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.

Was lAuft eigentlich falsch mit Mensch und Gesellschaft? Warum handeln die meisten Menschen nicht verantwortlich gegenA1/4ber der Umwelt? Dies sind die Kernfragen, mit denen sich dieses Buch beschAftigt. Es richtet damit seine Aufmerksamkeit auf einen zunehmend bedeutenden Bereich der Umweltforschung, der sich mit den individuellen und sozialen Ursachen der Umweltproblematik befasst und damit ein wichtiges Gegengewicht zur naturwissenschaftlich-technologisch motivierten Umweltforschung darstellt.

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.

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.

Is climate catastrophe inevitable? In a world of extreme inequality, rising nationalism and mounting carbon emissions, the future looks gloomy. Yet one group of environmentalists, the 'ecomodernists', are optimistic. They argue that technological innovation and universal human development hold the keys to an ecologically vibrant future. However, this perspective, which advocates fighting climate change with all available technologies - including nuclear power, synthetic biology and others not yet invented - is deeply controversial because it rejects the Green movement's calls for greater harmony with nature. In this book, Jonathan Symons offers a qualified defence of the ecomodernist vision. Ecomodernism, he explains, is neither as radical or reactionary as its critics claim, but belongs in the social democratic tradition, promoting a third way between laissez-faire and anti-capitalism. Critiquing and extending ecomodernist ideas, Symons argues that states should defend against climate threats through transformative investments in technological innovation. A good Anthropocene is still possible - but only if we double down on science and humanism to push beyond the limits to growth.

Global climate change is undeniable. Over the next few decades, as sea levels rise, storms intensify, and drought and desertification run rampant, hundreds of millions of civilians will abandon their homes, cities, and even entire countries. What will happen to these massive numbers of environmental refugees? Where will they go, what rights will they have, and who will take care of them?   Over 200 million people in Asian countries live on land that will be affected by rising seas. Picture Pakistan, India, and China—all nuclear powers—skirmishing at their borders over access to shared rivers and farmable land with former coastal areas now submerged. Imagine tens of thousands of Pacific and Indian Ocean islanders cast adrift by waves that have drowned their nations, and more than 100,000 Caribbean islanders forced to leave submerged towns. Consider the complete abandonment of Miami Beach and other coastal communities up and down the Americas. At the same time, hundreds of millions will be desperate for water and a secure life in drought-ravaged Africa and the Middle East.   Rising Tides sounds an urgent wakeup call to the growing crisis of climate refugees, and offers an essential, continent-by-continent look at these dangers. The crisis is everywhere and it is imminent. Detailing a number of solutions, John R. Wennersten and Denise Robbins argue that no nation can tackle this universal problem alone. The crisis of climate refugees requires global, concerted solutions beyond the strategic, fiscal, and legal capability of a single country or agency.

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.

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.

Sustainable development brings together a series of normative themes related to negotiating environmental limits, to addressing equity, needs and development, and to the process of transformation and transition. To mark the 30th Anniversary of Our Common Future (1987), that first placed sustainable development on the global agenda, the editors have brought together a group of international scholars from a range of social science backgrounds. They have discussed these same themes ? looking backwards in terms of what has been achieved, assessing the current situation with respect to sustainable development, and looking forwards to identify the key elements of the future agenda. This book presents a series of critical reflections on these enduring themes. The overriding concern is with the present and with the future as the editors seek to explore the question: What next for sustainable development?

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.

This significant new book analyses fundamental changes in society-nature interaction: the socioeconomic use of materials, energy and land. The volume presents a number of case studies addressing transitions from an agrarian to an industrial socioecological regime, analysed within the materials and energy flow accounting (MEFA) framework. It is argued that by concentrating on the biophysical dimensions of change in the course of industrialization, social development issues can be explicitly linked to changes in the natural environment. From the historical transition in Europe, to current transitions in developing countries, the book offers a broad and comprehensive analysis of transition processes across scales, from local to national. The comparison of historical and current assessments allows a theory of the underlying patterns of the agrarian-industrial transition to emerge. On this basis, future trends and possible pathways towards (or indeed further departures from) sustainability are discussed. Empirical in character and cautious in its assumptions, this insightful book provides rich and in-depth material for further studies in socioecological research. It will be essential reading for students and researchers of ecological economics, industrial ecology, human ecology, environmental sociology, environmental history, geography as well as land, energy and development studies.

Global climate change is undeniable. Over the next few decades, as sea levels rise, storms intensify, and drought and desertification run rampant, hundreds of millions of civilians will abandon their homes, cities, and even entire countries. What will happen to these massive numbers of environmental refugees? Where will they go, what rights will they have, and who will take care of them? Over 200 million people in Asian countries live on land that will be affected by rising seas. Picture Pakistan, India, and China-all nuclear powers-skirmishing at their borders over access to shared rivers and farmable land with former coastal areas now submerged. Imagine tens of thousands of Pacific and Indian Ocean islanders cast adrift by waves that have drowned their nations, and more than 100,000 Caribbean islanders forced to leave submerged towns. Consider the complete abandonment of Miami Beach and other coastal communities up and down the Americas. At the same time, hundreds of millions will be desperate for water and a secure life in drought-ravaged Africa and the Middle East. Rising Tides sounds an urgent wakeup call to the growing crisis of climate refugees, and offers an essential, continent-by-continent look at these dangers. The crisis is everywhere and it is imminent. Detailing a number of solutions, John R. Wennersten and Denise Robbins argue that no nation can tackle this universal problem alone. The crisis of climate refugees requires global, concerted solutions beyond the strategic, fiscal, and legal capability of a single country or agency.

Are money and technology the core illusions of our time? In this book, Alf Hornborg offers a fresh assessment of the inequalities and environmental degradation of the world. He shows how both mainstream and radical economists are limited by a particular worldview and, as a result, do not grasp that conventional money is at the root of many of the problems that are threatening societies, not to mention planet Earth itself. Hornborg demonstrates how market prices obscure asymmetric exchanges of resources - human labor, land, energy, materials - under a veil of fictive reciprocity. Such unequal exchange, he claims, underpins the phenomenon of technological development, which is, fundamentally, a redistribution of time and space - human labor and land - in world society. Hornborg deftly illustrates how money and technology have shaped our thinking and our social and ecological relations, with disturbing consequences. He also offers solutions for their redesign in ways that will promote justice and sustainability.

This urgent book brings our cities to the fore in understanding the human input into climate change. The demands we are making on nature by living in cities has reached a crisis point and unless we make significant changes to address it, the prognosis is terminal consumption. Providing a radical new argument that integrates global understandings of making nature and making cities, the authors move beyond current policies of mitigation and adaption and pose the challenge of urban stewardship to tackle the crisis. Their new way of thinking re-orients possibilities for environmental policy and calls for us to reinvent our cities as spaces for activism.

This urgent book brings our cities to the fore in understanding the human input into climate change. The demands we are making on nature by living in cities has reached a crisis point and unless we make significant changes to address it, the prognosis is terminal consumption. Providing a radical new argument that integrates global understandings of making nature and making cities, the authors move beyond current policies of mitigation and adaption and pose the challenge of urban stewardship to tackle the crisis. Their new way of thinking re-orients possibilities for environmental policy and calls for us to reinvent our cities as spaces for activism.

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

The pressing nature of environmental threats, such as: climate change, land-grabbing, biopiracy, animal exploitation and human environmental victimisation, are pushing the entire world to seek alternatives to prevent environmental damage in every corner of the globe. Southern Green Criminology focuses on the threat the western world poses to the rest of the globe, and how Western imposed ideas of progress are damaging the planet, especially the southern hemisphere. In the past five years, the attention of green criminologists has been directed at the Global South as the geographical site that experiences the severest consequences of harmful environmental practices. Such criminological direction is aimed at combating the environmental harms that affect the geographical and the metaphorical Souths. The main topic of this book is the conflicts that arise in the interaction between human beings and our natural environment, seen from a Southern perspective with a focus on the victimisation of the South. This book is simultaneously a scientific and a political endeavour, and will prove invaluable to students, researchers and environmental enthusiasts alike.

In Animate Planet Kath Weston shows how new intimacies between humans, animals, and their surroundings are emerging as people attempt to understand how the high-tech ecologically damaged world they have made is remaking them, one synthetic chemical, radioactive isotope, and megastorm at a time. Visceral sensations, she finds, are vital to this process, which yields a new animism in which humans and "the environment" become thoroughly entangled. In case studies on food, water, energy, and climate from the United States, India, and Japan, Weston approaches the new animism as both a symptom of our times and an analytic with the potential to open paths to new and forgotten ways of living.

Environmental issues appear deceptively simple: science tells us what the problems are and how to solve them, and, for Christians, the Bible motivates us to care for creation. And yet, both in society in general as well as in the Christian church in particular, we cannot seem to agree on what to do regarding environmental issues. In The Nature of Environmental Stewardship, climate scientist Johnny Wei-Bing Lin argues that determining the content of environmental stewardship, far from being a straightforward exercise, is a difficult and complex endeavour. He sets forth a general taxonomy, drawing from worldviews, ethical theories, science epistemology, sciencepolicy studies, politics, and economics, that can help us better understand what excellent creation care consists of and how to bridge the differences people have regarding environmental issues.

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.

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.

A collection of essays on the ecology, biodiversity, and restoration of the Texas Hill Country. For most of five decades, evolutionary biologist David Hillis has studied the biodiversity of the Texas Hill Country. Since the 1990s, he has worked to restore the natural beauty and diversity of his Mason County ranch, the Double Helix. In his excursions around his ranch and across the Edwards Plateau, Hillis came to realize how little most people know about the plants and animals around them or their importance to our everyday lives. He began thinking about how natural history is connected to our enjoyment of life, especially in a place as beautiful and beloved as the Hill Country, which, not coincidentally, happens to be one of the most biodiverse parts of Texas. Featuring short nontechnical essays accompanied by vivid color photos, Armadillos to Ziziphus is a charming and casual introduction to the environment of the region. Whether walking the pasture with his Longhorn cattle, explaining the ecological significance of microscopic organisms in springtime mud puddles, or marveling at the local Ziziphus (aka Lotebush, a spiny shrub), Hillis guides first-time visitors and long-term residents alike in an appreciation for the Hill Country’s natural beauty and diversity.

Though the scientific community largely agrees that climate change is underway, debates about this issue remain fiercely polarized. These conversations have become a rhetorical contest, one where opposing sides try to achieve victory through playing on fear, distrust, and intolerance. At its heart, this split no longer concerns carbon dioxide, greenhouse gases, or climate modeling; rather, it is the product of contrasting, deeply entrenched worldviews. This brief examines what causes people to reject or accept the scientific consensus on climate change. Synthesizing evidence from sociology, psychology, and political science, Andrew J. Hoffman lays bare the opposing cultural lenses through which science is interpreted. He then extracts lessons from major cultural shifts in the past to engender a better understanding of the problem and motivate the public to take action. How Culture Shapes the Climate Change Debate makes a powerful case for a more scientifically literate public, a more socially engaged scientific community, and a more thoughtful mode of public discourse.

This book applies a justice framework to analysis of the actual and potential role of international law with respect to people on the move in the context of anthropogenic climate change. That people are affected by the impacts of climate change is no longer doubted, including with implications for people movement (migration, displacement, relocation, etc.). Climate Change and People on the Move tackles unique questions concerning international responsibility for people movement arising from the inequities inherent to climate change. Corrective and distributive justice provide the analytical backbone, and are explored in a substantial theoretical chapter and then applied to subsequent contextual analysis. Corrective justice supports analysis as to whether people movement in the climate change context could be conceived or framed as harm, loss, or damage which is compensable under international law, either through fault-centred regimes or no-fault regimes (i.e. insurance). Distributive justice supports analysis as to whether such movement could be conceived or framed as a disproportionate burden, either for those faced with movement or those faced with sheltering people on the move, from which duties of re-distribution may stem. This book contributes to the growing scholarship and analysis concerning international law or governance and people movement in response to the impacts of climate change by investigating the bounds of the law where the phenomenon is viewed as one of (in)justice.