Suchergebnisse

Foreword to the First Edition /Adeline Gordon Levine --1.Toxic Exposure: The Plague of Our Time --The Plague as a Metaphor for Toxic Exposure --Contaminated Communities --Contamination as a Widespread Event --Defining a Contaminated Community --The Stages of Toxic Disaster --Collateral Damage in the Risk Society --The Theory of Environmental Turbulence --2.Legler: The Story of a Contaminated Community --A Methodological Note --Groundwater Contamination in Legler --Period of Incubation --Discovery and Announcement --Disruption of Lifestyle: Water Delivery --The Hookup of City Water --Lingering Concerns --Afterword About the Landfill's Afterlife --3.Lifescape Change: Cognitive Adjustment to Toxic Exposure --Defending Our Prior Assumptions --Perceiving a Changed Status --Perceptions of Health --Inherent Uncertainty --Confirmed Exposures --Environment --Loss of Personal Control --The Inversion of Home --Loss of Social Trust --Conclusion: The Lifescape Impacts of Toxic Exposure --4.Individual and Family Impacts --Coping with Exposure: Individuals --Outcomes: Positive and Negative --Coping with Exposure: Couples --Coping with Exposure: Children --Case Studies of Family Dynamics --Stigmatized Relationships: Outsiders Just Don't Understand --Neighbors: Proximate Support --Summary: Individual and Family Impacts --5.Disabling Citizens: The Governmental Response to Toxic Exposure --A Dialectic of Double Binds --Communicational Distortion in the Institutional Context --Distortion and the Communication of Bad News --Differing Paradigms of Risk Between Citizens and Regulators --Institutional Contexts --6.The Enabling Response: Community Development and Toxic Exposure --Enablement Through Community Development --Keys to Enablement: Leadership and Activism --Key Benefits of Community Development --The Consensus/Dissensus Continuum --Consensus and Dissensus in Legler --Consensus and Dissensus Elsewhere --Toxic Victims: A New Social Movement? --Sustainability as a Metaenvironmental Justice Issue --Conclusion: A Radical Environmental Populism --7.The Societal Meaning of Pollution --Denial and the Culture of Contamination --Rejecting a Contaminating Culture: Local Environmental Resistance --Changing the Culture of Contamination --Cultural Immunity: Last Defense of the Contaminating Culture --Sustainability as the Third Stage of Modernity.

Disaster by Design: The Aral Sea, Lessons for Sustainability addresses the impacts of the Aral Sea disaster. The virtual disappearance of what was the world's fourth largest inland body of water was neither natural nor accidental. It was the result of deliberate policy decisions. The sea's disappearance is hardly the entire disaster. Instead, we find an accumulation of cascading effects, beginning with the decision to grow cotton, reached remotely in Moscow, that altered the farming practices surrounding the Aral Sea. Unsustainable choices resulted in soil salinization, water pollution and toxic blowing sands, impacting the entire bioregion and beyond. A remote island was used to test biological weapons. Uzbekistan, most notably Karakalpakstan, was the autonomous republic at the epicenter of the disaster. Sustainable prospects exist, including renewable energy, permaculture and strengthening the social fabric amidst poverty and ecological collapse. This volume of Research in Social Problems and Public Policy is essential reading for everyone concerned with averting environmental disaster and instead creating livable, sustainable communities. Disaster by Design is a clarion call and an insightful study of Central Asia today.

The main topic of this case study is local community response to environmental contamination resulting from corruption and waste mismanagement. The field research was carried out in part of a massive Italian district colloquially referred to as the "land of fires" where illegal wastes dumped by the mafia routinely burned. A document analysis, participant observation and semi-structured interviews were conducted. Abandoned by those tasked with protecting public and environmental health, one might expect widespread concern, activism and protest. The case study supports the theory in terms of citizen mobilization while clarifying conditions that discourage public protest and action. The waste companies and the governmental institutions intended to regulate them were perceived as jointly complicit. Those who did not protest appeared to be caught in a classic double bind in which any response they made was wrong. Fear that the contamination and fires were harming their health demanded action. Yet, citizens dreaded that such efforts would bring mob and institutions' reprisal and did not have practical effective outcomes. This dilemma is fully explored, and the results are discussed within an eco-historical perspective. The case study is also updated to reflect more recent conditions that inspired widespread protest in the same affected region.

This volume ponders the cultures that generated the bulk of our global contamination legacy. Insight is sought into its creation and an understanding of differences in how it is being addressed. Hopefully the illumination of the problem will contribute to a better understanding of the constraining conditions and will help guide us in meeting the twin challenges created by the legacy of contamination: how to stop it and how to address what we already have done. Section one focuses on the psycho-social dynamics of chemical contamination. Section two deals with nuclear events, both accidents, but also the closed cities and closed society needed to produce a nuclear context. Section 3 addresses mitigations, dominated by 4 out of 5 chapters addressing Russia. And section four provides perspectives, comparative pieces addressing secrecy in nuclear programs, distorted risk communication in the aftermath of the World Trade Center Disaster, environmental altruism and in core social response to environmental challenges. It examines the cultures most responsible for global contamination. It adopts a global and practical perspective, with case examples from the United States and Russia. It seeks to stop contaminations from taking place in the future and positively address those from the past. This book series is available electronically at website.