Eco Wars

Can grassroots interest groups ever win the wars they wage in the political arena against big business in America? Praised by some as a crucial component of the democratic system and criticized by others as stubborn, single-issue factions that pose a threat to the equitable progress of political change, interest groups are considered by many detractors to have a success rate directly related to their alliance with wealthy, powerful corporations. As Ronald T. Libby asserts in Eco-Wars, viable strategies are available to environmental, food safety, animal rights, gun control, and other organizations that seek to challenge business interests in the political arena. Employing newly released documents culled from five non-business-related alliances with mostly social concerns, known today as "expressive" interest groups, Libby examines how they confront powerful industries. Eco-Wars investigates an antibiotechnology campaign aimed at drug companies; an animal rights effort directed against the agricultural industry; an anti-pesticide campaign focused on the chemical industry; a property rights fight against environmental groups; and a secondhand smoke campaign opposing tobacco companies. Drawing upon previously classified files, Eco-Wars also draws from interviews with both activists and the industry representatives they oppose.With his balanced analysis, Libby goes beyond the polemical nature of much work on this subject, offering a new avenue for research in the social sciences and a useful tool for interest groups.

A book in which David Day investigates every aspect of the environmental movement from the conservation of endangered species to the excesses of the chemical, agricultural and nuclear industries.

“How did liberals get to be the way they are today?” That’s the question many Americans are asking as they witness the efforts of the most left-wing president in American history. At last, historians Donald T. Critchlow and W. J. Rorabaugh supply the answer. As the authors show, it is a mistake to see the Obama administration’s agenda as a single man’s vision. Equally flawed, they reveal, is the now-common argument that today’s liberalism is simply a continuation of early-twentieth-century progressivism. Today’s Left has embraced a more radical vision for transformative change: to remake all aspects of American life. Takeover delineates the sharp break in the history of modern liberalism that began in the 1960s. Critchlow and Rorabaugh show how leftists in pursuit of “social justice” went from protest rallies to the halls of power by rewriting the Democratic Party’s presidential nominating rules for their own benefit and using the courts to advance their radical agenda. The authors masterfully connect the dots in America’s recent history, showing the close links among such seemingly unrelated causes as radical environmentalism, nationalized health care, class warfare, abortion rights, feminism, regulating the free market, assisted suicide, sex education, and energy policies to reduce consumption. Takeover is a bold revisionist history that completely reshapes our understanding of the current political crisis.

Eco-disasters such as coal-mining accidents, oil spills, and food-borne diseases appear regularly in the news, making them seem nearly commonplace. These ecological crises highlight the continual tensions between human needs and the environmental impact these needs produce. Contemporary documentaries and feature films explore environmental-human conflicts by depicting the consequences of our overconsumption and dependence on nonrenewable energy. Film and Everyday Eco-disasters examines changing perspectives toward everyday eco-disasters as reflected in the work of filmmakers from the silent era forward, with an emphasis on recent films such as Dead Ahead, an HBO dramatization of the Exxon Valdez disaster; Total Recall, a science fiction action film highlighting oxygen as a commodity; The Devil Wears Prada, a comment on the fashion industry; and Food, Inc., a documentary interrogation of the food industry. The authors evaluate not only the success of these films as rhetorical arguments but also their rhetorical strategies. This interdisciplinary approach to film studies fuses cultural, economic, and literary critiques in articulating an approach to ecology that points to sustainable development as an alternative to resource exploitations and their associated everyday eco-disasters.

This collection of articles highlights some of the challenges facing English Corpus Linguistics at the beginning of the 21st century and shows how these challenges are being addressed by researchers.

This book examines the importance of "military ethics" in the formulation and conduct of contemporary military strategy. Clausewitz’s original analysis of war relegated ethics to the side-lines in favor of political realism, interpreting the proper use of military power solely to further the political goals of the state, whatever those may be. This book demonstrates how such single-minded focus no longer suffices to secure the interest of states, for whom the nature of warfare has evolved to favor strategies that hold combatants themselves to the highest moral and professional standards in their conduct of hostilities. Waging war has thus been transformed in a manner that moves beyond Clausewitz’s original conception, rendering political success wholly dependent upon the cultivation and exercise of discerning moral judgment by strategists and combatants in the field. This book utilizes a number of perspectives and case studies to demonstrate how ethics now plays a central role in strategy in modern armed conflict. This book will be of much interest to students of just war, ethics, military strategy, and international relations.

This book provides an in-depth insight into the ecological perspective on a number of ongoing issues pertaining to security, the economy, the state, global environmental governance, development, and the environment. The chapters critically compare and analyze the role of global eco-politics in understanding and sorting out issues linked with climate change. Furthermore, it presents a contemporary and accessible description of why we need to embrace eco-politics in order to address the various ecological challenges that we face in the current changing climate scenario.