Next World Conversations is inspired by a simple truth: Times of crisis catalyze visions of better worlds. Temporarily overshadowing the larger and longer-term catastrophes of climate change, ecological decline, and social injustice, the COVID-19 pandemic triggered dramatic transformations in how we work, learn, and interact. Even as loud voices demanded a return to business as usual, many of us realized that the old normal we had left behind was very deeply flawed. We will not go back. In...

Understanding ExtrACTIVISM surveys how contemporary resource extractive industry works and considers the responses it inspires in local citizens and activists. Chapters cover a range of extractive industries operating around the world, including logging, hydroelectric dams, mining, and oil and natural gas extraction. Taking an activist anthropological stance, Anna Willow examines how culture and power inform recent and ongoing disputes between projects’ proponents and opponents, beneficiar...

Post-Carbon Futures: Imagining (and Enacting) New Worlds through Transition Studies explores the multitude of possibilities for conceiving and creating fulfilling post-carbon ways of life.Offering diverse perspectives and abundant empirical examples, this robust volume sheds new light on how complex ecological, economic, and political factors contour processes of conscious cultural change. The works gathered here center contributors’ experiences and observations of life in...

This book theorizes the roles of optimism in anthropological thinking, research, writing, and practice. It sets out to explore optimism’s origins and implications, its conceptual and practical value, and its capacity to contribute to contemporary anthropological aims. In an era of extensive ecological disruption and social distress, this volume contemplates how an optimistic anthropology can energize the discipline while also contributing to bettering the lives, communities, and environmen...

This book offers a comprehensive and current look at the complex relationship between anthropology and activism. Activism has become a vibrant research topic within anthropology. Many scholars now embrace their own roles as engaged social actors, which has compelled reflexive attention to the anthropology/activism intersection and its implications. With contributions by emerging scholars as well as leading activist anthropologists, this volume illuminates the diverse ways in which the anth...

This timely volume examines resistance to natural resource extraction from a critical ethnographic perspective. Using a range of case studies from North, Central and South America, Australia, and Central Asia, the contributors explore how and why resistance movements seek to change extraction policies, evaluating their similarities, differences, successes and failures. A range of ongoing debates concerning environmental justice, risk and disaster, sacrifice zones, and the economic cycles o...

Environmental Activism on the Ground draws upon a wide range of interdisciplinary scholarship to examine small scale, local environmental activism, paying particular attention to Indigenous experiences. It illuminates the questions that are central to the ongoing evolution of the environmental movement while reappraising the history and character of late twentieth and early twenty-first environmentalism in Canada, the United States, and beyond. This collection considers the different ways ...

A truly comprehensive introduction to the topic, Understanding Sustainable Development is designed to give students on a wide range of courses an appreciation of the key concepts and theories of sustainable development.Fully updated, the third edition includes detailed coverage of the Sustainable Development Goals and their impact on global development. Major challenges and topics are explored through a range of international case studies and media examples which maintain ...

A philosopher and a scientist propose that sustainability can be understood as living well together without diminishing opportunity to live well in the future.Most people acknowledge the profound importance of sustainability, but few can define it. We are ethically bound to live sustainably for the sake of future generations, but what does that mean? In this book Randall Curren, a philosopher, and Ellen Metzger, a scientist, clarify normative aspects of sustainabil...

Concepts and their role in the evolution of modern environmental policy, with case studies of eleven influential concepts ranging from “environment” to “sustainable consumption.”Concepts are thought categories through which we apprehend the world; they enable, but also constrain, reasoning and debate and serve as building blocks for more elaborate arguments. This book traces the links between conceptual innovation in the environmental sphere and the evolution of en...

Prominent scholars and practitioners consider the role of global environmental politics in the face of increasing environmental stress.Humanity's collective impact on the Earth is vast. The rate and scale of human-driven environmental destruction is quickly outstripping our political and social capacities for managing it. We are in effect creating an Earth 2.0 on which the human signature is everywhere, a “new earth” in desperate need of humane and insightful guida...

Aboriginal families and communities are losing their children to child welfare systems at an alarming rate. Such children have very poor futures to look forward to; rejection, abuse and belonging to nowhere are too often the fate of children in care. Academic failure, poor self-esteem and loss of identity accompany them, often right into life on the streets, experiencing lateral violence, homelessness, crime and ultimately jail, where 70 % of inmates are former children in care. This trage...