Revised and updated throughout, this unique anthology examines global environmental politics from a range of perspectives—contemporary and classic, activist and scholarly—and reflects voices of the powerless and powerful. Paradigms of sustainability, environmental security, and ecological justice illustrate the many ways environmental problems and their solutions are framed in contemporary international debates about climate, water, forests, toxics, energy, food, biodiversity, and other environmental challenges of the twenty-first century. Organized thematically, the selections offer a truly global scope. Seventeen new readings discuss climate justice, environmental peacebuilding, globalization, land grabs, corporate environmentalism, climate adaptation, gender, disaster risk, resilience, and the future of global environmental politics in the wake of the “Rio+20” global summit of 2012.This book stresses the underlying questions of power, interests, authority, and legitimacy that shape environmental debates, and it provides readers with a global range of perspectives on the critical challenges facing the planet and its people.

Revised and updated throughout, this unique anthology examines global environmental politics from a range of perspectives and captures the voices of both the powerless and the powerful. Paradigms of sustainability, environmental security, and ecological justice illustrate the many ways environmental challenges and their solutions are framed in contemporary international debates about climate, water, forests, toxics, energy, food, and biodiversity. Organized thematically, the selections offer a truly global scope. Seventeen new readings explore climate justice, globalization, land and water grabs, climate change and conflict, China’s international environmental relations, and the future of climate politics in the wake of the Paris Agreement. This book stresses the underlying questions of power, interests, authority, and legitimacy that shape environmental debates, and it provides readers with a global range of perspectives on the critical challenges facing the planet and its people. This new edition of Green Planet Blues connects directly with a wide-range of upper-level undergraduate and graduate-level courses.

Eight contributions written by professors of political science, government, and politics as well as researchers and program directors for environmental change, energy, and security projects provide insight into the process of environmental peacemaking, based on their experiences in a variety of international regions. An initial chapter makes a case for the process; successive chapters address the Baltic, South Asia, the Aral Sea basin, southern Africa, the Caspian Sea, and the US-Mexican border. Annotation (c)2003 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com).

The story of global cooperation between nations and peoples is a tale of dreamers goading us to find common cause in remedying humanity’s worst problems. But international institutions have also provided a tool for the powers that be to advance their own interests and stamp their imprint on the world. Mark Mazower’s Governing the World tells the epic story of that inevitable and irresolvable tension—the unstable and often surprising alchemy between ideas and power. From the beginning, the willingness of national leaders to cooperate has been spurred by crisis: the book opens in 1815, amid the rubble of the Napoleonic Empire, as the Concert of Europe was assembled with an avowed mission to prevent any single power from dominating the continent and to stamp out revolutionary agitation before it could lead to war. But if the Concert was a response to Napoleon, internationalism was a response to the Concert, and as courts and monarchs disintegrated they were replaced by revolutionaries and bureaucrats. 19th century internationalists included bomb-throwing anarchists and the secret policemen who fought them, Marxist revolutionaries and respectable free marketeers. But they all embraced nationalism, the age’s most powerful transformative political creed, and assumed that nationalism and internationalism would go hand in hand. The wars of the twentieth century saw the birth of institutions that enshrined many of those ideals in durable structures of authority, most notably the League of Nations in World War I and the United Nations after World War II. Throughout this history, we see that international institutions are only as strong as the great powers of the moment allow them to be. The League was intended to prop up the British empire. With Washington taking over world leadership from Whitehall, the United Nations became a useful extension of American power. But as Mazower shows us, from the late 1960s on, America lost control over the dialogue and the rise of the independent Third World saw a marked shift away from the United Nations and toward more pliable tools such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. From the 1990s to 2007, Governing the World centers on a new regime of global coordination built upon economic rule-making by central bankers and finance ministers, a regime in which the interests of citizens and workers are trumped by the iron logic of markets. Now, the era of Western dominance of international life is fast coming to an end and a new multi-centered global balance of forces is emerging. We are living in a time of extreme confusion about the purpose and durability of our international institutions. History is not prophecy, but Mark Mazower shows us why the current dialectic between ideals and power politics in the international arena is just another stage in an epic two-hundred-year story.

This title was first published in 2003. Environmental Human Rights redefines the political, ethical and legal relationships between the environment and human rights to claim the human rights to an environment free from toxic pollution and to natural resources. Through a focus on the operational dynamics of social power, this compelling book details how global capitalism subjugates concerns of human security and environmental protection to the values of allocative efficiency and economic growth. The capacity of social power to construct ethical norms and to determine the efficacy of law is examined to explain how ethical and legal concepts have been selectively applied to accommodate existing patterns of production, consumption and exchange that cause environmental degradation and human rights violations. By looking at how environmental values have been systematically excluded from the human rights discourse, the book claims that human rights politics and law has been constructed on double standards to accommodate the destructive forces of capitalism.

What it means for global sustainability when environmentalism is dominated by the concerns of the affluent—eco-business, eco-consumption, wilderness preservation. Over the last fifty years, environmentalism has emerged as a clear counterforce to the environmental destruction caused by industrialization, colonialism, and globalization. Activists and policymakers have fought hard to make the earth a better place to live. But has the environmental movement actually brought about meaningful progress toward global sustainability? Signs of global “unsustainability” are everywhere, from decreasing biodiversity to scarcity of fresh water to steadily rising greenhouse gas emissions. Meanwhile, as Peter Dauvergne points out in this provocative book, the environmental movement is increasingly dominated by the environmentalism of the rich—diverted into eco-business, eco-consumption, wilderness preservation, energy efficiency, and recycling. While it's good that, for example, Barbie dolls' packaging no longer depletes Indonesian rainforest, and that Toyota Highlanders are available as hybrids, none of this gets at the source of the current sustainability crisis. More eco-products can just mean more corporate profits, consumption, and waste. Dauvergne examines extraction booms that leave developing countries poor and environmentally devastated—with the ruination of the South Pacific island of Nauru a case in point; the struggles against consumption inequities of courageous activists like Bruno Manser, who worked with indigenous people to try to save the rainforests of Borneo; and the manufacturing of vast markets for nondurable goods—for example, convincing parents in China that disposable diapers made for healthier and smarter babies. Dauvergne reveals why a global political economy of ever more—more growth, more sales, more consumption—is swamping environmental gains. Environmentalism of the rich does little to bring about the sweeping institutional change necessary to make progress toward global sustainability.

The worst chemical disaster ever could be happening right now. In India and Bangladesh between forty and eighty million people are at risk of consuming too much arsenic from well water that might have already caused one hundred thousand cancer cases and thousands of deaths. Many millions elsewhere in South-East Asia and South America may soon suffer a similar fate. Venomous Earth is the story of this tragedy: the geology, the biology, the politics and the history. It starts in Ancient Greece, touches down in today's North America and takes in William Morris, alchemy, farming, medicine, mining and a cosmetic that killed two popes.

How do race and nature work as terrains of power? From eighteenth-century claims that climate determined character to twentieth-century medical debates about the racial dimensions of genetic disease, concepts of race and nature are integrally connected, woven into notions of body, landscape, and nation. Yet rarely are these complex entanglements explored in relation to the contemporary cultural politics of difference. This volume takes up that challenge. Distinguished contributors chart the traffic between race and nature across sites including rainforests, colonies, and courtrooms. Synthesizing a number of fields—anthropology, cultural studies, and critical race, feminist, and postcolonial theory—this collection analyzes diverse historical, cultural, and spatial locations. Contributors draw on thinkers such as Fanon, Foucault, and Gramsci to investigate themes ranging from exclusionary notions of whiteness and wilderness in North America to linguistic purity in Germany. Some essayists focus on the racialized violence of imperial rule and evolutionary science and the biopolitics of race and class in the Guatemalan civil war. Others examine how race and nature are fused in biogenetic discourse—in the emergence of “racial diseases” such as sickle cell anemia, in a case of mistaken in vitro fertilization in which a white couple gave birth to a black child, and even in the world of North American dog breeding. Several essays tackle the politics of representation surrounding environmental justice movements, transnational sex tourism, and indigenous struggles for land and resource rights in Indonesia and Brazil. Contributors. Bruce Braun, Giovanna Di Chiro, Paul Gilroy, Steven Gregory, Donna Haraway, Jake Kosek, Tania Murray Li, Uli Linke, Zine Magubane, Donald S. Moore, Diane Nelson, Anand Pandian, Alcida Rita Ramos, Keith Wailoo, Robyn Wiegman

This volume brings together contributions from prominent philosophers, political scientists and other scholars on the challenges that globalization poses to traditional environmental values.