Showing results by publisher "Tantor Media" in Environmental Economics

In The Progress Illusion, Jon D. Erickson charts the rise of the economic worldview and its infiltration into our daily lives as a theory of everything. Drawing on his own experience as a young economist inoculated in the 1980s era of "greed is good," Erickson shows how pseudoscience came to dominate economic thought. He pokes holes in the conventional wisdom of neo-classical economics, illustrating how flawed theories about financial decision-making and maximizing efficiency ignore human psychology and morality.

The Paris Accords, widely accepted as the key to solving today's climate crisis, set a goal of zero net carbon emissions by 2050. But that's not good enough. The only way to guarantee a livable future is climate restoration, which can reduce greenhouse gases to historic levels. Scientist and entrepreneur Peter Fiekowsky explains the technology and maps a practical path that will let humankind survive and thrive.

This book chronicles the creation of Everglades National Park, the largest subtropical wilderness in the United States. Prior to the park's creation, the Everglades was seen as a reviled and useless swamp, unfit for typical recreational or development projects. Park advocates drew on new ideas concerning the value of biota and ecology, the importance of wilderness, and the need to protect habitats, marine ecosystems, and plant life to redefine the Everglades. Using these ideas, the Everglades began to be recognized as an ecologically valuable and fragile wetland.

Former President of Ireland Mary Robinson's mission to bring together the fight against climate change and the global struggle for human rights has taken her all over the world. It also brought her to a heartening revelation: that that an irrepressible driving force in the battle for climate justice could be found at the grassroots level, mainly among women, many of them mothers and grandmothers like herself.

Time is up. The climate crisis is no longer a future to be feared, but a devastating reality. We see it in the wildfires in California and floods across Britain—the "once in a generation" extreme weather events that now happen every year. In a world where those in charge are constantly letting us down, real change in our lifetime means taking power into our own hands. The task ahead of us is daunting, but the emergence of a new wave of movements focused on climate justice, equality, and solidarity also brings hope.

In Residual Governance, Gabrielle Hecht dives into the wastes of gold and uranium mining in South Africa to explore how communities, experts, and artists fight for infrastructural and environmental justice. Hecht outlines how mining in South Africa is a prime example of what she theorizes as residual governance—the governance of waste and discard, governance that is purposefully inefficient, and governance that treats people and places as waste and wastelands.