Environmental Politics

After decades of debate about global warming, the fact of the climate crisis is finally widely accepted. People at all scales—from the household to the global market—are attempting to govern climate to deal with its causes and impacts. Although the stakes are different now, governing climate is centuries old. In this book, Zeke Baker develops a genealogy of climate science that traces the relationship between those who have created knowledge of the climate and those who have attempted to gain power and govern society, right up to the present, historic moment.

Epic wildfire. Devastating drought. Cataclysmic flooding. Extreme weather in the wake of climate change threatens to turn the American West into a region hostile to human habitation—a “Great American Desert,” as early US explorers once mislabeled it. As Bruce E. Cain suggests in this timely book, the unique complex of politics, technology, and logistics that once won the West must be rethought and reconfigured to win it anew in the face of a widespread accelerating threat.

If Zufar al-Massoud, the celebrated leader of the Salafist jihadists, accomplishes his planned terrorist act, Thanksgiving Day in the U.S. will forever be known as America's Day of Blood. He and his fellow conspirators will not only place multiple IEDs along the New York City Macy's parade route, slaughtering thousands of onlookers but will release canisters of sarin gas on the subway landings in both New York and Washington, D.C.

In 2015, a group of young people sued the federal government for violating their constitutional rights by promoting the climate catastrophe, depriving them of life, liberty, and property without due process of law. They Knew offers evidence for their claims, presenting a devastating account of the federal government's role in bringing about today's climate crisis. James Speth, tapped by the plaintiffs as an expert on climate, documents how administrations from Carter to Trump continued aggressive support of a fossil fuel-based energy system.

Four decades ago, the areas around Yellowstone and Glacier National Parks sheltered the last few hundred surviving grizzlies in the lower 48 states. Protected by the Endangered Species Act, their population has surged to more than 1,500, and this burgeoning number of grizzlies now collides with the increasingly populated landscape of the 21st-century American West. Montana journalist Robert Chaney chronicles the resurgence of this charismatic species against the backdrop of the country's long history with the bear.

Learn how sea levels rise (SLR) is unstoppable for many centuries, due to excess heat already stored in our oceans - and how soon our shorelines will go underwater. Understand how disastrous SLR will profoundly affect more than 10,000 coastal communities as soon as 2050, both in the US and around the world. What will happen where you live? How much will the water rise? And when? Find out why extreme weather events, forest fires, and flooding share the same causes as catastrophic SLR, but weather disruptions are temporary and SLR permanent.

The Copernican view of the universe is mistaken. The Earth continues to be the center of the universe, because here there is life, and plenty of it. From the very limited exploration of our solar system, we have learned that there is no complex meaningful life. For humanity to survive in this century, we need to change the paradigm back to the Earth is the center of the universe. The nearest star system, Proxima Centuri, is at least 4.2 light years, (over 20 trillion miles) and unreachable. It would take approximately 70,000 years with present technology to get there.

In his new book, Barnyards and Birkenstocks: Why Farmers and Environmentalists Need Each Other, Don Stuart stresses collaboration. An attorney who has held director positions with American Farmland Trust, a commercial fisheries trade association, and the Washington Association of Conservation Districts, he argues that combining efforts could advance the economic needs of one group while furthering conservation activities of the other, and points out costs of continued political impasse.

Si bien el Green New Deal se ha convertido en una sensación de la noche a la mañana dentro de los círculos activistas, también está ganando peso como movimiento paralelo dentro de la comunidad empresarial global y va a sacudir los cimientos de la sociedad en los próximos años. Los sectores clave que conforman la infraestructura de la economía mundial se están desvinculando rápidamente de los combustibles fósiles y están apostando por las energías solar y eólica.

After 1991, international organizations from the Red Cross to Greenpeace sought to help the victims, yet found themselves stymied by post-Soviet political circumstances they did not understand. International diplomats and scientists allied to the nuclear industry evaded or denied the fact of a wide-scale public health disaster caused by radiation exposure. Efforts to spin the story about Chernobyl were largely successful; the official death toll ranges between 31 and 54 people. In reality, radiation exposure from the disaster caused between 35,000 and 150,000 deaths in Ukraine alone.

This timely new book, edited by celebrated scholar Daniel C. Esty, offers fresh thinking and forward-looking solutions from environmental thought leaders across the political spectrum. The book’s 40 essays cover such subjects as ecology, environmental justice, Big Data, public health, and climate change, all with an emphasis on sustainability. This book focuses on moving toward sustainability through actionable, bipartisan approaches based on rigorous analytical research.

Sixteen-year-old climate activist Xiuhtezcatl Martinez and his group the Earth Guardians believe that choices made now will have a lasting impact on the world of tomorrow, and they want to ensure a positive, just, and sustainable future. Beginning with their empowering story, We Rise explores many aspects of effective activism and provides step-by-step information on how to start and join solution-oriented movements.

As fossil fuel prices rise, oil insecurity deepens, and concerns about climate change cast a shadow over the future of coal, a new energy economy is emerging. Wind, solar, and geothermal energy are replacing oil, coal, and natural gas, at a pace and on a scale we could not have imagined even a year ago. For the first time since the Industrial Revolution, we have begun investing in energy sources that can last forever. Plan B 4.0 explores both the nature of this transition to a new energy economy and how it will affect our daily lives.

Toyota would like us to think that Mother Nature drives a Prius, Ford wants us to Join the Green Revolution,” and McDonald’s has painted its golden arches green. But are big brands and the celebrities endorsing them really as green as they claim? In The Greenwash Effect, Guy Pearse looks behind the corporate façade in the tradition of Fast Food Nation and No Logo - and what he finds will startle you.

Maverick environmental writers William J. Kelly and Chip Jacobs follow up their acclaimed Smogtown with a provocative examination of China’s ecological calamity already imperiling a warming planet. Toxic smog most people figured was obsolete needlessly kills as many there as the 9/11 attacks every day, while sometimes Grand Canyon-sized drifts of industrial particles aloft on the winds rain down ozone and waterway-poisoning mercury in America. Vivid, gonzo prose blends first-person reportage with exhaustive research and a sense of karma, describing the horror of "Cancer Villages", spellbinding "peasant revolts" against cancer-spreading plants, and much more....

Mals, Italy, has long been known as the breadbasket of the Tyrol. But recently the tiny town became known for something else entirely. A Precautionary Tale tells us why, introducing readers to an unlikely group of activists and a forward-thinking mayor who came together to ban pesticides in Mals by a referendum vote, making it the first place on Earth to accomplish such a feat, and a model for other towns and regions to follow. For hundreds of years, the people of Mals had cherished their traditional foodways and kept their local agriculture organic. Their town had become a mecca for tourists drawn by the alpine landscape, the rural and historic character of the villages, and the fine breads, wines, cheeses, herbs, vegetables, and the other traditional foods they produced.

In Americans at Risk, Dr. Irwin Redlener draws on his broad experience as a pediatrician working with mobile emergency units both for children and adults, his time making recommendations to legislators about the vulnerabilities of children to biological and chemical agents and his regular meetings with Tom Ridge of the office of Homeland Security over a period of four years to write this urging a plan for a coordinated plan between government and the private sector.

The ocean sustains life on our planet, from absorbing carbon to regulating temperatures. But as we exhaust the resources on land, its reserves are increasingly dredged and extracted to fuel new industry. Today we are facing two urgent challenges at sea: massive environmental destruction, and spiraling inequality in the ocean economy. Chris Armstrong reveals how existing governing institutions are failing to respond to the most pressing problems of our time.

How serious are the threats to our environment? Here is one measure of the problem: if we continue to do exactly what we are doing, with no growth in the human population or the world economy, the world in the latter part of this century will be unfit to live in. Of course human activities are not holding at current levels—they are accelerating, dramatically—and so, too, is the pace of climate disruption, biotic impoverishment, and toxification.

In Getting to Green, Frederic C. Rich argues that meaningful progress on urgent environmental issues can be made only on a bipartisan basis. Rich reminds us of American conservation's conservative roots and of the bipartisan political consensus that had Republican congressmen voting for, and Richard Nixon signing, the most important environmental legislation of the 1970s.