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This book narrates the unexpected dilemmas middle-class Bolivians have faced following the coming to power of a left-wing, indigenous movement. Shakow argues that new middle classes in Bolivia, as elsewhere in the Third World, constitute a significant force that profoundly shapes politics and social life.

Cover -- Half Title -- Title Page -- Copyright Page -- Contents -- Introduction -- PART I: PHILOSOPHY -- 1 Toward an Earth Ethic: Aldo Leopold's Anticipation of the Gaia Hypothesis -- 2 Climate Change, Environmental Ethics, and Biocentrism -- 3 Moral Ambiguities in the Politics of Climate Change -- 4 Ethical and Prudential Responsibilities, Culture and Climate Change -- PART II: GOVERNANCE -- 5 Closing the Boxes, Enlarging the Circles: Toward a New Paradigm of Global Governance and Economy -- 6 Climate Change Policy with a Renewed Environmental Ethic: An Ecological Economics Approach -- 7 Two Global Crises, Ethics Renewal, and Governance Reform -- PART III: INTERNATIONAL LAW AND HUMAN RIGHTS -- 8 Climate Change, Developing Countries, and Human Rights: An International Law Perspective -- 9 Future Generations' Rights: Linking Intergenerational and Intragenerational Rights in Ecojustice -- 10 Climate Change and Poverty: Confronting Our Moral and Ethical Commitments: Some Reflections -- PART IV: CIVIL SOCIETY -- 11 Soft Power, NGOs, and Climate Change: The Case of The Nature Conservancy -- 12 Climate Changes Everything -- PART V: CASE STUDIES -- 13 Trends and Impacts of Climate Change in Cameroon, Central Africa: Considerations for Renewed Ethics towards Resilience Options for the Community -- 14 Addressing Climate Change: Challenges, Ethics, and Hope -- Contributors

ABSTRACTAnthropologists have criticized "civil society" as a Eurocentric, bourgeois, and individualist concept that brands the Global South and Eastern Europe as inherently inferior. In this article, I introduce an understudied meaning of civil society as collective action inspired by indigenous cultural institutions, which has been operative in Bolivia during the 1990s and early 2000s, and, I suggest, more widely in the Global South. This variant of civil society, however, served as a framework for development professionals to blame failures of development upon local people. But I also argue that civil society's meaning is historically contingent. The concept diminished in Bolivia following Evo Morales's government's return to central state patronage after a decade of austerity and liberal state decentralization. Massive new funding for development in central Bolivia allayed development workers' concerns that locals weren't doing their part to achieve development. If the reemergence of the civil society concept in Bolivia marked the rise of citizen participation as a substitute for state‐funded development, the decline of "civil society" marked the return to state‐led development. [civil society, neoliberalism, decentralization, development, indigeneity, Bolivia]

In this article, I analyze Bolivians' public condemnations of patronage—the buying of political support with jobs or favors—over the past decade. The rise of indigenous and leftist governments in Latin America has led many to hope for a transition from neoliberalism. In Bolivia, the new Morales government has promised to effect this transition in part by rooting out clientelismo and peguismo (patronage job seeking), long a mainstay of Bolivian politics. I argue, however, that at the level of everyday practice, Bolivians engage hybrid ideals—of patronage, populism, state capitalism, liberalism, and left‐indigenist democracy. Focusing on debates over patronage in the central Bolivian Cochabamba region, I show that most people who denounced patronage were unable to avoid others' counterdenunciations that they were buscapegas (patronage seekers). Furthermore, while residents of Sacaba often expressed a yearning for ideological purity by denouncing patronage, they also used the language of patron–client reciprocity to assert demands for radical democracy.

As environmental history migrates to the Middle East there is natural excitement about new research methods such as molecular biology and soil science. But the Braudelian project of describing "man in his intimate relationship to the earth which bears and feeds him" may be complicated by echoes of the region's literary past.

It has now been one hundred years since the passage of the first estate tax, and since that time the size and complexity of the federal tax system has only continued to grow. In the face of that complexity it is worthwhile for the United States to begin considering alternatives. Do we continue with our system of income and consumption taxation, or do we turn to a wealth tax? A wealth tax is sometimes criticized as being too complex, but there are reasons to suggest it is no more complex than our current system—and possibly even less complex. When analyzed, the main source of contention—valuation—is not actually as onerous as it seems. A wealth tax of about 1.6% may ultimately engender little opposition from taxpayers. Accordingly, this Article argues that the merits of a wealth tax are worth considering, and its drawbacks not insurmountable.