In recent years, sustainable development has emerged as a central goal of the World Bank and grassroots activists alike. In Grassroots Struggles for Sustainability in Central America, Lynn R. Horton explores the implications of this new, often contested discourse and related policies for Central America's rural and indigenous poor. Drawing on the testimony of leaders and residents of three communities in Nicaragua, Costa Rica, and Panama, Horton explores grassroots assumptions, values, and practices of sustainable development and, in particular, the ways in which they overlap with or challenge international financial institutions' discourse of sustainability.

With a comparative, empirical approach, Horton also analyzes dominant practices linked to sustainable development - neoliberal reforms, project interventions, and environmental protection. She reveals how these practices support or undermine economic, cultural, and political opportunities for the rural and indigenous poor and impact these communities' advancement of their own visions of sustainability. Finally, the author explores processes of empowerment that enable communities to articulate and put into practice local visions of sustainability, which contribute toward broader social and structural transformations.

Grassroots Struggles for Sustainability in Central America will interest sociologists, anthropologists, and others who study the theory and practice of sustainable development.

Scholars, politicians, and activists worldwide are finally recognizing the severity of the global environmental crisis, yet serious threats to the environmental movement remain. Anti-environmentalists dismiss the very idea of a "crisis" as a mirage. Much less obvious, however, is the more subtle threat masquerading under the mantle of environmentalism itself. It is this threat that Green Delusions addresses. Writing from the standpoint of a committed environmentalist, Martin W. Lewis contends that many of the most devoted and strident "greens," those who propose a radical environmentalism, unwittingly espouse an ill-conceived doctrine that has devastating implications for the global ecosystem. In this book he distinguishes the main variants of eco-extremism, exposes the fallacies upon which such views ultimately flounder, and demonstrates that the policies advocated by their proponents would, if enacted, result in unequivocal ecological disaster. At once polemic and prescriptive, Green Delusions is an impassioned attempt to defend the environmental movement against extremist ideas that would lead to self-defeating political strategies.