Download or read book Economic Development and Environmental History in the Anthropocene written by Gareth Austin and published by Bloomsbury Academic. This book was released on 2017 with total page 326 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For the populations of the developing economies - the vast majority of humanity - the present century offers the prospect of emulating Western standards of living. This hope is combined with increasing awareness of the environmental consequences of the very process of global industrialisation itself. This book explores the interactions between economic development and the physical environment in four regions of the developing world: Sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, Southeast Asia and East Asia. The contributors focus on the 'Anthropocene': our present era, in which humanity's influence on the physical environment has begun to mark the geological record. Economic Development and Environmental History in the Anthropocene examines environmental changes at global level and human responses to environmental opportunities and constraints on more local and regional scales, themes which have been insufficiently studied to date. This volume fills this gap in the literature by combining historical, economic and geographical perspectives to consider the implications of the Anthropocene for economic development in Asia and Africa.
Download or read book Economic Development and Environmental History in the Anthropocene written by Gareth Austin and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2017-10-19 with total page 345 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For the populations of the developing economies – the vast majority of humanity – the present century offers the prospect of emulating Western standards of living. This hope is combined with increasing awareness of the environmental consequences of the very process of global industrialisation itself. This book explores the interactions between economic development and the physical environment in four regions of the developing world: Sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, Southeast Asia and East Asia. The contributors focus on the 'Anthropocene': our present era, in which humanity's influence on the physical environment has begun to mark the geological record. Economic Development and Environmental History in the Anthropocene examines environmental changes at global level and human responses to environmental opportunities and constraints on more local and regional scales, themes which have been insufficiently studied to date. This volume fills this gap in the literature by combining historical, economic and geographical perspectives to consider the implications of the Anthropocene for economic development in Asia and Africa.
Download or read book The Great Acceleration written by J. R. McNeill and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2016-04-04 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Earth has entered a new age—the Anthropocene—in which humans are the most powerful influence on global ecology. Since the mid-twentieth century, the accelerating pace of energy use, greenhouse gas emissions, and population growth has thrust the planet into a massive uncontrolled experiment. The Great Acceleration explains its causes and consequences, highlighting the role of energy systems, as well as trends in climate change, urbanization, and environmentalism. More than any other factor, human dependence on fossil fuels inaugurated the Anthropocene. Before 1700, people used little in the way of fossil fuels, but over the next two hundred years coal became the most important energy source. When oil entered the picture, coal and oil soon accounted for seventy-five percent of human energy use. This allowed far more economic activity and produced a higher standard of living than people had ever known—but it created far more ecological disruption. We are now living in the Anthropocene. The period from 1945 to the present represents the most anomalous period in the history of humanity’s relationship with the biosphere. Three-quarters of the carbon dioxide humans have contributed to the atmosphere has accumulated since World War II ended, and the number of people on Earth has nearly tripled. So far, humans have dramatically altered the planet’s biogeochemical systems without consciously managing them. If we try to control these systems through geoengineering, we will inaugurate another stage of the Anthropocene. Where it might lead, no one can say for sure.
Download or read book Ecological Economics for the Anthropocene written by Peter G. Brown and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2015-09-01 with total page 408 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ecological Economics for the Anthropocene provides an urgently needed alternative to the long-dominant neoclassical economic paradigm of the free market, which has focused myopically—even fatally—on the boundless production and consumption of goods and services without heed to environmental consequences. The emerging paradigm for ecological economics championed in this new book recenters the field of economics on the fact of the Earth's limitations, requiring a total reconfiguration of the goals of the economy, how we understand the fundamentals of human prosperity, and, ultimately, how we assess humanity's place in the community of beings. Each essay in this volume contributes to an emerging, revolutionary agenda based on the tenets of ecological economics and advances new conceptions of justice, liberty, and the meaning of an ethical life in the era of the Anthropocene. Essays highlight the need to create alternative signals to balance one-dimensional market-price measurements in judging the relationships between the economy and the Earth's life-support systems. In a lively exchange, the authors question whether such ideas as "ecosystem health" and the environmental data that support them are robust enough to inform policy. Essays explain what a taking-it-slow or no-growth approach to economics looks like and explore how to generate the cultural and political will to implement this agenda. This collection represents one of the most sophisticated and realistic strategies for neutralizing the threat of our current economic order, envisioning an Earth-embedded society committed to the commonwealth of life and the security and true prosperity of human society.
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 The Ecocentrists written by Keith Makoto Woodhouse and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2018-06-05 with total page 543 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Disenchanted with the mainstream environmental movement, a new, more radical kind of environmental activist emerged in the 1980s. Radical environmentalists used direct action, from blockades and tree-sits to industrial sabotage, to save a wild nature that they believed to be in a state of crisis. Questioning the premises of liberal humanism, they subscribed to an ecocentric philosophy that attributed as much value to nature as to people. Although critics dismissed them as marginal, radicals posed a vital question that mainstream groups too often ignored: Is environmentalism a matter of common sense or a fundamental critique of the modern world? In The Ecocentrists, Keith Makoto Woodhouse offers a nuanced history of radical environmental thought and action in the late-twentieth-century United States. Focusing especially on the group Earth First!, Woodhouse explores how radical environmentalism responded to both postwar affluence and a growing sense of physical limits. While radicals challenged the material and philosophical basis of industrial civilization, they glossed over the ways economic inequality and social difference defined people’s different relationships to the nonhuman world. Woodhouse discusses how such views increasingly set Earth First! at odds with movements focused on social justice and examines the implications of ecocentrism’s sweeping critique of human society for the future of environmental protection. A groundbreaking intellectual history of environmental politics in the United States, The Ecocentrists is a timely study that considers humanism and individualism in an environmental age and makes a case for skepticism and doubt in environmental thought.
Download or read book Brazil in the Anthropocene written by Liz-Rejane Issberner and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2016-12-19 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines Brazil's position in the global ecological crisis and how social, political, ethical, scientific and economic issues affect its environmental performance.
Download or read book The Birth of the Anthropocene written by Jeremy Davies and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2016-05-24 with total page 245 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The world faces an environmental crisis unprecedented in human history. Carbon dioxide levels have reached heights not seen for three million years, and the greatest mass extinction since the time of the dinosaurs appears to be underway. Such far-reaching changes suggest something remarkable: the beginning of a new geological epoch. It has been called the Anthropocene. The Birth of the Anthropocene shows how this epochal transformation puts the deep history of the planet at the heart of contemporary environmental politics. By opening a window onto geological time, the idea of the Anthropocene changes our understanding of present-day environmental destruction and injustice. Linking new developments in earth science to the insights of world historians, Jeremy Davies shows that as the Anthropocene epoch begins, politics and geology have become inextricably entwined.
Download or read book The Anthropocene and the Global Environmental Crisis written by Clive Hamilton and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-05-15 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Anthropocene, in which humankind has become a geological force, is a major scientific proposal; but it also means that the conceptions of the natural and social worlds on which sociology, political science, history, law, economics and philosophy rest are called into question. The Anthropocene and the Global Environmental Crisis captures some of the radical new thinking prompted by the arrival of the Anthropocene and opens up the social sciences and humanities to the profound meaning of the new geological epoch, the ‘Age of Humans’. Drawing on the expertise of world-recognised scholars and thought-provoking intellectuals, the book explores the challenges and difficult questions posed by the convergence of geological and human history to the foundational ideas of modern social science. If in the Anthropocene humans have become a force of nature, changing the functioning of the Earth system as volcanism and glacial cycles do, then it means the end of the idea of nature as no more than the inert backdrop to the drama of human affairs. It means the end of the ‘social-only’ understanding of human history and agency. These pillars of modernity are now destabilised. The scale and pace of the shifts occurring on Earth are beyond human experience and expose the anachronisms of ‘Holocene thinking’. The book explores what kinds of narratives are emerging around the scientific idea of the new geological epoch, and what it means for the ‘politics of unsustainability’.
Download or read book Freedom in the Anthropocene written by A. Stoner and published by Springer. This book was released on 2015-12-05 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Freedom in the Anthropocene illuminates the Anthropocene from the perspective of critical theory. The authors contextualize our current ecological predicament by focusing on the issues of history and freedom and how they relate to our present inability to render environmental threats and degradation recognizable and surmountable.
Download or read book The Anthropocene and its Future written by Karl Bruckmeier and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book History of the Future of Economic Growth written by Iris Borowy and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2017-02-24 with total page 215 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The future of economic growth is one of the decisive questions of the twenty-first century. Alarmed by declining growth rates in industrialized countries, climate change, and rising socio-economic inequalities, among other challenges, more and more people demand to look for alternatives beyond growth. However, so far these current debates about sustainability, post-growth or degrowth lack a thorough historical perspective. This edited volume brings together original contributions on different aspects of the history of economic growth as a central and near-ubiquitous tenet of developmental strategies. The book addresses the origins and evolution of the growth paradigm from the seventeenth century up to the present day and also looks at sustainable development, sustainable growth, and degrowth as examples of alternative developmental models. By focusing on the mixed legacy of growth, both as a major source of expanded life expectancies and increased comfort, and as a destructive force harming personal livelihoods and threatening entire societies in the future, the editors seek to provide historical depth to the ongoing discussion on suitable principles of present and future global development. History of the Future of Economic Growth is aimed at students and academics in environmental, social, economic and international history, political science, environmental studies, and economics, as well as those interested in ongoing discussions about growth, sustainable development, degrowth, and, more generally, the future.
Download or read book Affluence and Freedom written by Pierre Charbonnier and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2021-06-22 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this pathbreaking book, Pierre Charbonnier opens up a new intellectual terrain: an environmental history of political ideas. His aim is not to locate the seeds of ecological thought in the history of political ideas as others have done, but rather to show that all political ideas, whether or not they endorse ecological ideals, are informed by a certain conception of our relationship to the Earth and to our environment. The fundamental political categories of modernity were founded on the idea that we could improve on nature, that we could exert a decisive victory over its excesses and claim unlimited access to earthly resources. In this way, modern thinkers imagined a political society of free individuals, equal and prosperous, alongside the development of industry geared towards progress and liberated from the Earth’s shackles. Yet this pact between democracy and growth has now been called into question by climate change and the environmental crisis. It is therefore our duty today to rethink political emancipation, bearing in mind that this can no longer draw on the prospect of infinite growth promised by industrial capitalism. Ecology must draw on the power harnessed by nineteenth-century socialism to respond to the massive impact of industrialization, but it must also rethink the imperative to offer protection to society by taking account of the solidarity of social groups and their conditions in a world transformed by climate change. This timely and original work of social and political theory will be of interest to a wide readership in politics, sociology, environmental studies and the social sciences and humanities generally.
Download or read book Environment Modernization and Development in East Asia written by Ts'ui-jung Liu and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-04-08 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Environment, Modernization and Development in East Asia critically examines modernization's long-term environmental history. It suggests new frameworks for understanding as inter-related processes environmental, social, and economic change across China and Japan.
Download or read book The Question of Limits written by Christian Marouby and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-11-09 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: We have forgotten how to think about limits. Most philosophical approaches to the environment have focused primarily on the value of the natural world, the status of anthropocentrism and the Anthropocene, and the largely ethical questions of our impact on the world. While fully acknowledging these concerns, this book emphasizes the centrality of the confrontation between the imperative of growth that has been present since the Enlightenment and our belated rediscovery of limits. The expression "Limits to Growth", the title of a famous book from 1972 by Donella H. Meadows et al., may have passed into a common discourse, yet the notion of limits itself remains insufficiently theorized, or even reflected upon, in the current movement of environmental advocacy. Sometimes it even seems as if there is an effort to avoid it. This book argues that, on the contrary, we can only resolve the present global challenges by confronting the question of limits and making it central to our reflection. This entails discussing the long history of thinking about limits in which Malthus is the most infamous figure, but which also includes such major participants as John Stuart Mill and Karl Marx. Ultimately, The Question of Limits contends that the value of embracing limits extends beyond the environment and offers the potential to become a transformative social good. The Question of Limits will be of great interest to students and scholars working at the intersection of environmental studies, economics, intellectual history and philosophy.
Download or read book Before the UN Sustainable Development Goals written by Martin Gutmann and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2022-02-24 with total page 535 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Chapter 14 from this book is published open access and free to read or download from Oxford Scholarship Online, https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/ Before the UN Sustainable Development Goals enables professionals, scholars, and students engaged with the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) to develop a richer understanding of the legacies and historical complexities of the policy fields behind each goal. Each of the seventeen chapters tells the decades- or centuries-old backstory of one SDG and reveals the global human connections, governance tools and frameworks, and the actors involved in past efforts to address sustainable development challenges. Collectively, the seventeen chapters build a historical latticework that reveals the multiple and often interwoven sources that have shaped the challenges later encompassed in the SDGs. Engaging and insightfully written, the book's chapters are authored by international experts from multiple disciplines. The book is an indispensable resource and a vital foundation for understanding the past's indelible footprint on our contemporary sustainable development challenges.
Download or read book Environmental History written by John Robert McNeill and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2010 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume brings to the reader the history of the alteration of environment by human action, and the reciprocal influence of the environment upon human history. A set of macro- and micro-regional studies of environmental history and economic development with respect to India, China, Bangladesh, and Brazil are discussed
