Global Warming and the Sweetness of Life

Global Warming and the Sweetness of Life

Author: Matt Hern

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 2019-04-23

Total Pages: 227

ISBN-13: 0262345471

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Seeking new definitions of ecology in the tar sands of northern Alberta and searching for the sweetness of life in the face of planetary crises. Confounded by global warming and in search of an affirmative politics that links ecology with social change, Matt Hern and Am Johal set off on a series of road trips to the tar sands of northern Alberta—perhaps the world's largest industrial site, dedicated to the dirty work of extracting oil from Alberta's vast reserves. Traveling from culturally liberal, self-consciously “green” Vancouver, and aware that our well-meaning performances of recycling and climate-justice marching are accompanied by constant driving, flying, heating, and fossil-fuel consumption, Hern and Johal want to talk to people whose lives and fortunes depend on or are imperiled by extraction. They are seeking new definitions of ecology built on a renovated politics of land. Traveling with them is their friend Joe Sacco—infamous journalist and cartoonist, teller of complex stories from Gaza to Paris—who contributes illustrations and insights and a chapter-length comic about the contradictions of life in an oil town. The epic scale of the ecological horror is captured through an series of stunning color photos by award-winning aerial photographer Louis Helbig. Seamlessly combining travelogue, sophisticated political analysis, and ecological theory, speaking both to local residents and to leading scholars, the authors propose a new understanding of ecology that links the domination of the other-than-human world to the domination of humans by humans. They argue that any definition of ecology has to start with decolonization and that confronting global warming requires a politics that speaks to a different way of being in the world—a reconstituted understanding of the sweetness of life. Published with the help of funding from Furthermore: a program of the J. M. Kaplan fund


The Sweetness of Life

The Sweetness of Life

Author: Françoise Héritier

Publisher: Penguin UK

Published: 2013-03-07

Total Pages: 51

ISBN-13: 184614700X

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"There is a form of lightness and grace in the simple fact of existence, regardless of occupation, of strong feelings, or of political commitments of any sort - and that is the only thing I have wanted to write about. About that little extra thing that is granted to all of us, a lust for life." So begins Francoise Heritier, in her exploration of the things in life worth living for, the moments and events that give life flavour. An eminent anthropologist, now in her eighties, she draws on her own memories and the wisdom gained in a lifetime of exploration, to show how life is richer and more interesting than we often remember.


Eaarth

Eaarth

Author: Bill McKibben

Publisher: Vintage Canada

Published: 2011-04-12

Total Pages: 277

ISBN-13: 0307399192

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The bestselling author of Deep Economy shows that we’re living on a fundamentally altered planet — and opens our eyes to the kind of change we’ll need in order to make our civilization endure. Twenty years ago, with The End of Nature, Bill McKibben offered one of the earliest warnings about global warming. Those warnings went mostly unheeded; now, he insists, we need to acknowledge that we’ve waited too long, and that massive change is not only unavoidable but already under way. Our old familiar globe is suddenly melting, drying, acidifying, flooding, and burning in ways that no human has ever seen. We’ve created, in very short order, a new planet, still recognizable but fundamentally different. We may as well call it Eaarth. That new planet is filled with new binds and traps. A changing world costs large sums to defend — think of the money that went to repair New Orleans, or the trillions of dollars it will take to transform our energy systems. But the endless economic growth that could underwrite such largesse depends on the stable planet we’ve managed to damage and degrade. We can’t rely on old habits any longer. Our hope depends, McKibben argues, on scaling back — on building the kind of societies and economies that can hunker down, concentrate on essentials, and create the type of community (in the neighborhood, but also on the Internet) that will allow us to weather trouble on an unprecedented scale. Change — fundamental change — is our best hope on a planet suddenly and violently out of balance.


Deep Time Reckoning

Deep Time Reckoning

Author: Vincent Ialenti

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 2020-09-22

Total Pages: 205

ISBN-13: 0262539268

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A guide to long-term thinking: how to envision the far future of Earth. We live on a planet careening toward environmental collapse that will be largely brought about by our own actions. And yet we struggle to grasp the scale of the crisis, barely able to imagine the effects of climate change just ten years from now, let alone the multi-millennial timescales of Earth's past and future life span. In this book, Vincent Ialenti offers a guide for envisioning the planet's far future—to become, as he terms it, more skilled deep time reckoners. The challenge, he says, is to learn to inhabit a longer now. Ialenti takes on two overlapping crises: the Anthropocene, our current moment of human-caused environmental transformation; and the deflation of expertise—today's popular mockery and institutional erosion of expert authority. The second crisis, he argues, is worsening the effects of the first. Hearing out scientific experts who study a wider time span than a Facebook timeline is key to tackling our planet's emergency. Astrophysicists, geologists, historians, evolutionary biologists, climatologists, archaeologists, and others can teach us the art of long-termism. For a case study in long-term thinking, Ialenti turns to Finland's nuclear waste repository “Safety Case” experts. These scientists forecast far future glaciations, climate changes, earthquakes, and more, over the coming tens of thousands—or even hundreds of thousands or millions—of years. They are not pop culture “futurists” but data-driven, disciplined technical experts, using the power of patterns to construct detailed scenarios and quantitative models of the far future. This is the kind of time literacy we need if we are to survive the Anthropocene.


A Good War

A Good War

Author: Seth Klein

Publisher: ECW Press

Published: 2020-09-01

Total Pages: 352

ISBN-13: 1773055917

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“This is the roadmap out of climate crisis that Canadians have been waiting for.” — Naomi Klein, activist and New York Times bestselling author of This Changes Everything and The Shock Doctrine • One of Canada’s top policy analysts provides the first full-scale blueprint for meeting our climate change commitments • Contains the results of a national poll on Canadians’ attitudes to the climate crisis • Shows that radical transformative climate action can be done, while producing jobs and reducing inequality as we retool how we live and work. • Deeply researched and targeted specifically to Canada and Canadians while providing a model that other countries could follow Canada needs to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions by 50% to prevent a catastrophic 1.5 degree increase in the earth’s average temperature — assumed by many scientists to be a critical “danger line” for the planet and human life as we know it. It’s 2020, and Canada is not on track to meet our targets. To do so, we’ll need radical systemic change to how we live and work—and fast. How can we ever achieve this? Top policy analyst and author Seth Klein reveals we can do it now because we’ve done it before. During the Second World War, Canadian citizens and government remade the economy by retooling factories, transforming their workforce, and making the war effort a common cause for all Canadians to contribute to. Klein demonstrates how wartime thinking and community efforts can be repurposed today for Canada’s own Green New Deal. He shares how we can create jobs and reduce inequality while tackling our climate obligations for a climate neutral—or even climate zero—future. From enlisting broad public support for new economic models, to job creation through investment in green infrastructure, Klein shows us a bold, practical policy plan for Canada’s sustainable future. More than this: A Good War offers a remarkably hopeful message for how we can meet the defining challenge of our lives. COVID-19 has brought a previously unthinkable pace of change to the world—one which demonstrates our ability to adapt rapidly when we’re at risk. Many recent changes are what Klein proposes in these very pages. The world can, actually, turn on a dime if necessary. This is the blueprint for how to do it.


After Suburbia

After Suburbia

Author: Roger Keil

Publisher: University of Toronto Press

Published: 2022-08-31

Total Pages: 570

ISBN-13: 1487531079

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After Suburbia presents a cross-section of state-of-the-art scholarship in critical global suburban research and provides an in-depth study of the planet’s urban peripheries to grasp the forms of urbanization in the twenty-first century. Based on cutting-edge conceptual thought and steeped in richly detailed empirical work conducted over the past decade, After Suburbia draws on research from Asia, Africa, Australia, Europe, and the Americas to showcase comprehensive global scholarship on the urban periphery. Contributors explicitly reject the traditional centre-periphery dichotomy and the prioritization of epistemologies that favour the Global North, especially North American cases, over other experiences. In doing so, the book strongly advances the notion of a post-suburban reality in which traditional dynamics of urban extension outward from the centre are replaced by a set of complex contradictory developments. After Suburbia examines multiple centralities and diverse peripheries which mesh to produce a surprisingly contradictory and diverse metropolitan landscape.


Contemplative Practices and Anti-Oppressive Pedagogies for Higher Education

Contemplative Practices and Anti-Oppressive Pedagogies for Higher Education

Author: Greta Gaard

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2022-05-15

Total Pages: 243

ISBN-13: 1000553027

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This volume explores mindfulness and other contemplative approaches as strategic tools for cultivating anti-oppressive pedagogies in higher education. Research confirms that simply providing students with evidence and narratives of economic, social, and environmental injustices proves insufficient in developing awareness and eliciting responses of empathy, solidarity, and a desire to act for change. From the environmental humanities to the environmental sciences, legal studies, psychology, and counseling, educators from a range of geographical and disciplinary standpoints describe their research-based mindfulness pedagogies. Chapters explore how to interrupt and interrogate oppression through contemplative teaching tools, assignments, and strategies that create greater awareness and facilitate deeper engagement with learning contents, contexts, and communities. Providing a framework that facilitates awareness of the links between historic and current oppression, self-identity, and trauma, and creating a transformative learning experience through mindfulness, this book is a must-read for faculty and educators interested in intersections of mindfulness, contemplative pedagogies, and anti-oppression.


Routledge Handbook of Art, Science, and Technology Studies

Routledge Handbook of Art, Science, and Technology Studies

Author: Hannah Star Rogers

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2021-12-22

Total Pages: 952

ISBN-13: 0429792832

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Art and science work is experiencing a dramatic rise coincident with burgeoning Science and Technology Studies (STS) interest in this area. Science has played the role of muse for the arts, inspiring imaginative reconfigurations of scientific themes and exploring their cultural resonance. Conversely, the arts are often deployed in the service of science communication, illustration, and popularization. STS scholars have sought to resist the instrumentalization of the arts by the sciences, emphasizing studies of theories and practices across disciplines and the distinctive and complementary contributions of each. The manifestation of this commonality of creative and epistemic practices is the emergence of Art, Science, and Technology Studies (ASTS) as the interdisciplinary exploration of art–science. This handbook defines the modes, practices, crucial literature, and research interests of this emerging field. It explores the questions, methodologies, and theoretical implications of scholarship and practice that arise at the intersection of art and STS. Further, ASTS demonstrates how the arts are intervening in STS. Drawing on methods and concepts derived from STS and allied fields including visual studies, performance studies, design studies, science communication, and aesthetics and the knowledge of practicing artists and curators, ASTS is predicated on the capacity to see both art and science as constructions of human knowledge- making. Accordingly, it posits a new analytical vernacular, enabling new ways of seeing, understanding, and thinking critically about the world. This handbook provides scholars and practitioners already familiar with the themes and tensions of art–science with a means of connecting across disciplines. It proposes organizing principles for thinking about art–science across the sciences, social sciences, humanities, and arts. Encounters with art and science become meaningful in relation to practices and materials manifest as perceptual habits, background knowledge, and cultural norms. As the chapters in this handbook demonstrate, a variety of STS tools can be brought to bear on art–science so that systematic research can be conducted on this unique set of knowledge-making practices.


Plastic Unlimited

Plastic Unlimited

Author: Alice Mah

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons

Published: 2022-04-21

Total Pages: 123

ISBN-13: 1509549471

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Despite the global movement to tackle plastic pollution, demand for plastics continues to rise. As the world transitions away from fossil fuels, plastics are set to be the biggest driver of oil demand. Single-use plastics – deemed essential in the fight against COVID-19 – have been given a new lease of life. In a world beset with crisis fatigue, what can we do to curb the escalating plastics crisis? In this book, Alice Mah reveals how petrochemical and plastics corporations have fought relentlessly to protect and expand plastics markets in the face of existential threats to business. From denying the toxic health effects of plastics to co-opting circular economy solutions to plastic waste and exploiting the opportunities offered up by the global pandemic, industry has deflected attention from the key problem: plastics production. The consequences of unfettered plastics growth are pernicious and highly unequal. We all have a part to play in reducing plastics consumption but we must tackle the problem at its root: the capitalist imperative for limitless growth.


Kicking the Carbon Habit

Kicking the Carbon Habit

Author: William Sweet

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 2006

Total Pages: 276

ISBN-13: 9780231137119

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With glaciers melting, oceans growing more acidic, species dying out, and catastrophic events like Hurricane Katrina ever more probable, strong steps must be taken now to slow global warming. Further warming threatens entire regional economies and the well being of whole populations, and in this century alone, it could create a global cataclysm. Synthesizing information from leading scientists and the most up-to-date research, science journalist William Sweet examines what the United States can do to help prevent climate devastation. Rather than focusing on cutting oil consumption, which Sweet argues is expensive and unrealistic, the United States should concentrate on drastically reducing its use of coal. Coal-fired plants, which currently produce more than half of the electricity in the United States, account for two fifths of the country's greenhouse gas emissions of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Sweet believes a mixture of more environmentally sound technologies-wind turbines, natural gas, and nuclear reactors-can effectively replace coal plants, especially since dramatic improvements in technology have made nuclear power cleaner, safer, and more efficient. Sweet cuts through all the confusion and controversies. He explores dramatic advances made by climate scientists over the past twenty years and addresses the various political and economic issues associated with global warming, including the practicality of reducing emissions from automobiles, the efficacy of taxing energy consumption, and the responsibility of the United States to its citizens and the international community to reduce greenhouse gases. Timely and provocative, Kicking the Carbon Habit is essential reading for anyone interested in environmental science, economics, and the future of the planet.