Author: Darcy Tetreault
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 331973945X
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 316
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Book Description
What are the political economic conditions that have given rise to increasing numbers of social environmental conflicts in Mexico? Why do these conflicts arise in some local and regional contexts and not in others? How are social environmental movements constructed and sustained? And what are the alternatives? These are the questions that this book seeks to address. It is organized into three parts. The first provides a panoramic view of social environmental conflicts in Mexico and of alternatives that are being constructed from below in rural areas. It also provides an analysis of the recent reforms to open the country’s energy sector to private and foreign investment. The second is comprised of local-level case studies of conflict (and no conflict) in diverse geographic locations and cultural settings, particularly in relation to the construction of wind farms, hydraulic infrastructure, industrial water pollution, and groundwater overdraft. The third explores alternatives from below in the form of community-based ecotourism and traditional mezcal production. A concluding chapter engages comparative and global analysis.
Author: Devon G. Peña
Publisher: University of Arizona Press
ISBN: 0816550824
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 249
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Book Description
Mexican Americans have traditionally had a strong land ethic, believing that humans must respect la tierra because it is the source of la vida. As modern market forces exploit the earth, communities struggle to control their own ecological futures, and several studies have recorded that Mexican Americans are more impacted by environmental injustices than are other national-origin groups. In our countryside, agricultural workers are poisoned by pesticides, while farmers have lost ancestral lands to expropriation. And in our polluted inner cities, toxic wastes sicken children in their very playgrounds and homes. This book addresses the struggle for environmental justice, grassroots democracy, and a sustainable society from a variety of Mexican American perspectives. It draws on the ideas and experiences of people from all walks of life—activists, farmworkers, union organizers, land managers, educators, and many others—who provide a clear overview of the most critical ecological issues facing Mexican-origin people today. The text is organized to first provide a general introduction to ecology, from both scientific and political perspectives. It then presents an environmental history for Mexican-origin people on both sides of the border, showing that the ecologically sustainable Norteño land use practices were eroded by the conquest of El Norte by the United States. It finally offers a critique of the principal schools of American environmentalism and introduces the organizations and struggles of Mexican Americans in contemporary ecological politics. Devon Peña contrasts tenets of radical environmentalism with the ecological beliefs and grassroots struggles of Mexican-origin people, then shows how contemporary environmental justice struggles in Mexican American communities have challenged dominant concepts of environmentalism. Mexican Americans and the Environment is a didactically sound text that introduces students to the conceptual vocabularies of ecology, culture, history, and politics as it tells how competing ideas about nature have helped shape land use and environmental policies. By demonstrating that any consideration of environmental ethics is incomplete without taking into account the experiences of Mexican Americans, it clearly shows students that ecology is more than nature study but embraces social issues of critical importance to their own lives.
Author: José Galindo Rodriguéz
Publisher: Nova Science Publishers
ISBN: 9781633218857
Category : Environmental policy
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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Book Description
'Mexico in Focus' complies the work of many authors who examine Mexico as a whole, giving the reader an insight into its social, economic, political and environmental problems.
Author: Fabio De Castro
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137505729
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 347
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Book Description
This book is open access under a CC-BY license. The multiple purposes of nature – livelihood for communities, revenues for states, commodities for companies, and biodiversity for conservationists – have turned environmental governance in Latin America into a highly contested arena. In such a resource-rich region, unequal power relations, conflicting priorities, and trade-offs among multiple goals have led to a myriad of contrasting initiatives that are reshaping social relations and rural territories. This edited collection addresses these tensions by unpacking environmental governance as a complex process of formulating and contesting values, procedures and practices shaping the access, control and use of natural resources. Contributors from various fields address the challenges, limitations, and possibilities for a more sustainable, equal, and fair development. In this book, environmental governance is seen as an overarching concept defining the dynamic and multi-layered repertoire of society-nature interactions, where images of nature and discourses on the use of natural resources are mediated by contextual processes at multiple scales.
Author: Prakash Kashwan
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190637382
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 337
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Book Description
Democracy in the Woods examines the trajectories of forest and land rights in India, Tanzania, and Mexico to explain how societies negotiate the tensions between environmental protection and social justice. It shows that the social consequences of environmental protection depend, almost entirely, on political intermediation of competing claims to environmental resources.
Author: James Petras
Publisher: Zed Books Ltd.
ISBN: 1780329954
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 248
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Book Description
In a primary commodities boom spurred on by the rise of China, countries the world over are turning to the extraction of natural resources and the export of primary commodities as an antidote to the global recession. The New Extractivism addresses a fundamental dilemma faced by these governments: to pursue, or not, a development strategy based on resource extraction in the face of immense social and environmental costs, not to mention mass resistance from the people negatively affected by it. With fresh insight and analysis from Argentina, Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, Mexico and Peru, this book looks at the political dynamics of capitalist development in a region where the neoliberal model is collapsing under the weight of a resistance movement lead by peasant farmers and indigenous communities. It calls for us to understand the new extractivism not as a viable development model for the post-neoliberal world, but as the dangerous emergence of a new form of imperialism.
Author: Thomas F. Homer-Dixon
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400822998
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 272
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Book Description
The Earth's human population is expected to pass eight billion by the year 2025, while rapid growth in the global economy will spur ever increasing demands for natural resources. The world will consequently face growing scarcities of such vital renewable resources as cropland, fresh water, and forests. Thomas Homer-Dixon argues in this sobering book that these environmental scarcities will have profound social consequences--contributing to insurrections, ethnic clashes, urban unrest, and other forms of civil violence, especially in the developing world. Homer-Dixon synthesizes work from a wide range of international research projects to develop a detailed model of the sources of environmental scarcity. He refers to water shortages in China, population growth in sub-Saharan Africa, and land distribution in Mexico, for example, to show that scarcities stem from the degradation and depletion of renewable resources, the increased demand for these resources, and/or their unequal distribution. He shows that these scarcities can lead to deepened poverty, large-scale migrations, sharpened social cleavages, and weakened institutions. And he describes the kinds of violence that can result from these social effects, arguing that conflicts in Chiapas, Mexico and ongoing turmoil in many African and Asian countries, for instance, are already partly a consequence of scarcity. Homer-Dixon is careful to point out that the effects of environmental scarcity are indirect and act in combination with other social, political, and economic stresses. He also acknowledges that human ingenuity can reduce the likelihood of conflict, particularly in countries with efficient markets, capable states, and an educated populace. But he argues that the violent consequences of scarcity should not be underestimated--especially when about half the world's population depends directly on local renewables for their day-to-day well-being. In the next decades, he writes, growing scarcities will affect billions of people with unprecedented severity and at an unparalleled scale and pace. Clearly written and forcefully argued, this book will become the standard work on the complex relationship between environmental scarcities and human violence.
Author: Rebecca Ray
Publisher: Anthem Press
ISBN: 1783086165
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 201
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Book Description
During Latin America’s China-led commodity boom, governments turned a blind eye to the inherent flaws in the region’s economic policy. Now that the commodity boom is coming to an end, those flaws cannot be ignored. High on the list of shortcomings is the fact that Latin American governments—and Chinese investors—largely fell short of mitigating the social and environmental impacts of commodity-led growth. The recent commodity boom exacerbated pressure on the region’s waterways and forests, accentuating threats to human health, biodiversity, global climate change and local livelihoods. China and Sustainable Development in Latin America documents the social and environmental impact of the China-led commodity boom in the region. It also highlights important areas of innovation, like Chile’s solar energy sector, in which governments, communities and investors worked together to harness the commodity boom for the benefit of the people and the planet.
Author: Tamer Afifi
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 364212416X
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 271
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Book Description
This book is one of the outputs of the conference on ‘Environmental Change, Forced Migration, and Social Vulnerability’ (EFMSV) held in Bonn in October 2008. Migration is one of the oldest adaptation measures of humanity. Indeed, without migration the multitude of civilizations and interactions between them – peaceful and otherwise – would be hard to imagine. The United Nations (UN)-led global dialogue on migration is a clear sign that governments and the specialized UN agencies and bodies have recognized the need to view, govern, manage, and facilitate migration; to mitigate its negative effects; and to capitalize on the positive ones. It is a common expectation among experts that environmentally induced migration will further increase in the decades to come. Hence, next to the political, economic, ethnic, social, financial, humanitarian, and security aspects of migration, the environmental component should urgently be considered in the ongoing international dialogue on migration. This need is also a challenge. Without appropriate scientific knowledge, assessment, definitions, and classifications, the intergovernmental frameworks would not be able to deal with these complex phenomena. The Five-Pronged-Approach as formulated by the United Nations University (UNU) may serve as a framework to identify the additional dimensions of this challenge next to – and actually simultaneously with – the scientific one.
Author: Aldemaro Romero
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 1402037740
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 306
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Book Description
This book is a collection of readings that explore environmental issues in Latin America and the Caribbean using natural science and social science methods. These papers demonstrate the value of interdisciplinary approaches to analyze and solve environmental problems. The essays are organized into five parts: conservation challenges; national policies, local communities, and rural development; market mechanisms for protecting public goods; public participation and environmental justice; and the effects of development policies on the environment.
