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Books > Earth & environment > The environment
Most Americans-even environmentalists-date the emergence of laws
protecting nature to the early 1970s. But Karl Boyd Brooks shows
that, far from being a product of that activist decade, American
environmental law emerged well before the first Earth Day, often in
unexpected places far from Capitol Hill.
Surveying the landscape from the end of World War II to Earth
Day 1970, Brooks traces a dramatic shift in Americans' relationship
to the environment and the emergence of new environmental statutes.
He takes readers into legislative hearing rooms, lawyers'
conferences, and administrators' offices to describe how Americans
forged a new body of law that reflected their hopes for rescuing
the land from air pollution, deforestation, and other potential
threats. For while previous law had treated nature as a commodity,
more and more Americans had come to see it as a national treasure
worth preserving.
Brooks explores the way key features of the New Deal's legal
legacy influenced environmental law. This path-breaking
environmental history examines how cultural, intellectual, and
economic changes in postwar America brought about new solutions to
environmental problems that threatened public health and degraded
natural aesthetics. Visiting riverbanks and freeways, duck blinds
and airsheds, Before Earth Day reveals the new strategies and
efforts by which the unceasing process of legal change created
environmental law. And through real-world examples-how Los
Angelenos pressed cases about water and air quality, how an Idaho
lawyer helped clients pursue new environmental regulations, how
citizens challenged government and corporate plans to dam
rivers-Brooks demonstrates that key changes in property, procedure,
contract, and other legal rules in those early years stimulated the
national environmental laws to come.
Gracefully written and meticulously researched, Brooks's work
dramatically updates our understanding of the origins of
environmental law. By taking the postwar years more seriously, he
shows that earlier actions across the country played a central role
in shaping the structure and goals of well-known federal laws
passed during the "environmental decade" of the seventies. Before
Earth Day describes nothing less than an entirely new way of
thinking, as environmental law emerged from local jurisdictions to
reshape national agendas, firing the popular imagination and only
then remodeling law school curricula. A long-needed corrective to
standard political and legal history, it demonstrates both the
longstanding environmental concerns of Americans and the resilience
of law.
Environmental regulations provide protection to the public,
workers and the environment. To protect themselves from long-term
liabilities, however, companies have to do more than just comply
with the basic responsibilities. This handbook is designed to
introduce terminology, methodology, tools, procedures and practical
guidance for incorporating efficient pollution prevention
strategies into the overall business plan. It is a company s
responsibility to protect and control its management of waste and
pollution, and a company that fails to do so will ultimately
inflict a negative impact on its bottom line, especially in
financial performance. "Responsible Care" delivers critical
guidelines and rules of thumb required for industrial managers to
improve their companies profitability through waste reduction,
cleaner production technologies and sound management
practices."
A critical resource for approaching sustainability across the
disciplines Sustainability and social justice remain elusive even
though each is unattainable without the other. Across the
industrialized West and the Global South, unsustainable practices
and social inequities exacerbate one another. How do social justice
and sustainability connect? What does sustainability mean and, most
importantly, how can we achieve it with justice? This volume
tackles these questions, placing social justice and
interdisciplinary approaches at the center of efforts for a more
sustainable world. Contributors present empirical case studies that
illustrate how sustainability can take place without contributing
to social inequality. From indigenous land rights, climate
conflict, militarization and urban drought resilience, the book
offers examples of ways in which sustainability and social justice
strengthen one another. Through an understanding of history,
diverse cultural traditions, and complexity in relation to race,
class, and gender, this volume demonstrates ways in which
sustainability can help to shape better and more robust solutions
to the world's most pressing problems. Blending methods from the
humanities, environmental sciences and the humanistic social
sciences, this book offers an essential guide for the next
generation of global citizens.
"Rome's genial new book . . . brings to life another era."
--Nicholas Lemann, "The New Yorker
"
The first Earth Day is the most famous little-known event in modern
American history. Because we still pay ritual homage to the planet
every April 22, everyone knows something about Earth Day. Some
people may also know that Earth Day 1970 made the environmental
movement a major force in American political life. But no one has
told the whole story before.
The story of the first Earth Day is inspiring: it had a power, a
freshness, and a seriousness of purpose that are difficult to
imagine today. Earth Day 1970 created an entire green generation.
Thousands of Earth Day organizers and participants decided to
devote their lives to the environmental cause. Earth Day 1970
helped to build a lasting eco-infrastructure--lobbying
organizations, environmental beats at newspapers,
environmental-studies programs, ecology sections in bookstores,
community ecology centers.
In "The Genius of Earth Day," the prizewinning historian Adam Rome
offers a compelling account of the rise of the environmental
movement. Drawing on his experience as a journalist as well as his
expertise as a scholar, he explains why the first Earth Day was so
powerful, bringing one of the greatest political events of the
twentieth century to life.
The role of non-native species in their new environments is one of
the central issues in conservation biology and ecology today. This
book presents a comprehensive evolutionary exploration of the
complex and dynamic interactions between introduced species and
native ones, and shows that non-native species can bring useful and
important contributions to novel ecosystems. Based on a wide
variety of examples and case studies, a strong case is made for a
more positive and objective approach to non-native species and a
greater appreciation of the valuable ecosystem services they
provide.
Contested Waters provides an in-depth analysis of trans-boundary
water conflict involving the Indus Basin in Pakistan. The book
focuses on both national scale and local scale case studies to
illustrate how these water conflicts are both discursively and
materially driven by human institutions and politics. Through case
studies of controversy over large dams, local flooding and
irrigation methods, Daanish Mustafa highlights the various deeply
political and institutional factors driving water conflict -
specifically the disparity between national scale strategies of
water politics and local scale water politics - and calls for
engagement with water conflict in political terms.
As the Earth's oil supply runs out, and the effects of climate
change threaten nations and their populations, the search for
carbon-neutral sources of energy becomes more important and
increasingly urgent. This book focuses on solutions to the energy
problem, and not just the problem itself. It describes the major
energy-generation technologies currently under development, and
provides an authoritative summary of the current status of each
one. It stresses the need for a balanced portfolio of alternative
energy technologies. Certain solutions will be more appropriate
than others in particular locations, due to the differences in
availability of natural resources such as solar, wind, wave, tidal
and geothermal. In addition, nuclear options (both fission and
fusion), as well as technologies such as fuel cells, photovoltaics,
artificial photosynthesis and hydrogen (as an energy carrier), all
have a potential role to play. A state-of-the-art critique of
energy efficiency in building design is also included. Each chapter
is written by an acknowledged international expert and provides a
non-technical overview of the competing and complementary
approaches to energy generation.
Broad in scope and comprehensive in treatment, Energy..beyond Oil
provides an authoritative synthesis of the scientific and
technological issues which are essential to the survival of the
human race in the near future. The book will be of interest and use
to graduate students and researchers in all areas of energy
studies, and will also be highly useful for policy-makers and
professionals in the environmental sector as well as a more general
readership who wish to learn more about this extremely topical
subject.
Who Needs Nuclear Power challenges conventional thinking about the
role of civil nuclear power in a rapidly changing energy context,
where new energy carriers are penetrating markets around the world.
Against the backdrop of a global energy transition and the defining
issue of Climate Change, Chris Anastasi assesses new nuclear build
in a fast-moving sector in which new technologies and practices are
rapidly emerging. He considers various countries at different
stages of nuclear industry development, and discusses their
political, legal and technical institutions that provide the
framework for both existing nuclear facilities and new build, as
well as a country's technical capability. He also highlights the
critical issue of nuclear safety culture, exploring how
organisations go about instilling it and maintaining it in their
operations and encouraging it in their supply chains; the critical
role played by independent regulators and international
institutions in ensuring the integrity of the industry is also
highlighted. This book provides a balanced and holistic view of
nuclear power for both an expert and non-expert audience, and a
realistic assessment of the potential for this technology over the
critical period to 2050 and beyond.
This important collection of essays from the leading writers in the
field, focuses on the importance of taking environmental issues
into account in the process of development and poverty reduction.
This book deepens our understanding of environmental sustainability
in a context of economic
growth, putting sustainable development firmly back on the agenda.
In Navigating History: Economy, Society, Knowledge, and Nature the
contributors present new research that touches on the core themes
developed in Karel Davids's work. Major themes include resources of
knowledge, cultures of learning, and humans and their natural
environment. Together, these fourteen essays provide a fascinating
panorama of social, economic, and environmental history of the past
millennium.
Many people see a weak association between marketing and
sustainable development and even consider them as two incompatible
fields. However, marketing benefits from an extremely powerful
position to encourage transformations at the production level and
to guide consumers towards responsible behaviors. From its
inception, marketing has been positioned as a support for the
relationship between the company and its customers, with the quest
for well-being set in the very foundations of the discipline. In a
context that is marked by crises and much skepticism, marketing
today should, more than ever, prove that it acts in good faith.
This book offers practitioners, public authorities, professors and
students illustrations that demonstrate that the dissemination of
sustainable practices is indeed a marketing issue. It argues that
it is particularly important not only to overcome the divide
between the concepts of marketing and sustainability, but also to
use marketing tools and frameworks to support sustainable
development and strengthen the green market.
This book provides information and resources to city planners and
other public policy officials on the importance of smart
sustainable cities and their relationship with urban
knowledge-based economy. It answers important topical questions
relating to urban sustainable development and human well-being,
namely, how can we implement policies and programs that can make
cities “smart” and boost their knowledge-based development? How
can such programs reduce inequalities and enhance the environment
where people live and work? The authors suggest a new approach to
the creation of sustainable smart cities, not only in metropolises
but also in smaller urban spaces. They advance the body of
knowledge in entrepreneurship literature by examining both the
European regional understanding of entrepreneurship and the quality
of life and well-being at city levels. They also provide synthetic
indexes to assess the relationship between perceived quality of
life and entrepreneurship. This book stimulates the debate
on the role of smart cities in promoting entrepreneurship, which is
a currently under-investigated topic in Europe, and is of interest
to a wide range of practitioners, professionals and academics in
the area of well-being and quality of life research, urban studies,
public policy, and sustainable development.
This book is available as open access through the Bloomsbury Open
Access programme and is available on www.bloomsburycollections.com.
Drawing on a wide range of examples from literature, comics, film,
television and digital media, Nerd Ecology is the first substantial
ecocritical study of nerd culture's engagement with environmental
issues. Exploring such works as Star Trek, Tolkien's Lord of the
Rings, The Matrix, Joss Whedon's Buffy the Vampire Slayer and
Firefly, the fiction of Thomas Pynchon, The Hunger Games, and
superhero comics such as Green Lantern and X-Men, Anthony Lioi maps
out the development of nerd culture and its intersections with the
most fundamental ecocritical themes. In this way Lioi finds in the
narratives of unpopular culture - narratives in which marginalised
individuals and communities unite to save the planet - the building
blocks of a new environmental politics in tune with the concerns of
contemporary ecocritical theory and practice.
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