"Conveys the message that developing countries need to be free to make their own decisions about how to improve their people's lives. Activists who've never had to worry about starvation, malaria and simple survival have no right to impose their fears, prejudices and ideologies on the world's poor".-- Book cover.

The violence wrought by climate change, toxic drift, deforestation, oil spills, and the environmental aftermath of war takes place gradually and often invisibly. Using the innovative concept of "slow violence" to describe these threats, Rob Nixon focuses on the inattention we have paid to the attritional lethality of many environmental crises, in contrast with the sensational, spectacle-driven messaging that impels public activism today. Slow violence, because it is so readily ignored by a hard-charging capitalism, exacerbates the vulnerability of ecosystems and of people who are poor, disempowered, and often involuntarily displaced, while fueling social conflicts that arise from desperation as life-sustaining conditions erode. In a book of extraordinary scope, Nixon examines a cluster of writer-activists affiliated with the environmentalism of the poor in the global South. By approaching environmental justice literature from this transnational perspective, he exposes the limitations of the national and local frames that dominate environmental writing. And by skillfully illuminating the strategies these writer-activists deploy to give dramatic visibility to environmental emergencies, Nixon invites his readers to engage with some of the most pressing challenges of our time.

A portrait of a resilient African village, ruled until recently by magic and tradition, now facing modern problems and responding, often triumphantly, to change When Sarah Erdman, a Peace Corps volunteer, arrived in Nambonkaha, she became the first Caucasian to venture there since the French colonialists. But even though she was thousands of miles away from the United States, completely on her own in this tiny village in the West African nation of Côte d'Ivoire, she did not feel like a stranger for long. As her vivid narrative unfolds, Erdman draws us into the changing world of the village that became her home. Here is a place where electricity is expected but never arrives, where sorcerers still conjure magic, where the tok-tok sound of women grinding corn with pestles rings out in the mornings like church bells. Rare rains provoke bathing in the streets and the most coveted fashion trend is fabric with illustrations of Western cell phones. Yet Nambonkaha is also a place where AIDS threatens and poverty is constant, where women suffer the indignities of patriarchal customs, where children work like adults while still managing to dream. Lyrical and topical, Erdman's beautiful debut captures the astonishing spirit of an unforgettable community.

'Environmental skepticism' describes the viewpoint that major environmental problems are either unreal or unimportant. In other words, environmental skepticism holds that environmental problems, especially global ones, are inauthentic. Peter Jacques describes, both empirically and historically, how environmental skepticism has been organized by mostly US-based conservative think tanks as an anti-environmental counter-movement. This is the first book to analyze the importance of the US conservative counter-movement in world politics and its meaning for democratic and accountable deliberation, as well as its importance as a mal-adaptive project that hinders the world's people to rise to the challenges of sustainability. Specific consideration is given to the threat of the counter-movement to marginalized people of the world and its philosophical implications through its commitment to a 'deep anthropocentrism'.

Publisher description

"Exploring over a century of Zimbabwe's colonial and post-colonial history, Elijah Doro investigates the murky and noxious history of that powerful crop: tobacco. In a compelling narrative that debunks previous histories glorifying tobacco farming, Doro reveals the indelible marks that tobacco left on landscapes, communities, and people. Demonstrating that the history of tobacco farming is inseparable from that of colonial encounter, Doro outlines how tobacco became an institutionalised culture of production, which was linked to state power and natural ecosystems, and driven by a pernicious heritage of unbridled plunder. With the destruction of landscapes, the negative impacts of the export trade and the growing tobacco epidemic in Zimbabwe, tobacco farming has a long and varied legacy in southern African and across the world. Connecting the local to the global, and the environmental to the social, this book illuminates our understandings of environmental history, colonialism and sustainability"--

Informed by the anthropological research of Professor Donald E. Brown on human universals, this book compiles 10 articles exploring the representation of common human cultural practices and concerns in literature, cinema and language. The book as a whole demonstrates not only that Brown’s human universals are shared by different cultures, but most importantly that they have the potential to form a basis for inter- and intra-cultural communication and consolidation, bridging gaps of misinformation and miscommunication, both spatial and temporal. The contributors are Egyptian scholars who cross temporal and spatial boundaries and borders from Africa and the Middle East to Asia, Europe and the Americas, and dive deep into the heart of the shared human universals of myth, folklore and rituals, dreams, trauma, cultural beliefs, search for identity, language, translation and communication. They bring their own unique perspectives to the investigation of how shared human practices and concerns seep through the porous boundaries of different cultures and into a variety of creative and practical genres of fiction, drama, autobiography, cinema and media translation. Their research is interdisciplinary, informed by anthropological, social, psychological, linguistic and cultural theory, and thus offers a multi-faceted and multi-layered view of the human experience.

Environmental Biotechnology: A Biosystems Approach, Second Edition presents valuable information on how biotechnology has acted as a vital buffer among people, pollution, and the environment. It answers the most important questions on the topic, including how, and why, a knowledge and understanding of the physical, chemical, and biological principles of the environment must be achieved in order to develop biotechnology applications. Most texts address either the applications or the implications of biotechnology. This book addresses both. The applications include biological treatment and other environmental engineering processes. The risks posed by biotechnologies are evaluated from both evidence-based and precautionary perspectives. Using a systems biology approach, the book provides a context for researchers and practitioners in environmental science that complements guidebooks on the necessary specifications and criteria for a wide range of environmental designs and applications. Users will find crucial information on the topics scientific researchers must evaluate in order to develop further technologies. - Provides a systems approach to biotechnologies which includes the physical, biological, and chemical processes in context - Presents relevant case studies on cutting-edge technologies, such as nanobiotechnologies and green engineering - Addresses both the applications and implications of biotechnologies by following the lifecycle of a variety of established and developing biotechnologies - Includes crucial information on the topics scientific researchers must evaluate in order to develop further technologies