You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
Mountains bear the imprint of human activity. Deep scars from logging and surface mining crosscut the landmarks of sports and recreation - national parks and lookout areas, ski slopes and lodges. Although the environmental effects of extractive industries are well known, skiing is more likely to bring to mind images of luxury, wealth, and health. In Making Meaning out of Mountains, Mark Stoddart draws on interviews, field observations, and media analysis to explore how the ski industry in British Columbia has helped transform mountain environments and, in turn, how skiing has come to be inscribed with multiple, often conflicted meanings informed by power struggles rooted in race, class, and ...
Mountains bear the imprint of human activity. Scars from logging and surface mining sit alongside national parks and ski lodges. Although the environmental effects of extractive industries are well known, skiing is more likely to bring to mind images of luxury, wealth, and health. In Making Meaning out of Mountains, Mark Stoddart draws on interviews, field observations, and media analysis to reveal the multiple, often conflicting meanings attached to skiing in British Columbia. Corporate leaders promote the industry as sustainable development, while environmentalists and some First Nations argue that skiing sacrifices wildlife habitats and traditional lands to tourism and corporate gain. Skiers themselves appreciate the opportunity to commune with nature but are concerned about skiing’s environmental impact. This multilayered analysis not only challenges us to reflect more seriously on skiing’s negative effects, it also brings to light how certain groups came to be viewed as the “natural” inhabitants and legitimate managers of mountain environments.
This book examines the “oil-tourism interface”, the broad range of direct and indirect contact points between offshore oil extraction and nature-based tourism. Offshore oil extraction and nature-based tourism are pursued as development paths across the North Atlantic region. Offshore oil promises economic benefits from employment and royalty payments to host societies, but is based on fossil fuel-intensive resource extraction. Nature-based tourism, instead, is based on experiencing natural environments and encountering wildlife, including whales, seals, or seabirds. They share social-ecological space, such as oceans, coastlines, cities and towns where tourism and offshore oil operations and offices are located. However, they rarely share cultural or political space, in terms of media coverage, public debate, or policy discussion that integrates both modes of development. Through a comparative analysis of Denmark, Iceland, Newfoundland and Labrador, Norway, and Scotland, this book offers important lessons for how coastal societies can better navigate relationships between resource extraction and nature-based tourism in the interests of social-ecological wellbeing.
An insightful guide to understanding conflicts over the conservation of biodiversity and groundbreaking strategies to deal with them.
This book offers a critical analysis of core concepts that have influenced contemporary conversations about environment-society relations in academic, political, and civil circles. Considering these conceptualizations are currently shaping responses to environmental crises in fundamental ways, critical reflections on concepts such as the Anthropocene, metabolism, risk, resilience, environmental governance, environmental justice and others, are well-warranted. Contributors to this volume, working across a multitude of areas within environmental social science, scrutinize underlying worldviews and assumptions, asking a common set of key questions: What are the different concepts able to explain? How do they take into account society-environment relations? What social, cultural, or geo-political biases and blinders are inherent? What actions or practices do the concepts inspire? The transdisciplinary engagement and reflexivity regarding concepts of environment-society relations represented in these chapters is needed in all spheres of society—in academia, policy and practice—not the least to confront current tendencies of anti-reflexivity and denialism.
Social scientists' autobiographies can yield insight into personal commitments to research agendas and the very project of social science itself. But despite the long history of life writing, sociologists have tended to view the practice with skepticism. Canadian Sociologists in the First Person is the first book to survey the Canadian sociological imagination through personal recollections. Exploring the lives and experiences of twenty contributors from across the country, this book connects the unique and shared features of their careers to broad social dynamics while providing a guide to their own research and administrative contributions to their universities, their profession, and their...
This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to read on the Oxford Academic platform and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations. Understanding climate obstruction is foundational to advancing effective action on the global climate crisis. Starting in the late 1980s, a broad range of actors--including corporations and trade associations acting in coordination with conservative think tanks, foundations, and public relations firms--mounted a long-term effort to oppose action to mitigate the greenhouse gas emissions responsible for climate change. This is the first book to document the developmen...
This handbook is currently in development, with individual articles publishing online in advance of print publication. At this time, we cannot add information about unpublished articles in this handbook, however the table of contents will continue to grow as additional articles pass through the review process and are added to the site. Please note that the online publication date for this handbook is the date that the first article in the title was published online.
The ravages of climate change emerged as a central issue in the 21st century. In the U.S., the political divide over climate change and how to confront it expanded. While Democrats became increasingly determined to join international efforts led by the United Nations to combat climate change, Republicans largely balked. The country embraced climate leadership when led by Obama and Biden but when led by Bush and Trump, a rebuff ensued. Those opposing climate action included the fossil fuel industries and others that sought to profit from the status quo. Climate crisis activism of the 21st century is the story of the tension between those wishing to continue business as usual and those seeing their futures directly impacted by such choices and demanding climate justice. This is a guide to understanding climate policy and activism, highlighting the participants, the progression of environmental science, and the pendulum of national policy under changing parties in power.
This original book analyses and reimagines the concept of sustainable development in international law from a non-Western legal perspective. Built upon the intersection of law, politics, and history in the context of Africa, its peoples and their experiences, customary law and other legal cosmologies, this ground-breaking study applies a critical legal analysis to Africa's interaction with conceptualising and operationalising sustainable development. It proposes a turn to non-Western legal normativity as the foundational principle for reimagining sustainable development in international law. It highlights eco-legal philosophies and principles in remaking sustainable development where ecological integrity assumes a central focus in the reimagined conceptualisation and operationalisation of sustainable development. While this pioneering book highlights Africa as its analytical pivot, its arguments and proposals are useful beyond Africa. Connecting global discourses on nature, the environment, rights and development, Godwin Eli Kwadzo Dzah illuminates our current thinking on sustainable development in international law.