*First Place Winner of the Society of Environmental Journalists' Rachel Carson Environment Book Award* "If you're looking for something to cling to in what often feels like a hopeless conversation, Schlossberg's darkly humorous, knowledge-is-power, eyes-wide-open approach may be just the thing."--Vogue From a former New York Times science writer, this urgent call to action will empower you to stand up to climate change and environmental pollution by making simple but impactful everyday choices. With urgency and wit, Tatiana Schlossberg explains that far from being only a distant problem of the natural world created by the fossil fuel industry, climate change is all around us, all the time, lurking everywhere in our convenience-driven society, all without our realizing it. By examining the unseen and unconscious environmental impacts in four areas-the Internet and technology, food, fashion, and fuel - Schlossberg helps readers better understand why climate change is such a complicated issue, and how it connects all of us: How streaming a movie on Netflix in New York burns coal in Virginia; how eating a hamburger in California might contribute to pollution in the Gulf of Mexico; how buying an inexpensive cashmere sweater in Chicago expands the Mongolian desert; how destroying forests from North Carolina is necessary to generate electricity in England. Cataloging the complexities and frustrations of our carbon-intensive society with a dry sense of humor, Schlossberg makes the climate crisis and its solutions interesting and relevant to everyone who cares, even a little, about the planet. She empowers readers to think about their stuff and the environment in a new way, helping them make more informed choices when it comes to the future of our world. Most importantly, this is a book about the power we have as voters and consumers to make sure that the fight against climate change includes all of us and all of our stuff, not just industry groups and politicians. If we have any hope of solving the problem, we all have to do it together. "A compelling-and illuminating-look at how our daily habits impact the environment."--Vanity Fair "Shows how even the smallest decisions can have profound environmental consequences."--The New York Times

Meat consumption impacts all aspects of human life and humanity?s long-term survival prospects. Despite this knowledge, society continues to ignore the negative impact of consuming meat, which include excessively high contributions to global greenhouse gas emissions, land and water pollution and depletion, antimicrobial resistance, and negative impacts on human health. Impact of Meat Consumption on Health and Environmental Sustainability addresses the difficulties, challenges, and opportunities in reducing excessive meat consumption in order to mitigate human and environmental damage. Policymakers, academicians, researchers, advanced-level students, technology developers, and government officials will find this text useful in furthering their research exposure to pertinent topics such as dietary recommendations for limiting meat consumption, trade and the meat industry, ethics of meat production and consumption, and the environmental impacts of meat consumption.

Consuming less is our best strategy for saving the planet—but can we do it? In this thoughtful and surprisingly optimistic book, journalist J. B. MacKinnon investigates how we may achieve a world without shopping. We can’t stop shopping. And yet we must. This is the consumer dilemma. The economy says we must always consume more: even the slightest drop in spending leads to widespread unemployment, bankruptcy, and home foreclosure. The planet says we consume too much: in America, we burn the earth’s resources at a rate five times faster than it can regenerate. And despite efforts to “green” our consumption—by recycling, increasing energy efficiency, or using solar power—we have yet to see a decline in global carbon emissions. Addressing this paradox head-on, acclaimed journalist J. B. MacKinnon asks, What would really happen if we simply stopped shopping? Is there a way to reduce our consumption to earth-saving levels without triggering economic collapse? At first this question took him around the world, seeking answers from America’s big-box stores to the hunter-gatherer cultures of Namibia to communities in Ecuador that consume at an exactly sustainable rate. Then the thought experiment came shockingly true: the coronavirus brought shopping to a halt, and MacKinnon’s ideas were tested in real time. Drawing from experts in fields ranging from climate change to economics, MacKinnon investigates how living with less would change our planet, our society, and ourselves. Along the way, he reveals just how much we stand to gain: An investment in our physical and emotional wellness. The pleasure of caring for our possessions. Closer relationships with our natural world and one another. Imaginative and inspiring, The Day the World Stops Shopping will embolden you to envision another way.

An environmentalist maps the hidden costs of overconsumption in a globalized world by tracing the environmental consequences of five commodities. The Shadows of Consumption gives a hard-hitting diagnosis: many of the earth's ecosystems and billions of its people are at risk from the consequences of rising consumption. Products ranging from cars to hamburgers offer conveniences and pleasures; but, as Peter Dauvergne makes clear, global political and economic processes displace the real costs of consumer goods into distant ecosystems, communities, and timelines, tipping into crisis people and places without the power to resist. In The Shadows of Consumption, Peter Dauvergne maps the costs of consumption that remain hidden in the shadows cast by globalized corporations, trade, and finance. Dauvergne traces the environmental consequences of five commodities: automobiles, gasoline, refrigerators, beef, and harp seals. In these fascinating histories we learn, for example, that American officials ignored warnings about the dangers of lead in gasoline in the 1920s; why China is now a leading producer of CFC-free refrigerators; and how activists were able to stop Canada's commercial seal hunt in the 1980s (but are unable to do so now). Dauvergne's innovative analysis allows us to see why so many efforts to manage the global environment are failing even as environmentalism is slowly strengthening. He proposes a guiding principle of “balanced consumption” for both consumers and corporations. We know that we can make things better by driving a high-mileage car, eating locally grown food, and buying energy-efficient appliances; but these improvements are incremental, local, and insufficient. More crucial than our individual efforts to reuse and recycle will be reforms in the global political economy to reduce the inequalities of consumption and correct the imbalance between growing economies and environmental sustainability.

Consuming the Environment explores the environmental impacts of consuming everyday products and explains how we can consume more sustainably. Written in an accessible style, this book begins with our everyday mundane experiences of consuming products – online, in the grocery store, at the mall – and shows how these practices are connected to a global system dependent upon ever increasing consumption. Drawing on the expertise of researchers in topics such as energy, food, water, land, fashion, electronics, eco-tourism, green products, and (micro)plastics, this volume unpacks the complex and largely invisible relationships that consumerism has with resource extraction and manufacturing. By focusing on a diverse range of everyday consumer products, as well as more subtle things that have been transformed into products, such as knowledge, waste, and pets, the chapters are structured around the central argument that we must re-orient ourselves as citizens rather than consumers. It is as citizens that we may help to organize our communities and hold our governments and industry accountable to planetary sustainability boundaries. With the inclusion of summary boxes, directed discussion, assignment questions, and further reading in each chapter, this book will be an essential resource for undergraduate and postgraduate students studying courses on consumerism, sustainable consumption, and environmental sociology.

All aspire to liberty and security in their lives but few people truly enjoy them. This book explains why this is so. In what Conor Gearty calls our 'neo-democratic' world, the proclamation of universal liberty and security is mocked by facts on the ground: the vast inequalities in supposedly free societies, the authoritarian regimes with regular elections, and the terrible socio-economic deprivation camouflaged by cynically proclaimed commitments to human rights. Gearty's book offers an explanation of how this has come about, providing also a criticism of the present age which tolerates it. He then goes on to set out a manifesto for a better future, a place where liberty and security can be rich platforms for everyone's life. The book identifies neo-democracies as those places which play at democracy so as to disguise the injustice at their core. But it is not just the new 'democracies' that have turned 'neo', the so-called established democracies are also hurtling in the same direction, as is the United Nations. A new vision of universal freedom is urgently required. Drawing on scholarship in law, human rights and political science this book argues for just such a vision, one in which the great achievements of our democratic past are not jettisoned as easily as were the socialist ideals of the original democracy-makers.

Designing for Zero Waste is a timely, topical and necessary publication. Materials and resources are being depleted at an accelerating speed and rising consumption trends across the globe have placed material efficiency, waste reduction and recycling at the centre of many government policy agendas, giving them an unprecedented urgency. While there has been a considerable literature addressing consumption and waste reduction from different disciplinary perspectives, the complex nature of the problem requires an increasing degree of interdisciplinarity. Resource recovery and the optimisation of material flow can only be achieved alongside and through behaviour change to reduce the creation of material waste and wasteful consumption. This book aims to develop a more robust understanding of the links between lifestyle, consumption, technologies and urban development.