Post-Rational Planning confronts today’s threats to truth, particularly after recent news events that present alternative facts and media smear campaigns, often described as post-truth politics. At the same time, it appreciates critical tensions: between rationality (prized by planners and other policy professionals) and desires for positive, socially just outcomes. Rather than abandoning quests for truth, this book provides planners, policy professionals, and students with tools for better responding to debates over truth. Post-Rational Planning examines planners’ unease with emotion and politics, advocating for more scholarship and practice capable of unpacking uses of rhetoric and framing to support or counter key planning decisions impacting social justice. This includes learning from recent works engaging with rhetoric, narrative construction, and framing in planning, while introducing other valuable concepts from disciplines like psychology, including confirmation bias; identity-protective cognition; from marketing and adult education. Each chapter sheds new light on a specific topic requiring a response through post-rational practice. It starts with recent research findings, then demonstrates them with case examples, enabling their use in classroom and practice settings. Each chapter ends by summarizing key lessons in "Take-aways for Practice," better enabling readers of all levels to synthesize and use key ideas.
Environmental activists and academics alike are realizing that a sustainable society must be a just one. Environmental degradation is almost always linked to questions of human equality and quality of life. Throughout the world, those segments of the population that have the least political power and are the most marginalized are selectively victimized by environmental crises. This book argues that social and environmental justice within and between nations should be an integral part of the policies and agreements that promote sustainable development. The book addresses the links between environmental quality and human equality and between sustainability and environmental justice.
The book will serve as a guide for local governments and private enterprises as they navigate the unchartered waters of investing in climate change adaptation and resilience. Not only does it identify potential funding sources but also presents a roadmap for asset management and public finance processes.
In the United States, some populations suffer from far greater disparities in health than others. Those disparities are caused not only by fundamental differences in health status across segments of the population, but also because of inequities in factors that impact health status, so-called determinants of health. Only part of an individual's health status depends on his or her behavior and choice; community-wide problems like poverty, unemployment, poor education, inadequate housing, poor public transportation, interpersonal violence, and decaying neighborhoods also contribute to health inequities, as well as the historic and ongoing interplay of structures, policies, and norms that shape lives. When these factors are not optimal in a community, it does not mean they are intractable: such inequities can be mitigated by social policies that can shape health in powerful ways. Communities in Action: Pathways to Health Equity seeks to delineate the causes of and the solutions to health inequities in the United States. This report focuses on what communities can do to promote health equity, what actions are needed by the many and varied stakeholders that are part of communities or support them, as well as the root causes and structural barriers that need to be overcome.
To be poor, working-class, or a person of color in the United States often means bearing a disproportionate share of the country’s environmental problems. Starting with the premise that all Americans have a basic right to live in a healthy environment, Dumping in Dixie chronicles the efforts of five African American communities, empowered by the civil rights movement, to link environmentalism with issues of social justice. In the third edition, Bullard speaks to us from the front lines of the environmental justice movement about new developments in environmental racism, different organizing strategies, and success stories in the struggle for environmental equity.
Environmental Justice as Social Work Practice places the natural environment as central to practice. Utilizing the Phases of Practice and micro to macro levels of practice, the book integrates neatly into a college semester course. Chapters cover important components of social work such as theory, ethics, conceptual foundations as well as distinct chapters on micro, mezzo, and macro practice. Each chapter expands the discipline's commitment to and applied efforts in the environmental movement while recognizing the unique contributions social work has to offer to ameliorate environmental inequities. Chapters include real-world stories from environmental social work practitioners, case studies, and boxed sections highlighting organizations and people who bridge the human and natural justice divide. Each chapter concludes with learning activities and critical thinking questions providing learning activities that map easily to a course syllabus. A matrix identifying the placement of educational competencies from the Council on Social Work Education is included. The textbook provides a framework for social work educators to bravely and competently teach environmental social work as a stand-alone college course or to incorporate into a traditional practice course.
Environmental Justice: Key Issues is the first textbook to offer a comprehensive and accessible overview of environmental justice, one of the most dynamic fields in environmental politics scholarship. The rapidly growing body of research in this area has brought about a proliferation of approaches; as such, the breadth and depth of the field can sometimes be a barrier for aspiring environmental justice students and scholars. This book therefore is unique for its accessible style and innovative approach to exploring environmental justice. Written by leading international experts from a variety of professional, geographic, ethnic, and disciplinary backgrounds, its chapters combine authoritative commentary with real-life cases. Organised into four parts—approaches, issues, actors and future directions—the chapters help the reader to understand the foundations of the field, including the principal concepts, debates, and historical milestones. This volume also features sections with learning outcomes, follow-up questions, references for further reading and vivid photographs to make it a useful teaching and learning tool. Environmental Justice: Key Issues is the ideal toolkit for junior researchers, graduate students, upper-level undergraduates, and anyone in need of a comprehensive introductory textbook on environmental justice.
An overview of critical conceptual approaches to water justice, illustrated with global historic and contemporary case studies of socio-environmental struggles.