Citizen Environmentalists


Book Description

A telling look at the lives and strategies of women environmental activists in the long 1960s, solidly grounded in a national context




Citizen Environmentalists


Book Description

A telling look at the lives and strategies of women environmental activists in the long 1960s, solidly grounded in a national context




What Every Environmentalist Needs to Know about Capitalism


Book Description

Praise for Foster and Magdoff's The Great Financial Crisis In this timely and thorough analysis of the current financial crisis, Foster and Magdoff explore its roots and the radical changes that might be undertaken in response. . . . This book makes a valuable contribution to the ongoing examination of our current debt crisis, one that deserves our full attention.--Publishers Weekly There is a growing consensus that the planet is heading toward environmental catastrophe: climate change, ocean acidification, ozone depletion, global freshwater use, loss of biodiversity, and chemical pollution all threaten our future unless we act. What is less clear is how humanity should respond. The contemporary environmental movement is the site of many competing plans and prescriptions, and composed of a diverse set of actors, from militant activists to corporate chief executives. This short, readable book is a sharply argued manifesto for those environmentalists who reject schemes of "green capitalism" or piecemeal reform. Environmental and economic scholars Magdoff and Foster contend that the struggle to reverse ecological degradation requires a firm grasp of economic reality. Going further, they argue that efforts to reform capitalism along environmental lines or rely solely on new technology to avert catastrophe misses the point. The main cause of the looming environmental disaster is the driving logic of the system itself, and those in power--no matter how "green"--are incapable of making the changes that are necessary. What Every Environmentalist Needs To Know about Capitalism tackles the two largest issues of our time, the ecological crisis and the faltering capitalist economy, in a way that is thorough, accessible, and sure to provoke debate in the environmental movement.




Citizens, Experts, and the Environment


Book Description

DIVClaims that the problematic communication gap between experts and ordinary citizens is best remedied by a renewal of local citizen participation in deliberative structures./div




Environmental Citizenship


Book Description

A multidisciplinary consideration of how effective environmental citizenship can be in achieving sustainability, with theoretical, practical, and ethnographic perspectives.




Local Environmental Struggles


Book Description

In recent years, environmentalism in the US has increasingly emerged at the community level, focusing on local ecological problems. Correspondingly, the American environmental movement has exhorted its supporters to 'think globally' but 'act locally'. The authors examine this modern environmental mantra by analysing the opportunities and constraints on local environmental action posed by economic and political structures at all levels. The difficulties involved in local activism are explored in three case studies - a wetlands protection project, water pollution of the Great Lakes, and consumer waste recycling. The final chapter then reflects on the challenges facing citizen-worker movements in each case study, and concludes that, despite the inherent difficulties, any successful attempt at mobilisation must have a local component.




Citizens, Experts, and the Environment


Book Description

The tension between professional expertise and democratic governance has become increasingly significant in Western politics. Environmental politics in particular is a hotbed for citizens who actively challenge the imposition of expert theories that ignore forms of local knowledge that can help to relate technical facts to social values. Where information ideologues see the modern increase in information as capable of making everyone smarter, others see the emergence of a society divided between those with and those without knowledge. Suggesting realistic strategies to bridge this divide, Fischer calls for meaningful nonexpert involvement in policymaking and shows how the deliberations of ordinary citizens can help solve complex social and environmental problems by contributing local contextual knowledge to the professionals’ expertise. While incorporating theoretical critiques of positivism and methodology, he also offers hard evidence to demonstrate that the ordinary citizen is capable of a great deal more participation than is generally recognized. Popular epidemiology in the United States, the Danish consensus conference, and participatory resource mapping in India serve as examples of the type of inquiry he proposes, showing how the local knowledge of citizens is invaluable to policy formation. In his conclusion Fischer examines the implications of the approach for participatory democracy and the democratization of contemporary deliberative structures. This study will interest political scientists, public policy practitioners, sociologists, scientists, environmentalists, political activists, urban planners, and public administrators along with those interested in understanding the relationship between democracy and science in a modern technological society.




But is it True?


Book Description

Amid the chaos of questions and conflicting information, Aaron Wildavsky arrives with just what the beleaguered citizen needs: a clear, fair, and factual look at how the rival claims of environmentalists and industrialists work, what they mean, and where to start sorting them out.




Environment and Citizenship


Book Description

The increasing awareness of the human impact on the environment is having a profound effect on the concept and content of citizenship – one of the fundamental institutions that structures human relations. In what is the first introduction of its kind, this book provides an accessible, stimulating and multidimensional overview of the many ways in which concern for the environment – driven primarily by the preoccupation with sustainability – is reshaping our understanding of citizenship. Environment and Citizenship is structured into three parts. Part I introduces the reader to the concept and theories of citizenship and explores the impact that environmental concerns is having on contemporary formulations of citizenship, both traditional (e.g. national, liberal and republican) and emerging (e.g. cosmopolitan, ecological and ecofeminist). Part II explores the practical manifestations of environmental citizenship, with each chapter focusing on a particular actor: citizens, governments, and corporations. These chapters include references to examples and case studies from a wide range of countries, broadly categorized as belonging to the Global North and the Global South. Part III explores the making of green citizens and outlines the dominant articulations of environmental citizenship that emerge from formal education, news media and popular culture. The book concludes with a general reflection on the present and future of environmental citizenship. The book contains a variety of illustrations, boxed case-studies, links to online resources and suggestions for further reading. This original and engaging text is essential reading for students and scholars of environmental politics, sustainability studies and development studies, as well as for environmental activists, policy practitioners and environmental educators. More broadly, this book will appeal to anyone interested in and concerned with issues of sustainability, social justice and citizenship in the twenty-first century.




Citizenship and the Environment


Book Description

This is the first book-length treatment of the relationship between citizenship and the environment. Andrew Dobson argues that ecological citizenship cannot be fully articulated in terms of the two great traditions of citizenship - liberal and civic republican - which have been bequeathed to us. He develops an original theory of citizenship, which he calls 'post-cosmopolitan', and argues that ecological citizenship is an example and an inflection of it. Ecological citizenship focuses on duties as well as rights, and these duties are owed, non-reciprocally, by those individuals and communities who occupy unsustainable amounts of ecological space, to those who occupy too little. The first virtue of ecological citizenship is justice, but post-cosmopolitanism follows some feminisms in arguing that care and compassion may be required to meet its special obligations. Dobson suggests that ecological citizenship's conception of political space is not the state or the municipality, or the ideal speech community of cosmopolitanism, but the 'ecological footprint'. Most governments around the world have signed up to sustainable development, and they cannot afford to ignore ecological citizenship as a means of getting there. Government policies usually revolve around financial sticks and carrots, but these leave people uncommitted to the idea of sustainability and only to the rewards that are attached to it. Dobson contrasts citizenship with fiscal incentives as a way of encouraging people to act more sustainably, in the belief that the former is more compatible with the long-term and deeper shifts of attitude and behaviour that sustainability requires. Both citizenship and sustainability, though, are often viewed with suspicion in liberal societies because they refuse to accept the inviolability of individual preferences. Dobson therefore offers an original account of the relationship between liberalism and sustainability, arguing that the former's commitment to a plurality of conceptions of the good entails a commitment to so-called 'strong' forms of the latter. How to make an ecological citizen? Dobson examines the potential of formal high school citizenship education programmes through a case study of the recent implementation of the compulsory citizenship curriculum in the UK. He concludes that the Department of Education and Skills has constructed a Trojan horse capable of kick-starting ecological citizenship, if teachers are willing and able to travel in it. This book will be of interest to those working in the fields of environmental political theory, citizenship, globalisation, cosmopolitanism, liberalism, and citizenship education.