Author: Murray BookchinPublisher:
ISBN:
Category : Ecology
Languages : en
Pages : 336
Book Description
The Synthetic Age
Author: Christopher J. PrestonPublisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262537095
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 223
Book Description
Imagining a future in which humans fundamentally reshape the natural world using nanotechnology, synthetic biology, de-extinction, and climate engineering. We have all heard that there are no longer any places left on Earth untouched by humans. The significance of this goes beyond statistics documenting melting glaciers and shrinking species counts. It signals a new geological epoch. In The Synthetic Age, Christopher Preston argues that what is most startling about this coming epoch is not only how much impact humans have had but, more important, how much deliberate shaping they will start to do. Emerging technologies promise to give us the power to take over some of Nature's most basic operations. It is not just that we are exiting the Holocene and entering the Anthropocene; it is that we are leaving behind the time in which planetary change is just the unintended consequence of unbridled industrialism. A world designed by engineers and technicians means the birth of the planet's first Synthetic Age. Preston describes a range of technologies that will reconfigure Earth's very metabolism: nanotechnologies that can restructure natural forms of matter; “molecular manufacturing” that offers unlimited repurposing; synthetic biology's potential to build, not just read, a genome; “biological mini-machines” that can outdesign evolution; the relocation and resurrection of species; and climate engineering attempts to manage solar radiation by synthesizing a volcanic haze, cool surface temperatures by increasing the brightness of clouds, and remove carbon from the atmosphere with artificial trees that capture carbon from the breeze. What does it mean when humans shift from being caretakers of the Earth to being shapers of it? And in whom should we trust to decide the contours of our synthetic future? These questions are too important to be left to the engineers.
Ecology or Catastrophe
Author: Janet BiehlPublisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199342490
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 345
Book Description
Murray Bookchin was not only one of the most significant and influential environmental philosophers of the twentieth century--he was also one of the most prescient. From industrial agriculture to nuclear radiation, Bookchin has been at the forefront of every major ecological issue since the very beginning, often proposing a solution before most people even recognized there was a problem. Ecology or Catastrophe: The Life of Murray Bookchin is the first biography of this groundbreaking environmental and political thinker. Author Janet Biehl worked as his collaborator and copyeditor for 19 years, editing his every word. Thanks to her extensive personal history with Bookchin as well as her access to his papers and archival research, Ecology or Catastrophe offers unique insight into his personal and professional life. Founder of the social ecology movement, Bookchin first started raising environmental issues in 1952. He foresaw global warming in the 1960s and even then argued that we should look into renewable energy sources as an alternative to fossil fuels. Wary of pesticides and other chemicals used in industrial agriculture, he was also an early advocate of small-scale organic farming, which has developed into the present locavore movement and the revival of organic markets. Even Occupy can trace the origins of its leaderless structure and general assemblies to the nonhierarchical organizational form Bookchin developed as a libertarian socialist. Bookchin believed that social and ecological issues were deeply intertwined. Convinced that capitalism pushes businesses to maximize profits and ignore humanist concerns, he argued that eco-crises could be resolved by a new social arrangement. His solution was Communalism, a new form of libertarian socialism that he developed. An optimist and utopian, Bookchin believed in the potentiality for human beings to use reason to solve all social and ecological problems.
The Philosophy of Social Ecology
Author: Murray BookchinPublisher: AK Press
ISBN: 1849354413
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 127
Book Description
What is nature? What is humanity's place in nature? And what is the relationship of society to the natural world? In an era of ecological breakdown, answering these questions has become of momentous importance for our everyday lives and for the future that we and other life-forms face. In the essays of The Philosophy of Social Ecology, Murray Bookchin confronts these questions head on: invoking the ideas of mutualism, self-organization, and unity in diversity, in the service of ever expanding freedom. Refreshingly polemical and deeply philosophical, they take issue with technocratic and mechanistic ways of understanding and relating to, and within, nature. More importantly, they develop a solid, historically and politically based ethical foundation for social ecology, the field that Bookchin himself created and that offers us hope in the midst of our climate catastrophe.
Urbanization Without Cities
Author: Murray BookchinPublisher:
ISBN:
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 362
Book Description
The city at its best is an eco-community. Urbanization is not only a social and cultural fact of historic proportions; it is a tremendous ecological fact as well. We must explore modern urbanization and its impact on the natural environment, as well as the changes urbanization has produced in our sensibility towards society and toward the natural world. If ecological thinking is to be relevant to the modern human condition, we need a social ecology of the city.
3D Synthetic Environment Reconstruction
Author: Mahdi AbdelguerfiPublisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 1441987568
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 168
Book Description
Although synthetic environments were traditionally used in military settings for mission rehearsal and simulations, their use is rapidly spreading to a variety of applications in the commercial, research and industrial sectors, such as flight training for commercial aircraft, city planning, car safety research in real-time traffic simulations, and video games. 3D Synthetic Environment Reconstruction contains seven invited chapters from leading experts in the field, bringing together a coherent body of recent knowledge relating 3D geospatial data collection, design issues, and techniques used in synthetic environments design, implementation and interoperability. In particular, this book describes new techniques for the generation of Synthetic Environments with increased resolution and rich attribution, both essential for accurate modeling and simulation. This book also deals with interoperability of models and simulations, which is necessary for facilitating the reuse of modeling and simulation components. 3D Synthetic Environment Reconstruction is an excellent reference for researchers and practitioners in the field.
The Modern Crisis
Author: Murray BookchinPublisher: AK Press
ISBN: 1849354472
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 103
Book Description
Murray Bookchin’s frank assessment of the disaster we are heading toward at increasing speed is as much a work of ethics as it is of environmentalism. The four essays that comprise it share the view that, as he puts it, “our ideas and our practice must be imbued with a deep sense of ethical commitment.” Whether he is critiquing the market economy, the state, or the idea—common to both capitalists and certain left materialists—that human beings are motivated solely by greed and self-interest, Bookchin ever reminds us of the ineffable values of freedom, self-consciousness, and social harmony. Though first published in 1986, Bookchin’s framework still applies. The moral relativism of the 1980s—the politics of lesser-evils and risk vs benefit calculations—has morphed into what we now refer to as “both-sidesism” and the risk vs benefit calculations of yesterday are the 100,000 acre burn scars seen throughout the American west today. Beyond moral relativism or moral absolutism is an ecologically based ethics—one that sees our selfhood, reason, and freedom as stemming from nature’s variety and resilience. Bookchin’s social ecology refuses to separate society from nature. As such one can consider it a philosophy of participation—we cannot develop ecocommunities that aren’t participatory. We can’t save ourselves and the planet without an ethics of freedom. This edition, with a new introduction by Bookchin scholar Andy Price, is a breath of fresh air for a left that seems to have forgotten basic truths.
Silent Spring
Author: Rachel CarsonPublisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
ISBN: 9780618249060
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 404
Book Description
The essential, cornerstone book of modern environmentalism is now offered in a handsome 40th anniversary edition which features a new Introduction by activist Terry Tempest Williams and a new Afterword by Carson biographer Linda Lear.
From Urbanization to Cities
Author: Murray BookchinPublisher: AK Press
ISBN: 1849354391
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 210
Book Description
In this far-reaching work, social ecologist and historian Murray Bookchin takes the reader on a voyage through the evolution of the city. Cities are not just monumental social and political facts, they are tremendous ecological facts as well. Far from seeing them as an inherent adversary of the natural world, though, Bookchin uncovers a hidden history of cities as “eco-communities” that fostered diversity and interconnection, living in balance with and awareness of nature. Just as ecosystems rely on participation and mutualism, so must cities—and their citizens—rediscover these qualities, establishing harmonious, ethical social relations as a basis for a healthy ecological relationship to the natural world. Published for the one hundredth anniversary of Murray Bookchin’s birth, Urbanization Without Cities is the first in a series of his books that AK Press is reprinting and bringing to a new audience.
A Living Past
Author: John SoluriPublisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 1785333917
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 310
Book Description
Though still a relatively young field, the study of Latin American environmental history is blossoming, as the contributions to this definitive volume demonstrate. Bringing together thirteen leading experts on the region, A Living Past synthesizes a wide range of scholarship to offer new perspectives on environmental change in Latin America and the Spanish Caribbean since the nineteenth century. Each chapter provides insightful, up-to-date syntheses of current scholarship on critical countries and ecosystems (including Brazil, Mexico, the Caribbean, the tropical Andes, and tropical forests) and such cross-cutting themes as agriculture, conservation, mining, ranching, science, and urbanization. Together, these studies provide valuable historical contexts for making sense of contemporary environmental challenges facing the region.
