Download or read book Defiant Earth written by Clive Hamilton and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2017-06-05 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Humans have become so powerful that we have disrupted the functioning of the Earth System as a whole, bringing on a new geological epoch – the Anthropocene – one in which the serene and clement conditions that allowed civilisation to flourish are disappearing and we quail before 'the wakened giant'. The emergence of a conscious creature capable of using technology to bring about a rupture in the Earth's geochronology is an event of monumental significance, on a par with the arrival of civilisation itself. What does it mean to have arrived at this point, where human history and Earth history collide? Some interpret the Anthropocene as no more than a development of what they already know, obscuring and deflating its profound significance. But the Anthropocene demands that we rethink everything. The modern belief in the free, reflexive being making its own future by taking control of its environment – even to the point of geoengineering – is now impossible because we have rendered the Earth more unpredictable and less controllable, a disobedient planet. At the same time, all attempts by progressives to cut humans down to size by attacking anthropocentrism come up against the insurmountable fact that human beings now possess enough power to change the Earth's course. It's too late to turn back the geological clock, and there is no going back to premodern ways of thinking. We must face the fact that humans are at the centre of the world, even if we must give the idea that we can control the planet. These truths call for a new kind of anthropocentrism, a philosophy by which we might use our power responsibly and find a way to live on a defiant Earth.
Download or read book Marx and the Earth written by John Bellamy Foster and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2016-01-12 with total page 326 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A decade and a half ago John Bellamy Foster and Paul Burkett introduced a new, revolutionary understanding of the ecological foundations of Marx’s thought, demonstrating that Marx’s concepts of the universal metabolism of nature, social metabolism, and metabolic rift prefigured much of modern systems ecology. Ecological relations were shown to be central to Marx’s critique of capitalism, including his value analysis. Now in Marx and the Earth Foster and Burkett expand on this analysis in the process of responding to recent ecosocialist criticisms of Marx. The result is a full-fledged anti-critique—pointing to the crucial roles that dialectics, open-system thermodynamics, intrinsic value, and aesthetic understandings played in the original Marxian critique, holding out the possibility of a new red-green synthesis.
Download or read book The Uninhabitable Earth written by David Wallace-Wells and published by Crown. This book was released on 2019-02-19 with total page 386 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • “The Uninhabitable Earth hits you like a comet, with an overflow of insanely lyrical prose about our pending Armageddon.”—Andrew Solomon, author of The Noonday Demon NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The New Yorker • The New York Times Book Review • Time • NPR • The Economist • The Paris Review • Toronto Star • GQ • The Times Literary Supplement • The New York Public Library • Kirkus Reviews It is worse, much worse, than you think. If your anxiety about global warming is dominated by fears of sea-level rise, you are barely scratching the surface of what terrors are possible—food shortages, refugee emergencies, climate wars and economic devastation. An “epoch-defining book” (The Guardian) and “this generation’s Silent Spring” (The Washington Post), The Uninhabitable Earth is both a travelogue of the near future and a meditation on how that future will look to those living through it—the ways that warming promises to transform global politics, the meaning of technology and nature in the modern world, the sustainability of capitalism and the trajectory of human progress. The Uninhabitable Earth is also an impassioned call to action. For just as the world was brought to the brink of catastrophe within the span of a lifetime, the responsibility to avoid it now belongs to a single generation—today’s. LONGLISTED FOR THE PEN/E.O. WILSON LITERARY SCIENCE WRITING AWARD “The Uninhabitable Earth is the most terrifying book I have ever read. Its subject is climate change, and its method is scientific, but its mode is Old Testament. The book is a meticulously documented, white-knuckled tour through the cascading catastrophes that will soon engulf our warming planet.”—Farhad Manjoo, The New York Times “Riveting. . . . Some readers will find Mr. Wallace-Wells’s outline of possible futures alarmist. He is indeed alarmed. You should be, too.”—The Economist “Potent and evocative. . . . Wallace-Wells has resolved to offer something other than the standard narrative of climate change. . . . He avoids the ‘eerily banal language of climatology’ in favor of lush, rolling prose.”—Jennifer Szalai, The New York Times “The book has potential to be this generation’s Silent Spring.”—The Washington Post “The Uninhabitable Earth, which has become a best seller, taps into the underlying emotion of the day: fear. . . . I encourage people to read this book.”—Alan Weisman, The New York Review of Books
Download or read book Half Earth Our Planet s Fight for Life written by Edward O. Wilson and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2016-03-07 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "An audacious and concrete proposal…Half-Earth completes the 86-year-old Wilson’s valedictory trilogy on the human animal and our place on the planet." —Jedediah Purdy, New Republic In his most urgent book to date, Pulitzer Prize–winning author and world-renowned biologist Edward O. Wilson states that in order to stave off the mass extinction of species, including our own, we must move swiftly to preserve the biodiversity of our planet. In this "visionary blueprint for saving the planet" (Stephen Greenblatt), Half-Earth argues that the situation facing us is too large to be solved piecemeal and proposes a solution commensurate with the magnitude of the problem: dedicate fully half the surface of the Earth to nature. Identifying actual regions of the planet that can still be reclaimed—such as the California redwood forest, the Amazon River basin, and grasslands of the Serengeti, among others—Wilson puts aside the prevailing pessimism of our times and "speaks with a humane eloquence which calls to us all" (Oliver Sacks).
Download or read book Down to Earth written by Bruno Latour and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2018-11-26 with total page 140 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The present ecological mutation has organized the whole political landscape for the last thirty years. This could explain the deadly cocktail of exploding inequalities, massive deregulation, and conversion of the dream of globalization into a nightmare for most people. What holds these three phenomena together is the conviction, shared by some powerful people, that the ecological threat is real and that the only way for them to survive is to abandon any pretense at sharing a common future with the rest of the world. Hence their flight offshore and their massive investment in climate change denial. The Left has been slow to turn its attention to this new situation. It is still organized along an axis that goes from investment in local values to the hope of globalization and just at the time when, everywhere, people dissatisfied with the ideal of modernity are turning back to the protection of national or even ethnic borders. This is why it is urgent to shift sideways and to define politics as what leads toward the Earth and not toward the global or the national. Belonging to a territory is the phenomenon most in need of rethinking and careful redescription; learning new ways to inhabit the Earth is our biggest challenge. Bringing us down to earth is the task of politics today.
Download or read book Abundant Earth written by Eileen Crist and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2019-01-17 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Abundant Earth, Eileen Crist not only documents the rising tide of biodiversity loss, but also lays out the drivers of this wholesale destruction and how we can push past them. Looking beyond the familiar litany of causes—a large and growing human population, rising livestock numbers, expanding economies and international trade, and spreading infrastructures and incursions upon wildlands—she asks the key question: if we know human expansionism is to blame for this ecological crisis, why are we not taking the needed steps to halt our expansionism? Crist argues that to do so would require a two-pronged approach. Scaling down calls upon us to lower the global human population while working within a human-rights framework, to deindustrialize food production, and to localize economies and contract global trade. Pulling back calls upon us to free, restore, reconnect, and rewild vast terrestrial and marine ecosystems. However, the pervasive worldview of human supremacy—the conviction that humans are superior to all other life-forms and entitled to use these life-forms and their habitats—normalizes and promotes humanity’s ongoing expansion, undermining our ability to enact these linked strategies and preempt the mounting suffering and dislocation of both humans and nonhumans. Abundant Earth urges us to confront the reality that humanity will not advance by entrenching its domination over the biosphere. On the contrary, we will stagnate in the identity of nature-colonizer and decline into conflict as we vie for natural resources. Instead, we must chart another course, choosing to live in fellowship within the vibrant ecologies of our wild and domestic cohorts, and enfolding human inhabitation within the rich expanse of a biodiverse, living planet.
Download or read book The Ecocentrists written by Keith Makoto Woodhouse and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2018-06-05 with total page 543 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Disenchanted with the mainstream environmental movement, a new, more radical kind of environmental activist emerged in the 1980s. Radical environmentalists used direct action, from blockades and tree-sits to industrial sabotage, to save a wild nature that they believed to be in a state of crisis. Questioning the premises of liberal humanism, they subscribed to an ecocentric philosophy that attributed as much value to nature as to people. Although critics dismissed them as marginal, radicals posed a vital question that mainstream groups too often ignored: Is environmentalism a matter of common sense or a fundamental critique of the modern world? In The Ecocentrists, Keith Makoto Woodhouse offers a nuanced history of radical environmental thought and action in the late-twentieth-century United States. Focusing especially on the group Earth First!, Woodhouse explores how radical environmentalism responded to both postwar affluence and a growing sense of physical limits. While radicals challenged the material and philosophical basis of industrial civilization, they glossed over the ways economic inequality and social difference defined people’s different relationships to the nonhuman world. Woodhouse discusses how such views increasingly set Earth First! at odds with movements focused on social justice and examines the implications of ecocentrism’s sweeping critique of human society for the future of environmental protection. A groundbreaking intellectual history of environmental politics in the United States, The Ecocentrists is a timely study that considers humanism and individualism in an environmental age and makes a case for skepticism and doubt in environmental thought.
Download or read book Giants in the Earth written by Ole Edvart Rølvaag and published by . This book was released on 1927 with total page 506 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A narrative of pioneer hardship and heroism on the boundless Dakota prairie, as a Norwegian-American immigrant family passed through Ellis Island and worked to eke out a living in America's midwest.
Download or read book Critique of Earth written by Arend Theodoor van Leeuwen and published by James Clarke & Co.. This book was released on 2003-02 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Short description: The second series of van Leeuwen's Gifford Lectures under the overall title of "Critique of Heaven and Earth," examining the young Karl Marx?
Download or read book Inheritors of the Earth written by Chris D. Thomas and published by PublicAffairs. This book was released on 2017-09-05 with total page 376 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Human activity has irreversibly changed the natural environment. But the news isn't all bad. It's accepted wisdom today that human beings have permanently damaged the natural world, causing extinction, deforestation, pollution, and of course climate change. But in Inheritors of the Earth, biologist Chris Thomas shows that this obscures a more hopeful truth -- we're also helping nature grow and change. Human cities and mass agriculture have created new places for enterprising animals and plants to live, and our activities have stimulated evolutionary change in virtually every population of living species. Most remarkably, Thomas shows, humans may well have raised the rate at which new species are formed to the highest level in the history of our planet. Drawing on the success stories of diverse species, from the ochre-colored comma butterfly to the New Zealand pukeko, Thomas overturns the accepted story of declining biodiversity on Earth. In so doing, he questions why we resist new forms of life, and why we see ourselves as unnatural. Ultimately, he suggests that if life on Earth can recover from the asteroid that killed off the dinosaurs, it can survive the onslaughts of the technological age. This eye-opening book is a profound reexamination of the relationship between humanity and the natural world.
Download or read book A Friend of the Earth written by T. C. Boyle and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2011-08-01 with total page 379 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: _______________________ 'A comedy with teeth ... razor sharp and darkly funny' (TIMES) 'Boyle's prose is so good and his imagination so fertile that after a while you just sit back and are swept along' (TELEGRAPH) 'Surreal, daring and compassionate. Easily one of the best books of the year' (MAIL) 'Superb ... if Boyle was from this side of the pond, this is the book they'd all have to beat for the Booker Prize' (SUNDAY TIMES) It's 2025, and 75-year-old environmentalist and retired eco-terrorist Ty Tierwater is eking out a bleak living managing a pop star's private zoo. It is the last one in southern California, and vital for the cloning of its captive species. Once, Ty was so serious about environmental causes that as a radical activist committed to Earth Forever! he endangered the lives of both his daughter, Sierra, and his wife, Andrea. Now, when he's just trying to survive in a world cursed by storm and drought, Andrea re-enters his life. Frightening, funny, surreal and gripping, T.C. Boyle's story is both a modern morality tale, and a provocative vision of the future.
Download or read book Facing the Anthropocene written by Ian Angus and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2016-07 with total page 277 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Science tells us that a new and dangerous stage in planetary evolution has begun—the Anthropocene, a time of rising temperatures, extreme weather, rising oceans, and mass species extinctions. Humanity faces not just more pollution or warmer weather, but a crisis of the Earth System. If business as usual continues, this century will be marked by rapid deterioration of our physical, social, and economic environment. Large parts of Earth will become uninhabitable, and civilization itself will be threatened. Facing the Anthropocene shows what has caused this planetary emergency, and what we must do to meet the challenge. Bridging the gap between Earth System science and ecological Marxism, Ian Angus examines not only the latest scientific findings about the physical causes and consequences of the Anthropocene transition, but also the social and economic trends that underlie the crisis. Cogent and compellingly written, Facing the Anthropocene offers a unique synthesis of natural and social science that illustrates how capitalism's inexorable drive for growth, powered by the rapid burning of fossil fuels that took millions of years to form, has driven our world to the brink of disaster. Survival in the Anthropocene, Angus argues, requires radical social change, replacing fossil capitalism with a new, ecosocialist civilization.
Download or read book Shades of Earth written by Beth Revis and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2013-01-15 with total page 346 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The final book in the New York Times bestselling trilogy, perfect for fans of Battlestar Galactica and Prometheus! FUELED BY LIES. RULED BY CHAOS. ALMOST HOME. Amy and Elder have finally left the oppressive walls of the spaceship Godspeed behind. They're ready to start life afresh—to build a home—on Centauri-Earth, the planet that Amy has traveled 25 trillion miles across the universe to experience. But this new Earth isn't the paradise Amy had been hoping for. There are giant pterodactyl-like birds, purple flowers with mind-numbing toxins, and mysterious, unexplained ruins that hold more secrets than their stone walls first let on. The biggest secret of all? Godspeed's former passengers aren't alone on this planet. And if they're going to stay, they'll have to fight. Amy and Elder must race to discover who—or what—else is out there if they are to have any hope of saving their struggling colony and building a future together. They will have to look inward to the very core of what makes them human on this, their most harrowing journey yet. Because if the colony collapses? Then everything they have sacrificed—friends, family, life on Earth—will have been for nothing.
Download or read book The End of the End of the Earth written by Jonathan Franzen and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2018-11-13 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A sharp and provocative new essay collection from the award-winning author of Freedom and The Corrections The essayist, Jonathan Franzen writes, is like “a fire-fighter, whose job, while everyone else is fleeing the flames of shame, is to run straight into them.” For the past twenty-five years, even as his novels have earned him worldwide acclaim, Franzen has led a second life as a risk-taking essayist. Now, at a moment when technology has inflamed tribal hatreds and the planet is beset by unnatural calamities, he is back with a new collection of essays that recall us to more humane ways of being in the world. Franzen’s great loves are literature and birds, and The End of the End of the Earth is a passionate argument for both. Where the new media tend to confirm one’s prejudices, he writes, literature “invites you to ask whether you might be somewhat wrong, maybe even entirely wrong, and to imagine why someone else might hate you.” Whatever his subject, Franzen’s essays are always skeptical of received opinion, steeped in irony, and frank about his own failings. He’s frank about birds, too (they kill “everything imaginable”), but his reporting and reflections on them—on seabirds in New Zealand, warblers in East Africa, penguins in Antarctica—are both a moving celebration of their beauty and resilience and a call to action to save what we love. Calm, poignant, carefully argued, full of wit, The End of the End of the Earth provides a welcome breath of hope and reason.
Download or read book The Late Great Planet Earth written by Hal Lindsey and published by Zondervan. This book was released on 2016-10-11 with total page 170 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The impact of The Late Great Planet Earth cannot be overstated. The New York Times called it the "no. 1 non-fiction bestseller of the decade." For Christians and non-Christians of the 1970s, Hal Lindsey's blockbuster served as a wake-up call on events soon to come and events already unfolding -- all leading up to the greatest event of all: the return of Jesus Christ. The years since have confirmed Lindsey's insights into what biblical prophecy says about the times we live in. Whether you're a church-going believer or someone who wouldn't darken the door of a Christian institution, the Bible has much to tell you about the imminent future of this planet. In the midst of an out-of-control generation, it reveals a grand design that's unfolding exactly according to plan. The rebirth of Israel. The threat of war in the Middle East. An increase in natural catastrophes. The revival of Satanism and witchcraft. These and other signs, foreseen by prophets from Moses to Jesus, portend the coming of an antichrist . . . of a war which will bring humanity to the brink of destruction . . . and of incredible deliverance for a desperate, dying planet.
Download or read book Here on Earth written by Tim Fridtjof Flannery and published by Penguin UK. This book was released on 2012 with total page 345 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'Here on Earth' is a revolutionary dual biography of the planet and of our species. Tim Flannery reimagines the history of Earth, from its earliest origins as a chaotic ball of elemental dust and gases to the teeming landscape we currently call home.
Download or read book The Ecological Rift written by John Bellamy Foster and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2011-11-01 with total page 544 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Humanity in the twenty-first century is facing what might be described as its ultimate environmental catastrophe: the destruction of the climate that has nurtured human civilization and with it the basis of life on earth as we know it. All ecosystems on the planet are now in decline. Enormous rifts have been driven through the delicate fabric of the biosphere. The economy and the earth are headed for a fateful collision—if we don't alter course. In The Ecological Rift: Capitalism’s War on the Earth environmental sociologists John Bellamy Foster, Brett Clark, and Richard York offer a radical assessment of both the problem and the solution. They argue that the source of our ecological crisis lies in the paradox of wealth in capitalist society, which expands individual riches at the expense of public wealth, including the wealth of nature. In the process, a huge ecological rift is driven between human beings and nature, undermining the conditions of sustainable existence: a rift in the metabolic relation between humanity and nature that is irreparable within capitalist society, since integral to its very laws of motion. Critically examining the sanguine arguments of mainstream economists and technologists, Foster, Clark, and York insist instead that fundamental changes in social relations must occur if the ecological (and social) problems presently facing us are to be transcended. Their analysis relies on the development of a deep dialectical naturalism concerned with issues of ecology and evolution and their interaction with the economy. Importantly, they offer reasons for revolutionary hope in moving beyond the regime of capital and toward a society of sustainable human development.
