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Environmental issues have become increasingly prominent in local struggles, national debates, and international policies. In response, scholars are paying more attention to conventional politics and to more broadly defined relations of power and difference in the interactions between human groups and their biophysical environments. Such issues are at the heart of the relatively new interdisciplinary field of political ecology, forged at the intersection of political economy and cultural ecology. This volume provides a toolkit of vital concepts and a set of research models and analytic frameworks for researchers at all levels. The two opening chapters trace rich traditions of thought and prac...
This book reviews and analyzes the period (roughly from the 1950s to the present) when the "environment" became an issue as important as economic growth, or war and peace; to assess the current situation, and begin planning for the challenges that lie ahead. Most people are aware of both the environmental destruction taking place around the world and of the specter of climate change. The devastation of New Orleans by hurricane Katrina illustrates the potential for disaster when climate change is combined with the mismanaged environmental policy. How did we get to this point? What has been done and what can be done to avoid future environmental disasters? Thirty-two contributing chapter autho...
With reference to Nepal.
"The decline of coral ... if it continues ... will mark the end of one of the great beauties of creation and the end of a great hope that of discovering life forms hitherto unknown on the Earth ... Let us not forget that we are responsible to posterity for the preservation of the beauties of the sea as well as for those on land. We must learn how to make use of the biological and mineral resources of the oceans ... But we must also learn how to preserve the integrity and the equilibrium of that world which is so inextricably bound to our own." - Jacques Yves Cousteau, Excerpt from Life and Death in a Coral Sea, 1971 This book reports on the World Bank's 5th Annual Conference on Environmental...
All serious environmental threats are now international in scope and more than one thousand international environmental agreements already exist. Yet the prospects for international cooperation leading to the management of impacts on the planet remain grim. The Global Environment meets the need for an authoritative assessment of the state of international environmental institutions, laws and policies at the end of the 20th century. The book examines disagreements over the meaning of sustainable development, problems inherent in implementing environmental policies and the conflict over the exclusion of developing countries from the Kyoto Protocol. It discusses the profound trade-offs that may be required, the role of international financial interests in promoting incompatible forms of development and analyses international environmental institutions, law and policy and sustainable development.
A comparative analysis of global environmental assessments shows the importance of policy salience, scientific credibility, and social and political legitimacy in determining the influence of scientific assessments on global environmental policy.
An unflinching investigation of the false promises of land sparing, exposing how its illusory successes mask the failures of green capitalism For two decades, the concept of land sparing, the claim that agricultural intensification can spare land by preventing forest clearing for agricultural expansion, has dominated tropical forest conservation. Land sparing policies transform landscapes and livelihoods with the promise of reconciling agricultural development with environmental conservation. But that land sparing promise is false. Based on six years of research on agrarian frontiers in Indonesia, Brazil, and Bolivia, this book traces where and how land sparing becomes policy and charts the social and ecological effects of these political contests. Gregory M. Thaler explains why land sparing appears successful in some places but not in others and reveals that success as an illusion achieved by displacing deforestation to new frontiers. The failure of land sparing exposes a harsh truth behind assurances of green capitalism: capitalist development is ecocide.
Despite widespread popular support for environmental action, Phillip F. Cramer argues that current U.S. environmental policy approaches fail to address the real threat of environmental insecurity. Cramer traces this failure to a reluctance to recognize and address the interconnectedness of natural forces--just as all elements within the environment are linked, so too should our perspectives on, and responses to, environmental degradation be linked. In this book Cramer provides an innovative holistic approach to environmental protection that incorporates the best lessons learned from the fields of biology, ethics, philosophy, political science, law, ecology, and international relations. He especially advocates local action and, providing illustrative examples, demonstrates how local action around the world is most effective when carried out within a global framework that supports information dissemination and international coordination. This book will energize to thought and action any scholar, student, or general reader concerned with environmental issues and our current trajectory toward environmental decay.