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."

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.

Why do people living in different areas vote in different ways? Why does this change over time? How do people talk about politics with friends and neighbours, and with what effect? Does the geography of well-being influence the geography of party support? Do parties try to talk to all voters
at election time, or are they interested only in the views of a small number of voters living in a small number of seats? Is electoral participation in decline, and how does the geography of the vote affect this? How can a party win a majority of seats in Parliament without a majority of votes in
the country? Putting Voters in their Place explores these questions by placing the analysis of electoral behaviour into its geographical context. Using information from the latest elections, including the 2005 General Election, the book shows how both voters and parties are affected by, and seek to
influence, both national and local forces. Trends are set in the context of the latest research and scholarship on electoral behaviour. The book also reports on new research findings.

Despite decades of efforts to combat homelessness, many people continue to experience it in Canada's major cities. There are a number of barriers that prevent effective responses to homelessness, including a lack of agreement on the fundamental question: what is homelessness? In Multiple Barriers, Alison Smith explores the forces that shape intergovernmental and multilevel governance dynamics to help better understand why, despite the best efforts of community and advocacy groups, homelessness remains as persistent as ever. Drawing on nearly 100 interviews with key actors in Vancouver, Calgary, Toronto, and Montreal, as well as extensive participant observation, Smith argues that institutional differences across cities interact with ideas regarding homelessness to contribute to very different models of governance. Multiple Barriers shows that the genuine involvement of locally based service providers, with the development of policy, are necessary for an effective, equitable, and enduring solution to the homelessness crisis in Canada.

Microclimate for Cultural Heritage: Measurement, Risk Assessment, Conservation, Restoration, and Maintenance of Indoor and Outdoor Monuments, Third Edition, presents the latest on microclimates, environmental issues and the conservation of cultural heritage. It is a useful treatise on microphysics, acting as a practical handbook for conservators and specialists in physics, chemistry, architecture, engineering, geology and biology who focus on environmental issues and the conservation of works of art. It fills a gap between the application of atmospheric sciences, like the thermodynamic processes of clouds and dynamics of planetary boundary layer, and their application to a monument surface or a room within a museum. Sections covers applied theory, environmental issues and conservation, practical utilization, along with suggestions, examples, common issues and errors.

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.

To reduce emissions and address climate change, we need to invest in renewables and rapidly decarbonise our energy networks. However, decarbonisation is often seen as a technical project, detached from questions of politics and social justice. What if this is leading to unfair transitions, in which some people bear the costs of change while others benefit? In this timely and expansive book, Ed Atkins asks: are we getting decarbonisation right? And how could it be made better for people and communities? In doing so, this book proposes a different type of energy transition. One that prioritises and takes opportunities to do better – to provide better jobs, community ownership and improve people’s homes and lives.

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.

Coasts and Estuaries: The Future provides valuable information on how we can protect and maintain natural ecological structures while also allowing estuaries to deliver services that produce societal goods and benefits. These issues are addressed through chapters detailing case studies from estuaries and coastal waters worldwide, presenting a full range of natural variability and human pressures. Following this, a series of chapters written by scientific leaders worldwide synthesizes the problems and offers solutions for specific issues graded within the framework of the socio-economic-environmental mosaic. These include fisheries, climate change, coastal megacities, evolving human-nature interactions, remediation measures, and integrated coastal management. The problems faced by half of the world living near coasts are truly a worldwide challenge as well as an opportunity for scientists to study commonalities and differences and provide solutions. This book is centered around the proposed DAPSI(W)R(M) framework, where drivers of basic human needs requires activities that each produce pressures. The pressures are mechanisms of state change on the natural system and Impacts on societal welfare (including well-being). These problems then require responses, which are the solutions relating to governance, socio-economic and cultural measures (Scharin et al 2016).

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.

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.

'The Web of Meaning is both a profound personal meditation on human existence and a tour-de-force weaving together of historic and contemporary world-wide secular and spiritual thought on the deepest question of all: why are we here?' Gabor Mate M.D., author, In The Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters With Addiction 'We need, now more than ever, to figure out how to make all kinds of connections. This book can help--and therefore it can help with a lot of the urgent tasks we face.' Bill McKibben, author, Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out? As our civilization careens towards a precipice of climate breakdown, ecological destruction and gaping inequality, people are losing their existential moorings. Our dominant worldview of disconnection, which tells us we are split between mind and body, separate from each other, and at odds with the natural world, has passed its expiration date. Yet another world is possible. Award-winning author, Jeremy Lent, investigates humanity's age-old questions - who am I? why am I? how should I live? - from a fresh perspective, weaving together findings from modern systems thinking, evolutionary biology and cognitive neuroscience with insights from Buddhism, Taoism and indigenous wisdom. The result is a breathtaking accomplishment: a rich, coherent worldview based on a deep recognition of connectedness within ourselves, between each other, and with the entire natural world.

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.

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 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 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.

Science, which inevitably underlies environmental disputes, poses significant challenges for the scientifically untrained judges who decide such cases. In addition to disrupting ordinary fact-finding and causal inquiry, science can impact the framing of disputes and the standard of review. Judges must therefore adopt various tools to adjust the level of science allowed to enter their deliberations, which may fundamentally impact the legitimacy of their reasoning. While neglecting or replacing scientific authority can erode the convincing nature of judicial reasoning, the same authority, when treated properly, may lend persuasive force to adjudicatory findings, and buttress the legitimacy of judgments. In this work, Katalin Sulyok surveys the environmental case law of seven major jurisdictions and analyzes framing techniques, evidentiary procedures, causal inquiries and standards of review, offering valuable insight into how judges justify their choices between rival scientific claims in a convincing and legitimate manner.

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.

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.

Water scarcity is the next big climate crisis. Water stress - not just scarcity, but also water-quality issues caused by pollution - is already driving the first waves of climate refugees. Rivers are drying out before they meet the oceans and ancient lakes are disappearing. It's increasingly clear that human mismanagement of water is dangerously unsustainable, for both ecological and human survival. And yet in recent years some key countries have been quietly and very successfully addressing water stress. How are Singapore and Israel, for example - both severely water-stressed countries - not in the same predicament as Chennai or California? In The Last Drop, award-winning environmental journalist Tim Smedley meets experts, victims, activists and pioneers to find out how we can mend the water table that our survival depends upon. He offers a fascinating, universally relevant account of the environmental and human factors that have led us to this point, and suggests practical ways to address the crisis, before it's too late.

Communal-level resource management successes and failures comprise complex interactions that involve local, regional, and (increasingly) global scale political, economic, and environmental changes, shown to have recurring patterns and trajectories. The human past provides examples of long-term millennial and century-scale successes followed by undesired transitions ("collapse"), and rapid failure of collaborative management cooperation on the decadal scale. Management of scarce resources and common properties presents a critical challenge for planners attempting to avoid the "tragedy of the commons" in this century. Here, anthropologists, human ecologists, archaeologists, and environmental scientists discuss strategies for social well-being in the context of diminishing resources and increasing competition. The contributors in this volume revisit "tragedy of the commons" (also referred to as "drama" or "comedy" of the commons) and examine new data and theories to mitigate pressures and devise models for sustainable communal welfare and development. They present twelve archaeological, historic, and ethnographic cases of user-managed resources to demonstrate that very basic community-level participatory governance can be a successful strategy to manage short-term risk and benefits. The book connects past-present-future by presenting geographically and chronologically spaced out examples of communal-level governance strategies, and overviews of the current cutting-edge research. The lesson we learn from studying past responses to various ecological stresses is that we must not wait for a disaster to happen to react, but must react to mitigate conditions for emerging disasters.

This book includes a collection of essays that explore the relationship between Disability Studies and literary ecocriticism, particularly as this relationship plays out in American literature and culture. The contributors to this collection operate from the premise that there is much to be gained for both fields by putting them in conversation, and they do so in a variety of ways. In this manner, the collection contributes to what Joni Adamson and Scott Slovic have referred to as a "third wave of ecocriticism." Adamson and Slovic attribute the rise of this "third wave" to the richly diverse contributions to ecocriticism over the past decade by scholars intent on including postmodernism, ecofeminism, transnationalism, globalization, and postcolonialism into ecocritical discussions. The essays in Toward an Ecosomatic Paradigm extend this approach of this "third wave" by analyzing disability from an "environmental point of view" while simultaneously examining the environmental imagination from a disability studies perspective. More specifically, the goal of the collection is to investigate the role that literary narratives play in fostering the "ecosomatic paradigm." As a theoretical framework, the ecosomatic paradigm underscores the dynamic and inter-relational process wherein human mind-bodies interact with the places, both built and wild, they inhabit. That is, the ecosomatic paradigm proceeds from the assumption that nature and culture are meshed in an ongoing and deep relationship that has implications for both the human subject and the natural world. An ecosomatic approach highlights the profound overlap between embodiment and emplacement, and is therefore enriched by both disability studies and ecocritical insight. By drawing on points of confluence between disability studies and ecological criticism, the various ecosomatic readings in this collection challenge normative (even ableist) constructions of the body-environment dyad by complicating and expanding our understanding of this relationship as it is represented in American literature and culture. Collectively, the essays in this book augment the American environmental imagination by highlighting the relationship between disability and the environment as reflected in American literary texts across multiple periods and genres.

Read the Sunday Times bestseller that reveals the Earth’s awesome impact on the shape of human civilisations.

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Human evolution in East Africa was driven by geological forces. Ancient Greece developed democracy because of its mountainous terrain. Voting behaviour in the United States today follows the bed of an ancient sea.

Professor Lewis Dartnell takes us on an astonishing journey into our planet’s past to tell the ultimate origin story. Blending science and history, Origins reveals the Earth’s awesome impact on the shape of human civilisations – and helps us to see the challenges and opportunities of the future.