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The Earth has entered a new age—the Anthropocene—in which humans are the most powerful influence on global ecology. Since the mid-twentieth century, the accelerating pace of energy use, greenhouse gas emissions, and population growth has thrust the planet into a massive uncontrolled experiment. The Great Acceleration explains its causes and consequences, highlighting the role of energy systems, as well as trends in climate change, urbanization, and environmentalism. More than any other factor, human dependence on fossil fuels inaugurated the Anthropocene. Before 1700, people used little in the way of fossil fuels, but over the next two hundred years coal became the most important energy ...
"Climate Change and US National Security is the latest report from Strategic Foresight Initiative Senior Fellow Dr. Peter Engelke and Scowcroft Center Deputy Director Dr. Daniel Y. Chiu. It is a part of the Transatlantic Partnership for the Global Future, an initiative that brings together experts from government, business, academia, and the science and technology communities to address critical global challenges and assess their effects on the future of transatlantic relations. The Partnership is a collaboration between the Strategic Foresight Initiative and the Government of Sweden"--Publisher's description.
Global Interdependence provides a new account of world history from the end of World War II to the present, an era when transnational communities began to challenge the long domination of the nation-state. In this single-volume survey, leading scholars elucidate the political, economic, cultural, and environmental forces that have shaped the planet in the past sixty years. Offering fresh insight into international politics since 1945, Wilfried Loth examines how miscalculations by both the United States and the Soviet Union brought about a Cold War conflict that was not necessarily inevitable. Thomas Zeiler explains how American free-market principles spurred the creation of an entirely new e...
A three-thousand-year history of the Yellow River and the legacy of interactions between humans and the natural landscape From Neolithic times to the present day, the Yellow River and its watershed have both shaped and been shaped by human society. Using the Yellow River to illustrate the long-term effects of environmentally significant human activity, Ruth Mostern unravels the long history of the human relationship with water and soil and the consequences, at times disastrous, of ecological transformations that resulted from human decisions. As Mostern follows the Yellow River through three millennia of history, she underlines how governments consistently ignored the dynamic interrelationsh...
With the fields of public administration and public management suffering a crisis of relevance, Alasdair Roberts offers a provocative assessment of their shortfalls. The two fields, he finds, no longer address urgent questions of governance in a turbulent and dangerous world. Strategies for Governing offers a new path forward for research, teaching, and practice. Leaders of states, Roberts writes, are constantly reinventing strategies for governing. Experts in public administration must give advice on the design as well as execution of strategies that effective, robust, and principled. Strategies for Governing challenges us to reinvigorate public administration and public management, preparing the fields for the challenges of the twenty-first century.
Global crises—from pandemics to climate change—demonstrate the vulnerability of the biosphere and each of us as individuals, calling for responses guided by creative analysis and compassionate reflection. Transforming, building on its companion volume, Awakening, explores actions that create paths of understanding and collaboration as the groundwork for transformative community. The community of scholars in this volume offers perspectives that collectively form a complex tapestry of resources. The volume engages with the complex range of challenges and possibilities across a variety of sectors, and provides an interdisciplinary approach to the prospects for transformative healing of human and non-human communities, and the global environment we inhabit. Spirituality is essential to this, and, as such, the work explores vital dimensions of emerging spiritual concepts, methods, and practices that harbor interfaith potential for genuine reconciliation and communion.
A magisterial account of how the cultural and maritime relationships between the British, Dutch and American territories changed the existing world order – and made the Industrial Revolution possible Between 1500 and 1800, the North Sea region overtook the Mediterranean as the most dynamic part of the world. At its core the Anglo-Dutch relationship intertwined close alliance and fierce antagonism to intense creative effect. But a precondition for the Industrial Revolution was also the establishment in British North America of a unique type of colony – for the settlement of people and culture, rather than the extraction of things. England’s republican revolution of 1649–53 was a spect...
Kierkegaard developed a distinctive type of sociology in the 1840s—a theological sociology. Looking at society through the lens of analysis categories such as worship, sin, and faith, Kierkegaard developed a profoundly insightful way of understanding how, for example, the modern mass media works. He gets right inside the urban world of Golden Age Denmark, and its religion, and analyses “the present age” of consumption, comfort, competition, distraction, and image-construction with astonishing depth. To Kierkegaard worship centers all individuals and all societies; hence his sociology is doxological. This book argues that we also live in the present age Kierkegaard described, and our wa...
At the beach, bodies converge with the elements and strange treasures come to light. Departing from the conventional association of modernism with the city, this book makes a case for the coastal zone as a surprisingly generative setting for twentieth-century literature and art. An unruly and elusive confluence of human and more-than-human forces, the seashore is also a space of performance—a stage for loosely scripted, improvisatory forms of embodiment and togetherness. The beach, Hannah Freed-Thall argues, was to the modernist imagination what mountains were to Romanticism: a space not merely of anthropogenic conquest but of vital elemental and creaturely connection. With an eye to the p...
This book traces the emergence of wildlife policy in colonial eastern and central Africa over the course of a century. Spanning from imperial conquest through the consolidation of colonial rule, the rise of nationalism, and the emergence of neocolonial and neoliberal institutions, this book shows how these fundamental themes of the twentieth century shaped the relationships between humans and animals in what are today Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, Zambia, and Malawi. A set of key themes emerges—changing administrative forms, militarization, nationalism, science, and a relentlessly broadening constituency for wildlife. Jeff Schauer illuminates how each of these developments were contingent upon the colonial experience, and how they fashioned a web of structures for understanding and governing wildlife in Africa—one which has lasted into the twenty-first century.