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"Consumption (Economics) -- Environmental aspects"
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The low-carbon good life
\"The Low-Carbon Good Life is about how to reverse and repair four interlocking crises arising from modern material consumption: the climate crisis, growing inequality, biodiversity loss, and food related ill-health. Across the world today and throughout history, good lives are characterised by healthy food, connections to nature, being active, togetherness, personal growth, a spiritual framework, and sustainable consumption. A low-carbon good life offers opportunities to live in ways that will bring greater happiness and contentment. Slower ways of living await. A global target of no more than one tonne of carbon per person would allow the poorest to consume more and everyone to find our models of low-carbon good lives. But dropping old habits is hard, and large scale impacts will need fresh forms of public engagement and citizen action. Local to national governments need to act; equally they need pushing by the power and collective action of citizens. Innovative and engaging and written in a style that combines storytelling with scientific evidence, this book will be of great interest to students and scholars of climate change, sustainability, environmental economics and sustainable consumption, as well as non-specialist readers concerned about the climate crisis\"-- Provided by publisher.
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Reoccupy Earth
Habit rules our lives. And yet climate change and the catastrophic future it portends, makes it clear that we cannot go on like this.
Our habits are integral to narratives of the good life, to social norms and expectations, as well as to economic reality. Such shared shapes are vital. Yet while many of our individual habits seem perfectly reasonable, when aggregated together they spell disaster. Beyond consumerism, other forms of life and patterns of dwelling are clearly possible. But how can we get there from here? Who precisely is the 'we' that our habits have created, and who else might we be?
Philosophy is about emancipation-from illusions, myths, and oppression. In Reoccupy Earth, the noted philosopher David Wood shows how an approach to philosophy attuned to our ecological existence can suspend the taken-for-granted and open up alternative forms of earthly dwelling. Sharing the earth, as we do, raises fundamental questions about space and time, place and history, territory and embodiment-questions that philosophy cannot directly answer but can help us to frame and to work out for ourselves. Deconstruction exposes all manner of exclusion, violence to the other, and silent subordination. Phenomenology and Whitehead's process philosophy offer further resources for an ecological imagination.
Bringing an uncommon lucidity, directness, and even practicality to sophisticated philosophical questions, Wood plots experiential pathways that disrupt our habitual existence and challenge our everyday complacency. In walking us through a range of reversals, transformations, and estrangements that thinking ecologically demands of us, Wood shows how living responsibly with the earth means affirming the ways in which we are vulnerable, receptive, and dependent, and the need for solidarity all round.
If we take seriously values like truth, justice, and compassion we must be willing to contemplate that the threat we pose to the earth might demand our own species' demise. Yet we have the capacity to live responsibly. In an unfashionable but spirited defense of an enlightened anthropocentrism, Wood argues that to deserve the privileges of Reason we must demonstrably deploy it through collective sustainable agency. Only in this way can we reinhabit the earth. Focusing not on big ideas but on habits, Wood plots pathways that disrupt our routine experience of the world and challenge our everyday complacency.The book offers an unfashionable but spirited defense of an enlightened anthropocentrism - one that insists not on the free human individual but on collective sustainable agency.Wood is one of the major figures in environmental philosophy and is especially adept at conveying complex ideas in compelling and lucid terms.
eBook
The shadows of consumption : consequences for the global environment
An environmentalist maps the hidden costs of overconsumption in a globalized world by tracing the environmental consequences of five commodities - automobiles, gasoline, refrigerators, beef and harp seals - throughout recent history and up to the present.
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Treading Softly
We are living beyond our means, running up debts both economic and ecological, consuming the planet's resources at rates not remotely sustainable. But it's hard to imagine a different way. How can we live without cheap goods and easy credit? How can we consume without consuming the systems that support life? How can we live well and live within our means? InTreading Softly, Thomas Princen helps us imagine an alternative. We need, he says, a new normal, an ecological order that is actually economical with resources, that embraces limits, that sees sustainable living not as a \"lifestyle\" but as a long-term connection to fresh, free-flowing water, fertile soil, and healthy food. The goal would be to live well by living well within the capacities of our resources. Princen doesn't offer a quick fix -- there's no list of easy ways to save the planet to hang on the refrigerator. He gives us instead a positive, realistic sense of the possible, with an abundance of examples, concepts, and tools for imagining, then realizing, how to live within our biophysical means.
eBook
Buy better consume less : create real environmental change
\"Making the effort to recycle, but drowning under all the packaging? Trying to buy ethical fashion, but struggling to see past the \"sustainable\" marketing campaigns? Confused whether to buy products with a low carbon footprint, or that are fairtrade, or palm-oil free? For too long, eco-responsibility has been shifted onto us, the consumers, forcing us to individually spend time and effort to take micro-actions and make the right choices to live sustainably. It's time to push back and demand change. With practical tips on how to see through corporations' greenwashing, hold them accountable and consume less, EthicalHour founder Sian Conway-Wood shows how we can create demand for sustainability in supply chains and put pressure on decision makers to put people and planet above profit.\"--Page 4 of cover.
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The shadows of consumption : consequences for the global environment
The Shadows of Consumption gives a hard-hitting diagnosis: many of the earth's ecosystems and billions of its people are at risk from the consequences of rising consumption. Products ranging from cars to hamburgers offer conveniences and pleasures; but, as Peter Dauvergne makes clear, global political and economic processes displace the real costs of consumer goods into distant ecosystems, communities, and timelines, tipping into crisis people and places without the power to resist. In The Shadows of Consumption, Peter Dauvergne maps the costs of consumption that remain hidden in the shadows cast by globalized corporations, trade, and finance. He traces the environmental consequences of five commodities: automobiles, gasoline, refrigerators, beef, and harp seals. In these fascinating histories we learn, for example, that American officials ignored warnings about the dangers of lead in gasoline in the 1920s; why China is now a leading producer of CFC-free refrigerators; and how activists were able to stop Canada's commercial seal hunt in the 1980s (but are unable to do so now). Dauvergne's innovative analysis allows us to see why so many efforts to manage the global environment are failing even as environmentalism is slowly strengthening. He proposes a guiding principle of \"balanced consumption\" for both consumers and corporations. We know that we can make things better by driving a fuel-efficient car, eating locally grown food, and buying energy-efficient appliances; but these improvements are incremental, local, and insufficient. More crucial than our individual efforts to reuse and recycle will be reforms in the global political economy to reduce the inequalities of consumption and correct the imbalance between growing economies and environmental sustainability.
eBook
Self-devouring growth : a planetary parable as told from Southern Africa
\"Under capitalism, economic growth is seen as the key to collective wellbeing. In Self-Devouring Growth Julie Livingston upends this notion, showing that while consumption-driven growth may seem to benefit a particular locale, it produces a number of unacknowledged, negative consequences that ripple throughout the wider world. Structuring the book as a parable in which the example of Botswana has lessons for the rest of the globe, Livingston shows how fundamental needs for water, food, and transportation become harnessed to what she calls self-devouring growth: an unchecked and unsustainable global pursuit of economic growth that threatens catastrophic environmental destruction. As Livingston notes, improved technology alone cannot stave off such destruction; what is required is a greater accounting of the web of relationships between humans, nonhuman beings, plants, and minerals that growth entails. Livingston contends that by failing to understand these relationships and the consequences of self-devouring growth we may be unknowingly consuming our future\"-- Provided by publisher.
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Green consumerism : an A-to-Z guide
Via 150 signed entries, Green Consumerism: An A-to-Z Guide offers a wide-ranging examination of green consumerism, one reflecting the diversity of views and debates surrounding the concept. The multiplicity of topics and disciplinary perspectives provides a useful survey of the nature of green consumerism, the forms it takes, the issues impacting it, and the practices it involves. Contributing authors also provide insights into the social and spacial constitution of green consumerism, its multifaceted and sometimes contested contours, and the ways it is embedded and shaped in relation to wider cultural, economic, political and environmental processes. Readers will derive a sense not only of what green consumerism has become, but more critically, how it might evolve, addressing both limitations and possibilities for real and meaningful change. Vivid photographs, searchable hyperlinks, numerous cross references, an extensive resource guide, and a clear, accessible writing style make the Green Society volumes ideal for classroom use as well as for research.
eBook
Treasures of the earth : need, greed, and a sustainable future
Would the world be a better place if human societies were somehow able to curb their desires for material goods? Saleem Ali's pioneering book links human wants and needs by providing a natural history of consumption and materialism with scientific detail and humanistic nuance.
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The Myth of Green Marketing
Smith analyses the role that social myths such as green marketing play in public understanding of the environmental crisis. Sure to raise controversy with its unique discussion of the cultural and social aspects of environmental issues.
eBook