front cover of Half Wild
Half Wild
People, Dogs, and Environmental Policy
Dave Dempsey
Michigan State University Press, 2023
Humans and canines have been cohabitating for centuries, straddling a boundary that allows us to live together within and across our species. In this empathetic volume, author Dave Dempsey explores this life on the border, the overlapping planes between humans and the nonhuman world that lead to both magnificent creation and appalling destruction. Dempsey’s forty-year career as an environmentalist gives this book a nuanced context that could only be afforded by someone who has lived a half-wild existence himself, both defending and expanding the range of protections afforded to other species. As the former environmental advisor to Michigan Governor James J. Blanchard, Dempsey’s recollections also provide a unique perspective on the history of environmental policy, ruminating on how such policy reflects the way we understand ourselves in relation to the environment. Through vignettes that recall personal stories and those that outline historical events that influenced policymaking, Dempsey calls attention to the philosophical question of how we as humans relate to animals and our environment.
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front cover of History 4° Celsius
History 4° Celsius
Search for a Method in the Age of the Anthropocene
Ian Baucom
Duke University Press, 2020
In History 4° Celsius Ian Baucom continues his inquiries into the place of the Black Atlantic in the making of the modern and postmodern world. Putting black studies into conversation with climate change, Baucom outlines how the ongoing concerns of critical race, diaspora, and postcolonial studies are crucial to understanding the Anthropocene. He draws on materialist and postmaterialist thought, Sartre, and the science of climate change to trace the ways in which evolving political, cultural, and natural history converge to shape a globally destructive force. Identifying the quest for limitless financial gain as the primary driving force behind both the slave trade and the continuing increase in global greenhouse gas emissions, Baucom demonstrates that climate change and the conditions of the Black Atlantic, colonialism, and the postcolony are fundamentally entwined. In so doing, he argues for the necessity of establishing a method of critical exchange between climate science, black studies, and the surrounding theoretical inquiries of humanism and posthumanism.
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Hope for a Heated Planet
How Americans Are Fighting Global Warming and Building a Better Future
Musil, Robert K
Rutgers University Press, 2009
Rejecting cries of gloom and doom, Hope for a Heated Planet shows how the fight against global warming can be won by the grassroots efforts of individuals. Robert K. Musil, who led the Nobel Peace Prize-winning organization Physicians for Social Responsibility, explains that a growing new climate movement can produce unprecedented change-in the economy, public health, and home-while saving the planet.

Musil draws on personal experience and compelling data in this practical and rigorous analysis of the causes and cures for global warming. The book presents all the players in the most pressing challenge facing society today, from the massive fossil fuel lobby to the enlightened corporations that are joining the movement to "go green." Musil thoroughly explains the tremendous potential of renewable energy sources-wind, solar, and biofuel-and the startling conclusions of experts who say society can do away entirely with fossil fuels. He tells readers about the engaged politicians, activists, religious groups, and students who are already working together against climate change.

But the future depends, Musil insists, on what changes ordinary citizens make. Through personal choices and political engagement, he shows how readers can cut carbon emissions and create green communities where they live. With practical and realistic solutions, Hope for a Heated Planet inspires readers to be accountable and enables them to usher in an age of sustainability for future generations.

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front cover of Hope Is an Imperative
Hope Is an Imperative
The Essential David Orr
David W. Orr
Island Press, 2010
For more than three decades, David Orr has been one of the leading voices of the environmental movement, championing the cause of ecological literacy in higher education, helping to establish and shape the field of ecological design, and working tirelessly to raise awareness of the threats to future generations posed by humanity’s current unsustainable trajectory.
 
Hope Is an Imperative brings together in a single volume Professor Orr’s most important works. These include classics such as “What Is Education For?,” one of the most widely reprinted essays in the environmental literature, “The Campus and the Biosphere,” which helped launch the green campus movement,and “Loving Children: A Design Problem,” which renowned theologian and philosopher Thomas Berry called “the most remarkable essay I’ve read in my whole life.”
 
The book features thirty-three essays, along with an introductory section that considers the evolution of environmentalism, section introductions that place the essays into a larger context, and a foreword by physicist and author Fritjof Capra.
 
Hope Is an Imperative is a comprehensive collection of works by one of the most important thinkers and writers of our time. It offers a complete introduction to the writings of David Orr for readers new to the field, and represents a welcome compendium of key essays for longtime fans. The book is a must-have volume for every environmentalist’s bookshelf.
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front cover of How Climate Change Comes to Matter
How Climate Change Comes to Matter
The Communal Life of Facts
Candis Callison
Duke University Press, 2014
During the past decade, skepticism about climate change has frustrated those seeking to engage broad publics and motivate them to take action on the issue. In this innovative ethnography, Candis Callison examines the initiatives of social and professional groups as they encourage diverse American publics to care about climate change. She explores the efforts of science journalists, scientists who have become expert voices for and about climate change, American evangelicals, Indigenous leaders, and advocates for corporate social responsibility.

The disparate efforts of these groups illuminate the challenge of maintaining fidelity to scientific facts while transforming them into ethical and moral calls to action. Callison investigates the different vernaculars through which we understand and articulate our worlds, as well as the nuanced and pluralistic understandings of climate change evident in different forms of advocacy. As she demonstrates, climate change offers an opportunity to look deeply at how issues and problems that begin in a scientific context come to matter to wide publics, and to rethink emerging interactions among different kinds of knowledge and experience, evolving media landscapes, and claims to authority and expertise.
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