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This book provides a definitive overview of the global drivers of high-mountain cryosphere change and their implications for people across high-mountain regions.
Post-Carbon Futures: Imagining (and Enacting) New Worlds through Transition Studies explores the multitude of possibilities for conceiving and creating fulfilling post-carbon ways of life. Offering diverse perspectives and abundant empirical examples, this robust volume sheds new light on how complex ecological, economic, and political factors contour processes of conscious cultural change. The works gathered here center contributors’ experiences and observations of life in an era of profound uncertainty. Bringing together theoretically informed considerations, ethnographic examples, and viewpoints from active transition movement participants, this book is certain to catalyze rich discussi...
A sobering investigation of the rush for lithium for electric vehicles, the problematic history of lithium mining, and the consequences for sustainability. Consumers today are buying electric vehicles with lithium-ion batteries motivated by the belief that they are doing good and decarbonizing society. But is sustainable lithium extraction possible? In Living Minerals, Javiera Barandiarán examines the history of lithium mining and uses during the twentieth century, with a specific focus on the two oldest brine-lithium mines: Silver Peak, Nevada, and Salar de Atacama, Chile, where lithium is found as one more element in a liquid mix of salts, minerals, and organisms. For six decades, mining ...
Studies challenging the idea that technology and science flow only from global North to South. The essays in this volume study the creation, adaptation, and use of science and technology in Latin America. They challenge the view that scientific ideas and technology travel unchanged from the global North to the global South—the view of technology as “imported magic.” They describe not only alternate pathways for innovation, invention, and discovery but also how ideas and technologies circulate in Latin American contexts and transnationally. The contributors' explorations of these issues, and their examination of specific Latin American experiences with science and technology, offer a br...
The politics of scientific advice across four environmental conflicts in Chile, when the state acted as a “neutral broker” rather than protecting the common good. In Science and Environment in Chile, Javiera Barandiarán examines the consequences for environmental governance when the state lacks the capacity to produce an authoritative body of knowledge. Focusing on the experience of Chile after it transitioned from dictatorship to democracy, she examines a series of environmental conflicts in which the state tried to act as a “neutral broker” rather than the protector of the common good. She argues that this shift in the role of the state—occurring in other countries as well—is ...
Labeled either as the "next industrial revolution" or as just "hype," nanoscience and nanotechnologies are controversial, touted by some as the likely engines of spectacular transformation of human societies and even human bodies, and by others as conceptually flawed. These challenges make an encyclopedia of nanoscience and society an absolute necessity. Providing a guide to what these understandings and challenges are about, the Encyclopedia of Nanoscience and Society offers accessible descriptions of some of the key technical achievements of nanoscience along with its history and prospects. Rather than a technical primer, this encyclopedia instead focuses on the efforts of governments arou...
In Occupying Schools, Occupying Land, Rebecca Tarlau looks at the Brazilian Landless Workers' Movement over the past thirty-five years to illustrate how social movements can use state services, such as schools, to support their social change goals. Through a detailed ethnographic and long-term examination of the MST's educational struggle, Tarlau shows how educational institutions can in turn help movements build capacity and social influence. This book provides an analysis of how activists convinced government officials to implement these educational practices and how these initiatives strengthened the movement.
Climate change and environmental degradation have intensified the pressures on crucial resources such as food and water security and air quality. In this collection, academic researchers and practitioners who have lived and worked in countries as geographically and culturally diverse as Brazil, China, India, Ghana, Palestine, Uganda and Venezuela draw on their wide-ranging international and inter-sectoral experience to offer valuable comparative insights into the relationship between research and evidence-based policy for sustaining natural resources. Their contributions provide a novel mix of disciplinary perspectives ranging across geography, ecology, social policy, the political economy, ...
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