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Climate change is one of today's most important issues, presenting an intellectual challenge to the natural and social sciences. While there has been progress in natural science understanding of climate change, social science research has not been as fully developed. This collection of essays breaks new theoretical and empirical ground by presenting climate change as a thoroughly social phenomenon, embedded in our institutions and cultural practices.
Despite three decades of scientists' warnings and environmentalists' best efforts, the political will and public engagement necessary to fuel robust action on global climate change remain in short supply. Katharine K. Wilkinson shows that, contrary to popular expectations, faith-based efforts are emerging and strengthening to address this problem. In the US, perhaps none is more significant than evangelical climate care. Drawing on extensive focus group and textual research and interviews, Between God & Green explores the phenomenon of climate care, from its historical roots and theological grounding to its visionary leaders and advocacy initiatives. Wilkinson examines the movement's recepti...
Each chapter in this innovative social problems text is written by a specialist or pair of specialists from appropriate subfields within sociology. The typical single-author approach is limiting given the complexity of the contemporary issues surrounding each social problem discussed. Involving many content experts ensures that the theories, research, and examples used in each chapter will be as current and relevant as possible. Chapters open with personal statements from the contributing authors, discussing how they got involved with studying the problem they are writing about. Javier Trevino serves as the general editor, making sure that each author follows the chapter template and maintains a consistency in level and style.
"Academics have long claimed that the relationship between religion and science concerns knowledge of the physical world, and that conflict ensues because religion has one way of knowing and science another. For example, it is claimed that to find the age of the Earth religious people look to holy scripture and scientists look at the age of rocks. This book shows that this is indeed true among the elites who focus on this debate. However, contrary to the assumptions of elites and public discourse in general, that same relationship and conflict does not exist between religious citizens and science. This book shows that regular religious people in the U.S. are at most in conflict over a few fa...
Why acknowledging diverse eco-social relationships can help us overcome the political polarization that undermines our ability to protect the environment When we picture the ideal environmentalist, we likely have in mind someone who dedicates herself to reducing her own environmental footprint through individual choices about consumption—driving a fuel-efficient car, for example, or eating less meat, or refusing plastic straws. This is a benchmark that many aspire to—and many others reject. In Eco-Types, Emily Huddart Kennedy shows that there is more than one way to care about the environment, outlining a spectrum of eco-social relationships that range from engagement to indifference. Dr...
The citizens of the Marshall Islands have been told that climate change will doom their country, and they have seen confirmatory omens in the land, air, and sea. This book investigates how grassroots Marshallese society has interpreted and responded to this threat as intimated by local observation, science communication, and Biblical exegesis. With grounds to dismiss or ignore the threat, Marshall Islanders have instead embraced it; with reasons to forswear guilt and responsibility, they have instead adopted in-group blame; and having been instructed that resettlement is necessary, they have vowed instead to retain the homeland. These dominant local responses can be understood as arising from a pre-existing, vigorous constellation of Marshallese ideas termed "modernity the trickster": a historically inspired narrative of self-inflicted cultural decline and seduction by Euro-American modernity. This study illuminates islander agency at the intersection of the local and the global, and suggests a theory of risk perception based on ideological commitment to narratives of historical progress and decline.
Moving beyond existing approaches that largely deal with the biophysical consequences of climate change realities in Africa, this book explores an alternative perspective that traces climate change as a travelling idea. It focuses on how globally constructed discourses on climate change find their way to the local level in the Bamenda Grassfields of Cameroon, thereby seeking to understand how these discursive practices lead to social transformations, and to new configurations of power. In the translation process from the 'global' to the 'local' level a continuous modification and appropriation of the idea of climate change takes place that finally leads to a concrete implementation of climat...
This book does not set out once more to raise the alarm to encourage us to take radical measures to head off climate chaos. There have been any number of books and reports in recent years explaining just how dire the future looks and how little time we have left to act. This book is about why we have ignored those warnings, and why it is now too late. It is a book about the frailties of the human species as expressed in both the institutions we built and the psychological dispositions that have led us on the path of self-destruction. It is about our strange obsessions, our hubris, and our penchant for avoiding the facts. It is the story of a battle within us between the forces that should have caused us to protect the Earth - our capacity to reason and our connection to Nature - and those that, in the end, have won out - our greed, materialism and alienation from Nature. And it is about the 21st century consequences of these failures. Clive Hamilton is author of the bestselling Affluenza and Growth Fetish, of Scorcher, and most recently Freedom Paradox.
Looks at the effects climate change will have on Earth by the end of this century, focusing on a collaboration between scientists and big business to develop advances in geoengineering so that humans can fight global warming.
An original 'international political ecology' analysis of the implications of climate change and water scarcity for twenty-first-century conflict and security.