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Books > Earth & environment > The environment > Social impact of environmental issues > General
Children's Environmental Identity Development: Negotiating Inner and Outer Tensions in Natural World Socialization draws inspiration from environmental education, education for sustainability, environmental psychology, sociology, and child development to propose a theoretical framework for considering how children's identity in/with/for nature evolves through formative experiences. The natural world socialization of young children considers not only how the natural environment affects the growth and development of young children but also how children shape and influence natural settings. Such childhood relations with the environment are explicitly linked to familial, sociocultural, geographical, and educational contexts. While the book is theoretical and will be of interest to academics and students, the use of accessible language, vignettes, and figures will make it useful to teachers, policy-makers, parents, and others genuinely concerned with children's relationships with other humans and the natural world.
Towards a Cultural Politics of Climate Change provides a new perspective on how climate change matters in policy-making, business and everyday life. It argues that the work of low carbon transitions takes place through the creation of devices, the mobilisation of desires, and the articulation of dissent. Using case studies from the US, Australia, and Europe, the book examines the creation and contestation of new forms of cultural politics - of how a climate-changed society is articulated, realized and contested. Through this approach it opens up questions about how, where and by whom climate politics is conducted and the ways in which we might respond differently to this societal challenge. This book provides a key reference point for the emerging academic community working on the cultural politics of climate change, and a means through which to engage this new area of research with the broader social sciences.
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.
'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.
Children's Environmental Identity Development: Negotiating Inner and Outer Tensions in Natural World Socialization draws inspiration from environmental education, education for sustainability, environmental psychology, sociology, and child development to propose a theoretical framework for considering how children's identity in/with/for nature evolves through formative experiences. The natural world socialization of young children considers not only how the natural environment affects the growth and development of young children but also how children shape and influence natural settings. Such childhood relations with the environment are explicitly linked to familial, sociocultural, geographical, and educational contexts. While the book is theoretical and will be of interest to academics and students, the use of accessible language, vignettes, and figures will make it useful to teachers, policy-makers, parents, and others genuinely concerned with children's relationships with other humans and the natural world.
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
Ecologies of the Heart offers a highly readable new look at the range of approaches we use in thinking about environmental management. In answering the questions of why people hold beliefs about the environment that are `counterfactual' - against the facts - to modern scientists, often making ecological choices on emotional grounds, the book shows that these beliefs are understandable and have an empirical basis in solving the world ecological crisis. Eugene Anderson argues that although no one person is going to solve the world ecological crisis single-handedly, it will never be solved unless we recognize the problem presented by beliefs that are plausible but inadequate.
Over this last decade, the concept of Social Metabolism has gained prestige as a theoretical instrument for the required analysis, to such an extent that there are now dozens of researchers, hundreds of articles and several books that have adopted and use this concept. However, there is a great deal of variety in terms of definitions and interpretations, as well as different methodologies around this concept, which prevents the consolidation of a unified field of new knowledge. The fundamental aim of the book is to conduct a review of the past and present usage of the concept of social metabolism, its origins and history, as well as the main currents or schools that exist around this concept. At the same time, the reviews and discussions included are used by the authors as starting points to draw conclusions and propose a theory of socio-ecological transformations. The theoretical and methodological innovations of this book include a distinction of two types of metabolic processes: tangible and intangible; the analysis of the social metabolism at different scales (in space and time) and a theory of socio-ecological change overcoming the merely “systemic†or “cybernetic†nature of conventional approaches, giving special protagonism to collective action.
This book explores the specifically human dimensions of the problem posed by a new generation of invasive pests and pathogens to tree health worldwide. The growth in global trade and transportation in recent decades, along with climate change, is allowing invasive pests and pathogens to establish in new environments, with profound consequences for the ecosystem services provided by trees and forests, and impacts on human wellbeing. The central theme of the book is to consider the role that social science can play in better understanding the social, economic and environmental impacts of such tree disease and pest outbreaks. Contributions include explorations of how pest outbreaks are socially constructed, drawing on the historical, cultural, social and situated contexts of outbreaks; the governance and economics of tree health for informing policy and decision-making; stakeholder engagement and communication tools; along with more philosophical approaches that draw on environmental ethics to consider 'non-human' perspectives. Taken together the book makes theoretical, methodological and applied contributions to our understanding of this important subject area and encourages researchers from across the social sciences and humanities to bring their own disciplinary perspectives and expertise to address the complexity that is the human dimensions of forest and tree health. Chapters 5 and 11 are open access under a CC BY 4.0 license via link.springer.com.
Read the Sunday Times bestseller that reveals the Earth’s awesome impact on the shape of human civilisations. ‘Stands comparison with Sapiens… Thrilling’ Sunday Times Human evolution in East Africa was driven by geological forces. Ancient Greece developed democracy because of its mountainous terrain. Voting behaviour in the United States today follows the bed of an ancient sea. Professor Lewis Dartnell takes us on an astonishing journey into our planet’s past to tell the ultimate origin story. Blending science and history, Origins reveals the Earth’s awesome impact on the shape of human civilisations – and helps us to see the challenges and opportunities of the future.
As American politics has become increasingly polarized, gridlock at the federal level has led to a greater reliance on state governments to get things done. But this arrangement depends a great deal on state cooperation, and not all state officials have chosen to cooperate. Some have opted for conflict with the federal government. Conservative Innovators traces the activity of far-right conservatives in Kansas who have in the past decade used the powers of state-level offices to fight federal regulation on a range of topics from gun control to voting processes to Medicaid. Telling their story, Ben Merriman then expands the scope of the book to look at the tactics used by conservative state governments across the country to resist federal regulations, including coordinated lawsuits by state attorneys general, refusals to accept federal funds and spending mandates, and the creation of programs designed to restrict voting rights. Through this combination of state-initiated lawsuits and new administrative practices, these state officials weakened or halted major parts of the Obama Administration's healthcare, environmental protection, and immigration agendas and eroded federal voting rights protections. Conservative Innovators argues that American federalism is entering a new, conflict-ridden era that will make state governments more important in American life than they have been at any time in the past century.
Climate change will be an ecological and humanitarian catastrophe unless we move quickly to eliminate greenhouse gas emissions. Policy experts advise us that we need to make major changes to our lifestyles, and our governments need to agree globally binding treaties and implement market instruments like carbon taxes. This advice is a mistake: it treats technological innovation as being at the periphery of the climate policy challenge, whereas it needs to be at its core; we will phase out emissions when and only when the technologies to replace fossil fuels are good enough, and policies need - quickly - to support these new technologies directly. Anyone with an interest in climate change and energy policy will find this book forward-thinking and invaluable. Professional policy-makers, climate and energy policy researchers, and students of energy and public policy, economics, political science, environmental studies, and geography will find this book especially stimulating.
In 1949, Oxford University Press published ecologist and writer Aldo Leopold's (1887-1948) classic work, A Sand County Almanac. The book, which has sold over two million copies worldwide, develops Leopold's "land ethic," calling for a responsible relationship between people and the land they inhabit. It remains a touchstone text for the American conservation movement, and has been little less than foundational to the fields of environmentalism and ecology. In this new project, Stories from the Leopold Shack Aldo's daughter Estella B. Leopold offers a window into the development of the land-ethic theory as it unfolded in her father's life and thought. She reveals this organic development through a series of biographical accounts centered on "the Shack," a small barn on 80 acres in south central Wisconsin purchased by Aldo in 1934 and used by the family every weekend. Working the land together, the family built more than a successful farm, habitable family shelter, or pleasant weekend getaway; they established a new way of living and relating to the land. This experiment became one of the earliest efforts in ecological restoration in the United States, and had a profound impact on Aldo Leopold's later work in forest management and conservationism. This autobiographical collection begins with the shack and how it came to be rebuilt, giving readers a glimpse into the lives of the Leopold children as they grew up in it. It goes on to describe the family's efforts from 1935 until 1948 to begin ecological restoration on the property of the old farm, and concludes with a discussion of more recent and sustained restoration from 1948 until 2012, including the development of the Aldo Leopold Foundation and its work. Readers of this collection will certainly come away with not only a better understanding of the genesis of Leopold's "land ethic," but also an intimate portrait of the family that grew within Aldo's hub of restoration and conservation.
Ina Peters analyzes how collective identities and collective action frames have contributed to the persistence and eventual fragmentation of the collective action against the Belo Monte Dam. Reconstructing the rationale of the conflict, Ina Peters addresses theoretical research gaps regarding the dynamics - particularly cohesion and fragmentation - in social movements. The study considers the influence of the regional context and the applicability of Western theories in non-Western case studies. It is based on primary data that was collected through semistructured interviews and analyzed in detail by means of a combined top-down and bottom-up procedure based on the grounded theory methodology.
Lewis Mumford, one of the most respected public intellectuals of the twentieth century, speaking at a conference on the future environments of North America, said, "In order to secure human survival we must transition from a technological culture to an ecological culture." In Ecohumanism and the Ecological Culture, William Cohen shows how Mumford's conception of an educational philosophy was enacted by Mumford's mentee, Ian McHarg, the renowned landscape architect and regional planner at the University of Pennsylvania. McHarg advanced a new way to achieve an ecological culture through an educational curriculum based on fusing ecohumanism to the planning and design disciplines. Cohen explores Mumford's important vision of ecohumanism-a synthesis of natural systems ecology with the myriad dimensions of human systems, or human ecology and how McHarg actually formulated and made that vision happen. He considers the emergence of alternative energy systems and new approaches to planning and community development to achieve these goals. The ecohumanism graduate curriculum should become the basis to train the next generation of planners and designers to lead us into the ecological culture, thereby securing the educational legacy of both Lewis Mumford and Ian McHarg.
The Handbook on Climate Change and Human Security is a landmark publication which links the complexities of climate change to the wellbeing and resilience of human populations.It is written in an engaging and accessible way but also conveys the state of the art on both climate change research and work into human security, utilizing both disciplinary and interdisciplinary approaches. Organized around thematic sections, each chapter is written by an acknowledged expert in the field, and discusses the key concepts and evidence base for our current policy choices, and the dilemmas of international policy in the field. The Handbook is unique in addressing sophisticated ethical and moral questions as well as new information and data from different geographical regions. It is a timely volume that makes the case for acting wisely now to avert impending crises and global environmental problems. The Handbook is international in scope and provides an assessment that will be of value to academics, students and policy professionals alike. NGOs and policy institutes which need a grasp of the specificity and range of the issues and problems will also find this book insightful. Contributors: K. Bickerstaff, H.G. Brauch, S. Dalby, G. Edwards, G. Feola, D. Gasper, N.P. Gleditsch, M. Grasso, C.M. Hall, E. Hinton, C.D. Klose, M. Mason, R. Matthew, R. Nordas, M. Nuttall, U. Oswald Spring, M.R. Redclift, E. Remling, J. Ribot, J.T. Roberts, J. Scheffran, D. Simon, S. Srinivasan, S. Vanderheiden, E.E. Watson, C. Webersik
Building Effective Crisis Communications for Disaster Recovery: A Case of Earthquake Reconstruction and Rehabilitation in Sichuan, China reviews and evaluates public relations (PR) campaigns launched by the Chinese government to facilitate long-term disaster recovery after the Wenchuan earthquake in 2008. The Discourse of Renewal (DR) theory is employed to guide the study and explore how the Chinese government utilized communication to help communities recover from disaster and promote community growth. Steered by the co-creational perspective, this book also examines the influence of PR campaigns on the public's situation awareness, attitude agreement, perceived care and concern, and ultimately the public's relationship with the Chinese government in renewal. In addition to developing and testing a DR evaluation model, this study investigates the communication obstacles that constrain the effectiveness of DR. In-depth interviews, content analysis, and surveys are conducted to analyze the themes, characteristics, effectiveness, and barriers of the campaigns. The findings of Building Effective Crisis Communications for Disaster Recovery include that (1) DR theory, which has heretofore been developed and applied mainly in Western culture, can inform the study of crisis communication in an Eastern culture, especially in China, (2) DR employed in government campaigns can be very powerful in achieving PR goals in crisis renewal, and (3) imbalanced deployment of campaign resources can affect the outcome of DR. This book also discusses the implications of utilizing these findings to better plan and implement long-term DR campaigns.
Climate change will be an ecological and humanitarian catastrophe unless we move quickly to eliminate greenhouse gas emissions. Policy experts advise us that we need to make major changes to our lifestyles, and our governments need to agree globally binding treaties and implement market instruments like carbon taxes. This advice is a mistake: it treats technological innovation as being at the periphery of the climate policy challenge, whereas it needs to be at its core; we will phase out emissions when and only when the technologies to replace fossil fuels are good enough, and policies need - quickly - to support these new technologies directly. Anyone with an interest in climate change and energy policy will find this book forward-thinking and invaluable. Professional policy-makers, climate and energy policy researchers, and students of energy and public policy, economics, political science, environmental studies, and geography will find this book especially stimulating.
Habit rules our lives. And yet climate change and the catastrophic future it portends, makes it clear that we cannot go on like this. Our habits are integral to narratives of the good life, to social norms and expectations, as well as to economic reality. Such shared shapes are vital. Yet while many of our individual habits seem perfectly reasonable, when aggregated together they spell disaster. Beyond consumerism, other forms of life and patterns of dwelling are clearly possible. But how can we get there from here? Who precisely is the 'we' that our habits have created, and who else might we be? Philosophy is about emancipation-from illusions, myths, and oppression. In Reoccupy Earth, the noted philosopher David Wood shows how an approach to philosophy attuned to our ecological existence can suspend the taken-for-granted and open up alternative forms of earthly dwelling. Sharing the earth, as we do, raises fundamental questions about space and time, place and history, territory and embodiment-questions that philosophy cannot directly answer but can help us to frame and to work out for ourselves. Deconstruction exposes all manner of exclusion, violence to the other, and silent subordination. Phenomenology and Whitehead's process philosophy offer further resources for an ecological imagination. Bringing an uncommon lucidity, directness, and even practicality to sophisticated philosophical questions, Wood plots experiential pathways that disrupt our habitual existence and challenge our everyday complacency. In walking us through a range of reversals, transformations, and estrangements that thinking ecologically demands of us, Wood shows how living responsibly with the earth means affirming the ways in which we are vulnerable, receptive, and dependent, and the need for solidarity all round. If we take seriously values like truth, justice, and compassion we must be willing to contemplate that the threat we pose to the earth might demand our own species' demise. Yet we have the capacity to live responsibly. In an unfashionable but spirited defense of an enlightened anthropocentrism, Wood argues that to deserve the privileges of Reason we must demonstrably deploy it through collective sustainable agency. Only in this way can we reinhabit the earth.
I highly recommAnd Quickening as an extremely useful and practical guide. It reaffirms that personal and social change are intertwined; that each of us counts; that our lives do make a difference; and that, through involvement and by developing our skills, we can make an even greater difference. An antidote to cynicism . . . an essential 'how-to' manual for anyone interested in translating values into positive results. Exploding the popular myths about public life, power, and self-interest that stop individuals from discovering the rewards of public involvement, this thoughtful resource offers practical advice from ordinary Americans on how to get more involved. Details guidelines anyone can use to master the skills required to be effective in public life.
As global environmental changes become increasingly evident and efforts to respond to these changes fall short of expectations, questions about the circumstances that generate environmental reforms become more pressing. Defensive Environmentalists and the Dynamics of Global Reform answers these questions through a historical analysis of two processes that have contributed to environmental reforms, one in which people become defensive environmentalists concerned about environmental problems close to home and another in which people become altruistic environmentalists intent on alleviating global problems after experiencing catastrophic events such as hurricanes, droughts and fires. These focusing events make reform more urgent and convince people to become altruistic environmentalists. Bolstered by defensive environmentalists, the altruists gain strength in environmental politics and reforms occur.
Environmental harms exert a significant toll and pose substantial economic costs on societies around the world. Although such harms have been studied from both legal and social science perspectives, these disciplinary-specific approaches are not, on their own, fully able to address the complexity of these environmental challenges. Many legal approaches, for example, are limited by their inattention to the motivations behind environmental offences, whereas many social science approaches are hindered by an insufficient grounding in current legislative frameworks. This edited collection constitutes a pioneering attempt to overcome these limitations by uniting legal and social science perspectives. Together, the book's contributors forge an innovative socio-legal approach to more effectively respond to, and to prevent, environmental harms around the world. Integrating theoretical and empirical work, the book presents carefully selected illustrations of how legal and social science scholarship can be brought together to improve policies. The various chapters examine how a socio-legal approach can ultimately lead to a more comprehensive understanding of environmental harms, as well as to innovative and effective responses to such environmental offences.
The worlds developing countries will be experiencing massive increases in their urban populations over the 21st century. If managed intelligently and humanely, this growth can pave the way to sustainable development; otherwise, it will favour higher levels of poverty and environmental stress. The outcome depends on decisions being made now. The principal theme that runs through this volume is the need to transform urbanization into a positive force for development. Part I of this book reviews the demography of the urban transition, stressing the importance of benefi cial rural-urban connections and challenging commonly held misconceptions. Part II asks how urban housing, land and service provision can be improved in the face of rapid urban expansion, drawing lessons from experiences around the world. Part III analyses the challenges and opportunities that urbanization presents for improving living environments and reducing pressures on local and global ecosystems. These social and environmental challenges must be met in the context of fast-changing demographic circumstances; Part IV explores the range of opportunities that these transformations represent. These challenges and opportunities vary greatly across Africa, Asia and Latin America, as detailed in Part V. Published with IIED and UNFPA
"They assess the effectiveness of the organizing tactics employed,
casting particular scrutiny on the courts as agents of social
change...The authors have presented concrete examples, all the
while making clear that there are no road maps for successful
organizing." "This is an important and unusual booka].It is an academic book
on an important issue When Bill Clinton signed an Executive Order on Environmental Justice in 1994, the phenomenon of environmental racism--the disproportionate impact of environmental hazards, particularly toxic waste dumps and polluting factories, on people of color and low-income communities--gained unprecedented recognition. Behind the President's signature, however, lies a remarkable tale of grassroots activism and political mobilization. Today, thousands of activists in hundreds of locales are fighting for their children, their communities, their quality of life, and their health. From the Ground Up critically examines one of the fastest growing social movements in the United States, the movement for environmental justice. Tracing the movement's roots, Luke Cole and Sheila Foster combine long-time activism with powerful storytelling to provide gripping case studies of communities across the U.S--towns like Kettleman City, California; Chester, Pennsylvania; and Dilkon, Arizona--and their struggles against corporate polluters. The authors effectively use social, economic and legal analysis to illustrate the historical and contemporary causes for environmental racism. Environmental justice struggles, theydemonstrate, transform individuals, communities, institutions and even the nation as a whole. |
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