Confronting Environments: Local Understanding in a Globalizing World(Globalization and the Environment)

Carrier and his group of international researchers tackle the complex factors affecting people's understandings of their environment-not just the natural environment, but landscapes shaped by humans, and their social contexts. The authors consider the impact of local events, such as tourism or environmental protection regimes, with detailed analyses of local cases. They also evaluate the large-scale political-economic forces that operate at regional and global levels, such as policies and bureaucratic requirements of international agencies and a country's position in global commodity markets. Their approach encourages policy makers and researchers to think about their natural and non-natural environment in novel ways. This book will be an excellent resource for all concerned with social, cultural and political-economic aspects of environmental use and conservation, and researchers in anthropology, geography, and political ecology.

Table of Contents:
Chapter 1 Preface Chapter 2 Introduction Chapter 3 1: Selling Space: Power and Resource Allocation in a Caribbean Coastal Community Chapter 4 2: "Working in Nature", "Caring for Nature": Diverse Views of the Environment in the Context of an Environmental Dispute Chapter 5 3: Developing "Nature": Global Ecology and the Politics of Conservation in Northern Pakistan Chapter 6 4: Getting Engaged: Pollution, Toxic Illness, and Discursive Shift in a Tokyo Community Chapter 7 5: Environmental Conservation and Institutional Environments in Jamaica Chapter 8 6: A Situated Global Imperative: Debating (the Nation's) Forests in Finland Chapter 9 7: A Changing Sense of Place: Direct Action and Environmental Protest in the U.K. Chapter 10 Conclusion: Understandings Matter

About the Author :
James G. Carrier is Adjunct Professor of Anthropology, Indiana University and Honorary Research Associate, Department of Anthropology, Oxford Brookes University. His recent books include Occidentalism: Images of the West and Meanings of the Market: The Free Market in Western Culture.

Review :
Attentive to both thick description and general processes, exploring and critically engaging with the concepts of the local and the global, Confronting Environments represents an important moment in the revival and rethinking of environmental anthropology. Situating themselves at different ethnographic sites, the authors disentangle the 'environment' as well as the politics and abstractions frequently used to represent it. This book is to be recommended for environmentalists and students of human-environmental relations. It is a timely project, given the urgency of environmental problems and our failures to adequately act and to understand. By critically examining the role of the local and global within the lived experiences of the enviroment, this collection is a valuable addition to the debated on enviromental understanding in the social sciences. This book is a very useful contribution to the broader literature on human-environment interactions....Useful for students and researchers from many disciplines beyond anthropology. Recommended.