The Biosphere and Civilization: In the Throes of a Global Crisis PDF Download

Author: Victor I. Danilov-Danil'yan
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319671936
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 263

View

Book Description
This monograph explores the dire ecological, social, and economic situations facing mankind through comprehensive analyses of global ecological issues, poverty, environmental stability and regulation, and sustainable development. Drs. Victor Danilov-Danil’yan and Igor Reyf discuss the development of ecology as a science, the increasing concern among scientists and public servants for the unsustainability of current economic and demographic trends, and the dire consequences our planet and civilization are already suffering as a result of the ongoing environmental and social crisis. They also address the philosophical implications of the crisis, and suggest possible solutions. The book conveys complex objects of study, namely the biosphere and the harmful anthropogenic processes it has been experiencing for decades, so that the work is accessible without omitting key components of the subject matter. Readers will learn about the social and economic contributors to a threatened biosphere, the mechanisms that maintain the stability of the global environment, and the scales at which sustainable development and preservation can be applied to initiate environmental regulation. Though intended to appeal to the general public and non-specialists, environmental researchers, organizations involved in sustainable development and conservation, and students engaged in ecology, environment, and sustainability studies will also find this book of interest.

Author: Fr. Pantaleon Foundation
Publisher: Trafford Publishing
ISBN: 1698712197
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 608

View

Book Description
Kpim of Environment is a superb book crafted from assembled and peer-reviewed articles focusing on the fundamental issues that build, sustain or degrade the environment. There is no doubt, the modern world is seriously faced with diverse challenges, especially that of having a healthy environment. What is it that causes the environment to become a threat? The focus of this book is to interrogate what ought to be the core issue(s) and expectations of making our environment, our world, a better and safer place in the contemporary time or in the era of global heating. Established scholars have explored the various aspects of the complex environment in development and highlighted what the underlying issues are through integral reflection, intersectionality, theory and practice – resilience and sustainability – in the changing world. By working out the issues in their fields of specialization and interest, the authors very insightfully offered instances and strategies to manage the environment in ways that will allow faith, reason and action in discerning policy and outcomes of environmental intelligence and care. The unique voices of the authors are not only revealing, but also irresistible to be ignored on the question of reason, faith and environment. You will discover how philosophical, theological and applied scientific knowledge crisscrossed the weaving of the essays together to strike a meaningful outcome. The book is organized in three sections with running chapters for each article, including a book review on cutting to die, resilience and general conclusion. By scrutinizing the meaning of environment for adaptation and growth through technology, reason and faith, this book offers a glimpse and in-depth analysis of what the competing issues are – and will keep readers and systematic policy work busy for many years ahead.

Author: Dawson Church
Publisher: Elite Books
ISBN: 0971088853
Category : Body, Mind & Spirit
Languages : en
Pages : 392

View

Book Description
This book takes the viewpoint that personal health and earth’s health are one. In this mindset, it examines powerful new trends shaping individual wellness and planetary health. A wide spectrum of factors are considered as the book includes sections by 40 prominent educators, scientists, ecologists, psychologists, doctors, entrepreneurs and spiritual leaders. Their goal?--?To offer visionary ideas that point the way to a sane, hopeful and sustainable future?.

Author: Martin Rees
Publisher: Basic Books
ISBN: 0786740698
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 240

View

Book Description
A scientist known for unraveling the complexities of the universe over millions of years, Sir Martin Rees now warns that humankind is potentially the maker of its own demise -- and that of the cosmos. Though the twenty-first century could be the critical era in which life on Earth spreads beyond our solar system, it is just as likely that we have endangered the future of the entire universe. With clarity and precision, Rees maps out the ways technology could destroy our species and thereby foreclose the potential of a living universe whose evolution has just begun. Rees boldly forecasts the startling risks that stem from our accelerating rate of technological advances. We could be wiped out by lethal "engineered" airborne viruses, or by rogue nano-machines that replicate catastrophically. Experiments that crash together atomic nuclei could start a chain reaction that erodes all atoms of Earth, or could even tear the fabric of space itself. Through malign intent or by mistake, a single event could trigger global disaster. Though we can never completely safeguard our future, increased regulation and inspection can help us to prevent catastrophe. Rees's vision of the infinite future that we have put at risk -- a cosmos more vast and diverse than any of us has ever imagined -- is both a work of stunning scientific originality and a humanistic clarion call on behalf of the future of life.

Author: Paul Raskin
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780997837605
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 138

View

Book Description
This inquiry builds a conceptual and strategic framework for understanding the contemporary global crisis and for shaping our world in transition. Its bedrock concern is the search for an organic planetary civilization, a vision that now opens before us as both possibility and exigency in an interdependent and dangerous century.

Author: Donella H. Meadows
Publisher: Universe Pub
ISBN: 9780876632222
Category : Economic development.
Languages : en
Pages : 0

View

Book Description
Examines the factors which limit human economic and population growth and outlines the steps necessary for achieving a balance between population and production. Bibliogs

Author: Eileen Crist
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022659694X
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 316

View

Book Description
In Abundant Earth, Eileen Crist not only documents the rising tide of biodiversity loss, but also lays out the drivers of this wholesale destruction and how we can push past them. Looking beyond the familiar litany of causes—a large and growing human population, rising livestock numbers, expanding economies and international trade, and spreading infrastructures and incursions upon wildlands—she asks the key question: if we know human expansionism is to blame for this ecological crisis, why are we not taking the needed steps to halt our expansionism? Crist argues that to do so would require a two-pronged approach. Scaling down calls upon us to lower the global human population while working within a human-rights framework, to deindustrialize food production, and to localize economies and contract global trade. Pulling back calls upon us to free, restore, reconnect, and rewild vast terrestrial and marine ecosystems. However, the pervasive worldview of human supremacy—the conviction that humans are superior to all other life-forms and entitled to use these life-forms and their habitats—normalizes and promotes humanity’s ongoing expansion, undermining our ability to enact these linked strategies and preempt the mounting suffering and dislocation of both humans and nonhumans. Abundant Earth urges us to confront the reality that humanity will not advance by entrenching its domination over the biosphere. On the contrary, we will stagnate in the identity of nature-colonizer and decline into conflict as we vie for natural resources. Instead, we must chart another course, choosing to live in fellowship within the vibrant ecologies of our wild and domestic cohorts, and enfolding human inhabitation within the rich expanse of a biodiverse, living planet.

Author: Jeremy Rifkin
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1509563741
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 194

View

Book Description
What would happen if we were to awaken one day and suddenly realize that the world we live in appeared eerily alien, as if we’d been teleported to some other distant world? That frightening prospect is now. Our planetary hydrosphere, which animates all of life on Earth, is rebelling in the wake of a global warming climate, spurring biblical spring floods, devastating summer droughts, heatwaves, and wildfires and powerful autumn hurricanes and typhoons, wreaking havoc on ecosystems and society. For too long we have misjudged the very nature of our existence and to what we owe our lifeline. We have come to believe that we live on a land planet when the reality is that we live on a water planet, and now the Earth’s hydrosphere is rewilding in the throes of a changing climate, taking our species and our fellow creatures into a mass extinction event as it searches for a new equilibrium. Jeremy Rifkin calls on us to rethink our place in the universe and realize that we live on Planet Aqua. He takes us on a new journey into the future where we will need to reassess every aspect of the way we live – how we engage nature, govern society, conceptualize economic life, educate our children, and even orient ourselves in time and space. The next stage in the human journey is to rebrand our home Planet Aqua and learn how to readapt to the waters of life. Underpinned by robust research, this major new work by one of the world’s leading public intellectuals aims to redefine the very core of our existence on Planet Aqua.

Author: Jeremy Rifkin
Publisher: Macmillan + ORM
ISBN: 1137437766
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 344

View

Book Description
In The Zero Marginal Cost Society,New York Times bestselling author Jeremy Rifkin describes how the emerging Internet of Things is speeding us to an era of nearly free goods and services, precipitating the meteoric rise of a global Collaborative Commons and the eclipse of capitalism. Rifkin uncovers a paradox at the heart of capitalism that has propelled it to greatness but is now taking it to its death—the inherent entrepreneurial dynamism of competitive markets that drives productivity up and marginal costs down, enabling businesses to reduce the price of their goods and services in order to win over consumers and market share. (Marginal cost is the cost of producing additional units of a good or service, if fixed costs are not counted.) While economists have always welcomed a reduction in marginal cost, they never anticipated the possibility of a technological revolution that might bring marginal costs to near zero, making goods and services priceless, nearly free, and abundant, and no longer subject to market forces. Now, a formidable new technology infrastructure—the Internet of things (IoT)—is emerging with the potential of pushing large segments of economic life to near zero marginal cost in the years ahead. Rifkin describes how the Communication Internet is converging with a nascent Energy Internet and Logistics Internet to create a new technology platform that connects everything and everyone. Billions of sensors are being attached to natural resources, production lines, the electricity grid, logistics networks, recycling flows, and implanted in homes, offices, stores, vehicles, and even human beings, feeding Big Data into an IoT global neural network. Prosumers can connect to the network and use Big Data, analytics, and algorithms to accelerate efficiency, dramatically increase productivity, and lower the marginal cost of producing and sharing a wide range of products and services to near zero, just like they now do with information goods. The plummeting of marginal costs is spawning a hybrid economy—part capitalist market and part Collaborative Commons—with far reaching implications for society, according to Rifkin. Hundreds of millions of people are already transferring parts of their economic lives to the global Collaborative Commons. Prosumers are plugging into the fledgling IoT and making and sharing their own information, entertainment, green energy, and 3D-printed products at near zero marginal cost. They are also sharing cars, homes, clothes and other items via social media sites, rentals, redistribution clubs, and cooperatives at low or near zero marginal cost. Students are enrolling in free massive open online courses (MOOCs) that operate at near zero marginal cost. Social entrepreneurs are even bypassing the banking establishment and using crowdfunding to finance startup businesses as well as creating alternative currencies in the fledgling sharing economy. In this new world, social capital is as important as financial capital, access trumps ownership, sustainability supersedes consumerism, cooperation ousts competition, and "exchange value" in the capitalist marketplace is increasingly replaced by "sharable value" on the Collaborative Commons. Rifkin concludes that capitalism will remain with us, albeit in an increasingly streamlined role, primarily as an aggregator of network services and solutions, allowing it to flourish as a powerful niche player in the coming era. We are, however, says Rifkin, entering a world beyond markets where we are learning how to live together in an increasingly interdependent global Collaborative Commons.

Author: Paul R. Ehrlich
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022611371X
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 205

View

Book Description
Hope on Earth is the thought-provoking result of a lively and wide-ranging conversation between two of the world’s leading interdisciplinary environmental scientists: Paul R. Ehrlich, whose book The Population Bomb shook the world in 1968 (and continues to shake it), and Michael Charles Tobias, whose over 40 books and 150 films have been read and/or viewed throughout the world. Hope on Earth offers a rare opportunity to listen in as these deeply knowledgeable and highly creative thinkers offer their takes on the most pressing environmental concerns of the moment. Both Ehrlich and Tobias argue that we are on the verge of environmental catastrophe, as the human population continues to grow without restraint and without significant attempts to deal with overconsumption and the vast depletion of resources and climate problems it creates. Though their views are sympathetic, they differ in their approach and in some key moral stances, giving rise to a heated and engaging dialogue that opens up dozens of new avenues of exploration. They both believe that the impact of a human society on its environment is the direct result of its population size, and through their dialogue they break down the complex social problems that are wrapped up in this idea and attempts to overcome it, hitting firmly upon many controversial topics such as circumcision, religion, reproduction, abortion, animal rights, diet, and gun control. For Ehrlich and Tobias, ethics involve not only how we treat other people directly, but how we treat them and other organisms indirectly through our effects on the environment. University of California, Berkeley professor John Harte joins the duo for part of the conversation, and his substantial expertise on energy and climate change adds a crucial perspective to the discussion of the impact of population on global warming. This engaging and timely book invites readers into an intimate conversation with some of the most eminent voices in science as they offer a powerful and approachable argument that the ethical and scientific issues involved in solving our environmental crisis are deeply intertwined, while offering us an optimistic way forward. Hope on Earth is indeed a conversation we should all be having.