Download or read book Urbanization and Affordances that Promote Well Being for Urban People and for a Healthy Biosphere written by Stephan Barthel and published by Frontiers Media SA. This book was released on 2020-01-30 with total page 187 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The world is urbanizing at an unprecedented rate. It is estimated that in the near future urban landscapes for another ca. 2.7 billion people will be built on planet Earth, approximately converting land equivalent to the size of South Africa. Such land conversion, coupled with citizen densification, increasing in-equalities, shifting diets, and emerging technologies, challenge human well-being and pose ever-increasing demand for resources generated by the Biosphere. This Research Topic concentrates on the various ways urbanization can promote individual well-being (mental, physical, and social health) as well as ecological health (a healthy Biosphere). What kind of affordances for human health promotion can urbanization include? What kinds of affordances for a psychological connection with nature can urbanization include? What kinds of nudges for pro-environmental behavior and consumption (decreasing detrimental consumption behaviors) can be actively designed in urban settings? The Research Topic at hand uses a transactional approach, where an affordance can be understood as a non-deterministic in-situ precondition for a human activity, enabled by relations between abilities of an individual with features of an environment. We encourage a broad definition of the concept of affordances, where ‘the environment’ must not be restricted to the material biophysical environment alone, but also could be combined with social immaterial features. We see that the transactional approach of this Research Topic posits that meaning arises in relations between humans and their environment, that it will be equally applicable to natural and designed environments, and that it doesn’t regard dichotomies like city-contra-nature or social-contra-ecological. Hence, this Research Topic is interested in if the transactional approach can be used as a conceptual tool, not only for promotion of mental, physical, and social health in cities, but simultaneously for unraveling relations at the micro scale in cities which can be used for solutions that also promote a healthy Biosphere.

Download or read book Urban Environmental Education Review written by Alex Russ and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2017-06-06 with total page 449 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Urban Environmental Education Review explores how environmental education can contribute to urban sustainability. Urban environmental education includes any practices that create learning opportunities to foster individual and community well-being and environmental quality in cities. It fosters novel educational approaches and helps debunk common assumptions that cities are ecologically barren and that city people don't care for, or need, urban nature or a healthy environment. Topics in Urban Environmental Education Review range from the urban context to theoretical underpinnings, educational settings, participants, and educational approaches in urban environmental education. Chapters integrate research and practice to help aspiring and practicing environmental educators, urban planners, and other environmental leaders achieve their goals in terms of education, youth and community development, and environmental quality in cities. The ten-essay series Urban EE Essays, excerpted from Urban Environmental Education Review, may be found here: naaee.org/eepro/resources/urban-ee-essays. These essays explore various perspectives on urban environmental education and may be reprinted/reproduced only with permission from Cornell University Press.

Download or read book Sustainability Assessments of Urban Systems written by Claudia R. Binder and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2020-03-26 with total page 523 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Provides guidelines for assessing the sustainability of urban systems including theory, methods and case studies.

Download or read book The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Urban and Regional Futures written by Robert C. Brears and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2023-01-13 with total page 2334 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: While urban settlements are the drivers of the global economy and centres of learning, culture, and innovation and nations rely on competitive dynamic regions for their economic, social, and environmental objectives, urban centres and regions face a myriad of challenges that impact the ways in which people live and work, create wealth, and interact and connect with places. Rapid urbanisation is resulting in urban sprawl, rising emissions, urban poverty and high unemployment rates, housing affordability issues, lack of urban investment, low urban financial and governance capacities, rising inequality and urban crimes, environmental degradation, increasing vulnerability to natural disasters and so forth. At the regional level, low employment, low wage growth, scarce financial resources, climate change, waste and pollution, and rising urban peri-urban competition etc. are impacting the ability of regions to meet socio-economic development goals while protecting biodiversity. The response to these challenges has typically been the application of inadequate or piecemeal solutions, often as a result of fragmented decision-making and competing priorities, with numerous economic, environmental, and social consequences. In response, there is a growing movement towards viewing cities and regions as complex and sociotechnical in nature with people and communities interacting with one another and with objects, such as roads, buildings, transport links etc., within a range of urban and regional settings or contexts. This comprehensive MRW will provide readers with expert interdisciplinary knowledge on how urban centres and regions in locations of varying climates, lifestyles, income levels, and stages development are creating synergies and reducing trade-offs in the development of resilient, resource-efficient, environmentally friendly, liveable, socially equitable, integrated, and technology-enabled centres and regions.

Download or read book The Experience of Nature written by Rachel Kaplan and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1989-07-28 with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Nature Play Learning Places written by Robin C. Moore and published by . This book was released on 2014 with total page 169 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Social Sustainability Past and Future written by Sander van der Leeuw and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2020-02-13 with total page 533 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A novel, integrated approach to understanding long-term human history, viewing it as the long-term evolution of human information-processing. This title is also available as Open Access.

Download or read book Manifesto for Living in the Anthropocene written by Katherine Gibson and published by punctum books. This book was released on 2015 with total page 183 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The recent 10,000 year history of climatic stability on Earth that enabled the rise of agriculture and domestication, the growth of cities, numerous technological revolutions, and the emergence of modernity is now over. We accept that in the latest phase of this era, modernity is unmaking the stability that enabled its emergence. Over the 21st century severe and numerous weather disasters, scarcity of key resources, major changes in environments, enormous rates of extinction, and other forces that threaten life are set to increase. But we are deeply worried that current responses to these challenges are focused on market-driven solutions and thus have the potential to further endanger our collective commons. Today public debate is polarized. On one hand we are confronted with the immobilizing effects of knowing "the facts" about climate change. On the other we see a powerful will to ignorance and the effects of a pernicious collaboration between climate change skeptics and industry stakeholders. Clearly, to us, the current crisis calls for new ways of thinking and producing knowledge. Our collective inclination has been to go on in an experimental and exploratory mode, in which we refuse to foreclose on options or jump too quickly to "solutions." In this spirit we feel the need to acknowledge the tragedy of anthropogenic climate change. It is important to tap into the emotional richness of grief about extinction and loss without getting stuck on the "blame game." Our research must allow for the expression of grief and mourning for what has been and is daily being lost. But it is important to adopt a reparative rather than a purely critical stance toward knowing. Might it be possible to welcome the pain of "knowing" if it led to different ways of working with non-human others, recognizing a confluence of desire across the human/non-human divide and the vital rhythms that animate the world? Our discussions have focused on new types of ecological economic thinking and ethical practices of living. We are interested in: Resituating humans within ecological systems Resituating non-humans in ethical terms Systems of survival that are resilient in the face of change Diversity and dynamism in ecologies and economies Ethical responsibility across space and time, between places and in the future Creating new ecological economic narratives. Starting from the recognition that there is no "one size fits all" response to climate change, we are concerned to develop an ethics of place that appreciates the specificity and richness of loss and potentiality. While connection to earth others might be an overarching goal, it will be to certain ecologies, species, atmospheres and materialities that we actually connect. We could see ourselves as part of country, accepting the responsibility not forgotten by Indigenous people all over the world, of "singing" country into health. This might mean cultivating the capacity for deep listening to each other, to the land, to other species and thereby learning to be affected and transformed by the body-world we are part of; seeing the body as a center of animation but not the ground of a separate self; renouncing the narcissistic defense of omnipotence and an equally narcissistic descent into despair. We think that we can work against singular and global representations of "the problem" in the face of which any small, multiple, place-based action is rendered hopeless. We can choose to read for difference rather than dominance; think connectivity rather than hyper-separation; look for multiplicity - multiple climate changes, multiple ways of living with earth others. We can find ways forward in what is already being done in the here and now; attend to the performative effects of any analysis; tell stories in a hopeful and open way - allowing for the possibility that life is dormant rather than dead. We can use our critical capacities to recover our rich traditions of counter-culture and theorize them outside the mainstream/alternative binary. All these ways of thinking and researching give rise to new strategies for going forward. Think of the chapters of this book as tentative hoverings, as the fluttering of butterfly wings, scattering germs of ideas that can take root and grow."--Publisher's website.

Download or read book Forests Trees and Human Health written by Kjell Nilsson and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2010-10-10 with total page 428 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The link between modern lifestyles and increasing levels of chronic heart disease, obesity, stress and poor mental health is a concern across the world. The cost of dealing with these conditions places a large burden on national public health budgets so that policymakers are increasingly looking at prevention as a cost-effective alternative to medical treatment. Attention is turning towards interactions between the environment and lifestyles. Exploring the relationships between health, natural environments in general, and forests in particular, this groundbreaking book is the outcome of the European Union’s COST Action E39 ‘Forests, Trees and Human Health and Wellbeing’, and draws together work carried out over four years by scientists from 25 countries working in the fields of forestry, health, environment and social sciences. While the focus is primarily on health priorities defined within Europe, this volume explicitly draws also on research from North America.

Download or read book Handbook of Environmental Psychology and Quality of Life Research written by Ghozlane Fleury-Bahi and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-08-12 with total page 567 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This Handbook presents a broad overview of the current research carried out in environmental psychology which puts into perspective quality of life and relationships with living spaces, and shows how this original analytical framework can be used to understand different environmental and societal issues. Adopting an original approach, this Handbook focuses on the links with other specialties in psychology, especially social and health psychology, together with other disciplines such as geography, architecture, sociology, anthropology, urbanism and engineering. Faced with the problems of society which involve the quality of life of individuals and communities, it is fundamental to consider the relationships an individual has with his different living spaces. This issue of the links between quality of life and environment is becoming increasingly significant with, at a local level, problems resulting from different types of annoyances, such as pollution and noise, while, at a global level, there is the central question of climate change with its harmful consequences for humans and the planet. How can the impact on well-being of environmental nuisances and threats (for example, natural risks, pollution, and noise) be reduced? How can the quality of life within daily living spaces (home, cities, work environments) be improved? Why is it important to understand the psychological issues of our relationship with the global environment (climatic warming, ecological behaviours)? This Handbook is intended not only for students of various disciplines (geography, architecture, psychology, town planning, etc.) but also for social decision-makers and players who will find in it both theoretical and methodological perspectives, so that psychological and environmental dimensions can be better taken into account in their working practices.

Download or read book Principles and Methods in Landscape Ecology written by Almo Farina and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2008-01-22 with total page 412 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Landscape ecology is an integrative and multi-disciplinary science and Principles and Methods in Landscape Ecology reconciles the geological, botanical, zoological and human perspectives. In particular ,new paradigms and theories such as percolation, metapopulation, hierarchies, source-sink models have been integrated in this last edition with the recent theories on bio-complexity, information and cognitive sciences. Methods for studying landscape ecology are covered including spatial geometry models and remote sensing in order to create confidence toward techniques and approaches that require a high experience and long-time dedication. Principles and Methods in Landscape Ecology is a textbook useful to present the landscape in a multi-vision perspective for undergraduate and graduate students of biology, ecology, geography, forestry, agronomy, landscape architecture and planning. Sociology, economics, history, archaeology, anthropology, ecological psychology are some sciences that can benefit of the holistic vision offered by this texbook.

Download or read book Civic Ecology written by Marianne E. Krasny and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2015-01-30 with total page 325 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Offer stories of ... emerging grassroots environmental stewardship, along with an interdisciplinary framework for understanding and studying it as a growing international phenomenon.--Back cover.

Download or read book The Community Food Forest Handbook written by Catherine Bukowski and published by Chelsea Green Publishing. This book was released on 2018 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Collaboration and leadership strategies for long-term success Fueled by the popularity of permaculture and agroecology, community food forests are capturing the imaginations of people in neighborhoods, towns, and cities across the United States. Along with community gardens and farmers markets, community food forests are an avenue toward creating access to nutritious food and promoting environmental sustainability where we live. Interest in installing them in public spaces is on the rise. People are the most vital component of community food forests, but while we know more than ever about how to design food forests, the ways in which to best organize and lead groups of people involved with these projects has received relatively little attention. In The Community Food Forest Handbook, Catherine Bukowski and John Munsell dive into the civic aspects of community food forests, drawing on observations, group meetings, and interviews at over 20 projects across the country and their own experience creating and managing a food forest. They combine the stories and strategies gathered during their research with concepts of community development and project management to outline steps for creating lasting public food forests that positively impact communities. Rather than rehash food forest design, which classic books such as Forest Gardening and Edible Forest Gardens address in great detail, The Community Food Forest Handbook uses systems thinking and draws on social change theory to focus on how to work with diverse groups of people when conceiving of, designing, and implementing a community food forest. To find practical ground, the authors use management phases to highlight the ebb and flow of community capitals from a project's inception to its completion. They also explore examples of positive feedbacks that are often unexpected but offer avenues for enhancing the success of a community food forest. The Community Food Forest Handbook provides readers with helpful ideas for building and sustaining momentum, working with diverse public and private stakeholders, integrating assorted civic interests and visions within one project, creating safe and attractive sites, navigating community policies, positively affecting public perception, and managing site evolution and adaptation. Its concepts and examples showcase the complexities of community food forests, highlighting the human resilience of those who learn and experience what is possible when they collaborate on a shared vision for their community.

Download or read book Aquaponics Food Production Systems written by Simon Goddek and published by Springer. This book was released on 2019-06-21 with total page 620 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This open access book, written by world experts in aquaponics and related technologies, provides the authoritative and comprehensive overview of the key aquaculture and hydroponic and other integrated systems, socio-economic and environmental aspects. Aquaponic systems, which combine aquaculture and vegetable food production offer alternative technology solutions for a world that is increasingly under stress through population growth, urbanisation, water shortages, land and soil degradation, environmental pollution, world hunger and climate change.

Download or read book Standing up for a Sustainable World written by Claude Henry and published by Edward Elgar Publishing. This book was released on 2020-12-25 with total page 496 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The world has witnessed extraordinary economic growth, poverty reduction and increased life expectancy and population since the end of WWII, but it has occurred at the expense of undermining life support systems on Earth and subjecting future generations to the real risk of destabilising the planet. This timely book exposes and explores this colossal environmental cost and the dangerous position the world is now in. Standing up for a Sustainable World is written by and about key individuals who have not only understood the threats to our planet, but also become witness to them and confronted them.

Download or read book Radical Embodied Cognitive Science written by Anthony Chemero and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2011-08-19 with total page 269 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A proposal for a new way to do cognitive science argues that cognition should be described in terms of agent-environment dynamics rather than computation and representation. While philosophers of mind have been arguing over the status of mental representations in cognitive science, cognitive scientists have been quietly engaged in studying perception, action, and cognition without explaining them in terms of mental representation. In this book, Anthony Chemero describes this nonrepresentational approach (which he terms radical embodied cognitive science), puts it in historical and conceptual context, and applies it to traditional problems in the philosophy of mind. Radical embodied cognitive science is a direct descendant of the American naturalist psychology of William James and John Dewey, and follows them in viewing perception and cognition to be understandable only in terms of action in the environment. Chemero argues that cognition should be described in terms of agent-environment dynamics rather than in terms of computation and representation. After outlining this orientation to cognition, Chemero proposes a methodology: dynamical systems theory, which would explain things dynamically and without reference to representation. He also advances a background theory: Gibsonian ecological psychology, “shored up” and clarified. Chemero then looks at some traditional philosophical problems (reductionism, epistemological skepticism, metaphysical realism, consciousness) through the lens of radical embodied cognitive science and concludes that the comparative ease with which it resolves these problems, combined with its empirical promise, makes this approach to cognitive science a rewarding one. “Jerry Fodor is my favorite philosopher,” Chemero writes in his preface, adding, “I think that Jerry Fodor is wrong about nearly everything.” With this book, Chemero explains nonrepresentational, dynamical, ecological cognitive science as clearly and as rigorously as Jerry Fodor explained computational cognitive science in his classic work The Language of Thought.

Download or read book Situating Sustainability written by C. Parker Krieg and published by Helsinki University Press. This book was released on 2021-11-22 with total page 366 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Situating Sustainability reframes our understanding of sustainability through an emerging international terrain of concepts and case studies. These approaches include material practices, such as extraction and disaster recovery, and extend into the domains of human rights and education. This volume addresses the need in sustainability science to recognize the deep and diverse cultural histories that define environmental politics. It brings together scholars from cultural studies, anthropology, literature, law, behavioral science, urban studies, design, and development to argue that it is no longer possible to talk about sustainability in general without thinking through the contexts of research and action. These contributors are joined by artists whose public-facing work provides a mobile platform to conduct research at the edges of performance, knowledge production, and socio-ecological infrastructures. Situating Sustainability calls for a truly transdisciplinary research that is guided by the humanities and social sciences in collaboration with local actors informed by histories of place. Designed for students, scholars, and interested readers, the volume introduces the conceptual practices that inform the leading edge of engaged research in sustainability.