An award-winning environmental activist and social entrepreneur exposes the link between our financial and environmental crisesFor decades, politicians and business leaders alike told the American public that today's challenge was growing the economy, and that environmental protection could be left to future generations. Now in the wake of billions of dollars in costs associated with coastal devastation from Hurricane Sandy, rampant wildfires across the West, and groundwater contami...

A New York Times Book Review Notable Book of the YearA Washington Post Best Book of the YearA Businessweek Best Business Book of the YearA Chicago Tribune Best Book of the YearIn this brilliant, essential book, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Thomas L. Friedman speaks to America's urgent need for national renewal and explains how a green revolution can bring about both a sustainable environment...

Jeffrey D. Sachs is one of the world's most perceptive and original analysts of global development. In this major new work he presents a compelling and practical framework for how global citizens can use a holistic way forward to address the seemingly intractable worldwide problems of persistent extreme poverty, environmental degradation, and political-economic injustice: sustainable development.Sachs offers readers, students, activists, environmentalists, and policy makers the too...

During recent years, environmental debate worldwide has been dominated by climate change, carbon emissions and eff orts to achieve low carbon economies. But a number of academic, technical, political, business and NGO initiatives indicate that there is a new wave of environmental attention focused on a wholly different set of subjects: namely that of natural capital, ecosystem services and biodiversity, or in other words, what Nature does for us. From recycling miracles in the soil to the ...

Two experts explain the consequences for the planet when corporations use sustainability as a business tool.McDonald's promises to use only beef, coffee, fish, chicken, and cooking oil obtained from sustainable sources. Coca-Cola promises to achieve water neutrality. Unilever seeks to achieve 100 percent sustainable agricultural sourcing by 2020. Walmart has pledged to become carbon neutral. Big-brand companies seem to be making commitments that go beyond the usual...

An Introduction to Sustainability provides students with a comprehensive overview of the key concepts and ideas which are encompassed within the growing field of sustainability.The fully updated second edition, including new figures and images, teases out the diverse but intersecting domains of sustainability and emphasises strategies for action. Aimed at those studying the subject for the first time, it is unique in giving students from different disciplinary backgrounds ...

Rethinking Private Authority examines the role of non-state actors in global environmental politics, arguing that a fuller understanding of their role requires a new way of conceptualizing private authority. Jessica Green identifies two distinct forms of private authority--one in which states delegate authority to private actors, and another in which entrepreneurial actors generate their own rules, persuading others to adopt them.Drawing on a wealth of empirical evidence s...

Due to new production areas and persistent productivity gains, Brazil has consolidated its position as a global leader and even as a ‘model’ of commercial, integrated crop production. The country is now seen as an agricultural powerhouse that has a lot to offer in terms of reducing the prospect of a looming, increasingly global, food crisis.Agribusiness and the Neoliberal Food System in Brazil focuses on the intensification of Brazilian agribusiness as a privileged entry point into...

Brazil is considered one of the world’s most important environmental powers. With a continental territory containing almost 70 per cent of the Amazon rainforest, along with a rich biodiversity and huge amount of natural resources, its geopolitical role in environmental decisions is crucial to ongoing global negotiations surrounding climate change.Development policies based on extraction and exportation of raw materials by the mining and agribusiness sectors threaten the global envi...

This book is not another warning about the end of the world. It is neither a penitential sermon on environmentalism, nor an appeal to frugality and self-restraint. Far from having exhausted the era of technological, social and democratic progress, we are on the brink of a new stage of industrial modernity: a shift from a fossil-based to a postfossil economy, from the ruthless exploitation of nature toward growth in tandem with it. Decoupling economic growth from environmental consumption i...

How do peak oil, climate change, and the limits of growth affect abortion rights, income equality, and civil liberty? In this impassioned treatise, author and activist Alexis Zeigler reveals the hidden connections between ecology, economics, politics, and social justice—and shows us how to use these connections to effect real, long-lasting change.Most activist movements, says Zeigler, suffer from a kind of tunnel vision in which the true causes and resulting side effects of the des...

In 1998 a bloody war erupted in The Horn of Africa between Ethiopia and Eritrea. During the war Ethiopia arrested and expelled 70,000 of its citizens, and stripped another 50,000-plus of their citzenship on the basis of their presumed ethnicity. Nationalism, Law and Statelessness: Grand Illusions in the Horn of Africa examines the events which led up to the war, documents the expulsions and denationalisations that took place and follows the flight of these stateless Ethiopians out...