Suchergebnisse

Over the course of the past century, there has been a sustained reflective engagement about environmental risks, disasters, and human vulnerability in our modern industrial world. This inquiry has raised a host of crucial questions. Just how safe is humanity in a world of toxic chemicals and industrial installations that have destructive potential? Is it feasible to prevent large-scale catastrophes like the ones in Bhopal, Chernobyl, and Fukushima and smaller-scale disasters such as oil spills and gas leaks? How do environmental hazards affect social and political orders? S. Ravi Rajan expertly synthesizes decades of public policy and academic discourse on how societies measure and ultimately come to terms with risk, danger, and vulnerability and offers a fresh, humanistic perspective for grappling with the new global scale and interconnectedness of these threats.

Over the course of the past century, there has been a sustained reflective engagement about environmental risks, disasters, and human vulnerability in our modern industrial world. This inquiry has raised a host of crucial questions. Just how safe is humanity in a world of toxic chemicals and industrial installations that have destructive potential? Is it feasible to prevent large-scale catastrophes like the ones in Bhopal, Chernobyl, and Fukushima and smaller-scale disasters such as oil spills and gas leaks? How do environmental hazards affect social and political orders? S. Ravi Rajan expertly synthesizes decades of public policy and academic discourse on how societies measure and ultimately come to terms with risk, danger, and vulnerability and offers a fresh, humanistic perspective for grappling with the new global scale and interconnectedness of these threats

A discussion of the responsibility of ordinary citizens in regard to recent events maintains that the perpetrators & planners of the 11 Sept 2001 atrocities are genocidal criminals, & it is an insult to compare them to revolutionary anticolonial freedom fighters. These mass murderers hijacked airplanes, god, religion, & culture for their own heinous purposes, & anyone who loves freedom has a moral duty to resist them. However, it is contended that the principles of democracy & freedom are currently being eroded in the name of increased security. Five trends in world history are described as the persistence of imperialism; the backing of evil leaders by Western governments striving to gain accesses to a region's resources; assumptions of universalisms; the increasing dilution of democracy; & institutionalized forgetting. Each trend is said to be just as frightening as the Sept 11 catastrophe & citizens must struggle against oligarchic appetites in order to preserve the ideals of democracy, freedom, & justice for all. J. Lindroth

This paper is an introduction to a special issue of the Journal of Political Ecology on "Ecologies of Hope." The authors argue that discrete, specific, and often, local actions can create spaces that are bettering human lives and livelihoods. The five papers identify actions and movements that are situated in the "middle" between the individual and larger social and economic formations, and inbetween social and economic status- quo and revolution. They are everyday initiatives that do not make revolutionary claims, but which in small but significant ways, help transform the lives of people and communities. These "ecologies of hope" resonate with the work of Karl Polanyi, and his identification of the modern disembedding of the economy and the environment from its societal and cultural context. Polanyi argued that processes that result in a loss of cultural "habitation" engender movements by societies to protect their social solidarity, and distortions of their relationship with the natural environment. Creating and carving out "ecologies of hope" may not mitigate catastrophic global change or miraculously transform the unjust into the just, but does make life and livelihoods a bit more habitable. For people whose lives are affected, this matters. Political ecology should recognize the importance of creating spaces for "habitation" that are not necessarily structural and scalable.Key words: Karl Polanyi, ecologies of hope, habitation, self-organized communities.

Hermínio Martins was one of the key pioneers of the sociology of science and technology. He published extensively in Portuguese and was recognized for his academic contributions with an honorary doctorate at Lisbon (2006) and two Portuguese Medals of Honour. Following his retirement from the University of Oxford, he wrote prolifically in English on a wide range of topics that examined the ethical and societal consequences of the commoditization of the human body and mind. These essays are deep philosophical reflections on our contemporary world, and draw extensively and eclectically upon a wide range of theoretical influences including continental philosophy, history and psychology, to name but a few disciplines. 'The Technocene' is a selection of some of these insightful essays, made available to a global audience for the first time.

This book is the result of a collaborative effort in which environmental historians from Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa came together to offer new perspectives on the new and somehow intriguing entity. These scholars forged a dialogue from their own historical traditions to find common threads and common challenges. The contributors focus on three basic themes that can serve as building blocks for future research: the state, the civil society, and the academia, that is, what has been written in each country on the relations between nature and society over time. The historical perspective is crucial for understanding the environmental and social challenges which might be faced by the BRICS nations in the years to come