Environmental Politics

The world is desperate for cobalt. It drives the proliferation of digital and clean technologies. But this "demon metal" has a horrific present and a troubled history. The modern search for cobalt has brought investors back to a small town in Northern Canada, a place called Cobalt. Like the demon metal, this town has a dark and turbulent history.

Friedman brings a fresh outlook to the crises of destabilizing climate change and rising competition for energy - both of which could poison our world if we do not act quickly and collectively. His argument speaks to all of us who are concerned about the state of America in the global future.

A tremendous upheaval is coming this century: with every degree of temperature increase, roughly a billion people will be pushed outside the zone in which humans have lived for thousands of years. While we can and should do everything we can to mitigate the impact of climate change, the brutal truth is that huge swathes of the world are becoming uninhabitable. Mass migration will remake the world in the 21st century, either by accident, or design—and as Royal Society Science Prize-winning science journalist Gaia Vince shows us, far better the latter.

Economists insist that recovery is at hand, yet unemployment remains high, real estate values continue to sink, and governments stagger under record deficits. The End of Growth proposes a startling diagnosis: humanity has reached a fundamental turning point in its economic history. The expansionary trajectory of industrial civilization is colliding with non-negotiable natural limits.

Proper stewardship of natural assets and liabilities is a matter of planetary urgency: natural resources have the potential either to transform the poorest countries or to tear them apart, while the carbon emissions and agricultural follies of the rich world could further impoverish them. The Plundered Planet charts a course between unchecked profiteering on the one hand and environmental romanticism on the other to offer realistic and sustainable solutions to dauntingly complex issues.

From tenements, to alleyways, 20th-century American cities created spaces where pests flourished and people struggled for healthy living conditions. In Pests in the City, Biehler argues that urban ecologies that supported pests were shaped not only by the physical features of cities, but also by social inequalities, housing policies, and ideas about domestic space. This story reveals how pests thrived on lax code enforcement; the marginalization of the poor, immigrants, and people of color; and at the intersection of public health, politics, and environmental justice.

The conservation of natural resources, like that of any other asset, involves trade-offs. Yet, in a world faced with the harsh realities of climate change, crafting the right environmental policies is an increasingly urgent task. In Conservation, Charles Perrings and Ann Kinzig bring together new research in economics and biodiversity to investigate conservation decisions and the theory behind them.

We live in a world awash in manmade chemicals, from the pesticides on our front lawns to the diesel exhaust in the air we breathe. Although experts are beginning to understand the potential dangers of these substances, there are still more than 80,000 synthetic compounds that have not been sufficiently tested to interpret their effects on human health.

The world is encountering multiple crises—climate, droughts, floods, energy, food, and pandemics, to name a few. We have a problem, this is the solution. Capitalism and Crises is about how capitalism can fix them—how it can solve not cause them. The reason why it has caused them is that we have misconceived the nature of our capitalist system. We have failed to understand the key institution at the heart of it—business—and as a result we have allowed it to cause as well as solve problems. This book describes why this has happened and what needs to change to address it.

Recent years have seen out-of-control wildfires rage across remote Brazilian rainforests, densely populated California coastlines, and major cities in Australia. What connects these separate events is more than immediate devastation and human loss of life. In Global Burning, Eve Darian-Smith contends that using fire as a symbolic and literal thread connecting different places around the world allows us to better understand the parallel, and related, trends of the growth of authoritarian politics and climate crises and their interconnected global consequences.

Rejecting the old Left/Right ideologies, Rand develops a more pragmatic view capable of delivering practical solutions to this critical problem. A renewed capitalism harnessed to the task is the only way we might replace fossil fuels fast enough to mitigate severe climate risk. If we leave our dogma at the door, Rand argues, we might just build an economy that survives the century.

Epic wildfire. Devastating drought. Cataclysmic flooding. Extreme weather in the wake of climate change threatens to turn the American West into a region hostile to human habitation—a “Great American Desert,” as early US explorers once mislabeled it. As Bruce E. Cain suggests in this timely book, the unique complex of politics, technology, and logistics that once won the West must be rethought and reconfigured to win it anew in the face of a widespread accelerating threat.

In its 2001 report on global climate, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change of the United Nations prominently featured the "Hockey Stick", a chart showing global temperature data over the past 1,000 years. The Hockey Stick demonstrated that temperature had risen with the increase in industrialization and use of fossil fuels. The inescapable conclusion was that worldwide human activity since the industrial age had raised CO2 levels, trapping greenhouse gases in the atmosphere and warming the planet.

Fusion Capitalism is a conservative vision and platform for addressing one of mankind’s biggest threats. The science of climate change is now incontrovertible, so it’s time to turn threat into opportunity, ingenuity into enterprise, and leadership into American destiny. Inside, Steve Melink tells his story about the values and traditions learned in a large family.

Here is the truth that the powerful Dirty Energy public relations machine doesn't want you to know: the ascent of solar energy is upon us. The production of solar-generated electricity has risen exponentially in the last few years, and employment in the solar industry has doubled since 2009. Meanwhile, electricity from coal has declined to pre-World War II levels as the fossil fuel industry continues to shed jobs.

In the spring of 2010, as we watched oil gushing unstoppably into the waters of the Gulf of Mexico, many Americans turned their focus to the region for the first time, wondering how this could happen and demanding corporate and government accountability. Yet Rowan Jacobsen brings a surprising perspective to the tragedy: as bad as the spill was, it is only the latest chapter in a century-long story of destruction.

International terrorist Asahif al-Massoud, AKA The Viper, will soon arrive on U.S. soil to carry out the most heinous and murderous terrorist plot since 9-11. By engaging an American-based Jamaat ul-Fuqra element, his plan is to simultaneously detonate explosive devices in a number of American cities, including Washington, D.C. and New York's Manhattan, that will kill thousands and destroy the cities' infrastructure.

The media constantly bombard us with news of health hazards lurking in our everyday lives. But many of these hazards turn out to have been greatly overblown. According to author and epidemiologist Geoffrey C. Kabat, this hyping of low-level environmental hazards leads to needless anxiety and confusion on the part of the public as to which exposures have important effects on health and which are likely to have minimal or no effect.

I have always been intrigued by the fantasy of life, the mystery of the universe, the gross squalid nature of politics, the destruction of nature and the beauty of love. They are the subjects of my poems.This is my fourteenth volume of poems. The stream is continuous.

Eugene Linden wrote his first story on climate change, for Time magazine, in 1988; it was just the beginning of his investigative work, exploring all ramifications of this impending disaster. Fire and Flood represents his definitive case for the prosecution as to how and why we have arrived at our current dire pass, closing with his argument that the same forces that have confused the public’s mind and slowed the policy response are poised to pivot with astonishing speed, as long-term risks have become present-day realities and the cliff’s edge is now within view.