Offering readers a glimpse behind the binoculars, For the Birds reveals birders to be important allies in the larger environmental conservation movement. Drawn from extensive interviews and field observations, it shows birders participating in citizen science projects, witnessing the devastating effects of climate change, and discovering small pockets of biodiversity in unexpected places.
 

Chelsea Schelly uses ethnographic research, participant observation, and numerous in-depth interviews to examine four alternative U.S. communities where individuals use electricity, water, heat, waste, food, and transportation technologies that differ markedly from those used by the vast majority of modern American residential dwellers. 
 

In 2005, beekeepers in the United States began observing a mysterious and disturbing phenomenon: once-healthy colonies of bees were suddenly collapsing, leaving behind empty hives. As it explores the contours of this crisis, Vanishing Bees considers an equally urgent question: what happens when beekeepers, farmers, scientists, agrichemical corporations, and government regulators approach the problem from different vantage points and cannot see eye-to-eye? The answer may have profound consequences for every person who wants to keep fresh food on the table.

From Workshop to Waste Magnet presents Philadelphia’s environmental history as a bracing case study in mismanagement and injustice. Tracing the complex interactions among economic decline, federal regulations, local politics, and shifting ethnic demographics, sociologist Diane Sicotte uncovers how only a few communities came to host many types of polluting or waste disposal land uses. What she finds reveals the devastation that occurs when mass quantities of society’s wastes mix with toxic levels of systemic racism and inequality.

Why do people build in areas open to repeated natural disasters? Drawing on a variety of insights from environmental sociology, Superstorm Sandy offers a wide-ranging look at the Jersey Shore both before and after this disaster, examining the many factors—such as cultural attachment, tourism revenues, and governmental regulation—that combined to create a highly vulnerable coastal region and that fueled the demand to rebuild.

In This is Our Land, environmental historian Cody Ferguson documents a little-noted but important change in the environmental movement, describing three representative grassroots groups—in Montana, Arizona, and Tennessee—whose stories show how quite ordinary citizens can band together to solve environmental problems. As they did, they redefined political participation and expanded the ability of citizens to shape their world. 

 

The Tragedy of the Commodity explores the role of human agency in the overfishing crisis, highlighting the social and economic forces behind this looming ecological problem. In a critique of the classic theory “the tragedy of the commons” by ecologist Garrett Hardin, the authors argue that it is the commodification of aquatic resources that leads to the depletion of fisheries and the development of environmentally suspect means of aquaculture.