Category: Blog

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Extractive Conservation: Peasant Agroecological Systems as New Frontiers of Exploitation?

The latest Environment and Society featured article is now available! This month’s article—”Extractive Conservation: Peasant Agroecological Systems as New Frontiers of Exploitation?”—comes from Volume 7 (2016). In their article, Anne Cristina de la Vega-Leinert and Peter Clausing analyze to what extent conservation has become an inherent element of extraction. They scrutinize the Land Sparing versus Land Sharing debate by explicitly incorporating environmental justice issues of access to land and natural resources and contend that dominant conservation regimes, embedded within Land Sparing, legitimize the displacement of local people and their land use to compensate for distant, unsustainable resource use.

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The Social Life of Blame in the Anthropocene

The latest Environment and Society featured article is now available! This month’s article—”The Social Life of Blame in the Anthropocene”—comes from Volume 6 (2015). In his article, Peter Rudiak-Gould shows how life in the Anthropocene reconfigures blame in four ways—it invites ubiquitous blame, ubiquitous blamelessness, selective blame, and partial blame—and reviews case studies from around the world, investigating which climate change blame narratives actors select, why, and with what consequences

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New Volume of Environment and Society!

Berghahn Journals is pleased to announce that the latest volume of Environment and Society has recently published and is available online at www.berghahnjournals.com/environment-and-society.

Volume 9, guest edited by Jaskiran Dhillon, revolves around the theme of “Indigenous Resurgence, Decolonization, and Movements for Environmental Justice” and aims to set forth a theoretical and discursive interruption of the dominant, mainstream environmental justice movement by reframing issues of climate change and environmental degradation through an anticolonial lens. Specifically, the writers for this volume are invested in positioning environmental justice within historical, social, political, and economic contexts and larger structures of power that foreground the relationships among settler colonialism, nature, and planetary devastation. As always, editor’s introduction is freely available to all readers. Environment and Society 9 is rounded out by a section of book reviews on recent and relevant publications.

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Valuing and Evaluating Marine Ecosystem Services: Putting the Right Price on Marine Environments?

The latest Environment and Society featured article is now available! This month’s article—”Valuing and Evaluating Marine Ecosystem Services: Putting the Right Price on Marine Environments?”—comes from Volume 5 (2014). In their article, Julian Clifton, Leanne C. Cullen-Unsworth, and Richard K. F. Unsworth explain how the flow of ecosystem services from coral reefs, seagrass meadows, and mangrove forests sustains the livelihoods of billions of people worldwide. Faced with the global degradation of marine and coastal ecosystems, policy makers are increasingly focusing on ecosystem service valuation techniques to encourage conservation and sustainable use of marine resources. The article provides a review and synthesis of the available information on economic valuation techniques as applied to tropical marine habitats.

Visit the featured article page to download your copy of the article today before it’s gone! A new article is featured every month.

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Flagships or Battleships: Deconstructing the Relationship between Social Conflict and Conservation Flagship Species

The latest Environment and Society featured article is now available! This month’s article—”Flagships or Battleships: Deconstructing the Relationship between Social Conflict and Conservation Flagship Species”—comes from Volume 4 (2013). In their article, Leo R. Douglas and Diogo Veríssimo examine the multiple roles of flagships in conflicts including their part in human-wildlife conflicts and as symbols of broader sociopolitical disputes and show that the relationship between the co-occurrence of conflict and flagship species, while complex, illuminates important patterns and lessons that require further attention

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Unintended Consequences: Climate Change Policy in a Globalizing World

The latest Environment and Society featured article is now available! This month’s article—”Unintended Consequences: Climate Change Policy in a Globalizing World”—comes from Volume 3 (2012). In her article, Yda Schreuder explains how the cap-and-trade system introduced by the European Union (EU) in order to comply with carbon emissions reduction targets under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change Kyoto Protocol (1997) has in some instances led to the opposite outcome of the one intended. In fact, the ambitious energy and climate change policy adopted by the EU—known as the Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS)—has led to carbon leakage and in some instances to relocation or a shift in production of energy-intensive manufacturing to parts of the world where carbon reduction commitments are not in effect.

Visit the featured article page to download your copy of the article today before it’s gone! A new article is featured every month.

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Abandoned Mine Lands and Collective Cleanup Efforts

On 5 August 2015, a contractor working for the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) accidentally breached a plug of waste rock at the Gold King Mine near Silverton, Colorado. Unbeknownst to the backhoe operator responsible for the breach, the plug was holding back three million gallons of acid mine drainage laced with numerous toxic metals such as zinc, cadmium, mercury, lead, and arsenic. Within hours, the yellow-tinged toxic waters from the Gold King Mine spread downstream from Cement Creek into the Animas River, eventually making their way into the San Juan River until being diluted by their entry into the Colorado River. En route, the waters heavily impacted the livelihoods of farmers, fly fishing guides, and rafting companies from Durango, Colorado, to the Navajo Nation in northern New Mexico.

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Refugees on Their Own Land: Edolo People, Land, and Earthquakes

All the land customarily used and occupied by the Edolo people of Papua New Guinea (PNG) has been devastated by the swarm of earthquakes that commenced in late February 2018. Few outsiders, however, would be aware of that disaster. With media coverage of events in PNG soon deflected to “bigger” issues of money and the politics of resource extraction, the physical destruction wrought by the quakes has disappeared from view.

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Shared Meals and Food Fights: Geographical Indications, Rural Development, and the Environment

The latest Environment and Society featured article is now available! This month’s article—”Shared Meals and Food Fights: Geographical Indications, Rural Development, and the Environment”—comes from Volume 2 (2011). In their article, Fabio Parasecoli and Aya Tasaki highlight relevant issues within the global debate on geographical indications as they relate to food products, and they explore the environmental impact of geographical indications and their potential in ensuring the livelihood of rural communities in emerging economies and promoting sustainable agricultural models.

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Adaptation—Genuine and Spurious

The latest Environment and Society featured article is now available! This month’s article—”Adaptation—Genuine and Spurious: Demystifying Adaptation Processes in Relation to Climate Change”—comes from Volume 1 (2010). In their article, Thomas F. Thornton and Nadia Manasfi critically examine the concept of human adaptation by dividing it into eight fundamental processes and viewing each in a broad cultural, ecological, and evolutionary context. They focus their assessment especially on northern indigenous peoples, who exist at the edges of present-day climate governance frameworks but at the center of increasingly acute climate stress.

Visit the featured article page to download your copy of the article today before it’s gone! A new article is featured every month.

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