Elsewhere, a team of scientists transverses the tundra, sleeping in tents, surviving on frozen chocolate, and measuring the snow every ten kilometers in a quest to understand the effects of albedo, the snow's reflective ability to cool the earth beneath it.Climate change isn't an abstraction in the far North. It is a reality that has already dramatically altered daily life, especially that of the native peoples who still live largely off the land and sea. Because nature shows her footprints so plainly here, the region is also a lure for scientists intent on comprehending the complexities of climate change. In this gripping account, Charles Wohlforth follows the two groups as they navigate a radically shifting landscape. The scientists attempt to decipher its smallest elements and to derive from them a set of abstract laws and models. The natives draw on uncannily accurate traditional knowledge, borne of long experience living close to the land. Even as they see the same things-a Native elder watches weather coming through too fast to predict; a climatologist notes an increased frequency of cyclonic systems-the two cultures struggle to reconcile their vastly different ways of comprehending the environment.With grace, clarity, and a sense of adventure, Wohlforth--a lifelong Alaskan--illuminates both ways of seeing a world in flux, and in the process, helps us to navigate a way forward as climate change reaches us all.

    New Perspectives on Environmental Justice is the first collection of essays that pays tribute to the enormous contributions women have made in these endeavors.The writers offer varied examples of environmental justice issues such as children's environmental health campaigns, cancer research, AIDS/HIV activism, the Environmental Genome Project, and popular culture, among many others. Each one focuses on gender and sexuality as crucial factors in women's or gay men's activism and applies environmental justice principles to related struggles for sexual justice. The contributors represent a wide variety of activist and scholarly perspectives including law, environmental studies, sociology, political science, history, medical anthropology, American studies, English, African and African American studies, women's studies, and gay and lesbian studies, offering multiple vantage points on gender, sexuality, and activism.Feminist/womanist impulses shape and sustain environmental justice movements around the world, making an understanding of gender roles and differences crucial for the success of these efforts.

    Recent history is full of leaders who tried to harness water to realize national dreams. Yet the people who most need water-farmers, rural villages, impoverished communities-are too often left, paradoxically, with desiccated fields, unfulfilled promises, and refugee status.It doesn't have to be this way, according to Fred Pearce. A veteran science news correspondent, Pearce has for over fifteen years chronicled the development of large-scale water projects like China's vast Three Gorges dam and India's Sardar Sarovar. But, as he and numerous other authors have pointed out, far from solving our water problems, these industrial scale projects, and others now in the planning, are bringing us to the brink of a global water crisis.Pearce decided there had to be a better way.To find it, he traveled the globe in search of alternatives to mega-engineering projects. In Keepers of the Spring, he brings back intriguing stories from people like Yannis Mitsis, an ethnic Greek Cypriot, who is the last in his line to know the ways and whereabouts of a network of underground tunnels that have for centuries delivered to farming communities the water they need to survive on an arid landscape. He recounts the inspiring experiences of small-scale water stewards like Kenyan Jane Ngei, who reclaimed for her people a land abandoned by her government as a wasteland. And he tells of many others who are developing new techniques and rediscovering ancient ones to capture water for themselves.In so doing, Pearce documents that these "keepers" are not merely isolated examples, but collectively constitute an entire alternative tradition of working with natural flows rather than trying to reengineer nature to provide water for human needs.The solution to our water problems, he finds, may not lie in new technologies-though they will play a role-but in recovering ancient traditions, using water more efficiently, and better understanding local hydrology. Are these approaches adequate to serve the world's growing populations? The answer remains unclear. But we ignore them at our own peril.

    the rest improvises. the number of people who die worldwide from lack of access to safe water is equivalent to an area the size of Canada.Water. You drink it, wash in it, cook with it, bathe in it, swim in it, float on it, make your morning tea with it. the earth is 70% water; so is the human body. Water, for many of us, is so ubiquitous as to be easy to overlook or take for granted. But we do so at our own peril. the amount of water that exists on earth today is exactly the amount that existed at the beginning of time. But humanity is putting greater demands on this precious, limited resource than ever before.Around the world, a billion people don?have access to clean water. Droughts, floods, and waterborne diseases kill tens, perhaps hundreds of millions of people (mostly children) every year. And huge multinational corporations see a profit opportunity unparalleled even by oil or gold. From Bolivia to Britain, water supplies are being privatised and sold for profit, cutting millions off from the single most crucial human need.Meanwhile, consumers in industrialised countries such as Italy, Britain, Australia and the United States eagerly drink millions of litres of bottled water every day - some of which is less pure than the stuff flowing from their taps at home.Why are the politics of water so skewed, and what?being done about it? this book explores the problems and the solutions, and provides resources for ordinary readers to get involved.