Bottleneck Humanity S Impending Impasse

Ecological roots of our toubled time are deeper than its economic manifestations. Anguished posterity will look back on this 21st century as the bottleneck century. Bottleneck: Humanitys Impending Impasse was written to show how and why three converging trends have put humankind in much deeper peril than is generally acknowledged. First, there are many more of us inhabiting this planet than it can sustain. Second, technological advances of recent centuries have made gigantic and prodigal our per capita resource appetites and our per capita environmental impacts. Third, even though, as the symbol-using species, we humans conceivably could do better at anticipating future circumstances and planning ahead, our evolutionary heritage together with unanticipated dysfunctions of modern division of labor have kept us too preoccupied with short-term concerns. People today are dependent upon a fantastically intricate web of exchange relations (the market). Even when functioning normallyand not in a collapsed condition, as currentlythis system of relations has a serious and pervasive dehumanizing effect not adequately discerned by economists nor sociologists. Recognition of and adequate adaptation to the deteriorating ecological context of human life has been impeded. Human societies (even our own) are almost certainly going to act in ways that will make an inevitably difficult future unnecessarily worse. Factors analyzed in this book have made people seriously averse to the kind and extent of cooperation our difficult future will require. Together with the basic trio of disturbing trendshumans having become so numerous, so ravenous, and so short-sightedthis has made the nature of todays human prospect far more dire than most policymakers dare admit. It tempts even the wisest and most civic-minded to seek or promote remedial policies that will worsen the real predicament.

A manned mission to Mars is faced with challenges and topics that may not be obvious but of great importance and challenging for such a mission. This is the first book that collects contributions from scholars in various fields, from astronomy and medicine, to theology and philosophy, addressing such topics. The discussion goes beyond medical and technological challenges of such a deep-space mission. The focus is on human nature, human emotions and biases in such a new environment. The primary audience for this book are all researchers interested in the human factor in a space mission including philosophers, social scientists, astronomers, and others. This volume will also be of high interest for a much wider audience like the non-academic world, or for students.

More than the usual academic textbook, the present volume presents sociology as terrain that one can virtually traverse and experience. Each version of the sociological imagination captured by the chapter essays takes the readers to the realm of the taken-for-granted (such as zoological collections, food, education, entrepreneurship, religious participation, etc.) and the extraordinary (the likes of organizational fraud, climate change, labour relations, multiple modernities, etc.) - altogether presumed to be problematic and yet possible. Using the sociological perspective as the frame of reference, the readers are invited to interrogate the realities and trends which their social worlds relentlessly create for them, allowing them in return, to discover their unique locations in their cultures' social map.

The book draws on the views of leading thinkers in Tourism and considers a broad range of issues from multidisciplinary perspectives facing Tourism industry for the first time in one volume: dwindling energy, new technology, security (like war and terrorism), political economy, sustainability, and human resources. By critically reviewing these social and economic challenges in a global scale, the book helps to create a comprehensive view of future tourism in the unfolding and challenging society of the third millennium.

Our world runs on fossil fuels. It is estimated that oil production will drop to half of the peak amount around 2030. What will happen as we reach the point where there is no practical way to get whatever is still in the ground? Fossil fuels are in decline, but recoverable reserves of metals are also becoming less plentiful. Electricity will be in decline worldwide because it is produced mainly with fossil fuels. Without mechanization, irrigation, and synthetic fertilizer, yields for crops of any sort drop considerably, and famine is inevitable; it will simply not be possible to maintain a global population of the present size. Those who expect to survive and prosper will be those who have mastered the art of subsistence farming. In Tumbling Tide, Peter Goodchild examines what life will look like in the post-peak world, exploring such topics as housing, food production, education, and politics, and delivers the troubling news that solar panels and vegetable patches won’t be enough. Tumbling Tide differs from similar books in the sense that it provides far more detail about the effects of peak oil in the coming decades, and examines the social effects — crime, cults, craziness, and chaos — that could stem from this crisis.

With human-induced environmental impacts disrupting human life in deeper ways and at a wider scale than anything previously experienced, this multidisciplinary book looks at the ways that current knowledge bases seem inadequate to help us deal with such realities. It offers a critical appraisal of the current knowledge infrastructure, including science, technology, innovation, education and informal knowledge systems.

The papers assembled in this volume should enable readers to understand what too many people today insistently misperceive. Environmental protection is not just a "special interest". It is an essential task for everyone. This book brings together texts by social scientists from the United States, France and Spain. Their common frame of reference is the dialectic between experts and activists in socio-environmental movements, as well as the concern about changes, both cognitive and political, arising in that context.

Environmental Anthropology studies historic and present human-environment interactions. This volume illustrates the ways in which today's environmental anthropologists are constructing new paradigms for understanding the multiplicity of players, pressures, and ecologies in every environment, and the value of cultural knowledge of landscapes. This Handbook provides a comprehensive survey of contemporary topics in environmental anthropology and thorough discussions on the current state and prospective future of the field in seven key sections. As the contributions to this Handbook demonstrate, the subfield of environmental anthropology is responding to cultural adaptations and responses to environmental changes in multiple and complex ways. As a discipline concerned primarily with human-environment interaction, environmental anthropologists recognize that we are now working within a pressure cooker of rapid environmental damage that is forcing behavioural and often cultural changes around the world. As we see in the breadth of topics presented in this volume, these environmental challenges have inspired renewed foci on traditional topics such as food procurement, ethnobiology, and spiritual ecology; and a broad new range of subjects, such as resilience, nonhuman rights, architectural anthropology, industrialism, and education. This volume enables scholars and students quick access to both established and trending environmental anthropological explorations into theory, methodology and practice.