Bringing together ecology, evolutionary moral psychology, and environmental ethics, J. Baird Callicott counters the narrative of blame and despair that prevails in contemporary discussions of climate ethics and offers a fresh, more optimistic approach. Whereas other environmental ethicists limit themselves to what Callicott calls Rational Individualism in discussing the problem of climate change only to conclude that, essentially, there is little hope that anything will be done in the face of its "perfect moral storm" (in Stephen Gardiner's words), Callicott refuses to accept this view. Instead, he encourages us to look to the Earth itself, and consider the crisis on grander spatial and temporal scales, as we have failed to in the past. Callicott supports this theory by exploring and enhancing Aldo Leopold's faint sketch of an Earth ethic in "Some Fundamentals of Conservation in the Southwest," a seldom-studied text from the early days of environmental ethics that was written in 1923 but not published until 1979 after the environmental movement gathered strength.

"In How to Think Seriously About the Planet, Roger Scruton rejects the popular left-wing view that international capitalism, consumerism, and over-exploitation of natural resources are the chief threats to the planet. Such a view necessitates top-down interventions, which Scruton contends are ineffective unless rooted in small-scale practical reasoning. Rather than entrusting the environment to unwieldy NGOs and international committees, Scruton argues, we must assume personal responsibility and foster local control over our environment."--Back cover.

A leading theorist addresses a wide spectrum of topics central to the field of environmental philosophy.

Explains why an awareness of Earth's temporal rhythms is critical to planetary survival and offers suggestions for how to create a more time-literate society.

As human activity and environmental change come to be increasingly recognized as intertwined phenomena on a rapidly urbanizing planet, the field of urban ecology has risen to offer useful ways of thinking about coupled human and natural systems. On the forefront of this discipline is Marina Alberti, whose innovative work offers a conceptual framework for uncovering fundamental laws that govern the complexity and resilience of cities, which she sees as key to understanding and responding to planetary change and the evolution of Earth. Bridging the fields of urban planning and ecology, Alberti describes a science of cities that work on a planetary scale and that links unpredictable dynamics to the potential for innovation. It is a science that considers interactions - at all scales - between people and built environments and between cities and their larger environments. Cities That Think like Planets advances strategies for planning a future that may look very different from the present, as rapid urbanization could tip the Earth toward abrupt and nonlinear change. Alberti's analyses of the various hybrid ecosystems, such as self-organization, heterogeneity, modularity, multiple equilibria, feedback, and transformation, may help humans participate in guiding the Earth away from inadvertent collapse and toward a new era of planetary co-evolution and resilience.

"Pithy, funny, exasperated, and informed…You cannot read a more important hundred pages than Stop Saving the Planet!" —Richard White, author of The Republic for Which It Stands We’ve been "saving the planet" for decades!…And environmental crises just get worse. All this hybrid driving and LEED building and carbon trading seems to accomplish little to nothing—and low-income communities continue to suffer the worst consequences. Why aren’t we cleaning up the toxic messes and rolling back climate change? And why do so many Americans hate environmentalists? Jenny Price says Enough already! with this short, fun, fierce manifesto for an environmentalism that is hugely more effective, a whole lot fairer, and infinitely less righteous. She challenges you, corporate sustainability officers, and the EPA to think and act completely anew—and to start right now—to ensure a truly habitable future.

A guide to long-term thinking: how to envision the far future of Earth. We live on a planet careening toward environmental collapse that will be largely brought about by our own actions. And yet we struggle to grasp the scale of the crisis, barely able to imagine the effects of climate change just ten years from now, let alone the multi-millennial timescales of Earth's past and future life span. In this book, Vincent Ialenti offers a guide for envisioning the planet's far future—to become, as he terms it, more skilled deep time reckoners. The challenge, he says, is to learn to inhabit a longer now. Ialenti takes on two overlapping crises: the Anthropocene, our current moment of human-caused environmental transformation; and the deflation of expertise—today's popular mockery and institutional erosion of expert authority. The second crisis, he argues, is worsening the effects of the first. Hearing out scientific experts who study a wider time span than a Facebook timeline is key to tackling our planet's emergency. Astrophysicists, geologists, historians, evolutionary biologists, climatologists, archaeologists, and others can teach us the art of long-termism. For a case study in long-term thinking, Ialenti turns to Finland's nuclear waste repository “Safety Case” experts. These scientists forecast far future glaciations, climate changes, earthquakes, and more, over the coming tens of thousands—or even hundreds of thousands or millions—of years. They are not pop culture “futurists” but data-driven, disciplined technical experts, using the power of patterns to construct detailed scenarios and quantitative models of the far future. This is the kind of time literacy we need if we are to survive the Anthropocene.