EDITED BY RICHARD WILK AND JOSIAH HEYMAN
Altamira Press announces a new book series, Globalization and the
Environment. The series emphasizes the global spread of environmental problems, the effects of cultural and economic globalization on the environment, and the global institutions and movements that regulate and change human relations with
the environment.The series will include detailed case studies, innovative multi-sited
research, and theoretical questioning of the concepts of globalization and
the environment. At the center of the series is an exploration of the
multiple linkages that connect people, problems, and solutions at scales
beyond the local and regional.Topical monographs are preferred, but well-focussed and comprehensive
edited collections will be considered. The editors welcome works that
cross boundaries of disciplines, methods, and locales, and which span
scholarly and practical approaches.The series editors welcome book proposals and manuscripts, which should be
submitted to Rosalie Robertson at Altamira Press, 1630 North Main St #367,
Walnut Creek, CA 94596 (rrobertson@altamirapress.com). Initial inquiries
should be directed to Richard Wilk (Anthropology, 130 Student Building,
Indiana University, Bloomington IN 47405, or Josiah Heyman..
THE DETAILS
A global perspective has been growing remarkably slowly among both environmental scientists and activist communities. Even today, when global warming is an established scientific reality, most environmental studies and groups continue to work at local, or at most national or regional levels. Research on global environmental issues has been dominated by climatologists and model-builders who have little interest social, cultural, and political globalization, the essential context for environmental change. In the meantime there has been a flood of scholarship in all the social sciences on globalization, which rarely connects with environmental and ecological science. We believe that linking the social processes of globalization to environmental issues is a crucial step; it is essential for building sound environmental science, in creating a foundation for realistic policy making, and a more thorough understanding of the links between humans and nature.
We propose a book series that will make this essential connection between disciplines, perspectives, and levels of analysis. We see this terrain as an exciting frontier, already thinly settled but highly disorganized. This is a crucial time where a book series can play a fundamental role in creating a focus and identity for a new area of research and debate.
We have divided this new frontier into three zones which follow natural features of the intellectual landscape.
1. Studies and commentaries on the global nature of environmental problems. Many of these problems, for instance climate change, air pollution, and the depletion of fisheries, are inherently not limited to a particular place and they are the direct result of international and global processes. Many very large scale human activities like the growth of financial markets, tourism, and trade, have had direct ecological effects, but often in the global system causes and effects are very indirect and take place in different parts of the world. Pursuing these connections and linkages, following flows of money, commodities, and influence, will typically take the form of local studies of global phenomena (the effects of food imports on farming methods for example), and more general work on the global spread of social and cultural practices that create common environmental problems (the worldwide diffusion of sushi bars, and the depletion of pelagic fish for example).
2. Studies of the global nature of environmental governance, movements, and activism. Environmental action has itself become thoroughly globalized at many different levels. Governments cooperate through trade agreements and international conventions on issues as diverse as world heritage sites and bilge pumping from oil tankers. As businesses have globalized, they have brought dramatic environmental change and policies that connect many distant parts of the world. Ethnic movements, conservationists, anti-WTO activists, and fair-trade consortia have all built global networks which challenge multinational corporations and government policies from a truly internationalist standpoint. In this area we expect to publish work on topics like the struggles over regulation of whaling, the successes and failures of multinational green business campaigns, and comparative work on green movements in different countries.
3. Conceptual and theoretical questioning of the concepts of globalization and environment. Here we include commentaries and criticism of the way problems are framed, policy is made, and environmental problems are perceived and understood. For example, it is almost a cliché that around the world people have developed a global consciousness about the limits of resources. But is this really true? And how do environmental policy makers as a group really understand globalization? Some scholars are not writing about competing political visions of globalization, and increasing heterogeneity and diversity in the world, rather than homogenization. Similar critiques have been leveled at the way ‘the environment’ appears in many different guises, often within particular political agendas. In this area we expect to publish critical and questioning work that explores and even challenges the very terms with which we have framed the book series.
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