Download or read book Living with Environmental Change written by Kirsten Hastrup and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-03-05 with total page 594 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Climate change is a lived experience of changes in the environment, often destroying conventional forms of subsistence and production, creating new patterns of movement and connection, and transforming people’s imagined future. This book explores how people across the world think about environmental change and how they act upon the perception of past, present and future opportunities. Drawing on the ethnographic fieldwork of expert authors, it sheds new light on the human experience of and social response to climate change by taking us from the Arctic to the Pacific, from the Southeast Indian Coastal zone to the West-African dry-lands and deserts, as well as to Peruvian mountain communities and cities. Divided into four thematic parts - Water, Landscape, Technology, Time – this book uses rich photographic material to accompany the short texts and reflections in order to bring to life the human ingenuity and social responsibility of people in the face of new uncertainties. In an era of melting glaciers, drying lands, and rising seas, it shows how it is part and parcel of human life to take responsibility for the social community and take creative action on the basis of a localized understanding of the environment. This highly original contribution to the anthropological study of climate change is a must-read for all those wanting to understand better what climate change means on the ground and interested in a sustainable future for the Earth.
Download or read book Living with Environmental Change written by W. Neil Adger and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2012-12-06 with total page 341 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Vietnam and the neighbouring countries of Southeast Asia face diverse challenges created by the rapid evolution of their social, economic and environmental systems and resources. Taking a multidisciplinary perspective, this book provides a comprehensive assessment of the Vietnamese situation, identifying the factors shaping social vulnerability and resilience to environmental change and considering prospects for sustainable development.
Download or read book Living in Denial written by Kari Marie Norgaard and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2011-03-11 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An analysis of why people with knowledge about climate change often fail to translate that knowledge into action. Global warming is the most significant environmental issue of our time, yet public response in Western nations has been meager. Why have so few taken any action? In Living in Denial, sociologist Kari Norgaard searches for answers to this question, drawing on interviews and ethnographic data from her study of "Bygdaby," the fictional name of an actual rural community in western Norway, during the unusually warm winter of 2000-2001. In 2000-2001 the first snowfall came to Bygdaby two months later than usual; ice fishing was impossible; and the ski industry had to invest substantially in artificial snow-making. Stories in local and national newspapers linked the warm winter explicitly to global warming. Yet residents did not write letters to the editor, pressure politicians, or cut down on use of fossil fuels. Norgaard attributes this lack of response to the phenomenon of socially organized denial, by which information about climate science is known in the abstract but disconnected from political, social, and private life, and sees this as emblematic of how citizens of industrialized countries are responding to global warming. Norgaard finds that for the highly educated and politically savvy residents of Bygdaby, global warming was both common knowledge and unimaginable. Norgaard traces this denial through multiple levels, from emotions to cultural norms to political economy. Her report from Bygdaby, supplemented by comparisons throughout the book to the United States, tells a larger story behind our paralysis in the face of today's alarming predictions from climate scientists.
Download or read book Learning to Live with Climate Change written by Blanche Verlie and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-06-16 with total page 85 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This imaginative and empowering book explores the ways that our emotions entangle us with climate change and offers strategies for engaging with climate anxiety that can contribute to social transformation. Climate educator Blanche Verlie draws on feminist, more-than-human and affect theories to argue that people in high-carbon societies need to learn to ‘live-with’ climate change: to appreciate that human lives are interconnected with the climate, and to cultivate the emotional capacities needed to respond to the climate crisis. Learning to Live with Climate Change explores the cultural, interpersonal and sociological dimensions of ecological distress. The book engages with Australia’s 2019/2020 ‘Black Summer’ of bushfires and smoke, undergraduate students’ experiences of climate change, and contemporary activist movements such as the youth strikes for climate. Verlie outlines how we can collectively attune to, live with, and respond to the unsettling realities of climate collapse while counteracting domineering ideals of ‘climate control.’ This impressive and timely work is both deeply philosophical and immediately practical. Its accessible style and real-world relevance ensure it will be valued by those researching, studying and working in diverse fields such as sustainability education, climate communication, human geography, cultural studies, environmental sociology and eco-psychology, as well as the broader public. The Open Access version of this book, available at https://doi.org/10.4324/9780367441265, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.
Download or read book How Culture Shapes the Climate Change Debate written by Andrew J. Hoffman and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2015-03-11 with total page 121 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Though the scientific community largely agrees that climate change is underway, debates about this issue remain fiercely polarized. These conversations have become a rhetorical contest, one where opposing sides try to achieve victory through playing on fear, distrust, and intolerance. At its heart, this split no longer concerns carbon dioxide, greenhouse gases, or climate modeling; rather, it is the product of contrasting, deeply entrenched worldviews. This brief examines what causes people to reject or accept the scientific consensus on climate change. Synthesizing evidence from sociology, psychology, and political science, Andrew J. Hoffman lays bare the opposing cultural lenses through which science is interpreted. He then extracts lessons from major cultural shifts in the past to engender a better understanding of the problem and motivate the public to take action. How Culture Shapes the Climate Change Debate makes a powerful case for a more scientifically literate public, a more socially engaged scientific community, and a more thoughtful mode of public discourse.
Download or read book How to Avoid a Climate Disaster written by Bill Gates and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2021-02-16 with total page 201 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: #1 NEW YORK TIMES BEST SELLER • In this urgent, authoritative book, Bill Gates sets out a wide-ranging, practical—and accessible—plan for how the world can get to zero greenhouse gas emissions in time to avoid a climate catastrophe. Bill Gates has spent a decade investigating the causes and effects of climate change. With the help of experts in the fields of physics, chemistry, biology, engineering, political science, and finance, he has focused on what must be done in order to stop the planet's slide to certain environmental disaster. In this book, he not only explains why we need to work toward net-zero emissions of greenhouse gases, but also details what we need to do to achieve this profoundly important goal. He gives us a clear-eyed description of the challenges we face. Drawing on his understanding of innovation and what it takes to get new ideas into the market, he describes the areas in which technology is already helping to reduce emissions, where and how the current technology can be made to function more effectively, where breakthrough technologies are needed, and who is working on these essential innovations. Finally, he lays out a concrete, practical plan for achieving the goal of zero emissions—suggesting not only policies that governments should adopt, but what we as individuals can do to keep our government, our employers, and ourselves accountable in this crucial enterprise. As Bill Gates makes clear, achieving zero emissions will not be simple or easy to do, but if we follow the plan he sets out here, it is a goal firmly within our reach.
Download or read book Living with Environmental Change written by Kirsten Hastrup and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-03-05 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Climate change is a lived experience of changes in the environment, often destroying conventional forms of subsistence and production, creating new patterns of movement and connection, and transforming people’s imagined future. This book explores how people across the world think about environmental change and how they act upon the perception of past, present and future opportunities. Drawing on the ethnographic fieldwork of expert authors, it sheds new light on the human experience of and social response to climate change by taking us from the Arctic to the Pacific, from the Southeast Indian Coastal zone to the West-African dry-lands and deserts, as well as to Peruvian mountain communities and cities. Divided into four thematic parts - Water, Landscape, Technology, Time – this book uses rich photographic material to accompany the short texts and reflections in order to bring to life the human ingenuity and social responsibility of people in the face of new uncertainties. In an era of melting glaciers, drying lands, and rising seas, it shows how it is part and parcel of human life to take responsibility for the social community and take creative action on the basis of a localized understanding of the environment. This highly original contribution to the anthropological study of climate change is a must-read for all those wanting to understand better what climate change means on the ground and interested in a sustainable future for the Earth.
Download or read book Living with Climate Change written by Jane A. Bullock and published by CRC Press. This book was released on 2017-08-02 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The climate has changed and communities across America are living with the consequences: rapid sea level rise, multi-state wildfires, heat waves, and enduring drought. Living with Climate Change: How Communities Are Surviving and Thriving in a Changing Climate details the steps cities are taking now to protect lives and businesses, to reduce their vulnerability, and to adapt and make themselves more resilient. The authors included in this book have been directly involved in the successful design and implementation of community-based adaptation and resilience programs.
Download or read book Environmental Change and the World s Futures written by Jonathan Paul Marshall and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-08-27 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Climate change and ecological instability have the potential to disrupt human societies and their futures. Cultural, social and ethical life in all societies is directed towards a future that can never be observed, and never be directly acted upon, and yet is always interacting with us. Thinking and acting towards the future involves efforts of imagination that are linked to our sense of being in the world and the ecological pressures we experience. The three key ideas of this book – ecologies, ontologies and mythologies – help us understand the ways people in many different societies attempt to predict and shape their futures. Each chapter places a different emphasis on the linked domains of environmental change, embodied experience, myth and fantasy, politics, technology and intellectual reflection, in relation to imagined futures. The diverse geographic scope of the chapters includes rural Nepal, the islands of the Pacific Ocean, Sweden, coastal Scotland, North America, and remote, rural and urban Australia. This book will appeal to researchers and students in anthropology, sociology, environmental studies, cultural studies, psychology and politics.
Download or read book Environmental Change and Sustainability written by Steven Silvern and published by BoD – Books on Demand. This book was released on 2013-05-08 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Environments around the globe are undergoing human-induced change. Human population growth, rapid urbanization, expanding global economy, and the diffusion of western consumer lifestyles are placing increasing pressure on natural and social systems. Global institutions, nation-states, and local communities are seeking to identify and employ sustainable solutions to these environmental and socio-economic challenges. Sustainability has emerged as a policy discourse that seeks to balance the desire and need for economic growth with the protection of the environment, and the promotion of social and environmental justice. This book contributes to the study and search for sustainable responses to global environmental change. The authors of this volume explore environmental change in different places around the world and the diverse responses to such changes. The chapters demonstrate the need for place-specific sustainable development; the authors suggest the need to see sustainable responses to environmental change as a negotiated outcome between various social actors living and working in diverse spatial, environmental and socio-economic contexts. Environmental Change and Sustainability is a timely international examination of the relationship between environmental change and sustainability. As an InTech open source volume, current and cutting edge research methodologies and research results are quickly published for the academic policy-making communities. Dimensions of environmental change and sustainability explored in this volume include: Natural science approaches to study of environmental change Importance of perception in human understanding of environmental change Role of external events and institutions in shaping sustainable responses to environmental change Importance of bottom-up sustainable development as key to reducing environmental risk and community vulnerability The need for place-based sustainable development that combines local conditions with global processes Creation of a sustainable development model that synthesizes local, traditional knowledge of the environment and environmental management with the techniques and understandings generated by modern environmental science
Download or read book Surviving Sudden Environmental Change written by Jago Cooper and published by University Press of Colorado. This book was released on 2012-02-01 with total page 355 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Archaeologists have long encountered evidence of natural disasters through excavation and stratigraphy. In Surviving Sudden Environmental Change, case studies examine how eight different past human communities—ranging from Arctic to equatorial regions, from tropical rainforests to desert interiors, and from deep prehistory to living memory—faced, and coped with, such dangers. Many disasters originate from a force of nature, such as an earthquake, cyclone, tsunami, volcanic eruption, drought, or flood. But that is only half of the story; decisions of people and their particular cultural lifeways are the rest. Sociocultural factors are essential in understanding risk, impact, resilience, reactions, and recoveries from massive sudden environmental changes. By using deep-time perspectives provided by interdisciplinary approaches, this book provides a rich temporal background to the human experience of environmental hazards and disasters. In addition, each chapter is followed by an abstract summarizing the important implications for today’s management practices and providing recommendations for policy makers. Publication supported in part by the National Science Foundation.
Download or read book Living with Environmental Change written by Kirsten Hastrup and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-03-05 with total page 301 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Climate change is a lived experience of changes in the environment, often destroying conventional forms of subsistence and production, creating new patterns of movement and connection, and transforming people's imagined future. This book explores how people across the world think about environmental change and how they act upon the perception of past, present and future opportunities. Drawing on the ethnographic fieldwork of expert authors, it sheds new light on the human experience of and social response to climate change by taking us from the Arctic to the Pacific, from the Southeast Indian Coastal zone to the West-African dry-lands and deserts, as well as to Peruvian mountain communities and cities. Divided into four thematic parts - Water, Landscape, Technology, Time - this book uses rich photographic material to accompany the short texts and reflections in order to bring to life the human ingenuity and social responsibility of people in the face of new uncertainties. In an era of melting glaciers, drying lands, and rising seas, it shows how it is part and parcel of human life to take responsibility for the social community and take creative action on the basis of a localized understanding of the environment. This highly original contribution to the anthropological study of climate change is a must-read for all those wanting to understand better what climate change means on the ground and interested in a sustainable future for the Earth.
Download or read book Living in Denial written by Kari Marie Norgaard and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2011-03-11 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An analysis of why people with knowledge about climate change often fail to translate that knowledge into action. Global warming is the most significant environmental issue of our time, yet public response in Western nations has been meager. Why have so few taken any action? In Living in Denial, sociologist Kari Norgaard searches for answers to this question, drawing on interviews and ethnographic data from her study of "Bygdaby," the fictional name of an actual rural community in western Norway, during the unusually warm winter of 2000-2001. In 2000-2001 the first snowfall came to Bygdaby two months later than usual; ice fishing was impossible; and the ski industry had to invest substantially in artificial snow-making. Stories in local and national newspapers linked the warm winter explicitly to global warming. Yet residents did not write letters to the editor, pressure politicians, or cut down on use of fossil fuels. Norgaard attributes this lack of response to the phenomenon of socially organized denial, by which information about climate science is known in the abstract but disconnected from political, social, and private life, and sees this as emblematic of how citizens of industrialized countries are responding to global warming. Norgaard finds that for the highly educated and politically savvy residents of Bygdaby, global warming was both common knowledge and unimaginable. Norgaard traces this denial through multiple levels, from emotions to cultural norms to political economy. Her report from Bygdaby, supplemented by comparisons throughout the book to the United States, tells a larger story behind our paralysis in the face of today's alarming predictions from climate scientists.
Download or read book Waterworlds written by Kirsten Hastrup and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2015-11-01 with total page 318 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In one form or another, water participates in the making and unmaking of people’s lives, practices, and stories. Contributors’ detailed ethnographic work analyzes the union and mutual shaping of water and social lives. This volume discusses current ecological disturbances and engages in a world where unbounded relationalities and unsettled frames of orientation mark the lives of all, anthropologists included. Water emerges as a fluid object in more senses than one, challenging anthropologists to foreground the mutable character of their objects of study and to responsibly engage with the generative role of cultural analysis.
Download or read book Being the Change written by Peter Kalmus and published by New Society Publishers. This book was released on 2017-08-01 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “A plethora of insights about nature and ourselves, revealed by one man’s journey as he comes to terms with human exploitation of our planet.” —Dr. James Hansen, climate scientist and former director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies Life on one-tenth the fossil fuels turns out to be awesome. We all want to be happy. Yet as we consume ever more in a frantic bid for happiness, global warming worsens. Alarmed by drastic changes now occurring in the Earth’s climate systems, Peter Kalmus, a climate scientist and suburban father of two, embarked on a journey to change his life and the world. He began by bicycling, growing food, meditating, and making other simple, fulfilling changes. Ultimately, he slashed his climate impact to under a tenth of the US average and became happier in the process. Being the Change explores the connections between our individual daily actions and our collective predicament. It merges science, spirituality, and practical action to develop a satisfying and appropriate response to global warming. Part one exposes our interconnected predicament: overpopulation, global warming, industrial agriculture, growth-addicted economics, a sold-out political system, and a mindset of separation from nature. It also includes a readable but authoritative overview of climate science. Part two offers a response at once obvious and unprecedented: mindfully opting out of this broken system and aligning our daily lives with the biosphere. The core message is deeply optimistic: living without fossil fuels is not only possible, it can be better. “In this timely and provocative book, Peter Kalmus points out that changing the world has to start with changing our own lives. It’s a crucial message that needs to be heard.” —John Michael Greer, author of After Progress and The Retro Future
Download or read book A Living Past written by John Soluri and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2018-02-19 with total page 310 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Though still a relatively young field, the study of Latin American environmental history is blossoming, as the contributions to this definitive volume demonstrate. Bringing together thirteen leading experts on the region, A Living Past synthesizes a wide range of scholarship to offer new perspectives on environmental change in Latin America and the Spanish Caribbean since the nineteenth century. Each chapter provides insightful, up-to-date syntheses of current scholarship on critical countries and ecosystems (including Brazil, Mexico, the Caribbean, the tropical Andes, and tropical forests) and such cross-cutting themes as agriculture, conservation, mining, ranching, science, and urbanization. Together, these studies provide valuable historical contexts for making sense of contemporary environmental challenges facing the region.
Download or read book Religion and Dangerous Environmental Change written by Dieter Gerten and published by LIT Verlag Münster. This book was released on 2010 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Given the increasing threats of environmental changes to human societies it is imperative to complement technological and economical problem solutions with alternative perspectives from the humanities and the arts. This pioneering book attempts to advance climate and environmental sciences by including religion as a microcosm of cultural response to environmental change. The authors are renowned in disciplines as diverse as hydrology, religious studies, theology, cultural studies, philosophy and visual arts. They exemplify how religion can contribute to sustainable mitigation of climate change and to creative adaption to its impacts, thus preparing for a deep cultivation of research on religion in environmental change.
