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The untold history of how people came to conceive, to manage, and to dispute environmental crisis, The Environment is essential reading for anyone who wants to help protect the environment from the numerous threats it faces today.
Written to allay children's fears about the environment, this book shows how smart technologies, innovative ideas, and a growing commitment to alternative lifestyles are exploding around the world, creating a future that will be brighter than we sometimes might think. Includes profiles of unexpected personalities.
You Can Help Our Earth Live Longer! Everything we do has an impact on the world around us--from the clothes we wear and food we eat to the gardens we grow and the trash we throw away. And to take the best care of the earth--and ourselves--it's important to make smart choices. With The Everything Kids' Environment Book, you'll find out what you can do every day to help protect our planet. You'll also learn why the rainforest is so important to us, how animals go extinct, and what environmentalists can tell us about taking good care of our world. Learn how to "go green" and to: Find new uses for recycled grocery bags. Create your own greenhouse. Make acid rain--safely!--to see how it affect plants. Test organic food against foods grown with chemicals. Make your own compost pile. Re-create deforestation with the soil from timbered trees. Test your sensitivity to noise. Whether you are in the classroom, surfing the Internet, or just hanging out with your friends, you can make a difference. Start today--so our Earth can live another 4.5 billion years!
"Outstanding . . . a wide-ranging invitation to think through the moral ramifications of our eating habits." —The New Yorker One of the New York Times Book Review's Ten Best Books of the Year and Winner of the James Beard Award Author of This is Your Mind on Plants, How to Change Your Mind and the #1 New York Times Bestseller In Defense of Food and Food Rules What should we have for dinner? Ten years ago, Michael Pollan confronted us with this seemingly simple question and, with The Omnivore’s Dilemma, his brilliant and eye-opening exploration of our food choices, demonstrated that how we answer it today may determine not only our health but our survival as a species. In the years since, Pollan’s revolutionary examination has changed the way Americans think about food. Bringing wide attention to the little-known but vitally important dimensions of food and agriculture in America, Pollan launched a national conversation about what we eat and the profound consequences that even the simplest everyday food choices have on both ourselves and the natural world. Ten years later, The Omnivore’s Dilemma continues to transform the way Americans think about the politics, perils, and pleasures of eating.
What on Earth? The Environment is a simple first introduction to the environment—the air, soil, water, plants, and animals. How do we as humans slot into the natural world around us and how do our actions affect the environment? What on Earth can we do about it? The book contains three different types of pages: Explore, Investigate, and Create. This structure provides a child-led and hands-on way for children to learn about the world around them. Create pages consist of fun crafts and activities to give children a chance to play and have fun while learning.
Mexican Americans have traditionally had a strong land ethic, believing that humans must respect la tierra because it is the source of la vida. As modern market forces exploit the earth, communities struggle to control their own ecological futures, and several studies have recorded that Mexican Americans are more impacted by environmental injustices than are other national-origin groups. In our countryside, agricultural workers are poisoned by pesticides, while farmers have lost ancestral lands to expropriation. And in our polluted inner cities, toxic wastes sicken children in their very playgrounds and homes. This book addresses the struggle for environmental justice, grassroots democracy, and a sustainable society from a variety of Mexican American perspectives. It draws on the ideas and experiences of people from all walks of life—activists, farmworkers, union organizers, land managers, educators, and many others—who provide a clear overview of the most critical ecological issues facing Mexican-origin people today. The text is organized to first provide a general introduction to ecology, from both scientific and political perspectives. It then presents an environmental history for Mexican-origin people on both sides of the border, showing that the ecologically sustainable Norteño land use practices were eroded by the conquest of El Norte by the United States. It finally offers a critique of the principal schools of American environmentalism and introduces the organizations and struggles of Mexican Americans in contemporary ecological politics. Devon Peña contrasts tenets of radical environmentalism with the ecological beliefs and grassroots struggles of Mexican-origin people, then shows how contemporary environmental justice struggles in Mexican American communities have challenged dominant concepts of environmentalism. Mexican Americans and the Environment is a didactically sound text that introduces students to the conceptual vocabularies of ecology, culture, history, and politics as it tells how competing ideas about nature have helped shape land use and environmental policies. By demonstrating that any consideration of environmental ethics is incomplete without taking into account the experiences of Mexican Americans, it clearly shows students that ecology is more than nature study but embraces social issues of critical importance to their own lives.
The politics of scientific advice across four environmental conflicts in Chile, when the state acted as a “neutral broker” rather than protecting the common good. In Science and Environment in Chile, Javiera Barandiarán examines the consequences for environmental governance when the state lacks the capacity to produce an authoritative body of knowledge. Focusing on the experience of Chile after it transitioned from dictatorship to democracy, she examines a series of environmental conflicts in which the state tried to act as a “neutral broker” rather than the protector of the common good. She argues that this shift in the role of the state—occurring in other countries as well—is driven in part by the political ideology of neoliberalism, which favors market mechanisms and private initiatives over the actions of state agencies. Chile has not invested in environmental science labs, state agencies with in-house capacities, or an ancillary network of trusted scientific advisers—despite the growing complexity of environmental problems and increasing popular demand for more active environmental stewardship. Unlike a high modernist “empire” state with the scientific and technical capacity to undertake large-scale projects, Chile's model has been that of an “umpire” state that purchases scientific advice from markets. After describing the evolution of Chilean regulatory and scientific institutions during the transition, Barandiarán describes four environmental crises that shook citizens' trust in government: the near-collapse of the farmed salmon industry when an epidemic killed millions of fish; pollution from a paper and pulp mill that killed off or forced out thousands of black-neck swans; a gold mine that threatened three glaciers; and five controversial mega-dams in Patagonia.
Howard T. Odum possessed one of the most innovative minds of the twentieth century. He pioneered the fields of ecological engineering, ecological economics, and environmental accounting, working throughout his life to better understand the interrelationships of energy, environment, and society and their importance to the well-being of humanity and the planet. This volume is a major modernization of Odum's classic work on the significance of power and its role in society, bringing his approach and insight to a whole new generation of students and scholars. For this edition Odum refines his original theories and introduces two new measures: emergy and transformity. These concepts can be used to evaluate and compare systems and their transformation and use of resources by accounting for all the energies and materials that flow in and out and expressing them in equivalent ability to do work. Natural energies such as solar radiation and the cycling of water, carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen are diagrammed in terms of energy and emergy flow. Through this method Odum reveals the similarities between human economic and social systems and the ecosystems of the natural world. In the process, we discover that our survival and prosperity are regulated as much by the laws of energetics as are systems of the physical and chemical world.
To date, U.S. law has largely served as an obstacle to an honest assessment of our preparedness to face the climate change challenge. Given that society has become comfortable amidst mild climatic conditions, and given a pervasive reluctance to change, extreme and abrupt climatic changes will hit hard. Our current legal structure maintains a dangerous status quo and it is time to unleash the potential of communities and the private sector to produce innovative solutions. This book, the fourth in a series by the Environmental Law Collaborative, addresses disruption from a variety of influences and perspectives. Some essays consider the disruptive effects of environmental changes on human and ecological safety, security, and well-being, suggesting that the impacts of climate changes are not accounted for in the current legal system. Some identify key changes needed to respond to climatic challenges, social inequities, and dwindling grey and green resources. Others deconstruct social, political, and professional frameworks to understand how such influences might be used to disrupt the current regime, or even ones where expectations are being disrupted with the endorsement of law. Taken together, these essays provide an understanding of the cause, effect, and opportunity that environmental disruption presents in the climate change era.
Environment and Society connects the core themes of environmental studies to the urgent issues and debates of the twenty-first century. In an era marked by climate change, rapid urbanization, and resource scarcity, environmental studies has emerged as a crucial arena of study. Assembling canonical and contemporary texts, this volume presents a systematic survey of concepts and issues central to the environment in society, such as: social mobilization on behalf of environmental objectives; the relationships between human population, economic growth and stresses on the planet’s natural resources; debates about the relative effects of collective and individual action; and unequal distribution of the social costs of environmental degradation. Organized around key themes, with each section featuring questions for debate and suggestions for further reading, the book introduces students to the history of environmental studies, and demonstrates how the field’s interdisciplinary approach uniquely engages the essential issues of the present.
