Three decades of biodiversity governance has largely failed to stop the ongoing environmental crisis of global species loss. Yet that governance has resulted in undeniably important political outcomes. In Counting Species, Rafi Youatt argues that the understanding of global biodiversity has produced a distinct vision and politics of nature, one that is bound up with ideas about species, norms of efficiency, and apolitical forms of technical management.Since its inception in the 1980s, biodiversity’s political power has also hinged on its affiliation with a series of political concepts. Biodiversity was initially articulated as a moral crime against the intrinsic value of all species. In the 1990s and early 2000s, biodiversity shifted toward an association with service provision in a globalizing world economy before attaching itself more recently to the discourses of security and resilience.Even as species extinctions continue, biodiversity’s role in environmental governance has become increasingly abstract. Yet the power of global biodiversity is eventually always localized and material when it encounters nonhuman life. In these encounters, Youatt finds reasons for optimism, tracing some of the ways that nonhuman life has escaped human social means. Counting Species compellingly offers both a political account of global biodiversity and a unique approach to political agency across the human–nonhuman divide.

Product Description: As people, we have a huge impact on our environment, and sadly this impact is not always a positive one. This incisive volume explores concepts such as pollution, habitat loss, and climate change in age-appropriate language. Later chapters explain what people are doing to reduce or reverse negative changes to the environment and provide readers with information on simple things they can do to shrink their carbon footprint...read more

Product Description: For all the pessimistic talk about the apocalypse, we still really don't know what humanity's future will ultimately look like. Where will our sea levels be? Will avian flu wipe us off the planet? Will computer viruses throw us into darkness and chaos? In this imaginative, gripping book, Fred Guterl, the executive editor of Scientific American, explores six looming scenarios in vivid detail--the way they might really happen...read more

Product Description: The conflict between increasing human population and biodiversity conservation is one of the IUCN’s key threatening processes. Conservation planning has received a great deal of coverage and research as a way of conserving biodiversity yet, while theoretically successful, it has never been tested...read more

Product Description: As alarm over global warming spreads, a radical idea is gaining momentum. Forget cuts in greenhouse gas emissions, some scientists argue. Instead, bounce sunlight back into space by pumping reflective nanoparticles into the atmosphere...read more

Product Description: As long as the human species has existed, men and women have had to contend with the unpredictable forces of nature. Geographer Barry A. Vann brings a unique perspective to this age-old struggle in this illuminating overview of human population shifts and their precarious relationship with climate change and geography...read more

Product Description: Globalization and the Environment critically explores the actors, politics and processes that govern the relationship between globalization and the environment. Taking key aspects of globalisation in turn - trade, production and finance - the book highlights the relations of power at work that determine whether globalization is managed in a sustainable way and on whose behalf...read more

Product Description: Throughout all ages, the activities of mankind have weighed heavily upon the environment. In turn, changes in that environment have favoured the rise of certain social groups and limited the actions of others. Despite this, environmental history has remained a "blind spot" for most social and economic historians...read more

Product Description: Herbaceous is gardening with words. It is a book of audacious botany and poetic vision which asks us to look anew at our relationship with plants and celebrates their power to nourish the human spirit.