Suchergebnisse

Cover -- Half Title -- Title Page -- Copyright Page -- Table of Contents -- 1 Introduction: Individuals, Societies, and Pragmatic Environmentalism -- Part I: Living in a Material World -- 2 Greenhouse Gases: Warmer Isn't Better -- 3 Waste: Our Sinks Are Almost Sunk -- 4 Biodiversity: Society Wouldn't Exist Without It -- 5 Water: There's No Substitute -- Part II: At the Intersection of Ecology and Society -- 6 Population: A Problem of Quantity or Quality -- 7 Transportation: Beyond Air Pollution -- 8 Food: From Farm to Fork -- 9 Energy Production: Our Sunny Prospects -- Part III: Organizing a Sustainable Society -- 10 Political Economy: Making Markets Fair and Sustainable -- 11 Governance: Biases and Blind Spots -- 12 Inequality and Growth: Prosperity for All -- Part IV: Shifting the Focus to Results -- 13 From Our Beliefs to Our Behaviors: Pragmatic Environmentalism in Action -- Glossary -- References -- Index.

"Do you really think you are getting a good deal when given that free mobile phone for switching service providers, if a multinational retailer undercuts its competitors or by the fact that food is relatively cheaper today in many countries than ever before? Think again! As Michael Carolan clearly shows in this compelling book, cheapness is an illusion. The real cost of low prices is alarmingly high. It is shown for example that citizens are frequently subsidising low prices through welfare support to poorly-paid workers in their own country, or relying on the exploitation of workers in poor countries for cheap goods. Environmental pollution may not be costed into goods and services, but is paid for indirectly by people living away from its source or by future generations. Even with private cars, when the total costs of this form of mobility are tallied it proves to be an astronomically expensive model of transportation. All of these costs need to be accounted for. The author captures these issues by the concept of cheaponomics . The key point is that costs and risks are socialised: we all pay for cheapness, but not at the point of purchase. Drawing on a wide range of examples and issues from over-consumption and waste to over-work, unemployment, inequality, and the depersonalising of communities, it is convincingly shown that cheapness can no longer be seen as such a bargain. Instead we need to refocus for a better sense of well-being, social justice and a balanced approach to prosperity."--Publisher description

In this challenging work, the author argues that the goal of any food system should not simply be to provide the cheapest calories possible. A secure food system is one that affords people and nations - in both the present and future - the capabilities to prosper and lead long, happy, and healthy lives. For a variety of reasons, food security has come to be synonymous with cheap calorie security. On this measure, the last fifty years have been a remarkable success. But the author shows that these cheap calories have also come at great cost, to the environment, individual and societal.

AbstractNoting that the field of agro‐food studies has undergone numerous 'turns' over the years, this article first seeks to make sense of this evolving literature by examining aspects of the metaphysical foreground upon which this 'turning' takes place. Doing this highlights a coalescing of sorts within the field; a movement the author describes as being less toward a specific theoretical framework as it is around a general way of doing agro‐food scholarship. This style of scholarship embraces relationality, process, and multiplicity while emphasising the generative capacities of what agro‐food scholars do for enacting novel political, ontological, and normative practices. The reminder of the article co‐experiments with what it means to be open to these productive capacities as researchers, in terms of making the un‐thought thinkable and un‐doable routine. In doing this the article offers an account of agro‐food imaginaries that is hopeful precisely because it is unsettling.

This article details how patent law works to create discrete, immutable biological 'objects'. This socio-legal maneuver is necessary to distinguish these artifacts from the unwieldy (and thus unpatentable) realm of the natural world. The creation of 'objects' also serves the interests of capital, where a stable, unchanging, immutable object goes hand in hand with commodification. Yet this stabilization is incomplete. Pointing to a variety of different examples, this article illustrates how biotech patents do not speak to specific, immutable things. Biotech patents, rather, are better understood as ontologically fluid (though, as discussed, this fluidity can only occur within limits), which is to say their identity cannot be 'fixed' — or, at least, not without undermining the very existence of today's biotechnology regime. The article concludes by speaking briefly about how this mutability is perpetuating certain inequalities, particularly between holders of various property forms.

A variety of forces aligned at the turn of the last century to make ethyl alcohol — what is today known as ethanol — inefficient and uneconomical as a fuel alternative. Rather than a case of inevitable technological unfolding, the transition from King Coal to Big Oil was a sociologically contingent event. As a controversy study, this paper seeks to avoid the reductionist tendencies of past historical analyses of fuel. The author also seeks to redress a fundamental gap within the STS literature on the subject of automobile/fuel socio-technical systems, where the story of ethyl alcohol remains conspicuously absent. Among studies that examine how/why the automobile became locked in, little is said about ethyl alcohol, even though, as this paper details, it remained part of the fuel landscape well into the 20th century. The paper begins with an overview of the landscape developments of fuel during the later decades of the 19th century. Attention then turns to examining the various factors that went into shaping the automobile/fuel socio-technical system within the US during the first half of the 20th century.

Abstract  This article develops a broad sociological understanding of why biofuels lost out to leaded gasoline as the fuel par excellence of the twentieth century, while drawing comparisons with biofuels today. It begins by briefly discussing the fuel‐scape in the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, examining the farm chemurgic movement, New Deal agricultural policies, mechanization trends within agriculture, and, finally, the invention of leaded gasoline. The second half of the article applies insights from that historical analysis to the biofuel craze currently under way. By employing a political‐economy interpretation of the socioeconomic context combined with a path‐dependency‐informed analysis of the technological trajectories, the article reveals the social forces that structured the trends and outcomes in biofuel innovations across the two eras.

ABSTRACTThis article examines a number of problems associated with patents. These are aspects of patents (and patent law) that are masked by conventional discourse that frequently equates strong patent protections with innovation and, ultimately, economic growth. This article will discuss: patents' links with knowledge and expertise; infrastructural requirements; innovation incentive structures; coercive tendencies (via high litigation and transactions costs); and global 'harmonization' agreements (specifically TRIPs). In sum, it provides a glimpse of why patent law matters for understanding today's political economy and why global inequalities will continue to grow unless the international socio‐legal landscape changes substantially.