One of the world's leading scholars of religious trends shows how climate change has driven dramatic religious upheavals. Long before the current era of man-made climate change, the world has suffered repeated, severe climate-driven shocks. These shocks have resulted in famine, disease, violence, social upheaval, and mass migration. But these shocks were also religious events. Dramatic shifts in climate have often been understood in religious terms by the people who experienced them. They were described in the language of apocalypse, millennium, and Judgment. Often, too, the eras in which these shocks occurred have been marked by far-reaching changes in the nature of religion and spirituality. Those changes have varied widely - from growing religious fervor and commitment; to the stirring of mystical and apocalyptic expectations; to waves of religious scapegoating and persecution; or the spawning of new religious movements and revivals. In many cases, such responses have had lasting impacts, fundamentally reshaping particular religious traditions. In Climate, Catastrophe, and Faith historian Philip Jenkins draws out the complex relationship between religion and climate change. He asserts that the religious movements and ideas that emerge from climate shocks often last for many decades, and even become a familiar part of the religious landscape, even though their origins in particular moments of crisis may be increasingly consigned to remote memory. By stirring conflicts and provoking persecutions that defined themselves in religious terms, changes in climate have redrawn the world's religious maps, and created the global concentrations of believers as we know them today. This bold new argument will change the way we think about the history of religion, regardless of tradition. And it will demonstrate how our growing climate crisis will likely have a comparable religious impact across the Global South.

Contemporary megaprojects have evolved from the discreet, modernist projects undertaken in the past by centralized authorities to encompass everything from large-scale construction to space exploration. Contemporary Megaprojects explores how these projects have been impacted by cutting-edge technology, the private sector, and the processes of decentralization and dematerialization. With case studies ranging from mega-plantations in Southeast Asia to ocean mapping to sports events, the contributions in this collected volume demonstrate the increasing ambition and pervasiveness of these projects, as well as their significant impact on both society and the environment.

At a time when it is clear that climate change adaptation and mitigation are failing, this book examines how our assumptions about (valid and usable) knowledge are preventing effective climate action. Through a cross-disciplinary, empirically-based analysis of climate science and policy, the book situates the failures of climate policy in the cultural history of prediction and its interfaces with policy. Fava calls into question the current interfaces between scientific research and climate policy by tracing multiple connections between modelling, epistemology, politics, food security, religion, art, and the apocalyptic. Demonstrating how the current domination of climate policy by models and scenarios is part of the problem, the book examines how artistic practices are a critical location to ask questions differently, rethink environmental futures, and activate social change. The analysis starts with another moment of climatic change in recent western history: the overlap of the Little Ice Age and the "scientific revolution," during which intense climatic, scientific and political change were contemporary with mathematical calculation of the apocalypse. Dealing with the need for complex answers to complex and urgent questions, this is essential reading for those interested in climate action, interdisciplinary research and methodological innovation. The empirical analyses amount to a methodological experiment, across history of science, theology, art theory and history, architecture, future studies, climatology, computer modelling, and agricultural policy. This book is a major contribution to understanding how we are precluding effective climate action, and designing futures that resemble our worst nightmares.

The history of the Cold War has focused overwhelmingly on statecraft and military power, an approach that has naturally placed Moscow and Washington center stage. Meanwhile, regions such as Alaska, the polar landscapes, and the cold areas of the Soviet periphery have received little attention. However, such environments were of no small importance during the Cold War: in addition to their symbolic significance, they also had direct implications for everything from military strategy to natural resource management. Through histories of these extremely cold environments, this volume makes a novel intervention in Cold War historiography, one whose global and transnational approach undermines the simple opposition of "East" and "West."

In recent decades, practices like the cultivation of a few high-yielding crop varieties on a large scale, the application of heavy machinery and continued mechanization of agriculture, the removal of natural habitats, and the application of pesticides and synthetics have resulted in the simplification of agro-ecosystems. This has enabled a substantial increase in food production but has at the same time transformed landscapes. Indeed, there is a concern that a decline in biodiversity has affected microbiome activities that support processes across soils, plants, animals, the marine environment, and humans. Although they have increased food production, the above practices cannot be considered sustainable in long-term applications. Biodiversity, Functional Ecosystems, and Sustainable Food Production explore ecosystems in terms of crop and animal production, pest and disease control, nutrient cycling, and soil fertility. Chapters range from agro-biodiversity to antimicrobial use in animal food production to microbiome applications for sustainable food systems and the impacts of environment-friendly unit operations on the functional properties of bee pollen. By examining such topics about each other, the text emphasizes how food production, ecosystem function, food quality, and consumer health are all interconnected.

How to Make A Wetland tells the story of two Turkish coastal areas, both shaped by ecological change and political uncertainty. On the Black Sea coast and the shores of the Aegean, farmers, scientists, fishermen, and families grapple with livelihoods in transition, as their environment is bound up in national and international conservation projects. Bridges and drainage canals, apartment buildings and highways-as well as the birds, water buffalo, and various animals of the regions-all inform a moral ecology in the making. Drawing on six years of fieldwork in wetlands and deltas, Caterina Scaramelli offers an anthropological understanding of sweeping environmental and infrastructural change, and the moral claims made on livability and materiality in Turkey, and beyond. Beginning from a moral ecological position, she takes into account the notion that politics is not simply projected onto animals, plants, soil, water, sediments, rocks, and other non-human beings and materials. Rather, people make politics through them. With this book, she highlights the aspirations, moral relations, and care practices in constant play in contestations and alliances over environmental change.

Human-induced climate change is causing resource scarcities, natural disasters, and mass migrations, which in turn destabilize national, international, and human security structures and multiply the human inputs to climate change. Alarms about the expanding role of climate change as a force multiplier of existing threats to national, international, and human security structures studies are being raised at all levels of governance and intelligence—national (including the U.S. Senate, the Director of National Intelligence, the Central Intelligence Agency, and the Pentagon), transnational (including the European Union and the United Nations), and private (such as the Central News Agency and the American Security Project). Climate Change and Security: A Gathering Storm of Global Challenges focuses on the three major feedback effects of human-induced climate change on human and international security—resource scarcity, natural disasters, and sea-level rise. Decreasing per capita availability of renewable resources due to such regional effects of climate change as drought and desertification leads to intensified competition for these resources and may result in armed violence—especially when compounded by conditions of rapid population growth, tribalism, and sectarianism, as in Darfur and Somalia. The increase in the frequency and intensity of meteorological disasters associated with global warming weakens already debilitated tropical societies and makes them still more vulnerable to political instability, as in Haiti. Sea-level rise will lead to disruptive mass migrations of climate refugees as dense littoral populations are forced to abandon low-lying coastal regions, as in Bangladesh.

Though still a relatively young field, the study of Latin American environmental history is blossoming, as the contributions to this definitive volume demonstrate. Bringing together thirteen leading experts on the region, A Living Past synthesizes a wide range of scholarship to offer new perspectives on environmental change in Latin America and the Spanish Caribbean since the nineteenth century. Each chapter provides insightful, up-to-date syntheses of current scholarship on critical countries and ecosystems (including Brazil, Mexico, the Caribbean, the tropical Andes, and tropical forests) and such cross-cutting themes as agriculture, conservation, mining, ranching, science, and urbanization. Together, these studies provide valuable historical contexts for making sense of contemporary environmental challenges facing the region.

This comprehensive overview of the first quarter-century of American environmental sociology introduces readers to the research and theoretical perspectives in this new field of study. Formally established in 1976 with the formation of the American Sociological Association's Section on Environmental Sociology, the field emerged in response to widespread societal recognition of the significance of environmental problems in the 1970s and has flourished ever since. Focusing on both built and natural environments, this volume provides overviews of key topics in both branches of the field, summarizing and synthesizing existing research in each area.

Although this volume pays ample attention to theoretical perspectives in environmental sociology, it also provides thorough reviews of research on the central topics in the field. Contributors introduce and consider the current work available in such areas as the design of built environments, hazards and disasters, risks, the environmental movement, and impact assessment, among others. This timely and important collection is a must-read for students and scholars specializing in environmental sociology, social ecology, environmental studies, and urban and regional planning.

The completion of this volume would not have been possible without the generous and dedicated help of numerous people. The book had its genesis in a conference held at Cornell University in the fall of 1990 that was organized by Dudley Poston, Paul Eberts, and Michael Hannan, all professors at the time at Cornell. With the very generous financial assistance of David Call, then the dean of Cornell's College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, Poston, Eberts, and Hannan put together a two-day conference oflectures and papers by human ecologists from Cornell University and elsewhere. The conference focused on sociological human ecology and celebrated the fortieth anniversary of the publication of Amos Hawley's Human Ecology (Ronald Press 1950). Professor Hawley was the keynote speaker at the conference. Many of the authors of the chapters in this volume presented earlier versions at the Cornell conference in 1990. Cornell's Departments of Rural Sociology and Sociology also contrib uted financial assistance; however, without Dean Call's very generous support, the conference would not have been possible. A few months after the conference, Poston and Michael Micklin discussed the possibility of asking the various authors of the Cornell conference papers to revise them for publication in a volume on sociological human ecology. Many opted to do so, but others did not because of time and other kinds of commitments and constraints."

This is a moment of major and rapid historical change. The global elite - what used to be called the ruling class - are confronted by crises to which they have no credible response. First, the economic and political system presided over by the US is in turbulent decline. Second, within the next few years, global oil production will be in decline and, with the 'easy oil' gone, energy production is becoming dirtier than ever. Third, climate change is gathering momentum and is just one aspect of a broader environmental crisis which threatens human survival. Toxic Futures is about the world brought into being through the collusion of state and corporate power. Maintaining profit has relied on institutionalized fraud on the one hand and a war on the poor and on the environment on the other. Resistance is growing at all scales and, however chaotic, constitutes a fourth dimension of the elite crisis. This significant and timely book locates South Africa in the crisis and explores the implications for environmental, social, and economic justice. It concludes that another world is inevitable. Whether people allow the political and economic elite to lead them into a world of growing destruction or take charge to create a world of mutual solidarity is the central challenge of the age.

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.

This volume characterizes the current state of natural science and socioeconomic modeling of the impacts of climate change and current climate variability on forests, grasslands, and water. It identifies what can be done currently with impact assessments and suggests how to undertake such assessments. Impediments to linking biophysical and socioeconomic models into integrated assessments for policy purposes are identified, and recommendations for future research activities to improve the state of the art and remove these impediments to model integration are provided. This book is for natural and social scientists with an interest in the impacts of climate change on terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems and their socioeconomic impacts, and policy makers interested in understanding the status of current assessment capabilities and in identifying priority areas for future research.

Drawing on almost 20 years of Liam Leonard's research in the field, The Sustainable Nation: Politics, Economy and Justice provides a detailed case study of a modern European state's tumultuous development through first decades of the Millennium. As the Republic of Ireland experienced an initial phase of accelerated growth, followed by a dramatic economic downturn, the nation's attempts to expand its infrastructure was met with resistance from communities concerned about local environments. The Sustainable Nation: Politics, Economy and Justice looks at some of the conflicts that emerged as part of the Irish people's attempts to achieve a sustainable form of development. Other issues such as the rise of a multicultural and globalized society as well as issues of social justice are also explored within this study. This book represents a culmination of Leonard's research on Ireland which began at the turn of the Millennium. The book provides an in depth and up to date study on Ireland's growth and the substantial changes experienced there during the last two decades.

Although poisonous substances have been a hazard for the whole of human history, it is only with the development and large-scale production of new chemical substances over the last two centuries that toxic, manmade pollutants have become such a varied and widespread danger. Covering a host of both notorious and little-known chemicals, the chapters in this collection investigate the emergence of specific toxic, pathogenic, carcinogenic, and ecologically harmful chemicals as well as the scientific, cultural and legislative responses they have prompted. Each study situates chemical hazards in a long-term and transnational framework and demonstrates the importance of considering both the natural and the social contexts in which their histories have unfolded.

Environmental Criminology: Spatial Analysis and Regional Issues combines various academic perspectives to provide a multi-disciplinary approach to examining environmental criminology. Using sociological, criminological, anthropological, historical and media analysis, this volume examines local and regional issues in crime. The interdisciplinary nature of the collection makes the book ideal for students or researchers who wish to expand their approach to environmental criminology.

The concept of fragmentation is explored in this book as it applies to arid, pastoral systems throughout the world. Global significance of the world's vast rangelands is large. Arid and semiarid rangelands make up almost 25% of the earth's landscapes and support more than 20 million people whose livelihoods depend on these lands. It is the home of the planet's last remaining megafauna and many other important species. The case is developed that fragmentation arises from different natural, social and economic conditions worldwide but creates similar outcomes for human and natural systems. With information from nine sites around the world the authors examine how fragmentation occurs, the patterns that result, and the consequences of fragmentation for ecosystems and the people who depend on them for their livelihoods.

'One of the most perceptive and thought-provoking books yet written about the multiple intersecting crises that are now upending our once-familiar world. . . Essential reading for these turbulent times.' Amitav Ghosh, author of The Great Derangement Dougald Hine, author and social thinker, has spent most of his life talking to people about climate change. And then one afternoon in the second year of the pandemic, he found he had nothing left to say. Why would someone who cares so deeply about ecological destruction want to stop talking about climate change now? At Work in the Ruins explores that question. 'Climate change asks us questions that climate science cannot answer,' Hine says. Questions like, how did we end up in this mess? Is it just a piece of bad luck with the atmospheric chemistry-or is it the result of a way of approaching the world that would always have brought us to such a pass? How we answer such questions has consequences. According to Hine, our answers shape our understanding and our thinking about what kind of problem we think we're dealing with and, therefore, what kind of responses we go looking for. "But when science is turned into an object of belief and a source of overriding authority," Hine continues, "it becomes hard even to talk about the questions that it cannot answer." In eloquent, deeply researched prose, Hine demonstrates how our over-reliance on the single lens of science has blinded us to the nature of the crises around and ahead of us, leading to 'solutions' that can only make things worse. At Work in the Ruins is his reckoning with the strange years we have been living through and our long history of asking too much of science. It's also about how we find our bearings and what kind of tasks are worth giving our lives to, given all we know or have good grounds to fear about the trouble the world is in. For anyone who has found themselves needing to make sense of the COVID time and how we talk about it, At Work in the Ruins offers guidance by standing firmly forward and facing the depth of the trouble we are in. Hine, ultimately, helps us find the work that is worth doing, even in the ruins. 'A book of rare originality and depth-profound, far-reaching, mind-altering stuff.' Helen Jukes, author of A Honeybee Heart has Five Openings

This is the first systematically comparative study of environmental protest in a representative cross-section of EU member states. It breaks entirely new ground in the study of environmental politics in Europe and is a major contribution to the study of protest events.

The onset of global concerns about environmental risks, climate change and threats to the planet from industry have focused the minds of a generation. Throughout the world, new movements are emerging in an attempt to challenge those who would put profits before the planet. This volume brings together global contributions that represent the cutting edge of research in the area of global environmental movements. Contributions include chapters on the spatial impacts of environmental groups in Israel, the work of Greenpeace in Brazil, environmental activism in Ireland, animal rights and anti-hunt activism in Malta, the global de-growth movement, environmental movement mobilization in China, and anti-pollution activism in India. The scope and breath of this research indicates the emergence of both a global grassroots environmental mobilization in addition to analysis and documentation of these responses by researchers world-wide. With increased threats from climatic change and ecological degradation being highlighted as a threat to much of the world's population in the coming century, this activism and ensuing research becomes all the more significant.

The Community, Environment and Disaster Risk Management series deals with a wide range of issues relating to global environmental hazards, natural and man-made disasters, and approaches to disaster risk reduction. As people and communities are the first and the most important responders to disasters and environment-related problems, this series aims to analyse critical field-based mechanisms which link community, policy, and governance systems. Justice, Equity and Emergency Management takes the principles proposed in Disaster Recovery Through the Lens of Justice and applies a justice and equity lens across all phases of emergency management, focusing on key topics such as hazard mitigation, emerging technologies, long-term recovery, and others. The authors in this volume interrogate the applicability of the principles to technological innovation, indigenous peoples, persons with access and functional needs, agricultural disasters, and several other contexts. It is our hope that this effort will lead us closer to truly operationalizing and applying these principles in a way that leads to systemic change and better outcomes.

The advent of social complexity has been a longstanding debate among social scientists. Existing theories and approaches involving the origins of social complexity include environmental circumscription, population growth, technology transfers, prestige-based and interpersonal-group competition, organized conflict, perennial wartime leadership, wealth finance, opportunistic leadership, climatological change, transport and trade monopolies, resource circumscription, surplus and redistribution, ideological imperialism, and the consideration of individual agency. However, recent approaches such as the inclusion of bioarchaeological perspectives, prospection methods, systematically-investigated archaeological sites along with emerging technologies are necessarily transforming our understanding of socio-cultural evolutionary processes. In short, many pre-existing ways of explaining the origins and development of social complexity are being reassessed. Ultimately, the contributors to this edited volume challenge the status quo regarding how and why social complexity arose by providing revolutionary new understandings of social inequality and socio-political evolution.

Contextualizing Disaster offers a comparative analysis of six recent "highly visible" disasters and several slow-burning, "hidden," crises that include typhoons, tsunamis, earthquakes, chemical spills, and the unfolding consequences of rising seas and climate change. The book argues that, while disasters are increasingly represented by the media as unique, exceptional, newsworthy events, it is a mistake to think of disasters as isolated or discrete occurrences. Rather, building on insights developed by political ecologists, this book makes a compelling argument for understanding disasters as transnational and global phenomena.