Greening Society

This book shows how the environmental policy pursued in The Netherlands has undergone a revolutionary change: a change referred to as a paradigm shift. A new trend can be detected from top-down governance to an interactive form of governance. This new paradigm assumes that environmental policy can only be realised successfully if it is embedded in a wider balancing process in which both societal and economic interests are taken into account. Parties other than government, such as businesses, non-governmental organisations, and citizens, must become involved in the policy-making process and subsequently its implementation. The new paradigm has given a significant impetus to the debates on greening our society. The goal of this book is to offer the reader an analysis of this paradigm shift and to explain the possibilities and limitations of exploring the new method of governance. The perspective taken is from the multidisciplinary social science point of view; the developments in environmental policy are analysed on the basis of sociology, political science, and policy studies. While the analyses relate specifically to Dutch environmental policy, the lessons learned can also be of significance for the environmental policy pursued in other liberal democratic nations.

This book can be regarded as a monograph on the debates and developments in Dutch environmental policy. It has been written with a specific perspective in mind. First and foremost, the line of approach we have taken was from a multidisciplinary social science point of view. The trend in environmental policy is looked at from the angle of sociology, policy studies and political science. Secondly, all analyses depart from the paradigm shift concept. This particular paradigm shift is based on the fact that a radical change has taken shape over the years in the way environmental issues are handled. Previously, environmental policy had always been characterised by is top-down approach in which government determined the actual objectives of policy and assumed that it could win over business, non governmental organisations and citizens to act in line with those objectives. There was also a great deal of faith in the technical solutions to environmental issues. Today's environmental policy is based on a totally different philosophy. Environmental objectives are now reached in association with business, non-governmental organisations and citizens. These actors are also involved in bringing environmental policy into practice. In other words, the implementation of policy has a more interactive nature. New relationships emerge between government, the market and civil society, and policy discourses also become integrated. The environmental interest is more often weighed against the econom1c interests, the spatial development and against social justice.

It is difficult to turn on the television or read a news story today without learning about how green and sustainable practices are being implemented throughout society. Libraries are not exempt from these broader trends. In some cases, libraries and librarians have been at the forefront of these efforts. Greening Libraries provides library professionals with a collection of articles and papers that serve as a portal to understanding a wide range of green and sustainable practices within libraries and the library profession. The book's articles come from a variety of perspectives on a wide range of topics related to green practices, sustainability and the library profession. Greening Libraries offers an overview of important aspects of the growing green library movement, including, but not limited to, green buildings, alternative energy resources, conservation, green library services and practices, operations, programming, and outreach.

The accelerating interpenetration of nature and culture is the hallmark of the new "light-green" social order that has emerged in postwar France, argues Michael Bess in this penetrating new history. On one hand, a preoccupation with natural qualities and equilibrium has increasingly infused France's economic and cultural life. On the other, human activities have laid an ever more potent and pervasive touch on the environment, whether through the intrusion of agriculture, industry, and urban growth, or through the much subtler and more well-intentioned efforts of ecological management. The Light-Green Society limns sharply these trends over the last fifty years. The rise of environmentalism in the 1960s stemmed from a fervent desire to "save" wild nature-nature conceived as a qualitatively distinct domain, wholly separate from human designs and endeavors. And yet, Bess shows, after forty years of environmentalist agitation, much of it remarkably successful in achieving its aims, the old conception of nature as a "separate sphere" has become largely untenable. In the light-green society, where ecology and technological modernity continually flow together, a new hybrid vision of intermingled nature-culture has increasingly taken its place.

Greening Brazil challenges the claim that environmentalism came to Brazil from abroad. Two political scientists, Kathryn Hochstetler and Margaret E. Keck, retell the story of environmentalism in Brazil from the inside out, analyzing the extensive efforts within the country to save its natural environment, and the interplay of those efforts with transnational environmentalism. The authors trace Brazil’s complex environmental politics as they have unfolded over time, from their mid-twentieth-century conservationist beginnings to the contemporary development of a distinctive socio-environmentalism meant to address ecological destruction and social injustice simultaneously. Hochstetler and Keck argue that explanations of Brazilian environmentalism—and environmentalism in the global South generally—must take into account the way that domestic political processes shape environmental reform efforts. The authors present a multilevel analysis encompassing institutions and individuals within the government—at national, state, and local levels—as well as the activists, interest groups, and nongovernmental organizations that operate outside formal political channels. They emphasize the importance of networks linking committed actors in the government bureaucracy with activists in civil society. Portraying a gradual process marked by periods of rapid advance, Hochstetler and Keck show how political opportunities have arisen from major political transformations such as the transition to democracy and from critical events, including the well-publicized murders of environmental activists in 1988 and 2004. Rather than view foreign governments and organizations as the instigators of environmental policy change in Brazil, the authors point to their importance at key moments as sources of leverage and support.

Today, the environment seems omnipresent in European policy within and beyond the European Union. The idea of a shared European environment, however, has come a long way and is still being contested. Greening Europe focuses on the many ways people have interacted with nature and made it an issue of European concern. The authors ask how notions of Europe mattered in these activities and they expose the many entanglements of activists across the subcontinent who set out to connect and network, and to exchange knowledge, worldviews, and strategies that exceeded their national horizons. Moving beyond human agency, the handbook also highlights the eminent role nature played in both "greening" Europe and making Europe a shared environment.

This volume examines the intersections of health care and environmental health, both in terms of traditional failures and the revolution underway to fix them. Authored by one of the pioneers in health care's green movement, it presents practical solutions for health care organizations and clinicians to improve their environments and the health of their communities.

A portrait of the CEC notes its establishment as the first international organization created to address "trade and the environment" issues, discussing such topics as the unprecedented resources and opportunities available within North America and what the agency can teach mainstream society about environmental protection and economic integration. (Politics & Government)

Greening the Globe discusses the success of international efforts to implement changes in environmental practices.