Critical Concepts in the Environment – serie

Modern environmentalism is now over fifty years old. This five volume set provides wide-ranging coverage of the state and scope of environmentalism from its science-driven, physical geography-focused roots to its spread to social science and cultural studies. The articles and accompanying commentaries provide insight into the critical areas of debate in the field's fifty-year development. A detailed index is provided to guide the reader through the material.

The science of climate change has experienced an extraordinary expansion in the period since the mid-1980s and is paralleled by considerable public and political awareness of related issues.The degree of natural variability in, and the causes of, climate change have become particularly important points of debate and the past decade has seen many publications dealing with these issues. Indeed, the area of climate research as a whole is now so large, and the sources of data so diverse, that many researchers are unaware of significant developments across the field. This collection therefore aims to provide a balanced selection of published papers, so as to make easily available the existing breadth and depth of information.Taken together, the set of volumes will provide for the researcher (a) a greater awareness of the evidence for natural variability of climate; (b) a perspective on the role of various forcing factors in climate change; (c) a selection of papers that argue both for, and against, the 'solar' and 'anthropogenic' hypotheses as explanations for recent and current climate change; (d) a sense of what future climate will be like, and what remains to be discovered or achieved.

This collection gathers classic, influential, and important papers in environmental philosophy from the late 1960s and early 1970s (when academic environmental philosophy began to coalesce) to the present. The volumes explore environmental ethics, epistemological, metaphysical, and comparative worldview questions raised by environmental concerns. The set also represents a genuinely global and international focus.The set includes a full index and new introductions by the editors.

Edited by a leading scholar in the field, this new four-volume Routledge Major Work brings together canonical and cutting-edge research in ecological economics. In tracing both the development of thought in the field, as well as exploring the most recent scholarship, diverse elements of the rapidly expanding literature are brought together for the first time, providing an overview of—and vision for—ecological economics.While the roots of ecological economics can be traced back to the late 1800s the modern movement developed from diverse writings in the following century. The field became fully established and institutionalized in the late 1980s. This collection shows how research questioning the basis of mainstream economics combined with a concern for environmental degradation and limits to growth to produce ecological economics. There are also many academics who, while not calling themselves ecological economists, have ideas which are directly of relevance. The common interest, as shown especially in Parts 1–3 of the collection, has been to move beyond standard economic approaches and towards a new political economy which takes note of learning in other sciences.Besides identifying and collecting seminal works, the editor has also chosen pieces for their ability cogently to summarize and explain developments and ongoing thinking. Ecological economics is now a vibrant and dynamic field, but it has to date lacked a coherent guide to its rapidly expanding literature. Aided by the collection’s thematic organization and the editor’s newly written general and volume introductions, this Routledge Major Work will enable users to make sense of the wide range of approaches, theories, and concepts that have informed research in ecological economics to date. It is an essential collection destined to be valued as a vital research resource by all scholars and students of the subject.

The collection’s fresh and explicitly interdisciplinary approach provides a unique insight into the development of the subject from a predominantly science-based topic to a vibrant interdisciplinary concern, with an increasing appreciation of the social obligations of conservation. Biodiversity and Conservation is an essential reference collection and is destined to be valued by scholars and students—as well as conservation policy-makers and practitioners—as a vital one-stop research and pedagogic resource.

The United Nations has pithily defined sustainable development as progress that ‘meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs’. But sustainable development remains highly contested and is subject to a wide variety of interpretations, applications, and criticisms. Moreover, those seeking fully to understand this critical concept are confronted with a (sometimes dispiritingly) voluminous body of scholarly, polemical, and journalistic writing.Edited by the acclaimed author of Understanding Sustainable Development (Earthscan, 2008), this new title from Routledge’s Critical Concepts in the Environment series answers the need for an authoritative reference work to make sense of the vast literature on sustainable development, and the continuing explosion in research output.Drawing on a wide variety of sources that take full cognizance of the rich background and necessary adaptability of the concept to the imperatives of time, place, and culture, and which emphasize its connected and transdisciplinary nature, the editor has brought together in four volumes the canonical and the best cutting-edge work to produce an indispensable ‘mini library’. The collection covers the history, mediation, application, and likely future orientations of sustainable development, both conceptually and as a continually emerging practice.Sustainable Development is fully indexed and includes comprehensive introductions, newly written by the editor, which place the collected materials in their historical and intellectual context. It is an essential reference collection and is certain to be valued by scholars and students—as well as serious policy-makers and practitioners—as a vital one-stop research and pedagogic resource.

Addressing the need for an authoritative reference work to make sense of this rapidly growing subject and its multidisciplinary corpus of scholarly literature, ‘Environmental Education’ is a new title from the acclaimed Routledge series, Critical Concepts in the Environment. Edited by two of the field’s leading scholars, this Major Works collection embraces a wide variety of methodological traditions to bring together in four volumes the foundational and the very best cutting-edge scholarship. The collection enables users to access—and to make sense of—the most important findings and theories that have been developed by environmental education research. It provides a synoptic view of all the key issues, current debates, and controversies.‘Environmental Education’ is fully indexed and includes comprehensive introductions, newly written by the editors, which place the collected materials in their historical and intellectual context. It is an essential reference collection and is destined to be valued by scholars and students—as well as policy-makers and practitioners—as a vital one-stop research and pedagogic resource.œ œ œ Environmental Education is edited by Alan Reid (Monash University), editor of Environmental Education Research, and Justin Dillon (University of Bristol), co-editor of the International Journal of Science Education and Past President of the European Science Education Research Association.

Most of what we understand about ‘the environment’, we know through the media, broadly defined, and related communication processes. Indeed, such processes have played a vital role in defining ‘the environment’ as a crucial concept, and in bringing environmental issues and problems to public and political attention. Thus, at least since the emergence and rise of the modern environmental movement in the 1960s, the mass media have been a central public arena for publicizing environmental issues and for contesting claims, arguments, and opinions about our use and abuse of the environment. (Moreover, the learned editor of this new Routledge collection avers, this applies not only to our beliefs and knowledge about those aspects of the environment which are regarded as problems or issues for public and political concern, but extends much deeper to the very ways in which we—as individuals, cultures, and societies—view, perceive, value, and relate to our environment and nature generally.)A rapidly expanding body of research and scholarship from a diverse range of disciplines across the humanities, sciences, and social sciences has sought to address key questions about all aspects of media, mediation, and communication roles in social, political, and cultural definitions of ‘the environment’. Such questions have focused in particular on how the media and related communication processes are centrally implicated in the social and political definition, contestation, and resolution of major global environmental issues and problems—notably, most recently, climate change. But media and communication roles in relation to local and national environmental issues also continue to be an important focus for scholarly research on what is increasingly recognized as the emerging and consolidating domain of ‘environmental communication’.Addressing the need for an authoritative and comprehensive reference work to enable users to navigate this increasingly complex area of research and study, and to answer key questions about the central role of media and communication in relation to the environment and environmental issues, Media and the Environment is a new title from Routledge’s acclaimed Critical Concepts in the Environment series. Edited by Anders Hansen, it is a four-volume collection of foundational and the very best cutting-edge scholarship. The collection brings together core texts charting the history and development of environmental communication, along with research examining the three major strands of the communication process: the sources and production of communication about the environment; the study of representations of the environment in news, entertainment media, advertising, film, and popular culture; and the study of how communication about the environment impacts on and interacts with public and political beliefs about the environment, as well as political action regarding the environment. The collection’s final part provides a series of case studies from the field of environmental communication praxis, examining how activists, NGOs, local government, and large corporations have sought to use communication as a key tool in the political processes of environmental change.Supplemented with a full index, and including an introduction, newly written by the editor, which places the assembled texts in their historical and intellectual context, Media and the Environment is destined to be valued by scholars and students as a vital research resource.

Campaigns to redress gender inequities and injustices have resulted in significant achievements towards equality, especially for well-educated, career-orientated, white women in the West. However, such campaigns have primarily been conducted in the male-dominated arenas of public politics, paid work, and education, and the ‘successes’ of women’s equality are usually calculated by the masculinist values of politics and the workplace. These, the learned editor of this new Routledge Major Works collection avers, are the very values—predicated on continuous economic and material growth, fuelled by consumption and competition, and combative politics—which are destroying the world’s environment at a dizzying rate. However, since the late 1960s, a growing environmental awareness, combined with the third-wave feminist movement in the West, has challenged this worldview, particularly the liberal notion of ‘equality’ based on women achieving masculinist economic and social norms. Uneasy with the horror of a world in which everyone striving for ‘equality’ would end up consuming at the rate of an average Western male, the newly emerging ecological feminism of the 1970s argued that what constitutes ‘success’ needs to be reimagined, in other—arguably feminist/feminine—ways. This way of thinking prompted a reconceptualization of the relationship between environment and gender, with distinctive debates emerging variously in North America, Australia, New Zealand, the UK, Scandinavia, and France.The work of feminist critics in the Global South have both developed and challenged these debates, and have drawn to public attention the most egregious examples of how environmental impacts consistently, and structurally, exacerbate the inequalities that women and girls endure, especially in poorer parts of the world. Literature developing the links between environment, development, and gender has broadened the earlier Western eco-feminism discourse, and has also influenced—albeit selectively—various development strategies by global institutions (such as the World Bank, the Asian Development Bank, and various UN agencies) and NGOs (notably, for example, Oxfam).Questions about how we want to live in relation to our environment have arguably never been more urgent and this new title from Routledge’s Critical Concepts in the Environment series answers the need for an authoritative reference work to make sense of the growing—and ever more complex—corpus of scholarly and campaigning literature on gender and the environment, and the continuing explosion in research output.Drawing on a wide variety of sources, Susan Buckingham has brought together in four volumes canonical and cutting-edge work to produce an indispensable ‘mini library’. The collection is fully indexed and includes comprehensive introductions, newly written by the editor, which place the collected materials in their historical and intellectual context. It is an essential reference collection and is certain to be valued by scholars and students—as well as by serious policy-makers and practitioners—as a vital one-stop research and pedagogic resource.

The notion of ‘human rights’ is perhaps the most weighty and widely recognized ethical category of our time, while environmental threats are among the greatest challenges currently facing civilization. It is unsurprising therefore that questions about and around the connection between human rights and the environment abound. Can harms inflicted by the activities of some humans on others through the medium of the natural environment amount to a violation of the latter’s rights? Do human beings have a right to an adequate environment? If so, is this ‘right’ already protected by existing, well-established rights—such as the right to life, or to health, for instance? Or do we need to recognize more specific environmental human rights? Anyway, is the language of human rights—and are the institutions that purport to guarantee them—ill-suited to the pursuit of environmental protection? If not, what can we learn from steps already taken in law and politics to link the aims of human rights and environmental protection?Interest in these and other questions has developed at a dizzying pace over the past two decades. Indeed, serious thinking about environmental rights is now a vibrant and dynamic area of study and research, and the sheer scale of the growth in its output makes this collection especially timely. Moreover, the highest quality work in the field has emanated from a wide range of different academic disciplines and perspectives, and has been published in a variety of largely specialist journals. Drawing on these and other sources, Tim Hayward has brought together in four volumes canonical and cutting-edge work to produce an indispensable one-stop ‘mini library’.Human Rights and the Environment is fully indexed and includes a comprehensive and accessible introduction, newly written by the editor, which places the collected materials in their historical and intellectual context. It is an essential reference collection and is certain to be valued by scholars and students—as well as by serious policy-makers and practitioners—as a vital research and pedagogic resource.

In recent years, future climate change has increasingly been recognized as one of the most important issues of the twenty-first century, challenging the very structure of our global society. No longer just an abstruse scientific concern, it prompts difficult choices for both individuals and governments. Moreover, it is of the first importance to those working in disciplines such as climatology, engineering, economics, sociology, geopolitics, local politics, law, and global health.Emanating from across the social and natural sciences, as well as in the humanities, serious scholarship on future climate change flourishes now as it has never done before, and this new title in the Routledge series, Critical Concepts in the Environment, meets the need for an authoritative reference work to make sense of a vast literature – and the continuing explosion in research output. Edited by leading scholars in the field, this new Routledge Major Work is a four-volume collection of foundational and cutting-edge contributions.The first volume (Science) in the collection deals with the development of the science of global warming and climate change, starting with Tyndall (1861), through to the IPCC synthesis (2007), and ending with the very latest research. Volume two (Impact Assessments), meanwhile, assembles the best thinking on how the potential physical, biological, social-political, and economic impacts of climate change are assessed. This volume also includes material on potential surprises that science is starting to investigate, such as the rapid melting of the Greenland and Western Antarctic ice sheets, die back of the Amazon rainforest, release of gas hydrates, and other tipping points. The third volume (Politics and Solutions) gathers the most influential research on climate-change solutions; it encompasses global and local politics, engineering, renewable energy, and geoengineering. The final volume in the collection (Framing the Debate) brings together key scholarship to question and explore how the climate-change debate has been framed and reframed as a scientific, economic, security, health, development, geopolitical, ethical, and cultural issue.With comprehensive introductions to each volume, newly written by the editors, which place the collected material in its historical and intellectual context, Future Climate Change is an essential collection destined to be welcomed as a vital research resource by all scholars and students of the subject.

Especially in an era of rapid global environmental change, questions and issues about and around natural hazards and disasters are dizzying in their complexity—and urgency. Answering the need for an authoritative reference work to make sense of this fast-moving area, and its vast and multidisciplinary corpus of scholarly literature, Disaster Risk is a new title from the acclaimed Routledge series, Critical Concepts in the Environment. Edited by a trio of expert researchers, this new collection of major works embraces a wide variety of methodological traditions to bring together in four volumes the foundational and the very best cutting-edge scholarship. The collection enables users to access—and to make sense of—the most important research and practice. It provides a synoptic view of all the key issues, current debates, and controversies.Disaster Risk is fully indexed and includes comprehensive introductions, newly written by the editors, which place the collected materials in their historical and intellectual context. It is an essential reference collection and is destined to be valued by scholars and students—as well as policy-makers and practitioners—as a vital one-stop research and pedagogic resource.œ œ œ Disaster Risk is edited by three leading scholars in the field: Ben Wisner, formerly Director of International Studies at California State University at Long Beach, with a long career before that in research and teaching. He is presently engaged in full-time research and writing and has recently completed a four-year project for the United Nations University on defining and managing urban social vulnerability to disasters in six megacities (Johannesburg, Tokyo, Manila, Mumbai, Mexico City, and Los Angeles). The other co-editors of this Routledge Major Works collection are J. C. Gaillard of the University of Auckland, New Zealand; and Ilan Kelman, based at the Center for International Climate and Environmental Research, Oslo, Norway.

This four volume collection of selected works examines the political, social and economic aspects of the interaction between Chinese society and the natural environment from past to present as well as future challenges. Volume 1 and 2 are dedicated to China’s environmental history and the tremendous environmental challenges of today’s emerging economy, the second part (Volume 3-4) focuses on society’s response to environmental degradation and climate change.