Now in its second edition, Global Capitalism and Climate Change: The Need for an Alternative World System examines anthropogenic climate change in the context of global capitalism, a political economy that emphasizes profit-making, is committed to on-going economic growth, results in massive social inequality, fosters a treadmill of production and consumption, and is heavily reliant on fossil fuels. Looking ahead, Hans A. Baer explores the systemic changes necessary to create a more socially just, democratic, and environmentally sustainable world system capable of moving humanity toward a safer climate. This book is recommended for readers interested in anti-systemic efforts, including eco-anarchism, eco-feminism, the de-growth perspective, Indigenous voices, and the climate justice movement.

Climate change and ecological instability have the potential to disrupt human societies and their futures. Cultural, social and ethical life in all societies is directed towards a future that can never be observed, and never be directly acted upon, and yet is always interacting with us. Thinking and acting towards the future involves efforts of imagination that are linked to our sense of being in the world and the ecological pressures we experience. The three key ideas of this book – ecologies, ontologies and mythologies – help us understand the ways people in many different societies attempt to predict and shape their futures. Each chapter places a different emphasis on the linked domains of environmental change, embodied experience, myth and fantasy, politics, technology and intellectual reflection, in relation to imagined futures. The diverse geographic scope of the chapters includes rural Nepal, the islands of the Pacific Ocean, Sweden, coastal Scotland, North America, and remote, rural and urban Australia. This book will appeal to researchers and students in anthropology, sociology, environmental studies, cultural studies, psychology and politics.

Recognizing that climate politics has been an increasingly contentious and heated topic in Australia over the past two decades, this book examines Australian capitalism as a driver of climate change and the nexus between the corporations and Coalition and Australian Labor parties. As a highly developed country, Australia is punching above its weight in terms of contributing to greenhouse gas emissions despite rising temperatures, droughts, water shortages and raging bushfires, storm surges and flooding, and the bleaching of the Great Barrier Reef. Drawing upon both archival and ethnographic research, Hans Baer examines Australian climate politics at the margins, namely the Greens, the labour union, the environmental NGOs, and the grass-roots climate movement. Adopting a climate justice perspective which calls for "system change, not climate change" as opposed to the conventional approach of seeking to mitigate emissions through market mechanisms and techno-fixes, particularly renewable energy sources, this book posits system-challenging transitional steps to shift Australia toward an eco-socialist vision in keeping with a burgeoning global socio-ecological revolution. Accessibly written and including an interview with renowned comedian and climate activist Rod Quantock OAM, this book is essential reading for academics, students and general readers with an interest in climate change and climate activism.

This book examines the current status of Mexicano and Latino politics in the United States. Political scientist and community activist Armando Navarro maintains that both represent a dysfunctional and failed mode of politics, attributable to their system maintenance and mainstream ideological orientation and approach. As colonial agents, they protect both a United States that is decaying and declining and the degenerative liberal capitalist system. Navarro argues that the United States is not a representative democracy; but in fact, is a “White Corpocratic Dictatorship” controlled by Capital, which is evolving into a Fascist State. The book provides an in-depth analysis and contention that Mexicanos and Latinos in Aztlán (Southwest) are an “occupied and internal colonized people.” It argues they are the “Palestinians and Kurds” of the United States. His supposition is sustained by the book’s profiles of Mexicano political history, demography, socioeconomics, electoral politics, immigration, and the Triad Crisis (e.g., Second Great Depression, Global Economic Crisis, and Global Capitalist Crisis). Each chapter provides the justification and case for Navarro’s two unique alternative change models, applicable to today’s bankrupt and failed Mexicano and Latino Politics in the twenty-first century. The preferred model is “Aztlán’s Politics of a Nation-Within-a-Nation (APNWN),” which is based on the models of the Mormon Nation of Utah and that of French Quebec. Navarro, therefore, calls for the reformation of the United States’ liberal capitalist system by way of social democracy for the empowerment of Mexicanos and Latinos. His second model is “Aztlán’s Politics of Separatism” (APS), which offers two strategic options, (1) Aztlán (Southwest) becoming a separate and sovereign nation-state or (2) its reannexation and re-integration with Mexico. Navarro outlines a “plan of action” for building a New Movement designed to attain APNWN or APS. In addition, several ominous forecasts are made, such as the United States being in a state of decline and no longer a hegemonic superpower due to the rise of a multi-polar world. Moreover, Navarro attributes the United States’ decline to the inherent contradictions of global capitalism. His sobering message is that if the current economic conditions are left unchanged, this will produce an “End of Times” scenario—the unleashing of the “Four Horseman of the Apocalypse.”

In addressing the urgent questions raised by climate change, this book provides a comprehensive overview of the anthropology of climate change, guided by a critical political ecological framework. It examines the emergence and slow maturation of the anthropology of climate change, reviews the historic foundations for this work in the archaeology of climate change, and presents three alternative contemporary theoretical perspectives in the anthropology of climate change. This second edition is fully updated to include the most recent literature published since the first edition in 2014. It also examines a number of new topics, including an analysis of the 2014 American Anthropological Association’s Global Climate Change Task Force report, a new case study on responses to climate change in developed societies, and reference to the stance of the Trump administration on climate change. Not only does this book provide a valuable overview of the field and the key literature, but it also gives researchers and students in Environmental Anthropology, Climate Change, Human Geography, Sociology, and Political Science a novel framework for understanding climate change that emphasizes human socioecological interactions.

In addressing the urgent questions raised by climate change, this book provides a comprehensive overview of the anthropology of climate change guided by a critical political ecological framework. It argues that anthropologists must significantly expand their focus on climate change and their contributions to responding to climate change as a grave risk to humanity. The book presents a human socioecological framework for conceptualizing climate change. It examines the emergence and slow maturation of the anthropology of climate change; reviews the historic foundations for this work in the archaeology of climate change; and presents three alternative contemporary theoretical perspectives in the anthropology of climate change. The book synthesizes anthropological work and perspectives on climate change in the form of case studies in various regions of the world revealing the nature of global climate change as constituting multiple and somewhat diverse changes in local settings. It explores the applied anthropology of climate change in terms of the ways anthropologists are contributing to climate policy, working with communities on climate change issues, as well as within the climate movement both internationally and nationally. Finally it provides an overview of what other the social sciences are saying about climate change and explores ways that the anthropology of climate change can interface with sociology, political science, and human geography in order to create an integrated social science of climate change. This book gives researchers and students in Environmental Anthropology, Climate Change, Human Geography, and Sociology, a novel framework for understanding climate change that emphasizes human socioecological interactions.

The Routledge Handbook of Transformative Global Studies provides diverse and cutting-edge perspectives on this fast-changing field. For 30 years the world has been caught in a long ‘global interregnum,’ plunging from one crisis to the next and witnessing the emergence of new, vibrant, multiple, and sometimes contradictory forms of popular resistance and politics. This global ‘interregnum’ – or a period of uncertainty where the old hegemony is fading and the new ones have not yet been fully realized – necessitates critical self-reflection, brave intellectual speculation and (un)learning of perceived wisdoms, and greater transdisciplinary collaboration across theories, localities, and subjects. This Handbook takes up this challenge by developing fresh perspectives on globalization, development, neoliberalism, capitalism, and their progressive alternatives, addressing issues of democracy, power, inequality, insecurity, precarity, wellbeing, education, displacement, social movements, violence and war, and climate change. Throughout, it emphasizes the dynamics for system change, including bringing post-capitalist, feminist, (de)colonial, and other critical perspectives to support transformative global praxis. This volume brings together a mixture of fresh and established scholars from across disciplines and from a range of both Northern and Southern contexts. Researchers and students from around the world and across the fields of politics, sociology, international development, international relations, geography, economics, area studies, and philosophy will find this an invaluable and fresh guide to global studies in the 21st century.

Many progressive scholars, particularly in the social sciences, have increasingly come to acknowledge that anthropogenic climate change constitutes yet another contradiction of global capitalism. This book constitutes an effort to develop a critical social science of climate change, one that posits its roots in global capitalism with its emphasis on profit-making, a treadmill of production and consumption, heavy reliance on fossil fuels, and commitment to ongoing economic expansion. It explores the systemic changes necessary to create a more socially just and sustainable world system that would possibly start to move humanity toward a safer climate and discusses the role of a burgeoning climate movement in this effort.

The editors of the third edition of the seminal textbook Understanding and Applying Medical Anthropology bring it completely up to date for both instructors and students. The collection of 49 readings (17 of them new to this edition) offers extensive background description and exposes students to the breadth of theoretical, methodological, and practical perspectives and issues in the field of medical anthropology. The text provides specific examples and case studies of research as it is applied to a range of health settings: from cross-cultural clinical encounters to cultural analysis of new biomedical technologies and the implementation of programs in global health settings. The new edition features: • a major revision that eliminates many older readings in favor of more fresh, relevant selections; • a new section on structural violence that looks at the impact of poverty and other forms of social marginalization on health; • an updated and expanded section on “Conceptual Tools,” including new research and ideas that are currently driving the field of medical anthropology forward (such as epigenetics and syndemics); • new chapters on climate change, Ebola, PTSD among Iraq/Afghanistan veterans, eating disorders, and autism, among others; • recent articles from Margaret Mead Award winners Sera Young, Seth Holmes, and Erin Finley, along with new articles by such established medical anthropologists as Paul Farmer and Merrill Singer.

This book applies a critical perspective to anthropogenic climate change and the global socio-ecological crisis. The book focuses on the critical anthropology of climate change by opening up a dialogue with the two main contending perspectives in the field, namely the cultural ecological and the cultural interpretive perspectives. Guided by these, the authors take a firm stance on the types of changes that are needed to sustain life on Earth as we know it. Within this framework, they explore issues of climate and social equity, the nature of the current era in Earth’s geohistory, the perspectives of the elite polluters driving climate change, and the regrettable contributions of anthropologists and other scholars to climate change. Engaging with perspectives from sociology, political science, and the geography of climate change, the book explores various approaches to thinking about and responding to the existential threat of an ever-warming climate. In doing so, it lays the foundation for a brave new sustainable world that is socially just, highly democratic, and climatically safe for humans and other species. This book will be of interest to researchers and students studying environmental anthropology, climate change, human geography, sociology, and political science.