43 results for "Environment"

This changes everything: capitalism vs. the climate

Klein, Naomi
Naomi Klein, author of the number 1 international bestsellers, The Shock Doctrine and No Logo, returns with This Changes Everything, a must-read on how the climate crisis needs to spur transformational political change. Forget everything you think you know about global warming. It's not about carbon - it's about capitalism. The good news is that we can seize this existential crisis to transform our failed economic system and build something radically better. In her most provocative book yet, Naomi Klein, author of the global bestsellers The Shock Doctrine and No Logo, tackles the most profound threat humanity has ever faced: the war our economic model is waging against life on earth. Klein exposes the myths that are clouding the climate debate. You have been told the market will save us, when in fact the addiction to profit and growth is digging us in deeper every day. You have been told it's impossible to get off fossil fuels when in fact we know exactly how to do it - it just requires breaking every rule in the "free-market" playbook: reining in corporate power, rebuilding local economies and reclaiming our democracies. You have also been told that humanity is too greedy and selfish to rise to this challenge. In fact, all around the world, the fight back for the next economy is already succeeding in ways both surprising and inspiring. Climate change, Klein argues, is a civilizational wake-up call, a powerful message delivered in the language of fires, floods, storms, and droughts. Confronting it is no longer about changing the light bulbs. It's about changing the world - before the world changes so drastically that no one is safe. Either we leap - or we sink. Once a decade, Naomi Klein writes a book that redefines its era. No Logo did so for globalization. The Shock Doctrine changed the way we think about austerity. This Changes Everything is about to upend the debate about the stormy era already upon us.
Penguin Books 2015-08-04 566 pages

Cannibal capitalism: how our system is devouring democracy, care, and the planet - and what we can do about it

Fraser, Nancy
Capital is currently cannibalizing every sphere of life-guzzling wealth from nature and racialized populations, sucking up our ability to care for each other, and gutting the practice of politics. In this tightly argued and urgent volume, leading Marxist feminist theorist Nancy Fraser charts the voracious appetite of capital, tracking it from crisis point to crisis point, from ecological devastation to the collapse of democracy, from racial violence to the devaluing of care work. These crisis points all come to a head in Covid-19, which Fraser argues can help us envision the resistance we need to end the feeding frenzy. What we need, she argues, is a wide-ranging socialist movement that can recognize the rapaciousness of capital - and starve it to death.
Verso 2022-09-20 190 pages

The age of sustainable development

Sachs, Jeffrey
"Jeffrey D. Sachs is one of the world's most perceptive and original analysts of global development. In this major new work he presents a compelling and practical framework for how global citizens can use a holistic way forward to address the seemingly intractable worldwide problems of persistent extreme poverty, environmental degradation, and political-economic injustice: sustainable development. Sachs offers readers, students, activists, environmentalists, and policy makers the tools, metrics, and practical pathways they need to achieve Sustainable Development Goals. Far more than a rhetorical exercise, this book is designed to inform, inspire, and spur action. Based on Sachs's twelve years as director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University, his thirteen years advising the United Nations secretary-general on the Millennium Development Goals, and his recent presentation of these ideas in a popular online course, The Age of Sustainable Development is a landmark publication and clarion call for all who care about our planet and global justice"--Provided by publisher.
Columbia University Press 2015-03-10 543 pages

Prophecy

Seltzer, David
Twenty years ago... Fact: 100,000 people were wiped out in Minamata, Japan. Cause: a chemical neurotoxin. Effect: Sickness... Madness... Death. Source: Water. Now, in Manatee County, Maine... Biological changes are beginning to occur. People are sick. Their minds are confused. Children are born dead... born deformed. And a family of campers has been found dead, mutilated by some indescribable brutal force... The Prophecy has been horribly fulfilled!
Ballantine Books 1979 247 pages

Inconspicuous consumption: the environmental impact you don't know you have

Schlossberg, Tatiana
"As we become a more digital society, the gains that have been made for the environment by moving toward a paperless world with more and more efficient devices will soon be or already have been offset by the number of devices in our lives that are always using energy. But many don't think about the impact on the environment of the "Internet of things." Whether it's a microwave connected to the internet, use of Netflix, or online shopping, these technological advances have created new impacts that the people who are most well-versed in these issues haven't considered. In INCONSPICUOUS CONSUMPTION, Tatiana Schlossberg reveals the complicated, confounding and even infuriating ways that we all participate in a greenhouse gas-intensive economy and society, and how some of the biggest and most consequential areas of unintended emissions and environmental impacts are unknowingly part of our daily activities. She will empower people to make the best choices that they can, while allowing them to draw their own conclusions"--
Grand Central Publishing 2019 277 pages

The geography of nowhere: the rise and decline of America's man-made landscape

Kunstler, James Howard
Eighty percent of everything ever built in America has been built since the end of World War II. This tragic landscape of highway strips, parking lots, housing tracts, mega-malls, junked cities, and ravaged countryside is not simply an expression of our economic predicament, but in large part a cause. It is the everyday environment where most Americans live and work, and it represents a gathering calamity whose effects we have hardly begun to measure." "In The Geography of Nowhere, James Howard Kunstler traces America's evolution from a nation of Main Streets and coherent communities to a land where everyplace is like noplace in particular, where the city is a dead zone and the countryside a wasteland of cars and blacktop. Now that the great suburban build-out is over, Kunstler argues, we are stuck with the consequences: a national living arrangement that destroys civic life while imposing enormous social costs and economic burdens. Kunstler explains how our present zoning laws impoverish the life of our communities, and how all our efforts to make automobiles happy have resulted in making human beings miserable. He shows how common building regulations have led to a crisis in affordable housing, and why street crime is directly related to our traditional disregard for the public realm." "Kunstler takes the reader on a historical journey to understand how Americans came to view their landscape as a commodity for exploitation rather than a social resource. He explains why our towns and cities came to be wounded by the abstract dogmas of Modernism, and reveals the paradox of a people who yearn for places worthy of their affection, yet bend their efforts in an economic enterprise of destruction that degrades and defaces what they most deeply desire." "Kunstler proposes sensible remedies for this American crisis of landscape and townscape: a return to sound principles of planning and the lost art of good place-making, an end to the tyranny of compulsive commuting, the unreality of the suburb, the alienation and violence of downtown, the vulgarity of the highway strip, and the destruction of our countryside. The Geography of Nowhere puts the issue of how we actually live squarely at the center of our ongoing debate about the nation's economy and America's future.
Simon & Schuster 1993 303 pages

Making peace with the planet

Commoner, Barry
In his monumental bestsellers, The Closing Circle and Science and Survival , Barry Commoner was one of the first scientists to alert us to the hideous environmental costs of our technological development. Now, twenty years later, Commoner reviews the vast efforts made in the public and private spheres to address and control the damage done and shows us why, despite billions of dollars spent to save the environment, we now find ourselves in an even deeper crisis. It is a book of hard facts and figures whose conclusion--that environmental pollution can be prevented only through fundamental redesign of the way we produce goods--demands basic changes all across America, from the highest offices in Washington, D.C., to your own kitchen garbage can. If, in the sixties and seventies, an eco-revolution seemed afoot, Commoner now documents how short we have fallen. Attempts to reshape consumer patterns have been halfhearted, there have been terrible miscalculations in government policy (and in environmental organization strategies), and we still face the deliberate resistance of private industry to change. Despite these problems, Commoner argues convincingly for the key role still to be played by community organizations in scrutinizing and directing environmental action. Translating technical information into digestible form, Commoner takes us step by step through an EPA "environmental impact" review, breaks down the arguments for and against incineration, explains dioxin, Bhopal, auto emission controls, mercury poisoning, the greenhouse effect, and the Byzantine calculation of "acceptable risk"--in ways that show how each of these factors affects all of us. With a new introduction by the author, Making Peace with the Planet makes a clear and impassioned plea for us to stop wasting money and precious nonrenewable resources, including time.
New Press 1992 293 pages

The green imperative: ecology and ethics in design and architecture

Papanek, Victor J.
A fresh edition of the sustainable design pioneer Victor Papanek’s classic and ever-relevant book examining the important role of design in combating climate change. Whether it’s horror at the plastic littering the world’s beaches or despair at the melting polar ice caps, the world is gradually waking up to the impending climate disaster. In The Green Imperative , Papanek argues for design that addresses these issues head-on. This means using materials that can be recycled and reused, no more pointless packaging, thinking about how products make us feel and engage all our senses, putting nature at the heart of design, working at a smaller scale, rejecting aesthetics for their own sake, and thinking before we buy. First published at the end of the twentieth century, this book offered a plethora of honest advice, clear examples, and withering critiques, laying out the flaws of and opportunities for the design world at that time. A quarter of a century on, Papanek’s lucid prose has lost none of its verve, and the problems he highlights have only become more urgent, giving today’s reader both a fascinating historical perspective on the issues at hand and a blueprint for how they might be solved.
Thames & Hudson Ltd 2021 318 pages

Between earth and sky: our intimate connections to trees

Nadkarni, Nalini
"A lovely work of writing and a rich scientific exploration of trees, suffused with poetry and humanity. Between Earth and Sky takes us on a journey through the wonders of the forest canopy and the web of spiritual and literal connections we have with trees. Nalini Nadkarni is a unique figure in forest ecology—as a pioneering tree climber and explorer, and a topnotch scientist, she's a hero in a world where heroes don't come around often."—Richard Preston, author of The Wild Trees and The Hot Zone “Besides cutting them, climbing them, and planting them, the urge to anthropomorphize trees, make them into metaphors, and worship them, is practically universal. Many people feel an intimate connection to trees. Nadkarni's scientific, personal, and literary book shows why, on so many levels, this should be so. Although the ancient Chinese thought of humans as the connection between earth and sky, my vote would go to trees.”—Liza Dalby, author of East Wind Melts the Ice “From mosses to giant figs, from nail polish to turpentine, from poetry to rap music, world-acclaimed arbornaut Nadkarni weaves science and story together as she shares her passion for trees, reminding us that forests and humans are inextricably linked.” –Margaret D. Lowman, author of Life in the Treetops and It's a Jungle Up There “I came in from an afternoon of splitting firewood to find this book waiting for me in the mail. It's as wonderful a compendium as one could imagine of all things that make trees such special companions, rooted and steady and patient and full of glory.”—Bill McKibben, author of The Bill McKibben Reader “An epic and lyrical look at trees—an exploration that ranges from molecules and metabolism to ecology, poetry and dance—so breathtaking and eye-opening that it will be impossible to ever look at a tree or think about the world in the same way again.”—Thomas E. Lovejoy, President, The Heinz Center
University of California Press 2009 322 pages

Between earth and sky: our intimate connections to trees

Nadkarni, Nalini
"A lovely work of writing and a rich scientific exploration of trees, suffused with poetry and humanity. Between Earth and Sky takes us on a journey through the wonders of the forest canopy and the web of spiritual and literal connections we have with trees. Nalini Nadkarni is a unique figure in forest ecology--as a pioneering tree climber and explorer, and a topnotch scientist, she's a hero in a world where heroes don't come around often."--Richard Preston, author of The Wild Trees and The Hot Zone "Besides cutting them, climbing them, and planting them, the urge to anthropomorphize trees, make them into metaphors, and worship them, is practically universal. Many people feel an intimate connection to trees. Nadkarni's scientific, personal, and literary book shows why, on so many levels, this should be so. Although the ancient Chinese thought of humans as the connection between earth and sky, my vote would go to trees."--Liza Dalby, author of East Wind Melts the Ice "From mosses to giant figs, from nail polish to turpentine, from poetry to rap music, world-acclaimed arbornaut Nadkarni weaves science and story together as she shares her passion for trees, reminding us that forests and humans are inextricably linked." -Margaret D. Lowman, author of Life in the Treetops and It's a Jungle Up There "I came in from an afternoon of splitting firewood to find this book waiting for me in the mail. It's as wonderful a compendium as one could imagine of all things that make trees such special companions, rooted and steady and patient and full of glory."--Bill McKibben, author of The Bill McKibben Reader "An epic and lyrical look at trees--an exploration that ranges from molecules and metabolism to ecology, poetry and dance--so breathtaking and eye-opening that it will be impossible to ever look at a tree or think about the world in the same way again."--Thomas E. Lovejoy, President, The Heinz Center
University of California Press 2008 322 pages

Making money moral: how a new wave of visionaries is linking purpose and profit

Rodin, Judith,Madsbjerg, Saadia
"In Making Money Moral: How a New Wave of Visionaries Is Linking Purpose and Profit, authors Judith Rodin and Saadia Madsbjerg explore a burgeoning movement of bold and ambitious innovators. These trailblazers are unlocking private-sector investments in new ways to solve global problems, from environmental challenges to social issues such as poverty and inequality. They are earning great returns and reimagining capitalism in the process. Pioneers in the field of sustainable and impact investing, Rodin and Madsbjerg offer first-hand stories of how investors of every type and in every asset class are investing in world-changing solutions--with great success."--Publisher's description
Wharton School Press 2021 160 pages

The Cold and the Dark The World After Nuclear War

Paul R. Ehrlich,Carl Sagan
The Cold and the Dark is the record of the Conference on the Long-Term Worldwide Biological Consequences of Nuclear War, held in Washington, D.C., on October 31 to November 1, 1983. The conference involved over 200 scientists from many nations and drew together the best available scientific information. Its central finding was the phenomenon of nuclear winter: a much more profound and long-lasting devastation of the earth and atmosphere than had been believed possible before. In the two principal papers, Carl Sagan presents the atmospheric and climatic consequences of nuclear war and Paul Ehrlich summarizes its biological implications. Also included is the text of the "Moscow Link" --a dialogue between Soviet and American scientists on nuclear winter--and the technical papers providing the scientific evidence for the book's conclusions.
Norton 1984 229 pages

The well-tempered city: what modern science, ancient civilizations, and human nature teach us about the future of urban life

Rose, Jonathan F. P.
"Cities are birthplaces of civilization; centers of culture, trade, and progress; cauldrons of opportunity -- and the home of eighty percent of the world's population by 2080. As the 21st century progresses, metropolitan areas will bear the brunt of global megatrends such as climate change, natural resource depletion, population growth, income inequality, mass migrations, education and health disparities, among many others. In The Well-Tempered City, Jonathan F.P. Rose-the man who "repairs the fabric of cities" -- distills a lifetime of interdisciplinary research and firsthand experience into a five-pronged model for how to design and reshape our cities with the goal of equalizing their landscape of opportunity. Drawing from the musical concept of "temperament" as a way to achieve harmony, Rose argues that well-tempered cities can be infused with systems that bend the arc of their development toward equality, resilience, adaptability, well-being, and the ever-unfolding harmony between civilization and nature. These goals may never be fully achieved, but our cities will be richer and happier if we aspire to them, and if we infuse our every plan and constructive step with this intention." --Publisher.
HarperWave 2017-09-12 463 pages

The well-tempered city: what modern science, ancient civilizations, and human nature teach us about the future of urban life

Rose, Jonathan F. P.
"A visionary in responsible urban development and renewal presents an interdisciplinary exploration of the development of cities from the beginning of civilization to the present, revealing the conditions that gave rise to the happiest communities, and the qualities that define them"--NoveList
HarperWave 2016-09-13 463 pages

Cannibals and kings: the origins of cultures

Harris, Marvin
Since time began, man has been threatened by growing populations and diminishing resources. In response, he has created idiosyncratic cultures whose forms and functions can - to the outsider - seem incomprehensible. In fascinating and at times bizarre detail a distinguished American anthropologist traces the evolution of cultures in terms not of traditionally accepted notions of the inexorable march of material progress but rather of man's supremely rational survival tactics and adaptability in a world which ever threatens him with extinction.
Fontana 1978 255 pages