This book discusses the poor and people of color and their struggle to take control of one of the most basic aspects of their lives: the quality of their environment. It exposes the fact of environmental inequity and its consequences in face of general neglect by policymakers and social scientists.
This book discusses the poor and people of color and their struggle to take control of one of the most basic aspects of their lives: the quality of their environment. It exposes the fact of environmental inequity and its consequences in face of general neglect by policymakers and social scientists.
A Conspiracy of Optimism explains the controversy now raging over the U.S. Forest Service’s management of America’s national forests. Confronted with the dual mandate of production and preservation, the U.S. Forest Service decided it could achieve both goals through more intensive management. For a few decades after World War Two, this “conspiracy of optimism” masked the fact that high levels of resource extraction were destroying forest ecosystems. The effects of intensive management—massive clear-cuts, polluted streams, declining wildlife populations, and marred scenery—initiated several decades of environmental conflict that continues to the present. Hirt documents the roots of this conflict and illuminates recent changes in administration and policy that suggest a hopeful future for federal lands.
The Feeling of Risk brings together the work of Paul Slovic, one of the world's leading analysts of risk, to describe the extension of risk perception research into the first decade of this new century. In this collection of important works, Paul Slovic explores the conception of 'risk as feelings' and examines the interaction of feeling and cognition in the perception of risk. He also examines the elements of knowledge, cognitive skill, and communication necessary for good decisions in the face of risk. The first section of the book looks at the difficulty of understanding risk without an emotional component, for example that disaster statistics lack emotion and thus fail to convey the true meaning of disasters and fail to motivate proper action to prevent them. The book also highlights other important perspectives on risk arising from cultural worldviews and concerns about specific hazards pertaining to blood transfusion, biotechnology, prescription drugs, smoking, terrorism, and nanotechnology. Following on from The Perception of Risk (2000), this book presents some of the most significant research on risk perception in recent years, providing essential lessons for all those involved in risk perception and communication.
This groundbreaking text provides students with an overview and assessment of green criminology as well as a call to action. Green Criminology draws attention to the ways in which the political-economic organization of capitalism causes ecological destruction and disorganization. Focusing on real-world issues of green crime and environmental justice, chapters examine ecological withdrawals, ecological additions, toxic towns, wildlife poaching and trafficking, environmental laws, and nongovernmental environmental organizations. The book also presents an unintimidating introduction to research from the physical sciences on issues such as climate change, pollution levels, and the ecological footprint of humans, providing a truly interdisciplinary foundation for green criminological analysis. To help students succeed in the course—and to encourage them to see themselves as future green criminology researchers—the end-of-chapter study guides include: • Questions and Activities for Students that review topics students should be able to conceptualize and address. • Lessons for Researchers that suggest additional areas of research in the study of green crime.
This introductory level text explores various theoretical approaches to human-environment geography, demonstrating how local dynamics and global processes influence how we interact with our environments. Introduces students to fundamental concepts in environmental geography and science Explores the core theoretical traditions within the field, along with major thematic issues such as population, food and agriculture, and water resources Offers an engaging and unique view of the spatial relationships between humans and their environment across geographical locations around the world Includes a variety of real-world policy questions and emphasizes geography’s strong tradition of field work by featuring prominent nature-society geographers in guest field notes
This book opens from the viewpoint of a four year old child who sees his father leave to fight in World War II and how it affects him. After the war our family moves into a new subdivision made up of all manner of WW II vets. Our house neighbored a five acre dairy farm. When the farm owner dies, the widow makes a bad decision that causes an invasion of rats. After a battle with the rats, the widow begins boarding horses which we were allowed to ride in exchange for caring for them. Our family fell into hard times in the mid-50's, the house was sold, and a move took place to a rural town (Arnold, Mo). The move occurred at a time which placed the author in a unique historical event, the graduation of Fox High School's very first senior class. After Graduation the author served three years in the U.S. Army, twenty six months of it in Germany. He was in Germany when the Berlin Wall was built It was also while the author was in Germany that the he received Jesus Christ as Savior. This book goes on to show what a Radical and beautiful change that Jesus makes in the Author's life to give it meaning and purpose.
Swedish immigrants began arriving in Seattle in the 1880s, and by 1900 had formed a thriving community of churches, businesses, social clubs, labor organizations, choruses, and dance groups, as well as a Swedish-language press. Their civic accomplishments are exemplified by well-known Seattle institutions founded by Swedish immigrants, including a national department store chain and a world-class medical facility, which began as Swedish Hospital. The story of the Swedish community in Seattle is also a personal history of families and friends building a new life as Americans. Swedish culture is perhaps most publicly visible in annual celebrations such as Midsummer and Lucia. A lively local interest in Swedish music and dance suggests that Swedish Seattle is not limited to residents who happen to be of Swedish descent.
This influential book describes the knowledge and skills educators need to recognize and combat the bias and inequity that undermine educational engagement for students experiencing poverty. This edition features revisions based on new research and lessons from the author’s professional development work, including the dangers of “grit” and deficit perspectives. “A must-read for educators in schools of all kinds. This accessible, highly relevant book empowers teachers with tools they can use today. Read it, talk about it with your friends and colleagues, and use it as a guide for your next project in educational activism! Our students’ school experiences will surely be better for it.” —Rethinking Schools “Provides a good overview of the topic, delivers clear, well-researched information, and helps all educators expand their knowledge of poverty and social class.” —Choice “Gorski provides practical strategies for teachers, administrators, and school staff that will help immediately improve schools, particularly for the most marginalized students.” —Cheryl Robinson, cultural competency coordinator, Alexandria City Public Schools, Virginia
Today's students want to understand not only the causes and character of global environmental problems like climate change, species extinction, and freshwater scarcity, but also what to do about them. This book offers the most comprehensive, fair-minded, accessible, and forward-looking text for introducing students to the challenge of global environmental protection. Drawing on a diverse range of voices, the book sequentially explains our current predicament, examines what is being done to respond at a variety of levels from the international to the local, and outlines different, relevant strategic choices for genuine political engagement. Developed by two top researchers and master teachers of global environmental politics, the book brings together sharply written introductory essays with tightly edited selections from a broad cross section of thinkers to provide a text that will excite and educate students of global environmental affairs. In addition, the book introduces a series of exercises designed specifically to help students draw connections between their own lives and the broader challenge of global sustainability. Global Environmental Politics: From Person to Planet finally answers the question of how to teach students about environmental harm with a sober sense of ecological reality, a firm grasp on politics, and an optimistic look toward the future. Features of This Innovative Text Reader: Original section introductions by the volume editors cover key topics such as the four major planetary challenges (climate, extinction, water, and food); leading causes of environmental harm; the role of states, markets, and civil society; race, class, and geopolitical difference; and the value of thinking strategically and using a broad political imagination. Carefully selected and judiciously edited readings from a wide range of sources feature high-profile authors from popular as well as specialist media. Action-oriented exercises engage students in being part of the solution.
Providing sweeping coverage, Global Struggles and Social Change is perfect for students and anyone interested in globalization, international and comparative politics, political sociology, and communication studies.
After centuries of neglect, the ethics of food are back with a vengeance. Justice for food workers and small farmers has joined the rising tide of concern over the impact of industrial agriculture on food animals and the broader environment, all while a global epidemic of obesity-related diseases threatens to overwhelm modern health systems. An emerging worldwide social movement has turned to local and organic foods, and struggles to exploit widespread concern over the next wave of genetic engineering or nanotechnologies applied to food. Paul B. Thompson's book applies the rigor of philosophy to key topics in the first comprehensive study explore interconnections hidden deep within this welter of issues. Bringing to bear more than thirty years of experience working closely with farmers, agricultural researchers and food system activists, he explores the eclipse of food ethics during the rise of nutritional science, and examines the reasons for its sudden re-emergence in the era of diet-based disease. Thompson discusses social injustice in the food systems of developed economies and shows how we have missed the key insights for understanding food ethics in the developing world. His discussions of animal production and the environmental impact of agriculture break new ground where most philosophers would least expect it. By emphasizing the integration of these issues, Thompson not only brings a comprehensive philosophical approach to moral issues in the production, processing, distribution, and consumption of food -- he introduces a fresh way to think about practical ethics that will have implications in other areas of applied philosophy.
This book offers an alternative analysis of the various theories and dimensions of green and environmental justice which are rooted in political economy. Much green criminological literature sidelines political economic theoretical insights and therefore with this work the authors enrich the field by vigorously exploring such perspectives. It engages with a number of studies relevant to a political economic approach to justice in order to make two key arguments: that capitalism has produced profound ecological injustices and that the concept of ecological justice (human and ecological rights) itself needs critiquing. Green Criminology and Green Theories of Justice is a timely text which urges the field to revisit its radical roots in social justice while broadening its disciplinary horizons to include a meaningful analysis of political economy and its role in producing and responding to environmental harm and injustice.
This work is organized in seven sections around major themes of socio-economics. The first section outlines socio-economics in an historical perspective, drawing on the "Methodenstreit" in the German school of economics at the turn of the century. Four additional essays view economic behaviour from the perspective of psychology, sociology and values outside the realm of economics. The second section of the book explores the process of choice and goals made by the variety of economic factors, among them factors that influence choices, values and motivations outside economics. The next two sections, each containing three papers, examine executive leadership and entrepreneurship from the broader socio-economic perspective. Section five includes papers that deal with the role of institutions in the modern political economy. It develops an institutional theory of markets, firms, human values in economic behaviour and investment in ethnic goals and morality. Section six focuses on the modern corporate culture considering collective human capital. The final three papers examine the boundaries that embrace the processes and activities of firms. They consider the bonds and relationships that develop between firms and organizations in the modern political economy.
Class, Race, Gender and Crime Social Realities of Justice in America examines how class, race, and gender affect crime and justice in contemporary American society. To this end, the authors provide a detailed and nuanced portrait of the multi-layered social reality of crime, incorporating useful historical and contemporary examples as they analyze the twin problems of crime production and crime control.
Climate change and its attendant environmental catastrophes--droughts, wildfires, floods, heat waves, and so on--are no longer a looming threat; they're here, now. In this age of well-warranted environmental panic, every trip to the grocery store or purchase from Amazon must become a full-scale research project. Are these tomatoes local? Is this water bottle BPA-free? Did I remember to bring a canvas tote, or will I have to risk contributing to landfills by accepting a plastic bag? The ethos that one person's choices can make a difference is admirable, but ultimately misguided. In Who Rules the Earth?, Paul F. Steinberg, one of America's leading scholars on the politics of environmentalism, draws from the latest social science research to explain why there is room for hope. Green consumer choices and changes in personal lifestyles are important, but they are not nearly enough. Lasting social change requires modifying the very rules that guide human behavior and shape the ways we interact with the Earth. We know these rules by familiar names like city ordinances, product design standards, purchasing agreements, public policies, cultural norms, or national constitutions. Though these rules are largely invisible to us, their impact across the world has been dramatic. By changing the rules, the Canadian province of Ontario cut the levels of pesticides in its waterways in half. The city of Copenhagen has adopted new planning codes that will reduce its carbon footprint to zero by 2025. In the United States, a handful of industry mavericks designed new rules to promote greener buildings, and transformed the world's largest industry into a more sustainable enterprise. Steinberg takes the reader on a series of journeys, from a familiar walk on the beach to a remote village deep in the jungles of Peru, helping the reader to "see" the social rules that pattern our physical reality and showing why these are the big levers that will ultimately determine the health of our planet. Unveiling the influence of social rules at all levels of society-from private property to government policy, and from the rules governing our oceans to the dynamics of innovation and change within corporations and communities-Who Rules the Earth? is essential reading for anyone interested in bringing about real environmental change"--
Key metaphors in world-system analysis are profoundly spatial, but there have been few attempts to understand how space, location, and topography affect world-system organization and process. To fill this gap, this book examines case studies of the restructuring of space and transport in core, semiperipheral, and peripheral economies. It addresses such topics as the role of ocean transport in linking terrestrially based units of the capitalist world economy, the role of land transport systems in the construction and restructuring of relationships between raw materials peripheries and core economies, and the role of the airplane in transforming and representing changing spatial, economic, and social relations in the capitalist world economy. World-systems theory and many other perspectives on the world economy, including international political economy and analysis of globalization, typically pay only limited attention to issues of space, location, and the role of transportation in the world economy. This book identifies key theoretical and empirical issues and provides the basis for formulating research strategies to address this gap in our understanding.
Key questions in food ethics-food aid, local diets, food labelling, sustainability and agricultural pollution-have been understood through a lens that takes production, processing and distribution to be general features of the industrial economy. Challenging these fundamental assumptions calls for an approach that goes beyond dietary advice. A deep inquiry into the nature of food and farming, and into the institutions that structure food purchases and environmental regulation shows how a place-based agrarian outlook reveals unappreciated philosophical complexity, opening to a more satisfactory ethos for contemporary food practices. At the same time, the promise of an alternative food ethic requires uncovering the way that traditional agrarian norms continue to be implicated in structural racism and oppression. Thompson's "agrarian pragmatism" counters mainstream applied ethics with a line of argument contrasting ethical inquiry with discourses of persuasion and social control. The book concludes with a study of how food ethics provides an entry into dialog between themes in environmental philosophy and the philosophy of race"--
This book challenges the myth that Americans' emphasis on personal fulfilment necessarily weakens commitment to the common good. Drawing on extensive participant-observation with a variety of environmentalist groups, Paul Lichterman argues that individualism sometimes enhances public, political commitment and that a shared respect for individual inspiration enables activists with diverse political backgrounds to work together. This personalised culture of commitment has sustained activists working long-term for social change. The book contrasts 'personalised politics' in mainly white environmental groups with a more traditional, community-centred culture of commitment in an African-American group. The untraditional, personalised politics of many recent social movements invites us to rethink common understandings of commitment, community, and individualism in a post-traditional world.
The benefits of modern technology often involve health, safety and environmental risks that produce public suspicion of technologies and aversion to certain products and substances. Amplified by the pervasive power of the media, public concern about health and ecological risks can have enormous economic and social impacts, such as the 'stigmatization' experienced in recent years with nuclear power, British beef and genetically modified plants. This volume presents the most current and comprehensive examination of how and why stigma occurs and what the appropriate responses to it should be to inform the public and reduce undesirable impacts. Each form of stigma is thoroughly explored through a range of case studies. Theoretical contributions look at the roles played by government and business, and the crucial impact of the media in forming public attitudes. Stigma is not always misplaced, and the authors discuss the challenges involved in managing risk and reducing the vulnerability of important products, industries and institutions while providing the public with the relevant information they need about risks.
This volume presents six major issues that have been divisive in and out of the Native American community. Readers will learn about the varied cultural, political, social, and economic dimensions of contemporary Native America and will be prompted to consider the complexity and complications of ethnic and cultural diversity in the United States. Where do you stand on the issue of sports teams named after Native Americans? Are tribal claims on ancestral remains and sacred objects in museums valid? The contemporary issues that Native Americans struggle with are critical concerns for all Americans. This volume presents six major issues that have been divisive in and out of the Native American community. Readers will learn about the varied cultural, political, social, and economic dimensions of contemporary Native America and will be prompted to consider the complexity and complications of ethnic and cultural diversity in the United States. Readers will ponder the very foundations of the United States and the rights of its original inhabitants' descendants. The range of issues encompasses Native Americans throughout the country, from the Mashpee Wampanoags of Massachusetts to Pacific Northwest tribes. This book incorporates views from a wide variety of sources, including newspaper op-eds, Supreme Court rulings, and more. A resource guide complementing each chapter includes an extensive listing of suggested reading plus videos/film, Web sites, and organizations.
One of America's most distinguished political theorists examines what happens when national politics enters a small New England town After the election of 2016 and, even more urgently, after the election of 2020, many citizens looked at the economic and cultural divisions that were causing deep disruptions in American politics and asked, "What is happening to us?" Paul W. Kahn explores these fundamental changes as they show themselves in a small New England town--his home of twenty-five years, Killingworth, Connecticut. His inquiry grounds a democratic theory that puts volunteering, not voting, at its center. Absent active participation, citizens lose the capacity for judgment that comes from working with others to solve real problems. Volunteering, however, is under existential threat today. Changes in civil society, commerce, employment, and public opinion formation have isolated families from each other and from their communities. Even middle-class families live under financial stress, uncertain of their children's future, and without the support of civil society. Local media has disappeared. Residents do not have the time, information, or interest to volunteer. Under these conditions, national polarization enters local politics, which becomes yet another site for national conflict. To save our democracy, Kahn concludes, we need to find ways of matching opportunities for participation to the ways we live our lives today.
A comprehensive yet accessible introduction to the conceptual tools used to explore real-world environmental problems Environment and Society: A Critical Introduction, Third Edition demonstrates how theoretical approaches such as environmental ethics, political economy, and social construction work as conceptual tools to identify and clarify contemporary environmental issues. Assuming no background knowledge in the subject, this reader-friendly textbook uses clear language and engaging examples to first describe nine key conceptual tools, and then apply them to a variety of familiar objects—from bottled water and French fries to trees, wolves, and carbon dioxide. Throughout the text, highly accessible chapters provide insight into the relationship between the environment and present-day society. Divided into two parts, the text begins by explaining major theoretical approaches for interpreting the environment-society relationship and discussing different perspectives about environmental problems. Part II examines a series of objects, each viewed through a sample of the theoretical tools from Part I, helping readers think critically about critical environmental topics such as deforestation, climate change, the global water supply, and hazardous e-waste. This fully revised third edition stresses a wider range of competing ways of thinking about environmental issues and features additional cases studies, up-to-date conceptual understandings, and new chapters in Part I on racializd environments and feminist approaches. Environment and Society: A Critical Introduction, Third Edition: Covers theoretical lenses such as commodities, environmental ethics, and risks and hazards, and applies them to touchstone environment-society objects like wolves, tuna, trees, and carbon dioxide Uses a conversational narrative to explain key historical events, topical issues and policies, and scientific concepts Features substantial revisions and updates, including new chapters on feminism and race, and improved maps and illustrations Includes a wealth of in-book and online resources, including exercises and boxed discussions, chapter summaries, review questions, references, suggested readings, an online test bank, and internet links Provides additional instructor support such as suggested teaching models, full-color PowerPoint slides, and supplementary teaching material Retaining the innovative approach of its predecessors, Environment and Society: A Critical Introduction, Third Edition remains the ideal textbook for courses in environmental issues, environmental science, and nature and society theory.
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