Environmental Political Theory

Environmental Political Theory PDF Author: Steve Vanderheiden
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1509529640
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 207

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Book Description
Our politics is intimately linked to the environmental conditions - and crises - of our time. The challenges of sustainability and the discovery of ecological limits to growth are transforming how we understand the core concepts at the heart of political theory. In this essential new textbook, leading political theorist Steve Vanderheiden examines how the concept of sustainability challenges – and is challenged – by eight key social and political ideas, ranging from freedom and equality to democracy and sovereignty. He shows that environmental change will disrupt some of our most cherished ideals, requiring new indicators of progress, new forms of community, and new conceptions of agency and responsibility. He draws on canonical texts, contemporary approaches to environmental political theory, and vivid examples to illustrate how changes in our conceptualization of our social aspirations can inhibit or enable a transition to a just and sustainable society. Vanderheiden masterfully balances crystal clear explanation of the essentials with cutting-edge analysis to produce a book that will be core reading for students of environmental and green political theory everywhere.

Environmental Political Theory

Environmental Political Theory PDF Author: Steve Vanderheiden
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1509529640
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 207

Get Book

Book Description
Our politics is intimately linked to the environmental conditions - and crises - of our time. The challenges of sustainability and the discovery of ecological limits to growth are transforming how we understand the core concepts at the heart of political theory. In this essential new textbook, leading political theorist Steve Vanderheiden examines how the concept of sustainability challenges – and is challenged – by eight key social and political ideas, ranging from freedom and equality to democracy and sovereignty. He shows that environmental change will disrupt some of our most cherished ideals, requiring new indicators of progress, new forms of community, and new conceptions of agency and responsibility. He draws on canonical texts, contemporary approaches to environmental political theory, and vivid examples to illustrate how changes in our conceptualization of our social aspirations can inhibit or enable a transition to a just and sustainable society. Vanderheiden masterfully balances crystal clear explanation of the essentials with cutting-edge analysis to produce a book that will be core reading for students of environmental and green political theory everywhere.

The Oxford Handbook of Environmental Political Theory

The Oxford Handbook of Environmental Political Theory PDF Author: Teena Gabrielson
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0191508411
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 528

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Book Description
Set at the intersection of political theory and environmental politics, yet with broad engagement across the environmental social sciences and humanities, The Oxford Handbook of Environmental Political Theory, defines, illustrates, and challenges the field of environmental political theory (EPT). Featuring contributions from distinguished political scientists working in this field, this volume addresses canonical theorists and contemporary environmental problems with a diversity of theoretical approaches. The initial volume focuses on EPT as a field of inquiry, engaging both traditions of political thought and the academy. In the second section, the handbook explores conceptualizations of nature and the environment, as well as the nature of political subjects, communities, and boundaries within our environments. A third section addresses the values that motivate environmental theorists—including justice, responsibility, rights, limits, and flourishing—and the potential conflicts that can emerge within, between, and against these ideals. The final section examines the primary structures that constrain or enable the achievement of environmental ends, as well as theorizations of environmental movements, citizenship, and the potential for on-going environmental action and change.

Environmental Political Philosophy

Environmental Political Philosophy PDF Author: Olli Loukola
Publisher: Transaction Publishers
ISBN: 1412846838
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 365

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Book Description
The need for solutions to environmental problems is urgent. Expanded environmental research and knowledge, along with interest in environmental issues, has focused attention on the social, political, and practical aspects of environmental problems. Environmental Political Philosophy searches for common environmental goals, values, and policies in society. An essential undercurrent in political theory about the environment is that such issues are not questions of efficiency or technology. They cannot simply be addressed through knowledge of processes and mechanics of nature, by boosting or targeting research, or by allocating of resources and development of technology. Neither can they be resolved solely by increasing civic understanding and mounting environmental campaigns or requiring endless eco-friendly actions. A crucial element of environmental political philosophy is highlighted through the studies in this volume, which address the question of what constitutes efficient action or effective decision making. Praxiology commences with empirical orientation, but does so by maintaining the important sense that in the evaluation of actions and policies, ethical considerations must be employed in conjunction with effectiveness and efficiency.

Green Political Thought

Green Political Thought PDF Author: Andrew Dobson
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134597134
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 247

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Book Description
Andrew Dobson's highly acclaimed introduction to green political thought is now available in a new edition. It has been fully revised and updated to take into account the areas that have grown in importance since the last edition was published. The third edition includes: * a comparison of ecologism with other principal modern ideologies, such as liberalism, conservatism, fascism, socialism, feminism and anarchism * an assessment of the relationship between green thinking and democracy, justice and citizenship * an exploration of 'sustainable development' addressing the fundamental question of 'what to sustain?' * real environmental problems and how green thinking relates to them.

Nature, Action and the Future

Nature, Action and the Future PDF Author: Katrina Forrester
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 110719928X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 253

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Book Description
Leading scholars of political thought demonstrate how the history of political ideas makes sense of environmental politics and climate change.

African American Environmental Thought

African American Environmental Thought PDF Author: Kimberly K. Smith
Publisher: University Press of Kansas
ISBN: 0700632662
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 270

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Book Description
African American intellectual thought has long provided a touchstone for national politics and civil rights, but, as Kimberly Smith reveals, it also has much to say about our relationship to nature. In this first single-authored book to link African American and environmental studies, Smith uncovers a rich tradition stretching from the abolition movement through the Harlem Renaissance, demonstrating that black Americans have been far from indifferent to environmental concerns. Beginning with environmental critiques of slave agriculture in the early nineteenth century and evolving through critical engagements with scientific racism, artistic primitivism, pragmatism, and twentieth-century urban reform, Smith highlights the continuity of twentieth-century black politics with earlier efforts by slaves and freedmen to possess the land. She examines the works of such canonical figures as Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Alain Locke, all of whom wrote forcefully about how slavery and racial oppression affected black Americans' relationship to the environment. Smith's analysis focuses on the importance of freedom in humans' relationship with nature. According to black theorists, the denial of freedom can distort one's relationship to the natural world, impairing stewardship and alienating one from the land. Her pathbreaking study offers the first linkage of the early conservation movement to black history, the first detailed description of black agrarianism, and the first analysis of scientific racism as an environmental theory. It also offers a new way to conceptualize black politics by bringing into view its environmental dimension, as well as a normative environmental theory grounded in pragmatism and aimed at identifying the social conditions for environmental virtue. Smith's work offers a new approach to established writers and thinkers and shows that they justly deserve a place in the canon of American environmental thought. African American Environmental Thought enriches our understanding of black politics and environmental history, and of environmental theory in general. Because slavery and racism have shaped the meaning of the American landscape, this body of thought offers us fresh conceptual resources by which we can make better sense of our world.

Political Nature

Political Nature PDF Author: John M. Meyer
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 9780262263719
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 230

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Book Description
Concern over environmental problems is prompting us to reexamine established thinking about society and politics. The challenge is to find a way for the public's concern for the environment to become more integral to social, economic, and political decision making. Two interpretations have dominated Western portrayals of the nature-politics relationship, what John Meyer calls the dualist and the derivative. The dualist account holds that politics—and human culture in general—is completely separate from nature. The derivative account views Western political thought as derived from conceptions of nature, whether Aristotelian teleology, the clocklike mechanism of early modern science, or Darwinian selection. Meyer examines the nature-politics relationship in the writings of two of its most pivotal theorists, Aristotle and Thomas Hobbes, and of contemporary environmentalist thinkers. He concludes that we must overcome the limitations of both the dualist and the derivative interpretations if we are to understand the relationship between nature and politics. Human thought and action, says Meyer, should be considered neither superior nor subservient to the nonhuman natural world, but interdependent with it. In the final chapter, he shows how struggles over toxic waste dumps in poor neighborhoods, land use in the American West, and rainforest protection in the Amazon illustrate this relationship and point toward an environmental politics that recognizes the experience of place as central.

The Politics of the Environment

The Politics of the Environment PDF Author: Neil Carter
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108472303
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 459

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Book Description
Revised to include new discussions on climate justice, green political parties, climate legislation and recent environmental struggles.

Environmental Human Rights

Environmental Human Rights PDF Author: Markku Oksanen
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351742515
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 322

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Book Description
The nature of environmental human rights and their relation to larger rights theories has been a frequent topic of discussion in law, environmental ethics and political theory. However, the subject of environmental human rights has not been fully established among other human rights concerns within political philosophy and theory. In examining environmental rights from a political theory perspective, this book explores an aspect of environmental human rights that has received less attention within the literature. In linking the constraints of political reality with a focus on the theoretical underpinnings of how we think about politics, this book explores how environmental human rights must respond to the key questions of politics, such as the state and sovereignty, equality, recognition and representation, and examines how the competing understandings about these rights are also related to political ideologies. Drawing together contributions from a range of key thinkers in the field, this is a valuable resource for students and scholars of human rights, environmental ethics, and international environmental law and politics more generally.

Environmental Political Thought

Environmental Political Thought PDF Author: Robert Garner
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350311847
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 316

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Book Description
This textbook offers a comprehensive overview of the most prominent theories, concepts and debates in environmental political thinking. In doing so, Robert Garner – an esteemed scholar in the field – offers a foundation from which readers can better tackle perennially thorny questions such as what environmental cost can we bear for development, what do we mean by terms such as 'sustainability', and how might we reconcile competing interests and influences in the political sphere. Garner concludes his introductory account by exploring the idea of a sustainable future and how society must be structured in order to achieve it, encouraging readers to consider the theoretical when considering the all-too important reality. This text is designed for those studying environmental and green political thought, as well as readers keen to understand the development of environmental political thought over recent generations.