With the arrival of European explorers and settlers during the seventeenth century, Native American ways of life and the environment itself underwent radical alterations as human relationships to the land and ways of thinking about nature all changed. This colonial ecological revolution held sway until the nineteenth century, when New England's industrial production brought on a capitalist revolution that again remade the ecology, economy, and conceptions of nature in the region. In Ecological Revolutions, Carolyn Merchant analyzes these two major transformations in the New England environment between 1600 and 1860. In a preface to the second edition, Merchant introduces new ideas about narrating environmental change based on gender and the dialectics of transformation, while the revised epilogue situates New England in the context of twenty-first-century globalization and climate change. Merchant argues that past ways of relating to the land could become an inspiration for renewing resources and achieving sustainability in the future.

The right to a healthy environment has been the subject of extensive philosophical debates that revolve around the question: Should rights to clean air, water, and soil be entrenched in law? David Boyd answers this by moving beyond theoretical debates to measure the practical effects of enshrining the right in constitutions. His pioneering analysis of 193 constitutions and the laws and court decisions of more than 100 nations in Europe, Latin America, Asia, and Africa reveals a positive correlation between constitutional protection and stronger environmental laws, smaller ecological footprints, superior environmental performance, and improved quality of life.

This is Volume VIII of thirteen in a collection on Urban and Regional Sociology. Originally published in 1946, this study looks at the revolution of environment, the physical reshaping and the question of how can real world ‘unity’ be established. The world's open spaces have been taken up and its raw materials have passed into the possession of individual states with a shifting from the area of Western civilisation to other parts of the world.

A renowned writer on the environment shows how population growth, rising consumption, and damaging technologies have combined to create the biggest environmental crisis in human history, spurring agricultural and industrial revolutions and perhaps speeding up the third revolution--the transition to sustainable development.