Download or read book Environmental Pragmatism written by Andrew Light and published by Psychology Press. This book was released on 1996 with total page 365 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Environmental pragmatism is a new strategy in environmental thought. It argues that theoretical debates are hindering the ability of the environmental movement to forge agreement on basic policy imperatives. This new direction in environmental thought moves beyond theory, advocating a serious inquiry into the merits of moral pluralism. Environmental pragmatism, as a coherent philosophical position, connects the methodology of classical American pragmatic thought to the explanation, solution and discussion of real issues. This concise, well-focused collection is the first comprehensive presentation of environmental pragmatism as a new philosophical approach to environmental thought and policy.
Download or read book Society and the Environment written by Michael Carolan and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-05-15 with total page 314 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Society and the Environment examines today's environmental controversies within a socio-organizational context. After outlining the contours of 'pragmatic environmentalism', Carolan considers the pressures that exist where ecology and society collide, such as population growth and its associated increased demands for food and energy. He also investigates how various ecological issues, such as climate change, are affecting our very own personal health. Finally, he drills into the social/structural dynamics (including political economy and the international legal system) that create ongoing momentum for environmental ills. This interdisciplinary text features a three-part structure in each chapter that covers 'fast facts' about the issue at hand, examines its wide-ranging implications, and offers balanced consideration of possible real-world solutions. New to this edition are 'Movement Matters' boxes, which showcase grassroots movements that have affected legislation. Discussion questions and key terms enhance the text's usefulness, making Society and the Environment the perfect learning tool for courses on environmental sociology.
Download or read book Pragmatism and Environmentalism written by Hugh P. McDonald and published by Editions Rodopi. This book was released on 2012-08 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The growing literature on Environmental Ethics has ballooned into a separate sub-field within philosophy, involving ethical studies concerning the value of other species, of ecosystems, and of the environment of all living things as a whole. Some consider Environmental Ethics to be a revolution in ethics which will completely change the human-centered orientation of morals and reorient it to include all species, ecosystems or the larger biosphere. This volume explores pragmatist approaches to ethics that can be used for environmental issues. Pragmatism may provide both a more defensible theory of non-anthropomorphic and intrinsic value than other ethical schools, and, more generally, supply an alternative model of what environmental philosophy could be. The holism of pragmatists constitutes a challenge to value and ethics centered in the individual, and a useful ground for more holistic theories of value which, some have argued, is more suitable to an environmental, as opposed to a humane, ethic. The authors of this bookOCOs chapters defend their understandings of pragmatism in the course of explaining contemporary ways to reconstruct central foundations to environmental ethics."
Download or read book Green Metropolis written by David Owen and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2009-09-17 with total page 253 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Look out for David Owen's next book, Where the Water Goes. A challenging, controversial, and highly readable look at our lives, our world, and our future. Most Americans think of crowded cities as ecological nightmares, as wastelands of concrete and garbage and diesel fumes and traffic jams. Yet residents of compact urban centers, Owen shows, individually consume less oil, electricity, and water than other Americans. They live in smaller spaces, discard less trash, and, most important of all, spend far less time in automobiles. Residents of Manhattan—the most densely populated place in North America—rank first in public-transit use and last in percapita greenhouse-gas production, and they consume gasoline at a rate that the country as a whole hasn’t matched since the mid-1920s, when the most widely owned car in the United States was the Ford Model T. They are also among the only people in the United States for whom walking is still an important means of daily transportation. These achievements are not accidents. Spreading people thinly across the countryside may make them feel green, but it doesn’t reduce the damage they do to the environment. In fact, it increases the damage, while also making the problems they cause harder to see and to address. Owen contends that the environmental problem we face, at the current stage of our assault on the world’s nonrenewable resources, is not how to make teeming cities more like the pristine countryside. The problem is how to make other settled places more like Manhattan, whose residents presently come closer than any other Americans to meeting environmental goals that all of us, eventually, will have to come to terms with.
Download or read book Pragmatic Environmentalism written by Shane Ralston and published by Troubador Publishing. This book was released on 2013 with total page 146 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Although this book is about the newly emerging academic field of environmental communication, it is also about voice and practical activism. Shane Ralston contends that a deeply pragmatic form of environmental communication has the potential to transform the way environmental activists speak about their methods and goals - moving them toward a rhetoric of eco-justice.Sometimes looking forward requires stepping back - in this case back to two progressive era thinkers who revolutionised our outlook on social and environmental justice: John Dewey and Aldo Leopard. The author argues that the impoverished state of present day studies in environmental communication can be traced to a shallow conception of the pragmatic - a conception that can be made deeper through recourse to Dewey's and Leopold's ideas. Originating from their philosophies are twin rhetorics of control and restraint, thatwhen balanced define a rhetoric of eco-justice. This new approach to speaking about environmental matters proves helpful for contemporary environmental activists - particularly when working in the areas of wilderness preservation, gardening politics, global climate change and environmental justice
Download or read book The Landscape of Reform written by Ben A. Minteer and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2006 with total page 275 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In The Landscape of Reform Ben Minteer offers a fresh and provocative reading of the intellectual foundations of American environmentalism, focusing on the work and legacy of four important conservation and planning thinkers in the first half of the twentieth century: Liberty Hyde Bailey, a forgotten figure in the Progressive conservation movement; urban and regional planning theorist Lewis Mumford; Benton MacKaye, the forester and conservationist who proposed the Appalachian Trail in the 1920s; and Aldo Leopold, author of the environmentalist classic A Sand County Almanac . Minteer argues that these writers blazed a significant "third way" in environmental ethics and practice, a more pragmatic approach that offers a counterpoint to the anthropocentrism-versus-ecocentrism—use-versus-preservation—narrative that has long dominated discussions of the development of American environmental thought. Minteer shows that the environmentalism of Bailey, Mumford, MacKaye, and Leopold was also part of a larger moral and political program, one that included efforts to revitalize democratic citizenship, conserve regional culture and community identity, and reclaim a broader understanding of the public interest that went beyond economics and materialism. Their environmental thought was an attempt to critique and at the same time reform American society and political culture. Minteer explores the work of these four environmental reformers and considers two present-day manifestations of an environmental third way: Natural Systems Agriculture, an alternative to chemical and energy-intensive industrial agriculture; and New Urbanism, an attempt to combat the negative effects of suburban sprawl. By rediscovering the pragmatic roots of American environmentalism, writes Minteer, we can help bring about a new, civic-minded environmentalism today.
Download or read book Environmental Pragmatism written by Eric Katz and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-04-15 with total page 365 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Environmental pragmatism is a new strategy in environmental thought. It argues that theoretical debates are hindering the ability of the environmental movement to forge agreement on basic policy imperatives. This new direction in environmental thought moves beyond theory, advocating a serious inquiry into the merits of moral pluralism. Environmental pragmatism, as a coherent philosophical position, connects the methodology of classical American pragmatic thought to the explanation, solution and discussion of real issues. This concise, well-focused collection is the first comprehensive presentation of environmental pragmatism as a new philosophical approach to environmental thought and policy.
Download or read book Agency Democracy and Nature written by Robert J. Brulle and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2000 with total page 364 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this book Robert Brulle draws on a broad range of empirical and theoretical research to investigate the effectiveness of U.S. environmental groups. Brulle shows how Critical Theory--in particular the work of Jürgen Habermas--can expand our understanding of the social causes of environmental degradation and the political actions necessary to deal with it. He then develops both a pragmatic and a moral argument for broad-based democratization of society as a prerequisite to the achievement of ecological sustainability. From the perspectives of frame analysis, resource mobilization, and historical sociology, using data on more than one hundred environmental groups, Brulle examines the core beliefs, structures, funding, and political practices of a wide variety of environmental organizations. He identifies the social processes that foster the development of a democratic environmental movement and those that hinder it. He concludes with suggestions for how environmental groups can make their organizational practices more democratic and politically effective.
Download or read book Why Women Don t Ask written by Linda Babcock and published by Piatkus Books. This book was released on 2009-12-01 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Did you know that by failing to negotiate her starting salary for her first job, a woman may sacrifice over a half a million pounds in earnings by the end of her career? Yet, as research reveals, men are four times as likely to ask for higher pay than are women with the same qualifications. In this eye-opening book, Linda Babcock and Sara Laschever draw on research in psychology, sociology, economics and organisational behaviour as well as dozens of interviews to explore the personal and societal reasons why women seldom ask for what they need, want and deserve at work and at home. Why Women Don't Ask - a sensation when published in the US in 2003 - is a call to arms that will help you recognise the ways in which our culture perpetuates inequalities - and how you can begin to overcome them.
Download or read book Ecovillages written by Karen T. Litfin and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2014-01-15 with total page 214 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In a world of dwindling natural resources and mounting environmental crisis, who is devising ways of living that will work for the long haul? And how can we, as individuals, make a difference? To answer these fundamental questions, Professor Karen Litfin embarked upon a journey to many of the world’s ecovillagesÑintentional communities at the cutting-edge of sustainable living. From rural to urban, high tech to low tech, spiritual to secular, she discovered an under-the-radar global movement making positive and radical changes from the ground up. In this inspiring and insightful book, Karen Litfin shares her unique experience of these experiments in sustainable living through four broad windows - ecology, economics, community, and consciousness - or E2C2. Whether we live in an ecovillage or a city, she contends, we must incorporate these four key elements if we wish to harmonize our lives with our home planet. Not only is another world possible, it is already being born in small pockets the world over. These micro-societies, however, are small and time is short. Fortunately - as Litfin persuasively argues - their successes can be applied to existing social structures, from the local to the global scale, providing sustainable ways of living for generations to come. You can learn more about Karen's experiences on the Ecovillages website: http://ecovillagebook.org/
Download or read book The Jurisdynamics of Environmental Protection written by Jim Chen and published by Environmental Law Institute. This book was released on 2003 with total page 554 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On November 1 and 2, 2002, the University of Minnesota Law School and the University of Minnesota''s Consortium on Law and Values in Health, Environment, and the Life Sciences sponsored a symposium in honor of Professor Daniel A. Farber's contributions to environmental law. The resulting symposium, The Pragmatic Ecologist: Environmental Protection as a Jurisdynamic Experience, was published in volume 87 of the Minnesota Law Review. The Environmental Law Institute has now combined the proceedings of The Pragmatic Ecologist with additional contributions from many other leading scholars.
Download or read book Eco pragmatism written by Daniel A. Farber and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2000-05 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Eco-pragmatism takes on the most critical controversies in environmental law today: how to weigh economic costs against environmental quality and human life, how to assess the long time horizons of environmental problems, and how to make appropriate decisions in the face of scientific uncertainty about the scope (or even the existence) of environmental problems. Farber discusses whether (and how) we should "discount" the values of future environmental benefits, how we should use economic measurements of environmental values, and how we can streamline the regulatory process to respond to rapidly changing scientific knowledge. The result is a pragmatic decision-making framework that is flexible enough to accommodate the unique challenges each case presents.
Download or read book Counterculture Green written by Andrew G. Kirk and published by University Press of Kansas. This book was released on 2007-11-19 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For those who eagerly awaited its periodic appearance, it was more than a publication: it was a way of life. The Whole Earth Catalog billed itself as "Access to Tools," and it grew from a Bay Area blip to a national phenomenon catering to hippies, do-it-yourselfers, and anyone interested in self-sufficiency independent of mainstream America. In recovering the history of the Catalog's unique brand of environmentalism, Andrew Kirk recounts how San Francisco's Stewart Brand and his counterculture cohorts in the Point Foundation promoted a philosophy of pragmatic environmentalism that celebrated technological achievement, human ingenuity, and sustainable living. By piecing together the social, cultural, material, environmental, and technological history of that philosophy's incarnation in the Catalog, Kirk reveals the driving forces behind it, tells the story of the appropriate technology movement it espoused, and assesses its fate. This book takes a fresh look at the many individuals and organizations who worked in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s to construct this philosophy of pragmatic environmentalism. At a time when many of these ideas were seen as heretical to a predominantly wilderness-based movement, Whole Earth became a critical forum for environmental alternatives and a model for how complicated ecological ideas could be presented in a hopeful and even humorous way. It also enabled later environmental advocates like Al Gore to explain our current "inconvenient truth," and the actions of Brand's Point Foundation demonstrated that the epistemology of Whole Earth could be put into action in meaningful ways that might foster an environmental optimism distinctly different from the jeremiads that became the stock in trade of American environmentalism. Kirk shows us that Whole Earth was more than a mere counterculture fad. In an era of political protest, it suggested that staying home and modifying your toilet or installing a solar collector could make a more significant contribution than taking to the streets to shout down establishment misdeeds. Given its visible legacy in the current views of Al Gore and others, the subtle environmental heresies of Whole Earth continue to resonate today, which makes Kirk's lucid and lively tale an extremely timely one as well.
Download or read book The Medea Hypothesis written by Peter Ward and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2009-04-20 with total page 205 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Darwinian life -- What is evolutionary "success"? -- Two hypotheses about the nature of life on earth -- Medean feedbacks and global processes -- Medean events in the history of life -- Humans as medeans -- Biomass through time as a test -- Predicted future trends of biomass -- Summation -- Environmental implications -- What must be done
Download or read book Biodivinity and Biodiversity written by Emma Tomalin and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-04-15 with total page 230 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is concerned with the argument that religious traditions are inherently environmentally friendly. Yet in a developing country such as India, the majority of people cannot afford to put the 'Earth first' regardless of the extent to which this idea can be supported by their religious traditions. Does this mean that the linking of religion and environmental concerns is a strategy more suited to contexts where people have a level of material security that enables them to think and act like environmentalists? This question is approached through a series of case studies from Britain and India. The book concludes that there is a tension between the 'romantic' ecological discourse common among many western activists and scholars, and a more pragmatic approach, which is often found in India. The adoption of environmental causes by the Hindu Right in India makes it difficult to distinguish genuine concern for the environment from the broader politics surrounding the idea of a Hindu rashtra (nation). This raises a further level of analysis, which has not been provided in other studies.
Download or read book Society and the Environment written by Michael S Carolan and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-03-10 with total page 490 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Without focusing entirely on what is wrong with the world around us, the third edition of Society and the Environment centers its discussion on realistic solutions to the problems that persist and examines current controversies within a socio-organizational context. After introducing “pragmatic environmentalism,” Carolan discusses the complex pressures and variables that exist where ecology and society collide, such as population growth and the concurrent increase in demands for food and energy, and transportation and its outsized influence on urban and community patterns. With further attention given to the social phenomena and structural dynamics driving today’s environmental problems, the book concludes with an important reflection on truly sustainable solutions and what constitutes meaningful social change. Each chapter in this interdisciplinary text follows a three-part structure beginning with an overview of what is wrong and why. This leads into a discussion on each issue’s wide-ranging implications and, finally, a balanced consideration of realistic solutions. Featuring updated and expanded examples, discussion points, and coverage of recent developments including the US withdrawing from the Paris Agreement, “booming” national economies and wealth distribution, growing global interest in environmental justice—with particular focus on the links between injustice and race and inequality—climate change, and renewable energy, this new edition remains an essential companion for courses on environmental sociology and sustainability.
Download or read book Natural Protest written by Michael Egan and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2009-05-07 with total page 637 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From Jamestown to 9/11, concerns about the landscape, husbanding of natural resources, and the health of our environment have been important to the American way of life. Natural Protest is the first collection of original essays to offer a cohesive social and political examination of environmental awareness, activism, and justice throughout American history. Editors Michael Egan and Jeff Crane have selected the finest new scholarship in the field, establishing this complex and fascinating subject firmly at the forefront of American historical study. Focused and thought-provoking, Natural Protest presents a cutting-edge perspective on American environmentalism and environmental history, providing an invaluable resource for anyone concerned about the ecological fate of the world around us.
