Cities in Transition investigates the recent urban and political-economic developments in North America, South America, Europe, South Africa and China. It features contributions by more than 30 experts in the field, including Saskia Sassen, M. Christine Boyer, Vittorio Lampugnani, Erik Swyngedouw, Marc Angélil, Joan Busquets, David Grahame Shane, George Baird, Maarten Hajer, West 8, MVRDV and many others.
Written in an engaging and jargon-free style by a team of international and interdisciplinary experts, Modern Environments and Human Health demonstrates by example how methods, theoretical approaches, and data from a wide range of disciplines can be used to resolve longstanding questions about the second epidemiological transition. The first book to address the subject from a multi-regional, comparative, and interdisciplinary perspective, Modern Environments and Human Health is a valuable resource for students and academics in biological anthropology, economics, history, public health, demography, and epidemiology.
World human population is expected to reach upwards of 9 billion by 2050 and then level off over the next half-century. How can the transition to a stabilizing population also be a transition to sustainability? How can science and technology help to ensure that human needs are met while the planet's environment is nurtured and restored? Our Common Journey examines these momentous questions to draw strategic connections between scientific research, technological development, and societies' efforts to achieve environmentally sustainable improvements in human well being. The book argues that societies should approach sustainable development not as a destination but as an ongoing, adaptive learning process. Speaking to the next two generations, it proposes a strategy for using scientific and technical knowledge to better inform future action in the areas of fertility reduction, urban systems, agricultural production, energy and materials use, ecosystem restoration and biodiversity conservation, and suggests an approach for building a new research agenda for sustainability science. Our Common Journey documents large-scale historical currents of social and environmental change and reviews methods for "what if" analysis of possible future development pathways and their implications for sustainability. The book also identifies the greatest threats to sustainabilityâ€"in areas such as human settlements, agriculture, industry, and energyâ€"and explores the most promising opportunities for circumventing or mitigating these threats. It goes on to discuss what indicators of change, from children's birth-weights to atmosphere chemistry, will be most useful in monitoring a transition to sustainability.
This volume had its origins in an international symposium organised by the Cold Regions Research Centre, and held at Wilfrid Laurier University in November, 1999. The chapters are modified from a selection of the papers at the meeting, and reflect reviews and revisions in light of discussions then. The original idea for the meeting was to address certain questions that the organisers were encountering in their own work, and that we felt had received limited attention in the recent literature. The two broad issues we wanted to address were: the complex associations of actual landforms and processes in cold regions, and how the almost universal legacies of past, different cold environments of the late Quaternary affect these landscapes in the present. The former involves the problem of identifying landform and sediment complexes, and the interrelations of relevant processes. We sought to identify this in terms oflandform and sediment assemblages appropriate to regional and field-oriented concerns.
This book centers on climate change, a pressing issue in the ecological transition, particularly for landscape and architecture schools. The scientific realities and consequences of this phenomenon are becoming increasingly well-known and it is now evident that architecture, urban planning and landscaping all have the potential to mitigate these consequences. Ecological Transition in Education and Research is a multidisciplinary collective work, intended to raise awareness of adaptation and mitigation strategies such as action-research, educational innovations and concrete transition practices that embrace different schools of thought. The overall goal is to promote educational practices and research on climate change.
The Ecological Transition studies the relationships between humans and the physical environment. It also assesses some converging approaches in cultural anthropology, including cultural ecology, economic anthropology, social exchange, and behavioral adaptation. Comprised of ten chapters, this book focuses on ecological transition, which refers to the process by which humans incorporate nature into society. It discusses how to formulate a policy-oriented cultural ecology and looks at the ecological transition as material evolution and as a problem of equilibrium. The succeeding chapters review some of the contributions of cultural ecology, including its successes and failures. Finally, the book examines the concept of adaptive and maladaptive actions in human ecology. This book is useful for anthropologists who are interested in cultural-ecological research and its implications in public policy.
This innovative book is one of the first to conduct a systematic comprehensive analysis of the ideals and practices of the evolving green state. It draws on elements of political theory, feminist theory, post-structuralism, governance and institutional theory to conceptualise the green state and advances thinking on how to understand its emergence in the context of climate and sustainability transitions. Focusing on the state as an actor in environmental, climate and sustainability politics, the book explores different principles guiding the emergence of the green state and examines the performance of states and institutional responses to the sustainable and climate transitions in the European and Nordic context in particular. The book’s unique focus on the Nordic countries underlines the important to learn from Nordics, which are perceived to be in the forefront of climate and sustainability governance as well as historically strong welfare states. With chapter contributions from leading international scholars in political science, sociology, economics, energy and environmental systems and climate policy studies, this book will be of great value to postgraduate students and researchers working on sustainability transitions, environmental politics and governance, and those with an area studies focus on the Nordic countries.
Climate Change and Cultural Transition in Europe is an account of Europe’s share in the making of global warming, which considers the past and future of climate-society interactions. Contributors include: Clara Brandi, Rüdiger Glaser, Iso Himmelsbach, Claudia Kemfert, Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Claus Leggewie, Franz Mauelshagen, Geoffrey Parker, Christian Pfister, Dirk Riemann, Lea Schmitt, Jörn Sieglerschmidt, Markus Vogt, and Steffen Vogt.
This bold and controversial argument shows why energy transitions are inherently complex and prolonged affairs, and how ignoring this fact raises unrealistic expectations that the United States and other global economies can be weaned quickly from a primary dependency on fossil fuels. Energy transitions are fundamental processes behind the evolution of human societies: they both drive and are driven by technical, economic, and social changes. In a bold and provocative argument, Energy Transitions: History, Requirements, Prospects describes the history of modern society's dependence on fossil fuels and the prospects for the transition to a nonfossil world. Vaclav Smil, who has published more on various aspects of energy than any working scientist, makes it clear that this transition will not be accomplished easily, and that it cannot be accomplished within the timetables established by the Obama administration. The book begins with a survey of the basic properties of modern energy systems. It then offers detailed explanations of universal patterns of energy transitions, the peculiarities of changing energy use in the world's leading economies, and the coming shifts from fossil fuels to renewable conversions. Specific cases of these transitions are analyzed for eight of the world's leading energy consumers. The author closes with perspectives on the nature and pace of the coming energy transition to renewable conversions.
