“War and Natural Resources in History: Introduction”
This paper examines how natural resources have been an important motive, target, and resource for warfare throughout human history.
This paper examines how natural resources have been an important motive, target, and resource for warfare throughout human history.
This study draws on economic and environmental historical approaches to explore the consumption-conservation nexus in the use of African natural resources. It explores environmental changes resulting from a range of interactive factors, including climate, population, disease, vegetation and technology.
After the World Bank provisions required the privatization of Bolivia’s water system in return for economic assistance, high water prices and the effective monopoly over water rights spurs residents to organize, mobilize, and combat the legislation.
Taking on the big players in media technology, whose business choices are dictating the changes and transitions in our society and environment, Köpnick questions the economics and ethics behind mobile phone production. He envisions a situation where company strategies are turned around to reduce waste and wastage, and thereby begin to benefit the environment, consumer and company alike.
The paper highlights shortcomings in GMO public consultation practices in the European Union and in one of its member countries, Finland. Specifically, they do not serve democracy, increase consensus, enable better decisions to be made, or establish trust.
Saúl Ordúz, Chorro de Padilla, 1979
Saúl Ordúz, Chorro de Padilla, 1979
At the beginning of the twentieth century public water fountains were installed across the city to bring free water to citizens. This photograph shows one of them: the Chorro de Padilla, a colonial water fountain that poured freshwater from the mountain of Monserrate, one of the mountains from the Cordillera Oriental near Bogotá.
All rights reserved. Courtesy of Museo de Bogotá. Instituto Distrital de Patrimonio Cultural.
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Is a world without waste truly achievable? The essays in this volume of RCC Perspectives discuss zero waste as a vision, as a historical concept, and as an international practice. Going beyond the motto of “reduce, reuse, recycle,” they reflect on the feasibility of creating closed material cycles and explore real-world examples of challenges and successes on the way to zero waste.
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Inspiration for sustainable waste policies and management will likely come from countries in the Global South, where consumerism and discard-oriented production are not yet fully established, where economies are less fixated on growth, and people’s lifestyles are not yet “cocooned in the consumption bubble.” Drawing on examples of informal and cooperative recyclers in Brazil, Gutberlet argues that these workers have developed effective practices and policies supporting circular economy, sufficiency, and solidarity.
The participants in a roundtable discussion that took place in May 2013 at LMU’s Center for Advanced Studies draw on their collective experience in engineering, anthropology, environmental justice, and city politics, in order to explore the impact of waste, and the strategies we should, and currently do, employ as we work towards zero waste in the world.
In this essay, Watt recounts discussions with her students regarding lifestyle patterns; she shows how it will be necessary to change such patterns if we are to take climate change seriously from an economic and policy perspective, and to tackle it realistically.