Environmental scientist and writer Haydn Washington argues that we will not solve the environmental crisis unless we change our worldview and ethics, and to do so we must rejuvenate our sense of wonder at nature.This book focuses on humanity’s relation with nature, and the sense of wonder and belonging common to indigenous cultures and children everywhere. Drawing on events in the author’s own four decades working to protect wild places, and the current literature on wonde...

The culmination of over three decades of writing by environmental scientist and writer Haydn Washington, this book examines the global environmental crisis and its solutions.Many of us know that something is wrong with our world, that it is wounded. At the same time, we often don’t know why things have gone wrong – or what can be done. Framing the discussion around three central predicaments – the ecological, the social, and the economic – Washington provides background as to why e...

Humans have always used denial. When we are afraid, guilty, confused, or when something interferes with our self-image, we tend to deny it. Yet denial is a delusion. When it impacts on the health of oneself, or society, or the world it becomes a pathology. Climate change denial is such a case. Paradoxically, as the climate science has become more certain, denial about the issue has increased. The paradox lies in the denial. There is a denial industry funded by the fossil fuel companies tha...

What is sustainability? Much has been said about the terms ‘sustainability’ and ‘sustainable development’ over the last few decades, but they have become buried under academic jargon. This book is one of the first that aims to demystify sustainability so that the layperson can understand the key issues, questions and values involved.Accessible and engaging, the book examines the ‘old’ sustainability of the past and looks to the future, considering how economic, ecological ...

Humanity is dependent on Nature to survive, yet our society largely acts as if this is not the case. The energy that powers our very cells, the nutrients that make up our bodies, the ecosystem services that clean our water and air; these are all provided by the Nature from which we have evolved and of which we are a part. This book examines why we deny or ignore this dependence and what we can do differently to help solve the environmental crisis.Written in an accessible and engagi...

The staggering rate of environmental pollution and animal abuse despite constant efforts to educate the public and raise awareness challenges the prevailing belief that the absence of serious action is a consequence of a poorly informed public. In recent decades alternative explanations of social and political inaction have emerged, including denialism. Challenging the information-deficit model, denialism proposes that people actively avoid unpleasant information that threatens their estab...

This book provides keys to decrypt current political debates on the environment in light of the theories that support them, and provides tools to better understand and manage environmental conflicts and promote environmentally friendly behaviour.As we work towards global sustainability at a time when efforts to conserve biodiversity and combat climate change correspond with land grabs by large corporations, food insecurity, and human displacement. While we seek to reconcile more-th...

There is a fundamental denial at the centre of why we have an environmental crisis – a denial that ignores that endless physical growth on a finite planet is impossible. Nature provides the ecosystem services that support our civilisation, thus making humanity unavoidably dependent upon it. However, society continues to ignore and deny this dependence.A Future Beyond Growth explores the reason why the endless growth economy is fundamentally unsustainable and consi...