Book Description

”[A] solid demonstration of the contributions of anthropology to understanding and developing solutions to environmental problems.”
—Environmental Conservation

The Environment in Anthropology presents ecology and current environmental studies from an anthropological point of view. From the classics to the most current scholarship, this book connects the theory and practice in environment and anthropology, giving readers a strong intellectual foundation as well as offering practical tools for solving environmental problems.

Haenn and Wilk pose the most urgent questions of environmental protection: How are environmental problems mediated by cultural values? What are the environmental effects of urbanization? When do environmentalists get in conflict with indigenous peoples? How can we assess the impact of "environmentally correct" businesses such as the Body Shop? They also cover the fundamental topics of population growth, large scale development, biodiversity conservation, sustainable environmental management, indigenous groups, consumption, and globalization.

Balancing landmark essays with cutting-edge scholarship, bridging theory and practice, and offering suggestions for further reading and new directions for research, The Environment in Anthropology is the ideal introduction to a burgeoning field.

Contributors include: J. Peter Brosius, Billie DeWalt, Arturo Escobar, Akhil Gupta, Caren Kaplan, Conrad Kottak, David Maybury-Lewis, B.J. McCay, Kay Milton, Virginia Nazarea, Robert Netting, Vandana Shiva, Julian Steward, and Susan C. Stonich.

Book Description
There is much we can learn about conservation from native peoples, says Gene Anderson. While the advanced nations of the West have failed to control overfishing, deforestation, soil erosion, pollution, and a host of other environmental problems, many traditional peoples manage their natural resources quite successfully. And if some traditional peoples mismanage the environment--the irrational value some place on rhino horn, for instance, has left this species endangered--the fact remains that most have found ways to introduce sound ecological management into their daily lives. Why have they succeeded while we have failed? In Ecologies of the Heart, Gene Anderson reveals how religion and other folk beliefs help pre-industrial peoples control and protect their resources. Equally important, he offers much insight into why our own environmental policies have failed and what we can do to better manage our resources.A cultural ecologist, Gene Anderson has spent his life exploring the ways in which different groups of people manage the environment, and he has lived for years in fishing communities in Hong Kong, Malaysia, Singapore, Tahiti, and British Columbia--as well as in a Mayan farmtown in south Mexico--where he has studied fisheries, farming, and forest management. He has concluded that all traditional societies that have managed resources well over time have done so in part through religion--by the use of emotionally powerful cultural symbols that reinforce particular resource management strategies. Moreover, he argues that these religious beliefs, while seeming unscientific, if not irrational, at first glance, are actually based on long observation of nature. To illustrate this insight, he includes many fascinating portraits of native life. He offers, for instance, an intriguing discussion of the Chinese belief system known as Feng-Shui (wind and water) and tells of meeting villagers in remote areas of Hong Kong's New Territories who assert that dragons live in the mountains, and that to disturb them by cutting too sharply into the rock surface would cause floods and landslides (which in fact it does). He describes the Tlingit Indians of the Pacific Northwest, who, before they strip bark from the great cedar trees, make elaborate apologies to spirits they believe live inside the trees, assuring the spirits that they take only what is necessary. And we read of the Maya of southern Mexico, who speak of the lords of the Forest and the Animals, who punish those who take more from the land or the rivers than they need. These beliefs work in part because they are based on long observation of nature, but also, and equally important, because they are incorporated into a larger cosmology, so that people have a strong emotional investment in them. And conversely, Anderson argues that our environmental programs often fail because we have not found a way to engage our emotions in conservation practices. Folk beliefs are often dismissed as irrational superstitions. Yet as Anderson shows, these beliefs do more to protect the environment than modern science does in the West. Full of insights, Ecologies of the Heart mixes anthropology with ecology and psychology, traditional myth and folklore with informed discussions of conservation efforts in industrial society, to reveal a strikingly new approach to our current environmental crises. ... Read more

Book Description
Among the most far-reaching effects of the modern environmental movement was the widespread acknowledgment that human beings were inescapably part of a larger ecosystem. With this book, Linda Nash gives us a wholly original and much longer history of "ecological" ideas of the body as that history unfolded in California's Central Valley. Taking us from nineteenth-century fears of miasmas and faith in wilderness cures to the recent era of chemical pollution and cancer clusters, Nash charts how Americans have connected their diseases to race and place as well as dirt and germs. In this account, the rise of germ theory and the pushing aside of an earlier environmental approach to illness constituted not a clear triumph of modern biomedicine but rather a brief period of modern amnesia. As Nash shows us, place-based accounts of illness re-emerged in the postwar decades, galvanizing environmental protest against smog and toxic chemicals. Carefully researched and richly conceptual, Inescapable Ecologies brings critically important insights to the histories of environment, culture, and public health, while offering a provocative commentary on the human relationship to the larger world. ... Read more

Book Description
Environmental and risk issues are symptomatic of deep-seated social and cultural tensions and transformations in the fabric of contemporary societies. This major contribution to the study of risk, ecology, and the place of social theory in making sense of the environment helps us to understand the politics of ecology and the place of social theory in making sense of environmental issues. The book provides insights into the complex dynamics of change in so-called risk societies.In this volume, the issues of risk and environment are explored at three levels. The contributors offer a critical assessment of dominant institutional ways of thinking and talking about risk and counterpose these with more open, self-critical approaches. They explore individuals' sense of risk and its expression in collective insecurities and they show how political thinking and debate on risk and environmentalism has been, and can further be, transformed.Wide-ranging and accessible, Risk, Environment & Modernity contains contributions from leading scholars, including Ulrich Beck, author of Risk Society. It will rapidly establish itself as the key text in the field and will be required reading by students of sociology, political science, geography, and environmental studies."This is the strongest edited collection on the relationship between modernity, risk and the environment to be published to date and it deserves a place on the book shelf of every one who takes these issues seriously. Perhaps more importantly this book needs to be read by everyone who thinks that existing responses will ultimately 'solve the environmental problem.' The editors present the collection as a slow manifesto capable of transforming the reductionism and realism they see dominating both natural and social scientific approaches to the environment. In twelve essays, organized into three sections, considerable progress is made toward this ambitious goal. . . . This is a book with an important message one can only hope that it is read and widely debated."--a prepublication review in Environmental Politics ... Read more

Book Description
Thirty years ago a new linguistic paradigm was created when Einar Haugen combined language with ecology. For Haugen, 'the ecology of language' meant the study of the interrelations between languages in the human mind and in the multilingual community. Since then a special branch of linguistics, named Ecolinguistics, has developed in which the connection between language and ecology has been established in a variety of ways and using a multitude of methods and approaches. In addition to the original ecolinguistic topics of language interrelation, language endangerment and language pressure, Ecolinguistics Reader also gives due consideration to the themes of biological and linguistic diversity as well as the ecocritical aspect. ... Read more

Book Description

Current patterns of land use and development are at once socially, economically, and environmentally destructive. Sprawling low-density development literally devours natural landscapes while breeding a pervasive sense of social isolation and exacerbating a vast array of economic problems. As more and more counties begin to look more and more the same, hope for a different future may seem to be fading. But alternatives do exist.

The Ecology of Place, Timothy Beatley and Kristy Manning describe a world in which land is consumed sparingly, cities and towns are vibrant and green, local economies thrive, and citizens work together to create places of eduring value. They present a holistic and compelling approach to repairing and enhancing communities, introducing a vision of "sustainable places" that extends beyond traditional architecture and urban design to consider not just the physical layout of a development but the broad set of ways in which communities are organized and operate. Chapters examine:

• the history and context of current land use problems, along with the concept of "sustainable places"
• the ecology of place and ecological policies and actions
• local and regional economic development
• links between land-use and community planning and civic involvement
• specific recommendations to help move toward sustainability

The Ecology of Place is a timely resource for planners, economic development specialists, students, and citizen activists working toward establishing healthier and more sustainable patterns of growth and development. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (3)

A good primer but not a best practice handbook
The scholarly work in this area has evolved a lot during the ten years since this book was published. If you are interested in the early history and development, this is a good choice. If you want to learn what can be done to improve your community's sustainability, however, this is not it -you'll be disappointed. Read "Taking sustainable cities seriously" by Portney (2004) instead. More inspiring and useful examples in there.

Not really useful
The book is abit too much of an overview to be useful in real world problems.

comprehensive evaluation how to create sustainable community
This book represents the most comprehensive evaluation of current trends in urban development and planning.It offers an over-arching strategy for creating more sustainable places to live.I highly recommend this book toall those interested in seeking comprehensive solutions to the ills ofurban growth. ... Read more

Book Description
Forces of nature and human intervention lead to innumerable local, regional and sometimes global changes in plant community patterns. Regardless of the causes and the intensity of change, ecosystems are often naturally able to recover most of their attributes through natural succession. In this thoughtful and provocative new book, Fakhri Bazzaz integrates and synthesizes information on how disturbance changes the environment, how species function, coexist, and share or compete for resources in populations and communities, and how species replace each other over successional time. It illustrates how a diverse array of plant species have been used to examine fundamental questions in plant ecology by integrating physiological, population and community ecology. Graduate students and research workers in plant ecology, global change, conservation and restoration will find the perspective and analysis offered by this book an exciting contribution to the development of our understanding of plant successional change. ... Read more

Book Description
What are the challenges to theatre and the purposes of performance in an ecologically threatened world? Is there a future for theatre as an ethically and politically alert art through environmental action? How might ecological understandings refigure the natural virtues of theatre and performance? Theatre Ecology gets to grips with such questions by investigating an eclectic cosmopolitan sample of environments and performance events, in theatres and beyond. It proposes that performance is a peculiarly twenty-first century addiction at the root global warming. Encountering this prospect head-on, it searches for pathological hope in historical theatre at the end of its tether and rumbles the contemporary paradigm of performance for signs of eco-sanity. Recognising the future is always before its time, Theatre Ecology is a paradoxical tract for survival past the final ecological era. ... Read more

Book Description
Health Ecologybrings together a variety of approaches from different perspectives and different locations, the contributors examine the various dimensions of health ecology in the framework of human ecology. ... Read more

Book Description
The book covers a wide range of known models, from classical(Cobb-Douglass production function, Leontiefinput-output analysis, Verhulst-Pearl andLotka-Volterra models of population dynamics, etc.) to themodels of world dynamics and the models of water contaminationpropagation after the Chernobyl nuclear catastrophe. It uses a uniqueblock-by-block approach to model analysis, which explains how allthese models are constructed from common simple components (blocks)that describe elementary physical processes. The book providestheoretical insights to guide the design of practical models.
Special attention is given to modeling of hierarchical regionaleconomic-ecological interaction and technological change in thecontext of environmental impact. Mathematical topics consideredinclude discrete and continuous models, differential and integralequations, optimization and bifurcation analysis, and relatedsubjects. The book presents a self-contained introduction for thoseapproaching the subject for the first time. It provides excellentmaterial for graduate courses in mathematical modeling.
Audience: Researchers, graduate and postgraduate students, and awide mathematical audience. ... Read more

Book Description
Liberation Ecologies brings together some of the most exciting theorists in thefield to explore the impact of political ecology in today's developing world.The book casts new light on the crucial interrelations of development, socialmovements and the environment in the South - the ''bigger'' half of our planet -and raises questions and hopes about change on the global scale. The in-depthcase material is drawn from across the Developing World, from Latin America,Africa and Asia. The issues raised in contemporary political, economic andsocial theory are illustrated through these case studies. Ultimately, LiberationEcologies questions what we understand by ''development'', be it mainstream oralternative, and seeks to renew our sense of nature's range of possibilities. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

liberation ecologies
In the years since Piers Blaikie published his radical studiesof soil erosion in the mid 1980s and coined the term "regionalpolitical ecology" with Harold Brookfield, human- environmental interactions in developing countries have become increasingly sophisticated. Geographers have taken a central role in debates about the social and economic causation of land degradation and hazards, and explored environmentally- inspired social movements, NGOs, and other resource management institutions. One landmark contribution was a special issue of Economic Geography on the theme of "Environment and Development", published in 1993. The papers from that journal issue helped to inspire a healthy debate that has echoed through the left- environmental journals and conference networks.In this edited volume, Dick Peet and Michael Watts have taken several re-worked papers from that special issue, and added new contributions. Their aim in Liberation Ecologies is to "integrate critical approaches to political economy with notions derived from post-structural philosophy" (p260), thereby critiquing and extending the political ecology framework. The book offers ten chapters, and an introduction and a conclusion by the editors. All the contributors are academics teaching in the United States, although at least seven are non-Americans. All but two (Escobar and Moore) were trained as geographers.All have some connection with the universities of Clark and Berkeley, and some with both. Four studies deal with Asia: three with Latin America, and four with Africa, with a strong bias towards rural environments. The long gestation period of the book, the theoretical mastery of its editors, and the credentials of its contributors add up to a polished and wide ranging survey of a vibrant and challenging field. In their Introduction, Peet and Watts provide an interesting reading of current debates in environment and development theory. They also criticize Blaikie's political ecology for its "plurality" (p7) , and they see its "voluntarist" explanations as largely "without politics or an explicit sensitivity to class interest and social struggle" (p8). Their own Liberation Ecology approach should operate from a wider epistemological base. It should tackle politics, including the actions of peoples' movements built around environmental justice and land rights. It should also show how local environmental knowledge is incorporated into alternative development strategies, look at the social construction of environment and development language and debates, and forge new forms of environmental history and ecology. It is a "discursive arena" (p38) which broadens debates about the environment to tackle the three domains of livelihood, entitlement, and social justice. Liberation ecology, therefore, adds neglected components to a "regional political ecology" analysis.Each chapter differs in its adoption of Peet and Watts' agenda, and none embraces every aspect of Liberation Ecology. The first two papers show how established environmental debates are socially constructed, emerging from a established, commercialized western orthodoxy. Escobar demolishes the aims and methods of sustainable development and biodiversity conservation, approaches that view the environment as a relatively unproblematic arena for technical interventions. Instead he promotes a postmodern view which sees nature as "socially constructed" by people and their intellectual and technical labors. Yapa's paper places the scientific response to poverty, and particularly Green Revolution improved seed varieties, as a reaction to another "construct" - an erroneous view of poverty. Poverty, he argues, resulted from these programs, rather than being solved by them. Bebbington takes on this line of thinking to challenge the vague support given by western writers to alternative development and indigenous organizations...As environments have been transformed, so have social relations. This theme also emerges in the work of Schroeder and Suryanata, who look at the potential of agroforestry to change the economic landscape and tenure relations. Agroforestry receives international praise, but can be wholly inappropriate to local needs, as in the case of pesticide-laden apple orchards in Java. Rangan takes on an example of what Robin Mearns and Melissa Leach call an "environmental orthodoxy" - the widespread belief in the successes of the Indian Chipko movement. She argues this movement is, unwittingly, a part of western development discourse, and it has held back social development by insisting on forest extraction legislation to the benefit of a small minority of traders and loggers.Other voices calling for tree-felling to supply local fuelwood, rather than tree-hugging, have been drowned out. Muldavin shows how Chinese agrarian restructuring now involves similar processes to capitalist industrial restructuring - "communal capital" is being destroyed under the new Chinese regime, and there are many localized environmental effects resulting from commercial agro- complexes. Three issues emerged in my reading of the book. Firstly, in attempting to re-fashion political ecology as a research tool and an epistemology, theoretical coherence is proposed around the notion of liberation ecology. Yet the contributors show great variety in research styles and in their conceptions of justice and development scenarios, and they are less strong in their support of post-structural theory and discourse analysis than the editors. The papers by Bebbington and Escobar, for example, sit far apart in their methods and their implications for policy. The editors never insisted on a on a unified voice, and recognise this eclecticism in the closing chapter (p262).However it is evident that the contributors' theoretical approaches are as diverse as the locations and societies they have investigated. This leads me to wonder if "liberation ecology" is actually an umbrella for disparate analytical forms. Secondly, despite promoting new and better forms of ecological analysis and environmental history in the Introduction (p12), few of the contributors then document, or explain, bio-physical processes or discuss recent advances in scientific or ethno- scientific evidence for environmental transformations. I think it is legitimate to ask why ecological analysis is lacking in this important book, especially since papers with a systems framework or natural science component did appear in the original 1993 Economic Geography collection. Writers in the "new ecology" tradition including Leach, Rocheleau and Scoones are well aware of the need to understand non- equilibrium ecological systems alongside the social, political and economic issues stressed in Liberation Ecologies. Instead, "environmental imaginaries", a term drawn from the work of Castoriadis, is used approvingly by Peet and Watts to describe the unique world-views of particular societies. These collective visions, or "social constructions" of nature, frame social action and development. But they do not, I would argue, provide the hard evidence ... Read more

Book Description

Book Description

Because of the profound effects of the built environment on the availability of natural resources for future generations, those involved with designing, creating, operating, renovating, and demolishing human structures have a vital role to play in working to put society on a path toward sustainability.

This volume presents the thinking of leading academics and professionals in planning, civil engineering, economics, ecology, architecture, landscape architecture, construction, and related fields who are seeking to discover ways of creating a more sustainable built environment. Contributors address the broad range of issues involved, offering both insights and practical examples. In the book:

• Stephen Kellert describes the scope of the looming ecological crisis
• Herman Daly explains the unsustainability of the world's economic system and the dangers inherent in the current movement toward globalization
• John Todd describes the evolution of wastewater processing systems inspired by natural systems
• John Tillman Lyle discusses the importance of landscape in the creation of the human environment
• Randall Arendt argues for a fundamental shift in land development patterns that would not only provide for more green space in new developments, but would also increase the profitability of developers and the quality of life for new home owners
• Thomas E. Graedel proposes the application of lessons learned from the emerging science of industrial ecology to the creation of "green" building.

Customer Reviews (1)

A comprehensive look at our environment
A comprehensive analysis and commentary on America's physical and social infrastructure, Kilbert has compiled an impressive list of authors/environmental policy specialists. They speak to issues as seeminglydiverse as the moral burdens being placed on future generations by shortsighted environmental policy to practical solutions ( the Brownfieldsinitiative)for reusing old industrial land in the inner city--a valuabletext for anyone involved in shaping public policy in the near future. ... Read more