Suchergebnisse

A review essay on books by (1) Brian Tokar, Earth for Sale: Reclaiming Ecology in the Age of Corporate Greenwash (Boston, MA: South End, 1997); (2) Joshua Karliner, The Corporate Planet: Ecology and Politics in the Age of Globalization (San Francisco, CA: Sierra Club Books, 1997); & (3) Carl Frankel, In Earth's Company: Business, Environment and the Challenge of Sustainability (Gabriola Island, BC, Canada: New Society, 1998). Tokar offers a scathing critique of mainstream environmental agencies, while Karliner targets business, documenting the extensive corporate deceit that surrounds environmental issues. Frankel's critical analysis of corporate efforts to promote a more environmentally friendly productive system is more sympathetic with the corporate US. These books present a similar picture of the environmental movement & society's progress in dealing with ecological crises, concluding that the capitalist market & government regulations are unable to protect natural ecosystems or eliminate environmental pollution. Although the authors offer prescriptions for dealing more effectively with ecological problems, their agendas are exclusionary & fail to recognize that US organizations/strategies are not necessarily best. J. Lindroth

Many western politicians are fond of giving public money to farmers to grow more food. In Europe, a relatively recent phenomenon is to pay farmers to not produce food – or, more accurately, to pay them to produce nature. There are now proposals to extend such 'payments for ecosystem services' (PES) schemes to developing countries.

Throughout the world, areas have been reserved for their exceptional environmental values, such as high biodiversity. Financial, political and community support for these protected areas is often dependent on visitation by nature-based tourists. This visitation inevitably creates environmental impacts, such as the construction and maintenance of roads, tracks and trails ; trampling of vegetation and erosion of soils ; and propagation of disturbance of resilient species, such as weeds. This creates tension between the conservation of environmental values and visitation. This review examines some of the main features of environmental impacts by nature-based tourists through a discussion of observational and manipulative studies. It explores the disturbance context and unravels the management implications of detecting impacts and understanding their causes. Regulation of access to visitor areas is a typical management response, qualified by the mode of access (e.g., vehicular, ambulatory). Managing access and associated impacts are reviewed in relation to roads, tracks and trails ; wildlife viewing ; and accommodations. Responses to visitor impacts, such as environmental education and sustainable tour experiences are explored. The review concludes with ten recommendations for further research in order to better resolve the tension between nature conservation and nature-based tourism.

Antigone fascinates G. W. F. Hegel and Luce Irigaray, both of whom turn to her in their explorations and articulations of ethics. Hegel and Irigaray make these re-turns to Antigone through the double and related lenses of nature and sexual difference. This essay investigates these figures of Antigone and the accompanying ethical accounts of nature and sexual difference as a way of examining Irigaray's complex relation to and creative uses of Hegel's thought.

Gathering into lively conversation scholars in medieval, early modern and object studies, Inhuman Nature explores the activity of the things, forces, and relations that enable, sustain and operate indifferently to us. Enamored by fictions of environmental sovereignty, we too often imagine "human" to be a solitary category of being. This collection of essays maps the heterogeneous and asymmetrical ecologies within which we are enmeshed, a material world that makes the human possible but also offers difficulties and resistance. Among the topics explored are the futurity that inheres in storms and wrecks, wood that resists its burning or offers art and dwelling, hymns that implant themselves like viruses, the ontology of everyday objects, the seep and flow of substance, the resistant nature of matter, the dependence of community upon making things public, and the interstices at which nature and culture become inseparable. Tinker as you will.

This article considers the ethical implications of a stance toward or relation with the natural environment that could be characterized as dominant across many sectors of not only the economy but consumption patterns generally. Despite popular perception or denial of climate change over the past decades, this is an implicit relation toward the collateral risks and damages to ecosystems by human activity. Not only are livelihoods sustained on the basis of natural resources but the direct costs of hydrocarbon development are borne locally in the environment. For some, this is understood to be without a personal cost despite the fears expressed. The article quotes from interviews with residents. It stages a broader, continuing conversation about the ambivalence of being dependent on hydrocarbons. This article explores the difficulty of developing an ethical engagement with the nonhuman and natural ecosystems when they are relegated to the status of what will be referred to as "bare nature." Rather than state of exception or standing reserve, nonhuman nature is only present as a form of absence and as nonentities and does not present an ethical challenge or claim.