With its implications for health care, the economy, and an assortment of other policy areas, population aging is one of the most pressing issues facing governments and society today, and confronting its complex reality is becoming increasingly urgent, particularly in the age of COVID-19. In The Four Lenses of Population Aging, Patrik Marier looks at how Canada's ten provinces are preparing for an aging society. Focusing on a wide range of administrative and policy challenges, this analysis explores multiple actions from the development of strategic plans to the expansion of long-term care capacity. To enhance this analysis, Marier adopts four lenses: the intergenerational, the medical, the social gerontological, and the organizational. By comparing the unique insights and contributions of each lens, Marier draws attention to the vital lessons and possible solutions to the challenges of an aging society. Drawing on over a hundred interviews with senior civil servants and thousands of policy documents, The Four Lenses of Population Aging is a significant contribution to public administration, provincial politics, and comparative public policy literatures, and a timely resource for policymakers and general readers seeking an informed perspective on a timely and important issue.

The aim of the book is to analyse the factors that have influenced wind power outcomes in a range of countries which have featured significant wind power deployment programmes. A central theme is the relationship between patterns of ownership and the outcomes. These flow from different social environments, but they are associated with different types of planning outcome and deployment rates. Grass roots ownership is more widespread than is commonly thought, although it is not a panacea for effective wind power programmes. Financial policies used to promote wind power also have important influences of the rates of deployment. However, what seems to be most important for wind power deployment is a double coincidence of widespread social support for wind power deployment and effective financial support systems for wind power.

Supporting Children and Their Families Facing Health Inequities in Canada fills an urgent national need to analyze disparities among vulnerable populations, where socio-economic and cultural factors compromise health and create barriers. Offering solutions and strategies to the prevalent health inequities faced by children, youth, and families in Canada, this book investigates timely issues of social, economic, and cultural significance. Chapters cover a diverse range of socio-economic and cultural factors that contribute to health inequality among the country's most vulnerable youth populations, including mental health challenges, low income, and refugee status. This book shares scientific evidence from thousands of interviews, questionnaires, surveys, and client consultations, while also providing professional insights that offer key information for at-risk families experiencing health inequities. Timely and transformative, this book will serve as an informed and compassionate guide to promote the health and resiliency of vulnerable children, youth, and families across Canada.

The year 2009 will be pivotal for Earth's climate. As scientists warn that we have only a few years to reverse the rise in greenhouse gas emissions if we are to avoid abrupt and catastrophic climate change, the world community has agreed to finalize negotiations on a new climate agreement in Copenhagen in late 2009. Intended to inject new inspiration and energy into national and international climate negotiations, this 26th edition of State of the World examines the steps we urgently need to take to prevent a global catastrophe while adapting to the now inevitable climatic shifts already set in motion. As well as the profound, long-term consequences of global warming, this volume explores the policy changes needed and the benefits that will flow from the transition to a low-carbon economy. It also includes 22 summaries on the many important issues linked to climate change, plus a Climate Change Reference Guide and Glossary. Published annually in 28 languages, State of the World is long established as the most authoritative and accessible annual guide to our progress towards a sustainable future. It is relied upon by national governments, UN agencies, development workers and law-makers for its up-to-the-minute analysis and information. Essential reading for anyone concerned with building a positive, global future.

In the United States alone, industrial and agricultural toxins account for about 60,000 avoidable cancer deaths annually. Pollution-related health costs to Americans are similarly staggering: $13 billion a year from asthma, $351 billion from cardiovascular disease, and $240 billion from occupational disease and injury. Most troubling, children, the poor, and minorities bear the brunt of these health tragedies.
Why, asks Kristin Shrader-Frechette, has the government failed to protect us, and what can we do about it? In this book, at once brilliant and accessible, Shrader-Frechette reveals how politicians, campaign contributors, and lobbyists--and their power over media, advertising, and public relations--have conspired to cover up environmental disease and death. She also shows how science and regulators themselves are frequently "captured" by well-funded polluters and special interests. But most important, the author puts both the blame--and the solution--on the shoulders of ordinary citizens. She argues that everyone, especially in a democracy, has a duty to help prevent avoidable environmental deaths, to remain informed about, and involved in, public-health and environmental decision-making. Toward this end, she outlines specific, concrete ways in which people can contribute to life-saving reforms, many of them building on recommendations of the American Public Health Association.
As disturbing as it is, Shrader-Frechette's message is ultimately hopeful. Calling for a new "democratic revolution," she reminds us that while only a fraction of the early colonists supported the American Revolution, that tiny group managed to change the world. Her book embodies the conviction thatwe can do the same for environmental health, particularly if citizens become the change they seek.
"Timely, accessible, and written with enviable clarity and passion. A distinguished philosopher sounds an ethical call to arms to prevent illness and death from pollution."
--Sheila Jasanoff, Harvard University
"Influential and impressive. A must-read."
--Nicholas A. Ashford, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
"By one of America's foremost philosophers and public intellectuals; immensely readable, courageous, often startling, insightful."
--Richard Hiskes, University of Connecticut
"Like Rachel Carson's Silent Spring--brilliant, brave."
--Sylvia Hood Washington, University of Illinois, Chicago
"A blistering account of how advocacy must be brought to bear on issues of justice and public health."
-- Jeffrey Kahn, University of Minnesota
"No other author can so forcefully bring together ethical analysis, government policy, and environmental science. Outstanding."
--Colleen Moore, University of Wisconsin

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.

Indigenous Sustainable Wisdom: First Nation Know-how for Global Flourishing's contributors describe ways of being in the world that reflect a worldview that guided humanity for 99% of human history: They describe the practical traditional wisdom that stems from Nature-based relational cultures that were or are guided by this worldview. Such cultures did not cause the kinds of anti-Nature and de-humanizing or inequitable policies and practices that now pervade our world. Far from romanticizing Indigenous histories, Indigenous Sustainable Wisdom offers facts about how human beings, with our potential for good and evil behaviors, can live in relative harmony again. Contributions cover views from anthropology, psychology, sociology, leadership, native science, native history, and native art.

The rise of environmentalism has been one of the more remarkable developments in the politics of western societies in recent decades. However, as environmental awareness has become more generalized, the forms of expression of environmental concern have changed. Established environmental movement organizations have become embedded in policy networks, but, in some countries, there has been a resurgence of environmental radicalism. New groups, adopting innovative tactics, have mounted spectacular and disruptive protests.
These developments pose interesting questions for social scientists and policy-makers. Has the institutionalization of established environmental organizations demobilized their supporters and reduced them to a passive, credit-card waving 'conscience' constituency? Has direct participation in environmental protest become the specialized activity of smaller numbers of people? Has there been a decline in the total volume of environmental protest, or is it merely that the forms of protest have changed? Have the protest repertoires of established groups moderated over time, or have they been stimulated by the emergence of more radical groups to adopt more challenging tactics? Has environmental protest become more confrontational? Do protests employ different repertoires of action according to the issues at stake? How does the incidence of protest vary over time and from one country to another? Is there evidence of a Europeanization of either the issues or the forms of environmental protest?
These are some of the questions this volume addresses. Based upon an analysis of the protest events reported in one quality newspaper in each of eight countries during a ten yearperiod, this is the first systematically comparative study of environmental protest in a representative cross-section of EU member states. It breaks entirely new ground in the study of environmental politics in Europe and is a major contribution to the study of protest events.

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.

'Inspiring. [...] Crammed with lively interviews and grounded examples' Ashish Kothari, founder of Kalpavriksh Permaculture is an environmental movement that makes us reevaluate what it means to be sustainable. Through innovative agriculture and settlement design, the movement creates new communities that are harmonious with nature. It has grown from humble origins on a farm in 1970s Australia and flourished into a worldwide movement that confronts industrial capitalism. The Politics of Permaculture is one of the first books to unpack the theory and practice of this social movement that looks to challenge the status quo. Drawing upon the rich seam of publications and online communities from the movement as well as extensive interviews with permaculture practitioners and organisations from around the world, Leahy explains the ways permaculture is understood and practiced in different contexts. In the face of extreme environmental degradation and catastrophic climate change, we urgently need a new way of living.

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.

This book shows why political theorists must take account of ecological concerns as part of their core enterprise, and how they can do so. It mounts a challenge to the received wisdom, of political theorists and their ecological critics alike, that specifically ecological values go against human interests. In Part I, Hayward criticizes those accounts of ecological values which appeal to naturea s a intrinsic valuea or advocate a a non--anthropolocentrica ethic. Such appeals are bound to fail, he argues, not because their moral impulse is too demanding but because a valuesa unrelated to human interests are conceptually incoherent. Insisting on them is politically counterproductive. Part II reveals how it is actually in humansa interests to integrate ecological concern into political institutions and policies. Following a nuanced discussion of a self--interesta , Hayward goes on to show how some ecological problems can be solved by harnessing humansa rational self--interest to market--based and fiscal policies, and others by using more enlightened interests in the provision of social goods. The argument regarding ecological problems that affect non--humans more directly than humans is that humans have an interest in self--respect and integrity which provides reasons to respect non--human beings and their environmental interests. The concluding chapter indicates how the articulation of ecological values in terms of interests makes it possible to integrate them into a political theory of basic social institutions. This book will be of interest to students and scholars in political theory and environmental studies.

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.

What can you do to improve your health and at the same time improve the health of our home planet? Do you want to be a healthier and more sustainable consumer? In this straightforward, easy-to-understand and entertaining book, dietitian and environmentalist Dr. Dana Ellis Hunnes outlines the actions we can all take. Many people feel overwhelmed by the scope of climate change and believe that only large, sweeping changes will make any difference. Yet the choices we make every day can have effects on climate change, the oceans, the land, and other species. This book outlines the problems we are facing, and then presents ideas or 'recipes' to empower us, to help us all make a difference. Recipe For Survival provides the guidance that you can use right now to improve your health, your family's health, and the health of the environment simultaneously.

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.

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.

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

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 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 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.

This book shows that Holocene human ecosystems are complex adaptive systems in which humans interacted with their environment in a nested series of spatial and temporal scales. Using panarchy theory, it integrates paleoecological and archaeological research from the Eastern Woodlands of North America providing a new paradigm to help resolve long-standing disagreements between ecologists and archaeologists about the importance of prehistoric Native Americans as agents for ecological change. The authors present the concept of a panarchy of complex adaptive cycles as applied to the development of increasingly complex human ecosystems through time. They explore examples of ecological interactions at the level of gene, population, community, landscape and regional hierarchical scales, emphasizing the ecological pattern and process involving the development of human ecosystems. Finally, they offer a perspective on the implications of the legacy of Native Americans as agents of change for conservation and ecological restoration efforts today.

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.

'A book of wonders' Bee Wilson, Sunday Times Books of the Year Winner of the Wainwright Prize 2022 - Eating to Extinction is an astonishing journey through the past, present and future of food, showing why reclaiming a diverse food culture is vital. 'Saladino inspires us to believe that turning the tide is still possible' Yotam Ottolenghi From a tiny crimson pear in the west of England to an exploding corn in Mexico, there are thousands of foods that are at risk of being lost for ever. Dan Saladino spans the globe to uncover their stories, meeting the pioneering farmers, scientists, cooks, food producers and indigenous communities who are defending food traditions and fighting for change. Eating to Extinction is about so much more than preserving the past. It is about the crisis facing our planet today, and why reclaiming a diverse food culture is vital for our future. * With a new preface by the author * Winner of multiple awards, including the Fortnum & Mason Food Book Award and the Guild of Food Writers Food Book Award. 'I love this book... I wish the whole world could read it' Raymond Blanc 'A brilliant read' Tim Spector

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.