Social Environment

Melting ice, a military arms race, the rush to exploit resources at any cost - the Arctic is now the stage on which our future will be decided. And as temperatures rise and the ice retreats, Vladimir Putin orders Russia's oil rigs to move north. But one early September morning in 2013, 30 men and women from 18 countries - the crew of Greenpeace's Arctic Sunrise - decide to draw a line in the ice and protest the drilling in the Arctic.

The discovery of the Americas around AD 1500 was an extraordinary watershed in human experience. It gave rise to the modern period of human ecology, a phenomenon global in scope that set in motion profound changes in almost every society on Earth. This new period, which saw the depletion of the lands of the New World, proved tragic for some, triumphant for others, and powerfully affecting for all.

How an underground fire turned a Pennsylvania community into a ghost town. On May 27, 1962, a fire set to clean up the town dump outside Centralia, Pennsylvania, spread by accident into abandoned coal mines beneath the small town. This spawned the environmental disaster known around the world today as the Centralia Mine Fire.

Award-winning journalist Eugene Linden has written numerous critically acclaimed works on the environment. In The Ragged Edge of the World, Linden recounts his experiences in locales ranging from Vietnam to Antarctica, offering an intimate look at creatures and cultures struggling to adapt to globalization.

In the mid-1990s, residents of Anniston, Alabama, began a legal fight against the agrochemical company Monsanto over the dumping of PCBs in the city's historically African American and white working-class west side. Simultaneously, Anniston environmentalists sought to safely eliminate chemical weaponry that had been secretly stockpiled near the city during the Cold War. In this probing work, Ellen Griffith Spears offers a compelling narrative of Anniston's battles for environmental justice.

This is the book for anyone who feels overwhelmed by the current state of our environment. Hopeful and prophetic, The Future Earth invites us to imagine how we can reverse the effects of climate change in our own lifetime and encourages us to enter a deeper relationship with the earth as conscientious stewards and to re-affirm our commitment to one another in our shared humanity.

Journalist Diana Kapp has crisscrossed this country writing for and about empowered girls, girls who expect to be leaders, founders, and inventors. This book takes it a step further. It says to girls: While you’re striving to be CEOs and world leaders, consider solving the biggest challenge of our lifetime, too - because you can do both at the same time, and here are 34 women doing just that.

For sixth grader Sam Warren and his friends Catalina, Alistair, Jaesang, and Zoe, the effects of climate change are too pressing to ignore. Adults don’t seem to be up to the challenge of taking action to make real change, but kids know it’s their futures on the line. If their parents, teachers, and government officials won’t step up well, then, they will!

A declaration of independence, and a call for systemic change, from the generation that will be most impacted by climate change. If anyone doubted the potential political power of the Millennial generation, Bernie Sanders' campaign put it in the spotlight. Are We Screwed? makes clear that the ardour for change defines this generation, especially when it comes to climate change, and they are willing to consider options that their elders might think naïve and impractical....

Deniers of climate change sometimes quip that claims about global warming are more about political science than climate science. They are wrong on the science, but may be right with respect to its political implications. A hotter world, writes Andrew Guzman, will bring unprecedented migrations, famine, war, and disease. It will be a social and political disaster of the first order.

Richard Mabey is Britain’s foremost nature writer. He has written a regular column for BBC Wildlife Magazine for over 25 years and, in doing so, has created a passionate, lyrical and deeply personal record of the natural world

2021 ist ein Jahr der Zäsur. Mit der Bundestagswahl endet nach 16 Jahren die Ära Merkel, und in einer historischen Entscheidung stärkt das Bundesverfassungsgericht die Freiheitsrechte der jüngeren Generation. Die Ökologie steht nun endlich im Zentrum aller Zukunftsfragen: Wirtschaft, Verkehr, Ernährung, aber auch Wissenschaft, Journalismus und Politik - elementare Bereiche der Gesellschaft müssen neu gedacht werden. Große Umbrüche stehen bevor. Und es hängt viel davon ab, ob wir gemeinsame Lösungen finden.

本书深入探讨了气候变化的严峻现实强调了应对未来干旱饥荒和流离失所问题的紧迫行动它并非止于绝望而是通过实用的解决方案激发希望倡导个人与集体的有力行动在环境挑战中共同打造可持续的未来

In this young readers edition of the New York Times bestselling, Pulitzer Prize-winning The Sixth Extinction, Elizabeth Kolbert tells us why and how human beings have altered life on the planet in a way no species has before.

While politicians, entrepreneurs, and even school children could tell you that sustainability is an important and nearly universal value, many of them, and many of us, may struggle to define the term, let alone trace its history. What is sustainability? Is it always about the environment? What science do we need to fully grasp what it requires? What does sustainability mean for business? How can governments plan for a sustainable future?

When Sleepers, Wake! was released in Australia, it immediately became influential around the world. Now its author, the polymath and former politician Barry Jones, turns his attention to what has happened since - especially to politics, health, and our climate in the digital age - and to the challenges faced by increasingly fragile democracies and public institutions.

On May 2, 2008, an enormous tropical cyclone made landfall in Burma, wreaking untold havoc and leaving an official toll of 138,300 dead and missing. In the days that followed, the sheer scale of the disaster became apparent as information began to seep out from the hard-hit delta area.

Society embraces regulations that limit physical harm to others, as when smoking restrictions are defended as protecting bystanders from secondhand smoke. But we have been slower to endorse parallel steps that discourage harmful social environments, as when regulators fail to note that the far greater harm caused when someone becomes a smoker is to make others more likely to smoke. In Under the Influence, Robert Frank attributes this regulatory asymmetry to the laudable belief that individuals should accept responsibility for their own behavior.

Pets have never been more popular. Over half of American households share their home with either a cat or a dog, and many contain both. This is a huge change from only a century ago, when the majority of domestic cats and dogs were working animals, keeping rodents at bay, guarding property, herding sheep. Nowadays, most are valued solely for the companionship they provide. As mankind becomes progressively more urban and detached from nature, we seem to be clinging to the animals that served us well in the past.

In Powering Prosperity: A Citizen's Guide to Shaping the 21st Century, Dr. Indranil Ghosh brings together his decades of experience as a sustainable economic development investor, an entrepreneur, and an MIT-trained scientist to provide a new framework for understanding the world's challenges and the choices societies must make to address them.