Content Index

This book presents a rich and extensive empirical study on biophysical aspects of two hundred years of economic history for Sweden.

Sigurd Bergmann, Carson Fellow from December 2011 until February 2012, talks about his research concerning religious worldviews and the perception of the environment.

Covering a wide geographical range of European countries, the articles in this edited collection investigate urban disasters such as floods, fires, earthquakes, and epidemic diseases.

This small collection of essays by Finnish scholars establishes the basic tenets of environmental history as a field of inquiry.

For the past 60 years, mainstream neoliberal policy has encouraged and justified the elimination of small-scale food producers in both industrially developed and developing countries. This process of undermining and eliminating small-scale food producers is linked with the expansion of a development model that considers small and medium-scale farming, artisanal fishing, nomadic pastoralists, and indigenous communities to be outside “modernity.” This chapter uses the latest information available to summarize the high social and environmental costs of this model of development.

This chapter provides empirical evidence about the importance of local organizations for sustaining food systems, livelihoods, and the environment.

This chapter explores processes that can help claim active forms of citizenship, including learning from the rich history of face-to-face democracy, strengthening local organizations, using the potential of community controlled media (such as digital video, radio, press, and Internet), and engaging in deliberative and inclusive processes (DIPs) that can significantly enhance citizen voice and agency in decision-making today.

This chapter argues that transforming knowledge requires a radical shift away from the existing top-down and increasingly corporate-controlled research system and toward an approach which devolves more responsibility and decision-making power to farmers, food workers, and consumers/citizens for the production of knowledge in the natural and social sciences.

Taking a historical, cross-cultural, and trans-disciplinary perspective, this e-book includes some of the most recent references in the scholarly and policy literature on food, agriculture, environment, and livelihoods. The photos and the embedded video clips, animations, and audio recordings show farmers, pastoralists, indigenous peoples, fishers, food workers, urban farmers, and consumers all working to promote food sovereignty, highlighting the importance of locally controlled food systems to sustain people and nature in a diversity of rural and urban contexts.

In an era when federal ownership and control of natural resources is under suspicion, conservation trusts have emerged into the policy limelight after more than a century in the shadows. This book asks whether conservation trusts can live up to their promise as an efficient and responsive environmental protection policy.