front cover of I Will Live for Both of Us
I Will Live for Both of Us
A History of Colonialism, Uranium Mining, and Inuit Resistance
Joan Scottie
University of Manitoba Press, 2022

front cover of Ignition
Ignition
What You Can Do to Fight Global Warming and Spark a Movement
Edited by Jonathan Isham and Sissel Waage
Island Press, 2007
The evidence is irrefutable: global warming is real. While the debate continues about just how much damage spiking temperatures will wreak, we know the threat to our homes, health, and even way of life is dire. So why isn’t America doing anything? Where is the national campaign to stop this catastrophe?
It may lie between the covers of this book. Ignition brings together some of the world’s finest thinkers and advocates to jump start the ultimate green revolution. Including celebrated writers like Bill McKibben and renowned scholars like Gus Speth, as well as young activists, the authors draw on direct experience in grassroots organization, education, law, and social leadership. Their approaches are various, from building coalitions to win political battles to rallying shareholders to change corporate behavior. But they share a belief that private fears about deadly heat waves and disastrous hurricanes can translate into powerful public action.
For anyone who feels compelled to do more than change their light bulbs or occasionally carpool, Ignition is an essential guide. Combining incisive essays with success stories and web resources, the book helps readers answer the most important question we all face: “What can I do?”
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In Praise of Nature
Edited by Stephanie Mills; Foreword by Tom Brokaw
Island Press, 1990

Five thought-provoking essays by Stephanie Mills are followed by reviews and excerpts of the ten most important pieces of related literature written by experts in the various fields. Reviewers include Peter Borrelli, David Brower, Ernest Callenbach, J. Baird Callicott, Lois Gibbs, and others. Following the essays is an annotated bibliography listing over 100 important environmental works.

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In The Nature Of Things
Language, Politics, and the Environment
Jane Bennett
University of Minnesota Press, 1993

front cover of Indigenous Peoples, National Parks, and Protected Areas
Indigenous Peoples, National Parks, and Protected Areas
A New Paradigm Linking Conservation, Culture, and Rights
Edited by Stan Stevens
University of Arizona Press, 2014
A vast number of national parks and protected areas throughout the world have been established in the customary territories of Indigenous peoples. In many cases these conservation areas have displaced Indigenous peoples, undermining their cultures, livelihoods, and self-governance, while squandering opportunities to benefit from their knowledge, values, and practices. This book makes the case for a paradigm shift in conservation from exclusionary, uninhabited national parks and wilderness areas to new kinds of protected areas that recognize Indigenous peoples’ conservation contributions and rights. It documents the beginnings of such a paradigm shift and issues a clarion call for transforming conservation in ways that could enhance the effectiveness of protected areas and benefit Indigenous peoples in and near tens of thousands of protected areas worldwide.
 
Indigenous Peoples, National Parks, and Protected Areas integrates wide-ranging, multidisciplinary intellectual perspectives with detailed analyses of new kinds of protected areas in diverse parts of the world. Eleven geographers and anthropologists contribute nine substantive fieldwork-based case studies. Their contributions offer insights into experience with new conservation approaches in an array of countries, including Australia, Canada, Guatemala, Honduras, Nepal, Nicaragua, Peru, South Africa, and the United States.
 
This book breaks new ground with its in-depth exploration of changes in conservation policies and practices—and their profound ramifications for Indigenous peoples, protected areas, and social reconciliation.
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Industrialized Nature
Brute Force Technology and the Transformation of the Natural World
Paul R. Josephson
Island Press, 2002

The construction of the Three Gorges Dam on China's Yangtze River. The transformation of the Amazon into a site for huge cattle ranches and aluminum smelters. The development of Nevada's Yucca Mountain into a repository for nuclear waste. The extensive irrigation networks of the Grand Coulee and Kuibyshev Dams. On the face of it, these massive projects are wonders of engineering, financial prowess, and our seldom-questioned ability to modify nature to suit our immediate needs. For nearly a century we have relied increasingly on science and technology to harness natural forces, but at what environmental and social cost?

In Industrialized Nature, historian Paul R. Josephson provides an original examination of the ways in which science, engineering, policy, finance, and hubris have come together, often with unforeseen consequences, to perpetuate what he calls "brute-force technologies"—the large-scale systems created to manage water, forest, and fish resources. Throughout the twentieth century, nations with quite different political systems and economic orientations all pursued this same technological subjugation of nature. Josephson compares the Soviet Union's heavy-handed efforts at resource management to similar projects undertaken in the United States, Norway, Brazil, and China. He argues that brute-force technologies require brute-force politics to operate. He shows how irresponsible—or well-intentioned but misguided—large-scale manipulation of nature has resulted in resource loss and severe environmental degradation.

Josephson explores the ongoing industrialization of nature that is happening in our own backyards and around the world. Both a cautionary tale and a call to action, Industrialized Nature urges us to consider how to develop a future for succeeding generations that avoids the pitfalls of brute-force technologies.

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Iron Will
Global Extractivism and Mining Resistance in Brazil and India
Markus Kröger
University of Michigan Press, 2020
Iron Will lays bare the role of extractivist policies and efforts to resist these policies through a deep ethnographic exploration of globally important iron ore mining in Brazil and India. Markus Kröger addresses resistance strategies to extractivism and tracks their success, or lack thereof, through a comparison of peaceful and armed resource conflicts, explaining how different means of resistance arise. Using the distinctly different contexts and political systems of Brazil and India highlights the importance of local context for resistance. For example, if there is an armed conflict at a planned mining site, how does this influence the possibility to use peaceful resistance strategies? To answer such questions, Kröger assesses the inter-relations of contentious, electoral, institutional, judicial, and private politics that surround conflicts and interactions, offering a new theoretical framework of “investment politics” that can be applied generally by scholars and students of social movements, environmental studies, and political economy, and even more broadly in Social Scientific and Environmental Policy research.

By drawing on a detailed field research and other sources, this book explains precisely which resistance strategies are able to influence both political and economic outcomes. Kröger expands the focus of traditionally Latin American extractivism research to other contexts such as India and the growing extractivist movement in the Global North. In addition, as the book is a multi-sited political ethnography, it will appeal to sociologists, political scientists, anthropologists, geographers, and others using field research among other methods to understand globalization and global political interactions. It is the most comprehensive book on the political economy and ecology of iron ore and steel. This is astonishing, given the fact that iron ore is the second-most important commodity in the world after oil.
 
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Islam and Ecology
A Bestowed Trust
Richard C. Foltz
Harvard University Press, 2003

Islam is the religion of over one billion people and is practiced in virtually every country on earth. The articulation of an Islamic environmental ethic in contemporary terms is all the more urgent because Western-style conservation efforts do not fit all cultural and philosophical traditions.

This volume outlines the Islamic view of the cosmic order and reviews the ways an Islamic world view can be interpreted, reassessed, and applied to such environmental problems as pollution and water scarcity. Sections on social justice and on issues of sustainability and development look at the history and roots of the current environmental crisis; at the broader context of women's rights of equal access to both natural and social resources; and at the interconnectedness of environmental protection and the alleviation of human poverty.

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