Ecology/Environment
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Fly and Be Damned
What Now for Aviation and Climate Change?
Peter McManners
Fly and be Damned gets underneath the well-known facts about the unsustainable nature of the aviation industry and argues for fundamental change to our traveling habits. The first book to transcend the emotional debate between the entrenched positions of those who are either for, or against, flying, this groundbreaking work argues that aviation is stuck in a stalemate between misguided policy and a growing imperative to deal with its environmental impact and that there is now little possibility… (more information)
Posthuman International Relations
Complexity, Ecologism and Global Politics
Erika Cudworth, Stephen Hobden
In this bold intervention, Cudworth and Hobden draw on recent advances in thinking about complexity theory to call for a profound re-envisioning of the study of international relations. As a discipline, IR is wedded to the enlightenment project of overcoming the ‘hazards’ of nature, and thus remains constrained by its blinkered ‘human-centred’ approach. Furthermore, as a means of predicting major global-political events and trends, it has failed consistently. Instead, the… (more information)
Earth Grab
The Rise of Geopiracy, The New Biomassters and Capturing Climate Genes
Diana Bronson, Hope Shand, Jim Thomas, Kathy Jo Wetter
’Geopiracy’ analyses how Northern governments and corporations are cynically using growing concerns about the ecological and climate crisis to propose geoengineering ‘quick fixes’. These threaten to wreak havoc on ecosystems, with disastrous impacts on the people of the global South. As calls for a ‘greener’ economy mount and oil prices escalate, corporations are seeking to switch from oil-based to plant-based energy. ’The New Biomassters’ exposes… (more information)
Ocean Ranger
Remaking the Promise of Oil
Susan Dodd
On February 15, 1982, the oil rig Ocean Ranger sank off the coast of Newfoundland taking the entire crew of eighty-four men — including the author’s brother — down with it. It was the worst sea disaster in Canada since the Second World War, but the memory of this event gradually faded into a sad story about a bad storm — relegated to the “Extreme Weather” section of the CBC archives. Susan Dodd resurrects this disaster from the realm of “history&rdquo… (more information)
Food Sovereignty in Canada
Creating Just and Sustainable Food Systems
Edited by Annette Aurélie Desmarais, Nettie Wiebe, Hannah Wittman
Contemporary Canadian agricultural and food policies are contributing to the current global food crisis: the industrialized, high-input, export-driven agricultural production sector, coupled with concentrated corporate processing and retailing, are ecologically unsustainable, increasingly unaffordable, unhealthy and socially unjust. Employing an interdisciplinary and multi-sectoral approach, Food Sovereignty in Canada explores how communities all over the country are actively engaged in implementing… (more information)
What Every Environmentalist Needs to Know About Capitalism
A Citizen’s Guide to Capitalism and the Environment
John Bellamy Foster, Fred Magdoff
There is a growing consensus that the planet is heading toward environmental catastrophe: climate change, ocean acidification, ozone depletion, global freshwater use, loss of biodiversity, and chemical pollution all threaten our future unless we act. What is less clear is how humanity should respond. The contemporary environmental movement is the site of many competing plans and prescriptions, and composed of a diverse set of actors, from militant activists to corporate chief executives. This… (more information)
Common Ground
The Sharing of Land and Landscapes for Sustainability
Mark Everard
Common Ground explores the shifting relationship between human society and the landscapes that bear it. Examining the changing understandings of the natural world and its management and exploitation, environmental activist Mark Everard presents solutions in the nature of ecosystem services. Notwithstanding our total dependence on the Earth’s natural resources, the relationship between humanity and the land has shifted significantly and frequently throughout our tenure, brief as it is relative… (more information)
Stop Signs
Cars and Capitalism on the Road to Economic, Social and Ecological Decay
Yves Engler, Bianca Mugyenyi
In North America, human beings have become enthralled by the automobile: A quarter of our working lives are spent paying for them; communities fight each other for the right to build more of them; our cities have been torn down, remade and planned with their needs as the overriding concern; wars are fought to keep their fuel tanks filled; songs are written to praise them; cathedrals are built to worship them. In Stop Signs: Cars and Capitalism on the Road to Economic, Social and Ecological Decay… (more information)
No-Nonsense Guide to Climate Change
The Science, the Solutions, the Way Forward
Danny Chivers
Just as the need for action on climate change becomes more urgent and overwhelming, the campaign to deny that humans are causing it has gained more traction. This completely new book meets the skeptics head on, offering a guide to the science, an insight into the politics of climate justice and a clear sense of the way forward. This is an ideal offering for students, academics and anyone interested in the growing issue of society’s impact on climate change and how to make climate justice… (more information)
Biofuels and the Globalization of Risk
The Biggest Change in North-South Relationships Since Colonialism?
James Smith
Biofuels and the Globalization of Risk offers a fresh, compelling analysis of the politics and policies behind the biofuels story, with its technological optimism and often-idealized promises for the future. This essential new critique argues that investment in biofuels may reconfigure risk and responsibility, whereby the global South is encouraged to invest its future in growing biofuel crops, often at the expense of food, in order that the global North may continue its unsustainable energy consumption… (more information)
Food versus Fuel
An Informed Introduction to Biofuels
Francis Johnson, Frank Rosillo-Calle
Food versus Fuel presents a high-level introduction to the science and economics behind a well-worn debate, that will debunk myths and provide quality facts and figures for academics and practitioners in development studies, environment studies, and agricultural studies. Compiled by an internationally renowned scientist and authority, and to include perspectives from ‘pro’ and ‘anti’ biofuels experts and activists, from the North and South, the aim of this book is to bring… (more information)
Agriculture and Food in Crisis
Conflict, Resistance and Renewal
Fred Magdoff, Brian Tokar
The failures of “free-market” capitalism are perhaps nowhere more evident than in the production and distribution of food. Although modern human societies have attained unprecedented levels of wealth, a significant amount of the world’s population continues to suffer from hunger or food insecurity on a daily basis. In Agriculture and Food in Crisis, Fred Magdoff and Brian Tokar have assembled an exceptional collection of scholars from around the world to explore this frightening… (more information)
Ecological Rift
Capitalism’s War on the Earth
John Bellamy Foster, Brett Clark, Richard York
Humanity in the twenty-first century is facing what might be described as its ultimate environmental catastrophe: the destruction of the climate that has nurtured human civilization and with it the basis of life on earth as we know it. All ecosystems on the planet are now in decline. Enormous rifts have been driven through the delicate fabric of the biosphere. The economy and the earth are headed for a fateful collision — if we don’t alter course. (more information)
Food Sovereignty
Reconnecting Food, Nature and Community
Edited by Annette Aurélie Desmarais, Nettie Wiebe, Hannah Wittman
Advocating a practical, radical change to the way much of our food system currently operates, this book argues that food sovereignty is the means to achieving a system that will provide for the food needs of all people while respecting the principles of environmental sustainability, local empowerment and agrarian citizenship. The current high input, industrialized, market-driven food system fails on all these counts. The UN-endorsed goal of food security is becoming increasingly distant as indicated… (more information)
No-Nonsense Guide to Green Politics
Derek Wall
Climate chaos and pollution, deforestation and consumerism: the crisis facing human civilization is clear enough. But the response of politicians has been cowardly and inadequate, while environmental activists have tended to favour single-issue campaigns rather than electoral politics. The No-Nonsense Guide to Green Politics measures the rising tide of eco-activism and awareness and explains why this event heralds a new political era worldwide: in the near future there will be no other politics… (more information)
About Canada: Animal Rights
John Sorenson
Adopting Mahatma Gandhi’s idea that “the greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way its animals are treated,” this book considers the status of animals in Canada. Casting a critical gaze over how dominant ideologies, such as capitalism and patriarchy, have negatively impacted our relationships with the natural world, Sorenson examines the institutional exploitation of animals in agriculture, fashion and entertainment. Addressing the fur trade, seal hunt… (more information)
The Global Fight for Climate Justice
Anticapitalist Responses to Global Warming and Environmental Destruction
Edited by Ian Angus
As capitalism continues with business as usual, climate change is fast expanding the gap between rich and poor, and between and within nations, as well imposing unparalleled suffering on those least able to protect themselves. In The Global Fight for Climate Justice, anti-capitalist activists from five continents offer radical answers to the most important questions of our time: Why is capitalism destroying the conditions that make life on Earth possible? How can we stop the destruction before it… (more information)
Food Rebellions!
Crisis and the Hunger for Justice
Eric Holt-Giménez, Raj Patel
Erosion of local and national control: takes a deep look at the world food crisis and its impact on the global South and under-served communities in the industrial North. While most governments and multilateral organisations offer short-term solutions based on proximate causes, authors Eric Holt-Giménez and Raj Patel unpack the planet’s environmentally and economically vulnerable food systems to reveal the root causes of the crisis. By tracking the political and economic evolution of… (more information)
Edible Action
Food Activism and Alternative Economics
Sally Miller
Hunger is up, obesity is up, food-borne illness is up, farms are lost to debt and despair; the food system fails growing numbers of people across the world every day. Yet if we adjust our lens, we see ubiquitous commitments to change: food movements and enterprises dedicated to making the world a better place to eat and to live. Food initiatives—from farmers’ markets to fair trade coffee—offer a pattern of powerful alternatives to conventional food economics, which benefit only… (more information)
The Socialist Register 2007
Coming toTerms with Nature
Edited by Colin Leys, Leo Panitch
Can capitalism come to terms with the environment? Can market forces and technology overcome the ‘limits to growth’ and yet preserve the biosphere? What is the nature of oil politics today? Can capitalism do without nuclear power, or make it safe? What is the significance of the impasse over the Kyoto protocol? How far has socialist thought developed to help us understand the environmental dilemma? Has it even begun to provide answers to it? Does socialist internationalism imply accelerated… (more information)
Fair Future
Resources Conflicts, Security and Global Justice
Wolfgang Sachs, Tilman Santarius
This is a book that cuts across the outdated divide of North and South to address the twin global questions of our age: social justice and environmental sustainability. It asks how the material needs of the poor can be met on a planet already exhibiting signs of acute environmental stress. By laying out fundamentals of shared analytical understanding, ethical commitment and practical institutional and policy changes, the authors provide the necessary intellectual and moral platform for progress… (more information)
The Global Food Economy
The Battle for the Future of Farming
Tony Weis
The modern food industry is a paradox: surplus “food mountains” sit alongside global malnutrition; the developed world subsidized its own agriculture while pressurizing the developing to liberalize at any cost; and an increasingly aggressive export competition is accompanied by a growing reliance on imports in many countries. The WTO’s uneven application of neoliberal economics to food production is relatively new, and the consequences of mounting deficits, rising “food miles… (more information)
Canada’s Deadly Secret
Saskatchewan Uranium and the Global Nuclear System
Jim Harding
Canada’s Deadly Secret chronicles the struggle over Saskatchewan’s uranium mining, the front end of the global nuclear system. It digs into impacts on Aboriginal rights, environmental health and the effect of free trade, tracing Saskatchewan’s pivotal role in nuclear proliferation and the spread of contamination and cancer. Harding shows that nuclear energy cannot address global warming, nor is there a “peaceful atom.” The book goes inside biased public inquiries;… (more information)
The Enemy of Nature (Second Edition)
The End of Capitalism or the End of the World? 2nd Edition
Joel Kovel
We live in and from nature, but the way we have evolved of doing this is about to destroy us. capitalism and its by-products—imperialism, war, neoliberal globalization, racism, poverty and the destruction of community—are all playing a part in the destruction of our ecosystem. only now are we beginning to realize the depth of the crisis and the kind of transformation that will have to occur to ensure our survival. This second, thoroughly updated, edition of The Enemy of Nature speaks… (more information)
Energy Security and Climate Change
A Canadian Primer
Cy Gonick
Peak oil and climate change were mere hypotheses only a few years ago. This book brings together some of Canada’s and the world’s leading authorities to explore the origins of twin crises of our times and to evaluate the various solutions being advanced. What emerges is an engrossing discussion that is critical, sophisticated and plain spoken, challenging and controversial. Energy Security and Climate Change will be of interest to those seeking an introduction to the issues, as well… (more information)
Climate Change
Melanie Jarman
This engaging guide outlines key issues in the major challenge facing national governments today—how to deal with climate change. With doom-laden forecasts of our future in the next decade, the issue’s importance cannot be over-estimated. Jarman shows how countries are beginning to adapt and what other countries must do to catch up. Climate change will affect millions of lives, particularly in the poorest countries. Yet many governments are reluctant to commit to tackling the problem… (more information)
Food is Different
Why we Must Get the WTO out of Agriculture
Peter M. Rosset
This book explains what is happening to the world’s agricultural systems and farmers under the impact of neoliberal economics. What is at stake is the very future of our global food system and each country’s agricultural and farming systems. The livelihoods of rural people in both industrial and developing countries are under threat. The book explains what is happening to agriculture in the World Trade Organisation (WTO) negotiating context, and unravels the complex ways in which agriculture… (more information)
Water Under Threat
Larbi Bouguerra
This richly documented book asks the major questions about the enormously important political and geostrategic issue of water. Does water have a price? Is it a right or a need? Is there a water crisis? Will wars be fought over water? Should we be worried about water pollution? Can available technological solutions keep pollution under control? It also provides some elements of an answer. It shows the ways in which water is used and managed, and raises central issues about our lifestyles, our ethics… (more information)
Consuming Sustainability
Critical Social Analyses of Ecological Change
Edited by Debra Davidson, Kierstin Hatt
How do our consumption decisions affect ecosystems? Can we rely on governments to maintain environmental wellbeing? Do rural peoples “see” the environment differently from urban residents? Is sustainability possible? We are confronted with personal and political decisions every day that affect the environment, yet, we often do not know how to assess, much less understand, our individual role in them. In Consuming Sustainability, the authors examine several contemporary environmental… (more information)
The Water Business
Corporations Versus People
Ann-Christin Sjolander Holland
Privatization of water supplies began in England in 1989 under Margaret Thatcher; in the next 10 years, nearly £10 billion went in profits to the new water companies. Today, two giant corporations, Veolia and Suez, control 80% of the international private water market and have some 300 million customers. Protests have broken out in country after country and the water giants are switching to new markets in China, North America and Europe. Meanwhile well over a billion people still lack access… (more information)
Ploughing Up the Farm
Neoliberalism, Modern Technology and the State of the World’s Farmers
Jerry Buckland
Ploughing Up the Farm brings together an impressive array of evidence to show that neoliberalism and modern technology underlie recent trends: rural depopulation in the North, rising rural poverty in the South and environmental problems all around the farming world. Market-driven growth and trade liberalization have encouraged production for agricultural export, and the growing use of chemical inputs are often biased against Third World farmers and small farmers everywhere. Jerry Buckland calls… (more information)
Environmental Illness in Nova Scotia, 1983-2003
David T. Janigan
Nova Scotia was the first Canadian province to be faced with a large-scale demand for workers’ compensation in a single institution, Camp Hill Medical Centre, Halifax. More than half of the 1100 workers complained of environmental illnesses (or the WHO’s idiopathic environmental intolerances) blamed on the poor indoor air quality, which was exhaustively investigated. In response, the Province established three outpatient facilities, one permanent, and overlapping and following these… (more information)
Toxic Criminology
Environment, Law and the State in Canada
Edited by Susan C. Boyd, Dorothy E. Chunn, Robert Menzies
Critical research, writing and advocacy by legal academics and practitioners, NGOs, indigenous peoples and ecofeminists has existed on a global scale since the 1960s, but not until the 1990s did criminologists begin to examine environmental crime in a more concerted way. This late entrance by criminologist has much to do with who is involved in environmental crime—namely upper strata, mostly “white” men who run corporations and state agancies and the preception of environmental… (more information)
Thinking Ecologically
Environmental Thought, Values and Policy
Bruce Morito
Thinking Ecologically has two aims. The first is to describe the metaphysical, epistemological and valuational directions taken toward the environment in the history of Western thought. The second is to develop an approach to environmental thought based on the idea of attunement. Attunement steers us toward thinking ecologically, in contrast to merely thinking about ecology. Appeal to some Eastern and Aboriginal approaches is made to develop the idea of attunement. As such, it challenges some basic… (more information)
Bringing the Food Economy Home
Local Alternatives to Global Agribusiness
Steven Gorelick, Todd Merrifield, Helena Norberg-Hodge
There has been much discussion about the quality of food being provided by global agribusiness and the serious environmental impact it produces. The benefits of fostering a local food production are often dismissed, but it would address a range of health, social and environmental problems. The authors argue if the trend of large agribusiness were thought about rather than accepted without question, then local food production would be seen as a viable means of supplementing this existing system.… (more information)
The Water Manifesto
Arguments for a World Water Contract
Riccardo Petrella
In 20 years time, some three of the eight billion people on earth will, if present trends continue, lack access to sufficient drinkable water. Already, half that number do not and another two billion lack clean water generally. The rest of humanity faces a degradation in fresh water quality. And there is no body of international law regulating the right and access to fresh water supplies. Ricardo Petrella exposes how corporate interests prevent an adequate response, and a market-oriented system… (more information)
Our Simmering Planet
What to do about Global Warming?
Joyeeta Gupta
Heat waves in Delhi and Athens. Hurricane Mitch in Central America and Tornadoes in the USA. Floods in Britatin and China. All unprecedented in severity, unprecedented in frequency. What is happenning to the world’s weather? This book takes us through the science, and behind the politics, to explore a number of questions. Do we need to worry about climate instability? What is the evidence regarding Global Warming?Our Simmering Planet discusses the likely impact of increases in average tempuatures… (more information)
Protect or Plunder?
Understanding Intellectual Property Rights
Vandana Shiva
Intellectual property rights, TRIPS, patents–they sound technical, even boring. Yet what kinds of ideas, technologies, identification of genes, even manipulations of life forms can be owned and exploited for profit by giant corporations is a vital issue for our times. Vandana Shiva shows how the Western-inspired and unprecedented widening of the concept of intellectual property does not stimulate human creativity and the generation of knowledge. Instead, it is being exploited by transnational… (more information)
Brave New Seeds
The Threat of Transgenic Crops to Farmers in the South
Robert Ali, Brac De La Perriere, Franck Seuret
Consumers have taken the lead in rejecting the biotech industry’s determination to foist GMOs on an unsuspecting and unconsulted public. This book gives a voice for the first time to farmers. They are the people being pressured by half a dozen giant corporations to grow these genetically engineered crops. What are the possible downsides for them, particularly for those hundreds of millions of farmers living in the developing countries? On their environment? On their health? On their independence… (more information)
Planet Dialectics
Explorations in Environment and Development
Wolfgang Sachs
Sachs is one of the most thoughtful and appealing intellectuals to deal with the dual crisis in the Western world’s relations with nature and social justice. In this book readers–be they concerned citizens, environmentalists, development specialists or cultural historians–will find trenchant and elegant explorations of some of the foremost issues the world faces at the beginning of the new century: Efficiency, the mantra of our times; Globalization, a market inevitability and the… (more information)
The Perils of Progress
The Health and Environment Hazards of Modern Technology, and What You Can Do About Them
John Ashton, Ron Laura
The Perils of Progress calls on the latest scientific research to challenge our society’s largely unquestioned commitment to new technologies. While these have undoubtedly brought many benefits, the authors argue that industrial society’s reliance on every latest technology as a cure-all for our problems is seriously misplaced-in some cases dangerously so. Clearly written, comprehensive in its coverage and meticulously researched, their book introduces the reader to a vast array of health… (more information)
When the Fish Are Gone
Ecological Collapse and the Social Organization of Fishing in Northwest Newfoundland, 1982-1995
Craig T. Palmer, Peter R. Sinclair
The Gulf Coast fisheries off Northwest Newfoundland provide a graphic example of the social and biological consequences of the failure to create conditions that would allow for fishing on a sustainable basis. This book shows how an ecological crisis has produced a social crisis threatening the viability of fishers, the fish plants where they sold their fish, and the communities in which they live. It is set in the context of the North Atlantic fisheries and of primary resource producing rural areas… (more information)
Empowerment
Towards Sustainable Development
Edited by Naresh C. Singh, Vangile Titi
While fashionable rhetoric threatens to overwhelm clear thinking sustainable development, the authors of this study believe that serious and difficult questions need to be asked if we are to move to a concept and practice of development which really integrates the needs of people, the economy, the environment and the practical world of decision-making. In particular, it is too easy to assume a positive relation between poverty reduction and an improved environment. Instead they argue that the alleviation… (more information)
Ecofeminism
Maria Mies, Vandana Shiva
Two authors, one an economist, the other a physicist and philosopher, come together in this book on a controversial environmental agenda. Using interview material, they bring together women’s perspectives from North and South on environmental deterioration and develop and new way of approaching this body of knowledge which is at once practical and philosophical. Do women involved in environmental movements see a link between patriarchy and ecological degradation? What are the links between… (more information)
Stifling Debate
Canadian Newspapers and Nuclear Power
Michael Clow
This study of nuclear coverage in four dailies in Ontario and New Brunswick finds that it is the promoters, not the opponents, of nuclear energy that overwhelmingly dominate news coverage. (more information)
Global Ecology
A New Arena of Political Conflict
Edited by Wolfgang Sachs
Behind the public’s hope of effective action by governments on environmental issues lie a complex terrain of conceptual confusion, conflicts of interest and philosophical dispute. This is hwy some of the world’s leading environmental thinkers have come together in this volume to probe critically the new languages being developed by the environmental professionals. The examine the contradictions inherent in the fashionable notion of sustainable development. They explore the emerging… (more information)
Ecofeminism as Politics
Nature, Marx and the Postmodern
Areil Salleh
This book explores the philosophical and political challenge of ecofeminism. It shows how the ecology movement has been held back by conceptual confusion over the implications of gender difference, while much that passes in the name of feminism is actually an obstacle to ecological change and global democracy. The author argues that ecofeminism reaches beyond contemporary social movements, being a political synthesis of four revolutions in one: ecology is feminism is socialism is post-colonial struggle… (more information)