Provocative, passionate and populist, RMB Manifestos are short and concise non-fiction books of literary, critical, and cultural studies. The grizzly bear, once the archetype for all that is wild, is quickly becoming a symbol of nature’s fierce but flagging resilience in the face of human greed and ignorance—and the difficulty a wealth-addicted society has in changing its ways. North America’s grizzlies have been under siege ever since Europeans arrived. They’d survived the arrival of spear-wielding humans 13,000 years ago, outlived the short-faced bear, the dire wolf and the sabre-tooth cat—not to mention mastodons, mammoths and giant ground sloths the size of elephants—but grizzly bears in much of Turtle Island succumbed to 375 years of unrelenting commercialization and industrialization, disappearing from the Great Plains and much of the mountain West. Despite their relatively successful recovery in Yellowstone National Park, the bears’ decline continues largely unchecked. And the front line in this centuries-old battle for survival has shifted to western Alberta and southern BC, where outdated mythologies, rapacious industry and disingenuous governments continue to push the Great Bear into the mountains and toward a future that may not have room for them at all.

Provocative, passionate and populist, RMB Manifestos are short and concise non-fiction books of literary, critical, and cultural studies. Beavers are the great comeback story—a keystone species that survived ice ages, major droughts, the fur trade, urbanization and near extinction. Their ability to create and maintain aquatic habitats has endeared them to conservationists, but puts the beavers at odds with urban and industrial expansion. These conflicts reflect a dichotomy within our national identity. We place environment and our concept of wilderness as a key touchstone for promotion and celebration, while devoting significant financial and personal resources to combating “the beaver problem.” We need to rethink our approach to environmental conflict in general, and our approach to species-specific conflicts in particular. Our history often celebrates our integration of environment into our identity, but our actions often reveal an exploitation of environment and celebration of its subjugation. Why the conflict with the beaver? It is one of the few species that refuses to play by our rules and continues to modify environments to meet its own needs and the betterment of so many other species, while at the same time showing humans that complete dominion over nature is not necessarily achievable.

Provocative, passionate and populist, RMB Manifestos are short and concise non-fiction books of literary, critical, and cultural studies. We live in critical times. Choices we make daily now will affect the future of life itself. Years from now children will study our era on the brink and ask their elders “When the planet was burning, what did you do?” Problems as big as the world are daunting, but solutions are at hand, within each of us. The Earth Manifesto: Saving Nature with Engaged Ecology offers an approach to regain control of our environmental destiny by rediscovering our affinity for nature and then acting to preserve it. Rooted in common sense, the author’s “Six Laws of Engaged Ecology” move us from theory, in concepts such as interdependence and the wilderness found in our minds, to practice with explanations of ground-truthing and creating a community through shared environmental principles.

The most common view of the relationship between social work and society seems to be the perspective that social work is an intermediary profession, acting between the individual and society. In this intermediary capacity, social work is somehow able to act in ways that are in the best interests of both the individual and society, seeking to empower the individual and to improve society. Critics of social work reject the view of social workers as neutral and objective, and see them rather as agents of social control, largely acting in ways that perpetuate existing inequalities. Social workers are, or can be, agents and catalysts of social change, as intermediaries objectively balancing the pressures of social control and social change.

An award-winning ecology writer goes looking for the wilderness we've lost, providing an eye-opening account of the true relationship between humans and nature.

Secure supplies of water, food and energy are essential to human dignity and well-being around the globe. Their vitality is dependent on healthy ecosystems supporting thriving biodiversity. All four elements are inter-related in that actions to govern one will automatically affect the others -- known as the Nexus. Global demand for the first three elements is increasing due to population growth and rising per capital incomes in developing countries, with steadily worsening results for the fourth. The Nexus elements are also subject to increasing pressures from climate disruption in the form of more frequent and severe flooding, droughts, storms, pest outbreaks, and extreme heat. Nature's capacity to moderate these impacts is also being eroded by rapid, widespread land use development and associated pollution. The combination of increasing demand, decreasing supplies, and rapidly changing hydro-climatic conditions at all points of the Nexus requires transformative policy responses that encompass economy, equity, social justice, fairness, and the environment. The Climate Nexus outlines these challenges and offers a pathway to resolving them.