Laguna Lake, the largest lake in the Philippines, supplies Manila's dense urban region with fish and water while operating as a sink for its stormflows and wastes. Transforming the lake to deliver these multiple urban ecological functions, however, has generated resource conflicts and contradictions that unfold unevenly across space. In Urban Ecologies on the Edge, Kristian Karlo Saguin tracks the politics of resource flows and unpacks the narratives of Laguna Lake as Manila's resource frontier. Provisioning the city (...) and keeping it safe from floods are both frontier-making processes that bring together contested socioecological imaginaries, practices, and relations. Combining fieldwork and historical accounts, Saguin demonstrates how people--powerful and marginalized--interact with the state and the environment to produce the unequal landscapes of urbanization at and beyond the city's edge. (shrink)

There are many ways to describe cities. As a physical environment, more so than many other environments, they are at least an extension of our present intentions. But cities are not confined to the moment. Built spaces are also in conversation with the past and oriented toward the future as physical manifestations of our values and priorities. But even with all of the ways we have to describe cities we do not normally think of them as in any way akin (...) to the “natural” environment. City and country, nature and culture, are opposed. We move through cities differently, with a different set of values, whether articulated or not. Consider just one small example: Even the most jaded urban dweller may hesitate to sully the environment around him when he perceives it to be something other than a product of the human community. Though we have all seen trash in a national park, we suspect (or at least hope) that there is a kind of hesitancy that occurs with a person wondering what to do with her candy wrappers on a trail in Yosemite. On the other hand, a visitor to my home, Greenwich Village, will usually not think twice about tossing his cigarette butts on the ground as he walks toward his next destination. (shrink)

Environmental aesthetics has become a matter of concern to many different groups in recent years—to conservationists, to legislators, reluctantly to industrialists, and indeed to the public at large. This interest seems to have a clear purpose. It is regarded as an effort, belated and desperate, to save the resources and beauties of our natural world from the possibility of complete and irrecoverable exploitation, and from the disfigurement and loss that must follow. It is an attempt to change the atmosphere from (...) a toxic medium that is often impossible to escape back to one that is fresh and invigorating. It is a proposal to rebuild our cities before they become unredeemable wastelands of physical and social decay. (shrink)

Contemporary Arabic speculative fiction, particularly following the Arab Spring uprisings, is often interpreted as part of an emerging trend of Arab dystopias responding to political upheaval. These texts' ecological concerns, which produce diverse conceptions of futurity, are understudied. This article examines how urban futures are envisioned in an Egyptian speculative fiction text, Ahmed Naji's _Istikhdām al-ḥayāh_ (2014; _Using Life_, 2017). Putting _Using Life_ in dialogue with discussions on Gulf futurism and Arabfuturisms, the article first examines the text's depiction of (...) hegemonic techno-futurist visions, aimed at manifesting a global utopian future through urban design and development projects. The author argues that this futurist discourse, which has affinities with Gulf futurism, operates through the dual enframing of nature and history, and then demonstrates how the text resists this techno-futurist vision through an assemblage aesthetics that echoes Sulaiman Majali's Arabfuturism(s) manifesto. The novel's assemblage aesthetics, which is central to its conception of counter-futures, redefines the human relationship to urban ecologies and to literature through an emphasis on embodiment. (shrink)

This book analyzes how science-based nature protection campaigns are transforming society and the environment through extensive fieldwork in China's southwestern cities. Furthermore, it examines the role of ecology in constituting state power and social inequality.

The article presents the results of an interdisciplinary (psychological, behavioral, sociological, urban) survey of residents of elite residential complexes of Odessa regarding theirs urban infrastructure preferences, as well as the degree of satisfaction with their place of residence. It was found that respondents are characterized by a high level of satisfaction with their place of residence. It was also revealed that the security criterion of the district is the main one for choosing a place of residence, which indicates (...) the unmet townspeople need for the general safety of the urban environment. Based on the obtained empirical data, an analysis of significant factors affecting the urban infrastructure preferences of residents from the point of view of the systemic concept of the social ecology of the city is conducted. Obtained data viewed that living in high-rise (multi-storey) buildings correlates with a low level of satisfaction, while low-rise buildings positively correlate with such significant aspects as the view from the window, a small number of neighbors, proximity to the sea, and effective house management. Multivariate regression revealed a positive relationship with such infrastructure objects as shopping and entertainment centers, postal services, places of family leisure, etc., which indicates the dominance of the consumer strategy in the behavior of the city resident. The collected empirical material served as the base for identifying the behavioral trends of the townspeople and allowed to simulate a qualitative profile of the activity of everyday support and personal development. (shrink)

Connolly draws on the recent changes in the Malaysian state of Penang to open up new perspectives on urban development, governance and the politics of place. Reviewing the role of residents, activists, planners and other experts in socio-natural changes and urban regeneration, it builds an important new framework of landscape political ecology.

Interdisciplinarity has been a key term in the ecological debate ever since its advent in the early 1960s. The paper addresses these historical links and how the two terms ‘interdisciplinary’ and ‘ecology’ have influenced each other. The later concept ‘sustainable development’ is also truly interdisciplinary, including physical, biological, socio-economic and cultural, as well as normative, mechanisms, contexts and effects operating at scales ranging from the microscopic to the macroscopic. Policies to promote sustainable development need to be based on the (...) type of interdisciplinary thinking that has been advocated for several decades within the ecological debate. This applies not least to research into the sustainability aspects of urban development, the case discussed in this paper. Despite longstanding requests for interdisciplinarity, the development within the academic world has proceeded in the opposite direction. Many of the most influential metatheoretical perspectives virtually prohibit, or at best strongly discourage, the inclusion of insights about certain parts of reality. Here, critical realism could play a very important role as an underlabourer of interdisciplinarity. (shrink)

With a few notable exceptions, urban garden scholarship tends to be either celebratory or critical of the role urban gardens play in wider political, social, cultural, economic and ecological dynamics. Drawing on urban political ecology scholarship, this article explores the question of nature within scholarship on urban gardens. I argue that failing to adequately scrutinize the co-constitutive character of nature and society has led some scholars to overlook the potential for urban gardens to achieve (...) broader socio-political goals, and led others to overstate the potential. Employing a political ecology approach to urban garden analysis clarifies the material and discursive role of nature in urban garden practice, and ultimately contributes to untangling the potential and limits of urban gardens as sites of socio-political change. (shrink)

To establish the evaluation index system of urbanization innovation level and ecological efficiency, the entropy method is applied to measure the comprehensive index of urbanization innovation level and ecological efficiency, the VAR model is established, and empirical measurement is used to study the internal relationship and dynamic development between urbanization innovation level and ecological efficiency. The empirical results show the following: The overall development of the innovation level in 30 cities in China is uneven, there is a large gap between (...) the urban innovation level in backwards areas and economically developed areas, and there is a certain coupling effect between the urban innovation level and ecological efficiency. There is a long-term dynamic equilibrium relationship between the urban innovation level and ecological efficiency, which will exert certain pressure on the ecological environment in the process of urbanization. However, the continuous improvement of urbanization will have a positive impact on the improvement of the ecological environment. The improvement of ecological efficiency will also promote the improvement of the urban innovation level. Therefore, this paper puts forwards policy suggestions to promote the harmonious development of urbanization and the ecological environment and provides a reference for realizing the balanced development of urbanization and ecological efficiency in China. (shrink)

The basic motivation for this article is to explore the critical, yet hopeful vision which urban theologians - and specifically ecofeminist urban theologians - have for justice, reconciliation and abundance of life in urban Gauteng. This requires that urban spatiality, with its conflicting sides in a rampantly capitalist Gauteng, needs to be understood. It also requires an understanding of how urbanity and ecology may - yet so often do not - overlap. According to ecofeminist theologian (...) Anne Primavesi, space and place needs to be understood in relation to the earth as the body of God - a web of interrelated and interconnected subjects and living beings which constitute the earth with its various ecosystems. This belies the established understanding that space and place is created mostly through the anthropocentric activity and mastery of people. Such an ecological understanding of space, place and urbanity leads to my exploration of a missiology of space as the manifestation of the presence of God in the spaces of nature and human civilisation. I conclude by proposing the practice of urban mission as making the liturgical and sacramental links between ecology, space, and the reclamation of urban space as sacred by Christian and other agents of urban activism. (shrink)

Thirty years after the death of Michel Foucault, notwithstanding the fact that his thought has profoundly shaped the contemporary reflection and contributed to move beyond structuralism, the Urban Political Ecology in general and the Urban Political Ecology of water in particular are still dominated by Marxist-inspired theoretical frameworks. This paper aims to provide a theoretical rationale for the development and implementation of a Foucauldian ap-proach to the UPE of water. We show how a Foucauldian approach could (...) shed light on the hydro-social cycle and could be the basis of a specific form of scholarly political engagement. (shrink)

Considering that the development of urbanization cannot be separated from the application of landscape pattern evolution, in order to improve the development level of ecocity, a modeling analysis of ecological urban landscape pattern evolution based on multisource remote sensing data is proposed. Taking ecotype city as the research object, the remote sensing images of ecological urban landscape pattern are screened by using multisource remote sensing data and nonremote sensing data as the basic data. CA-Markov model is constructed and (...) the evolution of ecological urban landscape pattern is analyzed. The experimental results show that, from 2005 to 2020, the development level of urbanization process is higher and higher and the area of building land patches is increasing, which reduces the fragmentation of building land patches. However, the landscape of cultivated land and green space is less and less, and the distribution of the patches also causes uneven phenomenon, which leads to the gradual decline of ecological urban landscape diversity. In the ecological urban landscape pattern, the degree of fragmentation and diversity of urban landscape is reduced due to the high connection and coverage of the construction land. (shrink)

This article demonstrates how white Christianity in urban South Africa is fated by demographic change. The repeal of apartheid in 1994 enacted some sociocultural changes in urban South Africa. The white population exited the city and town centres, followed by the black South Africans. The historical relationship of the government under the National Party (NP) and the Dutch Reformed Church (DRC) led to latters’ redundancy in the cities. The cultural development towards multiculturalism led to polycentric focus where the (...) suburban peripheries and the city centres experience some form of socio- and cultural-economic developments. Two proposals are made to redress the situation. Firstly, a rethinking was suggested of the theology of the city, which should always demonstrate solidarity with the poor and the marginalised trapped within the decadent city culture. Secondly, a missiological refocus was suggested, which should pursue, embrace and include activities that are not paternalistic. (shrink)

Urban residents have the potential to play a key role in helping to facilitate ecological resilience of wilderness areas and ecosystems beyond the city by helping ensure the migration of nonhuman climate refugee populations. Three ethical frameworks related to this issue could determine whether we have an ethical duty to help nonhuman climate refugee populations: ethical individualism, ethical holism, and species ethics. Using each of these frameworks could support the stronger view that policy makers and members of the public (...) have a moral duty to mitigate the impacts of climate induced migration, or the weaker claim that these impacts should be taken into account when making land-use and planning decisions in urban contexts. (shrink)

This book focuses on the regional political ecologies (RPEs) of environmental conflicts in India. It explores broadly, landscape-based analyses of political, economic and social issues, which impact environmental changes, challenges and conflicts at local and micro-local levels. The chapters in this volume examine the intervention of different stakeholders in the management of various regional ecological landscapes in India, including forests, rivers, canals, creeks and wetlands. The volume is an interdisciplinary endeavour, weaving together contextual narratives through a combination of approaches from (...) sociology, anthropology, geography, political studies and environmental history. Using such core approaches, the book studies the place-based dynamisms within the regional environmental conflicts in the selected conservation landscapes. It provides empirical reflections on transboundary issues, rural-urban transitions, middle-class environmentalism, identity conflicts, decentralized natural resource management and the role of political institutions. Regional Political Ecologies and Environmental Conflicts in India will be of great interest to students and scholars of Political Ecology and South Asian Environmental Studies. (shrink)

River conservation is rooted in the importance of managing watersheds (D.A.S.) in Indonesia, with 42,210 watersheds forming the basis for management policies. To ensure ecosystem sustainability, these policies consider various aspects such as land conditions, water quality, and regional land use. However, the reality on the ground shows that rapid urbanization and a lack of public awareness have led to river pollution and damage to riverbanks. Therefore, more robust conservation efforts are required to achieve environmental justice. This research employs a (...) normative juridical method and focuses on the Cirebon area. The findings reveal that implementing urban river conservation policies in Cirebon includes controlling illegal construction, conducting community outreach on the importance of river protection, and executing environmental rehabilitation programs to raise awareness of the negative impacts of unauthorized development. Despite progress in data collection and action planning, challenges such as community resistance and budget constraints continue to hinder the effectiveness of policy implementation. Collaboration between the Government, communities, and other stakeholders is essential to ensure the success of these conservation efforts. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Departing from the hegemonic position of epidemiology in population physical activity research and policy, I argue for the significance of a complementary, holistic approach: human movement ecology. The argument is developed in two steps. In a first step, and using perspectives from body ecology and eco-philosophy, I emphasize the potential in movement of a ’dynamic and spontaneous ecologization’, which opens for the development of ecological consciousness and sustainable practice. In a second step, I test HME towards a (...) ’hard case’: everyday routine walking in urban settings. Even here, and paying particular attention to the nature of habitual movement and the need for a ’greening’ of urban environments, I point to a significant movement ecological potential. I conclude that HME provides a fertile and complementary conceptual alternative to PA epidemiology. The challenge of low population PA levels is probably best met with facilitating for movement as an integral part of a sustainable everyday life. Actually, with an increased realization of HME ideals in practice, instrumental PA policies would become less relevant and, on a longer-term basis, perhaps not needed at all. (shrink)

Urban agriculture in Cuba is often promoted as an example of how agroecological farming can overcome the need for oil-derived inputs in food production. This article examines the geographical implications of Cuba’s low-carbon urban farming based on fieldwork in five organopónicos in Pinar del Río. The article charts how energy flows, biophysical relations, and socially mediated ecological processes are spatially organised to enable large-scale urban agricultural production. To explain this production system, the literature on Cuban agroecology postulates (...) a model of two distinct modes: agroecology versus industrial agriculture. Yet this distinction inadequately explains Cuba’s urban agriculture: production in the organopónicos rather sits across categories, at once involving agroecological, organic-industrial, and petro-industrial features. To resolve this contradiction, a more nuanced framework is developed that conceptualises production systems by means of their geographical configuration. This provides analytical clarity—and a political strategy for a low-carbon, degrowth agenda. (shrink)

An ecological study of the city is a new endeavor. Up to now, we have mostly been given inquiries dealing with transportation, housing, economic activity, recreational facilities, etc. All of this adds up to an attempt to reach partial solutions for problems affecting sub-systems. Urbanists and city planners have tried to reach a synthesis of these data whenever they were available.There is an ever increasing need to approach urban problems by borrowing the concepts and the methodology of ecology (...) The origins of this science stem from the research pertaining to plant and animal behavior in their natural habitat. Highly complex adaptation patterns could frequently be observed which allowed a large number of species not only to survive but also to attain a certain level of compatibility with other species. One need not be a determinist to recognize the common basis of adaptation for man and other animals and to tie together the physical and biological needs which underlie more complex individual and group behavior. Thus, for instance, von Frisch and Wilson - have recently redefined the biological bases of the noosphere. (shrink)

John Perry is known for his work on personal identity, and Jon Barwise, Director of the Center for the Study of Language and Information at Stanford, is a logician who works on model theory. Their cryptically titled collaboration is a first book-length foray into the semantics of natural language. Situations and Attitudes is programmatic even where detailed, and a sequel is promised which will carry through the program extensively and with full-dress technical detail. The program, for which the basic theoretical (...) machinery, the central categories, and the broad rationale are provided in this book, is an "innocent" model-theoretic semantics of natural language, in the spirit of realism and with debts to the likes of Putnam, Kripke, Donnellan, Montague, and psychologist J. J. Gibson. The authors describe their realism as "ecological" because they view meaning as a ubiquitous phenomenon of sentient organisms' natural and necessary attunement to constraints on the flow of information throughout their surrounds. They see an adequate semantic theory accounting for how language fits into the general flow of information. Their view is a realism not only in stressing the external significance of language, the primacy of its function of conveying information about the external world, but in seeing meaning itself as an objective uniformity in that world, a systematic relation of a special sort between different types of situations. The "innocence" of this semantics emerges in its leading concern--a correct treatment of the famously troublesome verbs of attitude which are used to embed sentences and so to report perception and cognition. Barwise and Perry refuse to sacrifice the view that sentences embedded in attitude reports "work just as they do elsewhere," i.e., are about situations, parts of the real world. The broader innocence is that of non-collaboration in the "Fregean tradition" of philosophical semantics which is "seriously flawed" by its inappropriate emphases, due to preoccupation with mathematics and symbolic logic, on univocal expressions, eternal sentences, entailments between sentences, arbitrariness and uniqueness of the name-named mapping, and a general tendency to think that all information available from an utterance must be part of its interpretation. The book counters that tradition on these points and others. (shrink)

There are inconsistencies in the treatment and attitudes of human beings to animals and much confusion in thinking about what are appropriate conditions for using and keeping animals. This article outlines some of these considerations and then proposes guidelines for designing animal management systems. In the first place, the global and local ecological effects of all animal management systems must be considered and an environment designed that will not rock the biospherical boat. The main points to consider are the interrelatedness (...) of living things with each other and the environment, the self-sustaining nature of ecosystems, and the importance of diversity in the stability and maintenance of ecosystems. These can and should be taken into account when assessing animal management. They are illustrated by examples of companion/urban dogs, as well as farm, zoo, and circus animals. The environment must also be considered from the point of view of the ethological needs of the animals. There are two possible approaches to this: (1) the reductionist approach, illustrated by the choice experimental tests; and (2) a holistic, evolutionist approach that concentrates on the degree of behavioral restriction and the identification of distress. The assessment of an animal's ethological needs, and thus the ethological soundness of an environment, must take into account the species needs (communication system, species-specific characteristics of the brain receptors and cognition) and the individual's needs (his past experience). The behavioral effects of domestication and how distress can be assessed are discussed. Different ethical positions toward animals and their treatment are briefly outlined, and it is argued that, provided animals are in ecologically and ethologically sound environments, their use by human beings is ethically acceptable. The animal-human association should be characterized by symbiosis—mutual benefit—rather than a parasitic or exploitative relationship—employer to employee, rather than master to slave. (shrink)

We are living a historical phase in which phenomena of enormous significance intersect: the digital turn, the “ecological transition”, the pandemic contingency, against the backdrop of a unique event in the history of human civilization and of Earth itself: for the first time behaviours and choices of a living species are among the main causes of a biotic transition.The way of thinking, planning, building cities and houses faces with new scenarios. Human and social sciences are called to a deep and (...) fundamental reflection, in the sign of complexity and of the overcoming of scientisms. This contribution, starting from a radical re-thinking of dwelling, intends to provide a critical review of some concrete perspectives of “urban and housing transition” towards new spatial and relational models. (shrink)

Climate change continues to have recognizable impacts across the globe, as weather patterns shift and impacts accumulate and intensify. In this wider context, urban areas face significant challenges as they attempt to mitigate dynamic changes at the local level — changes such as those caused by intensifying weather events, the disruption of critical supplies, and the deterioration of local ecosystems. One field that could help urban areas address these challenges is conservation biology. However, this paper presents the argument (...) that work in urban contexts may be especially difficult for conservation biologists. In light of current climate change predictions, conservation biology may need to abandon some of its core values in favor of commitments guiding urban ecology. More broadly, this essay aims to reconcile the goals of restoration and conservation, by reconceptualizing what an ecosystem is, in the context of a world threatened by global climate change. (shrink)

We set out by noting the preference for circular flows in ecological thought, and the related abhorrence of inefficiency and waste that Western ecology shares with mainstream economic thinking. This has often been manifest in a shared disdain both for uncontained, free-burning fire and for ‘unmanaged’ sexual desire. The paper constructs a ‘pyrosexual’ counter-narrative that explores the mutually constitutive and generative implication of sex and fire. Bringing together the solar ecology of Georges Bataille, feminist and queer thinking about (...) sexuality and reproduction, and a range of ways of theorising biological life and fire, we explore how fire mediates between organismic desire and the energetic dynamics of the earth and solar system. The first section takes a genealogical approach to fire and sex that traces their entanglement from the initial ‘assembling’ of fire through to the emergence of a fire-handling creature. The second section looks at how fire has been contained and intensified by human actors, and the role that heat-driven transformations of inorganic matter have played in the incitement and channeling of desire in urban spaces. The third section addresses the development of industrial ‘heat engines’ and the implications for desire and reproduction of tapping vast reservoirs of subterranean solar energy. We round off by beginning to consider what alternative possibilities might lie in the renegotiation of sex and fire on a planet undergoing rapid change. (shrink)

This book presents a comprehensive view of an important new field in human geography and interdisciplinary studies of nature-society relations. Tracing the development of political ecology from its origins in geography and ecological anthropology in the 1970s, to its current status as an established field, the book investigates how late twentieth-century developments in social and ecological theories are brought together to create a powerful framework for comprehending environmental problems. Making Political Ecology argues for an inclusionary conceptualization of the (...) field that absorbs empirical studies from urban, rural, First World and Third World contexts and the theoretical insights of feminism, poststructuralism, neo-Marxism, and non-equilibrium ecology. Extracts from the writings of key figures in political ecology provide an empirical grounding for these abstract concepts. Neumann's book will convince readers of political ecology's particular suitability for grappling with the most difficult questions concerning social justice, environmental change, and human relationships with nature. (shrink)

The author analyses an approach within the framework of urban sociology, characteristic to Chicago School. This approach combined certain biological premises in understanding the city with the typical sociological approach, seeing the city as a superorganism and a product of nature, which is why it is called the ecological theory of the city. In this regard, the connection between biology and sociology, as well as the theory of Robert Ezra Park and Ernest Watson Burgess, as typical representatives of this (...) sociological trend, will be the subject of special analysis, aiming to bring the reader closer to the ecological approach in urban sociology. The topic of particular interest is Park’s idea of the city as a product of nature, with symbiotic substructure and cultural superstructure, as well as Burgess’s idea of city growth and the theory of the concentric zones of city structure. Other issues of the ecological theory of the city were also analysed. (shrink)

An oasis of authorized criticism in the 1960s and the 1970s, and a privileged public arena for ‘extreme non-conformist’ intellectuals in the same period, ecology was also the matrix for the national movements which precipitated the end of the decaying party-state at the end of the 1980s and which had been in gestation since the late 1960s. Ideal metaphor for the fall of a system emblematized by the catastrophe at Chernobyl (April 1986), the ecological crisis - the crisis in (...) the relationship between nature and urban space - made it possible to understand the full extent of the post-war upheavals that had taken place at the heart of Soviet society. The rapid, huge-scale industrialization and urbanization of the country had produced a new educated middle class of ‘specialists’ (technicians, engineers, applied research managers, economists and administrators, and so on), which in the early 1960s constituted the hard core of the first generation of Soviets to be a majority of urban-dwellers. If it was not embodied, as in Western countries, in political movements or parties, the ecological cause was no less institutionalized. The horticultural societies (tovariscestva) on the edge of towns (ogorodniki), the ‘nature protection brigades’ which organized reafforestation campaigns (DOP), the Society for the Protection of Nature (VOOP), or local historical and ethnographical societies (kraevedenie) had a considerable number of supporters. It allowed the expression of a very extensive range of individual and collective sentiments, and of reactions both rejecting and adapting to a radically new natural, social and cultural environment - that of the town and a larger community. For a disorientated society, it was a question of re-appropriating its immediate, daily environment, of attempting to impose, individually or collectively, meaning on its existence and its social trajectory. Ecological sentiment was thus intimately bound up with the emergence of an ‘urban civilization’ in the Soviet Union under Brezhnev. (shrink)

We know that our gas-guzzling cars are warming the planet, the pesticides and fertilizers from farms are turning rivers toxic, and the earth has run out of space for the mountains of unrecycled waste our daily consumption has left in its wake. We’ve heard copious accounts of our impact—as humans, as a society—on the natural world. But this is not a one-sided relationship. Lost in these dire and scolding accounts has been the impact on us and our well-being. You sense (...) it while walking on a sandy beach, or in a wild, woody forest, or when you catch sight of wildlife, or even while gardening in your backyard. Could it be that the natural environment is an essential part of our happiness? Yes, says Eric Lambin emphatically in _An Ecology of Happiness_. Using a very different strategy in addressing environmental concerns, he asks us to consider that there may be no better reason to value and protect the health of the planet than for our own personal well-being. In this clever and wide-ranging work, Lambin draws on new scientific evidence in the fields of geography, political ecology, environmental psychology, urban studies, and disease ecology, among others, to answer such questions as: To what extent do we need nature for our well-being? How does environmental degradation affect our happiness? What can be done to protect the environment and increase our well-being at the same time? Drawing on case studies from Asia, Africa, Europe, and North America, Lambin makes a persuasive case for the strong link between healthy ecosystems and happy humans. Unique in its scope and evenhanded synthesis of research from many fields, _An Ecology of Happiness _offers a compelling human-centered argument that is impossible to overlook when we marvel at murmurations of starlings or seek out the most brilliant fall foliage: nature makes our steps a little lighter and our eyes a little brighter. What better reason to protect an ecosystem or save a species than for our own pleasure? (shrink)

We know that our gas-guzzling cars are warming the planet, the pesticides and fertilizers from farms are turning rivers toxic, and the earth has run out of space for the mountains of unrecycled waste our daily consumption has left in its wake. We’ve heard copious accounts of our impact—as humans, as a society—on the natural world. But this is not a one-sided relationship. Lost in these dire and scolding accounts has been the impact on us and our well-being. You sense (...) it while walking on a sandy beach, or in a wild, woody forest, or when you catch sight of wildlife, or even while gardening in your backyard. Could it be that the natural environment is an essential part of our happiness? Yes, says Eric Lambin emphatically in An Ecology of Happiness. Using a very different strategy in addressing environmental concerns, he asks us to consider that there may be no better reason to value and protect the health of the planet than for our own personal well-being. In this clever and wide-ranging work, Lambin draws on new scientific evidence in the fields of geography, political ecology, environmental psychology, urban studies, and disease ecology, among others, to answer such questions as: To what extent do we need nature for our well-being? How does environmental degradation affect our happiness? What can be done to protect the environment and increase our well-being at the same time? Drawing on case studies from Asia, Africa, Europe, and North America, Lambin makes a persuasive case for the strong link between healthy ecosystems and happy humans. Unique in its scope and evenhanded synthesis of research from many fields, An Ecology of Happiness offers a compelling human-centered argument that is impossible to overlook when we marvel at murmurations of starlings or seek out the most brilliant fall foliage: nature makes our steps a little lighter and our eyes a little brighter. What better reason to protect an ecosystem or save a species than for our own pleasure? (shrink)

Human behavioral ecology (HBE) began as an attempt to explain human economic, reproductive, and social behavior using neodarwinian theory in concert with theory from ecology and economics, and ethnographic methods. HBE has addressed subsistence decision-making, cooperation, life history trade-offs, parental investment, mate choice, and marriage strategies among hunter-gatherers, herders, peasants, and wage earners in rural and urban settings throughout the world. Despite our rich insights into human behavior, HBE has very rarely been used as a tool to (...) help the people with whom we work. This article introduces a special issue of Human Nature which explores the application of HBE to significant world issues through the design and critique of public policy and international development projects. The articles by Tucker, Shenk, Leonetti et al., and Neil were presented at the 104th annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association (AAA) in Washington, D.C., in December 2005, in the first organized session of the nascent Evolutionary Anthropology Section (EAS). We conclude this introduction by summarizing some theoretical challenges to applying HBE, and ways in which evolutionary anthropologists can contribute to solving tough world issues. (shrink)

This article analyses and interprets the works of Friedensreich Hundertwasser (1928–2000) as a source of inspiration for environmental ethics and offers an extended model of the Ecological Self based on an interpretation of his works. Hundertwasser was a prominent Jewish-Austrian artist and environmental activist, yet despite his commitment to environmental issues, he has not received the attention he deserves from the environmental ethics community. His works and writings suggest a critique and reformulation of the well-known concept of the Ecological Self. (...) This concept implies that humans are essentially embedded in the natural world – that the Self is porous and open rather than disengaged and atomistic. This article suggests an alternative, holistic and extended version of this concept. It assesses and incorporates additional layers found between humans and nature – clothing, architecture, urban environments, and social and political environments. (shrink)

This paper investigates practice, frameworks and philosophy in the field of ecological management, a novel integrative approach to closing the gap between ecological and economic theoretical models and ecological and economic behavior. First, I will present the current status in this emerging field and discuss management in relation to various sub-disciplines, including agroecology, circular economy, industrial ecology, and urban sustainability. This provides a basis to analyze the theoretical frameworks found in profitable, ecologically-based businesses and identify key general features (...) that characterize this approach, notably the relationships between: an enterprise’s diversity and its economic resiliency; zero waste policies and societal and environmental impacts; and affordances of the local environment and business’ long-term economic viability. Finally, the philosophical issues looming behind are discussed, notably problems regarding interdisciplinarity and the relation of ethical frameworks with management. Through use of the model-centered philosophy of science to disentangle some of these conceptual problems, I argue that ecological management has a unique place in sustainable development as an independent exploratory tool for constructing and testing economic and ethical models in the Anthropocene. (shrink)

This article engages the French pragmatism of Laurent Thévenot, Luc Boltanski and Bruno Latour in debates on how to forge a moral-political sociology of ecological valuation, justification and critique. Picking up the debate initiated by Thévenot on the possible emergence of a novel ‘green’ order of worth, the article juxtaposes the sociology of critical capacity of Boltanski and Thévenot with the actor-network theory of Bruno Latour. In doing so, the article suggests that each of these three pragmatic sociologists succeeds, in (...) characteristically different ways, in theoretically articulating an important but partial socio-political grammar of ecological worth. This claim is substantiated by invoking three case studies into environmental critique and compromise, on transnational carbon markets, urban sustainability projects, and Japanese whaling, respectively. Against this backdrop, the article concludes that – when read together as grammarians of the ecological bond – pragmatic sociology provides important insights into the bounded multiplicity of nature’s worth in political modernity. (shrink)

Though past commentators have attacked cities as corrupt, dirty places, it is almost too obvious to need stating that a sustainable future depends on them. This is because most people live in cities and because the streamlined use of urban space brings a wide range of efficiencies. Simultaneously, urban living and associated technologies may impact psychology such that people see humans and their cities as outside of nature, which has been shown to reduce concern for the wellbeing of (...) the planet. Exploring these points in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, we speculate on psychologically fueled environmental consequences of remote technologies. One possibility is that they may diminish contact with what we colloquially call “nature,” thereby reducing concern for it. Another possibility is that remote technologies may promote personalized work rhythms, allowing people more time in the outdoors, amplifying concern for the environment. Recognizing that vulnerable segments of the population are currently excluded from this second option, we optimistically sketch scenarios in which technologies may—somewhat ironically—help humankind escape technological entrapment, freeing people from a variety of backgrounds to reconnect in caring ways with nature. (shrink)

Rosario, Argentina, a city of more than one million people strategically located on the Paraná River in the heart of a fertile agricultural region, is home to a significant industrial corridor where ongoing urbanization for industry, including that associated with the port complex and agroexport industries, vies for real estate space with peri-urban and urban farming production. The city is also the site of thriving municipal programs seeking to change food production and consumption outcomes through urban and (...) peri-urban agriculture projects rooted in agroecology. This paper identifies the socio-natures critical for the formation and endurance of these agroecology assemblages. Based on interviews with 30 stakeholders in government, civil society, and agricultural production, we describe the integrated approach to environmental, social, and economic sustainability embedded in Rosario’s institutional agroecology programs. In particular, we discuss the actors and strategies, discursive renderings of socio-natures, and the marketing of agroecological materialities that form and are formed by these assemblages. We also discuss the power dynamics embedded in sustaining urban and peri-urban agroecological projects through institutional means. This research contributes to literature on agroecology, urban agriculture, and the urban metabolism through providing empirical examples of socio-natural entanglements in urban agroecological assemblages. (shrink)

Over the last several decades, scholars and practitioners have progressively acknowledged that we cannot consider cities as the place where nature stops anymore, resulting in urban environments being increasingly appreciated and theorized as hybrids between nature and culture, entities made of socio-ecological processes in constant transformation. Spanning the fields of political ecology, environmental studies, and sociology, this new direction in urban theory emerged in concert with global concern for sustainability and environmental justice. This volume explores the notion (...) that connecting with nature holds the key to a more progressive and liberatory politics. (shrink)

Climate change increasingly impacts the resilience of ecosystems and agricultural production. On the one hand, changing weather patterns negatively affect crop yields and thus global food security. Indeed, we live in an age where more than one billion people are going hungry, and this number is expected to rise as climate-induced change continues to displace communities and thus separate them from their means of food production (Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre 2015). In this context, if one accepts a humancentric ethic, then (...) the focus would be on addressing impacts to agricultural production, and thus food security (Borlaug 1997; Navin 2012). On the other hand, ecological resilience is also being impacted by climate change, as species go extinct or migrate due to fluctuating temperatures and shifting weather patterns. This reduction of resilience negatively impacts ecosystem services and the ability of the natural world to support life (Palmer and Larson 2014; Urban 2015). From an environmental holist perspective, then, one could argue that the ethical path would be to focus on reducing negative impacts to species and/or local ecosystems rather than increasing crop yields. Thus, there appears to be a tension between the prioritization of crop yields and the mitigation of ecosystem impacts. While this tension is well established in the agricultural literature (Kirschenmann 2010; Noll 2018), climatezas lochange exacerbates the situation, as agricultural lands are stressed and climate-induced migrations increase already high demands for foodstuffs, thus bringing the conflict to the forefront (Macdonald et al. 2015; Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations 2017a). (shrink)

Sagoff critiqued the exclusion of cultivated plants and animals from much of the body of work in ecology. However, there is a history of attempting to incorporate cultivated landscapes in ecology that goes back at least two decades, particularly in urban ecology. The subdiscipline of urban ecology has received relatively little attention in philosophy, although some of its methodologies, such as coupled human-natural systems research, have been critiqued. Here I will attempt to explicitly address (...) the conceptual limitations in ecology for studying cultivated ecosystems and evaluate these limitations in the context of coupled human-natural systems and socioecological research, urban ecosystem services frameworks, and actor-network theory. I argue that the history of cultivated organisms is highly germane to their ecology, necessitating the incorporation of human agency into ecological theory. However, human agency and nonhuman nature exist along a continuum of nature vs. culture. As a result, dualistic approaches to studying the role of human agency in ecosystem processes, such as socioecology and ecosystem services assessments—which explicitly separate humans from nature—have had limited success in cultivated landscapes. More fully integrated frameworks such as actor-network theory may better address ecological research questions in cultivated landscapes. (shrink)

This article examines the reasons for the limited interest in environmentalism in Judaism. The author suggests that the reasons are both historical and theological, Jews have been an urban people since the tenth century and they are also people of the book—that is a culture that sees any distraction from scholarly contemplation as less than worthy. However, over the past three decades there has been an interest and this is in response to the claim that the Judeo-Christian tradition is (...) to blame for the environmental crisis. The author challenges the notion that nature can be seen as the base of a core ethic of care pointing out that it is violent and does not care for the weak. The article challenges earth-based spirituality as it has appropriated the kabbalah, particularly the Skehinah and suggests that a misreading underpins this approach. (shrink)

Parental investment decisions guide parental actions regarding children’s productive work and are shaped by ecological context. Urban ecology enhances long-term payoffs to investment in human capital, increasing opportunity costs for work performed by children, and decreased workload should result. Using an embodied capital framework, self-reported data on urban and rural Indo-Fijian children’s work activities are compared. Results show higher workloads for older children, rural children, and girls. High scholastic achievement is associated with lower workloads for girls, but (...) not boys. This pattern is interpreted as daughter-biased investment in the context of urbanization. (shrink)