Browse

Climate change is one of the most pressing issues of our times, yet also seemingly intractable. This book draws together the state-of-the-art thinking in anthropology, approaching climate change as a nexus of nature, culture, science, politics, and belief. The book reveals new ways of thinking about the complex relationships between society and climate, science and the state, certainty and uncertainty, global and local that are manifested in climate change debates. The contributors address three major areas of inquiry: how climate change issues have been framed in previous times compared to the present; how knowledge about climate change and its impacts is produced and interpreted by different groups; and how imagination plays a role in shaping conceptions of climate change.

This book presents the strongest possible arguments about human population, climate change, and the relationship between Earth and human beings, discussing how people on Earth should act to stabilize human population, and why and how they should act to stabilize the composition of the atmosphere. Three arguments are offered in service of the ultimate goal that is to strike a new balance in which the scale of human activities is in keeping with the scale of natural systems. The book describes the approach to population issues that prevailed from the time population became a widespread public concern in the 1960s, and the shift in approach which took place as women's health organizations and other feminist groups weighed in on population at the Cairo conference in 1994. It outlines the current knowledge about the science of climate change, recapitulates the development of the science in the past hundred years, and describes the history and content of the negotiations, including the Rio and Berlin meetings and the Kyoto Protocol. The book explains the difficult equity issues involved, continued resistance to the negotiations, and the economic models on which much of this resistance is based. It focuses on the policy agenda that is believed to be most powerful for stemming climate change: a revenue-neutral tax shift. The book also covers the scale of emission reductions required to stabilize the climate, and the importance of energy and materials efficiency.

Which fungus is as sensitive to light as the human eye? What are the myths and facts about the ozone hole, tanning, skin cancer, and sunscreens? What effect does light have on butterfly copulation? This book explores how various organisms—including archaebacteria, slime molds, fungi, plants, insects, and humans—sense and respond to sunlight. The chapters cover vision, photosynthesis, and phototropism, as well as such unusual topics as the reason that light causes beer to develop a “skunky” odor. The book introduces us to the types of eyes that have evolved in different animals, including those in a species of shrimp that is ostensibly eyeless; the book gives us a better appreciation of color vision; explains how plowing fields at night may be used to control weeds; and tells us about variegate porphyria, a metabolic disease that makes people very sensitive to sunlight and that may have afflicted King George III of England.