The Environmentalist's Dilemma

The Environmentalist's Dilemma
Author: Arno Kopecky
Publisher:
Total Pages:
Release: 2021-10-19
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 9781770416093

In The Environmentalist's Dilemma, award-winning journalist Arno Kopecky zeroes in on the core predicament of our times: the planet may be dying, but humanity's doing better than ever. Inquisitive and relatable, he guides us through the moral minefields of our polarized world.

Toward Unity among Environmentalists

Toward Unity among Environmentalists
Author: Bryan G. Norton
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 304
Release: 1994-09-01
Genre: Science
ISBN: 0195357523

Today, six out of ten Americans describe themselves as "active" environmentalists or as "sympathetic" to the movement's concerns. The movement, in turn, reflects this millions-strong support in its diversity, encompassing a wide spectrum of causes, groups, and sometimes conflicting special interests. For far-sighted activists and policy makers, the question is how this diversity affects the ability to achieve key goals in the battle against pollution, erosion, and out-of-control growth. This insightful book offers an overview of the movement -- its past as well as its present -- and issues the most persuasive call yet for a unified approach to solving environmental problems. Focusing on examples from resource use, pollution control, protection of species and habitats, and land use, the author shows how the dynamics of diversity have actually hindered environmentalists in the past, but also how a convergence of these interests around forward-looking policies can be effected, despite variance in value systems espoused. The book is thus not only an assessment of today's movement, but a blueprint for action that can help pull together many different concerns under a common banner. Anyone interested in environmental issues and active approaches to their solution will find the author's observations both astute and creative.

Engaging the Everyday

Engaging the Everyday
Author: John M. Meyer
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 265
Release: 2015-03-13
Genre: Nature
ISBN: 0262527383

"Meyer pioneers a uniquely political approach to environmental social criticism that follows from a startling central propostion: that it is not outright oppression and denialism that are the most significant impediments but what he aptly terms the 'resonance dilemma.' This is the failure of climate and environmental challenges - however important we may grant that they are - to strike us as integral everyday concerns. This lively, eloquent, accessible volume models the very style of social criticism that it calls for in response to this dilemma: a 'resonant' environmental criticism that works on (rather than against) everyday practices." Lisa Disch, Department of Political Science, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, author of Hannah Arendt and the Limits of Philosophy.

The Omnivore's Dilemma

The Omnivore's Dilemma
Author: Michael Pollan
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 481
Release: 2007-08-28
Genre: Health & Fitness
ISBN: 0143038583

"Outstanding . . . a wide-ranging invitation to think through the moral ramifications of our eating habits." —The New Yorker One of the New York Times Book Review's Ten Best Books of the Year and Winner of the James Beard Award Author of This is Your Mind on Plants, How to Change Your Mind and the #1 New York Times Bestseller In Defense of Food and Food Rules What should we have for dinner? Ten years ago, Michael Pollan confronted us with this seemingly simple question and, with The Omnivore’s Dilemma, his brilliant and eye-opening exploration of our food choices, demonstrated that how we answer it today may determine not only our health but our survival as a species. In the years since, Pollan’s revolutionary examination has changed the way Americans think about food. Bringing wide attention to the little-known but vitally important dimensions of food and agriculture in America, Pollan launched a national conversation about what we eat and the profound consequences that even the simplest everyday food choices have on both ourselves and the natural world. Ten years later, The Omnivore’s Dilemma continues to transform the way Americans think about the politics, perils, and pleasures of eating.

The Skeptical Environmentalist

The Skeptical Environmentalist
Author: Bjørn Lomborg
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 546
Release: 2001-08-30
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 113964369X

The Skeptical Environmentalist challenges widely held beliefs that the environmental situation is getting worse and worse. The author, himself a former member of Greenpeace, is critical of the way in which many environmental organisations make selective and misleading use of the scientific evidence. Using the best available statistical information from internationally recognised research institutes, Bjørn Lomborg systematically examines a range of major environmental problems that feature prominently in headline news across the world. His arguments are presented in non-technical, accessible language and are carefully backed up by over 2500 footnotes allowing readers to check sources for themselves. Concluding that there are more reasons for optimism than pessimism, Bjørn Lomborg stresses the need for clear-headed prioritisation of resources to tackle real, not imagined problems. The Skeptical Environmentalist offers readers a non-partisan stocktaking exercise that serves as a useful corrective to the more alarmist accounts favoured by campaign groups and the media.

Ghostworkers and Greens

Ghostworkers and Greens
Author: Adam Tompkins
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Total Pages: 247
Release: 2016-04-19
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1501704206

Throughout the twentieth century, despite compelling evidence that some pesticides posed a threat to human and environmental health, growers and the USDA continued to favor agricultural chemicals over cultural and biological forms of pest control. In Ghostworkers and Greens, Adam Tompkins reveals a history of unexpected cooperation between farmworker groups and environmental organizations. Tompkins shows that the separate movements shared a common concern about the effects of pesticides on human health. This enabled bridge-builders within the disparate organizations to foster cooperative relationships around issues of mutual concern to share information, resources, and support.Nongovernmental organizations, particularly environmental organizations and farmworker groups, played a key role in pesticide reform. For nearly fifty years, these groups served as educators, communicating to the public scientific and experiential information about the adverse effects of pesticides on human health and the environment, and built support for the amendment of pesticide policies and the alteration of pesticide use practices. Their efforts led to the passage of more stringent regulations to better protect farmworkers, the public, and the environment. Environmental organizations and farmworker groups also acted as watchdogs, monitoring the activity of regulatory agencies and bringing suit when necessary to ensure that they fulfilled their responsibilities to the public. These groups served as not only lobbyists but also essential components of successful democratic governance, ensuring public participation and more effective policy implementation.

Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist and Other Essays

Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist and Other Essays
Author: Paul Kingsnorth
Publisher: Graywolf Press
Total Pages: 297
Release: 2017-08-01
Genre: Literary Collections
ISBN: 1555979726

A provocative and urgent essay collection that asks how we can live with hope in “an age of ecocide” Paul Kingsnorth was once an activist—an ardent environmentalist. He fought against rampant development and the depredations of a corporate world that seemed hell-bent on ignoring a looming climate crisis in its relentless pursuit of profit. But as the environmental movement began to focus on “sustainability” rather than the defense of wild places for their own sake and as global conditions worsened, he grew disenchanted with the movement that he once embraced. He gave up what he saw as the false hope that residents of the First World would ever make the kind of sacrifices that might avert the severe consequences of climate change. Full of grief and fury as well as passionate, lyrical evocations of nature and the wild, Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist gathers the wave-making essays that have charted the change in Kingsnorth’s thinking. In them he articulates a new vision that he calls “dark ecology,” which stands firmly in opposition to the belief that technology can save us, and he argues for a renewed balance between the human and nonhuman worlds. This iconoclastic, fearless, and ultimately hopeful book, which includes the much-discussed “Uncivilization” manifesto, asks hard questions about how we’ve lived and how we should live.

The Natural Alien

The Natural Alien
Author: Lorne Leslie Neil Evernden
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
Total Pages: 196
Release: 1993-01-01
Genre: Nature
ISBN: 9780802077851

In this eloquent and sympathetic book, Evernden evaluates the international environmental movement and the underlying assumptions that could doom it to failure. Beginning with a simple definition of environmentalists as "those who confess a concern for the non-human," he reviews what is inherent in industrial societies to make them so resistant to the concerns of environmentalists. His analysis draws on citing such diverse sources as Merleau-Ponty, Heidegger, and TIME, and examines how we tend to think about the world and how we might think about it. The book does not offer solutions to environmental questions, but it does offer the hope that there can be new ways of thinking and flexibility in human/environmental relations. Although humans seem alienated from our the natural world, we can develop a new understanding of `self in the world.' The second edition has a new preface and an epilogue in which Evernden analyses the latest environmental catch-phrase: sustainable development.

Water

Water
Author: Marq De Villiers
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Total Pages: 372
Release: 2001
Genre: Nature
ISBN: 9780618127443

This book provides an eye-opening account of how we are using, misusing and abusing our planet's most vital resource.

Supply-Side Sustainability

Supply-Side Sustainability
Author: Timothy F. H. Allen
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Total Pages: 478
Release: 2003-02-19
Genre: Science
ISBN: 0231504071

While environmentalists insist that lower rates of consumption of natural resources are essential for a sustainable future, many economists dismiss the notion that resource limits act to constrain modern, creative societies. The conflict between these views tinges political debate at all levels and hinders our ability to plan for the future. Supply-Side Sustainability offers a fresh approach to this dilemma by integrating ecological and social science approaches in an interdisciplinary treatment of sustainability. Written by two ecologists and an anthropologist, this book discusses organisms, landscapes, populations, communities, biomes, the biosphere, ecosystems and energy flows, as well as patterns of sustainability and collapse in human societies, from hunter-gatherer groups to empires to today's industrial world. These diverse topics are integrated within a new framework that translates the authors' advances in hierarchy and complexity theory into a form useful to professionals in science, government, and business. The result is a much-needed blueprint for a cost-effective management regime, one that makes problem-solving efforts themselves sustainable over time. The authors demonstrate that long-term, cost-effective resource management can be achieved by managing the contexts of productive systems, rather than by managing the commodities that natural systems produce.