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Abundant Earth documents the loss of biodiversity underway and lays out the drivers of this destruction. It goes beyond the litany of causes—a growing population, rising livestock numbers, expanding economies and trade, and spreading infrastructures—to ask the question: Since it is well-understood that humanity’s expansionism is irreparably diminishing life’s richness, why are we not taking the needed steps to halt our expansionism? It argues that the worldview of human supremacy—the conviction that humans are superior to all other life-forms and entitled to use them and their places—stands in the way, for it normalizes humanity’s ongoing expansion. This worldview is an obstacle to recognizing that the conjoined strategy of scaling down the human enterprise and pulling back from expanses of land and seas is the means for addressing the ecological crisis and preempting the suffering and dislocations of both humans and nonhumans. Scaling down calls us to lower the global population within a human-rights framework, move toward deindustrializing food production, and work to localize economies and contract global trade. Pulling back is the project of restoring terrestrial and marine ecologies, so that life’s abundance may resurge. The book argues that humanity will not advance by entrenching its domination over the biosphere, but will stagnate in the debased identity of nature-colonizer and decline in the predicament of vying for “natural resources.” Instead, humanity can chart another course, choosing to live in fellowship with our Earthly wild and domestic cohort, within vibrant ecologies, nestling human inhabitation inside a biodiverse, living planet.

When are transnational networks likely to convince policymakers in developing countries to adopt potentially costly environmental regulations for the good of managing biodiversity? Since most of the world’s remaining biodiversity is found in developing countries, identifying the pathways through which policymakers in these states are incentivized to engage in conservation is critical. This book argues that networks of nonstate experts are most likely to convince policymakers to address an emerging environmental problem if three conditions are met: First, network members must have a scientifically validated consensus about the cause-and-effect relationships and parameters of the problem, since a consensus about the science delegitimizes competing arguments and strengthens the authority of a network’s arguments. Second, networks must build mechanisms for socialization with policymakers in domestic regulatory agencies. Doing so promotes norms of shared ownership and responsibility for knowledge claims about conservation. Third, networks will have to make scientific arguments for conservation consonant with local environmental justice claims by communities residing in and around areas of globally important biodiversity. Networks can do so by arguing for policies that would protect biodiversity in a way that ensures continued, if environmentally sustainable, access for low-income populations that may otherwise be excluded from natural resources. If these three conditions are not met, conservation efforts are likely to face resistance from groups of local actors, policymakers, or both, who cannot reconcile global claims for biodiversity conservation with their immediate demands.

This book explains the causes of climate change and who is responsible for it. It shows that the emissions keep going up, and that nothing of substance has yet been achieved after more than two decades of effort. It is claimed that the energy sector can be converted from an overwhelmingly carbon-based one to almost zero carbon in the space of half a century, all at just a small cost, or even a profit, based on simplistic assumptions about economic growth and a new industrial revolution. The current industrial structures of all developed and most developing economies are overwhelmingly carbon-based. Decarbonizing requires the coordinated replacement of almost all of the capital stock of the world. Tackling climate change does mean lowering standard of living from its current unsustainable levels, even after the economic crisis. A border carbon tax has one other great virtue: it provides a bottom-up way of getting global action, and avoids the tortuous Kyoto-style top-down negotiations. Applying border adjustments is bound to take time and cause transitional difficulties. Carbon pricing is necessary, but it is not sufficient. By considering climate change mitigation in the context of a limited ability to pay, a very different strategy emerges. For the amounts currently spent, carbon emissions could be cut by much more in the short run, and the possibility of a series of breakthroughs could be husbanded through a major international R&D programme.

Thousands of synthetic chemicals are used to make our clothing, cosmetics, household products and electronic devices. However, many of these chemicals are hazardous and potentially dangerous to our health and the environment. For fifty years, the conventional approach to hazardous chemicals has focused on regulation, barriers, and control. Today, there is a growing international interest in going beyond a singular focus on toxic and hazardous chemicals and developing broader policies for managing all chemicals. This book proposes a new strategy for chemical management based on changing chemical production and consumption systems. Reviewing the many initiatives now on-going in the product and chemical markets, in industry, and in science, Chemicals without Harm offers a strategy based on characterizing, classifying and prioritizing chemicals, identifying and adopting safer alternatives to hazardous chemicals, and promoting the research and innovation needed to develop those alternatives.

Citizen science enlists members of the public to make and record useful observations, such as counting birds in their backyards. The large numbers of volunteers who participate in such projects collect valuable research data, which create an enormous body of scientific data on a vast geographic scale. In return, such projects aim to increase participants' connections to science, place, and nature. In this book, experts from a variety of disciplines share their experiences of creating and implementing successful citizen science projects, primarily those that use massive data sets gathered by citizen scientists to better understand the impact of environmental change. The book addresses basic aspects of how to conduct citizen science projects, as well as the nuances of creating a robust digital infrastructure and recruiting a large participant base. An overview of the types of environmental research approaches and techniques demonstrates how to make use of large data sets arising from citizen science projects. A final section focuses on citizen science's impacts and its broad connections to understanding the human dimensions and educational aspects of public participation. The book teaches teams of program developers and researchers how to cross the bridge from success at public engagement to using citizen science data to understand patterns and trends or to test hypotheses about how ecological processes respond to change at large geographic scales.

This book begins with the question of why PlaNYC2030—New York City’s municipal, long-term sustainability plan, launched during the Mayor Michael Bloomberg administration—had a robust urban forestry agenda, but lacked an urban agriculture agenda. PlaNYC launched the MillionTreesNYC campaign, investing over $400 million in city funds and leveraging a public-private partnership to plant one million trees citywide. Meanwhile, despite NYC having a long tradition of community gardening and burgeoning interest in local food systems, the plan contained no mention of community gardens or urban farms. In contrasting the top-down, centralized investment in the urban forest with the dispersed and decentralized social movement around urban agriculture, the book describes the ways in which political, discursive, and material processes intertwine to construct nature in the city. Urban greening unfolds through the strategic interplay of actors, the deployment of different narrative frames, and the mobilizing and manipulation of the physical environment—including other living, non-human entities. Understanding how and why the sustainability agenda is set and implemented provides crucial lessons to scholars, policymakers, and activists alike as they engage in the greening of cities.

In communities across the country and around the world, people are coming together to rebuild and restore local environments that have been affected by crisis, disinvestment, or disaster. In New Orleans after Katrina, in New York after Sandy, in Soweto after apartheid, and in any number of postindustrial, depopulated cities, people work together to restore nature, renew communities, and heal themselves. In Civic Ecology, Marianne Krasny and Keith Tidball offer stories of this emerging grassroots environmental stewardship, along with an interdisciplinary framework for understanding and studying it as a growing international phenomenon. Krasny and Tidball draw on research in social capital and collective efficacy, ecosystem services, social learning, governance, and social-ecological systems, and other findings in the social and ecological sciences to investigate how people, practices, and communities interact. Along the way, they chronicle local environmental stewards who have undertaken such tasks as beautifying blocks in the Bronx, clearing trash from the Iranian countryside, and working with traumatized veterans to conserve nature and recreate community. Krasny and Tidball argue that humans’ innate love of nature and attachment to place compels them to restore nature and places that are threatened, destroyed, or lost. At the same time, they report, nature and community exert a healing and restorative power on their stewards.

China's carbon dioxide emissions now outstrip those of other countries and its domestic air quality is severely degraded, especially in urban areas. Its sheer size and its growing, fossil-fuel-powered economy mean that China‗s economic and environmental policy choices will have an outsized effect on the global environmental future. Over the last decade, China has pursued policies that target both fossil fuel use and atmospheric emissions, but these efforts have been substantially overwhelmed by the country's increasing energy demands. With a billion citizens still living on less than $4,000 per year, China's energy and environmental policies must be reconciled with the goals of maintaining economic growth and raising living standards. This book offers an integrated analysis of China's economy, emissions, air quality, public health, and agriculture. It first offers essential scientific context and accessible summaries of the book's policy findings; it then provides the underlying scientific and economic research. These studies suggest that China's recent sulfur controls achieved enormous environmental health benefits at unexpectedly low costs. They also indicate that judicious implementation of carbon taxes could reduce not only China's carbon emissions but also its air pollution more comprehensively than current single-pollutant policies, all at little cost to economic growth.

The year is 2393, and the world is almost unrecognizable. Clear warnings of climate catastrophe went ignored for decades, leading to soaring temperatures, rising sea levels, widespread drought and—finally—the disaster now known as the Great Collapse of 2093, when the disintegration of the West Antarctica Ice Sheet led to mass migration and a complete reshuffling of the global order. Writing from the Second People's Republic of China on the 300th anniversary of the Great Collapse, a senior scholar presents a gripping and deeply disturbing account of how the children of the Enlightenment—the political and economic elites of the so-called advanced industrial societies—failed to act, and so brought about the collapse of Western civilization. In this haunting, provocative work of science-based fiction, the authors imagine a world devastated by climate change. Dramatizing the science in ways traditional nonfiction cannot, the book reasserts the importance of scientists and the work they do and reveals the self-serving interests of the so called “carbon combustion complex” that have turned the practice of science into political fodder. Based on sound scholarship and yet unafraid to speak boldly, this book provides a welcome moment of clarity amid the cacophony of climate change literature.

This book explores the relationship between common pool property and resources, and ecological sustainability. The debate between Hardin, who developed the idea of the ‘tragedy of the commons’ and Elinor Ostrom who showed commons could be sustainable, is discussed. The enclosure of the commons is examined. The contribution of virtual commons, social sharing to reduce resource use and conservation via commons are all critically discussed. The need to link cultural change, political action and ecological ethics to protect future generations is examined.

Concepts are thought categories through which we apprehend the world; they enable, but also constrain, reasoning and debate and serve as building blocks for more elaborate arguments. This book traces the links between conceptual innovation in the environmental sphere and the evolution of environmental policy and discourse. It offers both a broad framework for examining the emergence, evolution, and effects of policy concepts and a detailed analysis of eleven influential environmental concepts. In recent decades, conceptual evolution has been particularly notable in environmental governance, as new problems have emerged and as environmental issues have increasingly intersected with other areas. “Biodiversity,” for example, was unheard of until the late 1980s; “negative carbon emissions” only came into being over the last few years. After a review of concepts and their use in environmental argument, chapters chart the trajectories of a range of environmental concepts: environment, sustainable development, biodiversity, environmental assessment, critical loads, adaptive management, green economy, environmental risk, environmental security, environmental justice, and sustainable consumption. The book provides a valuable resource for scholars and policy makers and also offers a novel introduction to the environmental policy field through the evolution of its conceptual categories. Contributors Richard N. L. Andrews, Karin Bäckstrand, Karen Baehler, Daniel J. Fiorino, Yrjö Haila, Michael E. Kraft, Oluf Langhelle, Judith A. Layzer, James Meadowcroft, Alexis Schulman, Johannes Stripple, Philip J. Vergragt

This book explores the practical and conceptual implications of the de facto necessity of consensus for development of international environmental law. Juristic democracy emphasizes the role of the citizen rather than the nation-state as the source of legitimacy in international environmental law. It would allow international law to be rooted in local knowledge and grounded in democratic deliberation and consensus. The aim is to construct a global jurisprudence based on collective will formation. Building on concepts presented in two previous books, Deliberative Environmental Politics and Global Democracy and Sustainable Jurisprudence, the authors examine in detail the challenges that consensus poses for a system of juristic democracy. Baber and Bartlett analyze the implications of deliberative consensus for rule-bounded behavior, for the accomplishment of basic governance tasks, and for diversity in a politically divided and culturally plural world. They assess social science findings about the potential of small-group citizen panels to contribute to rationalized consensus, drawing on the extensive research conducted on the use of juries in courts of law. Finally, they analyze the place of juristic democracy in a future “consensually federal” system for earth system governance.

Buildings are the nation's greatest energy consumers. Forty percent of all our energy is used for heating, cooling, lighting, or powering machines and devices in buildings. Despite decades of investment in green construction technologies, residential and commercial buildings remain stubbornly energy inefficient. This book looks beyond the technological and material aspects of green construction to examine the cultural, social, and organizational shifts that sustainable building requires, examining the fundamental challenge to centuries-long traditions in design and construction that green building represents. The chapters consider the changes associated with green building through a sociological and organizational lens. They discuss shifts in professional expertise created by new social concerns about green building, including evolving boundaries of professional jurisdictions; changing industry strategies and structures, including the roles of ownership, supply firms, and market niches; new operational, organizational, and cultural arrangements, including the mainstreaming of environmental concerns; narratives and frames that influence the perception of green building; and future directions for the theory and practice of sustainable construction.

Coral Whisperers captures a key moment in the history of coral reef science and of environmental conservation at large. Drawing on more than one hundred interviews,the book documents the physical, intellectual, and emotional plight of coral scientists and their painstaking deliberations as they struggle to understand and save corals from what many of these scientistshave come to see as the corals’inevitable catastrophic future on a rapidly warming and otherwise assaulted planet.We are here in the thick of contemporary coral science, and we can feel its urgency: the experts, who are witnessing massive coral death around the planet, both grieve for this death and must simultaneously narrate it. Yet despite the desperate realities confronting corals in the Anthropocene, coral scientists have not given up hope. Through their engaging narratives, corals emerge as a sign, a measure, and a way out of the imminent catastrophe facinglife on earth.

Societies have long turned to experts for advice on controversial matters, but in the past, the arrangements to solicit expert advice were largely ad hoc. In recent years we have witnessed the development of an institutionalized system in which scientists offer knowledge in exchange for influence on the policy process, creating, in effect, a permanent assessment economy. We examine this process of expert assessment through detailed analyses of three groups of large, formal scientific assessments: the U.S. National Acid Precipitation Assessment Program, international assessments of ozone depletion, and assessments examining the potential disintegration of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet. We show that assessments not only summarize existing knowledge, but also can create new knowledge and set research agendas. Assessments can also impede the development of knowledge, particularly if scientists focus unduly on uncertainty or on achieving consensus. The desire to achieve consensus can also weaken assessment outcomes by leading scientists to converge on least common denominator results. Assessments often try to stay on the science side of a poorly defined and intermittently enforced boundary between science and policy because of a concern with objectivity and efficacy. Assessments often try to neutralize bias by being inclusive in terms of nationality, gender, and prior intellectual commitments—adopting what we call a “balance of bias” strategy. We conclude that the assessment process is one of expert discernment, but nevertheless surprisingly sensitive to the institutional arrangements that establish it.

This book focuses on how rivers function, how those functions have changed through time, and the role of humans in those changes. A river continually responds to changes in its environment and is never static. The type of river response depends on the magnitude and persistence of changes in water and sediment entering the river. The movements of water and sediment within a sand-bed channel adjust readily over a period of minutes to hours. The book discusses rivers of the Northeast and East-Central region of the United States, which drain east to the Atlantic Ocean. The single largest drainage basin in this region is the St. Lawrence, which delivers an average of 65,000 billion gallons of water to the ocean each year. The book examines the river systems in America, explains how the earliest human inhabitants reached America and modified the physical and biological environments of the rivers, and reveals that sedentary agricultural communities first appeared in the archeological record of North America more than 2,000 years ago. As with agricultural peoples elsewhere in the world, these first farmers affected rivers more than their hunter-gatherer predecessors. The book discusses the impact of industrialization on the health of rivers in United States, also focusing on the restoration and rehabilitation of rivers.

This book invites readers onto the fabled waters of the Cape Fear River and guides them on the 200-mile voyage from the confluence of the Deep and Haw Rivers at Mermaid Point all the way to the Cape of Fear on Bald Head Island. Accompanying the author by canoe and powerboat are a cadre of people passionate about the river, among them a river guide, a photographer, a biologist, a river keeper, and a boat captain. Historical voices also lend their wisdom to our understanding of this river, which has been a main artery of commerce, culture, settlement, and war for the entire region since it was first discovered by Verrazzano in 1524. The author explores the myriad environmental and political issues being played out along the waters of the Cape Fear. These include commerce and environmental stewardship, wilderness and development, suburban sprawl and the decline and renaissance of inner cities, and private rights versus the public good.

It is hard to make a desert in a place that receives sixty inches of rain each year. After decades of copper mining, however, all that remained of the old hardwood forests in the Ducktown Mining District of the Southern Appalachian Mountains was a fifty-square-mile barren expanse of heavily gullied red hills—a landscape created by sulfur dioxide smoke from copper smelting and destructive logging practices. This book examines this environmental disaster, one of the worst the South has experienced, and its impact on environmental law and Appalachian conservation. Beginning in 1896, the widening destruction wrought in Tennessee, Georgia, and North Carolina by Ducktown copper mining spawned hundreds of private lawsuits, culminating in Georgia v. Tennessee Copper Co., the U.S. Supreme Court's first air pollution case. In its 1907 decision, the Court recognized for the first time the sovereign right of individual states to protect their natural resources from transborder pollution, a foundational opinion in the formation of American environmental law. The author reveals how the Supreme Court case brought together the disparate forces of agrarian populism, industrial logging, and the forest conservation movement to set a legal precedent that remains relevant in environmental law today.

Humans are no longer spectators who need to adapt to their natural environment. Our impact on the earth has caused changes that are outside the range of natural variability and are equivalent to such major geological disruptions as ice ages. Some scientists argue that we have entered a new epoch in planetary history: the Anthropocene. In such an era of planet-wide transformation, we need a new model for planet-wide environmental politics. This book proposes “earth system” governance as just such a new paradigm. It offers both analytical and normative perspectives. It provides detailed analysis of global environmental politics in terms of five dimensions of effective governance: agency, particularly agency beyond that of state actors; architecture of governance, from local to global levels; accountability and legitimacy; equitable allocation of resources; and adaptiveness of governance systems. The book goes on to offer a wide range of policy proposals for future environmental governance and a revitalized United Nations, including the establishment of a World Environment Organization and a UN Sustainable Development Council, new mechanisms for strengthened representation of civil society and scientists in global decision making, innovative systems of qualified majority voting in multilateral negotiations, and novel institutions to protect those impacted by global change.

This book is a work of creative nonfiction in which the acclaimed author integrates memoir, natural history, cultural critique, and spiritual reflection into a single compelling narrative. The book is framed around Aldo Leopold and his classic A Sand County Almanac, bringing Leopold's ethic—that some could live without nature but most should not—into the twenty-first century. The author follows the seasons through seventy-four tales set in a variety of landscapes from valley to salty shore. The book convinces us that we should all develop long attachments to the local, observing that the land can change us for the better.