STEVE HINCHLIFFE - Böcker

The age in which people in the West have treated society and nature as essentially separate matters is at an end. Environmental change and degradation impinge on all our lives, and even our genes are increasingly seen by employers and insurers as commodities.The Natural and the Social draws on insights from across the social sciences to examine the changing character of these interrelations between society and nature. Individual chapters look in depth at genes, environments and human development, medical practices and health, and the management of environmental risk. Throughout students are encouraged to draw on their own experiences to understand the theoretical and practical problems of living in this new natural-and-social world.This exciting and original text will be essential reading for anyone who wants to understand more clearly the role and limitations of technological and scientific progress in contemporary society.

The age in which people in the West have treated society and nature as essentially separate matters is at an end. Environmental change and degradation impinge on all our lives, and even our genes are increasingly seen by employers and insurers as commodities.The Natural and the Social draws on insights from across the social sciences to examine the changing character of these interrelations between society and nature. Individual chapters look in depth at genes, environments and human development, medical practices and health, and the management of environmental risk. Throughout students are encouraged to draw on their own experiences to understand the theoretical and practical problems of living in this new natural-and-social world.This exciting and original text will be essential reading for anyone who wants to understand more clearly the role and limitations of technological and scientific progress in contemporary society.

Are we humans destroying the environments in which we live, or is environmental change inevitable and natural? How has the relationship between human societies and environments changed since pre-history? Will human population growth outpace the available resources of land and water? Is global warming and climate change already out of control? What can economic and political models tell us about international development? Changing Environments takes a broad, interdisciplinary approach to such questions, drawing on ideas from science, technology, social science and humanities to examine how and why environments change as a result of natural and human-mediated processes. It draws on examples from around the world, and includes consideration of:* the scales of time and space over which changes in our environments occur* the effects on environments that arise from human use of the resources of energy, land, water and the atmosphere* the role of technology and economics in shaping human actions on our environments* the use and limitations of different models for thinking about environmental changeThe book is part of a series entitled Environment: Change, Contest and Response that forms a large part of an Open University course on environmental matters. The other books in the series are: Making Sense of Environmental IssuesContesting EnvironmentsEnvironmental responses

Climate change, urban congestion, nuclear waste, deforestation, destruction of wildlife - how can we respond to these and the many other environmental problems that the world faces today? Can we trust the experts? Does technology have the answers? Should we look to governments or to markets to solve the problems? Are political solutions possible? Should we be optimistic or pessimistic about the environmental futures? To address these questions we need to look at environmental responses in an integrated way. This includes understanding the responses of environments to change, and the responses to those changes made by societies. Environmental Responses takes an innovative interdisciplinary approach to understanding the risks and uncertainties that inform our responses to environments. Featuring places such as Lake Baikal, Andalusia, Cumbria and Bhutan the book is richly illustrated drawing on examples from across the world. Among the issues covered are:* how we might deal with environmental risk in conditions of scientific and political uncertainty* the need to understand the technical, economic and political responses to environmental change* finding new ways of involving citizens in decisions affecting environmental futures* the prospects for achieving sustainable forms of developmentEnvironmental Responses is the final book in a series entitled Environment: Change, Contest and Response that forms a large part of an Open University interdisciplinary course on environmental matters. The other books in the series are:Understanding Environmental IssuesChanging EnvironmentsContested Environments

Pandemics, epidemics and food borne diseases are a major global challenge. Focusing on the food and farming sector, and mobilising social theory as well as empirical enquiry, Pathological Lives investigates current approaches to biosecurity and ask how pathological lives can be successfully ‘regulated’ without making life more dangerous as a result.   Uses empirical and social theoretical resources developed in the course of a 40-month research project entitled ‘Biosecurity borderlands’Focuses on the food and farming sector, where the generation and subsequent transmission of disease has the ability to reach pandemic proportionsDemonstrates the importance of a geographical and spatial analysis, drawing together social, material and biological approaches, as well as national and international examplesThe book makes three main conceptual contributions, reconceptualising disease as situated matters, the spatial or topological analysis of situations and a reformulation of biopoliticsUniquely brings together conceptual development with empirically and politically informed work on infectious and zoonotic disease, to produce a timely and important contribution to both social science and to policy debate

Pandemics, epidemics and food borne diseases are a major global challenge. Focusing on the food and farming sector, and mobilising social theory as well as empirical enquiry, Pathological Lives investigates current approaches to biosecurity and ask how pathological lives can be successfully ‘regulated’ without making life more dangerous as a result.   Uses empirical and social theoretical resources developed in the course of a 40-month research project entitled ‘Biosecurity borderlands’Focuses on the food and farming sector, where the generation and subsequent transmission of disease has the ability to reach pandemic proportionsDemonstrates the importance of a geographical and spatial analysis, drawing together social, material and biological approaches, as well as national and international examplesThe book makes three main conceptual contributions, reconceptualising disease as situated matters, the spatial or topological analysis of situations and a reformulation of biopoliticsUniquely brings together conceptual development with empirically and politically informed work on infectious and zoonotic disease, to produce a timely and important contribution to both social science and to policy debate

"An exemplary introduction to cutting edge work on the geographies of nature. Intellectually demanding, clearly written and empirically rich, this is a book that deserves a wide readership within and beyond the geographical discipline." - Sarah J. Whatmore, Oxford University Centre for the Environment

Geographies of Nature introduces readers to conventional understandings of nature - realist, environmental, constructivist - while examining alternative accounts from different disciplines where nature resists easy classification. Accessibly written, it demonstrates how recent thinking has urgent relevance and impact on the ways in which we approach environmental problems. The text:

Makes concepts like 'environment', 'conservation', and 'sustainability' accessible and applicable with the extensive use of case studies.Uses text boxes to introduce readers to debates and ideas.Grounds the reader and proceeds to the explanation of more complex arguments progressively.

Geographies of Nature presents a new kind of environmental analysis, one that refuses to view nature as wholly separate to the human and nonhuman practices through which it is constantly made and remade.

 

Human-animal co-existence is central to a politics of life, how we order societies, and to debates about who ’we’ humans think ’we’ are. In other words, our ways of understanding and ordering human-animal relations have economic and political implications and affect peoples’ everyday lives. By bringing together historically-oriented approaches and contemporary ethnographies which engage with science and technology studies (STS), this book reflects the multi-sited, multi-species, multi-logic and multiple ways in which lives are and have been assembled, disassembled, practised and possibly policed and politicized. Instead of asking only how control and knowledge are and have been extended over life, the chapters in this book also look at what happens when control fails, at practices which defy orders, escape detection, fail to produce or only loosely hang together. In doing so the book problematises and extends the Foucauldian notion of biopolitics that has been such a central analytical concept in studies of human-animal relations and provides a unique resource of cases and theoretical refinements regarding the ways in which we live together with more than human others.