Genealogies of Environmentalism

Genealogies of Environmentalism
Author: Clarence Glacken
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
Total Pages: 316
Release: 2017-07-28
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0813939097

Clarence Glacken wrote one of the most important books on environmental issues published in the twentieth century. His magnum opus, Traces on the Rhodian Shore, first published in 1967, details the ways in which perceptions of the natural environment have profoundly influenced human enterprise over the centuries while, conversely, permitting humans to radically alter the Earth. Although Glacken did not publish a comparable book before his death in 1989, he did write a follow-up collection of essays—lost works now compiled at last in Genealogies of Environmentalism. This new volume comprises all of Glacken's unpublished writings to follow Traces and covers a broad temporal and geographic canvas, spanning the globe from the mid-eighteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries. Each essay offers a brief intellectual biography of an important environmental thinker and addresses questions such as how many people the Earth can hold, what resources can sustain such populations, and where land for growth is located. This collection—carefully edited and annotated, and organized chronologically—will prove both a classic text and a springboard for further discussions on the history of environmental thought.

The 'Ecosystem Approach' in International Environmental Law

The 'Ecosystem Approach' in International Environmental Law
Author: Vito De Lucia
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 257
Release: 2019-03-28
Genre: Law
ISBN: 1351366521

The ecosystem approach, broadly understood as a legal and governance strategy for integrated environmental and biodiversity management, has been adopted within a wide variety of international environmental legal regimes and provides a narrative, a policy approach and in some cases legally binding obligations for States to implement what has been called a ‘new paradigm’ of environmental management. In this last respect, the ecosystem approach is also often considered to offer an opportunity to move beyond the outdated anthropocentric framework underpinning much of international environmental law, thus helping re-think law in the Anthropocene. Against this background, this book addresses the question of whether the ecosystem approach represents a paradigm shift in international environmental law and governance, or whether it is in conceptual and operative continuity with legal modernity. This central question is explored through a combined genealogical and biopolitical framework, which reveals how the ecosystem approach is the result of multiple contingencies and contestations, and of the interplay of divergent and sometimes irreconcilable ideological projects. The ecosystem approach, this books shows, does not have a univocal identity, and must be understood as both signalling the potential for a decisive shift in the philosophical orientation of law and the operationalisation of a biopolitical framework of control that is in continuity with, and even intensifies, the eco-destructive tendencies of legal modernity. It is, however, in revealing this disjunction that the book opens up the possibility of moving beyond the already tired assessment of environmental law through the binary of anthropocentrism and ecocentrism.

Surroundings

Surroundings
Author: Etienne S. Benson
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 285
Release: 2020-05-15
Genre: Science
ISBN: 022670629X

Given the ubiquity of environmental rhetoric in the modern world, it’s easy to think that the meaning of the terms environment and environmentalism are and always have been self-evident. But in Surroundings, we learn that the environmental past is much more complex than it seems at first glance. In this wide-ranging history of the concept, Etienne S. Benson uncovers the diversity of forms that environmentalism has taken over the last two centuries and opens our eyes to the promising new varieties of environmentalism that are emerging today. Through a series of richly contextualized case studies, Benson shows us how and why particular groups of people—from naturalists in Napoleonic France in the 1790s to global climate change activists today—adopted the concept of environment and adapted it to their specific needs and challenges. Bold and deeply researched, Surroundings challenges much of what we think we know about what an environment is, why we should care about it, and how we can protect it.

Post-Growth Living

Post-Growth Living
Author: Kate Soper
Publisher: Verso Books
Total Pages: 241
Release: 2020-11-10
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1788738896

An urgent and passionate plea for a new and ecologically sustainable vision of the good life. The reality of runaway climate change is inextricably linked with the mass consumerist, capitalist society in which we live. And the cult of endless growth, and endless consumption of cheap disposable commodities isn't only destroying the world, it is damaging ourselves and our way of being. How do we stop the impending catastrophe, and how can we create a movement capable of confronting it head-on? In Post-Growth Living, philosopher Kate Soper offers an urgent plea for a new vision of the good life, one that is capable of delinking prosperity from endless growth. Instead, she calls for a renewed emphasis on the joys of being, one that is capable of collective happiness not in consumption but by creating a future that allows not only for more free time, and less conventional and more creative ways of using it, but also for more fulfilling ways of working and existing. This is an urgent and necessary intervention into debates on climate change.

Screen Genealogies

Screen Genealogies
Author: Craig Buckley
Publisher: Amsterdam University Press
Total Pages: 329
Release: 2019-11-15
Genre: Computers
ISBN: 9048543959

Against the grain of the growing literature on screens, *Screen Genealogies* argues that the present excess of screens cannot be understood as an expansion and multiplication of the movie screen nor of the video display. Rather, screens continually exceed the optical histories in which they are most commonly inscribed. As contemporary screens become increasingly decomposed into a distributed field of technologically interconnected surfaces and interfaces, we more readily recognize the deeper spatial and environmental interventions that have long been a property of screens. For most of its history, a screen was a filter, a divide, a shelter, or a camouflage. A genealogy stressing transformation and descent rather than origins and roots emphasizes a deeper set of intersecting and competing definitions of the screen, enabling new thinking about what the screen might yet become.

Direct Action in British Environmentalism

Direct Action in British Environmentalism
Author: Brian Doherty
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 238
Release: 2002-11
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1134547161

Direct Action in British Environmentalism is the fulllest scholarly analysis available of this phenomenon. It is essential reading for students of politics and environmental studies.

Nature's End

Nature's End
Author: S. Sörlin
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 375
Release: 2009-07-23
Genre: Science
ISBN: 0230245099

Environmental History as a distinct discipline is now over a generation old, with a large and diverse group of practitioners around the globe. This book provides a reflection on the achievements, diversity, and direction of environmental history in its varied national, international and continental contexts.

The Genealogical Adam and Eve

The Genealogical Adam and Eve
Author: S. Joshua Swamidass
Publisher: InterVarsity Press
Total Pages: 265
Release: 2019-12-10
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0830865055

What if the biblical creation account is true, with the origins of Adam and Eve taking place alongside evolution? Building on well-established but overlooked science, S. Joshua Swamidass explains how it's possible for Adam and Eve to be rightly identified as the ancestors of everyone, opening up new possibilities for understanding Adam and Eve consistent both with current scientific consensus and with traditional readings of Scripture.

The Latin American Ecocultural Reader

The Latin American Ecocultural Reader
Author: Jennifer French
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
Total Pages: 602
Release: 2020-11-15
Genre: Literary Collections
ISBN: 0810142651

The Latin American Ecocultural Reader is a comprehensive anthology of literary and cultural texts about the natural world. The selections, drawn from throughout the Spanish-speaking countries and Brazil, span from the early colonial period to the present. Editors Jennifer French and Gisela Heffes present work by canonical figures, including José Martí, Bartolomé de las Casas, Rubén Darío, and Alfonsina Storni, in the context of our current state of environmental crisis, prompting new interpretations of their celebrated writings. They also present contemporary work that illuminates the marginalized environmental cultures of women, indigenous, and Afro-Latin American populations. Each selection is introduced with a short essay on the author and the salience of their work; the selections are arranged into eight parts, each of which begins with an introductory essay that speaks to the political, economic, and environmental history of the time and provides interpretative cues for the selections that follow. The editors also include a general introduction with a concise overview of the field of ecocriticism as it has developed since the 1990s. They argue that various strands of environmental thought—recognizable today as extractivism, eco-feminism, Amerindian ontologies, and so forth—can be traced back through the centuries to the earliest colonial period, when Europeans first described the Americas as an edenic “New World” and appropriated the bodies of enslaved Indians and Africans to exploit its natural bounty.

Critical Environmental Politics

Critical Environmental Politics
Author: Carl Death
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 367
Release: 2013-12-04
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1134684061

The aim of this book is to review central concepts in the study of environmental politics and to open up new questions, problems, and research agendas in the field. The volume does so by drawing on a wide range of approaches from critical theory to poststructuralism, and spanning disciplines including international relations, geography, sociology, history, philosophy, anthropology, and political science. The 28 chapters cover a range of global and local studies, illustrations and cases. These range from the Cochabamba conference in Bolivia to climate camps in the UK; UN summits in Rio de Janeiro and Johannesburg to climate migrants from Pacific islands; forests in Indonesia to Dutch energy governance reform; indigenous communities in Namibia to oil extraction in the Niger Delta; survivalist militias in the USA to Maasai tribesmen in Kenya. Rather than following a regional or issue-based (e.g. water, forests, pollution, etc) structure, the volume is organised in terms of key concepts in the field, including those which have been central to the social sciences for a long time (such as citizenship, commodification, consumption, feminism, justice, movements, science, security, the state, summits, and technology); those which have been at the heart of environmental politics for many years (including biodiversity, climate change, conservation, eco-centrism, limits, localism, resources, sacrifice, and sustainability); and many which have been introduced to these literatures and debates more recently (biopolitics, governance, governmentality, hybridity, posthumanism, risk, and vulnerability). Features and benefits of the book: Explains the most important concepts and theories in environmental politics. Reviews the core ideas behind crucial debates in environmental politics. Highlights the key thinkers – both classic and contemporary – for studying environmental politics. Provides original perspectives on the critical potential of the concepts for future research agendas as well as for the practice of environmental politics. Each chapter is written by leading international authors in their field. This exciting new volume will be essential textbook reading for all students of environmental politics, as well as provocatively presenting the field in a different light for more established researchers.