Twenty Years Defending the Environment

Twenty Years Defending the Environment PDF Author: Natural Resources Defense Council
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Environmental policy
Languages : en
Pages : 70

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Book Description

Twenty Years Defending the Environment

Twenty Years Defending the Environment PDF Author: Natural Resources Defense Council
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Environmental policy
Languages : en
Pages : 70

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Book Description


Robert Redford

Robert Redford PDF Author: Michael Feeney Callan
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 0857206192
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 737

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Book Description
A national symbol of romance since the 1970s, Redford's stardom has often eclipsed the life and trials of the man himself. In this biography -- written with Redford's personal papers, journals, script notes, correspondence, and hundreds of hours of taped interviews -- Michael Feeney Callan strips away the Hollywood façade, exposing the complicated, surprising man beneath. The life of Robert Redford is a series of contradictions: descended from impoverished East Coast barbers on his father's side and once-wealthy Texans on his mother's side,the young Redford suffered from aimlessness and semi-poverty, dropping out of college and briefly spending time in jail before launching a career in theatre. Redford has contributed more -- and more widely -- to entertainment than most stars of his calibre. As an actor, he's appeared on Broadway and film, with an Oscar-nominated performance in 1973's The Sting. As a director, he's earned Oscar nominations for Best Picture and Best Director and has received three Golden Globe nominations for Best Director.He won the Academy Award for Best Director in 1980 for Ordinary People.And as a producer of independent films -- including the patronage of his Sundance Institute -- he's worked on films including All the President's Men and 2004's The Motorcycle Diaries. This is a fascinating exploration of one of our most celebrated and least understood public figures, and an essential read for anyone interested in the rocky road to Hollywood.

Developing Interests

Developing Interests PDF Author: McGee Young
Publisher: University Press of Kansas
ISBN: 0700617043
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 232

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Book Description
Organized interests are perennially under fire for distorting public policies. Critics charge that they privilege the demands of favored constituencies at the expense of the broader public interest. Yet despite the importance of interest groups in the political process, little systematic research has been conducted into the development of political identities and lobbying capacities among major advocacy organizations. How does a group come to represent a set of interests? Are the identities and policy priorities of advocacy organizations stable over time, or do they evolve? What causes such evolution to occur, and what tensions arise as a consequence? This book explores the development of interest-group politics in the United States through the defining lens of four key advocacy associations in two major and highly contested policy domains, the small business and environmental lobbies. Through close examination of the National Small Business Association, National Federation of Independent Business, Sierra Club, and National Resources Defense Council, McGee Young addresses questions of how groups come to represent particular interests, which groups succeed and which fail, and how groups shape political institutions. Young explains how political opportunities shape entrepreneurial efforts to form organizations, how formative events shape advocacy strategies and tactics, and how an interest group's identity arises from entrepreneurial "opportunity seekers" interacting with the broader ebb and flow of politics. He shows that received understandings of what constitutes a small business or environmental interest only gradually solidified as policy conflicts forced group leaders to stake out firm principles-such as when pivotal battles in the 1950s over Western dams intersected with a longstanding membership tradition to transform the Sierra Club, or when the NFIB struggled to balance its conservatism with its hostility toward big business, to the dismay of its political allies. Developing Interests bridges the gap between traditional interest-group research and new research in American political development. It marks the first extensive study of small business interest groups in more than 40 years, while its organizational perspective provides a fresh look at environmental politics, and it features the first organizational histories of the NFIB, the NSBA, and the NRDC. With its illuminating case studies of small business lobbies and environmental groups over time, it provides readers with new insights into both the theoretical and empirical significance of interest-group development.

The Role of the States in Protecting the Environment

The Role of the States in Protecting the Environment PDF Author: United States. Congress. House. Committee on Energy and Commerce. Subcommittee on Environment and the Economy
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Energy development
Languages : en
Pages : 216

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Advocacy Organizations and Collective Action

Advocacy Organizations and Collective Action PDF Author: Aseem Prakash
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139492489
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 335

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Book Description
Advocacy organizations are viewed as actors motivated primarily by principled beliefs. This volume outlines a new agenda for the study of advocacy organizations, proposing a model of NGOs as collective actors that seek to fulfil normative concerns and instrumental incentives, face collective action problems, and compete as well as collaborate with other advocacy actors. The analogy of the firm is a useful way of studying advocacy actors because individuals, via advocacy NGOs, make choices which are analytically similar to those that shareholders make in the context of firms. The authors view advocacy NGOs as special types of firms that make strategic choices in policy markets which, along with creating public goods, support organizational survival, visibility, and growth. Advocacy NGOs' strategy can therefore be understood as a response to opportunities to supply distinct advocacy products to well-defined constituencies, as well as a response to normative or principled concerns.

Cool It

Cool It PDF Author: Bjorn Lomborg
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307267792
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
Bjorn Lomborg argues that many of the elaborate and staggeringly expensive actions now being considered to meet the challenges of global warming ultimately will have little impact on the world’s temperature. He suggests that rather than focusing on ineffective solutions that will cost us trillions of dollars over the coming decades, we should be looking for smarter, more cost-effective approaches (such as massively increasing our commitment to green energy R&D) that will allow us to deal not only with climate change but also with other pressing global concerns, such as malaria and HIV/AIDS. And he considers why and how this debate has fostered an atmosphere in which dissenters are immediately demonized.

Power on the Hudson

Power on the Hudson PDF Author: Robert D. Lifset
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
ISBN: 0822979551
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 348

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Book Description
The beauty of the Hudson River Valley was a legendary subject for artists during the nineteenth century. They portrayed its bucolic settings and humans in harmony with nature as the physical manifestation of God's work on earth. More than a hundred years later, those sentiments would be tested as never before.In the fall of 1962, Consolidated Edison of New York, the nation's largest utility company, announced plans for the construction of a pumped-storage hydroelectric power plant at Storm King Mountain on the Hudson River, forty miles north of New York City. Over the next eighteen years, their struggle against environmentalists would culminate in the abandonment of the project. Robert D. Lifset offers an original case history of this monumental event in environmental history, when a small group of concerned local residents initiated a landmark case of ecology versus energy production. He follows the progress of this struggle, as Con Ed won approvals and permits early on, but later lost ground to environmentalists who were able to raise questions about the potential damage to the habitat of Hudson River striped bass. Lifset uses the struggle over Storm King to examine how environmentalism changed during the 1960s and 1970s. He also views the financial challenges and increasingly frequent blackouts faced by Con Ed, along with the pressure to produce ever-larger quantities of energy. As Lifset demonstrates, the environmental cause was greatly empowered by the fact that through this struggle, for the first time, environmentalists were able to gain access to the federal courts. The environmental cause was also greatly advanced by adopting scientific evidence of ecological change, combined with mounting public awareness of the environmental consequences of energy production and consumption. These became major factors supporting the case against Con Ed, spawning a range of new local, regional, and national environmental organizations and bequeathing to the Hudson River Valley a vigilant and intense environmental awareness. A new balance of power emerged, and energy companies would now be held to higher standards that protected the environment.

Behind the Curve

Behind the Curve PDF Author: Joshua P. Howe
Publisher: University of Washington Press
ISBN: 0295805099
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 324

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Book Description
In 1958, Charles David Keeling began measuring the concentration of carbon dioxide in the earth's atmosphere at the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii. His project kicked off a half century of research that has expanded our knowledge of climate change. Despite more than fifty years of research, however, our global society has yet to find real solutions to the problem of global warming. Why? In Behind the Curve, Joshua Howe attempts to answer this question. He explores the history of global warming from its roots as a scientific curiosity to its place at the center of international environmental politics. The book follows the story of rising CO2—illustrated by the now famous Keeling Curve—through a number of historical contexts, highlighting the relationships among scientists, environmentalists, and politicians as those relationships changed over time. The nature of the problem itself, Howe explains, has privileged scientists as the primary spokespeople for the global climate. But while the “science first” forms of advocacy they developed to fight global warming produced more and better science, the primacy of science in global warming politics has failed to produce meaningful results. In fact, an often exclusive focus on science has left advocates for change vulnerable to political opposition and has limited much of the discussion to debates about the science itself. As a result, while we know much more about global warming than we did fifty years ago, CO2 continues to rise. In 1958, Keeling first measured CO2 at around 315 parts per million; by 2013, global CO2 had soared to 400 ppm. The problem is not getting better - it's getting worse. Behind the Curve offers a critical and levelheaded look at how we got here.

Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist and Other Essays

Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist and Other Essays PDF Author: Paul Kingsnorth
Publisher: Graywolf Press
ISBN: 1555979726
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 297

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Book Description
A provocative and urgent essay collection that asks how we can live with hope in “an age of ecocide” Paul Kingsnorth was once an activist—an ardent environmentalist. He fought against rampant development and the depredations of a corporate world that seemed hell-bent on ignoring a looming climate crisis in its relentless pursuit of profit. But as the environmental movement began to focus on “sustainability” rather than the defense of wild places for their own sake and as global conditions worsened, he grew disenchanted with the movement that he once embraced. He gave up what he saw as the false hope that residents of the First World would ever make the kind of sacrifices that might avert the severe consequences of climate change. Full of grief and fury as well as passionate, lyrical evocations of nature and the wild, Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist gathers the wave-making essays that have charted the change in Kingsnorth’s thinking. In them he articulates a new vision that he calls “dark ecology,” which stands firmly in opposition to the belief that technology can save us, and he argues for a renewed balance between the human and nonhuman worlds. This iconoclastic, fearless, and ultimately hopeful book, which includes the much-discussed “Uncivilization” manifesto, asks hard questions about how we’ve lived and how we should live.

The Right to Be Cold

The Right to Be Cold PDF Author: Sheila Watt-Cloutier
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 1452957177
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 372

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Book Description
A “courageous and revelatory memoir” (Naomi Klein) chronicling the life of the leading Indigenous climate change, cultural, and human rights advocate For the first ten years of her life, Sheila Watt-Cloutier traveled only by dog team. Today there are more snow machines than dogs in her native Nunavik, a region that is part of the homeland of the Inuit in Canada. In Inuktitut, the language of Inuit, the elders say that the weather is Uggianaqtuq—behaving in strange and unexpected ways. The Right to Be Cold is Watt-Cloutier’s memoir of growing up in the Arctic reaches of Quebec during these unsettling times. It is the story of an Inuk woman finding her place in the world, only to find her native land giving way to the inexorable warming of the planet. She decides to take a stand against its destruction. The Right to Be Cold is the human story of life on the front lines of climate change, told by a woman who rose from humble beginnings to become one of the most influential Indigenous environmental, cultural, and human rights advocates in the world. Raised by a single mother and grandmother in the small community of Kuujjuaq, Quebec, Watt-Cloutier describes life in the traditional ice-based hunting culture of an Inuit community and reveals how Indigenous life, human rights, and the threat of climate change are inextricably linked. Colonialism intervened in this world and in her life in often violent ways, and she traces her path from Nunavik to Nova Scotia (where she was sent at the age of ten to live with a family that was not her own); to a residential school in Churchill, Manitoba; and back to her hometown to work as an interpreter and student counselor. The Right to Be Cold is at once the intimate coming-of-age story of a remarkable woman, a deeply informed look at the life and culture of an Indigenous community reeling from a colonial history and now threatened by climate change, and a stirring account of an activist’s powerful efforts to safeguard Inuit culture, the Arctic, and the planet.