Download or read book The Future of Nature written by Libby Robin and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2013-10-22 with total page 585 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This anthology provides an historical overview of the scientific ideas behind environmental prediction and how, as predictions about environmental change have been taken more seriously and widely, they have affected politics, policy, and public perception. Through an array of texts and commentaries that examine the themes of progress, population, environment, biodiversity and sustainability from a global perspective, it explores the meaning of the future in the twenty-first century. Providing access and reference points to the origins and development of key disciplines and methods, it will encourage policy makers, professionals, and students to reflect on the roots of their own theories and practices.
Download or read book The Nature of the Future written by Emily Pawley and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2022-06-07 with total page 310 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "In the seemingly mundane Northern farm of early America and the people who sought to improve its productivity and efficiency, Emily Pawley finds a world rich with innovative practices and marked by a developing interrelationship between scientific knowledge, industrial methods, and capitalism. Agricultural "improvers" became increasingly scientistic, driving tremendous increases in the range and volume of agricultural output-and transforming American conceptions of expertise, success, and exploitation. Pawley's focus on soil, fertilizer, apples, mulberries, agricultural fairs, and experimental stations shows each nominally dull subject to have been an area of intellectual ferment and sharp contestation: mercantile, epistemological, and otherwise"--
Download or read book The Future of Human Nature written by Jürgen Habermas and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2014-10-15 with total page 121 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Recent developments in biotechnology and genetic research are raising complex ethical questions concerning the legitimate scope and limits of genetic intervention. As we begin to contemplate the possibility of intervening in the human genome to prevent diseases, we cannot help but feel that the human species might soon be able to take its biological evolution in its own hands. ‘Playing God’ is the metaphor commonly used for this self-transformation of the species, which, it seems, might soon be within our grasp. In this important new book, Jürgen Habermas – the most influential philosopher and social thinker in Germany today – takes up the question of genetic engineering and its ethical implications and subjects it to careful philosophical scrutiny. His analysis is guided by the view that genetic manipulation is bound up with the identity and self-understanding of the species. We cannot rule out the possibility that knowledge of one’s own hereditary factors may prove to be restrictive for the choice of an individual’s way of life and may undermine the symmetrical relations between free and equal human beings. In the concluding chapter – which was delivered as a lecture on receiving the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade for 2001 – Habermas broadens the discussion to examine the tension between science and religion in the modern world, a tension which exploded, with such tragic violence, on September 11th.
Download or read book The Nature of Tomorrow written by Michael Rawson and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2021-01-01 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An examination of how Western visions of endless future growth have contributed to the global environmental crisis "This book does something that is worth doing and that no other scholarly book I know of comes close to doing: tracing the history of imagined environmental futures in the Western world."--William Meyer, Colgate University For centuries, the West has produced stories about the future in which humans use advanced science and technology to transform the earth. Michael Rawson uses a wide range of works that include Francis Bacon's New Atlantis, the science fiction novels of Jules Verne, and even the speculations of think tanks like the RAND Corporation to reveal the environmental paradox at the heart of these narratives: the single-minded expectation of unlimited growth on a finite planet. Rawson shows how these stories, which have long pervaded Western dreams about the future, have helped to enable an unprecedentedly abundant and technology-driven lifestyle for some while bringing the threat of environmental disaster to all. Adapting to ecological realities, he argues, hinges on the ability to create new visions of tomorrow that decouple growth from the idea of progress.
Download or read book Technological Nature written by Peter H. Kahn, Jr. and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2011-02-25 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why it matters that our relationship with nature is increasingly mediated and augmented by technology. Our forebears may have had a close connection with the natural world, but increasingly we experience technological nature. Children come of age watching digital nature programs on television. They inhabit virtual lands in digital games. And they play with robotic animals, purchased at big box stores. Until a few years ago, hunters could "telehunt"—shoot and kill animals in Texas from a computer anywhere in the world via a Web interface. Does it matter that much of our experience with nature is mediated and augmented by technology? In Technological Nature, Peter Kahn argues that it does, and shows how it affects our well-being. Kahn describes his investigations of children's and adults' experiences of cutting-edge technological nature. He and his team installed "technological nature windows" (50-inch plasma screens showing high-definition broadcasts of real-time local nature views) in inside offices on his university campus and assessed the physiological and psychological effects on viewers. He studied children's and adults' relationships with the robotic dog AIBO (including possible benefits for children with autism). And he studied online "telegardening" (a pastoral alternative to "telehunting"). Kahn's studies show that in terms of human well-being technological nature is better than no nature, but not as good as actual nature. We should develop and use technological nature as a bonus on life, not as its substitute, and re-envision what is beautiful and fulfilling and often wild in essence in our relationship with the natural world.
Download or read book Prediction written by Daniel R. Sarewitz and published by . This book was released on 2000-04 with total page 434 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Based upon ten case studies, Prediction explores how science-based predictions guide policy making and what this means in terms of global warming, biogenetically modifying organisms and polluting the environment with chemicals.
Download or read book Out of Nature written by Kara Rogers and published by University of Arizona Press. This book was released on 2012-11-01 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: About half of all species under threat of extinction in the world today are plants. The loss of plant biodiversity is disturbing for many reasons, but especially because it is a reflection of the growing disconnect between humans and nature. Plants have been used for millennia in traditional systems of healing and have held a significant place in drug development for Western medicine as well. Despite the recent dominance of synthetic drug production, natural product discovery remains the backbone of drug development. As the diversity of life on Earth is depleted and increasing numbers of species become lost to extinction, we continue to lose opportunities to achieve advances in medicine. Through stories of drug revelation in nature and forays into botany, human behavior, and conservation, Kara Rogers sheds light on the multiple ways in which humans, medicine, and plants are interconnected. With accessible and engaging writing, she explores the relationships between humans and plants, relating the stories of plant hunters of centuries past and examining the impact of human activities on the environment and the world's biodiversity. Rogers also highlights the role that plant-based products can play in encouraging conservation and protecting the heritage and knowledge of indigenous peoples. Out of Nature provides a fresh perspective on modern drug innovation and its relationship with nature. The book delves into the complexity of biophilia—the innate human attraction to life in the natural world—and suggests that the reawakening of this drive is fundamental to expanding conservation efforts and improving medicine. Rogers's examination of plants, humans, and drug discovery also conveys a passionate optimism for the future of biodiversity and medicine. Including a collection of hand-drawn maps and plant illustrations created by the author, this well-researched narrative will inspire as well as inform.
Download or read book Under a White Sky written by Elizabeth Kolbert and published by Crown. This book was released on 2021-02-09 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NATIONAL BESTSELLER • The Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Sixth Extinction returns to humanity’s transformative impact on the environment, now asking: After doing so much damage, can we change nature, this time to save it? RECOMMENDED BY PRESIDENT OBAMA AND BILL GATES • SHORTLISTED FOR THE WAINWRIGHT PRIZE FOR WRITING • ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The Washington Post • ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: Time, Esquire, Smithsonian Magazine, Vulture, Publishers Weekly, Kirkus Reviews, Library Journal • “Beautifully and insistently, Kolbert shows us that it is time to think radically about the ways we manage the environment.”—Helen Macdonald, The New York Times That man should have dominion “over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth” is a prophecy that has hardened into fact. So pervasive are human impacts on the planet that it’s said we live in a new geological epoch: the Anthropocene. In Under a White Sky, Elizabeth Kolbert takes a hard look at the new world we are creating. Along the way, she meets biologists who are trying to preserve the world’s rarest fish, which lives in a single tiny pool in the middle of the Mojave; engineers who are turning carbon emissions to stone in Iceland; Australian researchers who are trying to develop a “super coral” that can survive on a hotter globe; and physicists who are contemplating shooting tiny diamonds into the stratosphere to cool the earth. One way to look at human civilization, says Kolbert, is as a ten-thousand-year exercise in defying nature. In The Sixth Extinction, she explored the ways in which our capacity for destruction has reshaped the natural world. Now she examines how the very sorts of interventions that have imperiled our planet are increasingly seen as the only hope for its salvation. By turns inspiring, terrifying, and darkly comic, Under a White Sky is an utterly original examination of the challenges we face.
Download or read book Nature Unbound written by Dan Brockington and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2012-07-26 with total page 266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This groundbreaking volume is the first comprehensive, critical examination of the rise of protected areas and their current social and economic position in our world. It examines the social impacts of protected areas, the conflicts that surround them, the alternatives to them and the conceptual categories they impose. The book explores key debates on devolution, participation and democracy; the role and uniqueness of indigenous peoples and other local communities; institutions and resource management; hegemony, myth and symbolic power in conservation success stories; tourism, poverty and conservation; and the transformation of social and material relations which community conservation entails. For conservation practitioners and protected area professionals not accustomed to criticisms of their work, or students new to this complex field, the book will provide an understanding of the history and current state of affairs in the rise of protected areas. It introduces the concepts, theories and writers on which critiques of conservation have been built, and provides the means by which practitioners can understand problems with which they are wrestling. For advanced researchers the book will present a critique of the current debates on protected areas and provide a host of jumping off points for an array of research avenues
Download or read book NEXT NATURE written by Koert van Mensvoort and published by Next Nature Network. This book was released on 2020-12-17 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Think of nature and you’re likely to picture a forest, not a freeway. But how natural is nature really? We live in a world of constructed wildlife reserves, rainbow tulips, designer babies and cultured meat. We control a tomato’s biology so precisely, you can hardly call it natural anymore. Meanwhile, our grip on the Internet and the financial markets has grown so slight that they’re coming to resemble forces of nature. Using countless well-known examples and scientific insights, Koert van Mensvoort shows how a technosphere is evolving on top of a biosphere billions of years old. He’ll take you on an epic journey full of businesses that breathe, woods that smell like shampoo, and creatures that live on plastic. Along the way, a totally new view of the natural world will unfurl – one that’s not only more realistic but infinitely more creative, exciting and beautiful. To cope with the immense challenges facing the world today, we need to go forward, not back, to nature.
Download or read book Rambunctious Garden written by Emma Marris and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2013-08-20 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Some of the material in this book appeared previously, in a different form, in the journal Nature"--T.p. verso.
Download or read book After Nature written by Jedediah Purdy and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2015-09 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An Artforum Best Book of the Year A Legal Theory Bookworm Book of the Year Nature no longer exists apart from humanity. Henceforth, the world we will inhabit is the one we have made. Geologists have called this new planetary epoch the Anthropocene, the Age of Humans. The geological strata we are now creating record industrial emissions, industrial-scale crop pollens, and the disappearance of species driven to extinction. Climate change is planetary engineering without design. These facts of the Anthropocene are scientific, but its shape and meaning are questions for politics—a politics that does not yet exist. After Nature develops a politics for this post-natural world. “After Nature argues that we will deserve the future only because it will be the one we made. We will live, or die, by our mistakes.” —Christine Smallwood, Harper’s “Dazzling...Purdy hopes that climate change might spur yet another change in how we think about the natural world, but he insists that such a shift will be inescapably political... For a relatively slim volume, this book distills an incredible amount of scholarship—about Americans’ changing attitudes toward the natural world, and about how those attitudes might change in the future.” —Ross Andersen, The Atlantic
Download or read book Nature in the City written by Harini Nagendra and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016-07-07 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In a rapidly urbanizing India, what is the future of nature conservation? How does the march of development impact the conflict between nature and people in India’s cities? Exploring these questions, Nature in the City examines the past, present and future of nature in Bengaluru, one of India’s largest and fastest growing cities. Once known as the Garden City of India, Bengaluru’s tree-lined avenues, historic parks and expansive water bodies have witnessed immense degradation and destruction in recent years, but have also shown remarkable tenacity for survival. This book charts Bengaluru’s journey from the early settlements in the 6th century CE to the 21st century city and demonstrates how nature has looked and behaved and has been perceived in Bengaluru’s home gardens, slums, streets, parks, sacred spaces and lakes. A fascinating narrative of the changing role and state of nature in the midst of urban sprawl and integrating research with stories of people and places, this book presents an accessible and informative story of a city where nature thrives and strives.
Download or read book A Different Nature written by David Hancocks and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2001 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A well-written and provocative, opinion-rich account of zoos, their history, and their goals and purposes. Hancocks has earned the right to speak authoritatively about these subjects, thanks to his tenure as director of two leading U. S. zoos. This book will appeal to general readers and to all persons interested in zoos and their role in conservation and education."—John Alcock, author of Animal Behavior: An Evolutionary Approach "Giraffes, elephants, gorillas, snakes, and toucans respond poorly to the usual conventions of human architecture. Zoo architects usually respond no less poorly to the needs of animals. David Hancocks draws on a lifetime's experience working as a zoo director and zoo architect to explore this dilemma, and offers a compelling vision for the future. This is an important book for those interested in conservation as well as for zoo and museum buffs."—William Conway, former President and General Director of the Wildlife Conservation Society and the Bronx Zoo "For over two decades David Hancocks has fervently tried to reform the fundamental character and mission of zoos. This book is his most thorough analysis of what is wrong with them and his most detailed and compelling plea for improvement. Every conscientious zoo administrator, curator, and keeper should read it from cover to cover with an open mind. Professionals in botanical gardens, museums, and nature parks should also consider this treatise because Hancocks advocates that a fusion of all of these institutions into a new entity better positioned to interpret the entire biosphere."-Mark A. Dimmitt, Director of Natural History, Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum
Download or read book Rediscovering Earth written by Anders Dunker and published by . This book was released on 2021 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Living Through the End of Nature written by Paul Wapner and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2010-02-12 with total page 267 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How environmentalism can reinvent itself in a postnature age: a proposal for navigating between naive naturalism and technological arrogance. Environmentalists have always worked to protect the wildness of nature but now must find a new direction. We have so tamed, colonized, and contaminated the natural world that safeguarding it from humans is no longer an option. Humanity's imprint is now everywhere and all efforts to “preserve” nature require extensive human intervention. At the same time, we are repeatedly told that there is no such thing as nature itself—only our own conceptions of it. One person's endangered species is another's dinner or source of income. In Living Through the End of Nature, Paul Wapner probes the meaning of environmentalism in a postnature age. Wapner argues that we can neither go back to a preindustrial Elysium nor forward to a technological utopia. He proposes a third way that takes seriously the breached boundary between humans and nature and charts a co-evolutionary path in which environmentalists exploit the tension between naturalism and mastery to build a more sustainable, ecologically vibrant, and socially just world. Beautifully written and thoughtfully argued, Living Through the End of Nature provides a powerful vision for environmentalism's future
Download or read book A Natural History of the Future written by Rob Dunn and published by Hachette UK. This book was released on 2022-01-20 with total page 298 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Over the past century, our species has made unprecedented technological innovations with which we have sought to control nature. In A Natural History of the Future, biologist Rob Dunn argues that such efforts are futile. We may see ourselves as life's overlords, but we are instead at its mercy. In the evolution of antibiotic resistance, the power of natural selection to create biodiversity, and even the surprising life of the London Underground, Dunn finds laws of life that no human activity can annul. When we create artificial islands of crops, dump toxic waste, or build communities, we provide new materials for old laws to shape. Life's future flourishing is not in question. Ours is. A Natural History of the Future sets a new standard for understanding the diversity and destiny of life itself.
