Contributed articles.

Rivers host vibrant multispecies communities in their waters and along their banks, and, according to queer-trans-feminist river scientist Cleo Wölfle Hazard, their future vitality requires centering the values of justice, sovereignty, and dynamism. At the intersection of river sciences, queer and trans theory, and environmental justice, Underflows explores river cultures and politics at five sites of water conflict and restoration in California, Oregon, and Washington. Incorporating work with salmon, beaver, and floodplain recovery projects, Wölfle Hazard weaves narratives about innovative field research practices with an affectively oriented queer and trans focus on love and grief for rivers and fish. Drawing on the idea of underflows—the parts of a river’s flow that can’t be seen, the underground currents that seep through soil or rise from aquifers through cracks in bedrock—Wölfle Hazard elucidates the underflows in river cultures, sciences, and politics where Native nations and marginalized communities fight to protect rivers. The result is a deeply moving account of why rivers matter for queer and trans life, offering critical insights that point to innovative ways of doing science that disrupt settler colonialism and new visions for justice in river governance.

The United States is among the wealthiest nations in the world, but it is far from the healthiest. Although life expectancy and survival rates in the United States have improved dramatically over the past century, Americans live shorter lives and experience more injuries and illnesses than people in other high-income countries. The U.S. health disadvantage cannot be attributed solely to the adverse health status of racial or ethnic minorities or poor people: even highly advantaged Americans are in worse health than their counterparts in other, "peer" countries. In light of the new and growing evidence about the U.S. health disadvantage, the National Institutes of Health asked the National Research Council (NRC) and the Institute of Medicine (IOM) to convene a panel of experts to study the issue. The Panel on Understanding Cross-National Health Differences Among High-Income Countries examined whether the U.S. health disadvantage exists across the life span, considered potential explanations, and assessed the larger implications of the findings. U.S. Health in International Perspective presents detailed evidence on the issue, explores the possible explanations for the shorter and less healthy lives of Americans than those of people in comparable countries, and recommends actions by both government and nongovernment agencies and organizations to address the U.S. health disadvantage.

This wide-ranging and accessible contribution to the study of risk, ecology and environment helps us to understand the politics of ecology and the place of social theory in making sense of environmental issues. The book provides insights into the complex dynamics of change in `risk societies′.

The purpose of this volume is to explore theory, problem formulation, and methodology in "experiencing the environment. " In this embryonic field, the writings of a number of individuals already stand out as representative of dis tinctive viewpoints. In order to facilitate further development of the field, a conference! was proposed to gather in one place representatives of a number of major viewpoints with regard to the embryonic field of "environmental psychology. " It was hoped that a colloquy among such representatives would facilitate a clarification of the similarities and differences between the various perspectives, and might enable proponents of any given point of view to benefit from the insights of others with different orientations. Hopefully, it might also promote a greater articulation for this emerging field of inquiry. With these ends in mind, the sponsors of the conference asked the various prospective participants to present their theoretical positions and representative research illustrative of those positions. Some of the perspectives represented at the conference emphasized the point that the construal of phenomena depends heavily on the values and needs of perceivers. Implicit in this kind of position is the thesis that anyone who seeks to describe a complex happening is likely to shape it in terms of presup positions, biases, etc. , that may not be shared by others.

A holistic approach to the nature-society relationship and its connection to disasters in Bangladesh. Though rooted in the hard science of the Riverbank Erosion Impact Study carried out between 1984 and 1989, Haque (geography, Brandon U.) is also very concerned with other aspects of the problem such as the displacement, relocation and resettlement of disaster refugees, human coping responses to natural hazards, social class formation and vulnerability of the population, and public policy issues. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

This book outlines how to conduct a complete environmental risk assessment. The first part documents the psychology and philosophy of risk perception and assessment, introducing a taxonomy of uncertainty and the importance of context. It provides a critical examination of the use and abuse of expert judgement and goes on to outline approaches to hazard identification and subjective ranking that account for uncertainty and context. The second part of the book describes technical tools that can assist risk assessments to be transparent and internally consistent. These include interval arithmetic, ecotoxicological methods, logic trees and Monte Carlo simulation. These methods have an established place in risk assessments in many disciplines and their strengths and weaknesses are explored. The last part of the book outlines some new approaches, including p-bounds and information-gap theory, and describes how quantitative and subjective assessments can be used to make transparent decisions.