Search

“System change not climate change!” This cry reverberated throughout the streets of Paris during 2015's heated COP21 climate negotiations. It was as much a demand as it was an indictment of the failure of existing political institutions to respond adequately to our world's ecological crisis. In an era of slow motion apocalypse, with 3,500 international environmental agreements to date, where did everything go wrong? In this new and greatly expanded edition of his 1991 classic Political Ecology, Dimitri Roussopoulos delves into the history of environmentalism to explain the failure of the state management of the ecological crisis. He explores civil society's various past responses and the prospects for channeling environmentalist aspirations into political alternatives, emphasizing the ideas of social ecology and the central role of democratic neighborhoods and cities in developing alternatives. Ecologists, Roussopoulos argues, aim further than simply protecting the environment—they call for new communities, new lifestyles, and a new way of doing politics. This US edition also includes a new preface analyzing the implications of Trump's presidency for climate politics and an extensive new conclusion analyzing the Paris Accord. Revised, expanded, and updated, Political Ecology is a classic that provides an essential, timely history of the environmental movement now when we need it most.

The Forest and the Marine Stewardship Councils constitute new global governance institutions using voluntary certification and labelling as market incentives to encourage sustainable management. Utilizing a comparative political economic framework, the authors analyse shifting British, Canadian and Australian responses to the stewardship councils.

Are we on the verge of a global environmental catastrophe, or is a modest revision of environmental policy all that is necessary to ensure our safety and prosperity? Governing the Environment considers both scenarios, and those between the two extremes, in its examination of current trends and challenges in managing environmental issues.This collection of seven essays, authored by leading Canadian academics, examines different aspects of the relationship between government and environmental issues. The volume focuses on Canadian contributions and innovations in the field, but it is of relevance to audiences around the world.Parson's introductory essay sets the stage for the complex discussions to follow. He provides background by sketching the Canadian institutional context for environmental protection: by describing the major pollutant burdens and the state of natural resources, and by summarizing the most salient policy issues. His conclusion elaborates on four major themes emerging from the work. These are the achievement of'adaptive management'; the challenge of building effective government and interjurisdictional capacities for managing the environment; the need for networks to share responsibility more effectively without overlapping tasks; and finally, the real challenge to state authority that these undertakings represent. This work is written for a multidisciplinary academic audience, encompassing students and teachers of advanced environmental studies and Canadian public policy.

The worst chemical disaster ever could be happening right now. In India and Bangladesh between forty and eighty million people are at risk of consuming too much arsenic from well water that might have already caused one hundred thousand cancer cases and thousands of deaths. Many millions elsewhere in South-East Asia and South America may soon suffer a similar fate. Venomous Earth is the story of this tragedy: the geology, the biology, the politics and the history. It starts in Ancient Greece, touches down in today's North America and takes in William Morris, alchemy, farming, medicine, mining and a cosmetic that killed two popes.

Understanding Global Environmental Politics develops a new, critical approach to global environmental politics. It argues that the major power structures of world politics are deeply problematic in ecological terms, and that they cannot be easily used to resolve major environmental challenges such as global warming. Instead of simply advocating the construction of new international institutions to respond to such challenges, therefore, the book argues that the construction of alternative social and political structures in necessary.