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Energy is central to the fabric of society. This book revisits the classic notions of energy impacts by examining the social effects of resource extraction and energy projects which are often overlooked. Energy impacts are often reduced to the narrow configurations of greenhouse gas emissions, chemical spills or land use changes. However, this neglects the fact that the way we produce, distribute and consume energy shapes society, political institutions and culture. The authors trace the impacts of contemporary energy and resource extraction developments and explain their significance for the shaping of powerful social imaginaries and a reconfiguration of political and democratic systems. Th...
This study documents and analyses the social impacts of fracking and natural gas developments across five locations in England. The primary data were derived from anthropological fieldwork, including interviews and observations, conducted over a period of four years, between 2016 and 2020. The objectives of this study were to: - document the lived experiences of those who lived, worked and protested in the vicinity of gas developments; - establish, analyse and compare the social impact of gas exploration projects across five different locations in England; - identify the affected and other relevant communities as well as any distributional inequalities across different groups of stakeholders; - explore the relationship between natural gas developments and social, psychological, health and political outcomes; - underscore the relevance of social impacts for determining any potential unconventional gas developments and political decision-making in the UK.
A thorough understanding of social and psychological factors as well as public understanding of risk is central to taking informed decisions about shale gas exploration and extraction in Lancashire and the UK. On the basis of existing evidence and the research conducted for this report, it is evident that the failure to consider these aspects of shale gas development significantly understates its actual and potential impacts, which may alter the planning balance in favour of development. From a social point of view, assessing shale gas exploration and extraction as a low-impact activity is unsupported by evidence. A social impact assessment should be fundamental in all political and local decision-making about shale gas development that prioritises public health and social well-being.
The liberal representative model of democracy is in a crisis. In protest camps, neighbourhood assemblies and through other non-hierarchical initiatives, the Occupy movement as well as other recent anti-austerity movements are redefining democracy as a positive way to engage with this crisis. The more direct democratic models of organisation that they are employing are not aimed at making the politicians regain their lost public legitimacy. Instead, direct democracy is perceived by these movements as a radical alternative to the established forms of representation. Can direct democracy become an actual alternative to representative democracy? This book takes an engaged and in-depth look at th...
This book identifies second stage challenges and opportunities for expanding renewable energy into a mainstay of electricity generation that can replace fossil fuels and nuclear power, comparing Japan with several countries in East Asia and Northern Europe. Environmentally sustainable renewable energy technologies have now overtaken fossil fuel and nuclear technologies in terms of total global investment, and the costs of these technologies and related ones (e.g. storage batteries) are rapidly falling. Yet renewable energy use varies greatly from country to country. Major second stage obstacles to replacing fossil and nuclear-fueled electricity generation include the lack of electricity grid...
This book provides an innovative analysis and interpretation of the overall trajectory of the Western European radical left from 1989 to 2015. After the collapse of really existing communism, this party family renewed itself and embarked on a recovery path, seeking to fill the vacuum of representation of disaffected working-class and welfarist constituencies created by the progressive neoliberalisation of European societies. The radical left thus emerged as a significant factor of contemporary political life but, despite some electoral gains and a few recent breakthroughs (SYRIZA in Greece, PODEMOS in Spain), it altogether failed to embody a credible alternative to neoliberalism and to pave ...
The Routledge Handbook of Social Studies of Outer Space offers state-of-the-art overview of contemporary social and cultural research on outer space. International in scope, the thirty-eight contributions by over fifty leading researchers and artists across a variety of disciplines and fields of knowledge, present a range of debates and pose key questions about the crafting of futures in relation to outer space. The Handbook is a call to attend more carefully to engagements with outer space, empirically, affectively, and theoretically, while characterizing current research practices and outlining future research agendas. This recalibration opens profound questions of intersectional politics,...
This volume brings together multi-method research on political mobilization in the USA, rights in Peru, peacebuilding in Croatia and Israel/Palestine, local forums in the Occupy movement and a crowd behaviors in the context of university party riots.
This book applies a critical perspective to anthropogenic climate change and the global socio-ecological crisis. The book focuses on the critical anthropology of climate change by opening up a dialogue with the two main contending perspectives in the field, namely the cultural ecological and the cultural interpretive perspectives. Guided by these, the authors take a firm stance on the types of changes that are needed to sustain life on Earth as we know it. Within this framework, they explore issues of climate and social equity, the nature of the current era in Earth’s geohistory, the perspectives of the elite polluters driving climate change, and the regrettable contributions of anthropolo...
Alan Tootill's first volume of Fracking The UK discussed the threat to Britain of a new dash for gas. It concluded that the US experience shows the UK government's imposition of shale gas exploration on an unwilling public is ill-judged and unacceptable. Published in March 2013, this remains an essential primer to fracking and how it might affect the UK. In this new volume, Alan Tootill covers the events in the UK since 2013, and with the struggle against fracking winning the political argument in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, concentrates on the English dimension to the continuing war against an unwanted industrialisation of our countryside and unwarranted attack on environmental and human health, human rights and local democracy.