- What makes people care about the environment? - Why and how do different cultural groups value land in different ways? With increasing international concern about green issues, and the apparent failure of mechanistic solutions to complex problems, Uncommon Ground provides a timely understanding of the cultural values that underpin human-environmental relations. Through a comparison of two very different groups, the Aboriginal people and the white cattle farmers in Far North Queensland, Uncommon Ground explores how the human-environmental relationship is culturally constructed. This highly topical study also examines the long-term conflicts over land in Australia, which have brought to the surface each group's environmental values. The author considers how these values are acquired, and the universal and cultural factors that lead to their development. Major emphasis is put on the cultural forms that create and express environmental values for the Aborigines and the white pastoralists, such as: - historical background - land use and economic modes - socio-spatial organization - language, knowledge and methods of socialization - oral and visual representation - cosmological beliefs and systems of law This book is very accessible and should be widely used on anthropology, environmental studies and geography courses.]

A valuable and documented source.

--Choice

Ferkiss has navigated an exceedingly complex course through our philosophical history, tracing the lineage of ideas about nature and technology as they evolved from ancient times through Taoism, industrialism, Marxism, and several other isms.'
--Sierra Magazine

Offers a colorful, concise, and well-written survey of formal thought on the role of science and technology.

--Policy Currents

Worldwide in its scope and reach, Ferkiss's book encompasses ethics and technology, society, and international relations--a true renaissance perspective. It is written clearly and without trepidations.
--Amitai Etzioni, author of The Moral Dimension

A valuable overview of conceptions of nature, science, and technology since ancient times. Anyone concerned with global environmental issues will benefit from its temperate, even- handed treatment of the hundreds of thinkers who have participated in great age-old debate over the human conquest of the earth and its resources.
--W. Warren Wagar, Distinguished Teaching Professor, SUNY, Binghamton

A fine book . . . an excellent source book and] a valuable reference work, one of those books that belong on the shelf, near at hand, in the collection of any serious student of environmentalism and the history of technology. It will be consulted often.
--Walter Rosenbaum, University of Florida, author of Environmental Politics and Policy

An extraordinary achievement--a dazzling scholarly tour de force that is so clearly and elegantly written that readers are gripped by the superb story Ferkiss] tells. It is the story of what may be the central issue of our time--humanity's relationship with nature. . . . Perhaps no scholar on earth is better equipped to tell this story. . . . Ferkiss] exhibits an extraordinary command of the subject as he takes readers on a fascinating guided tour through Western and Eastern culture, beautifully summarizing and judiciously commenting on the changing attitudes shown by people ranging from Buddhists to Nazis, from the ancient Greeks to today's Earth Firsters and ecotopians .... A genuine treat.
--Edward Cornish, President, World Future Society

A fine book...it reaches broadly and deeply into our cultural roots, bringing religion, theology, popular culture, science, folklore, natural history and much else into the discussion...an excellent source book and] a valuable reference work, one of those books that belong on the shelf, near at hand, in the collection of any serious student of environmentalism and the history of technology. It will be consulted often.
-- Walter Rosenbaum, University of Florida, author of Environmental Politics and Policy

While all human societies have enlisted technologies to control nature, the last hundred years have witnessed the technological exploitation and destruction of natural resources on an unprecedented scale. As environmental groups and the scientific community sound the alarm about deforestation, global warming and ozone depletion, the obvious question arises: how did we get where we are today? Victor Ferkiss here sets out to answer this central question, emphasizing that we cannot escape from our present environmental predicament unless we understand the ideas which have created it.
Tracing the development of cultural attitudes toward the environment and technology over almost the whole span of human civilization, this book is distinctive both in its comprehensiveness, and in its attempt to place side by side influential thinkers and movements with varied views on these issues.
In this extraordinary book Ferkiss asks the basic questions concerning humans and their relationship to the environment. He traces cultural attitudes towards the environment from early mankind to the present day. This book is distinguished in its comprehensiveness, as well as in its attempt to place influential thinkers and movements with varied views side-by-side.

Hailed as "one of the most eminent environmental historians of the West" by Alan Brinkley in The New York Times Book Review, Donald Worster has been a leader in reshaping the study of American history. Winner of the prestigious Bancroft Prize for his book Dust Bowl, Worster has helped bring humanity's interaction with nature to the forefront of historical thinking. Now, in The Wealth of Nature, he offers a series of thoughtful, eloquent essays which lay out his views on environmental history, tying the study of the past to today's agenda for change.
The Wealth of Nature captures the fruit of what Worster calls "my own intellectual turning to the land." History, he writes, represents a dialogue between humanity and nature--though it is usually reported as if it were simple dictation. Worster takes as his point of departure the approach expressed early on by Aldo Leopold, who stresses the importance of nature in determining human history; Leopold pointed out that the spread of bluegrass in Kentucky, for instance, created new pastures and fed the rush of American settlers across the Appalachians, which affected the contest between Britain, France, and the U.S. for control of the area. Worster's own work offers an even more subtly textured understanding, noting in this example, for instance, that bluegrass itself was an import from the Old World which supplanted native vegetation--a form of "environmental imperialism." He ranges across such areas as agriculture, water development, and other questions, examining them as environmental issues, showing how they have affected--and continue to affect--human settlement. Environmental history, he argues, is not simply the history of rural and wilderness areas; cities clearly have a tremendous impact on the land, on which they depend for their existence. He argues for a comprehensive approach to understanding our past as well as our present in environmental terms.
"Nostalgia runs all through this society," Worster writes, "fortunately, for it may be our only hope of salvation." These reflective and engaging essays capture the fascination of environmental history--and the beauty of nature lost or endangered--underscoring the importance of intelligent action in the present.

This book assesses and illustrates innovative and practical world-wide measures for combating sea level rise from the profession of landscape architecture. The work explores how the appropriate mixture of integrated, multi-scalar flood protection mechanisms can reduce risks associated with flood events including sea level rise. Because sea level rise is a global issue, illustrative case studies performed from the United States, Korea, Australia, New Zealand, Thailand, Japan, China, and the Netherlands identify the structural (engineered), non-structural (nature-based), and hybrid mechanisms (mixed) used to combat sea level rise and increase flood resilience. The alternative flood risk reduction mechanisms are extracted and analyzed from each case study to develop and explain a set of design-based typologies to combat sea level rise which can then be applied to help proctor new and existing communities. It is important for those located within the current or future floodplain considering sea level rise and those responsible for land use, developmental, and population-related activities within these areas to strategically implement a series of integrated constructed and green infrastructure-based flood risk reduction mechanisms to adequately protect threatened areas. As a result, this book is beneficial to both academics and practitioners related to multiple design professions such as urban designers, urban planners, architects, real estate developers, and landscape architects.

This new volume in the OSEB series presents reviews of key theoretical ideas and frameworks, and outlines progress in evolutionary studies.

In the mid-eighteenth century metaphysics was broadly understood as the study of three areas of philosophical thought: theology, psychology and cosmology. This book examines the fortunes of the third of these formidable metaphysical concepts, the world. Sean Gaston provides a clear and concise account of the concept of world from the mid-eighteenth century to the end of the twentieth century, exploring its possibilities and limitations and engaging with current issues in politics and ecology. He focuses on the work of five principal thinkers: Kant, Hegel, Husserl, Heidegger and Derrida, all of whom attempt to establish new grounds for seeing the world as a whole. Gaston presents a critique of the self-evident use of the concept of world in philosophy and asks whether one can move beyond the need for a world-like vantage point to maintain a concept of world. From Kant to the present day this concept has been a problem for philosophy and it remains to be seen if we need a new Copernican revolution when it comes to the concept of world.

Spatial and cultural analysis have recently found much common ground, focusing in particular on the nature of the city. Place/Culture/Representation brings together new and established voices involved in the reshaping of cultural geography.
The authors argue that as we write our geographies we are not just representing some reality, we are creating meaning. Writing becomes as much about the author as it is about purported geographical reality. The issue becomes not scientific truth as the end but the interpretation of cultural constructions as the means.
Discussing authorial power, discourses of the other, texts and textuality, landscape metaphor, the sites of power-knowledge relations and notions of community and the sense of place, the authors explore the ways in which a more fluid and sensitive geographer's art can help us make sense of ourselves and the landscapes and places we inhabit and think about.

This book deepens the understanding of the broader processes that shape and mediate the responses to climate change of poor urban households and communities in Asia, Africa and Latin America. Representing an important contribution to the evolution of more effective pro-poor climate change policies in urban areas by local governments, national governments and international organisations, this book is invaluable reading to students and scholars of environment and development studies.

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.

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.

In 1972, James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis began collaborating on the Gaia hypothesis. They suggested that over geological time, life on Earth has had a major role in both producing and regulating its own environment. Gaia is now an ecological and environmental worldview underpinning vital scientific and cultural debates over environmental issues. Their ideas have transformed the Earth and life sciences, as well as contemporary conceptions of nature. Their correspondence describes these crucial developments from the inside, showing how their partnership proved decisive for the development of the Gaia hypothesis. Clarke and Dutreuil provide historical background and explain the concepts and references introduced throughout the Lovelock-Margulis correspondence, while highlighting the major landmarks of their collaboration within the sequence of almost 300 letters written between 1970 and 2007. This book will be of interest to researchers in ecology, history of science, environmental history and climate change, and cultural science studies.

In the age of climate change, the possibility that dramatic environmental transformations might cause the dislocation of millions of people has become not only a matter for scientific speculation or science-fiction narratives, but the object of strategic planning and military analysis. Environmental History of Modern Migrations offers a worldwide perspective on the history of migrations throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and provides an opportunity to reflect on the global ecological transformations and developments which have occurred throughout the last few centuries. With a primary focus on the environment/migration nexus, this book advocates that global environmental changes are not distinct from global social transformations. Instead, it offers a progressive method of combining environmental and social history, which manages to both encompass and transcend current approaches to environmental justice issues. This edited collection will be of great interest to students and practitioners of environmental history and migration studies, as well as those with an interest in history and sociology.

This study focuses on the relationship between environment, history, politics, and rhetorical discourses in James Joyce's Ulysses. Delving into different aspects of Joyce's use of nature and linguistic discourses in orchestrating a specific dynamic of eco-politics, it adopts an interdisciplinary approach that includes cultural politics, historiographical poetics, and genetic criticism with close reading of the text. The first of the two sessions of the book addresses the environmental questions of land and consumption through discussions on co-operative politics, garden city movement, and the eco-politics of waste. The second section moves to examine the diverse ways in which nature and nation are (re)imagined exemplarily in Joyce's composition of the forest and the marketplace. By examining several thematic environmental issues addressed in Ulysses with the evidence of historical and archival resources, this study has demonstrated that Joyce is after all a writer with the environment in mind, and that the imagination of nature in Ulysses is inseparable from that of the emergent nation of fin-de-siecle Ireland.

The issue of 'sustainability' in the developed world is nowhere more critical than in the field of personal travel, which in many countries has become the fastest-growing contributor to global warming. Unless the use of cars can be brought under control, there is little chance of meeting government targets for reducing greenhouse emissions. Personal Transport and the Greenhouse Effect sets out the steps that could be taken to lessen the conflict between personal mobility and long-term environmental security. It provides a detailed analysis of the policy options available for limiting carbon dioxide emissions, and highlights the limitations of technological measures in solving the problem. Instead, the book's 12-point plan for sustainability shows how a significant reduction in emissions requires the use of all the policy measures available. This valuable contribution to a crucial area of debate covering energy, transport policy and the environment will be essential reading for policy makers, planners and students alike. Peter Huges is deputy editor of Local Transport Today, and has contributed to a wide range of publications including The Daily Telegraph, The Guardian, New Scientist and Energy Policy. Originally published in 1993

When disaster strikes, a ritual unfolds: a flood of experts, bureaucrats, and analysts rush to the scene; personal tragedies are played out in a barrage of media coverage; on the ground, confusion and uncertainty reign. In this major comparative study, Gregory Button draws on three decades of research on the most infamous human and environmental calamities to break new ground in our understanding of these moments of chaos. He explains how corporations, state agencies, social advocacy organizations, and other actors attempt to control disaster narratives, adopting public relations strategies that may either downplay or amplify a sense of uncertainty in order to advance political and policy goals. Importantly, he shows that disasters are not isolated events, offering a holistic account of the political dynamics of uncertainty in times of calamity.

Based on 40 years of experience, Integrated Environmental Management: A Transdisciplinary Approach brings together many ecological and technological tool boxes and applies them in a transdisciplinary method. The book demonstrates how to combine continuous improvement management tools and principles with proven environmental assessment methodologies. This integrated ecological and environmental management approach lets you view environmental problems from a holistic angle, considering the ecosystem as an entity as well as the entire spectrum of solutions and possible combinations of solutions. The book discusses the importance of examining all facets or possible problems associated with an ecosystem simultaneously and evaluating all the solution possibilities proposed by the relevant disciplines at the same time. The authors underline that there is no alternative to integrated, multidisciplinary, ecological-environmental management-at least not on a long-term basis. They lay down the fundamental concepts in an applications-oriented manner that allows you to apply the seven steps of environmental management directly. However, the book goes beyond delineating the available tool boxes; it also details how they can be integrated and combined to find an optimum solution to ecological-environmental problems.

This substantially revised second edition of Merchant's classic guide to radical environmental politics and movements, offers a comprehensive overview of the philosophical, ethical, scientific and economic aspects of the environment. With a new introduction, updated chapters, and two new sections on recent global movements and on globalization and the environment, it specifically identifies ways in which radical ecologists can transform science and society in order to sustain life. This classic work by one of the most important voices in the environmental movement is a must-read for those involved in the fields of ecology, sociology and social policy.

Campaigns to redress gender inequities and injustices have resulted in significant achievements towards equality, especially for well-educated, career-orientated, white women in the West. However, such campaigns have primarily been conducted in the male-dominated arenas of public politics, paid work, and education, and the 'successes' of women's equality are usually calculated by the masculinist values of politics and the workplace. These, the learned editor of this new Routledge Major Works collection avers, are the very values-predicated on continuous economic and material growth, fuelled by consumption and competition, and combative politics-which are destroying the world's environment at a dizzying rate. However, since the late 1960s, a growing environmental awareness, combined with the third-wave feminist movement in the West, has challenged this worldview, particularly the liberal notion of 'equality' based on women achieving masculinist economic and social norms. Uneasy with the horror of a world in which everyone striving for 'equality' would end up consuming at the rate of an average Western male, the newly emerging ecological feminism of the 1970s argued that what constitutes 'success' needs to be reimagined, in other-arguably feminist/feminine-ways. This way of thinking prompted a reconceptualization of the relationship between environment and gender, with distinctive debates emerging variously in North America, Australia, New Zealand, the UK, Scandinavia, and France. The work of feminist critics in the Global South have both developed and challenged these debates, and have drawn to public attention the most egregious examples of how environmental impacts consistently, and structurally, exacerbate the inequalities that women and girls endure, especially in poorer parts of the world. Literature developing the links between environment, development, and gender has broadened the earlier Western eco-feminism discourse, and has also influenced-albeit selectively-various development strategies by global institutions (such as the World Bank, the Asian Development Bank, and various UN agencies) and NGOs (notably, for example, Oxfam). Questions about how we want to live in relation to our environment have arguably never been more urgent and this new title from Routledge's Critical Concepts in the Environment series answers the need for an authoritative reference work to make sense of the growing-and ever more complex-corpus of scholarly and campaigning literature on gender and the environment, and the continuing explosion in research output. Drawing on a wide variety of sources, Susan Buckingham has brought together in four volumes canonical and cutting-edge work to produce an indispensable 'mini library'. The collection is fully indexed and includes comprehensive introductions, newly written by the editor, which place the collected materials in their historical and intellectual context. It is an essential reference collection and is certain to be valued by scholars and students-as well as by serious policy-makers and practitioners-as a vital one-stop research and pedagogic resource.

Is it possible for individuals to tackle waste by recycling, reusing and reducing alone? This provocative book critically analyses the widespread assumption that individuals and households have created our global waste crisis. Sociologist and waste expert Myra J. Hird reveals neoliberal capitalism's fallacy of infinite growth as the real culprit, and demonstrates how industry and local governments work in tandem to deflect our attention away from the real causes of our global waste problem. Hird offers crucial insights into the relations between waste and wider societal issues including ongoing (settler) colonialism, poverty, racism and sexism, and showcases how sociology may provide solutions through a 'pubic imagination' of waste.

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 Oxford Handbook of Energy and Society presents an overview of this expanding area that has evolved dramatically over the past decade, away from one largely dominated by structural, political economic treatments on the one hand, and social-psychological studies of individual-level attitudes and behaviors on the other, toward a far more conceptually and methodologically rich and exciting field that brings in, for example, social practices, system complexity, risk theory, social studies of science, and social movements theories. This volume seeks to capture the variety of scales and methods, and range of both conceptual and empirical analyses that define the field, while drawing particular attention to indigenous peoples, poverty, political power, communities and cities. Organized into seven sections, chapters cover social theory and energy-society relations, political-economic perspectives, consumption dynamics, energy equity and energy poverty, energy and publics, energy and governance, as well as emerging trends.

Engaging with discussions surrounding the culture of disease, Disrupting Breast Cancer Narratives explores politically insistent narratives of illness. Resisting the optimism of pink ribbon culture, these stories use anger as a starting place to reframe cancer as a collective rather than an individual problem. Disrupting Breast Cancer Narratives discusses the ways emotion, gender, and sexuality, in relation to breast cancer diagnosis and treatment, all become complicated, relational, and questioning. Providing theoretically informed close-readings of breast cancer narratives, this study explores how disruption functions both personally and politically. Highlighting a number of contributors in the field of health and gender studies including Barbara Ehrenreich, Kathlyn Conway, Audre Lorde, and Teva Harrison, this work takes into account documentary film, television, and social media as popular mediums used to explore stories of disease.

Native Americans suffer disproportionately from many social and health disparities. High rates of poverty, exposure to environmental toxins, and various forms of violence all increase the risk of health problems, including disabilities, yet there is very little published scholarship concerning Native American experiences with disabilities. In collecting contributions on various aspects of disability in Native American populations in one volume, this book seeks to redress this lack of attention. Writing about regions of the United States, Canada, and Australia, and spanning a diverse range of settings from remote rural areas, to reservations, to college campuses, the authors are attentive to the impact of specific environments on their inhabitants. Taking into account both physical and social environment, and recognizing the importance of cultural context, this book is a good starting point for anyone interested in developing a better understanding of the experience of Native peoples living with disabilities. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Social Work in Disability & Rehabilitation.