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Books > Earth & environment > The environment > Social impact of environmental issues
'A book of wonders' Bee Wilson, Sunday Times Books of the Year Winner of the Wainwright Prize 2022 - Eating to Extinction is an astonishing journey through the past, present and future of food, showing why reclaiming a diverse food culture is vital. 'Saladino inspires us to believe that turning the tide is still possible' Yotam Ottolenghi From a tiny crimson pear in the west of England to an exploding corn in Mexico, there are thousands of foods that are at risk of being lost for ever. Dan Saladino spans the globe to uncover their stories, meeting the pioneering farmers, scientists, cooks, food producers and indigenous communities who are defending food traditions and fighting for change. Eating to Extinction is about so much more than preserving the past. It is about the crisis facing our planet today, and why reclaiming a diverse food culture is vital for our future. * With a new preface by the author * Winner of multiple awards, including the Fortnum & Mason Food Book Award and the Guild of Food Writers Food Book Award. 'I love this book... I wish the whole world could read it' Raymond Blanc 'A brilliant read' Tim Spector
An unflinching photographic record of the epic effects of a violent climate, from the earliest extinction events to the present. Violent geologic events have ravaged the Earth since time began, spanning the vast eons of our planet's existence. These seismic phenomena have scored their marks in rock strata and been reflected in fossil records for future humanity to excavate and ponder. For most of the preceeding 78,000 years Homo sapiens simply observed natural climate upheaval. One hundred years ago, however, industrialization stunningly changed the rules, so that now most climate change is driven by us. Fire, Storm and Flood is an unflinching photographic record of the epic effects of a violent climate, from the earliest extinction events to the present, in which we witness climate chaos forced by unnatural global warming. It uses often emotional and moving imagery to drive home the enormity of climatic events, offering a sweeping acknowledgment of our crowded planet's heartbreaking vulnerability and show-stopping beauty.
Climate predictions - and the computer models behind them - play a key role in shaping public opinion and our response to the climate crisis. Some people interpret these predictions as 'prophecies of doom' and some others dismiss them as mere speculation, but the vast majority are only vaguely aware of the science behind them. This book gives a balanced view of the strengths and limitations of climate modeling. It covers historical developments, current challenges, and future trends in the field. The accessible discussion of climate modeling only requires a basic knowledge of science. Uncertainties in climate predictions and their implications for assessing climate risk are analyzed, as are the computational challenges faced by future models. The book concludes by highlighting the dangers of climate 'doomism', while also making clear the value of predictive models, and the severe and very real risks posed by anthropogenic climate change.
This topical and engaging Handbook brings together cutting edge research on the relationship between happiness and the natural environment. With interdisciplinary contributions from top scholars, it explores the role of happiness research as a new approach to environmental social science, illustrating the critical links between human wellbeing, happiness and the environment. Addressing key environmental issues that impact happiness, the book examines: climate change and extreme weather events, air pollution, noise, odour, access to green space, and the importance of green lifestyles. This wide range of environmental concerns is analysed through the lens of differing cultural backgrounds, exploring the importance of different forms of human interaction with the environment globally, as well as its effects. Environmental economics and sociology scholars will find the key case studies discussed particularly useful in assessing different cultural, political and regional approaches to the topic. It will also be an interesting read for policy-makers looking to better understand how the environment affects human happiness and wellbeing. Contributors include: M. Ahmadiani, M. Berlemann, F. Brereton, L. Bruni, X. Chen, C.A. Coral-Guerrero, S. Ferreira, H. Folmer, B.S. Frey, D. Fujiwara, F. Garcia-Quero, I. Gramatki, J. Guardiola, P. Howley, B.A. Jones, K. Kagohashi, S. Kant, K. Keohane, C. Krekel, K. Laffan, R. Lawton, A. Levinson, G. MacKerron, D. Maddison, S. Managi, M. Moro, S. Mourato, A. Oswald, J. Regner, K. Rehdanz, H. Ren, T. Ruckelshauss, J. Tang, T. Tsurumi, J. Tutt, R. Veenhoven, I. Vertinsky, H. Welsch, X. Zhang, X. Zhang, B. Zheng
Following the groundbreaking 30 Easy Ways to Join the Food Revolution,
Ollie Hunter is back with his second book - and this time he's tackling
everyday sustainability.
Join the Greener Revolution is a manifesto calling us to come together, to take responsibility and strive to rebuild our relationships with our local communities, our individual connection to the world, and rediscover the joy in living and eating green.
We are surrounded by stories of people on the move. Wild species, too, are escaping warming seas and desiccated lands in a mass exodus. Politicians and the media present this upheaval of migration patterns as unprecedented, blaming it for the spread of disease and conflict, and spreading anxiety across the world as a result. But the science and history of migration in animals, plants, and humans tell a different story. Far from being a disruptive behaviour, migration is an ancient and lifesaving response to environmental change, a biological imperative as necessary as breathing. Climate changes triggered the first human migrations out of Africa. Falling sea levels allowed our passage across the Bering Sea. Unhampered by borders, migration allowed our ancestors to people the planet, into the highest reaches of the Himalayan Mountains and the most remote islands of the Pacific, disseminating the biological, cultural and social diversity that ecosystems and societies depend upon. In other words, migration is not the crisis – it is the solution. Tracking the history of misinformation from the 18th century through to today's anti-immigration policies, The Next Great Migration makes the case for a future in which migration is not a source of fear, but of hope.
Philippe Sands has extensively revised this leading textbook to include all new developments since 1994, including all the international case-law (ICJ, ITLOS, WTO, human rights etc.) and new international legislation (genetically modified organisms, the Kyoto Protocol, oil pollution, chemicals etc.). It is the most comprehensive account of the principles and rules relating to the protection of the environment and the conservation of natural resources. It incorporates all the key material from the 1992 Rio Declaration and subsequent developments. Topics include: the legal and institutional framework; the field's historic development; standards for general application in addition to the protection of the atmosphere, oceans etc.; the techniques available for implementation such as the environmental impact assessment and liability/compensation for environmental damage. It will be used on its own as an academic course text, as well as a reference text for practitioners.
The surprising, fascinating, and remarkable ways that animals use creativity to thrive in their habitats Most of us view animals through a very narrow lens, seeing only bits and pieces of beings that seem mostly peripheral to our lives. However, whether animals are building a shelter, seducing a mate, or inventing a new game, animals' creative choices affect their social, cultural, and environmental worlds. The Creative Lives of Animals offers readers intimate glimpses of creativity in the lives of animals, from elephants to alligators to ants. Drawing on a growing body of scientific research, Carol Gigliotti unpacks examples of creativity demonstrated by animals through the lens of the creative process, an important component of creative behavior, and offers new thinking on animal intelligence, emotion, and self-awareness. With examples of the elaborate dams built by beavers or the lavishly decorated bowers of bowerbirds, Gigliotti provides a new perspective on animals as agents in their own lives, as valuable contributors to their world and ours, and as guides in understanding how creativity may contribute to conserving the natural world. Presenting a powerful argument for the importance of recognizing animals as individuals and as creators of a healthy, biodiverse world, this book offers insights into both the established and emerging questions about the creativity of animals.
A Honeybee Heart Has Five Openings begins as Helen Jukes is entering her thirties and struggling to settle into her new job and home. Then friends gift her a colony of honeybees-a gift that, according to folklore, brings good luck-and Jukes embarks on the rewarding, perilous journey of becoming a beekeeper. Jukes writes about what it means to "keep" wild creatures and to live alongside beings whose laws of life are so different from our own. She delves into the history of beekeeping, exploring the ancient-and sometimes disturbing-relationship between keeper and bee, human and wild thing. And as her colony grows, the very act of beekeeping seems to open new perspectives, making her world come alive again. A beautifully wrought meditation on uncertainty and hope, feelings of restlessness and home, and how we might better know ourselves, A Honeybee Heart Has Five Openings shows us how to be alert to these small creatures flitting among us that are yet so vital a force for the continuation of life.
Studies warn that global warming and sea level rise will create hundreds of millions of environmental refugees. While climate change will undoubtedly affect future migration patterns and behavior, the potential outcomes are more complex than the environmental refugee scenario suggests. This book provides a comprehensive review of how physical and human processes interact to shape migration, using simple diagrams and models to guide the researcher, policy maker and advanced student through the climate-migration process. The book applies standard concepts and theories used in climate and migration scholarship to explain how events such as Hurricane Katrina, the Dust Bowl, African droughts, and floods in Bangladesh and China have triggered migrations that haven't always fit the environmental refugee storyline. Lessons from past migrations are used to predict how future migration patterns will unfold in the face of sea level rise, food insecurity, political instability, and to review options for policy makers.
Future Sustainable Ecosystems: Complexity, Risk, Uncertainty provides an interdisciplinary, integrative overview of environmental problem-solving using statistics. It shows how statistics can be used to solve diverse environmental and socio-economic problems involving food, water, energy scarcity, and climate change risks. It synthesizes interdisciplinary theory, concepts, definitions, models and findings involved in complex global sustainability problem-solving, making it an essential guide and reference. It includes real-world examples and applications making the book accessible to a broader interdisciplinary readership. Discussions include a broad, integrated perspective on sustainability, integrated risk, multi-scale changes and impacts taking place within ecosystems worldwide. State-of-the-art statistical techniques, including Bayesian hierarchical, spatio-temporal, agent-based and game-theoretic approaches are explored. The author then focuses on the real-world integration of observational and experimental data and its use within statistical models.
Nautilus Award Gold Medal Winner, Ecology & Environment In Matter and Desire, internationally renowned biologist and philosopher Andreas Weber rewrites ecology as a tender practice of forging relationships, of yearning for connections, and of expressing these desires through our bodies. Being alive is an erotic process-constantly transforming the self through contact with others, desiring ever more life. In clever and surprising ways, Weber recognizes that love-the impulse to establish connections, to intermingle, to weave our existence poetically together with that of other beings-is a foundational principle of reality. The fact that we disregard this principle lies at the core of a global crisis of meaning that plays out in the avalanche of species loss and in our belief that the world is a dead mechanism controlled through economic efficiency. Although rooted in scientific observation, Matter and Desire becomes a tender philosophy for the Anthropocene, a "poetic materialism," that closes the gap between mind and matter. Ultimately, Weber discovers, in order to save life on Earth-and our own meaningful existence as human beings-we must learn to love.
In twenty short books, Penguin brings you the classics of the environmental movement. In the galvanising speeches and essays brought together in This Can't Be Happening, George Monbiot calls on humanity to stop averting its gaze from the destruction of the living planet, and wake up to the greatest predicament we have ever faced. Over the past 75 years, a new canon has emerged. As life on Earth has become irrevocably altered by humans, visionary thinkers around the world have raised their voices to defend the planet, and affirm our place at the heart of its restoration. Their words have endured through the decades, becoming the classics of a movement. Together, these books show the richness of environmental thought, and point the way to a fairer, saner, greener world.
The Maine Woods, vast and largely unsettled, are often described as unchanged since Henry David Thoreau's 1847 journey across the backcountry, in spite of the realities of Indian dispossession and the visible signs of logging, settlement, tourism, and real estate development. In the summer of 2014 scholars, indigenous peoples, activists, and other individuals retraced Thoreau's route. Inspired partly by this expedition, the accessible and engaging essays here offer valuable new perspectives on conservation, the cultural ties that connect Native communities to the land, and the profound influence the geography of the Maine Woods had on Thoreau and writers and activists who followed in his wake. Together, these essays offer a rich and multifaceted look at this special place and the ways in which Thoreau's Maine experiences continue to shape understandings of the environment a century and a half later. Contributors include the volume editor, Kathryn Dolan, James S. Finley, James Francis, Richard W. Judd, Dale Potts, Melissa Sexton, Chris Sockalexis, Stan Tag, Robert M. Thorson, and Laura Dassow Walls.
This book develops the concept of feminist technoecologies as a theoretical and methodological tool for examining the co-constitutive relation between technology and ecology, which have typically been considered as distinct objects of studies. In underscoring how their dynamic relationality troubles the location of agency, this book challenges the idea that technology, as the marker of the innovative capacity of the human, either corrupts or saves ecology. The contributions to the volume present feminist approaches that contextualise and historicize such issues as multi-species survival, border control regimes, solar power, bioart, artificial intelligence and air pollution. They insist on the centrality of corporeality, affects, ethics and vulnerability in the materialisation of technoecological relations, and call into question the exceptional status of the figure of (hu)Man. Together they offer critical and creative tools or modes of inquiry for imagining alternative modalities of practicing care and thinking environmental sustainability. As a creative contribution to the growing literature on new configurations of bodies, technologies and environments against the backdrop of ecological degradation, digital technologization, and precarity in late capitalism, Feminist Technoecologies extends the interchanges between feminist materialisms, environmental humanities and feminist technosciences studies, and will be a resource for all those interested in these fields. This book was originally published as a special issue of Australian Feminist Studies.
'Astounding on every page. John Vaillant is one of the great poetic chroniclers of the natural world' David Wallace-Wells 'A towering achievement; an immense work of research, reflection and imagination' Robert Macfarlane A gripping account of this century's most intense urban fire, and a panoramic exploration of the rapidly changing relationship between humanity and fire's fierce energy. In May 2016, Fort McMurray, Alberta, the hub of Canada's oil industry, was overrun by wildfire. The multi-billion-dollar disaster turned entire neighbourhoods into firebombs and drove 90,000 people from their homes in a single afternoon. Through the story of this apocalyptic conflagration, John Vaillant explores the past and the future of our ever-hotter, more flammable world. For hundreds of millennia, fire has been a partner in our evolution, shaping culture and civilization. Yet in our age of intensifying climate change, we are seeing its destructive power unleashed in ways never before witnessed by human beings. With masterly prose and cinematic style, Vaillant delves into the intertwined histories of the oil industry and climate science, the unprecedented devastation wrought by modern wildfires, and the lives forever changed by these disasters. Fire Weather is urgent reading for our new century of fire.
'Mushrooms are having a moment. [A] natural sequel for the many readers who enjoyed Merlin Sheldrake's Entangled Life.'-Library Journal 'If you enjoyed Merlin Sheldrake's Entangled Life . . . I highly recommend this book. . . . In the vein of Louis Theroux, Bierend journeys deep in the wonderfully strange subculture of the mushroom-mad.'-Idler magazine From ecology to fermentation, in pop culture through to medicine - mushrooms are quite literally everywhere! Author Doug Bierend guides readers through the weird, wonderful world of fungi and the amazing mycological movement. In Search of Mycotopia introduces us to an incredible, essential and oft-overlooked kingdom of life - fungi - and all the potential it holds for our future, through the work and research being done by an unforgettable community of mushroom-mad citizen scientists and microbe devotees. This engrossing and mind-expanding book will captivate readers who are curious about the hidden worlds and networks that make up our planet. Bierend uncovers a vanguard of mycologists: growers, independent researchers, ecologists, entrepreneurs and amateur enthusiasts exploring and advocating for fungi's capacity to improve and heal. From decontaminating landscapes and waterways to achieving food security, In Search of Mycotopia demonstrates how humans can work with fungi to better live with nature - and with one another. 'Comprehensive and enthusiastic. . . . This fascinating, informative look into a unique subculture and the fungi at its center is a real treat.'-Publishers Weekly
Economic growth isn't working, and it cannot be made to work. Offering a counter-history of how economic growth emerged in the context of colonialism, fossil-fueled industrialization, and capitalist modernity, The Future Is Degrowth argues that the ideology of growth conceals the rising inequalities and ecological destructions associated with capitalism, and points to desirable alternatives to it. Not only in society at large, but also on the left, we are held captive by the hegemony of growth. Even proposals for emancipatory Green New Deals or postcapitalism base their utopian hopes on the development of productive forces, on redistributing the fruits of economic growth and technological progress. Yet growing evidence shows that continued economic growth cannot be made compatible with sustaining life and is not necessary for a good life for all. This book provides a vision for postcapitalism beyond growth. Building on a vibrant field of research, it discusses the political economy and the politics of a non-growing economy. It charts a path forward through policies that democratise the economy, "now-topias" that create free spaces for experimentation, and counter-hegemonic movements that make it possible to break with the logic of growth. Degrowth perspectives offer a way to step off the treadmill of an alienating, expansionist, and hierarchical system. A handbook and a manifesto, The Future Is Degrowth is a must-read for all interested in charting a way beyond the current crises.
This book aims to demonstrate that the changing relationship between humanity and nature is key to understanding world history. Humans have been grappling with environmental problems since prehistoric times, and the environmental unsustainability of human practices has often been a decisive, if not immediately evident, shaping factor in history. The measures that societies and states have adopted to stabilize the relationship between humans and the natural world have repeatedly contributed to environmental crises over the course of history. Nature and Power traces the expanding scope of environmental action: from initiatives undertaken by individual villages and cities, environmental policy has become a global concern. Efforts to steer human use of nature and natural resources have become complicated, as Nature and Power shows, by particularities of culture and by the vagaries of human nature itself. Environmental history, the author argues, is ultimately the history of human hopes and fears.
Ecological Restoration and Management of Longleaf Pine Forests is a timely synthesis of the current understanding of the natural dynamics and processes in longleaf pine ecosystems. This book beautifully illustrates how incorporation of basic ecosystem knowledge and an understanding of socioeconomic realities shed new light on established paradigms and their application for restoration and management. Unique for its holistic ecological focus, rather than a more traditional silvicultural approach, the book highlights the importance of multi-faceted actions that robustly integrate forest and wildlife conservation at landscape scales, and merge ecological with socioeconomic objectives for effective conservation of the longleaf pine ecosystem.
Emphasizing the inductive nature of statistical thinking, Environmental and Ecological Statistics with R, Second Edition, connects applied statistics to the environmental and ecological fields. Using examples from published works in the ecological and environmental literature, the book explains the approach to solving a statistical problem, covering model specification, parameter estimation, and model evaluation. It includes many examples to illustrate the statistical methods and presents R code for their implementation. The emphasis is on model interpretation and assessment, and using several core examples throughout the book, the author illustrates the iterative nature of statistical inference. The book starts with a description of commonly used statistical assumptions and exploratory data analysis tools for the verification of these assumptions. It then focuses on the process of building suitable statistical models, including linear and nonlinear models, classification and regression trees, generalized linear models, and multilevel models. It also discusses the use of simulation for model checking, and provides tools for a critical assessment of the developed models. The second edition also includes a complete critique of a threshold model. Environmental and Ecological Statistics with R, Second Edition focuses on statistical modeling and data analysis for environmental and ecological problems. By guiding readers through the process of scientific problem solving and statistical model development, it eases the transition from scientific hypothesis to statistical model.
'Read this book, then look and wonder' Sunday Times We have to learn to live as part of nature, not apart from it. And the first step is to start looking after the insects, the little creatures that make our shared world go round. Insects are essential for life as we know it - without them, our world would look vastly different. Drawing on the latest ground-breaking research and a lifetime's study, Dave Goulson reveals the long decline of insect populations that has taken place in recent decades and its potential consequences. Eye-opening and inspiring, Silent Earth asks for profound change at every level and a passionate argument or us to love, respect and care for our six-legged friends. 'Compelling - Silent Earth is a wake-up call' Isabella Tree, author of Wilding 'Enlightening, urgent and funny, Goulson's book is a timely call for action' New Statesman
This two volume collection of pioneering material includes landmarks and significant contributions to the subjects of global environmental issues. The editors have prepared a new introduction for this authoritative collection.This collection enables the reader, whether an economist or environmentalist, to have access to material published in a wide range of journals, many of which are relatively unavailable. It will be of considerable value to researchers and teachers in all of the disciplines, including: theoretical ecology; resource and environmental economics; industrial ecology and environmental science.
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