On April 26, 1986, Unit Four of the Chernobyl nuclear reactor exploded in then Soviet Ukraine. More than 3.5 million people in Ukraine alone, not to mention many citizens of surrounding countries, are still suffering the effects. "Life Exposed" is the first book to comprehensively examine the vexed political, scientific, and social circumstances that followed the disaster. Tracing the story from an initial lack of disclosure to post-Soviet democratizing attempts to compensate sufferers, Adriana Petryna uses anthropological tools to take us into a world whose social realities are far more immediate and stark than those described by policymakers and scientists. She asks: What happens to politics when state officials fail to inform their fellow citizens of real threats to life? What are the moral and political consequences of remedies available in the wake of technological disasters?

Through extensive research in state institutions, clinics, laboratories, and with affected families and workers of the so-called Zone, Petryna illustrates how the event and its aftermath have not only shaped the course of an independent nation but have made health a negotiated realm of entitlement. She tracks the emergence of a "biological citizenship" in which assaults on health become the coinage through which sufferers stake claims for biomedical resources, social equity, and human rights. "Life Exposed" provides an anthropological framework for understanding the politics of emergent democracies, the nature of citizenship claims, and everyday forms of survival as they are interwoven with the profound changes that accompanied the collapse of the Soviet Union.

This contemporary textbook and manual for aspiring or new environmental managers provides the theory and practical examples needed to understand current environmental issues and trends. Each chapter explains the specific skills and concepts needed for today's successful environmental manager, and provides skill development exercises that allow students to relate theory to practice in the profession. Readers will obtain an understanding not only of the field, but also of how professional accountability, evolving science, social equity, and politics affect their work. This foundational textbook provides the scaffolds to allow students to understand the environmental regulatory infrastructure, and how to create partnerships to solve environmental problems ethically and implement successful environmental programs.

Reshaping Environments: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Sustainability in a Complex World draws together a team of specialist authors from disciplines including urban planning, social sciences, engineering and environmental science to examine the diverse influences humans have upon the natural environment. This interdisciplinary approach presents multifaceted responses for complex environmental issues. The book explores current environmental science theories to provide a solid foundation of theoretical knowledge. Drawing on a range of case studies, it develops core analytical skills for application to real-world environmental issues. Reshaping Environments gives environmental science students the tools and insight to comprehend the range of influences society imposes on the natural environment. It is essential reading for those interested in creating a mutually beneficial future for human society and the natural environment.

This Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Special Report (IPCC-SREX) explores the challenge of understanding and managing the risks of climate extremes to advance climate change adaptation. Extreme weather and climate events, interacting with exposed and vulnerable human and natural systems, can lead to disasters. Changes in the frequency and severity of the physical events affect disaster risk, but so do the spatially diverse and temporally dynamic patterns of exposure and vulnerability. Some types of extreme weather and climate events have increased in frequency or magnitude, but populations and assets at risk have also increased, with consequences for disaster risk. Opportunities for managing risks of weather- and climate-related disasters exist or can be developed at any scale, local to international. Prepared following strict IPCC procedures, SREX is an invaluable assessment for anyone interested in climate extremes, environmental disasters, and adaptation to climate change, including policymakers, the private sector, and academic researchers. Watch this new video produced by the IPCC:

The meat on our plates kills the planet. With global mass production of livestock reaching ever higher levels to feed an exploding world population's demand, mankind's ecological hoofprint reaches critical heights. The Ecological Hoofprint provides a rigorous and eye-opening analysis of global livestock production. Following his previous groundbreaking Zed book 'The Global Food Economy', Tony Weis shows what this production means for the health of the planet, how it contributes to worsening human inequality and how it constitutes a profound but invisible aspect of the systemic violence. This book explains how the phenomenal growth and industrialization of livestock production is a central part of the accelerating biophysical contradictions of industrial capitalist agriculture and of ongoing and future food crises.

What does Japan's 2011 nuclear accident have in common with the 2005 flooding of New Orleans from Hurricane Katrina? This thought-provoking book presents a compelling account of recent and historical disasters, both natural and human-caused, drawing out common themes and providing a holistic understanding of hazards, disasters and mitigation, for anyone interested in this important and topical subject. Based on his on-the-ground experience with several major recent disasters, Timothy H. Dixon explores the science, politics and economics behind a variety of disasters and environmental issues, arguing that many of the worst effects are avoidable. He describes examples of planning and safety failures, provides forecasts of future disasters and proposes solutions for hazard mitigation. The book shows how billions of dollars and countless lives could be saved by adopting longer-term thinking for infrastructure planning and building, and argues that better communication is vital in reducing global risks and preventing future catastrophes.

Extreme climatic events present society with significant challenges in a rapidly warming world. Ordinary citizens, the insurance industry and governments are concerned about the apparent increase in the frequency of weather and climate events causing extreme, and in some instances, catastrophic, impacts. Originally published in 2008, Climate Extremes and Society focuses on the recent and potential future consequences of weather and climate extremes for different socioeconomic sectors. The book also examines actions that may enable society to better respond to climate variability. It provides examples of the impact of climate and weather extremes on society. How have these extremes varied in the past, and how might they change in the future? What type of efforts will help society adapt to potential future changes in climate and weather extremes? The book is designed for all policy-makers, engineers and scientists who have an interest in the effects of climate extremes on society.

Unstoppable climate change. Extensive extinction. The breakdown of ecosystems. Mass displacement. Wars over resources. Societal collapse. The projections for our future feel too catastrophic to be plausible, too distant to be true. But ecology is the study of the connections that sustain life, and Daniel Macmillen Voskoboynik's book links history with biology, economics with physics, to join the dots between our overlapping crises. Whether it be environmental degradation or damaged health, racial oppression or gender injustice, our multiple problems have common roots but also shared solutions. Unpacking our past gives us the tools to build a more just future, where competition and control give way for cooperation and care. Avoiding the sterile language that so often surrounds climate change, The Memory We Could Be seeks to inspire, illustrating in human terms the world we could lose and the world we can still win. Open its pages to come to terms with complexity, and heal our separation from nature and each other. FOREWORD BY RAOUL MARTINEZ, AUTHOR OF CREATING FREEDOM: POWER, CONTROL AND THE FIGHT FOR OUR FUTURE

Domestic animals have lived with humans for thousands of years and remain essential to the everyday lives of people throughout the world. In this book, Natasha Fijn examines the process of animal domestication in a study that blends biological and social anthropology, ethology, and ethnography. She examines the social behavior of humans and animals in a contemporary Mongolian herding society. After living with Mongolian herding families, Dr. Fijn has observed through firsthand experience both sides of the human-animal relationship. Examining their reciprocal social behavior and communication with one another, she demonstrates how herd animals influence Mongolian herders lives and how the animals themselves are active partners in the domestication process."

Throughout much of history, a critical driving force behind global economic development has been the response of society to the scarcity of key natural resources. Increasing scarcity raises the cost of exploiting existing natural resources and creates incentives in all economies to innovate and conserve more of these resources. However, economies have also responded to increasing scarcity by obtaining and developing more of these resources. Since the agricultural transition over 12,000 years ago, this exploitation of new 'frontiers' has often proved to be a pivotal human response to natural resource scarcity. This book provides a fascinating account of the contribution that natural resource exploitation has made to economic development in key eras of world history. This not only fills an important gap in the literature on economic history but also shows how we can draw lessons from these past epochs for attaining sustainable economic development in the world today.

Through close examination of the correlation between tropicality and "otherness" and of science as a means of colonial appropriation, this volume offers a new interpretation of the history of colonial India and a critical contribution to the understanding of environmental history and the tropical world.

David Arnold is professor emeritus of history at University of Warwick.

"Arnold deftly untangles and analyses the nature of the connections between literary representations of the land, the development of botanical knowledge, and the consolidation of colonial power." "-Times Literary Supplement "

"A rich study of changing British perceptions of India. . . . Arnold's arguments about how scientific travelers of the early nineteenth century reimagined India as a place of death and tropicality are nuanced and powerful." "-Environmental History"

The relationship between human communities and the environment is extremely complex. In order to resolve the issues involved with this relationship, interdisciplinary research combining natural sciences, social sciences, and humanities is necessary. In this 2010 book, specialists summarise methods and research strategies for various aspects of social research devoted to environmental issues. Each chapter is illustrated with ethnographic and environmental examples, ranging from Australia to Amazonia, from Madagascar to the United States, and from prehistoric and historic cases to contemporary rural and urban ones. It deals with climate change, deforestation, environmental knowledge, natural reserves, politics and ownership of natural resources, and the effect of differing spatial and temporal scales. Contributing to the intellectual project of interdisciplinary environmental social science, this book shows the possibilities social science can provide to environmental studies and to larger global problems and thus will be of equal interest to social and natural scientists and policy makers.

An assessment of policy options for future global climate governance, written by a team of leading experts from the European Union and developing countries. Global climate governance is at a crossroads. The 1997 Kyoto Protocol was merely a first step, and its core commitments expire in 2012. This book addresses three questions which will be central to any new climate agreement. What is the most effective overall legal and institutional architecture for successful and equitable climate politics? What role should non-state actors play, including multinational corporations, non-governmental organizations, public private partnerships and market mechanisms in general? How can we deal with the growing challenge of adapting our existing institutions to a substantially warmer world? This important resource offers policy practitioners in-depth qualitative and quantitative assessments of the costs and benefits of various policy options, and also offers academics from wide-ranging disciplines insight into innovative interdisciplinary approaches towards international climate negotiations.

Demographers predict that world population will double to around twelve billion people during the first half of the twenty-first century and then begin to level off. Based on this scenario, Sustainable Development: The Challenge of Transition examines what societal changes must occur over the next generation to ensure a successful transition to sustainability within the constraints of the natural environment. An array of prominent authors present a broad discussion of the dimensions of sustainable development: not just economic and environmental, but also spiritual and religious, corporate and social, scientific and political. Unlike other books on the subject, this volume provides insightful policy recommendations about how business, government, and individuals must change their values, priorities, and behaviour to meet these challenges. This volume will appeal to scholars and decision makers interested in global change, environmental policy, population growth, and sustainable development, and also to corporate environmental managers.

Confronting climate change is now understood as a problem of 'decarbonising' the global economy: ending our dependence on carbon-based fossil fuels. This book explores whether such a transformation is underway, how it might be accelerated, and the complex politics of this process. Given the dominance of global capitalism and free-market ideologies, decarbonisation is dependent on creating carbon markets and engaging powerful actors in the world of business and finance. Climate Capitalism assesses the huge political dilemmas this poses, and the need to challenge the entrenched power of many corporations, the culture of energy use, and global inequalities in energy consumption. Climate Capitalism is essential reading for anyone wanting to better understand the challenge we face. It will also inform a range of student courses in environmental studies, development studies, international relations, and business programmes.

Environmental Histories of the Cold War explores the links between the Cold War and the global environment, ranging from the environmental impacts of nuclear weapons to the political repercussions of environmentalism. Environmental change accelerated sharply during the Cold War years, and so did environmentalism as both a popular movement and a scientific preoccupation. Most Cold War history entirely overlooks this rise of environmentalism and the crescendo of environmental change. These historical subjects were not only simultaneous but also linked together in ways both straightforward and surprising. The contributors to this book present these connected issues as a global phenomenon, with chapters concerning China, the USSR, Europe, North America, Oceania, and elsewhere. The role of experts as agents and advocates of using the environment as a weapon in the Cold War or, contrastingly, of preventing environmental damage resulting from Cold War politics is also given broad attention.

This anthology seeks to explore the complex, varied, and sometimes contradictory intersections between mothers, mothering, and environmental activism in discourse and in lived experiences. It is intended to look critically, and yet hopefully, at the ways in which feminist, Indigenous, and environmentalist challenges to the western, capitalist moral imagination are linked. It explores the reach of rape culture and the ways in which a capitalist, patriarchal society interacts with the earth as a feminine-personified identity. It also shares the hope available to all women through raising a coming generation and the great power to effect change. This work endeavours to share lessons from the Earth in resistance to the continued assaults of anthropogenic capitalist industry, and to inspire new ways to course-correct, to resist, to rise up, to create differently, to foster evolution and revolution as mothers, as women, as hearts and minds. This volume is curated to be a space for critical discussion about representations linking environmental activism, maternality, and "mother earth" as well as a venue for creative expression and art. In keeping with its intention to provide a space for discussion of a complex and varied array of perspectives on mothers, mothering, and mother earth, this is an interdisciplinary anthology. Contributions included hail from a wide range of disciplines and fields including psychology, sociology, anthropology, women's and gender studies, cultural studies, literary studies, as well as law and legal studies. Contributions from scholars working in the fields of social science are interwoven with creative contributions from academics, writers and artists working in fields in the humanities.

Given the importance that entrepreneurship and start-up businesses in technology-intensive sectors like life sciences, renewable energy, artificial intelligence, financial technologies, software and others have come to assume in economic development, the access of entrepreneurs to appropriate levels of finance has become a major focus of policymakers in recent decades. Yet, this prominence has led to a variety of policy models across countries and even within countries, as different levels of government have adapted to new challenges by refining or transforming pre-existing institutions and crafting new policy tools. Small Nations, High Ambitions investigates the roots of such policy diversity at the "subnational" level, offering in-depth accounts of the evolution of Quebec's and Scotland's policy strategies in the entrepreneurial finance sector and venture capital more specifically. As compared to other regions and provinces in the United Kingdom and Canada, Quebec and Scottish venture capital ecosystems rely on a high degree of state intervention, either direct (through public investment funds) or indirect (through government-backed, hybrid, or tax-advantaged funds). These two regions can thus be described as "sponsor states," heavily involved in the strategic backing of innovative businesses. Whereas most of the literature on venture capital has focused on economic variables to explain variations in policy models, this book seeks to explain policy divergence in Quebec and Scotland through political and ideological lenses. Its main argument is that the development of venture capital ecosystems in these regions was underpinned by Quebecois and Scottish nationalisms, which induced preferences for policy asymmetry and state intervention.

Whilst the science of conservation biology is thriving as a discipline, ultimately global conservation is failing. Why, when the majority of people say they value nature and its protection? David Johns argues that the loss of species and healthy ecosystems is best understood as human imposition of a colonial relationship on the non-human world - one of exploitation and domination. Global institutions benefit from transforming nature into commodities, and conservation is a low priority. This book places political issues at the forefront, and tackles critical questions of conservation efficacy. It considers the role of effective influence on decision making, key policy changes to reduce human footprint, and the centrality of culture in mobilising support. It draws on political lessons from successful social movements, including human anti-colonial struggles, to provide conservation biologists and practitioners in scientific and social science disciplines and NGOs with the tools and wider context to accelerate their work's impact.

Playing Out of Bounds investigates the North American Chinese Invitational Volleyball Tournament (NACIVT), an annual event that began in the 1930s in the streets of Manhattan and now attracts 1200 competitors from the U.S. and Canada. Its two key features are the 9-man game, where there are nine instead of the usual six volleyball players on the court, and the fact that player eligibility is limited to "100% Chinese" and Asian players, as defined in the tournament rules. These rules that limit competitors to specific ethno-racial groups is justified by the discrimination that Chinese people faced when they were denied access to physical activity spaces, and instead played in the alleyways and streets of Chinatowns. Drawing on interviews, participant-observation, and analysis of websites and tournament documents, Playing Out of Bounds explores how participants understand and negotiate their sense of belonging within this community of volleyball players and how membership within and the boundaries of this community are continually being (re)defined. This identity/community building occurs within a context of anti-Asian racism, growing numbers of mixed race players, and fluidity of what it means to be Canadian, American, Chinese, and Asian.

Finalist, 2022 Ecocriticism Book Prize, Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment Shortlisted, 2020 Book Prize, Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present How do literature and other cultural forms shape how we imagine the planet, for better or worse? In this rich, original, and long awaited book, Jennifer Wenzel tackles the formal innovations, rhetorical appeals, and sociological imbrications of world literature that might help us confront unevenly distributed environmental crises, including global warming. The Disposition of Nature argues that assumptions about what nature is are at stake in conflicts over how it is inhabited or used. Both environmental discourse and world literature scholarship tend to confuse parts and wholes. Working with writing and film from Africa, South Asia, and beyond, Wenzel takes a contrapuntal approach to sites and subjects dispersed across space and time. Reading for the planet, Wenzel shows, means reading from near to there: across experiential divides, between specific sites, at more than one scale. Impressive in its disciplinary breadth, Wenzel’s book fuses insights from political ecology, geography, anthropology, history, and law, while drawing on active debates between postcolonial theory and world literature, as well as scholarship on the Anthropocene and the material turn. In doing so, the book shows the importance of the literary to environmental thought and practice, elaborating how a supple understanding of cultural imagination and narrative logics can foster more robust accounts of global inequality and energize movements for justice and livable futures.

This thoughtful book provides an overview of the major developments in the theory and practice of 'environmental justice'. It illustrates the direction of the evolution of rights of nature and exposes the diverse meanings and practical uses of the concept of environmental justice in different jurisdictions, and their implications for the law, society and the environment. The term 'environmental justice' has different meanings to different scholars and is applied in many different contexts. For some, the focus is on equal distribution of the earth's benefits, with concern for the interests of the less wealthy, disadvantaged minorities, or indigenous peoples. For others, the focus is on the interests of the earth and nature itself. Additionally, for some, environmental justice is a framework for discourse, whilst for others it connotes specific legal principles and procedures. The application of these interpretations through the law involves diverse approaches and rules. In this timely book, expert contributors identify the meanings and the practical translations of environmental justice, reflecting the perspectives of academic, judicial and indigenous people from many countries. Among the issues considered are the rights of nature and its application through judicial practice, and approaches to respecting the laws, cultures and the rights of Indigenous peoples. This integrated exploration of the topic will provide an excellent resource for scholars, judicial officers and practitioners interested in environmental and social justice issues. Contributors: J. Aseron, S.Z. Bigdeli, K. Bosselmann, C. Chaulk, J.I. Colon-Rios, D. Craig, T. Daya-Winterbottom, W. Du Plessis, B. France-Hudson, E. Gachenga, S. Glazebrook, L. Godden, N. Greymorning, R. Karky, A. Keene, A. Kennedy, J. Khatarina, P. Martin, E. O'Connell, M. Perry, W. Phromlah, B.J. Preston, V. Rive, J.G. Rose, M.A. Santosa, A.S. Suwana, A. Telesetsky, J. Williams

Does climate change cause conflict? Did it cause the Syrian uprising? Some policymakers and academics have made this claim, but is it true? This study presents a new conceptual framework to evaluate this claim. Contributing to scholarship in the fields of critical security, environmental security, human security, and Arab politics, Marwa Daoudy prioritizes non-Western and marginalized perspectives to make sense of Syria's place in this international debate. Designing an innovative multidisciplinary framework and applying it to the Syrian case, Daoudy uses extensive field research and her own personal background as a Syrian scholar to present primary interviews with Syrian government officials and citizens, as well as the research of domestic Syrian experts, to provide a unique insight into Syria's environmental, economic and social vulnerabilities leading up to the 2011 uprising.