Nature Swapped and Nature Lost
Nature Swapped and Nature Lost

Author: Elia Apostolopoulou

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2020-06-23

Total Pages: 415

ISBN-13: 3030467880

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This book unravels the profound implications of biodiversity offsetting for nature-society relationships and its links to environmental and social inequality. Drawing on people’s resistance against its implementation in several urban and rural places across England, it explores how the production of equivalent natures, the core promise of offsetting, reframes socionatures both discursively and materially transforming places and livelihoods. The book draws on theories and concepts from human geography, political ecology, and Marxist political economy, and aims to shift the trajectory of the current literature on the interplay between offsetting, urbanization and the neoliberal reconstruction of conservation and planning policies in the era following the 2008 financial crash. By shedding light on offsetting’s contested geographies, it offers a fundamental retheorization of offsetting capable of demonstrating how offsetting, and more broadly revanchist neoliberal policies, are increasingly used to support capitalist urban growth producing socially, environmentally and geographically uneven outcomes. Nature Swapped and Nature Lost brings forward an understanding of environmental politics as class politics and sees environmental justice as inextricably linked to social justice. It effectively challenges the dystopia of offsetting’s ahistorical and asocial non-places and proposes a radically different pathway for gaining social control over the production of nature by linking struggles for the right to the city with struggles for the right to nature for all.

Hottest of the Hotspots
Hottest of the Hotspots

Author: Benjamin Neimark

Publisher: University of Arizona Press

Published: 2023

Total Pages: 241

ISBN-13: 0816542384

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Continually recognized as one of the "hottest" of all the world's biodiversity hotspots, the island of Madagascar has become ground zero for the most intensive market-based conservation interventions on Earth. This book details the rollout of market conservation programs, including the finding drugs from nature--or "bioprospecting"--biodiversity offsetting, and the selling of blue carbon credits from mangroves. It documents the tensions that exist at the local level and provides a voice for community workers many times left out of environmental policy discussions, ultimately in the hope of offering critiques that build better conservation interventions with perspectives of the locals.

The Routledge Companion to Folk Horror
The Routledge Companion to Folk Horror

Author: Robert Edgar

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2023-10-09

Total Pages: 460

ISBN-13: 1000951855

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The Routledge Companion to Folk Horror offers a comprehensive guide to this popular genre. It explores its origins, canonical texts and thinkers, the crucial underlying themes of nostalgia and hauntology, and identifies new trends in the field. Divided into five parts, the first focuses on the history of Folk Horror from medieval texts to the present day. It considers the first wave of contemporary Folk Horror through the films of the ‘unholy trinity’, as well as discussing the influence of ancient gods and early Folk Horror. Part 2 looks at the spaces, landscapes, and cultural relics, which form a central focus for Folk Horror. In Part 3, the contributors examine the rich history of the use of folklore in children’s fiction. The next part discusses recent examples of Folk Horror-infused music and image. Chapters consider the relationship between different genres of music to Folk Horror (such as folk music, black metal, and new wave), sound and performance, comic books, and the Dark Web. Often regarded as British in origin, the final part analyses texts which break this link, as the contributors reveal the larger realms of regional, national, international, and transnational Folk Horror. Featuring 40 contributions, this authoritative collection brings together leading voices in the field. It is an invaluable resource for students and scholars interested in this vibrant genre and its enduring influence on literature, film, music, and culture.

Reimagining the More-Than-Human City
Reimagining the More-Than-Human City

Author: Jamie Wang

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 2024-10-01

Total Pages: 281

ISBN-13: 0262550938

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An exploration of the multifaceted urban environmental issues in Singapore through a more-than-human lens, calling for new ways to think of and story cities. As climate change accelerates and urbanization intensifies, our need for more sustainable and livable cities has never been more urgent. Yet, the imaginary of a flourishing urban ecofuture is often driven by a specific version of sustainability that is tied to both high-tech futurism and persistent economic growth. What kinds of sustainable futures are we calling forth, and at what and whose expense? In Reimagining the More-Than-Human City, Jamie Wang attempts to answer these questions by critically examining the sociocultural, political, ethical, and affective facets of human-environment dynamics in the urban nexus, with a geographic focus on Singapore. Widely considered a model for the future of urbanism and an emblematic new world city, Singapore, Wang contends, is a fascinating site to explore how modernist sustainable urbanism is imagined and put into practice. Drawing on field research, this book explores distinct and intrarelated urban imaginaries situated in various sites, from the futuristic, authoritarian Supertree Grove, positioned as a technologically sustainable solution to a velocity-charged and singular urban transportation system, to highly protected nature reserves and to the cemeteries, where graves and memories continue to be exhumed and erased to make way for development. Wang also attends to more contingent yet hopeful alternatives that aim to reconfigure current urban approaches. In the face of growing enthusiasm for building high-tech, sustainable, and “natural” cities, Wang ultimately argues that urban imaginings must create space for a more relational understanding of urban environments.

Human Rights and Ocean Governance
Human Rights and Ocean Governance

Author: Mara Ntona

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2023-12-12

Total Pages: 257

ISBN-13: 1003828426

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This book argues for the utility of human rights in the practice of ocean governance. Maritime spatial planning (MSP) has become the dominant marine management paradigm, with MSP frameworks already at various stages of elaboration and implementation in more than half of all coastal states. However, as experience with MSP accrues, a central systemic shortcoming has become apparent, insofar as the normative frameworks that underpin MSP tend to be grounded in a rationalistic and economistic worldview. The result is a post-political, neoliberal approach to the implementation of MSP, which favours technocratic ‘fixes’ to complex societal problems over efforts to address underlying issues of power and inequality. Building upon the new field of critical MSP studies, this book offers a much-neglected legal contribution. More specifically, it analyses the extent to which law, and particularly human rights law, can be utilised to meaningfully challenge the unjust patterns of human-ocean interaction that MSP preserves or creates, and so provide a vehicle for the formulation and realisation of transformative blue futures. The book looks to human rights as norms that are uniquely capable of bringing into relief the values, cause-and-effect relationships, and uncertainties that prevailing capitalist-industrial framings of the ocean tend to downplay or, worse, disregard. And so, from a more pragmatic viewpoint, the book argues that the policy and advocacy tools associated with human rights can be used within MSP processes to foster patterns of human-ocean interaction which are more conducive to social and environmental justice. This book will be of interest to legal and planning scholars, geographers, and others concerned with ocean governance and the ‘blue turn’ in the social sciences and humanities more generally.

The Political Ecology of Austerity
The Political Ecology of Austerity

Author: Rita Calvário

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2021-11-10

Total Pages: 211

ISBN-13: 1000473023

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The Political Ecology of Austerity explores the environmental dimension of austerity that has thus far escaped academic, policy, and media attention. Offering a better comprehension of the full socio-environmental impact of austerity measures, the book highlights the importance of considering environmental issues when designing responses to economic crisis in the future. Mobilising detailed case studies from across the world, the volume documents the ways in which austerity impacts global and local ecologies, shapes environmental conflicts and gives rise to new forms and practices of social moblisation and resistance. Bringing together theoretical debates and rigorous case studies, the book proposes ‘the political ecology of austerity’ as an appropriate method of analysis that can inform our understanding of the shift in environmental protection policies and the intensification of growth practices (green or otherwise) that followed the 2008 global economic crisis. The Political Ecology of Austerity discloses austerity to be a globalised set of tools not only for budgetary discipline, but also for socio-environmental discipline that justifies the continuation of capital accumulation at the expense of further global environmental degradation. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of social and political sciences, environmental studies, urban studies, and political ecology.

Sustainable Development, International Law, and a Turn to African Legal Cosmologies
Sustainable Development, International Law, and a Turn to African Legal Cosmologies

Author: Godwin Eli Kwadzo Dzah

Publisher:

Published: 2024-02-02

Total Pages: 410

ISBN-13: 1009354035

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This original book analyses and reimagines the concept of sustainable development in international law from a non-Western legal perspective. Built upon the intersection of law, politics, and history in the context of Africa, its peoples and their experiences, customary law and other legal cosmologies, this ground-breaking study applies a critical legal analysis to Africa's interaction with conceptualising and operationalising sustainable development. It proposes a turn to non-Western legal normativity as the foundational principle for reimagining sustainable development in international law. It highlights eco-legal philosophies and principles in remaking sustainable development where ecological integrity assumes a central focus in the reimagined conceptualisation and operationalisation of sustainable development. While this pioneering book highlights Africa as its analytical pivot, its arguments and proposals are useful beyond Africa. Connecting global discourses on nature, the environment, rights and development, Godwin Eli Kwadzo Dzah illuminates our current thinking on sustainable development in international law.

Nature Is My Teacher
Nature Is My Teacher

Author: Prabhash Karan

Publisher: Xlibris Corporation

Published: 2019-03-09

Total Pages: 574

ISBN-13: 1984575171

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The book, Nature Is My Teacher, reveals the deep emotional conviction between human evolution and civilization! This book along with its four companion books—Of Human Nature and Good Habits; Life, Living and Lifestyle; How to Win Nature and Enjoy Good Life and Health and Medical Care—constitutes a series that tells the nature-human connection and its implication in our daily life, in the related set of separate episodes. Nature Is My Teacher primarily deals with the physical, notional, and real world in general. The book contains chapters: The Nature (When nature teaches, we learn.); Mother Nature (Mother has been and will always remain synonymous with love, devotion, and dedication. Its personification as a nurturing mother is so primitive.); The Universe (The universe is a source of our profound wonder, awe, and joy.); Planet Earth (Why do the sun and the moon look more of the same size?); The Weather (By weather, we generally mean the state of the atmosphere at a given time and place.); The Air We Breathe (Every human deserves clean air and blue sky.) The Water We Drink (Human civilizations grew, shrunk, or abolished depending on the availability of water.) The Future of Nature (The full melting of Greenland’s ice could raise sea level as much as 20 feet.); Origin of Life (What sparked life on earth?); Gift of Life (Life is the best gift to the fortunate few who got it.); Human Life (Human development is not only impossibly complex, but it is also a just marvelous.); Human Evolution (Human Evolution by natural selection is now being switched to evolution by human intervention.); Self and the Rest of the World (I am here because of you!); Time Goes By (Time is a very precious thing.); Life Changes Over Time (Humans are socially elastic and adaptive.); Worries, Anxieties, Fear, and Regret (We suffer from worrying well before worry starts or never starts.); How to Deal with Stress (The contemporary idea of stress is a very recent phenomenon.); Depression (Please stop merchandising mental illness!); Kindness and Devotion (Among all our base instincts, hate is one distinctly human. In animals, strength, violence, and venom are the weapons of survival, but in humans, their supremacy.); Charity and Humanity (Cheese in the mousetrap is not a charity.); The Power of Hope (Hope is a wonderful trick that Mother Nature has planted in the human mind that counterbalances our grief, sorrow, fear, dread, and regret. Hope is not a strategy, yet it is. During the time of war, hope is the weapon.); Education and Experience (We are not born knowledgeable. We gather knowledge primarily through education. Education is not a privilege; it is a civil right, precisely, a human right that refers to the “basic rights and freedoms to which all humans are entitled.”)

Grounded in Nature
Grounded in Nature

Author: Naomi Rohan

Publisher: Teilingen Press

Published: 2023-11-29

Total Pages: 247

ISBN-13: 1923045911

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Unearth the secrets of nature's healing power and transform your well-being. Ever wondered how the simple act of connecting with nature can transform your mental and physical health? “Grounded in Nature” is a 2-in-1 collection that explores two distinct yet interconnected practices - forest bathing and earthing - and will revolutionize your understanding of nature's profound impact on well-being. With practical techniques, scientific insights, and personal stories, author Naomi Rohan invites you to step outside, to feel the cool morning dew, the warmth of sun-baked clay, and the rough texture of tree bark. From “The Power of Forest Bathing”: - Uncover the ancient Japanese practice of Shinrin-Yoku and its transformative power. - Learn the art of mindful walking and engage your senses in the forest's symphony. - Discover the physical and mental health benefits of forest bathing. - Gain insights into forest ecology and learn how to practice forest bathing through different seasons. - Cultivate a love for nature in children and find green oases in urban spaces. From “Earthing Essentials”: - Understand the historical roots and scientific principles of earthing and grounding. - Discover practical techniques for incorporating grounding practices into daily life. - Gain insights into the healing power of the Earth and its impact on physical and mental health. - Explore global perspectives on earthing and its future trends. - Be inspired by personal stories of transformation through earthing. Written in an evocative, poetic writing style, rich in sensory language, this book creates an immersive reading experience that mirrors the tranquil and introspective nature of the practices it explores. This holistic guide is a must-read for anyone seeking to improve their mental and physical health through nature. Don’t miss out on the opportunity to harness the healing power of nature and transform your well-being. Get your copy of “Grounded in Nature” today!

For a Liberatory Politics of Home
For a Liberatory Politics of Home

Author: Michele Lancione

Publisher: Duke University Press

Published: 2023-10-06

Total Pages: 173

ISBN-13: 1478027428

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In For a Liberatory Politics of Home, Michele Lancione questions accepted understandings of home and homelessness to offer a radical proposition: homelessness cannot be solved without dismantling current understandings of home. Conventionally, home is framed as a place of security and belonging, while its loss defines what it means to be homeless. On the basis of this binary, a whole industry of policy interventions, knowledge production, and organizing fails to provide solutions to homelessness but perpetuates violent and precarious forms of inhabitation. Drawing on his research and activism around housing in Europe, Lancione attends to the interlocking crises of home and homelessness by recentering the political charge of precarious dwelling. It is there, if often in unannounced ways, that a profound struggle for a differential kind of homing signals multiple possibilities to transcend the violences of home/homelessness. In advancing a new approach to work with the politics of inhabitation, Lancione provides a critique of current practices and offers a transformative vision for a renewed, liberatory politics of home.