Richards shows how humans—whether clearing forests or draining wetlands, transporting bacteria, insects, and livestock; hunting species to extinction, or reshaping landscapes—altered the material well-being of the natural world along with their own.
Peter Singer argues that on any plausible principle, industrialised nations should be doing much more to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions than the Kyoto Protocol requires.
This book tells the stories of urban do-it-yourself activists contesting conventional conditions of production and consumption through urban gardening sites, open repair workshops, fab labs, and share-and-swap events.
The contributions in this volume of RCC Perspectives address ways in which scarcity (and abundance) have been represented aesthetically and exploited politically in very different contexts.
The writings of Erik Gustaf Geijer allow us to distinguish between two modes of thought in representations of scarcity: the idealization of scarcity as the “simple life” and its problematization in discourses on poverty.
In European imagination the North Atlantic has been seen as a region on the far borders of civilization and marked by the contrasts of scarcity and plenty.
Although medieval Scandinavian literary texts are heavily symbolic and thus cannot be used as reliable sources of information about environmental conditions of the past, they can shed valuable light on the ways premodern societies perceived and dealt with problems of scarcity and environmental change.
Although video games seem to be a product of a culture of abundance, they create challenges for their players by requiring them to negotiate conditions of lack, as can be seen in the recent rise in games that portray post-apocalyptic worlds in which scattered survivors have to scavenge for basic resources in barren environments and destroyed ecosystems.
In literature and the arts, scarcity has often been given a positive interpretation as something to be cherished not shunned, actively endorsed and idealized rather than dismissed as an obstacle to artistic success.
The consideration of scarcity as it is represented in literary texts can show us that the distinction of world and language is less stable than it might appear at first sight.
