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Humanitarianism is a contested concept. Should humanitarian action seek to address only the symptoms of crises, or also their causes? Can humanitarian agencies best achieve their goals through a commitment to neutrality, or should they take a self-consciously political approach? This paper argues that debates about the desirability of more ambitious approaches to humanitarianism have been clouded by a lack of conceptual clarity. Showing that the perspective of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) is not as apolitical as is often presented, and that so-called 'political humanitarianism' conflates four conceptually distinct ways of being political, the paper suggests that a black and white characterisation of approaches to humanitarianism as either political or apolitical is more accurately rendered as (at least) five shades of grey. Distinguishing the variants of 'political' humanitarianism matters, and the paper highlights how their conflation has marred normative debates on the desirability of different approaches.العمل الإنساني بوصفه مفهوماً متنازع عليه. هل يجب أن يسعى العمل الإنساني إلى معالجة أعراض الأزمات فقط أم أسبابها أيضًا؟ هل تستطيع الوكالات الإنسانية تحقيق أهدافها على أفضل وجه من خلال التزام الحياد، أم ينبغي لها اتباع نهج سياسي واعي بذاته؟ يجادل هذا المقال بأن النقاشات حول الرغبة في اتباع نهج أكثر طموحًا للعمل الإنساني قد خيم عليها الافتقار إلى وضوح المفهوم. يوضح المقال أن منظور اللجنة الدولية للصليب الأحمر ليس غير سياسياً، كما تقدم في كثير من الأحيان، وأن ما يسمى بـ "العمل الإنساني السياسي" يدمج أربع طرق مختلفة من حيث المفهوم لكونه سياسياً، يقترح المقال أن التوصيف بالأبيض والأسود لمقاربات الإنسانية على أنها إما سياسية أو غير سياسية يُقدّم بشكل أكثر دقة (على الأقل) كخمس درجات من الرمادي. التمييز بين المتغيرات المختلفة للمسائل الإنسانية "السياسية" - وهذا المقال يسلطان الضوء على كيف أن الخلط بينهما قد أفسد المناقشات المعيارية حول الرغبة في اتباع نهج مختلفة. عبارات محورية: العمل الإنساني الكلاسيكي، العمل الإنساني الجديد، اللجنة الدولية للصليب الأحمر، الحياد، المبادئ الإنسانية، العمل الإنساني السياسي، العواقبية، الأخلاق، الجهر، سيادة الدولة.人道主义是一个会引起异议的概念。人道主义行动是否只应处理危机的症状，还是也要处理危机的原因？人道主义机构能否通过承诺保持中立来最佳地实现目标，还是应采取自觉的政治方针?本文认为，关于希望有更进取的人道主义方法的讨论，由于缺乏概念的明确性而蒙上阴影。本文表明，红十字国际委员会的观点并不象常展示的那样，是非政治化的，同时，所谓的“政治人道主义”包含了四种概念上截然不同的政治化的方式，本文建议，这种非黑即白的定性，把人道主义方法定性为政治化或非政治的特性，可以更准确地转变成（至少）五度灰。区分“政治”人道主义的不同变体很重要--而本文强调了它们的结合如何破坏了关于不同方法的想望的常规辩论。 关键词：旧式人道主义、新式人道主义、红十字国际委员会、中立、人道主义原则、政治人道主义、结果主义、义务、发声、国家主权.

To most conservationists and many parents, it seems obvious that it is a good thing to teach children to value the natural world. Not only does connection with nature support their development and well‐being, but it also supports ongoing efforts by humans to sustain the natural world. However, there are incontrovertible trends towards a diminution of the state of nature as a consequence of human activities. In this context, as a thought experiment, we address a rather grim question: Should we still encourage children to be connected to nature, to care for it and be concerned about it? We first consider the meaning of connection to nature in the Anthropocene, and then turn to a consideration of several ethical dimensions of this problem, including the potential trade‐off between well‐known health benefits of time in nature and the long‐term psychological impacts of loss of nature (e.g., ecological grief and solastalgia). While there is no simple answer to our question, our analysis does highlight underappreciated ethical dilemmas of the Anthropocene as well as the value of the local, urban forms of nature to which children around the world are increasingly exposed and engaging with in unprecedented ways. A free Plain Language Summary can be found within the Supporting Information of this article.

Communication about climate change has never been more urgent. But what if talking about a need for concern about climate change actually contributes to resistance against such concern? I argue that in an effort to stimulate concern and action, climate communicators often fail to listen and give respect to the values and experiences of publics who are unconcerned about climate change. Climate change narratives tend to pathologise unconcern as a negative and uniform attitude, without reflecting critically on the sources of these narratives beyond scientific facts. In shaping normative and unreflexive narratives of concern and failing to address the actual concerns and priorities of diverse publics, communicators can effectively co-produce counter-narratives. In response, in this article I share the stories of people who identify as unconcerned about climate change. Their narratives reveal processes of discursive friction between the concerned and the unconcerned, through which values, priorities, and assumptions are brought into conflict. Recognising and representing the messiness and plurality of attitudes to climate change could generate more useful forms of friction, shifting from antagonistic to agonistic and productive discourse. Avoiding polarised narratives of climate concern and unconcern is vital to enable a broader participation in diverse coalitions for climate action.

This article documents an attempt to decolonise our approach to methodology to explicitly show respect for islands and their islanders. Our twin starting points are an awareness of a turn to the Anthropocene in studies related to islands and an appreciation of the imperative to think outside colonial frames. The Anthropocene has been conceived as both an enduring colonising force and a significant moment in decolonisation, and islands have been viewed as emblematic of the Anthropocene, so the relationship between them is complex. These dynamic conceptions raise dilemmas for those wanting to apply methodologies to island research and negotiate ethical relations across multiple geographies and knowledge systems. For those whose cultures have been subjected to colonial oppressions, there are emotional and material costs and varied risks in participating in attempts to decolonise island research. Settler researchers seeking to ally themselves with others to advance such agendas and aspirations may slow or damage decolonising practices if they act without appropriate permissions, respectful commitments to support and understand decolonisation, and preparedness to engage in deep learning about what decolonisation of knowledge means. With these challenges in mind, we detail an approach to decolonising one of our own island research projects in ways that are enriched by a Tuvaluan concept, Fale Pili, which means treating a neighbour’s problems as your own.

Current discussion on coloniality dismantles structures embedded in neoliberal capitalism that maintain and perpetuate social pathologies. Theories and praxes emerging from Abya Yala (North, Central, and South America) provide academic and nonacademic contributions to co-construct community psychologies de otra manera (otherwise). These accountable ways of knowing and acting in cultural context and local place, become ways of making counterculture to inform decolonial community psychologies. The epistemologies of the Global South have produced invaluable teachings for transformative revisions of community psychology within frameworks that go beyond liberation and toward decoloniality. Activist women and decolonial feminists from the Global South, contest patriarchal rationality and universalism and co-construct new ways of being, thinking-feeling, sentipensar, and acting. Decolonial paradigms weave networks of solidarity with communities in their struggles to sustain Indigenous cosmovisions, delinking from western-centric ideologies that are not anthropocentric and promote sustainability, epistemic and ecological justice, and Sumak Kawsay/Buen Vivir (wellbeing) that includes the rights of the Earth. This paper deepens into decolonial community psychologies from Abya Yala that are making the road caminando (walking) de otra manera by applying methodologies of affective conviviality with communities, sentipensando, and co-authoring collective stories that weave pluriversal solidary networks within ecologies of praxes into colorful tapestries of liberation. These are the proposed coordinates to sketch pathways toward decoloniality.

AIM To examine the interconnection between the rise of modern industrial agriculture, the Anthropocene epoch, and impacts on human health. To examine the impact of the emerging field of regenerative agriculture in addressing the mounting negative planetary and human health challenges. METHODS Structured interviews in social research for a PhD with over 80 regenerative farmers and industrial farmers in the field; and subsequent interviews with 40 other farmers. Literature search into the rise of modern human and animal diseases, the Anthropocene, and cognitive and paradigm change. RESULTS As Earth slips further into the human-caused Anthropocene epoch due to The Great Acceleration post-1950, there is a directly connected exponential rise in modern human diseases. Despite the emergence of Western agriculture and modern industrial society, our bodies are still adapted to the environment of our Palaeolithic past. Industrial agriculture and harmful agricultural practices are stripping essential nutrients from our foods while also lacing them with novel chemicals we are not adapted for. Consequently, the functioning of our gut microbiome has become destabilised. Evidence continues to mount that this is a key reason behind the exponential rise of many modern diseases. CONCLUSION To address what constitute evolutionary mismatch diseases due to cultural Dysevolution, a return to healthy regenerative agriculture, with foods rich in diverse nutrients and free of novel chemicals, provides a clear pathway to begin healing both the planetary systems and humans.

Five clusters of concern arising from IFSR-facilitated conversations with its organisational members are used to invite the broader systems community to rethink agency. It is argued that by addressing the cluster elements, potential will be co-created for the systems community as a whole to help citizens venture beyond failing responses to the global problematique and the Anthropocene-creating thinking in which we humans are trapped. The five clusters are as follows: 1. Exploring the in-between: Growing a shared understanding is going beyond a competition of ideas or a clash of concepts. It is a joint exploration of the unknown in-between. 2. Including the excluded: Systems research happens in open research ecosystems, not in disciplinary silos. It is transdisciplinary and constitutes a global discourse. 3. Living questions: Questions shape paradigms. Transcending paradigms starts from allowing the questions to have their own life, to grow and to dissolve, to improve and to transform. 4. Going beyond systems literacy: Learning to speak systems is one thing, proficiency in systems thinking, systems doing and systems being another. There is a difference between knowing and understanding that we may address as systems wisdom. 5. Rethinking agency: Agency goes from ego to eco, from me to we. Yet, it is not an either–or; it is ego and eco, me and we. To understand agency, we need to understand the ‘and’.

The paper aims to highlight the importance of subjective, objective and intersubjective domains when engaging in public education and research on wicked problems such as violence, poverty, climate change, loss of habitat and pandemics. The case is made that critical systemic thinking and practice—underpinned by a meta Design of Inquiring Systems—could help to foster a more relational response to the convergent social, economic and environmental policy challenges that pose ‘existential risks’. This paper explores the implications of ‘mismeasuring our lives’ by not understanding relationality. It reflects on the factors that are linked with the ‘unravelling’ of well‐being, in order to prevent and restore the multispecies relationships that have been forgotten. This requires a bio‐political approach to reframing not only economics but our relationships with one another and with nature. ‘Power and knowledge are linked’ and nowhere is Foucault's linkage more marked than in the biopolitical determination of what species are valued and why. Taxonomies are constructs based on values that need to be carefully considered in terms of the consequences of policy decisions.

Contains fulltext : 239181.pdf (Publisher’s version ) (Open Access) Procreation with donor gametes is widespread and commonly accepted, but it involves ethical questions about the child's best interest. Understanding the historical structures of the moral discussion of gamete donation may contribute to reflecting on the child's best interest. This is why I have analysed the debate on gamete donation in the Netherlands, and this analysis has uncovered some striking discontinuities. Notions of the child's best interest have undergone a radical swing. In the past, it was considered acceptable to conceal the truth about the child's biological origin, but in the past two decades the general opinion has changed to the common belief that this information should be shared with the child. This changed notion of the child's best interest will be analysed using a framework encompassing three views of the child, which derive from the debate on children's rights. These three views each provide a different interpretation of the child's moral and political status. I conclude that the changed notion of the child's best interest results from a view of the child that focuses on autonomy and citizenship, and which frames the child's interests according to its legal status. I comment on this view and I champion an alternative one, namely 'the embedded child'. This is a relational view based on care ethics that goes beyond what can be articulated in law, and that will help to establish a more balanced interpretation of the child's best interest at the practice and policy levels of gamete donation. 8 p.

The year 2020 was arelentless one that drained many of us of any hope. This review focuses on work in primatology over the long span of that year that may serve as a small remedy to the shadow cast. In 2020, primatology became a focal point of the fight against the COVID-19 pandemic and holds promise for understanding and preventing similar pandemics in the future. The past few years have also seen an increased concern in US primatology for understanding and working through the legacy of our colonial history, which has intersected with the urgency of the Black Lives Matter movement in 2020 to foment change that is only just beginning to be felt in our discipline. This review, which is by no means comprehensive, discusses these threads of research and their potential for change that might sustain primatology beyond the seemingly endless pandemic year. [COVID-19, pandemic, primatology, decolonizing primatology, decolonizing biological anthropology, biological anthropology, fieldwork, primates]. © 2021 by the American Anthropological Association

In 2018, a large, coordinated environmental flow was instituted along the Barwon-Darling (Barka) River to connect ecosystems and restore public confidence in water regulation in the Murray-Darling Basin. This article examines the multiple river realities enacted by this event—environmental flow, regulated flow, unregulated flow, shut-up flow—as a conflict over what constitutes the character of water during substantial change in Australia’s settler colonial systems of water governance. Geographical analyses of event spaces from military contexts assisted in unpacking the ontological and spatio-temporal matters germane to this situation in which managers needed to heed the dynamism of the river at both material and institutional registers. The article describes the scientific and regulatory practices and visual technologies through which management of an “event-ful” river brought together some waters (but not others) into something ontologically secure and coherent, and therefore governable. It shows how the naturalising discourse constrained and enabled what could be said about the relations deserving of water and who gets to decide what socio-material connections water might make. Aboriginal leaders interviewed during the flow chose to emphasise a wider relational set of connections than did state water managers, and to accentuate dysfunctional and destructive relations, thereby inviting others to think and feel differently about environmental flows.

We introduce the special issue "Our Present Crises: Climate Change, Biodiversity Loss, and Social Inequality" by highlighting how histories of the social and behavioral sciences can contribute to a multifaceted understanding of the links among the climate crisis, massive biodiversity loss, and social and economic inequities of nearly every kind. We propose that although the epistemological and ontological bases of these disciplines are themselves entangled with modernity/coloniality, there are, nonetheless, critical insights to be gained by exposing these entanglements. These insights may help generate visions of decolonial futures which eschew destructive dualisms in favor of relational ontologies which honor the living ecosystem of the earth.

COVID-19 can be seen as feedback for anthropocentric social, economic and environmental decision-making that disrespects other living systems. The paper makes a case that respects for multiple species, and the onus of beneficence should be applied to all living systems of which we are a strand. Human beings are not exceptional insofar as they are able to communicate, make decisions, demonstrate a sense of community and show empathy or to make political calculations. What does this mean for the way we live our lives? Respect for persons needs to include animals, plants and the earth. It is time to rethink rights and responsibilities to protect habitat. Goodall stresses that the loss of habitat leads to species that have never been in contact before (and thus without any resistance) causing cross species infections. © 2021 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

This essay traces how the concept of energy-defined as the ability to do work in physics-informed two similar fields of knowledge with very dissimilar results. One, the resource economy in the late 19th century, laid some important epistemic and ideological foundations for the destruction of the environment in the present. The other, ecology, introduced a new holistic view of nature, which laid the groundwork for the recent reconceptualization of ethics, epistemology, and humankind's role on Earth culminating in the Anthropocene hypothesis-formulated in direct opposition to the capitalist, anthropocentric notions inherited from the 19th century. In both cases, it was the concept of energy that enabled thinking about the multifarious visualities, materialities, and temporalities of natural phenomena as united in a single causal substructure of energy exchanges. In resource economics, the energetic worldview imposed an anthropocentric useful/useless divide on the environment-modeled, I argue, on the energy/entropy distinction-and made it "logical" to think of minerals, plants, and human labor as analogous resources, justifiably equated and linked in the economic system. The same ability to equate and connect was fundamental to the discipline of ecology and its application to sociology in the 20th century, and, in more recent years, to philosophy and historiography. In stripping nature of all surface illusions, energy proved enormously efficient for exposing the entanglement of large-scale systems composed of animate and inanimate actors equally imbued with agency.