Environmental Expertise

Environmental Expertise
Author: Esther Turnhout
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 289
Release: 2019-02-21
Genre: Nature
ISBN: 1107098742

Provides an overview of the important role that environmental experts play at the science-policy interface, and the complex challenges they face.

Engineering Nature

Engineering Nature
Author: Jessica B. Teisch
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
Total Pages: 274
Release: 2011
Genre: Science
ISBN: 0807834432

Focusing on globalization in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Jessica Teisch examines the processes by which American water and mining engineers who rose to prominence during and after the California Gold Rush of 1849 exported the United

Environmental Expertise

Environmental Expertise
Author: Esther Turnhout
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 289
Release: 2019-02-21
Genre: Science
ISBN: 1108627110

An important goal of environmental research is to inform policy and decision making. However, environmental experts working at the interface between science, policy and society face complex challenges, including how to identify sources of disagreement over environmental issues, communicate uncertainties and limitations of knowledge, and tackle controversial topics such as genetic modification and the use of biofuels. This book discusses the problems environmental experts encounter in the interaction between knowledge, society, and policy on both a practical and conceptual level. Key findings from social science research are illustrated with a range of case studies, from fisheries to fracking. The book offers guidance on how to tackle these challenges, equipping readers with tools to better understand the diversity of environmental knowledge and its role in complex environmental issues. Written by leading natural and social scientists, this text provides an essential resource for students, scientists and professionals working at the science-policy interface.

Planning for the Planet

Planning for the Planet
Author: Simone Schleper
Publisher: Berghahn Books
Total Pages: 252
Release: 2019-07-12
Genre: Nature
ISBN: 178920299X

During the 1960s and 1970s, rapidly growing environmental awareness and concern created unprecedented demand for ecological expertise and novel challenges for ecological advocacy groups such as the International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources (IUCN). This book reveals how, despite their vast scientific knowledge and their attempts to incorporate socially relevant themes, IUCN experts inevitably struggled to make global schemes for nature conservation a central concern for UNESCO, UNEP and other intergovernmental organizations.

Refining Expertise

Refining Expertise
Author: Gwen Ottinger
Publisher: NYU Press
Total Pages: 237
Release: 2013-03-04
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0814762611

Winner of the 2015 Rachel Carson Prize presented by the Society for Social Studies of Science Residents of a small Louisiana town were sure that the oil refinery next door was making them sick. As part of a campaign demanding relocation away from the refinery, they collected scientific data to prove it. Their campaign ended with a settlement agreement that addressed many of their grievances—but not concerns about their health. Yet, instead of continuing to collect data, residents began to let refinery scientists' assertions that their operations did not harm them stand without challenge. What makes a community move so suddenly from actively challenging to apparently accepting experts' authority? Refining Expertise argues that the answer lies in the way that refinery scientists and engineers defined themselves as experts. Rather than claiming to be infallible, they began to portray themselves as responsible—committed to operating safely and to contributing to the well-being of the community. The volume shows that by grounding their claims to responsibility in influential ideas from the larger culture about what makes good citizens, nice communities, and moral companies, refinery scientists made it much harder for residents to challenge their expertise and thus re-established their authority over scientific questions related to the refinery's health and environmental effects. Gwen Ottinger here shows how industrial facilities' current approaches to dealing with concerned communities—approaches which leave much room for negotiation while shielding industry's environmental and health claims from critique—effectively undermine not only individual grassroots campaigns but also environmental justice activism and far-reaching efforts to democratize science. This work drives home the need for both activists and politically engaged scholars to reconfigure their own activities in response, in order to advance community health and robust scientific knowledge about it.

A Forest on the Sea

A Forest on the Sea
Author: Karl Appuhn
Publisher: JHU Press
Total Pages: 376
Release: 2009
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 0801892619

The idea of a Venetian forestry service might strike one as the beginning of a joke. The statement that it began in the fourteenth century would surprise most people. Venice is built on a lagoon with no timber resources. This book reveals the story of Venice's attempt to establish protected forests in order to have a constant supply of wood. Beyond the need for wood for heating and cooking, tall beams of oak and beech were needed for ship building and the shoring up of breakwaters that kept the sea from flooding the city. The author follows the practice of forest conservation and management from its inception in the 1300s to the end of the eighteenth century. He details the administrative and legal debates as well as problems with the implementation of policies. This study is a corrective to histories that assume a lack of interest in forest conservation in Europe at this time. The experience of the Venetians also serves as an example for timber use and conservation today.

Discerning Experts

Discerning Experts
Author: Michael Oppenheimer
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 298
Release: 2019-03-07
Genre: Science
ISBN: 022660201X

Discerning Experts assesses the assessments that many governments rely on to help guide environmental policy and action. Through their close look at environmental assessments involving acid rain, ozone depletion, and sea level rise, the authors explore how experts deliberate and decide on the scientific facts about problems like climate change. They also seek to understand how the scientists involved make the judgments they do, how the organization and management of assessment activities affects those judgments, and how expertise is identified and constructed. Discerning Experts uncovers factors that can generate systematic bias and error, and recommends how the process can be improved. As the first study of the internal workings of large environmental assessments, this book reveals their strengths and weaknesses, and explains what assessments can—and cannot—be expected to contribute to public policy and the common good.

Itineraries of Expertise

Itineraries of Expertise
Author: Andra B. Chastain
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
Total Pages: 345
Release: 2020-03-10
Genre: History
ISBN: 0822987325

Itineraries of Expertise contends that experts and expertise played fundamental roles in the Latin American Cold War. While traditional Cold War histories of the region have examined diplomatic, intelligence, and military operations and more recent studies have probed the cultural dimensions of the conflict, the experts who constitute the focus of this volume escaped these categories. Although they often portrayed themselves as removed from politics, their work contributed to the key geopolitical agendas of the day. The paths traveled by the experts in this volume not only traversed Latin America and connected Latin America to the Global North, they also stretch traditional chronologies of the Latin American Cold War to show how local experts in the early twentieth century laid the foundation for post–World War II development projects, and how Cold War knowledge of science, technology, and the environment continues to impact our world today. These essays unite environmental history and the history of science and technology to argue for the importance of expertise in the Latin American Cold War.

Contesting Global Environmental Knowledge, Norms and Governance

Contesting Global Environmental Knowledge, Norms and Governance
Author: M. J. Peterson
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 256
Release: 2019-01-08
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1351679996

Through theoretical discussions and case studies, this volume explores how processes of contestation about knowledge, norms, and governance processes shape efforts to promote sustainability through international environmental governance. The epistemic communities literature of the 1990s highlighted the importance of expert consensus on scientific knowledge for problem definition and solution specification in international environmental agreements. This book addresses a gap in this literature – insufficient attention to the multiple forms of contestation that also inform international environmental governance. These forms include within-discipline contestation that helps forge expert consensus, inter-disciplinary contestation regarding the types of expert knowledge needed for effective response to environmental problems, normative and practical arguments about the proper roles of experts and laypersons, and contestation over how to combine globally developed norms and scientific knowledge with locally prevalent norms and traditional knowledge in ways ensuring effective implementation of environmental policies. This collection advances understanding of the conditions under which contestation facilitates or hinders the development of effective global environmental governance. The contributors examine how attempts to incorporate more than one stream of expert knowledge and to include lay knowledge alongside it have played out in efforts to create and maintain multilateral agreements relating to environmental concerns. It will interest scholars and graduate students of political science, global governance, international environmental politics, and global policy making. Policy analysts should also find it useful.

Environmental Skill

Environmental Skill
Author: Mark Coeckelbergh
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 260
Release: 2015-02-20
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1317500148

Today it is widely recognized that we face urgent and serious environmental problems and we know much about them, yet we do very little. What explains this lack of motivation and change? Why is it so hard to change our lives? This book addresses this question by means of a philosophical inquiry into the conditions of possibility for environmental change. It discusses how we can become more motivated to do environmental good and what kind of knowledge we need for this, and explores the relations between motivation, knowledge, and modernity. After reviewing a broad range of possible philosophical and psychological responses to environmental apathy and inertia, the author argues for moving away from a modern focus on either detached reason and control (Stoicism and Enlightenment reason) or the natural, the sentiments, and the authentic (Romanticism), both of which make possible disengaging and alienating modes of relating to our environment. Instead he develops the notion of environmental skill: a concept that bridges the gap between knowledge and action, re-interprets environmental virtue, and suggests an environmental ethics centered on experience, know-how and skillful engagement with our environment. The author then explores the implications of this ethics for our lives: it changes the way we think about , and deal with, health, food, animals, energy, climate change, politics, and technology.