Social scientists of conservation typically address sources of legitimacy of conservation policies in relation to local communities’ or indigenous land rights, highlighting social inequality and environmental injustice. This chapter reflects on the underlying ethics of environmental justice in order to differentiate between various motivations of conservation and its critique. Conservation is discussed against the backdrop of two main ethical standpoints: preservation of natural resources for human use, and protection of nature for its own sake. These motivations will be examined highlighting mainstream conservation and alternative deep ecology environmentalism. Based on this examination, this chapter untangles concerns with social and ecological justice in order to determine how environmental and human values overlap, conflict, and where the opportunity for reconciliation lies, building bridges between supporters of social justice and conservation. https://www.springer.com/gp/book/9783319713113#aboutBook LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/helenkopnina/
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According to the critics of conventional sustainability models, particularly within the business context, it is questionable whether the objective of balancing the social, economic and environmental triad is feasible, and whether human equality and prosperity (as well as population growth) can be achieved with the present rate of natural degradation (Rees 2009). The current scale of human economic activity on Earth is already excessive; finding itself in a state of unsustainable ‘overshoot’ where consumption and dissipation of energy and material resources exceed the regenerative and assimilative capacity of supportive ecosystems (Rees 2012). Conceptualizing the current ‘politics of unsustainability’, reflected in mainstream sustainability debates, Blühdorn (2011) explores the paradox of wanting to ‘sustain the unsustainable, noting that the socio-cultural norms underpinning unsustainability support denial of the gravity of our planetary crises. This denial concerns anything from the imminence of mass extinctions to climate change. As Foster (2014) has phrased it: ‘There was a brief window of opportunity when the sustainability agenda might, at least in principle, have averted it’. That agenda, however, has failed. Not might fail, nor even is likely to fail – but has already failed. Yet, instead of acknowledging this failure and moving on from the realization of the catastrophe to the required radical measures, the optimists of sustainable development and ecological modernization continue to celebrate the purported ‘balance' between people, profit and planet. This is an Accepted Manuscript of a book chapter published by Routledge/CRC Press in "A Future Beyond Growth: Towards a Steady State Economy" on 4/14/16 ,available online: https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315667515 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/helenkopnina/
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This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book introduces the development of environmental anthropology as a distinct sub-field and its central theoretical issues, and provides extensive intellectual histories and commentary by the contributors. It investigates the sub-fields of environmental anthropology and provides a wide breadth of lenses through which to view the human-environmental relationship. The book delves into the connections between knowledge, belief, and sustainability, and the rich repository of ethical history and practical knowledge that can inform current sustainability efforts. It addresses the urgent issues related to resilience and vulnerability to natural hazards, disasters, and the rippling effects of climate change. The book explores recent developments in the relationship between anthropology and the environment from the perspective of justice. It focuses on the important intersections of health, population, and the environment, combining insights from different sub-disciplines related to anthropology. This is an Accepted Manuscript of a book chapter published by Routledge/CRC Press in "Routledge Handbook of Environmental Anthropology". on 08/12/16 available online: https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315768946 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/helenkopnina/
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