This book argues that the Soviet Union was a highly influential actor in furthering understandings of society-nature interaction on the international stage and played a key role in helping to shape, conceptualize and assess the relationship between humankind and the Earth system. It considers how humankind’s capacity to affect physical and biological systems at a global scale was acknowledged and studied by Soviet scientists, discusses how the interaction between Soviet and Western scienti...

Soviet Climate Change Science explores the character and range of Soviet contributions to the emerging understanding of large-scale anthropogenic climate change during the post-1945 period. More specifically, it examines the role of Soviet scientists in helping to shape the debate, both domestically and on the international stage, and with a particular focus on the period 1960s to the 1980s.The book details the institutional underpinnings of Soviet activity in this area, t...

Jonathan D Oldfield provides a detailed assessment of the changing relationship between Russian society and the wider environment since the fall of the Soviet Union. Through this, he highlights the need to critically evaluate assumptions regarding the post-Soviet environment, in order to move beyond generalization and engage meaningfully with the particularities of Russia's contemporary environmental situation. The book begins by focusing on the nature of Soviet environmental legacies as a...

This book provides a comprehensive overview of the very rich thinking about environmental issues which has grown up in Russia since the nineteenth century, a body of knowledge and thought which is not well known to Western scholars and environmentalists. It shows how in the late nineteenth century there emerged in Russia distinct and strongly articulated representations of the earth’s physical systems within many branches of the natural sciences, representations which typically emphasised ...

Over the last 11,700 years, during which human civilization developed, the earth has existed within what geologists refer to as the Holocene Epoch. Now science is telling us that the Holocene Epoch in the geological time scale ended, replaced by the onset of a new, more dangerous Anthropocene Epoch, which began around 1950. The Anthropocene Epoch is characterized by an “anthropogenic rift” in the biological cycles of the Earth System, marking a changed reality in which human activities are...

'Building a society that operates within ecological constraints requires an unleashing of our political imaginations, and this book helps us do just that'-Astra Taylor, author of The Age of InsecurityHalf-Earth Socialism is a radical call to action to save the planet, including trenchant proposals to rewild half the earth to absorb carbon emissions and restore biodiversity; rapidly transition to renewable energy, paired with drastic cuts in consumption; and...

Science tells us that a new and dangerous stage in planetary evolution has begun—the Anthropocene, a time of rising temperatures, extreme weather, rising oceans, and mass species extinctions. Humanity faces not just more pollution or warmer weather, but a crisis of the Earth System. If business as usual continues, this century will be marked by rapid deterioration of our physical, social, and economic environment. Large parts of Earth will become uninhabitable, and civilization itself will...

The worldwide spread of neoliberalism has transformed economies, polities, and societies everywhere. In conventional accounts, American and Western European economists, such as Milton Friedman and Friedrich von Hayek, sold neoliberalism by popularizing their free-market ideas and radical criticisms of the state. Rather than focusing on the agency of a few prominent, conservative economists, Markets in the Name of Socialism reveals a dialogue among many economists on both sides of ...

Old Gods, New Enigmas is the highly-anticipated book by the best-selling author of City of Quartz and Planet of Slums. Mike Davis spent years working factory jobs and sitting behind the wheel of an eighteen wheeler before his profile as one of the world's leading urbanists emerged with the publication of his sober, if dystopian survey of Los Angeles. Since then, he's developed a reputation not only for his caustic analysis of ecological catastrophe and colonial h...

Class Theory and History takes an ambitious and ground-breaking look at the entire history of the Soviet Union and presents a new kind of analysis of the history of the USSR: examining its birth, evolution, and death in class terms. Utilizing the class analytics they have developed over the last three decades, resnick and Wolff formulate the most fully developed economic theory of communism now available, and use that theory to answer the question: did communism ever exist in the ...

This book is about nuclear legacies in Russia and Central Asia, focusing on selected sites of the Soviet atomic program, many of which have remained understudied. Nuclear operations, for energy or military purposes, demanded a vast infrastructure of production and supply chains that have transformed entire regions. In following the material traces of the atomic programs, contributors pay particular attention to memory practices and memorialization concerning nuclear legacies.Tracin...

In The Power of Systems**, Eglė Rindzevičiūtė introduces readers to one of the best-kept secrets of the Cold War: the International Institute of Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA), an international think tank established by the US and USSR to advance scientific collaboration.**From 1972 until the late 1980s, IIASA was one of the very few permanent platforms where policy scientists from both sides of the Cold War could work together to articu...