Suchergebnisse

"Opening with the extraordinary story of a young French priest working in 1968 amongst impoverished villages of northeast Brazil, struggling to bring sustenance, sustainability, and hope to these disregarded and willfully ignored communities, this book asks a broad and far-reaching question that challenges the contemporary sustainability movement: What about sustainability for the forgotten? Sustainability for the Forgotten is an incendiary book that confronts the history, policies, and practices of sustainability. It interrogates the usefulness of current sustainability approaches for the poorest of the poor, the chronic underclass, victims of natural disasters, refugees, the oppressed, and asks how can we do better? With examples that range from the coffeelands of El Salvador to the coal country of American Appalachia, from the streets of Detroit to refugee camps in Greece and the upscale metro centers of the affluent, sustainability is examined with a critical eye and with an emphasis on insuring that the forgotten are heard. At once well-researched and passionate, wide-ranging and sharply focused, Sustainability for the Forgotten is unlike any other book on the sustainability movement. Written with a distinctive voice that is reasoned, unflinching, and often poetic, the book challenges the sustainability movement to follow "a just and necessary path." The result is a provocative statement on the future of sustainability and a call to action that is ultimately hopeful."

Recently Kasperson et al.(6) have proposed a conceptual framework, "The Social Amplification of Risk," as a beginning step in developing a comprehensive theory of public experience of risk. A central goal of their effort is to systematically link technical assessments of risk with the growing findings from social scientific research. A key and growing domain of public risk experience is "desired" risk, but this is virtually neglected in the framework. This paper evaluates the scope of the "Social Amplification of Risk Framework," asking whether it is applicable to desired risks, such as risk recreation (hang gliding, mountain climbing, and so forth). The analysis is supportive of the framework's applicability to the domain of desired risk.

Energy has grown in importance to sociologists over the past several years because of the growing interest in environmental variables and because of the reality of the energy predicament facing many contemporary societies. These concerns have stimulated a steady growth in energy‐related sociological research; unfortunately, this research has proceeded either atheoretically or along lines where energy issues are "gerryrigged" to traditional sociological concerns. A continuation of these practices offers little hope for producing cumulative knowledge. Sociologists interested in developing theoretical research programs or theoretically guided empirical energy research have a substantial intellectual base upon which to build. Scholarly history contains numerous theories that focus on the relationship between energy and human activity. Presented here is a critical overview of the most prominent of these "energetic" theories of society, followed by an illustration of the severe problems in their theoretical method using several examples. Several recommendations regarding theory development are made. Our objective is to expose those with energy or environmental interests to this intellectual base and to offer guidance for avoiding the shortcomings in that base.

National parks are a global phenomenon found in more than 120 countries. These parks are as diverse as the physical settings and cultural patterns of the many nations that have established them, yet within each country they serve as part of the cohesiveness that binds people together. Parks reflect-and help create-people's pride and love for their national heritage.