In addition to environmental change, the structure and trends of global politics and the economy are also changing as more countries join the ranks of the world’s largest economies with their resource-intensive patterns. The nexus approach, conceptualized as attention to resource connections and their governance ramifications, calls attention to the sustainability of contemporary consumer resource use, lifestyles and supply chains. This book sets out an analytical framework for understanding these nexus issues and the related governance challenges and opportunities. It sheds light on the resource nexus in three realms: markets, interstate relations and local human security. These three realms are the organizing principle of three chapters, before the analysis turns to crosscutting case studies including shale gas, migration, lifestyle changes and resource efficiency, nitrogen fertilizer and food systems, water and the Nile Basin, climate change and security and defense spending. The key issues revolve around competition and conflict over finite natural resources. The authors highlight opportunities to improve both the understanding of nexus challenges and their governance. They critically discuss a global governance approach versus polycentric and multilevel approaches and the lack of those dimensions in many theories of international relations.

Originally published: New York: Metropolitan Books, 1999.

World War III has yet to happen, and yet material evidence of this conflict is strewn everywhere: resting at the bottom of the ocean, rusting in deserts, and floating in near-Earth orbit. In Military Waste, Joshua O. Reno offers a unique analysis of the costs of American war preparation through an examination of the lives and stories of American civilians confronted with what is left over and cast aside when a society is permanently ready for war. Using ethnographic and archival research, Reno demonstrates how obsolete military junk in its various incarnations affects people and places far from the battlegrounds that are ordinarily associated with warfare. Using a broad swath of examples—from excess planes, ships, and space debris that fall into civilian hands, to the dispossessed and polluted island territories once occupied by military bases, to the militarized masculinities of mass shooters—Military Waste reveals the unexpected and open-ended relationships that non-combatants on the home front form with a nation permanently ready for war.

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III THE PERENNIAL BOGEY OF WAR IT IS an open secret, a very open one, that springtide war scares have but one purpose, the extension of our already monstrous military and naval appropriations. The real object of attack is found in Congress. When the victory there is won, the appropriations made, another cipher added to the endless caravan of waste, there is no external sign of jubilation. Those concerned put their pasteboard armies back into the box and settle down quietly to the business of spending until the annual budget is made up again. There can be no doubt that the most powerful lobby in the world is that employed by the great armament builders of England and Germany. It is equally plain that these huge rival war trusts consciously and purposely play into each other's hands. The war scare as promulgated through the Armor- Plate Press of these countries is the chief agency for affecting public opinion and controlling the action of Reichstag and Parliament. The greater s and more imminent the danger, the louder the journalistic noise, the greater the appropriations are likely to be. But when one remembers that the financial resources of all the nations concerned are already strained to the limit of exhaustion by war expenditures in time of peace, and this in spite of the interrelations and mutual dependence of the civilized world which render war impossible, one f can see no reality in these clamours. They would be simply ridiculous were it not for their malicious efficiency in wasting the substance of the people. Except as a result of accidental clash in uncontrollable war machinery, international war is already impossible. Even these war schemers do not want war. All they care for is appropriations. And as wolves wear sheep's clothing at times, ...

An unprecedented look at that most commonplace act of everyday life--throwing things out--and how it has transformed American society. Susan Strasser's pathbreaking histories of housework and the rise of the mass market have become classics in the literature of consumer culture. Here she turns to an essential but neglected part of that culture--the trash it produces--and finds in it an unexpected wealth of meaning. Before the twentieth century, streets and bodies stank, but trash was nearly nonexistent. With goods and money scarce, almost everything was reused. Strasser paints a vivid picture of an America where scavenger pigs roamed the streets, swill children collected kitchen garbage, and itinerant peddlers traded manufactured goods for rags and bones. Over the last hundred years, however, Americans have become hooked on convenience, disposability, fashion, and constant technological change--the rise of mass consumption has led to waste on a previously unimaginable scale. Lively and colorful, Waste and Want recaptures a hidden part of our social history, vividly illustrating that what counts as trash depends on who's counting, and that what we throw away defines us as much as what we keep.