Download or read book Interpreting Nature written by I. G. Simmons and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-01-11 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Human society has constructed many varied notions of the environment. Scientific information about the environment is often seen as the only worthwhile knowledge. This ignores the complexities created by interaction between people and the environment. Idealist thinking argues that everything we know is based on a construct of our minds and that all is possible. Can both be correct and true? Interpreting Nature explores the position of humanity in the environment from the principle that the models we construct are imperfect and can only be provisional. Having examined the way in which the natural sciences have interrogated nature, the types of data produced and what they mean to us, this looks at the environment within philosophy and ethics, the social sciences and the arts, and analyses their role in the formation of environmental cognition.
Download or read book Counting the Costs written by Jonathan Rigg and published by Institute of Southeast Asian Studies. This book was released on 1995 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Written by an international panel of specialists on Thailand who share a common concern for the environment, this volume examines the causes and consequences of environment change both in the countryside and the urban areas of the Kingdom. The papers, however, in no sense reflect a common view; the authors embrace contrasting environmental ideologies in discussing a wide range of concerns. These include the role of Buddhism and tourism in promoting sustainable development, environmental systems of thought and action, the practicalities of water pollution control in Bangkok and the Gulf of Thailand, and the changing bases of life and livelihood among the hill peoples of the North. The environment as an issue of concern is now important phase of assimilation, interpretation, prescription and action. The papers in this volume reflect this change.
Download or read book Why Conserve Nature written by Stephen Trudgill and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2022-02-24 with total page 413 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A philosophical discussion about the meanings of nature which can give rise to our motivations to conserve nature.
Download or read book Unifying Geography written by David T. Herbert and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2004-08-05 with total page 424 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It can be argued that the differences in content and approach between physical and human geography, and also within its sub-disciplines, are often overemphasised. The result is that geography is often seen as a diverse and dynamic subject, but also as a disorganised and fragmenting one, without a focus. Unifying Geography focuses on the plural and competing versions of unity that characterise the discipline, which give it cohesion and differentiate it from related fields of knowledge. Each of the chapters is co-authored by both a leading physical and a human geographer. Themes identified include those of the traditional core as well as new and developing topics that are based on subject matter, concepts, methodology, theory, techniques and applications. Through its identification of unifying themes, the book will provide students with a meaningful framework through which to understand the nature of the geographical discipline. Unifying Geography will give the discipline renewed strength and direction, thus improving its status both within and outside geography.
Download or read book The Ethics of Environmentally Responsible Health Care written by Jessica Pierce and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2003-10-23 with total page 166 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As the state of the natural world declines, environmentally related health problems will increasingly shape the landscape of human health and disease. The confluence of several global trends - rapid population growth combined with an even more dramatic increase in natural resource consumption - drives ecological deterioration, and this in turn poses serious challenges to health. U.S. medicine and bioethics have too long ignored the relevance of these global trends to health care. This groundbreaking work is a call to attention. It brings bioethics and health care squarely into the 21st century. The book shows how environmental decline relates to human health and to health care practices in the U.S. and other industrialized countries. It outlines the environmental trends that will strongly affect health, and challenges us to see the connections between ways of practicing medicine and the very environmental problems that damage ecosystems and make people sick. In addition to philosophical analysis of the converging values of bioethics and environmental ethics, the book offers case studies as well as a number of practical suggestions for moving health care toward sustainability. The exploration of a hypothetical Green Health Center, in particular, offers an intellectual and moral framework for talking about environmental values in health care. Engaging and challenging, this book will appeal not only to health professionals and philosophers, but to anyone concerned about how to preserve and promote both human health and the health of the natural world.
Download or read book Environment and Law written by David Wilkinson and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2005-07-05 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This textbook provides a concise introduction for students with little or no legal background, to the role of law in environmental protection. It describes and explains law and legal systems, the concept of the environment, sources of environmental law and some of the techniques used in environmental law. Interdisciplinary in approach, the book explores some of the major connections between law and the disciplines of ethics, science, economics and politics. Environment and Law offers a greater understanding of international and national environmental law and has case-studies from all over the world, including examples from UK, US and Australian law.
Download or read book Third World Political Ecology written by Sinead Bailey and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2005-08-08 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: By drawing on examples from throughout the Third World, Bryant and Bailey explain the development and characteristics of environmental problems that plague parts of Asia, Africa and Latin America and their political and economic bases.
Download or read book Environmental Change in Lesotho written by Pendo Maro and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2011-08-20 with total page 199 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Environmental Change in Lesotho identifies and analyzes the drivers of land-use change and the consequences of these changes on the livelihoods of rural land-users/managers. To accomplish this, a combination of tools from the social sciences and environmental fields were developed to identify causes and consequences of land-use change at selected levels, using a ‘nested’ approach. These methods were then applied to a case study of two villages in the Lowland region of Lesotho. This book is directed at environmental and social science experts, researchers, decision-makers, and development/aid workers interested in understanding the intricate human-environment relationship as it relates to land-use change in a changing biophysical, socio-economic, political and institutional context, coupled by HIV/AIDS, changing demographics, local perceptions and what is termed here ‘dependency syndrome’.
Download or read book Claiming Sacred Ground written by Adrian J. Ivakhiv and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2001-07-26 with total page 350 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Claiming Sacred Ground Pilgrims and Politics at Glastonbury and Sedona Adrian J. Ivakhiv A study of people and politics at two New Age spiritual sites. In this richly textured account, Adrian Ivakhiv focuses on the activities of pilgrim-migrants to Glastonbury, England and Sedona, Arizona. He discusses their efforts to encounter and experience the spirit or energy of the land and to mark out its significance by investing it with sacred meanings. Their endeavors are presented against a broad canvas of cultural and environmental struggles associated with the incorporation of such geographically marginal places into an expanding global cultural economy. Ivakhiv sees these contested and "heterotopic" landscapes as the nexus of a complex web of interestes and longings: from millennial anxieties and nostalgic re-imaginings of history and prehistory; to real-estate power grabs; contending religious visions; and the free play of ideas from science, pseudo-science, and popular culture. Looming over all this is the nonhuman life of these landscapes, an"otherness" that alternately reveals and conceals itself behind a pagenant of beliefs, images, and place-myths. A significant contribution to scholarship on alternative spirituality, sacred space, and the politics of natural landscapes, Claiming Sacred Ground will interest scholars and students of environmental and cultural studies, and the sociology of religious movements and pilgrimage. Non-specialist readers will be stimulated by the cultural, ecological, and spiritual dimensions of extraordinary natural landscapes. Adrian Ivakhiv teaches in the Faculty of Environmental Studies at York University in Toronto, and is President of the Environmental Studies Association of Canada. April 2001 384 pages, 24 b&w photos, 2 figs., 9 maps, 6 1/8 x 9 1/4, index, append. cloth 0-253-33899-9 $37.40 s / £28.50 Contents I DEPARTURES 1 Power and Desire in Earth's Tangled Web 2 Reimagining Earth 3 Orchestrating Sacred Space II Glastonbury 4 Stage, Props, and Players of Avalon 5 Many Glastonburys: Place-Myths and Contested Spaces III SEDONA 6 Red Rocks to Real Estate 7 New Agers, Vortexes, and the Sacred Landscape IV ARRIVALS 8 Practices of Place: Nature and Heterotopia Beyond the New Age
Download or read book Just Environments written by David Cooper and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2005-08-18 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Can we do what we want with other species? How do conflicting international interests affect global issues? What do we owe the next generation? Just Environments investigates these questions and the ethics which lie at their core.
Download or read book Essential Readings in Biosemiotics written by Donald Favareau and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2010-06-10 with total page 882 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Synthesizing the findings from a wide range of disciplines – from biology and anthropology to philosophy and linguistics – the emerging field of Biosemiotics explores the highly complex phenomenon of sign processing in living systems. Seeking to advance a naturalistic understanding of the evolution and development of sign-dependent life processes, contemporary biosemiotic theory offers important new conceptual tools for the scientific understanding of mind and meaning, for the development of artificial intelligence, and for the ongoing research into the rich diversity of non-verbal human, animal and biological communication processes. Donald Favareau’s Essential Readings in Biosemiotics has been designed as a single-source overview of the major works informing this new interdiscipline, and provides scholarly historical and analytical commentary on each of the texts presented. The first of its kind, this book constitutes a valuable resource to both bioscientists and to semioticians interested in this emerging new discipline, and can function as a primary textbook for students in biosemiotics, as well. Moreover, because of its inherently interdisciplinary nature and its focus on the ‘big questions’ of cognition, meaning and evolutionary biology, this volume should be of interest to anyone working in the fields of cognitive science, theoretical biology, philosophy of mind, evolutionary psychology, communication studies or the history and philosophy of science.
Download or read book Ecological Landscape Design and Planning written by Jala Makhzoumi and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2003-09-02 with total page 348 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The authors of this book offer an holistic methodological approach to the design and planning of landscape, based on both research and practical experience.
Download or read book Eden on the Charles written by Michael Rawson and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2014-10-06 with total page 382 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drinking a glass of tap water, strolling in a park, hopping a train for the suburbs: some aspects of city life are so familiar that we don’t think twice about them. But such simple actions are structured by complex relationships with our natural world. The contours of these relationships—social, cultural, political, economic, and legal—were established during America’s first great period of urbanization in the nineteenth century, and Boston, one of the earliest cities in America, often led the nation in designing them. A richly textured cultural and social history of the development of nineteenth-century Boston, this book provides a new environmental perspective on the creation of America’s first cities. Eden on the Charles explores how Bostonians channeled country lakes through miles of pipeline to provide clean water; dredged the ocean to deepen the harbor; filled tidal flats and covered the peninsula with houses, shops, and factories; and created a metropolitan system of parks and greenways, facilitating the conversion of fields into suburbs. The book shows how, in Boston, different class and ethnic groups brought rival ideas of nature and competing visions of a “city upon a hill” to the process of urbanization—and were forced to conform their goals to the realities of Boston’s distinctive natural setting. The outcomes of their battles for control over the city’s development were ultimately recorded in the very fabric of Boston itself. In Boston’s history, we find the seeds of the environmental relationships that—for better or worse—have defined urban America to this day.
Download or read book Cultural Landscapes and Environmental Change written by Lesley Head and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-09-25 with total page 206 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Cultural landscapes are usually understood within physical geography as those transformed by human action. As human influence on the earth increases, advances in palaeocological reconstruction have also allowed for new interpretations of the evidence for the earliest human impacts on the environment. It is essential that such evidence is examined in the context of modern trends in social sciences and humanities. This stimulating new book argues that convergence of the two approaches can provide a more holistic understanding of long-term physical and human processes. Split into two major sections, this book attempts to bridge the gap between the sciences and humanities. The first section, provides an analysis of the methodological tools employed in examining processes of environmental change. Empirical research in the fields of palaecology and Quaternary studies is combined with the latest theoretical views of nature and landscape occurring in cultural geography, archaeology and anthropology. The author examines the way in which environmental management decisions are made. The book then moves on to discuss the relevance of this perspective to contemporary issues through a wide variety of international case studies, including World Heritage protection, landscape preservation, indigenous people and cultural tourism.
Download or read book The Green Studies Reader written by Laurence Coupe and published by Psychology Press. This book was released on 2000 with total page 346 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Laurence Coupe brings together a collection of extracts from a wide range of both historical and contemporary ecocritical texts.
Download or read book Ecotourism and Environmental Sustainability written by Tim Gale and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-04-29 with total page 278 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book offers conceptual and practical insights into the complex interactions between ecotourism and the natural environment, with consideration given to government policy, marketing by suppliers, consumer behaviour and visitor/environmental management. Illustrated by international case studies the roles of and interplay between tour operators, their clients, resource managers and local communities are examined. This creates a comprehensive and insightful overview of the factors that work for and against the achievement of environmental sustainability in and through ecotourism. The result is a critical examination of ecotourism and environmental sustainability that highlights ideas for best practice and proposes new directions for future research
Download or read book The Routledge Handbook of Indigenous Environmental Knowledge written by Thomas F. Thornton and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-11-29 with total page 427 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume provides an overview of key themes in Indigenous Environmental Knowledge (IEK) and anchors them with brief but well-grounded empirical case studies of relevance for each of these themes, drawn from bioculturally diverse areas around the world. It provides an incisive, cutting-edge overview of the conceptual and philosophical issues, while providing constructive examples of how IEK studies have been implemented to beneficial effect in ecological restoration, stewardship, and governance schemes. Collectively, the chapters in the Routledge Handbook of Indigenous Environmental Knowledge cover Indigenous Knowledge not only in a wide range of cultures and livelihood contexts, but also in a wide range of environments, including drylands, savannah grassland, tropical forests, mountain landscapes, temperate and boreal forests, Pacific and Indian Ocean islands, and coastal environments. The chapters discuss the complexities and nuances of Indigenous cosmologies and ethno-metaphysics and the treatment and incorporation of IEK in local, national, and international environmental policies. Taken together, the chapters in this volume make a strong case for the potential of Indigenous Knowledge in addressing today’s local and global environmental challenges, especially when approached from a perspective of appreciative inquiry, using cross-cultural methods and ethical, collaborative approaches which limit bias and inappropriate extraction of IEK. The book is a guide for graduate and advanced undergraduate teaching, and a key reference for academics in development studies, environmental studies, geography, anthropology, and beyond, as well as anyone with an interest in Indigenous Environmental Knowledge. Chapters 10 and 23 of this book are freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.
