Kategoria BISAC: Science >> Environmental Science (see also Chemistry - Environmental)

In Energy at the Crossroads, Vaclav Smil considers the twenty-first century's crucial question: how to reconcile the modern world's unceasing demand for energy with the absolute necessity to preserve the integrity of the biosphere. With this book he offers a comprehensive, accessible guide to today's complex energy issues -- how to think clearly and logically about what is possible and what is desirable in our energy future.

After a century of unprecedented production growth, technical innovation, and expanded consumption, the world faces a number of critical energy challenges...

Mitchell Thomashow, a preeminent educator, shows how environmental studies can be taught from different perspective, one that is deeply informed by personal reflection. Through theoretical discussion as well as hands-on participatory learning approaches, Thomashow provides concerned citizens, teachers, and students with the tools needed to become reflective environmentalists.What do I know about the place where I live? Where do things come from? How do I connect to the earth? What is my purpose as a human being? These are the questions that Thomashow identifies as being at the heart of...

Researchers studying the role institutions play in causing and confronting environmental change use a variety of concepts and methods that make it difficult to compare their findings. Seeking to remedy this problem, Oran Young takes the analytic themes identified in the Institutional Dimensions of Global Environmental Change (IDGEC) Science Plan as cutting-edge research concerns and develops them into a common structure for conducting research. He illustrates his arguments with examples of environmental change ranging in scale from the depletion of local fish stocks to the disruption of...

The Environmental Crusaders highlights citizens in Israel, the former Czechoslovakia, and the United States who challenged serious ecological problems and demanded a safe environment and an accountable society. The men and women portrayed here confronted the threat of nuclear contamination, chemical waste and pollution, exposure to garbage and industrial refuse, untreated sewage, and other serious dangers. Drawing upon 140 interviews, Myron Peretz Glazer and Penina Migdal Glazer portray the personal transformation of those who moved from uninvolved residents to political activists...

Human exposure to toxic substances that cause cancer, reproductive abnormalities, and other adverse health effects is a topic of increasing interest to scientists, journalists, workers, business executives, advocacy groups, and the public at large. Citizen concern has prompted the government to establish an elaborate regulatory system designed to protect people from chemical exposures. Harnessing Science examines the role of science in toxic chemical regulation at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. The book postulates that scientific knowledge and advice from experts outside of...

Global Environmental Change reviews the facts and the uncertainties relating to some of the major environmental issues facing us today--greenhouse warming, loss of stratospheric ozone, and acid precipitation--and shows how these facts and uncertainties are dealt with by both governmental and nongovernmental agencies. Anticipated environmental changes in future decades are described and explained, and the consequences of those projected changes are described for rise of sea level, water resources, agriculture, ecological systems, and other topics. Three chapters of the study are devoted to...

Recent international appeals for sustainable development policies have renewed efforts to explore the common ground between economics and ecology. This volume presents a collection of papers from leading researchers around the world, who evaluate the analytical foundations and empirical systems that are being developed to integrate economic and environmental indicators. These specialists identify key data requirements and modeling systems. Economists, ecologists, and policy makers will find this work introducing integrated modeling systems thought-provoking and useful.

This collection of essays examines the variety of ways in which communication scholarship and research contribute to the political mobilization and empowerment of citizens to act on environmental issues--environmental discourse and action in the largest sense. As seen here, the task of environmental empowerment involves a curious mixture of national and local politics, abstract principles and concrete actions, ethical frameworks and political expediency. The contributors to this volume provide a fascinating array of perspectives on how to go about this task and how earthtalk continues to...

Virtually every city in the nation's older industrial regions, no matter its size, grapples with the challenge of unused or abandoned manufacturing facilities and other industrial sites. Local public officials, economic development practitioners, and site owners who have sought to revitalize fallow industrial properties face daunting challenges: contamination of the buildings, equipment, and surrounding land and water. Public concern about health effects from hazardous chemicals, changing environmental law, and evolving private sector development and financing priorities have made it...

This study compares household energy use, environmental awareness, and consumerism among residents of small towns in Sweden and America. The author, a cultural anthropologist, uses quantitative and qualitative data from fieldwork to formulate a holistic analysis. The study considers broader questions about the uses of energy, consumer goods, quality of life, and the environment. The industrial worldview is critiqued at both individual and institutional levels. It concludes with a call for a more spiritual approach to environmentalism and social issues.

How do various worldviews, praxis orientations, and preferred future visions differ between the three major subcultures within the American Green Movement? Drawing on his experience as an activist, Kenn Kassman explains the distinctions between the three elements, which he terms "Neo-Primitivism," "Mystical Deep Ecology," and "Social Ecology" What emerges is a perceptive analysis of one of the most important of North America's new social movements: the Greens. Kassman examines and contradistinguishes the approach of each element in the movement to the general Green agenda--ecological...

Lombard analyzes the complementary relationship between trade and the environment in the emerging North American environmental management system comprising Canada, the United States, and Mexico. He views the development of closer trade relations among the three NAFTA members as having an overall and long-term beneficial impact on the environment, particularly air quality, in North America.

He presents a revised model of environmental policy implementation which stresses further decentralization of environmental protection enforcement, greater reliance on nongovernmental organizations,...

Numerous studies have revealed that the poor disproportionately bear the burden of environmental problems in America today. Issues range from higher levels of poisonous wastes, carbon dioxide, and ozone, to greater than normal incidences of asthma and lead poisoning. The environmental justice movement, which has emerged in working class and low-income African American and Latino communities since the early 1990s, is an effort that is reinterpreting the definition of the environment as where we live, work, and play to connect new constituencies traditionally outside of the postwar...

The brave new world of environmental economics--complete with pollution markets, emission brokers, and commodity auctions of emission allowances--has been developing in the U.S. for several decades. This book traces the evolution of such environmental management techniques in industrial Philadelphia. Initially as a greene country towne, the city's development led to significant pollution concerns, including rivers filled with sewage, typhoid deaths, and smoky plumes from coal combustion. Technological pollution controls improved conditions, but blunt regulatory tools eventually evolved...

Environmental and natural resource policy decision making is changing. Increasingly citizens and management agency personnel are seeking ways to do things differently; to participate meaningfully in the decision making process as parties work through policy conflicts. Doing things differently has come to mean doing things collaboratively.

Daniels and Walker examine collaboration in environmental and natural resource policy decision making and conflict management. They address collaboration by featuring a method collaborative learning, that has been designed to address decision making...

Can sustainable economic development be achieved without strong environmental protections? Bringing together theoretical issues in development economics and a wide range of empirical evidence, this book examines this question and explores ways that environmental sustainability has been--and might be--incorporated into existing theories of economic development. Protection of the environment is an essential part of development, and the best chance for achieving long-term sustainable development is to systematically incorporate environmental issues into key aspects of economic development...

Munch and his colleagues examine how democracy works in the practice of political regulation. Based on empirical research on the politics of clean air in the United Kingdom, France, Germany, and the United States, they provide a comparative sociological perspective. Thus, they look at social change and social integration rather than issues of governance and administration in terms of effectiveness and democratic legitimation.

The analysis looks at how different forms of democracy given in the four countries achieve more or less in the political regulation of clean air in terms of...

Forty years after the publication of Rachel Carson's "Silent Spring," this important study examines the history, industrial uses, and harmful effects of the twelve most commonly used organochloride chemicals. All have been fully or partially banned by the Stockholm Protocol, an international treaty signed by about 120 countries in December 2000. Among the twelve are the dioxins (the active ingredient in Agent Orange) and polychlorinated byphenyls (PCBs), which are toxic in minute quantities. Johansen pays special attention to the Inuit of the Arctic, where these chemicals have been...

Highlighting the connections between climate change and human security, this book elucidates what might happen when a mere 10-degree drop in average temperature results in a sudden inability to produce enough food, when rapidly advancing desertification produces water scarcities where none existed before, and when newly frozen landscapes lead to more power plants for energy, resulting in increased air pollution. The destabilizing effects of these possibilities create many potential challenges for U.S. national security in a globalized world in which we may have to intervene militarily to...

Pesticide exposure has long been a cause for concern, and with good reason. Studies have shown that all persons, but especially children, pregnant women, farmers, farmworkers, and the elderly, may experience negative health effects from pesticide exposure. These effects may include acute poisoning, cancer, neurological damage, birth defects, reduced sperm count, suppressed immune systems, and reproductive and developmental harm. This book is a comprehensive examination of pesticide use, pesticide harm, and alternatives to harmful pesticides.

Levine highlights the role of farming,...