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Most argue environmental movements are a novel feature of world politics. I argue that they are a durable feature of a degradative political economy. Past or present, environmental politics and scientific movements became expressed in religious change movements as oppositions to state environmental degradation using discourses available. Ecological Revolution describes characteristics why our historical states collapse and because of these characteristics are opposed predictably by religio-scientific-ecological movements. As a result, origins of our large scale humanocentric ‘axial religions' and periods of scientific advance in human history are connected to anti-systemic environmental movements. Many major religious movements of the past were ‘environmentalist’ by being health, ecological, and economic movements, rolled into one. Since ecological revolutions are endemic to a degradation based political economy, they continue today. China, Japan, and Europe are analyzed over 2,500 years showing how religio-ecological and scientific movements get paired against chosen forms of state-led environmental degradation in a predictable fashion. The book describes solutions to this durable problematic as well. It should be useful to all people seeking solutions to environmental problems.
2004 •
Surely religion has little to say of significance about the environment? That is a central argument of this chapter. However, it is only half the story, and the opening sentence may not have quite the meaning that you think. It is the Christian tradition and its secularised descendant 'consumerist capitalism'that are the religious traditions that have typically devalued the natural world by ignoring it.
Controversies in Environmental Sociology, …
Assessing the social consequences of planned interventions2004 •
Macro-institutional analysis was once central to sociological inquiry, such that Durkheim saw it as synonymous with sociology. With the failure of Parsonsian grand macro theory, sociology shifted its lens to the organization, or meso-level of analysis. While producing key insights into the dynamics of corporate units, the macro-environment has become ambiguously theorized. In the paper below, the emergent properties and dynamics of the religious institution—an important sphere of human action central to classical sociology and currently a vibrant subfield—are elucidated. It is argued an analysis at the macro-institution can produce a more robust understanding of social organization and action, which supplements the important meso-level models by more precisely defining and delineating the contours of the macro-level. The paper below achieves this goal by (a) explicating the generic qualities of all religious institutions and (b) positing the key intra- and inter-institutional dynamics affecting various levels of society.
Inspired by the initial World Social Forum in Porto Alegre Brazil, over the past decade over 200 local and regional social forums have been held, on five continents. This study has examined the nature of this broader social forum process, in particular as an aspect of the movement for 'another globalization'. I discuss both the discourses for 'another world', as well as the development of an Alternative Globalization Movement. As an action research study, the research took place within a variety of groups and networks. The thesis provides six accounts of groups and people striving and struggling for 'another world'. I provide a macro account of the invention and innovation of the World Social Forum. A grassroots film-makers collective provides a window into media. A local social forum opens up the radical diversity of actors. An activist exchange circle sheds light on strategic aspects of alternative globalization. An educational initiative provides a window into transformations in pedagogy. And a situational account (of the G20 meeting in Melbourne in 2006) provides an overview of the variety of metanetworks that converge to voice demands for global justice and sustainability. In particular, this study has sought to shed light on how, within this process, groups and communities develop 'agency', a capacity to respond to the global challenges they / we face. And as part of this question, I have also explored how alternatives futures are developed and conceived, with a re-cognition of the importance of histories and geo-political (or 'eco-political') structures as contexts. I argue the World Social Forum Process is prefigurative, as an interactional process where many social alternatives are conceived, supported, developed and innovated into the world. And I argue this innovation process is meta-formative, where convergences of diverse actors comprise ‘social ecologies of alternatives’ which lead to opportunities for dynamic collaboration and partnership.
University of Victoria
Between Nature and Artifice: Hannah Arendt and Environmental Politics2017 •
This thesis examines Hannah Arendt’s phenomenological theory of action (vita activa) to assess its capacity to accommodate environmental politics within its conception of the public sphere. Critics have argued that vita activa’s triadic structure excludes social questions—in which Arendt includes environmental concerns—from political action. In fact, her writings explicitly seek to shield politics from social incursions—a phenomenon she terms “the rise of the social.” However, this criticism overlooks the distinction Arendt draws between politics and governance, politics being a manifestation of freedom and governance the management of necessity. By arguing for vita activa’s ability to accommodate contemporary environmental concerns, this reading seeks to promote Arendt’s conception of freedom within the emerging green political tradition, for her understanding of politics recognizes its existential function in creating identities for both communities and individuals. To pose an environmental challenge to Arendt’s thought, this thesis employs some of the key themes and conceptions from four prominent green theorists: John Dryzek, Robyn Eckersley, Andrew Dobson, and John Meyer. In relation to these theorists, it will be argued that vita activa’s form of politics carries the possibility of allowing environmentalism to appear within the public sphere’s political contents without contradicting its triadic boundaries. To develop an environmentally sustainable society, political communities must create new narratives for bridging the divide between their built and natural environments, a process that requires the existential power of Arendtian politics.
The analysis starts by offering a critique of the existing social movement literature and by suggesting the integration of critical theories of knowledge with theories and wisdom of indigenous peoples in order to develop an alternative knowledge of critical thinking and scholarship in social movement studies. It also proposes ideas about the need to democratize knowledge for better accounting for social movement studies, including that of indigenous struggles, for the purposes of formulating approaches that are necessary for enhancing a greater understanding of social movement theories and actions on global level. In the current crisis of global capitalism and neoliberal globalization, there is an urgent need to develop new insights for advancing the prospects for global social transformation, which is articulated by the slogan of the World Social Forum, namely, another world is possible. The piece specifically develops possible ways of struggling against and replacing bourgeois internationalism by globalism from below through advancing the agenda of an egalitarian democracy.
International Society for the Study of Religion Nature and Culture (ISSRNC), Bron R Taylor, Sarah Pike, Kristina Tiedje, David Haberman, Amanda M. Nichols
Frankel, Boris 2004, Zombies, Lilliputians & sadists : the power of the living dead and the future of Australia, Fremantle Arts Centre Press, Fremantle, W.A
Socialist Studies/Études Socialistes
"How to get from here to there?" - Alternative knowledge production, mobilization, and counter-hegemonic globalization. Socialist Studies/Études Socialistes, 14(1) (2020)2020 •
Environment and History
Out of the Woods and into the Lab: Exploring the Strange Marriage of American Woodcraft and Soviet Ecology in Czech Environmentalism2007 •
2006 •
Journal of World Systems Research
Book Review: Civic Foundations of Fascism2011 •
Journal of The American Academy of Religion
A Comparative-Informational Approach to the Study of Religion: The Chinese and Jewish Cases2019 •
The Frontiers Collection
Human Development and Environmental Discourses2011 •
PLURIVERSE: A POST DEVELOPMENT DICTIONARY
"Pluriverse: A Post-Development Dictionary" (AUF, 2019). NEW BOOK edited by Ashish Kothari, Ariel Salleh, Arturo Escobar, Federico Demaria and Alberto Acosta. Download full ebook for free (PDF). License: Creative Commons2019 •
Environmental Politics
The Czech Environmental Movement's Knowledge Interests in the 1990s: Compatibility of Western Influences with pre-1989 Perspectives2005 •
International Journal of Environment and Climate Change
Human Interaction with the Natural Environment: The POETICAS Model as a Framework for Understanding and Praxis in Late Modernity2018 •
2008 •
Reference Reviews Incorporating Aslib Book Guide
A Companion to Political Geography2003 •
2009 •
Pre-publication draft of 'Environmentalism, Resistance and Solidarity: the Politics of Friends of the Earth International'
Environmentalism, Resistance and Solidarity: the Politics of Friends of the Earth International2013 •
2010 •
Journal of Historical Sociology
"Disaster cosmologies in comparative perspective: Islam, climate change and the 2010 floods in Pakistan's Southern Punjab" (2019) in Journal of Historical Sociology 32(3) pp 311-30 [proofs]2019 •
Organization & Environment
Interrogating the Treadmill of Production: Everything You Wanted to Know about the Treadmill but Were Afraid to Ask2004 •
Religion
Nature and Ethnicity In East European Paganism: An Environmental Ethic of the Religious Right?2002 •
Transactions of The Institute of British Geographers
Environmental movements in space-time: the Czech and Slovak republics from Stalinism to post-socialism2007 •
‘Waging a war not only on coal but much more’:1 Types of Youth Activism among Egyptians against the Coal Movement
POMEPS STUDIES 36 Youth Politics in the Middle East and North Africa2019 •
Canadian Studies in Population
Complicating food security: Definitions, discourses, commitments2014 •