Download or read book Environmental Expertise written by Esther Turnhout and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2019-02-21 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An important goal of environmental research is to inform policy and decision making. However, environmental experts working at the interface between science, policy and society face complex challenges, including how to identify sources of disagreement over environmental issues, communicate uncertainties and limitations of knowledge, and tackle controversial topics such as genetic modification and the use of biofuels. This book discusses the problems environmental experts encounter in the interaction between knowledge, society, and policy on both a practical and conceptual level. Key findings from social science research are illustrated with a range of case studies, from fisheries to fracking. The book offers guidance on how to tackle these challenges, equipping readers with tools to better understand the diversity of environmental knowledge and its role in complex environmental issues. Written by leading natural and social scientists, this text provides an essential resource for students, scientists and professionals working at the science-policy interface.
Download or read book Engineering Nature written by Jessica B. Teisch and published by Univ of North Carolina Press. This book was released on 2011 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Focusing on globalization in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Jessica Teisch examines the processes by which American water and mining engineers who rose to prominence during and after the California Gold Rush of 1849 exported the United
Download or read book A Forest on the Sea written by Karl Appuhn and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2009 with total page 376 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The idea of a Venetian forestry service might strike one as the beginning of a joke. The statement that it began in the fourteenth century would surprise most people. Venice is built on a lagoon with no timber resources. This book reveals the story of Venice's attempt to establish protected forests in order to have a constant supply of wood. Beyond the need for wood for heating and cooking, tall beams of oak and beech were needed for ship building and the shoring up of breakwaters that kept the sea from flooding the city. The author follows the practice of forest conservation and management from its inception in the 1300s to the end of the eighteenth century. He details the administrative and legal debates as well as problems with the implementation of policies. This study is a corrective to histories that assume a lack of interest in forest conservation in Europe at this time. The experience of the Venetians also serves as an example for timber use and conservation today.
Download or read book Planning for the Planet written by Simone Schleper and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2019-07-12 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During the 1960s and 1970s, rapidly growing environmental awareness and concern created unprecedented demand for ecological expertise and novel challenges for ecological advocacy groups such as the International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources (IUCN). This book reveals how, despite their vast scientific knowledge and their attempts to incorporate socially relevant themes, IUCN experts inevitably struggled to make global schemes for nature conservation a central concern for UNESCO, UNEP and other intergovernmental organizations.
Download or read book Discerning Experts written by Michael Oppenheimer and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2019-03-07 with total page 298 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Discerning Experts assesses the assessments that many governments rely on to help guide environmental policy and action. Through their close look at environmental assessments involving acid rain, ozone depletion, and sea level rise, the authors explore how experts deliberate and decide on the scientific facts about problems like climate change. They also seek to understand how the scientists involved make the judgments they do, how the organization and management of assessment activities affects those judgments, and how expertise is identified and constructed. Discerning Experts uncovers factors that can generate systematic bias and error, and recommends how the process can be improved. As the first study of the internal workings of large environmental assessments, this book reveals their strengths and weaknesses, and explains what assessments can—and cannot—be expected to contribute to public policy and the common good.
Download or read book Environmental Expertise written by Esther Turnhout and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2019-02-21 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Provides an overview of the important role that environmental experts play at the science-policy interface, and the complex challenges they face.
Download or read book Contesting Global Environmental Knowledge Norms and Governance written by M. J. Peterson and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-01-08 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Through theoretical discussions and case studies, this volume explores how processes of contestation about knowledge, norms, and governance processes shape efforts to promote sustainability through international environmental governance. The epistemic communities literature of the 1990s highlighted the importance of expert consensus on scientific knowledge for problem definition and solution specification in international environmental agreements. This book addresses a gap in this literature – insufficient attention to the multiple forms of contestation that also inform international environmental governance. These forms include within-discipline contestation that helps forge expert consensus, inter-disciplinary contestation regarding the types of expert knowledge needed for effective response to environmental problems, normative and practical arguments about the proper roles of experts and laypersons, and contestation over how to combine globally developed norms and scientific knowledge with locally prevalent norms and traditional knowledge in ways ensuring effective implementation of environmental policies. This collection advances understanding of the conditions under which contestation facilitates or hinders the development of effective global environmental governance. The contributors examine how attempts to incorporate more than one stream of expert knowledge and to include lay knowledge alongside it have played out in efforts to create and maintain multilateral agreements relating to environmental concerns. It will interest scholars and graduate students of political science, global governance, international environmental politics, and global policy making. Policy analysts should also find it useful.
Download or read book Refining Expertise written by Gwen Ottinger and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2013-03-04 with total page 237 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the 2015 Rachel Carson Prize presented by the Society for Social Studies of Science Residents of a small Louisiana town were sure that the oil refinery next door was making them sick. As part of a campaign demanding relocation away from the refinery, they collected scientific data to prove it. Their campaign ended with a settlement agreement that addressed many of their grievances—but not concerns about their health. Yet, instead of continuing to collect data, residents began to let refinery scientists' assertions that their operations did not harm them stand without challenge. What makes a community move so suddenly from actively challenging to apparently accepting experts' authority? Refining Expertise argues that the answer lies in the way that refinery scientists and engineers defined themselves as experts. Rather than claiming to be infallible, they began to portray themselves as responsible—committed to operating safely and to contributing to the well-being of the community. The volume shows that by grounding their claims to responsibility in influential ideas from the larger culture about what makes good citizens, nice communities, and moral companies, refinery scientists made it much harder for residents to challenge their expertise and thus re-established their authority over scientific questions related to the refinery's health and environmental effects. Gwen Ottinger here shows how industrial facilities' current approaches to dealing with concerned communities—approaches which leave much room for negotiation while shielding industry's environmental and health claims from critique—effectively undermine not only individual grassroots campaigns but also environmental justice activism and far-reaching efforts to democratize science. This work drives home the need for both activists and politically engaged scholars to reconfigure their own activities in response, in order to advance community health and robust scientific knowledge about it.
Download or read book New Natures written by Dolly Jorgensen and published by University of Pittsburgh Pre. This book was released on 2013-07-08 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: New Natures broadens the dialogue between the disciplines of science and technology studies (STS) and environmental history in hopes of deepening and even transforming understandings of human-nature interactions. The volume presents richly developed historical studies that explicitly engage with key STS theories, offering models for how these theories can help crystallize central lessons from empirical histories, facilitate comparative analysis, and provide a language for complicated historical phenomena. Overall, the collection exemplifies the fruitfulness of cross-disciplinary thinking. The chapters follow three central themes: ways of knowing, or how knowledge is produced and how this mediates our understanding of the environment; constructions of environmental expertise, showing how expertise is evaluated according to categories, categorization, hierarchies, and the power afforded to expertise; and lastly, an analysis of networks, mobilities, and boundaries, demonstrating how knowledge is both diffused and constrained and what this means for humans and the environment. Contributors explore these themes by discussing a wide array of topics, including farming, forestry, indigenous land management, ecological science, pollution, trade, energy, and outer space, among others. The epilogue, by the eminent environmental historian Sverker Sorlin, views the deep entanglements of humans and nature in contemporary urbanity and argues we should preserve this relationship in the future. Additionally, the volume looks to extend the valuable conversation between STS and environmental history to wider communities that include policy makers and other stakeholders, as many of the issues raised can inform future courses of action.
Download or read book Technoscience and Environmental Justice written by Gwen Ottinger and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2011 with total page 311 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Case studies exploring how experts' encounters with environmental justice are changing technical and scientific practice.
Download or read book Environmental Skill written by Mark Coeckelbergh and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-02-20 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Today it is widely recognized that we face urgent and serious environmental problems and we know much about them, yet we do very little. What explains this lack of motivation and change? Why is it so hard to change our lives? This book addresses this question by means of a philosophical inquiry into the conditions of possibility for environmental change. It discusses how we can become more motivated to do environmental good and what kind of knowledge we need for this, and explores the relations between motivation, knowledge, and modernity. After reviewing a broad range of possible philosophical and psychological responses to environmental apathy and inertia, the author argues for moving away from a modern focus on either detached reason and control (Stoicism and Enlightenment reason) or the natural, the sentiments, and the authentic (Romanticism), both of which make possible disengaging and alienating modes of relating to our environment. Instead he develops the notion of environmental skill: a concept that bridges the gap between knowledge and action, re-interprets environmental virtue, and suggests an environmental ethics centered on experience, know-how and skillful engagement with our environment. The author then explores the implications of this ethics for our lives: it changes the way we think about , and deal with, health, food, animals, energy, climate change, politics, and technology.
Download or read book Grand Challenges in Environmental Sciences written by National Research Council and published by National Academies Press. This book was released on 2001-05-24 with total page 107 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Scientists have long sought to unravel the fundamental mysteries of the land, life, water, and air that surround us. But as the consequences of humanity's impact on the planet become increasingly evident, governments are realizing the critical importance of understanding these environmental systemsâ€"and investing billions of dollars in research to do so. To identify high-priority environmental science projects, Grand Challenges in Environmental Sciences explores the most important areas of research for the next generation. The book's goal is not to list the world's biggest environmental problems. Rather it is to determine areas of opportunity thatâ€"with a concerted investmentâ€"could yield significant new findings. Nominations for environmental science's "grand" challenges were solicited from thousands of scientists worldwide. Based on their responses, eight major areas of focus were identifiedâ€"areas that offer the potential for a major scientific breakthrough of practical importance to humankind, and that are feasible if given major new funding. The book further pinpoints four areas for immediate action and investment.
Download or read book Citizen Science written by Alan Irwin and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2002-01-10 with total page 213 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: We are all concerned by the environmental threats facing us today. Environmental issues are a major area of concern for policy makers, industrialists and public groups of many different kinds. While science seems central to our understanding of such threats, the statements of scientists are increasingly open to challenge in this area. Meanwhile, citizens may find themselves labelled as `ignorant' in environmental matters. In Citizen Science Alan Irwin provides a much needed route through the fraught relationship between science, the public and the environmental threat.
Download or read book Citizens Experts and the Environment written by Frank Fischer and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2000-12-19 with total page 366 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: DIVClaims that the problematic communication gap between experts and ordinary citizens is best remedied by a renewal of local citizen participation in deliberative structures./div
Download or read book The Perception of the Environment written by Tim Ingold and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-11-29 with total page 644 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this work Tim Ingold offers a persuasive new approach to understanding how human beings perceive their surroundings. He argues that what we are used to calling cultural variation consists, in the first place, of variations in skill. Neither innate nor acquired, skills are grown, incorporated into the human organism through practice and training in an environment. They are thus as much biological as cultural. To account for the generation of skills we have therefore to understand the dynamics of development. And this in turn calls for an ecological approach that situates practitioners in the context of an active engagement with the constituents of their surroundings. The twenty-three essays comprising this book focus in turn on the procurement of livelihood, on what it means to ‘dwell’, and on the nature of skill, weaving together approaches from social anthropology, ecological psychology, developmental biology and phenomenology in a way that has never been attempted before. The book is set to revolutionise the way we think about what is ‘biological’ and ‘cultural’ in humans, about evolution and history, and indeed about what it means for human beings – at once organisms and persons – to inhabit an environment. The Perception of the Environment will be essential reading not only for anthropologists but also for biologists, psychologists, archaeologists, geographers and philosophers. This edition includes a new Preface by the author.
Download or read book COVID 19 written by Chris Day and published by . This book was released on 2021 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This book is devoted to the efforts of Environmental Health Practitioners (EHPs), their employer organisations and supportive professional bodies worldwide in responding to the COVID-19 pandemic"--
Download or read book Citizen Science written by Janis L. Dickinson and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2012-04-07 with total page 299 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Citizen science enlists members of the public to make and record useful observations, such as counting birds in their backyards, watching for the first budding leaf in spring, or measuring local snowfall. The large numbers of volunteers who participate in projects such as Project FeederWatch or Project BudBurst collect valuable research data, which, when pooled together, create an enormous body of scientific data on a vast geographic scale. In return, such projects aim to increase participants' connections to science, place, and nature, while supporting science literacy and environmental stewardship. In Citizen Science, experts from a variety of disciplines—including scientists and education specialists working at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, where many large citizen science programs use birds as proxies for biodiversity—share their experiences of creating and implementing successful citizen science projects, primarily those that use massive data sets gathered by citizen scientists to better understand the impact of environmental change. This first and foundational book for this developing field of inquiry addresses basic aspects of how to conduct citizen science projects, including goal-setting, program design, and evaluation, as well as the nuances of creating a robust digital infrastructure and recruiting a large participant base through communications and marketing. An overview of the types of research approaches and techniques demonstrates how to make use of large data sets arising from citizen science projects. A final section focuses on citizen science's impacts and its broad connections to understanding the human dimensions and educational aspects of participation. Citizen Science teaches teams of program developers and researchers how to cross the bridge from success at public engagement to using citizen science data to understand patterns and trends or to test hypotheses about how ecological processes respond to change at large geographic scales. Intended as a resource for a broad audience of experts and practitioners in natural sciences, information science, and social sciences, this book can be used to better understand how to improve existing programs, develop new ones, and make better use of the data resources that have accumulated from citizen science efforts. Its focus on harnessing the impact of "crowdsourcing" for scientific and educational endeavors is applicable to a wide range of fields, especially those that touch on the importance of massive collaboration aimed at understanding and conserving what we can of the natural world.
