learn from nature directly, the only sustainable society on earth. This book introduces Bio-TRIZ and ontology engineering to match and find technologies needed for spiritually affluent lifestyles. It provides many examples of Japanese cities that conducted lifestyle design projects based on nature technology. The book is a great reference for graduate-level students of environmental studies and engineering and for researchers in innovation, social science, engineering, and public policy, especially those with an interest in lifestyle change for a sustainable society.

Palgrave Advances in International Environmental Politics provides a state of the art review of the major theoretical approaches and substantive debates of the field. The first section reviews the historical development of international environmental politics as well as the theoretical and methodological approaches used in its study. The following chapters each review the trajectory of a key research area within international environmental politics and elaborate on current approaches and debates. Case studies in each chapter illuminate the main theoretical questions that emerge from the review.

Written in an engaging and accessible manner by one of the leading scholars in his field, Environment and Social Theory, completed revised and updated with two new chapters, is an indispensable guide to the way in which the environment and social theory relate to one another. This popular text outlines the complex interlinking of the environment, nature and social theory from ancient and pre-modern thinking to contemporary social theorizing. John Barry: examines the ways major religions such as Judaeo-Christianity have and continue to conceptualize the environment analyzes the way the non-human environment features in Western thinking from Marx and Darwin, to Freud and Horkheimer explores the relationship between gender and the environment, postmodernism and risk society schools of thought, and the contemporary ideology of orthodox economic thinking in social theorising about the environment. How humans value, use and think about the environment, is an increasingly central and important aspect of recent social theory. It has become clear that the present generation is faced with a series of unique environmental dilemmas, largely unprecedented in human history. With summary points, illustrative examples, glossary and further reading sections this invaluable resource will benefit anyone with an interest in environmentalism, politics, sociology, geography, development studies and environmental and ecological economics.

Think globally, act locally emphasizes the importance of scale in dealing with environmental challenges, but not how to factor it in. This major new book focuses on the spatial dimensions of urban environmental burdens, showing how important it is to take these into account when pursuing environmental justice and good governance - whether in the context of the sanitary risks of slum living, the pollution of uncontrolled industrialization and motorization, or the enormous ecological footprints of affluent urban lifestyles. Written by leading experts in the fields of urban development and environmental planning, the book reviews the urban environmental shifts that have shaped today s challenges, and examines conditions and problems in the urban centres of low-, middle- and high-income countries. Case studies address such economically diverse cities as Accra, New Delhi, Mexico City and Manchester, while thematic chapters explore issues including water, sanitation and transportation. The book concludes by exploring and analysing different scales of governance. The editors argue that we should not rely solely on local governance to address local burdens like poor sanitation, nor depend only on global governance for global challenges such as greenhouse gas emissions, but that scale is crucial in both understanding the problems and devising successful responses. Published with UNU-IAS and IIED.

Packed with provocative case studies, calculations and lifestyle comparisons, this entertaining and authoritative book makes the complexities of climatology understandable and challenges readers to rethink their notions of 'doing their bit'. The paperback edition features a new preface from Mark Lynas, author of High Tide: News From a Warming World

The world is faced with significant and interrelated challenges in the 21st century which threaten human rights in a number of ways. This book examines three of the largest issues of the century - armed conflict, environment, and poverty - and examines how these may be addressed using a human rights framework. It considers how these challenges threaten human rights and reassesses our understanding of human rights in the light of these issues. This multidisciplinary text considers both foundational and applied questions such as the relationship between morality and the laws of war, as well as the application of the International Human Rights Framework in cyber space. Alongside analyses from some of the most prominent lawyers, philosophers, and political theorists in the debate, each section includes contributions by those who have served as Special Rapporteurs within the United Nations Human Rights System on the challenges facing international human rights laws today.

This second edition of An Environmental History of the World continues to present a concise history, from ancient to modern times, of the interactions between human societies and the natural environment, including the other forms of life that inhabit our planet. Throughout their evolutionary history, humans have affected the natural environment, sometimes with a promise of sustainable balance, but also in a destructive manner. This book investigates the ways in which environmental changes, often the result of human actions, have caused historical trends in human societies. This process has happened in every historical period and in every part of the inhabited earth.

The book is organized into ten chapters. The main chapters follow a chronological path through the history of mankind, in relationship to ecosystems around the world. The first explains what environmental history is, and argues for its importance in understanding the present state of the world's ecological problems. Chapters two through eight form the core of the historical analysis, each concentrating on a major period of human history (pre-civilized, early civilizations, classical, medieval, early modern, early and later twentieth century, and contemporary) that has been characterized by large-scale changes in the relationship between human societies and the biosphere, and each gives several case studies that illustrate significant patterns occurring at that time. The chapters covering contemporary times discuss the physical impacts of the huge growth in population and technology, and the human responses to these problems. Our moral obligations to nature and how we can achieve a sustainable balance between technology and the environment are also considered. This revised second edition takes account of new research and the course of history containing new sections on global warming, the response of New Orleans to the hurricanes Katrina and Rita, and the experience of the Dutch people in protecting their low-lying lands against the encroachments of rivers, lakes, and the North Sea. New material is also offered on the Pacific Islands, including the famous case of Easter Island.

This is an original work that reaches further than other environmental histories. Rather than looking at humans and the environment as separate entities, this book places humans within the community of life. The relationship between environmental thought and actions, and their evolution, is discussed throughout. Little environmental or historical knowledge is assumed from the reader in this introduction to environmental history. We cannot reach a useful understanding of modern environmental problems without the aid of perspective provided by environmental history, with its illustrations of the ways in which past decisions helped or hindered the interaction between nature and culture. This book will be influential and timely to all interested in or researching the world in which we live.

The year 2016 was the hottest year on record and the third consecutive record-breaking year in planet temperatures. The following year was the hottest in a non-El Nino year. Of the seventeen hottest years ever recorded, sixteen have occurred since 2000, indicating the trend in climate change is toward an ever warmer Earth. However, climate change does not occur in a social vacuum; it reflects relations between social groups and forces us to contemplate the ways in which we think about and engage with the environment and each other. Employing the experience-near anthropological lens to consider human social life in an environmental context, this book examines the fateful global intersection of ongoing climate change and widening social inequality. Over the course of the volume, Singer argues that the social and economic precarity of poorer populations and communities-from villagers to the urban disadvantaged in both the global North and global South-is exacerbated by climate change, putting some people at considerably enhanced risk compared to their wealthier counterparts. Moreover, the book adopts and supports the argument that the key driver of global climatic and environmental change is the global economy controlled primarily by the world's upper class, which profits from a ceaseless engine of increased production for national middle classes who have been converted into constant consumers. Drawing on case studies from Alaska, Ecuador, Bangladesh, Haiti and Mali, Climate Change and Social Inequality will be of great interest to students and scholars of climate change and climate science, environmental anthropology, medical ecology and the anthropology of global health.

This concise and clearly written book, now available in paperback, demonstrates the power and scope of empirical analysis in environmental sociology. In doing so, it provides an antidote to the recent dominance of abstract theoretical disputes in sociological work on nature and the environment.
Dividing the author's first-hand research studies into three categories -- on cultures of movement, on environment, law and public policy, and on cultures of knowing and proving -- this text uses case studies, interviews, focus-group techniques and observational analyses to explore the development of environmentalism and the environmental movement. The analyses enable the reader to understand how environmental disputes are contested, perpetuated and resolved. The cases are carefully documented with extensive use of original materials. Drawing on the substantive findings in the empirical chapters, the book concludes with an original sociological treatment of the challenges that will face attempts to live sustainably. It is essential reading for students and academics in sociology, social anthropology, social geography and cultural studies.

Human activity is undeniably affecting the rates of change in many parts of the global system. How this global change develops into the future is vitally important, but modeling these changes requires a complex, integrated assessment of a wide range of disciplines in science and social science. This book describes the structure, assumptions, philosophy and results of an advanced global integrated assessment model: TARGETS. For a number of future directions selected on the basis of divergent cultural perspectives, the model charts global implications in terms of population and health, energy, land- and water-use and biogeochemical cycles. This integrated assessment approach has led to innovative fresh insights into global change. The book will help policymakers formulate the strategies required for a sustainable global future.

In Louis XIV's France, land took on new importance in politics and court life. A sequestered aristocracy promenaded in formal gardens while the military moved across the landscape, marking state boundaries with fortresses and refiguring the interior with canals and forests. Chandra Mukerji highlights the connections between the seemingly disparate activities of engineering and garden design, showing how the gardens at Versailles showcased French skills in using nature and art to design a distinctively French landscape and create a naturalized political territoriality.

In Louis XIV's France, land took on new importance in politics and court life. A sequestered aristocracy promenaded in formal gardens while the military moved across the landscape, marking state boundaries with fortresses and refiguring the interior with canals and forests. Chandra Mukerji highlights the connections between the seemingly disparate activities of engineering and garden design, showing how the gardens at Versailles showcased French skills in using nature and art to design a distinctively French landscape and create a naturalized political territoriality.

This is a book about the biological conquest of the New World. Taking as a case study the sixteenth century history of a region of highland central Mexico, it shows how the environmental and social changes brought about by the introduction of Old World species aided European expansion. The book spells out in detail the environmental changes associated with the introduction of Old World grazing animals into New World ecosystems, demonstrates how these changes enabled the Spanish takeover of land, and explains how environmental changes shaped the colonial societies.

In general terms, one way of describing the world we live in is to say that it is made up of nature and society, and that human beings belong to both. This was the first volume to be published which addresses the historical contexts of the relations between these two characteristics of human nature. A distinguished international team aims to contribute - through selective, interdisciplinary studies - to a much-needed but currently scant debate over the reciprocal links between conceptions of nature and conceptions of society from the ancient Greek kosmos to late twentieth-century 'ecology'. Individual essays and the general conclusions of the volume are important not only for our understanding of the evolution of knowledge of nature and of society, but also for an awareness of the types of truth and perception produced in the process.

In general terms, one way of describing the world we live in is to say that it is made up of nature and society, and that human beings belong to both. This is the first volume to be published that addresses the historical contexts of the relations between these two characteristics of human nature. Individual essays and the general conclusions of the volume are important not only for our understanding of the evolution of knowledge of nature and of society, but also for an awareness of the types of truth and perception produced in the process.

Feelings about lost or destroyed places rouse our deepest emotions. Losing a home or a suburb or leaving a homeland can be like losing a loved one. This book examines what it means to lose a place forever and why we return, and keep on returning, to these places so large in our memories. It considers many lost towns, suburbs, and homes: Darwin after Cyclone Tracy, the flooding of the town of Adaminaby in New South Wales, the inundation of Lake Pedder in Tasmania, bushfire at Macedon in Victoria, migration from other countries, the clearing of neighbourhoods for freeways and the everyday circumstances which force people from their land. Peter Read establishes how important the places we live in are, and how much we grieve when we lose them. It tells a human story, which is disturbing, poetic, and often inspiring. Everyone who has lost a place of importance to them will find it unforgettable.

The Achuar Indians of the Upper Amazon have developed sophisticated strategies of resource management. The author documents their knowledge of the environment, and explains how it is interwoven with cosmological ideas that endow nature with the characteristics of society.

At a level accessible to the educated lay reader, this book describes the changes human activities have produced in the global environment from 300 years ago to the present day. It offers a comprehensive and authoritative inventory of human impact in its varied forms - on the oceans, atmosphere, and climate - ranging from long-standing alterations to new and surprising ones that have emerged in recent years, from environmental disasters to success stories of environmental management, and false alarms. This balanced, non-polemical survey will interest all those concerned about the environment and the likely fate of the planet.

In this study Roland Fletcher argues that the built environment becomes a constraint on the long-term development of a settlement. It is costly to move settlements, or to demolish and rebuild from scratch, so the initial layout and buildings, and the forms of communication that result, may come to shackle further development and also to place constraints on social and political change. Using this theoretical framework, Dr Fletcher reviews worldwide settlement growth over the past 15,000 years, and concludes with a major discussion of the great transformations of human settlements - from mobile to sedentary, sedentary to urban, and urban to industrial. This book is an ambitious contribution to archaeological theory, and the questions it raises also have implications for the future of urban settlement.

Linking People, Place, and Policy: A GIScience Approach describes a breadth of research associated with the study of human-environment interactions, with particular emphasis on land use and land cover dynamics. This book examines the social, biophysical, and geographical drivers of land use and land cover patterns and their dynamics, which are interpreted within a policy-relevant context. Concepts, tools, and techniques within Geographic Information Science serve as the unifying methodological framework in which landscapes in Thailand, Ecuador, Kenya, Cambodia, China, Brazil, Nepal, and the United States are examined through analyses conducted using quantitative, qualitative, and image-based techniques.

Linking People, Place, and Policy: A GIScience Approach addresses a need for a comprehensive and rigorous treatment of GIScience for research and study within the context of human-environment interactions. The human dimensions research community, land use and land cover change programs, and human and landscape ecology communities, among others, are collectively viewing the landscape within a spatially-explicit perspective, where people are viewed as agents of landscape change that shape and are shaped by the landscape, and where landscape form and function are assessed within a space-time context. This book articulates some of these challenges and opportunities.

Ranging across philosophy, theology, ecology, psychology, and art, in Dump Philosophy Michael Marder argues that the earth, along with everything that lives and thinks on it, is at an advanced stage of being converted into a dump for industrial output and its by-products feeding consumerism and its excesses. Every day, scientific studies, media reports, and first-hand accounts of the rapidly deteriorating state of the environment hit us with a growing and disconcerting force. Trends such as microplastics in water, airborne toxins, topsoil degradation, and dangerous levels of carbon dioxide have upset the delicate ecological balance that has until now been sustaining life on the planet. Marder's original treatise paints a portrait of the Anthropocene as a global dump which wreaks havoc, causing disease and degrading our sensation, perception, and thinking, so that nuance is lost and ideas are reduced to soundbites in chains of free association. Describing the dump's fundamental characteristics and its effects on the body and the mind, he contemplates wider physiological, social, economic, and environmental metabolisms in the age of dumping, as well as the role of philosophy caught in its crosshairs. While surveying the devastation that is the reality of the twenty-first century, the book provides a frightening and yet intellectually spellbinding glimpse of the future.

Struggles for environmental justice involve communities mobilising against powerful forces which advocate 'development', driven increasingly by neoliberal imperatives. In doing so, communities face questions about their alliances with other groups, working with outsiders and issues of class, race, ethnicity, gender, worker/community and settler/indigenous relationships. Written by a wide range of international scholars and activists, contributors explore these dynamics and the opportunities for agency and solidarity. They critique the practice of community development professionals, academics, trade union organisers, social movements and activists and inform those engaged in the pursuit of justice as community, development and environment interact.